davextreme

31 May 2006

This oddly looks like it’ll compete with LiveJournal, which they also own.

Jobs' glass elevator locks in group customers - Engadget

Jobs’ glass elevator locks in group customers - Engadget

I think all elevators should do this at random intervals whenever non-crippled young people are taking them up one floor.

The Morning News - The Weathermen, by Clay Risen

Top 10 best real weatherman names.

30 May 2006

Nintendo Puts $250 Price Tag on Wii - Yahoo! News

As expected. This won’t affect the 25+ market as much, but will help a lot considering the price of the alternatives for poorer and younger gamers.

29 May 2006

Collective Nouns

Dre’s pictures of a bale of turtles got me thinking about collective nouns. There’s a snotty charm in knowing the proper pluralization of a pride of lions or a pod of dolphins, but once the subject hit the internet a few years ago the linguistic nerds got ahold of the idea and went a little bit crazy with it. Sure, it’s great to know that someone decided that a group of pupils should be called a “dilation”, but my interest lies in the more commonly accepted words.

Wikipedia has a nice list of animal names which suits most needs, along with a larger set of lists of collective nouns. I’ve added James Lipton’s An Exaltation of Larks to my Amazon Wish List. If anyone wants to buy it for me I’d be happy to become your resident expert on the matter, on call whenever you need to know the given collective noun for something and aren’t near a computer.

26 May 2006

Mr. Jefferson, meet Mr. Jefferson. By Akhil Reed Amar

“What the framers would say about raids on congressional offices.”

Surprise move: NBC reshuffles fall schedule

I link to this because it shows that not all TV executives are idiots. Putting a new show against CSI was dumb, but putting it against CSI plus Grey’s Anatomy would have killed it. I’ll totally watch Studio 60 on Monday nights.

25 May 2006

Answers

Yahoo! News today picks up a story called Philosopher, scientist, farmer crack chicken-egg question. According to University of Nottingham Professor John Brookfield, the answer of the “what came first: the chicken or the egg?” question lies in simple evolutionary theory. At some point there was an animal that was just one mutation from being what we now call a chicken. This animal laid an egg. In that egg was the first generation of the first chicken, therefor the egg came first.

Of course, as my dad, appropriately amused, retorts, from a creation science/intelligent design point of view, the chicken came first. Genesis speaks of God creating animals, not eggs.

But that’s not so bad, is it? Now we don’t have to worry about chickens or eggs, just about religion and science. Science says it was an egg, religion says it was a chicken. Choose your outlook and you have your answer.

House Judiciary passes Internet access measure

20-13 vote preserves net neutrality, preventing service providers from being able to intentionally slow down or block access to sites.