Monday 3 October 2005

Today I'm Mostly Copying Links From Robot Wisdom

May be you should just check Jorn's blog, instead, but here we go:

Apparently a group of astronomers have found a new planet in the solar system and have decided to call it, for now, Xena. More cutely Xena has a moon orbiting it. The astronomers have called that Gabrielle. Go here if this means nothing to you. Unfortunately it seems these are just placeholder names:
Brown planned to submit a paper describing the moon discovery to the Astrophysical Journal next week. The International Astronomical Union, a group of scientists responsible for naming planets, is deciding on formal names for Xena and Gabrielle.


The Guardian has a profile of Jon Stewart.
The key dividing line in America, he says, referring to the New Orleans flood, is poverty. "I have to say poor is poor. And in this country that's where people really get screwed. If that had been in Appalachia [a poor white area of West Virginia], it would still have been a real fuck-up because they're the people that people think about last."

So, as the host of The Daily Show, does he think about those people first? "Us, no," he says without skipping a beat. "We're thinking about jokes."


World of Warcraft, an On-line Role Playing Game, recently had problems with a plague. The problem was mostly created by certain players, known as griefers, actively trying to pass the disease on to other players. There is, of course, a real world message in this:
"Giving it the ability to propagate at all beyond a limited environment definitely reminds us that self-propagating code is likely to bite us in the ass without careful consideration and planning," Martin said. "This also underscores the fact that adequate testing is a requirement for software, as this--and thousands of other bugs--would have easily been discovered and hopefully fixed had the testing been more thorough."

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