Category: Random

We love pete@norriscomputing.demon.co.uk. We love him because he owns bigbollocks.com, which may or may not be the UK’s favourite website…

For the delectation and fulfilment of the basic geek instinct that is primal to our natures (huzzah), I hereby present to my compatriots in arms an article about ‘IT’, an astonishing and revolutionary new concept and product for the 21st Century. Apparently.

What is ‘IT’?
“Harvard Business School Press executive editor Hollis Heimbouch has just paid $250,000 for a book about IT — but neither the editor nor the agent, Dan Kois of The Sagalyn Literary Agency, knows what IT is.”

“All they do know: IT, also code-named Ginger, is an invention developed by 49-year-old scientist Dean Kamen, and the subject of a planned book by journalist Steve Kemper. According to Kemper’s proposal, IT will change the world, and is so extraordinary that it has drawn the attention of technology visionaries Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs and the investment dollars of pre-eminent Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr, among others. “

[Addendum: The BBC catches up with plasticbag.org.]

UK Readers: Take note, for this evening Disinfo Nation returns to Channel Four. Featuring Richard Metzger, chatting uber-web god of disinfo.com infamy, this TV show not only has included an interview with Robert Anton Wilson, not only included a glowing review of my other main site Barbelith, but is also soon to feature an interview with anarchist anti-god-head Grant Morrison – the man who has most systematically lit the fires in my Ur-head-space over the last ten to fifteen years. Be awed.

Spotted, Cool T-shirt Slogan: “And Jesus spake unto Burt Bacharach: ‘I am the way to San Jose’.”

Bizarre facts about stair-cases? rebuke.org reveals all. [Courtesy of notsosoft.com]

“An architect guy I met said that when designing stairs, you should always have an odd number, because people tend to take the first stair with their leading foot (in my case, my left), and it balances the body better if the last stair is on the leading foot as well. “

Gallup poll: [via Metafilter]

• As far as you know, does the earth revolve around the sun, or does the sun revolve around the earth?
  “Probing a more universal measure of knowledge, Gallup also asked the following basic science question, which has been used to indicate the level of public knowledge in two European countries in recent years: “As far as you know, does the earth revolve around the sun or does the sun revolve around the earth?” In the new poll, about four out of five Americans (79%) correctly respond that the earth revolves around the sun, while 18% say it is the other way around. These results are comparable to those found in Germany when a similar question was asked there in 1996; in response to that poll, 74% of Germans gave the correct answer, while 16% thought the sun revolved around the earth, and 10% said they didn’t know. When the question was asked in Great Britain that same year, 67% answered correctly, 19% answered incorrectly, and 14% didn’t know.”

• As far as you know, from what country did America gain its independence following the Revolutionary War?
  “When Americans are asked to identify the country from which America gained its independence, 76% correctly name Great Britain. A handful, 2%, think America’s freedom was won from France, 3% mention some other country (including Russia, China, and Mexico, among others named), while 19% are unsure.”

Due to a particularly interesting and apparently “old-fashioned” and “biologically determinist” section in Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine (Chapter 10: ‘An orgasm saved my life’), I’ve been scouring the web for information on evolutionary psychology’s positions on homosexuality. As yet, my aims remain relatively unrewarded, but I have found an astonishing document of an almost staggeringly dubious nature, which may or may not be true: “The Evolutionary Psychology of Human Sex and Gender”. One of the horrors of the Internet is, of course, that there is a lot of information but little way of judging what parts of that information are accurate and based on expertise or authority. I’m going to be pondering this one for a while, I fear.

So it’s nearly 11pm and I get a text message from my flatmates which demands to know what film Nick Nolte and Treat Williams have been in with a room full of monsters (or something like that). So I do a search on IMDB and it says that the only film that they have been in together is: Mulholland Falls. I assume that monsters was supposed to read Mobsters as that’s what the film is about, and predictive text input is always a little buggy. So I send a message back telling them that and get a reply saying that apparently the correct answer was Deep Rising. So I feel let down by the IMDB and suddenly concerned about the kinds of questions that my flatmates ask me long distance on a Tuesday evening.

Awesome new stuff from Apple includes: itunes (free MP3 encoder / ripper / player), omnipotently powerful powermacs and sickeningly gorgeous new powerbooks [design in detail]. Note to self: it is very important that my new job (whatsoever that may be) can provide me with enough money to buy a powerbook.

As Organizine shuts its doors, and everyone asks why, one sole piece of comment comes from its creator: “Mistakes were made”.