Bicycle Love

She really, REALLY loves her bicycle. NSFW and care of Urban Velo.

http://urbanvelo.org/hmm/

Webcomic quote of the day

I don't follow Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures very closely but I really liked this quote noted after the comic:

The best thing about enemies is you are usually not the only one they have.

Wrong Turn Down Google StreetView

Found on Google Earth Blog.

Monster insects!

Brought to my attention by Zooillogic over at ScienceBlogs.

The 5 Most Horrifying Bugs in the World

Been there. Done that.

I'm not usually a meme follower but this one came up and I thought I'd give it a try.

Ten+ things that I've done that you probably haven't done.

I earned my Eagle Award in the Boy Scouts by completing 5 merit badges in the 2 days before my 18th birthday.

I become a parent at age 19 and went on to complete college.

I fell out of a truck onto a highway at speed and suffered only a cracked skull.

I have installed and regularly used an operating system other than Windows. (Ubuntu Linux)

I willingly identify myself with "America's most hated and distrusted minority"; atheism.

I have napped flint and become marginally proficient with an atlatl.

I participated in a job interview that was essentially a spontaneous
recreation of the interview scene in the beginning of "Blade Runner."

I have ridden my bicycle from Pittsburgh to Washington DC. . . in two and a half days.

I was recruited my the Mayor's Office to perform Christmas carols in Pittsburgh subway stations. . . in Klingon.

I think that's only nine, but that's what you get.

Robot Trebuchet

Rubber Band Super Gatling

Fan Boys

I was always more of a Trek Nerd but I must see this movie.

Nerd Eargasm

Happy Cephalopodmas

Happy Freak'n Holidays

Bacn

Now everything you eat can taste like bacon.
Bacon Salt!

You must be this smart. . .

UPDATE: (9 December 2007) When I originally posted this link, I realized that the ALT tag had something of a redirect that was an advertisement and I simply stripped it out of the code. This article reveled that it was more sinister than that in that they could at any time change the image itself to become an advertisement and that the link could also be changed.

So, I saved a copy of the image and loaded it up on my own dime. If you click on the link to calculate your own blog's reading level (and I'm a bit suspicious as to it's accuracy anyway) do the same.

Animator-vs-Animation

http://alanbecker.deviantart.com/art/Animator-vs-Animation-34244097

Spiders on Drugs

Lego White & Nerdy

Weird Al Yankovik's "White & Nerdy" is nerdy. This is meta-nerdy.

The following is entirely inappropriate.

So, I went to this website that rates your blog much like a movie rating (G, PG, PG-13, etc). I thought it odd that my blog earned a PG-13 rating not for my repeated use of the word fuck and asshat but instead got flagged for using crap.

So, I made a page that I could test a few things with. I started with the FCC's Seven Words You Can't Say on TV; shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. I added a handful of other things I thought fairly common. Whore earned an R rating. I removed it. Slut rated a PG-13. Removing that earned a PG rating because of the word cocksucker.

This shows me that their program doesn't show you all the reasons it rates your site the way it does, just a few.

Getting rid of a few more and I finally earned a G rating with the words shit, piss, motherfucker and tits leftover from the original seven. It thought cum was a bad word but it didn't frag my G rating because of it. With motherfucker, tits, bugger and cumshot it gave me the message "No bad words were found."

This shows up some very serious flaws in their rating system. It got me thinking about how perverse, depraved and offensive a blog one could write while still earning a G for General Audiences rating. With motherfucker, tits, bugger and cumshot available, it sounds like it would be fairly easy.

Rating

So, I found a website that rates my blog as if it were a movie:

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:
* crap (3x)
* dead (2x)
* gun (1x)

Crap? They rate me PG-13 because I used the word crap a few times? And dead? And the word gun once?

What about the two times I used the word fuck and one use of the word asshat? Doesn't that set off your little censorship flags? (and that's in only the front page. The site doesn't spider the site to find the many other uses of those words.) Clearly, this website is as accurate in rating websites as the MPAA is at rating movies. And the only good thing about it is that this website at least tells you why they are rating your website the way that they are (even though the methodology is flawed). This is unlike the MPAA which is a secret organization that does not allow it's methods to be released and, according to "This Film Is Not Yet Rated", does not actually have any standards. Just a bunch of conservatives who watch a film and arbitrarily decide on a rating.

And if you look at the ratings and the movies attached to them, the MPAA loves violence but hates sex (especially gay sex). Many terribly violent and disturbing movies get themselves an R rating but any movie that dares to even show human genitals is going to get the dreaded NC-17 rating.

Ratings for movies, TV and video games are valuable, if they use standards that are understandable or, at the very least, public. If you know how a decision was made then you can make your own decision about whether your kids should be exposed to it. But, when the process is hidden (or in the case of this website, inherently flawed) then the rating is useless. In fact, it's worse than useless, it's prejudicial and discriminatory.

Dun dun duuuunnnn!!!!!!

It was. . . .
. . . . MURDER!

. . . and really bad eggs.

A Pirate’s Life for Me II: Opening the Map by Jason Godesky at the ANTHROPIK network