fighting lemmings!

Sung to the tune of "These are a Few of My Favorite Things..."

Loved the alt-text in today's xkcd:

Telescopes and bathyscapes and sonar probes of Scottish lakes,
Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse explained with abstract phase-space maps,
Some x-ray slides, a music score, Minard's Napoleonic war:
The most exciting new frontier is charting what's already here.

(Dr) Who ya gunna vote for?

Gacked from Adina
Featuring Sean Pertwee ( Jon Pertwee's son) talking about what his father use to say and David Tennant doing the voice over at the end.
How many Dr who in jokes can you jam into one election ad? *boggle*

The new Bros, or "Where's the angst?"

Jedward - Under Pressure (Ice Ice Baby) ft Vanilla Ice

They are teenagers, so by definition they should be full of angst. They are singing a song about a man cracking up under pressure. So why do I feel like this is being sung by people with big happy smiles on their faces, waving their arms in the air?

Here is how I think it should be done. Oh, and get those kids off my lawn!

Great Australian Firewall Bypass for Dummies

Those of you unfortunate enough to be within frothing spittle range when I get started on the topic will know that I have somewhat conflicted - not to deny contradictory - feelings about electronic piracy. On the one hand, I think stealing things from the creative people who make things I like is counter-productive. But I don't exactly get to take the high moral ground, because I'll happily illegally download tv shows which have been publicly aired but which the arse-hats can't be bothered to allow me to watch when and where I want. And I've been known to pirate computer games which contain DRM nonsense that I know will fuck up my computer, or stop me from installing it on multiple machines or whatever. I could trot out a glib little self-serving justification for this, but the truth is that I'm lazy: I'll do the right thing as long as they make it easy enough for me, but if they won't then my moral stand goes to shite.

But at least I'm not kidding myself about it. Which is why I generally consider the Pirate Party movement to be full of tools, despite the cool name. Its one thing to nick a few things because you're lazy, and another altogether to try to claim that stealing stuff is some kind of unalienable basic human right. All of which background is just to say that I am not a Pirate Party fanboy by any stretch of the imagination... but when they get off the issue of actual piracy, there are some folks there who have some useful things to say about freedom of information, and I want to give them some credit for that.

Australia, I love you like the born-again convert that I am, but our government's views on censorship are fucked. If someone wants to make information which they have created freely available on the internet, and I want to view it, then the only pirates involved in the transaction are anyone who tries to hijack that information twixt the cup and the lip. The fact that said pirates are doing so out of some supposedly high-minded attempt to protect me from myself doesn't make it ok, it makes it insulting in addition to a grievous imposition on my right to communicate with others. The fact that the people doing it are elected officials who claim to be representing me would be laughable if it wasn't so sad. The fact that they are spending millions of dollars of _my_ money to do this to me heaps ironic salt by the barrow-load into the papercuts of annoyance. And while it could be considered some consolation that they are doing it with such thorough and comprehensive incompetence that its more a matchstick across my path than a firewall, I find that doesn't make me feel any better about the Australian government's rush to emulate the Chinese model of freedom of information. So I was mightily pleased to see this guide to bypassing the Great Australian Firewall written in simple language for the non-technically-inclined, put out by the Pirate Party. Good onya guys; way to find an issue that actually has a moral leg to stand on, and do something concrete about it.

See? Even the tools can do something good once in awhile...

what happens when you get a better script writer...

from Very Demotivational. there were soooo many good ones, but this tickled my fancy, ever so. you can also get it on a Threadless shirt (well, actually, the shirt came first, I think, but you know what I mean...)!

Sick of Being Lied To

I'm sick.

And of course I was sick over the weekend. But it gets better: I had a day off scheduled and a three-day weekend lined up to go camping, and even managed to get out of work a little early on Friday. I was home by 3:30. At 3:45 - I kid you not - I cleared my throat while walking the dogs and thought for the first time "hmmm... thats a bit sore..." Feeling a bit better today - due back at work tomorrow morning. But I didn't start a post just to winge about being sick (well not _just_, anyways) but rather to pass along a couple of little tidbits I learned along the way.

Yesterday morning I woke up at about 6am in full sick mode. My head felt like it was stuck in a vice. A vice being dragged on a chain across a World War II battlefield behind a tank. With a gamy clutch. Driven by an epileptic. Not good, is the impression I'm trying to get at here. So I stumbled into the bathroom and fished around in the Drawer Where Aging Meds Go To Die, and found some miscellaneous things with no product or usage label on them shy of a string of dihexa-shrexa-bobexa-flourides. But I was 95% certain that they were the leftover cold medicine from last time I got sick, so I took two and went back to bed.

A couple of hours later I woke up not dead, feeling quite a bit better, and rational enough to wonder whatinhell that was I took. Hi ho trusty Internet! Here's what I found:

Acetaminophen is a Paracetamol is a painkiller by any other name. Actually, in my more coherent later state, I recognised that one.

Phenylephrine is a decongestant. No worries there. In fact, even less worries because there is some doubt as to whether it does anything.

Dextromethorphan is a cough suppressant. But here's the interesting bit; dig a little further in Wikipedia and find that there's a fairly huge amount of evidence pointing to the fact that cough suppressants don't do _anything_. Not just this one; none of em. And I don't just mean one study, I mean a meta-study by an independent volunteer organisation collecting the data from 27 different experiments on over three-and-a-half thousand people could find no significant improvement over a placebo. The conclusions in the study itself seem a little more wishy-washy - they say:

"This systematic review confirms the lack of evidence for or against an effect of OTC cough preparations despite using an extensive search strategy"

- until you realise that they are generalising to ALL over-the-counter cough medicines. They found some ambiguous support for the usefulness of expectorants. (Personally, when I've got one of those really tight hard-to-breathe chest colds I go looking for something with an actual expectorant (and its always hard to find something) and I find them helpful in those cases, but that ain't science... It certainly wouldn't surprise me to find them not useful on different sorts of colds.) For cough suppressants, they could find nothing even ambiguous to say.

(Though the wiki gods do hold out this hope: "Recent studies have found that theobromine, a compound found in cocoa solids, is more effective as a cough suppressant than prescription codeine. This compound suppresses the "itch" signal from the nerve in the back of the throat that causes the cough reflex. It is possible to get an effective dose (1 g, though 0.5 g may be sufficient) from 50g of dark chocolate, which contains 2 to 10 times more cacao than milk chocolate.")

So whats my point? Know what you're taking, he says, ensconcing himself firmly in the do-what-I-say-not-what-I do-camp? Yeah, some of that. But my story had another side too; those mystery drugs _did_ help me. Am I telling you this just to ruin the placebo effect for you? No, torturing sick people isn't _that_ funny. But don't let yourself get sucked in by expensive cold drugs - a couple of painkillers and some good chocolate will probably do you just as well. Even if that's just the placebo effect now too, at least its a _chocolate_ placebo...