In the wake of recent unrest in Georgia, the United States is calling for Russia to call a cease fire. Speaking in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice "said Russia should help resolve tensions instead of contributing to them."
I'm sorry, can you just give me a moment to regain my composure? I have become inexplicably overcome with a fit of hysterics at this laughably arrogant statement from the hypocrites who practically invented violence in the Middle East, and who like to hang around in foreign countries for a really long time.
I mean seriously, just who the heck do they think they are?
With mere hours left until CERN's brand new shiny Large Hadron Collider "activates", I want to take a moment to clear up some confusion about what this actually means.
See, according to some people I know, LHC activation is the exact moment that the 17-mile ring hits a chilly 1.9K and gets filled with exotic particles and crazy supernatural phenomena. It's really more drawn out that that, though; the Collider has been cooling down for months and this event will merely be the injection of the first particle beams into the system.
The exact time of it all? Well, it's hard to tell. At time of writing the official countdown is reading at 6 hours, and when expanded that implies midnight on the morning of Friday 8th August. But friends in other countries report different readings that also evaluate to midnight: in their own timezones. Clearly there's a bit of a calculation glitch in the Flash script. However, it's probably reasonably safe to assume that Swiss midnight is the correct time, since it's the only apparent constant.
Genius
The last link I followed in research for this article was to a "LHC activation petition", which I figured would be yet another group of hippies bemoaning the possibility that Switzerland and France will be a black hole by lunchtime tomorrow. Oh, how wrong was I.
Typically such momentous scientific achievements are inaugurated with profound words, such as Neil Armstrong's "One small step for man, one giant leap for all mankind", or when Oppenheimer famously quoted from the Bhagavad Gita upon the first test of a nuclear weapon. No doubt the Directorate of CERN will have prepared something similar to match this historic event.
However, we the undersigned feel something simple will suffice. Upon activating the LHC for the test, we advocate the opening words be "Commence Primary Ignition!", a call back to the 1977 movie "Star Wars" when the villains destroyed the planet Alderaan with their Death Star.
Some would charge that this does not convey a sufficient level of respect for the process at hand. However, given that particle physicists gave up on seriousness years ago ("strange" quarks? Honestly people) we feels it reflects the current standard quite well.
Further, in the event that the sum total of human knowledge painstakingly amassed over course of history is wrong and the scientific illiterates are correct and this experiment does result in "opening a gate to hell", "blowing up the planet", "creating a stargate to another dimension", or "granting the antichrist newfound powers" etc etc etc then this deliberate link to the destruction of a planet will allow the scientists to claim they knew this would happen and they meant to kill us all the entire time. The ability to still proclaim the experiment a success regardless of the outcome will prove helpful when procuring the necessary funds for the next mega-experiment.
I've signed the petition, and you should too!
Bootnote
In one version, Nostradamus predicted:
The year of the great seventh number accomplished,
It will appear at the time of the games of slaughter,
Not far from the great millennial age,
When the buried will go out from their tombs.
With the Beijing Olympic Games also kicking off tomorrow that's kind of creepy, and certainly not the first connection between the LHC and our favourite prophet, but as everyone should know by now Nostradamus's opinions are open to wild various interpretation… and this one was posted online just the other week, so take it with a pinch of salt.
See you all tomorrow. Hopefully.
The BBC reports, "a Mexican man whose case drew international attention has been executed in Texas for the rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl in 1993."
The International Court of Justice — the highest United Nations court — had ordered that 33 year old Jose Medellin's case, and those of fifty other Mexicans on death row, be reviewed because they had not been informed of their right to consular assistance at the time of their arrest, but unfortunately the US Supreme Court all but ignored them. President Bush actually directed Texas to comply with the ICJ but the Supreme Court justices decided 6-3 that he had overstepped his authority, and went ahead with the execution of Medellin. The others presumably remain on death row.
As the attorney general's office explained, "Texas is not bound by the World Court but by the US Supreme Court, which reviewed this matter and determined that the convicted murderer's execution shall proceed."
I don't particularly disagree with the outcome in this matter, but my opinion is irrelevant. This is yet another example of the United States blithely ignoring the direction of prominent International authorities. If the US wants to be seen as a democratic world power with the ability and will to improve life for all, then it needs to start behaving itself and working within guidelines laid down by the UN, like the rest of us try to do.
(Or are forced to do by our leaders, coughNew Labourcough.)
Microsoft has a nasty habit of allowing bizarre adverts into its messaging application, Windows Live Messenger. All ranting aside about the multi-billion-dollar corporation enlisting in-product ads, there doesn't seem to be a great quality control system in place.
First spelling mistakes, as I found last year:
Now crude and ambiguous links to what may possibly be a scat forum:
Thanks to Kamil K via Jake Vinson over at The Daily WTF for the heads-up on that last one.
It looks like there's a new malicious Facebook virus in the wild, and it just popped up today. Users are logging in this morning to find wallposts left by their friends along with a link:
hi Tomalak, hehe.. you could be tht naughty i didnt knw..really hard to see tht from my eyes lol
have a luk urself…
http://www.google.com.id.ezwjc3q9.k4sw5d.2b99df1a.cn/galle[…]za8lnik
(click open or run when prompted)
It's yet to be seen whether "virus" is really the right term for this, but regardless there is some malware out there somewhere taking advantage of the fact that a lot of Facebook users will blindly click on the suspicious-looking link hoping to find out where they've been "naughty". All they really find, though, is a download box for Picture_dl.exe. I didn't go as far as to actually download it, but presumably someone will hack it to pieces soon enough to discover its purpose.
In the meantime, I don't really want to report my friend to Facebook because she's clearly not sent this intentionally. It's called "koobface" and it's already known to the authorities. Apparently TPTB are working on it.
Meanwhile, do not click on every random link you see on the internet! The link above may look like a Google link to the untrained eye, but the reams of meaningless-looking text after "www.google.com" give away that this is, in fact, a phishing site. Actually, I'm kind of surprised that my FF3 installation didn't catch that…
Update: Arik's written about this too.
Update 2: It looks like this might be the first Facebook-based virus/worm since the facebook.com phish back in June.
Hi. In FF3 the "Bookmarks Toolbar", "Recent Tags" and "Recently Bookmarked" items near the top of my Bookmarks menu take too much space and I don't need that information as it's all available elsewhere. How can I get rid of them?
Some Engrish signs are funny and some are just plain daft. But this one goes above and beyond the call of duty when it comes to East Asian signage for which the English translation just downright failed.
Thanks to AdFreak for pointing this one out to us.
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