Seeing if the "note in reader" function will post the same way from the browser bookmarklet as it does from within google reader.
This, by the way, is the page where all the "wik" comes from.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974) - Crazy credits
from www.imdb.com
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This is a good observation:
"Great presidents (Roosevelt and Reagan) transform their times; good presidents (Eisenhower and Kennedy) understand them almost without trying; bad presidents (Buchanan and Carter) are overwhelmed by them. Obama is the first who has tried to defy them."
I think I might have to read the article.
from View from the Right
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I think I'd prefer a 1-day starship. Then I'd have it by next Tuesday.
STARSHIP DREAMS: A look at DARPA’s 100-year starship….
from Instapundit
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Found a thing called ifttt - If this, then that. It glues interweb thingies together.
So far, I set up a task to mirror all my Google+ posts to my Facebook wall. I set up a task to automatically add any item I star in Google Reader to Instapaper. I set up a task to text my phone when the forecast calls for rain. Those were all found task recipes that were on the site.
The previous post is my first attempt at creating brand new tasks. If I share something with a note in Reader, then it should appear here on Perfidy. However, if it just posts anything I share at all, then I'll have to start over.
Interesting tool, check it out.
[wik]: Okay, it just posts anything I share. Not so good.
[alsø wik] Tried another way. Better in that it only picks up things I share with a note, but I can't use the note for the blog post title like I can if I'm pulling from reader. Hmmn.
[alsø alsø wik] Tried to do it via email, which does allow me to control the title, and which ones would go here to Perfidy; but it trashes all links because it's taking the plain text of the message body. Which doesn't work.
[Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?]: Well, I can get a standard title, like, "From the feed" or something, and have the comment appear in the body of the post. Which works well enough. Still have the problem of it posting everything I share, which is more than I want to go here.
[see the løveli lakes...] Very frustrating. You can trigger off starred, liked and shared items. But only shared items have access to the comment. Ick. And using a standard feed as a trigger buries the comment in with all the other text, and you can't control the post title at all.
[the wøndërful telephøne system...] So, if I change my sharing behavior - that will affect two people, and not greatly. I can cope with that. But I still have the mildly annoying issue of using the comment field either as post title, or as post content, but not both. Using the shared item's title as the post title is awkward, because I can't control the length or formatting - for example, Instapundit always has titles in all caps. (Shouting at the world since 2001!)
But using a standard title, like "From the feed" gives the reader no clue as to the content, and funny (or at least mildly amusing) titles are kind of a thing for blogs and Perfidy. But if I use it for that, I'm left with just a link in the body of the post. I can't actually comment on the thing I'm linking to.
I think I'm leaning toward using the comment for actually commenting.
[And mäni interesting furry animals]: The thing that will annoy me is the repetitive, "From the feed" titles.
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Facebook Privacy ProTip
No need to thank me. It's all part of being a full service Internet Security blog.
from Borepatch.
[wik] Both images dead to link rot. Sigh.
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Now this makes more sense than a barrel full of sensible stuff. People have been arguing about how those crazy Egyptians built the pyramids for, literally, thousands of years. Now some French dude thinks he's got it sussed out:
A radical new idea has recently been presented by Jean-Pierre Houdin, a French architect who has devoted the last seven years of his life to making detailed computer models of the Great Pyramid. Using start-of-the-art 3-D software developed by Dassault Systemes, combined with an initial suggestion of Henri Houdin, his engineer father, the architect has concluded that a ramp was indeed used to raise the blocks to the top, and that the ramp still exists--inside the pyramid!
The theory suggests that for the bottom third of the pyramid, the blocks were hauled up a straight, external ramp. This ramp was far shorter than the one needed to reach the top, and was made of limestone blocks, slightly smaller than those used to build the bottom third of the pyramid. As the bottom of the pyramid was being built via the external ramp, a second ramp was being built, inside the pyramid, on which the blocks for the top two-thirds of the pyramid would be hauled. The internal ramp, according to Houdin, begins at the bottom, is about 6 feet wide, and has a grade of approximately 7 percent. This ramp was put into use after the lower third of the pyramid was completed and the external ramp had served its purpose.
The design of the internal ramp was partially determined by the design of the interior of the pyramid. Hemienu knew all about the problems encountered by Pharaoh Sneferu, his and Khufu's father. Sneferu had considerable difficulty building a suitable pyramid for his burial, and ended up having to construct three at sites south of Giza! The first, at Meidum, may have had structural problems and was never used. His second, at Dashur--known as the Bent Pyramid because the slope of its sides changes midway up--developed cracks in the walls of its burial chamber. Huge cedar logs from Lebanon had to be wedged between the walls to keep the pyramid from collapsing inward, but it too was abandoned. There must have been a mad scramble to complete Sneferu's third and successful pyramid, the distinctively colored Red Pyramid at Dashur, before the aging ruler died.
Well, yeah. And, he's got the evidence:
A microgravimetric survey done in the 80s revealed what looks like a blocky spiral on the inside of the pyramid. Pretty cool. Read the whole thing, here.
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NPR is doing a top 100 sf novels OF ALL TIME! list. (hat tip, Isegoria and Scalzi.) I have my favorites - the perennial favorite post here at perfidy is the top five list post - but of the books actually on the selection list, if I just had to choose, I'd pick these today:
For a lot of the books on the NPR list, I would have chosen a different book by the author, but that's just me being picky.
What really startled me, though, was the vastness of the list that I had not read:
Well, I guess I have some reading to do.
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Once I thought that this was the most awesomist picture ever:
Or maybe this one:
But now I know that it's this:
Bearmageddon. Jesus wept. Today is day zero for this webcomic, done by the guy who did the starkly amazing Axe Cop with his kid brother. New pages every Wednesday and Friday.
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Getting passports for the whole family will cost $850. Escape will be expensive.
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I hear that there's some debt shenanigans going on. If I weren't so appallingly cynical, I'd be shocked at the apparent inability of politicians and professional economists and Wall Street pimps to understand what's happening. I mean, it's pretty simple, as Reddit demonstrated the other day.
I see only a few possibilities:
It seems to me that each of the three groups most responsible for our current predicament fits one of those descriptions. I will allow that there is some possibility of overlap...
I'd say that reading the economic news is like watching a train derailing, except that you can't exactly watch a train derailing from the inside, so its not a perfect analogy. I have this terrible sense that inexorable doom is coming toward us. You look at the similarities between the first great depression and our current situation (banking crisis, pause, soveriegn debt crisis... who will be the Creditanstalt for our times?). You look at the results of debasing the currency in Imperial Rome, in pre-Industrial England, in dozens of countries from Weimar Germany to Zombabwe in the last century and wonder how we can be different, except in scale. You look at the disingenuousness of the economic statistics - Q1 revised down to .4% growth? G is a component of GDP. Take that out, subtract that from next to zero, and what do you have? And let's not mention the unemployment numbers.
In this environment, people like Ron Paul are made to look like the crazed radical for pointing out the obvious. Well, maybe the food, gold, ammo approach is less unreasonable and paranoid than it once was.
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