Link Archive 10/18/13 – 11/7/13

Star Wars inserted into Kinkade. Awesome. Dammit! I was tricked into rejecting Jesus by my toys! It's all so clear now... Glad they mentioned Smurfs. Those were a big scare in my church as a kid. My best friend's younger brother was tormented by the smurfs that literally(!) jumped off his bedsheets and danced around the room at night, chanting and mocking him. Sadly we can't replicate this, they burned the bedsheet. Maybe I just don't have the energy for it today, but I didn't get any schadenfreude out of this. Kinda feel bad for the bastard. Ron Paul's Campaign Manager Died of Pneumonia, Penniless and Uninsured I don't.... what??   Fake pharma ad - "Vaccines. And now my kids don't die." My Little Pony - "What people think I watch Vs What I actually watch" Just 3 more weeks 'till Season 4! Sayeth Scott Alexander: "I made fun of how religious people say “because of human dignity” when something weirds them out but they have no argument against it. Some people doubted me, or thought I was making a pattern out of noise. To these people I present -" Three parent babies 'incompatible with human dignity'   A tribute to the dead. The google maps link. Radioactive Fox. This is (almost) as good as Smells Like Teen Spirit & Never Gonna Give You Up mash-up. Can a clash of multi-billion titans do something to un-fuck patent law in this country? I dunno. I can hope. "Northern Telecom went bankrupt. Now Apple, RIM, Ericsson, Sony and MSFT want to use its assets to make your Droid phone more expensive." I despise Daylight Savings so freakin much. Article advocates getting rid of it and going to a 2-zone system in the US. I assume based on the theory of always asking for the outrageous so what you actually want will seem more reasonable. "Research based on time use surveys found Americans’ schedules are determined by television more than daylight. That suggests in effect, Americans already live on two time zones." The Logic of Stupid Poor People. "A hiring manager at my first professional job looked me up and down in the waiting room, cataloging my outfit, and later told me that she had decided I was too classy to be on the call center floor. I was hired as a trainer instead. The difference meant no shift work, greater prestige, better pay and a baseline salary for all my future employment." 20th Century Headlines Re-written to Get More Clicks (but you already read xkcd anyway, right?) A pertinent warning about The Internet, from the future. I've been getting less done than I want recently as well. Less than a century later, it's the Germans who are protecting Europe's rights from a big-brother government while the American public are looking the other way and shrugging. Oh how quickly things change. "Europe mulls sanctions against US over spying" Oh. My. God. There is a Tenacious D BLUEGRASS tribute band!! I've been doing sex all wrong! A trailer for a movie that I believe is actually real! :) GOP state official quits after 'Daily Show' interview. So I guess even the GOP can tolerate only so much dumb-fuckery. Seriously, wow. Send a note to your congress-person. Help stop the patent trolls. Damn, China's smog seen from space. You know what we need to do? Disband the EPA. Stupid job-killing bureaucrats! Think of all the jobs we could create in gas-mask manufacturing! Robot Sign-Spinners. I suppose these are the sorts of mind-numbing jobs we'd want to automate first. But wasn't the sign-spinner a reaction to the prohibition on billboards? These mannequins look to just be bringing that problem back, with the added bonus of foot-traffic congestion. I imagine it won't be too long until they're banned. The Rat Park experiment. Drug abuse - it's not so much about physical addiction as it is about life sucking. (also summarized in this cool comic). The man who brought you Neoractionism In A Giant Nutshell has produced The Anti-Reactionary FAQ. It's written with his traditional wit and humor and very informative. It is, again, on the long side. Might want to break it up over a day or two. No link here, as this was a comment on a friend's post. It made me die a little inside. "We hired a football coach one year and then built a teaching schedule for him that included a math class, a science class, two English classes and a PE class. He was a PE major. Every day he borrowed my lesson plans. I saw him sketching Xs and Os on the back of a student paper once, and I teased him for doing that instead of grading the paper. He said to me, dead serious, "I will never be fired if Grand Junction's English students are better than ours." [Grand Junction is our crosstown rival]. On the other hand, they hired me to teach English over many more experienced candidates because I was going to be the new swim coach. The head of secondary education's daughter was a swimmer."

Why have young people in Japan stopped having sex? I'm going to assume this is over-blown to sell eyeballs, but damn this sort of thing is awesome! (on an intellectual level) I want to read fiction set in this world. Watts hinted at it in Blindsight, but since most of the action was off-planet it wasn't much explored.