The Bit Mine

“ They don’t even have Mr. Pibb; they foist Dr. Pepper on you with a maddeningly un-apologetic shrug when any fool knows that Dr. Pepper is no substitute for Mr. Pibb, and it’s an absolute goddamned travesty, or — at best — extremely dissatisfying indeed.

— David Foster Wallace, Shipping Out

This may be why I don’t particularly care for DFW.

newsweek:

soupsoup:

(via The Onion)

Listen, Onion, it takes a lot more than meaningless numbers to make us ejaculate.

Amen, Onion.

Nesting Dolls

I’m in the middle of installing Windows XP in VirtualBox running on Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which is running in VirtualBox on Windows 7. There is a method to my madness, I promise.

Update: I somehow ended up running two simultaneous software updates and didn’t notice until I tried to reboot while the first update was still going. Result: Broken system. I guess it’s going to be a format, reinstall, try again kind of night.

“ It’s ‘Anaconda meets Jurassic Park,’ ” says Jason Head, a paleontologist at the University of Toronto who worked with Wilson’s team. “These sauropods would lay these huge fields of eggs that we find in India, just kind of kilometers of dinosaur eggshell, and so with these hatchling dinosaurs it must have just been a smorgasbord where a whole ecosystem of predators could basically come in and feed on them.

— NPR: Snake Vs. Dinosaur Deathmatch Preserved In Fossil Find

via www.blogadilla.com

On Cleaning

It took me three years of living on my own, but I’ve finally figure out The Basic Truths of Keeping My Place Acceptably Clean:

Just putting my shit away gets me 75% of the way there.
Vacuuming, dusting, and wiping down the flat surfaces takes care of the next 20%.
The last 5% is serious sleeves-rolled-up scrubbing, but I hardly ever actually have to do it. A couple of times a year for most of the apartment and once a month for the bathroom.

» Cell Size and Scale

From coffee beans to carbon atoms.

Towing a barge (not just any barge, a hover barge!) with a helicopter in Alaska.

Must see.

Beechcraft D-17 Staggerwing. Beautiful airplane.

5 Guys in a Limo.

» Crystal Cave of Giants - Naica, Mexico

jQuery and XML namespaces workaround

From Kevin Whinnery:

After some Googling, I figured out a round-about way to get at this tag using an attribute filter for nodeName:
$(this).find("[nodeName=namespace:tag]").text();
Attribute filters, FTW! Hopefully if you find this post first, it will save you some Googling.

23 days without Internet or cable

Despite my and my landlord’s best efforts, we just can’t convince Comcast that sometimes after a house burns down it gets rebuilt.

On the plus side I’m making really good progress on all of those DVDs that I bought and never watched, and I’m getting to bed really early.