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This is too funny.

People are turning the LOLCat speak into programming languages. It's awesome.

Am I a huge nerd? I think the fact that the code snippets on this page made me laugh out loud prove it.

IZ IPTR IN MAH INSTRUCTIONS LIEK "["?
LOL LSPTR IN MAH LOOPSTACKZ R IPTR
UPZ LSPTR!!
KTHX

(damn, the css makes code formatting totally foobar so I can't include it here. Looks like I need to fix that. Anyway, go look at the code, it's damned funny.)

The Rhyme Torrents project has released a two-disc set (how can a download of mp3's have "discs"?) of Halloween themed raps.

Here is the Halloween album from last year too!

Fun stuff.

They also have a collection of 6 albums of various Nerd-Core songs. Great!

La Lubu over at Feministie writes a very powerful post about the birth of her extremely premature baby and all the health care battles she had to fight.

Prior to that, I received my first bill from her original hospital. It came after six weeks of treatment—before my daughter was officially listed as being under the insurance plan (see, you have to produce a birth certificate first, and there’s a time lag between when you can obtain the official birth certificate from the state, and the processing of the paperwork with the insurance plan. First, I had to prove that the baby that came out of my body via the fully-paid for emergency c-section, was actually mine. Don’tcha just love bureaucracy? It didn’t include neonatology services, radiology services, pediatric cardiology, respiratory therapists, or even surgery. But it was about $750,000 just the same. Now remember, that was before the hefty insurance discount was applied.

And I laughed. Yes, I laughed. What the hell else could I do? Who the hell did they think was going to be pulling $750,000 out of her ass? Because it sure wasn’t me. At the Ronald McDonald House, I traded war stories with the other parents. Most of the parents there were long-termers—waiting for the call for new organs for their sick children. Everyone had lost their jobs because of their children’s medical crises. At least once. I met folks whose employers couldn’t be bothered to give them a week of time off. I met a family where both parents had hepatitis C (and that ain’t cheap, people); they were waiting for their toddler son to get a lung transplant. People from all over the nation. A nation of isolated medical crises.

PZ Myers gave a talk to the Freethinkers group at St. Olaf the other day. I wish I had been there.

He has the transcript up and I think you should read it.

I am here to bring you some good news.

The universe is about 13.7 billion years old, plus or minus a few hundred million, and the earth itself is about 4.6 billion years old. How do we know this? The work of astronomers in measuring cosmological constants, in calculating the age of stars and the size of our universe; the work of physicists on principles of radioactive decay, and measurements of the age of rocks; the work of geologists in charting the many layers of rock and puzzling out the mechanisms of change.

Today Nate turned me on to Off-The-Record Messaging. It's a plugin for encrypting IM traffic.

They have a proxy server version (that's still beta I believe) that lets you use it with most clients. I have it setup with TrillianPro and it works great!

It's a pretty seamless integration.

Here's an interesting video about Global Warming. It's by a science teacher and instead of trying to convince people that Global Warming is true, he instead works the risk management angle.

As I was watching it, it seemed to sound a lot like a version of Pascal's Wager, and at the end, he puts up a slide that acknowledges that and apparently he has a series of videos that address more questions too. I'll have to watch them also.

In any case, this is well worth a watch, whether you think Global Warming is true or not.



(p.s. He's wearing a League of Awesomeness t-shirt!)

Wow. This is totally cool. Graphic designer Jon Heilman has created a stunning replica of the map from Time Bandits!



It's printed on canvas and measures 40" x 24.5". I want one of these for my living room wall.

Link.

(h/t to BoingBoing)

Mark Vidler (creating mashups as Go Home Productions) has released 12 of his collections for free download!

This is some quality stuff.

(h/t to MashupTown for the link)