Back to the usual blog. Some of these stories have been developing over the course of the last week. You should be aware of them.

• Starting with something fun, the US Women’s water polo team posed in the buff along with dozens of other high profile athletes in this year’s ESPN Magazine Body Issue. The imagery in this second annual special edition is sure to raise some eyebrows – at least.
  

  Coming soon to ESPN

• The Three Lakes Winery has gone above and beyond the call of creativity this season by using sweet pie-grade pumpkins to craft a $10 bottle of pumpkin wine. According to reviews, it’s more drinkable than several $10 bottles made with actual grapes. They suggest heating the wine with mulling spices, which doesn’t sound like a half-bad idea. Bottoms up.
• Sunday was a sad day for sports and paranormal enthusiasts alike. Paul, the psychic octopus who successfully predicted many of the World Cup winners, died in his sleep. No word yet on whether anyone plans to eat Paul in an attempt to absorb his ability.
• In mid-October the China Daily Newspaper reported that China would be cutting its rare-earth exports by up to 30% next year, effectively blowing a hole in the tech industry. A few days later, China went out of its way to deny this claim. Naturally, no one knows what to believe. The uncomfortable truth is that China can use their monopoly on rare-earth mining as a bargaining chip in negotiations with other developed world powers. On Tuesday the 26th, U.S. House Science and Technology Committee Chairman Bart Gordon said today he is talking to senators in an effort to convince them to pass a measure on rare-earth elements shortly after the Nov. 2 election. Rare-element mining is about as environmentally friendly as clubbing baby seals with spare parts from a BP oil rig, however, it remains an unavoidable fact that this is now a matter of national security. The story continues to develop…
• In spite of the US Federal Reserve printing trillions of dollars (something they call quantitative easing) every few weeks, Tim Geithner swore the US would not devalue the dollar. Just days later, Ben Bernake announced that the FED would buy another $1.7 Trillion dollars in assets using printed money, sparking fears of 1970s style inflation. The whole thing seemed a bit disingenuous to many critics of an economic “low-dollar policy” designed to make the USA more competitive with developing nations.
• As more currency traders invest in Brazilian currency as a safe-haven against the unstable Dollar and heavily manipulated Yuan, Finance Minister Guido Mantega announced significant new taxes on foreign investors in an attempt to halt the rapid appreciation of his nation’s money supply. “There is nothing the Brazilian government can do to fight against the record low yield levels in developed economies,” Bank of America Corp. said in a note to investors. “The government has engaged in an impossible war.”
• On the science front, both anti-gravity generators and Star-Trek style deflector shields are approaching reality. Exciting stuff.
  

  Magnetic Deflector Shield

• This one will bake your noodle – there is new evidence suggesting that the third dimension is just a holographic projection. Zoom in close enough and the “pixels” actually begin to blur. Hello Matrix… have you seen Morpheus or Neo? A new device is being built to further test this development.
• The RealClear network has launched two new portals. Real Clear Science and Real Clear Religion. No word as to whether the two staffs ever lunch together in a friendly manner.

• Mechanically Separated Meat – Truth from Fiction
  A lot of you have been re-posting a nausea-inducing story about how MSM is crafted. As usual, I’d like to point all of you in the direction of Snopes. The story in question is verified or debunked point-for-point.
• New Facebook Chat Client
  No link for this one folks. Several FB users have seen a new chat window deployed as of about 5pm today.  The chat-window spacing is wider and profile-photos replace names. It’s a bit buggy – sometimes you will get a message but won’t be able to see it unless you open a new window/tab. Also, doing a copy/paste of a conversation becomes problematic since you no longer get the person’s name next to each new item.
• Yes, Groupon Can Crush Your Business
  Business Insider  counters a study out of Rice University claiming Groupon is bad for business. Summary: “If you offer up a massive discount that its users will love, and that will absolutely destroy you, it will happily accept. But that doesn’t mean Groupon is bad for businesses. It just means you’re doing it wrong.”
• Congress passes law ordering FCC to lower volume on TV commercials
  They can’t agree on a budget, or what to do about taxes, or much of anything else, but members of Congress have managed to get one piece of legislation through both houses that will make a difference to their constituents when it comes to watching TV
• You Can Switch From Right-handed to Left-handed Through Magnets
  It sounds as pointless as it does strange but think of it this way – if transcranial magnetic stimulation change a person’s dominant hand, how might that affect stroke patients or amputees? Pretty cool UC Berkeley.
• Why the revolution will not be tweeted
  Famous pop-psych author Malcolm Gladwell brings us an interestint column on the nature of revolutions and why the old-style in-your-face movement has not been replaced with Facebook, Twitter, or any desk-bound form of activism. A key quote regarding Iran’s Green Revolution: “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”
• Nielsen: 32 Percent Of New Smartphone Owners Choose Android Phones
  According to August data from The Nielsen Company, Android has passed the iPhone and BlackBerry to become the popular operating system for people who bought a smartphone in the past six months.
• Has the Cellphone Destroyed Our Ability to Be On Time as a Society?
  Thanks to cellphones, BlackBerrys and other gadgets, too many of us have become blasé about being late. We have so many ways to relay a message that we’re going to be tardy that we no longer feel guilty about it.
• Want to Drop a Few Pounds? Lie in Bed
  Next time your alarm clock sounds, you can hit the snooze button in good conscience: sleeping in may help you lose fat.

Yes, that’s right, the plague. For three god-awful days I have been trying to figure out how to breathe around a nasty summer flu while sleeping 12 hours a day with my heater cranked to 80 degrees. It’s all over now though, just in time for my sister’s birthday tomorrow. And good riddance. Nothing quite makes me appreciate being healthy like a death rattle for a cough.

It’s October! Here are a few items you should be familiar with and others you may have missed ~

• 20 Rallies About to Reverse, According to the Short Sellers
  If the short-sellers are to be believed, and these are the folks putting their money where their mouths are, the following 20 companies are about to take a corrective hit. Of course, nothing is permanent in the market as this week’s spike and rally by ARMH proves but it may be a good day to take your profits.
• Rahm Emanuel Gets Warm Send Off from Obama
  Obama’s chief-of-staff these last two years bids the White House a fond adieu. He will be running for Mayor of Chicago in the upcoming election.
• Meet Pete Rouse, Obama’s next chief of staff
  Obama’s pick to replace Emmanuel is starting to look more permanent by the day.  Rouse has an almost opposite personality profile from his predecessor but he shares Emmanuel’s “consummate insider” status.
• Rahm-a-Done
  Of course, not everyone believes Obama’s choice of another insider is the right one for an administration that has seen as much turbulence as this one has in the last year.  Joe Klein elaborates for Time/CNN.
• World Trade mosque/community center revealed with a CRAZY design
  Of course, no small part of that turbulence has whirled around the “ground zero mosque” debate.  On a day otherwise occupied with news, San Francisco’s SOMA Architects quietly released the proposed design for the building. It’s actually a really interesting piece of work.
• Apple TV jailbreak complete, next step: figuring out how to run apps
  Down the way in Cupertino, Apple got a nasty surprise. Their new Apple TV has already been jailbroken and developers are well on their way to making iOS applications run on a television set. Why didn’t Apple think of this first?
• San Francisco Giants: Why They Will Win the 2010 World Series
  The Bay Area is riding high on the SF Giants imminent first playoff appearance in almost a decade.  The influential Bleacher Report apparently thinks they can go all the way. If they do, no doubt rookie Buster Posey will get a good chunk of the credit: San Francisco is 45-27 in games Posey has started at catcher.
• Oakland police kill old dog who barked and growled at them
  While on the subject of wild stories out of the Bay, Police in Oakland shot and killed an arthritic, 11-year-old yellow Labrador in its backyard Tuesday while responding to a burglar alarm the dog accidentally tripped while her owner was out running errands. On Facebook? Let them know how you feel about it here.
• Google Street View now covers all the continents, including Antarctica
  Elsewhere in the world, Google now includes a penguin-cam.
• First distant planet with Earth-like conditions discovered
  A little further out, scientists have discovered an entire solar system full of potentially Earth-like planets for us to settle on. Unfortunately the leading candidate has 1.2-1.4 times Earth’s gravity, making it even more painful to get out of bed in the morning.
• UFOs eyed nukes, ex-Air Force personnel say
  But to get REALLY out of this world, you’ve got to come right back down to Earth. The political statements at the end might lead some to doubt the group’s intentions but then again – one could come up with far more convincing arguments for nuclear disarmament than “the aliens don’t like it”.

  The truth is out there Mulder…

Well, mostly lucid enough anyway.

• RIM introduces PlayBook
  Research in Motion has announced its iPad competitor and the device actually looks pretty good. This is in no small part due to the fact it’s running QNX instead of BlackBerry OS6.
• BlackBerry OS6 to be retired in favor of QNX
  Surprising no one, a Research in Motion vice president confirmed this morning that the fancy new QNX operating system inits BlackBerry PlayBook tablet will eventually replace the traditional BlackBerry OS in its smartphones
• Amazon launches beta of Kindle for the web
  Kindle for the Web allows you to read the first chapter of any book that has a Kindle edition right in your browser.
• AOL buys TechCrunch
  I’m not exactly thrilled about AOL buying another company I love but there it is. One of the most influential tech blogs in the Silicon Valley now belongs to the Internet’s most notorious dinosaur.
• US energy grid gets its first taste of tidal power
  A company called Ocean Power Technologies has come up with a tidal power generation in a familiar shape: a buoy. Now, after months in the water, the PowerBuoy has been hooked up to the energy grid, making it America’s first tidal energy generator.
• SolveMedia uses ads for verification instead of CAPTCHA
  I consider this to be a stroke of genius. Rather than the nonsensical text or words in difficult-to-read fonts used by most captcha tools — typically requiring about 14 seconds for users to negotiate — Solve’s Type-Ins tool achieves website user verification by asking users to type in advertising text instead.
• US Scientists continue to receive federal funding for stem cell research
  Scientists who use embryonic stem cells for research can continue to receive U.S. taxpayer funding while the government challenges a lower-court order that barred federal support, an appeals court said.
• FDA warns mouthwash brands are making false claims
  A day after taking POM Wonerful to task for making unsubstantiated claims about the benefits of pomegranate, the FDA now warns that mouthwash makers are just as full of false advertising claims.
• CAL Berkeley cuts five athletic programs including men’s Rugby
  A winning record, it seems, doesn’t mean what it used to. Having won 25 national championships since 1980, the Cal Bears will no longer have a Division I rugby team. The squad has been relegated to a “varsity club sport”. Men’s Baseball shares their fate.
• Oaxacan mudslide burries 300 homes in Mexico
  While LiLo’s fifth rehab is certainly an item of great import and Tiger’s golf game is in the press again – these items have overshadowed a pretty huge tragedy to the South.

Yes I realize the ghost of the English Language just rolled over in its grave.

If you’ve been jacked into the net long enough, you may remember one of the first internet memes, which proclaimed “ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US”. For a quick recap, check out the Wikipedia entry.

What’s this on Wikipedia? A portion of the original Japanese script for the cut scene? Oh my… we must have some fun with this. The internet has been laughing about “AYB” for years – can our best modern technology do better?

Original English Translation (from the game)

• Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb.
• Operator: Main screen turn on.
• CATS: All your base are belong to us.
• CATS: You have no chance to survive make your time.
• Captain: For great justice

Actual English Translation (Human, recent)

• Engineer: It appears that someone has planted explosives.
• Radio Operator: The main screen is receiving a visual.
• CATS: All of your bases are under our control.
• CATS: Make the most of these last moments of your lives.
• Captain: Our hopes for the future …

Ladies and gentleman, without further delay, I give you “All our base are belong to us” as translated by Microsoft Translation Services, Google Translate, and Babylon.

Google Translate:

• Professional organizations: by someone, it seems that a roadside bomb.
• Professional communication: the vision comes to the main screen.
• CATS: The military cooperation of the federal government, you are our base, all
• CATS: you are running low life at best respect
• Captain: We hope for the future of

Bing Translate:

• Engineer: by someone seems the booby is explosive.
• Vision communications person: come to (untranslatable)
• CATS: Federal Government army cooperation by all your base are have I got
• CATS: at most low life, before and in the future of
• Captain: we hope…

Babylon Translation Services

• An engineer: Explosive substance seems to have been set who was
• An operator: A vision comes to the Main screen
• CATS: By cooperation of the federation government troop had your base entirely
• CATS: Value to the utmost small amount of life; it is
• Captain: For hope in our future

“There I fixed it”

On balance, suddenly “All your base are belong to us” doesn’t seem such a big mistake. In fact, I’d wager it’s worth a C+ in a basic Japanese class. All the combined might of Google, Bing, and a professional translation service combined couldn’t make heads or tails of the conversation.

Overall, I’m left with two possible morals for this story. The first is this: learn Japanese. The other is that, while ridiculous, the original translation was far more entertaining than anything else including the original.

Good on ya CATS, hope to see you in a remake some day. Don’t ever lose that Engrish accent.

I don’t believe freedom of speech gives us the moral right to hurt others for the sake of a laugh. Satire is a dead art, replaced by over the top crassness. I know it’s a cycle but it still upsets me.

I think in any moral society we have certain protocols that are observed at its most basic level and Family guy happily crossed one of them. When we forget the things that make our society great – often interwoven within the moral fabric of a just and fair culture – we begin to loose the very things whole generations fought and died for.

It’s when you get caught up in the idea that you can say or do anything in a “free” society then simply create reparations for the people hurt once it is too late to salvage what was lost… that we begin down the dark road of democratic societies like the ones that produced the first Roman emperors or Hitler.

Liberty isn’t freedom from morality, it is freedom to live according to one’s on beliefs in a way that doesn’t harm the basic fabric of society. It was nicely summed up by Jefferson (1) when he spoke of our inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I’m not surprised when mainstream television reaches new lows, I’m just surprised when perfectly rational people defend those lows as virtuous and commendable.

Freedom and anarchy are not the same. Liberty and freedom from morality are in fact opposites that weak minded angry rebels think are analogous. It’s a Devil’s trick, that one.

Either you see it or you don’t. Sadly, the latter are now in the majority since we stopped teaching young Americans how to think for themselves in the early 1970s. The loss of logic is now the loss of four full generations.

1. Technically the idea was John Locke’s when he spoke of “Life, liberty, and happiness” as rights. One of the primary differences between European & North American post-enlightenment philosophy is the distinction between the right to happiness and the right to a pursuit of happiness.

I am blocked from posting in public forums on Facebook for an indeterminate amount of time because I abused the system by sharing my last post (on how to avoid abusing your friends by using Facebook lists) too many times.

Wow, that’s special.

Facebook, I stand in awe of your administrative algorithms and fear what is going to happen when Google’s engineers really sink their teeth into your market share.

We use a Facebook application, usually a game we play, and it wants to share news with our friends every time we so much as twitch near the keyboard. This can be useful to the 2% of our friends who actually use the application in question but to the other 98% (or in my case about 900 unfortunate souls), it’s Spam.

Don’t believe me? Check out this 1.5 million 2.03 million (single day increase from draft to post) member strong group called “I don’t care about your farm, or your fish, or your park, or your mafia!!!“

Trust me folks, its spam, and nobody likes a spammer. In fact, if you regularly post game info I’d be willing to bet 20% or more of your friends have blocked you from their news feed. That’s going to suck when you actually have something important to say.

Well, dear reader, I’m here today to teach you how to be a responsible Facebooker. Unfortunately, you are going to need to jump through a few hoops the first time you set this up but when you are done, never again will your mother-in-law get requests to “Torture A ULF Lieutenant” at 2pm on a Tuesday when you are supposed to be at work making the money to pay your rent.

Torture your in-laws with Mafia Wars posts

For starters you will need:

• To know how to create a new friend list
• Knowledge of how to set up security zones with secondary lists
• To know how to open multiple browser windows or tabs
• About 15min for the average moderate-to-heavy use application

I’ll cover all of these bullets in turn except for multiple windows and tabbed browsing. For that I’m going to make you google the answer because it’s ouside the range of what I have patience to screenshot.  Ok I won’t really make you google it, that link should pretty much cover the basics.

So here is the 1000 foot overview of what we are going to do

1. Create friend groups for each of your games/applications. This way when the Mafia wants you to torture that ULF member, you can post it to your wall in such a way that ONLY people from Mafia Wars actually see the request.
2. Create security groups so that friends who you only know from Mafia Wars don’t know your phone number, your weekend plans, and how drunk you got on Saturday night.
3. Finally, we are going to learn how to change the visibility settings in a game when it asks to post something on your wall.

So, let’s get started! Feel free to skip over any parts you already know. This is a Facebook 101 lesson from the ground up.

Step 1: Create a friend list on Facebook

1. Open Facebook, on the top right click on “Account”
2. Select “Edit Friends”

   
   

3. In the center column on the top left, click on “create new list”
4. Add at least one member. See the screenshot below illustrating this process. The people in blue are members of your list, the ones in white are not.
   

   Click Image to Enlarge

I’d like to add for posterity that getting back to a list for editing follows a slightly different path. You can either edit the lists per-person on the “Edit Friends” page or you can do it from the friends list interface.

Option #2 - From Your Home Page

For the latter option you need to click “friends” on the left column of your home page, this will expand your lists. Clicking a list will show you the news for that grouping. At the top-right of the center column, you will find an “Edit List” button. That will let you add/remove friends from a list. In Step 3 you will see why this is almost always the easier option.

Step 2: Secure your friend lists on Facebook

Ok so let’s face it, not all of you want to expose your phone number, relationship status, and political wall rants to the kids you play Farmville with. That’s totally understandable. I have a list called “limited profile”, which means you can’t see jack crap and another called “somewhat limited” that people like mom & dad go under so when a DJ says “hey did you call me at 5:30 this morning?” my parents don’t wonder how I plan on making it to lunch by 1pm (I’m looking at you Mr. Dresden).

Some of us learn these things in life the hard way. I’m often one of them.

But I digress. Essentially you want to create a series of secondary lists for security purposes that define how much of your profile a person can see. You can then add Castle Age players to both the Castle Age list AND a limited profile list – because Johnny McMasters in Manitoba just doesn’t need to know the same life details as your BFF in Manhattan or your former roommate in Los Angeles.

Once you have created a series of security “zones” (to use the IT vernacular), click on “Account Settings” again (top right) and this time go to “Privacy Settings”. Under both “Profile Information” and “Contact Information” you will want to select “Custom Settings and assure that each of your security zones is blocked from the appropriate areas.

Some of you may be asking “Why not just block every member of Castle Age from seeing my contact information?”

If you figured out the answer, congratulations, you get a cookie.

You may have real life friends who ALSO play Castle Age, Mafia Wars, or have a secret passion for zookeeping. I’m pretty sure you won’t want to block them from seeing critical information on your Facebook. So two groups it is – one for sorting and another for security. Deal with it.

Step 3: Determine who plays the same game

Okay so you can set up lists, you can grant everyone the proper security rights to your personal information – but how do you know who all plays the application? This part is pretty easy. I like to do it as follows:

1. Open the application, whether it’s Poker, Farmville, Mafia Wars, or some yet unknown phenomenon.
2. Scroll to the very bottom of the page.
3. Look for a link to the application name on the bottom left side of the footer. Click it.
   
   
   
4. This will take you to a page with information on the game & developer. Click on the “Info” tab
   

   Click Image to Enlarge

5. Once again, scroll to the bottom of the page
6. Under “friends using this application” click “see all”. It’s in small blue letters to the right just above a random selection of eight friends who have the app installed.
   

   Click Image to Enlarge

This is the list you need to create. This is also the tedious part.

1. Open another Facebook page in a separate browser (Ctrl-N) or a separate tab (Ctrl-T)
2. Leave your list open in the first instance and in the second, create your friend list
3. Carry names across. For some god awful reason they are not in the same order.
4. I find it useful to begin typing the name of each person in order, click to select, then double click my typing to “highlight all” and start typing the next person. This is all illustrated in the attached screenshot (below)
5. If you use Windows 7 and are using two separate browser windows, hi-light each one in turn. With your game members list hit “Windows Key + Left Arrow” and on the other hit “Windows Key + Right Arrow”. This will jump one window to each side of the page for easy copying.You can set this up in other operating systems but you don’t get the nifty shortcut keys. You can see why this helps.
   
   

   Click Image to Enlarge

6. Finally, consider hitting “save list” every 50 entries or so. You don’t want your browser to crash after 300 additions. Also, make a mental note of what person you are on at the start of each. It saves time if/when something goes wrong.

The larger the list, the more you will despise this initial process. Once you have the list created though, it only takes a few seconds a day to maintain. More or less, every time a new game friend is added you should immediately get them categorized. 30 seconds at the time of addition is a lot easier than cross checking the whole damn thing once a month.

Step 4: Posting information to the correct group

At this point, you will want to open your favorite spam producing application and perform an action that will result in a post being made to your wall. When the request pops up, look for the padlock icon. Click it and select “Custom”

You will note that in many browsers, the windows don’t quite fit inside of one another. This is tricky but not an impossible situation.

• If you have blocked a limited profile by default that includes most members of your gaming community, remove that right away.
• Change “Make visible to these People” to “Specific People”
• Type the name of the list(s) you want to publish to
• If your windows don’t fit click on the gray  text that reads “Only the people above can see this”, hold down the left button, and drag down. This will force the window to scroll so you can once again see the “save setting” button. Please note that while this works in Chrome and Internet Explorer, it does not work in some versions of Firefox and I have not tested it in Safari.

  Facebook needs to fix their UI bug. I’m talking to you Zuck.

• Click on Save Setting
• Add any notes you like and press “Publish”
  

  Click Image to Enlarge

A quick note for Farmville players! The only spam-producing event in your game (that I know of) is a lost animal. You will not be able to complete Step 4 unless you find one!

Congratulations Facebookers! Once your lists are set up it is dead simple to publish game notification to only a select group of gamers and not everybody you know. Now, for the sake of my poor bleeding eyeballs – get back out there and stop making a mess of my news feed.

Just remember: every time you add new friends to a game, add them to the appropriate lists.

Enjoy!

As an aside for developers, I would say there is a pretty strong need for an application that automates this process. This is above and beyond my ability; however, I’ve got a feeling it is well within yours. Someone make it happen, please

Suddenly I realized where I knew that figure from.

Coincidence? You tell me…

And who is the world’s #1 supervillain in this animated film, due out next summer?

Yes, that’s right, none other than Bill Gates!

This has been a tongue-in-cheek presentation. I actually quite like the direction Ballmer has taken Microsoft in and I am an MCSE supporting a mixed Vista/Win7 environment. Please don’t take this too seriously. Kthx.