Sunday, April 12, 2009

Have A Chocolate Bunny And Some Random Links.

Sunday Sweets: Geeky Goodness: Stargate-themed cakes. Because geeks are endlessly inventive people.

Bill Bailey - Doctor Who: Comedian Bill Bailey offers his take on the music and sound effects in Doctor Who, including his own interpretation of the theme song as "60s Belgian jazz."

Wide Angle: Top Ten Moments in Astronomy: Most of these are pretty hard to argue with.

Star Formation: The Game: Make your own stars. For points!

Uranium Ore: A jar of uranium ore on sale from Amazon. The user reviews are hysterical.

Speaking of Amazon, though, they appear to have been snorting that uranium or something: Amazon Censors Its Rankings & Search Results to Protect Us Against GLBT Books.

How We Staged the Morristown UFO Hoax : The authors set up a UFO hoax in New Jersey and, unsurprisingly, lots of people fell for it lock, stock and alien laser gun barrel.

4 comments:

  1. I read of the Amazon thing on another blog, as well, and I started to wonder if the company did that on purpose, to generate more attention (and, presumably, more sales) in this time when people aren't frivolously spending money any more.

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  2. I really doubt it. I know that supposedly all publicity is good publicity, but I've been following this a bit, and it seems to have been quite a PR nightmare for them and may have permanently cost them more than a few customers and a fair amount of trust and goodwill, even though they are fixing it.

    The moral of the story, it seems to me, is that you really, really need to pay attention to what assumptions you're building into your software, because modern technology can easily magnify your thoughtless prejudices a gazillionfold.

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