From the cbc

New Democrats vowed Sunday to get to the bottom of attacks on the party's online voting system during the weekend convention that saw Quebec MP Thomas Mulcair elected leader.

Seen in comments:

For whatever party is involved (and I have my suspicions but for now I'll put that aside) it could be a very handy dry-run for a similar assault on electronic voting.

There is no way we should move toward electronic voting until it can be proven to be 100% safe.

This seems to me to misunderstand the entire purpose of electronic voting, which is to faciliate voter fraud and other disruptions of the democratic process.

Have I randomly praised cover art today?

As pointed out by Paul McAuley, this is an excellent choice of cover art by Old Earth Books:



If one is a certain age, that cover is like 900 mg of nostaligia straight to the pituitary.

I'm also fond of this one


because had that been the cover back in the 1970s, it would have got me in less trouble for taking it to school than the cover on the edition I first bought. That cover was subject to misinterpretation about what genre exactly the book fell into:

How many Doctor Who fans are gynophobes?

Nicked from lederhosen

"There was a slightly jarring moment when a fan asked the panel if there would ever be a female Doctor, and Steven [Moffat] pointed out it would be entirely possible, but then asked for a show of hands who would like to see that happen. This got about 50% of the audience raising their hands, but then he asked how many people would switch off the show if there was a female Doctor, and 20-30% of the fans put their hand up, to a certain amount of gasping from everyone else."

Bird calls

Pet parrots, such as cockatoos, that are let loose in the wild are teaching native birds to talk.

So, remember Cain?

Failed Republican Presidential wanna-be? He's still making political videos. This comes with a special "animal lovers MPR" warning and a cut so people won't click on the video by accident.
( Read more... )

An unsurprising court decision

Ontario's top court has struck down the ban on brothels and ruled that prostitutes should be able to hire bodyguards.

The need for private guards is because historically cops don't give a crap about what happens to hookers, which is how Robert Pickton was able to murder 49 prostitutes before the police belatedly got shamed into doing something about him.

I wonder how long it will take some objectively pro-serial killer social conservative to object to this court decision?

Looks more like another case of judicial activism rather than interpretation of consititutional law.

Well, not long at all. And it's even signed "John Galt".

On rereading an old Bechdel collection

Clarice and Toni were pretty much doomed from day one, weren't they?

How often does it Rain on Titan?

Introduction: We are privileged to live on one of only two worlds in the solar system on which liquids rain onto a solid surface : Titan is the other. Here we show that simple energy balance, numerical models of global and mesoscale circulation, ground- and space-based observations of clouds, and Cassini observations of surface change, are all consistent with Titan rains lasting 2-100 hours occurring at ~100-1000 year inter-vals globally, but 10-100 hours each Titan year (30 Earth years) at the poles. Implications for observations by Cassini and possible future missions are discussed.

Do readers tend to see characters as white?

A data-point in favour of "yes, even if there's a description of the character that says otherwise.

I'm not planning on seeing the movie in question because I discovered on a previous occasion I have a surprisingly low tolerance for watching kids forced to fight each other to the death (and I do mean surprising; I assumed I was completely desensitized to fictional violence) but it's interesting if the producers chose not to white-wash the characters.

So we watched Uncanny Valley Tintin

How is it possible for Spielberg to have been an adult before he saw Tintin?

There was a shot of Red Rackham walking out the flames that made both my exgf and I wonder if the original Red Rackham was a woman. I later realized that this could not be the case, as there is only one woman of note in the Tintinoverse and that's Bianca Castafiore. In a very nice bit of timing, I managed to assert that fact out loud right before Bianca Castafiore was introduced in the film.

Bianca is considerably thinner in her movie version than in the comic books. She also seems to be a better singer than in the comics: the comic book version was, iirc, on par with Assurancetourix from Asterix.

This fact, on the other hand, came as a complete surprise.