Little Bobby Tables - great SQL joke on XKCD

Weird Al Wednesday - I Love Rocky Road

I'm in the mood for ice cream, so this seems appropriate. Keep an eye out for the gentleman in the Top Hat (it's Dr. Demento)



[via Revver]

Not a terrorist! But a Felfeet or Gooey fan?

V.U.
Originally uploaded by irishbrendandonnelly

It's a "Velvet Underground" t-shirt, redone in Arabic. For more info check out this style article, or just go to the gallery at brendandonnelly13.
It's fun to realize that not all English sounds are available in the Arabic alphabet (even though Arabic has more characters, including three forms of what English speakers might call "Z" ... two forms of "T" and two forms of "S"). There is no "P" in Arabic, and no "V" ... so it's reasonable for an Arabic-speaker to read the t-shirt as the "zee fell-feet andar-gerawoond" at least it's bossible. I can joke about that because I do speak Arabic and find the transliteration of English words can be priceless entertainment (in case you're wondering, when I first read the Joy Division t-shirt it parsed as "Gooey Defeegin" and then it parsed as "Jawey Defeegin" which meant "my weather is ..." and the word defeejin/defeegin had me mystified.

Asteroid Sulu

Congratulations Mr. Sulu.

The International Astronomical Union has given asteroid 1994 GT9 the new name of 7307 Takei in honor of George Takei, the actor who played Hikaru Sulu

[Via Boing Boing].

iPhone Battlefleet

Just a fun implementation of Battleship with an iPhone-suitable interface. It plays reasonably well through a regular browser version as well, though annoyingly slides the screen between turns ... in spite of there being enough room to fit two screens for full-scale browsers.

[Link]

Nobel Prize for Hard Drives

Well, actually it's the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded for the development of Giant-Magnetoresistive technology. Albert Fert of France and Peter Gruenberg of Germany were announced as winners for this work which has enabled the continued increase in disk capacities over the last decade. This should not be underestimated, as it's easy to ignore the fact that hard drives have increased in density faster than processors over the same period.
It's great to see contributions to computer systems (and storage - YAY!) recognized by the hard sciences, especially in one of the five original Nobel categories.

I'm rooting for Pixie Dust/AFC recording for next year, and racetrack memories (NewScientist Article) for the year after that!

[via Bloomberg and Associated Press]

Hifana's Wamono - Incredible Japanese Music Video

A great animated music video by Hifana, telling the tale of two fishermen and the huge catch they set off to pursue. [note: brief animated partial nudity, might be NSFW for some people]



Hifana sound amazing, and significant processing contributes to their recorded sound, but they are equally impressive when performing live and depending primarily on pads and scratching. Their live performances of Wamono (link1, link2) are not to be missed.

[via YouTube]