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RPS – 15 This is an extreme version of Rock-Paper-Scissors. There are fifteen hand gestures, each of which wins over seven gestures and loses to seven gestures. With that many gestures, there is only a one-in-fifteen chance of a tie. Via the Daily Nugget .

yeah Just upgraded to WordPress 2.3.1. The release, not the release candidate. I wound up have to go into phpMyAdmin and set the auto_increment value in some of the MySQL tables. Now that I’ve sorted it out, I have to say that so far I like it. Sidebar widgets and tags are built right in.

About a year ago there was a video circulating on the net about a computer game. You all know I’m too boring for computer games, but this one had a tie-in with physical, cultural and technological evolution. You can’t beat that. [The name, Leslie, tell them the name!] The game is called Spore . Better pre-order that puppy. It’s going to sell out fast. You know you want it . If you think you don’t want it, go grab another can of Monster , sit your hyper little butt down and watch the 36-minute video below. In the video, developer Will Wright demonstrates an alpha version of Spore at the 2005 Game Developer’s Conference. You’ve never seen anything like this before! So why is so cool about Spore? Well, you get to design one-celled organisms. The fun is in configuring your creations and watching them feed and grow and evolve. Give them a new limb, watch them figure out how to use it, that is, watch the software figure out how to use it! Put ...

Spoofcard.com Oh, this is a fun site. What Spoofcard.com does is allow you to block your telephone Caller ID and disguise your voice. Apparently they offer a service for folks who like to play practical jokes on their cellphones. No, not really. Where this would come in handy is if you want to display your company phone number when making business calls from your personal phone. You can record the calls and play them back from spoofcard.com’s web control panel. Very nice! If you aren’t into putting together a 555 timer and a comparator for a barebones audio distortion circuit Spoofcard.com could be a lot of fun.

Responsible Nanotechnology: 3D Spam? Nanotechnological Spam In the “just one more thing to worry about” category, the Committee for Responsible Nanotechnology (CRN) blog has an article about what might happen if spammers figure out how to control the 3D nanofactories we will all have on our desks someday. As if faxed travel ads aren’t bad enough.

In case you’ve ever wondered how your cat looks from a mouse’s viewpoint.

The Squid and the Bus « microecos Ok, I had to follow up my baby squid post with a link to a site that proves once and for all that everything’s scarier in Russian.

SkyScout SkyScout is a digital planetarium. You point it at the sky and it identifies whatever star or other celestial object you point it at.  I…  WANT

— Photo from the Squid blog, capped by Leslie . update: another lolsquid on the Science Notes blog.

Rivers Source Botanicals Retail/Wholesale As a psychiatric patient ^w^w shaman wannabe ^w^w armchair anthropologist, I am very interested in the varieties of religious experience, to steal a title from psychologist William James . More precisely, I’m interested in different paths to epiphany just as much as I am interested in the content of the epiphanies. The content, you see, is determined by your cultural expectations. (Boring.) The fact that we are wired for bliss amazes me. But I’m totally off-topic here, aren’t I? I wanted to put in a plug for Rivers Source Botanicals. They have an excellent selection of heritage plants and seeds to help you create that special healing garden. The flower pictured here is St. John’s Wort, a plant that is still used medicinally in Europe to treat depression. We can get it in health food stores, but your doctor isn’t likely to prescribe it. RSB often has SJW seeds in stock, along with echinacea, several types o...

I have been thinking about about the environmental and medical effects of nano-pollution. Nanotechnology is a catch-all phrase that describes microscopic man-made objects. These come in many shapes and sizes – soccer-ball-shaped cages made of 60 carbon atoms , nanotubes the thickness of a hair, among others. These objects persist in the environment after they’ve been used and disposed of. There has been little, if any, investigation into the effects of exposure to environmental nanotechnology. Nanotechnological pollution is on the horizon. Fortunately, at least one group is looking into it. The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (CRN) is trying to put together a multi-disciplinary collaborative network to establish guidelines for safely handling nano-materials. We don’t have very long to get the guidelines and some procedures in place. An emerging illness called Morgellons Disease is quite possibly the earliest indication of what we can all expect from nano-p...

I think I’ll name my next dog “ Hash: b2e189abf85e809a51522cdb0e53083a ” I found Don Park’s site (see below, Identicons) while searching for 2D codes such as ShotCode and QRCode. Once I get everything tagged, life is going to be much simpler. :-) Ok, so Don had links to some other fun icon sites, and I’d like to share them. This one, created in php by Charles Dark of Visual Consumption, uses the same concept but a different implementation to build a colorful 9-code “ Visiglyph ” of your IP address. This avatar, also based on IP address, can be found at planetOzh . I like mine. It’s purple. And here’s your identicon:

Don Parks Daily Habit – Visual Security: 9-block IP Identification An interesting site I came across a few weeks ago, lost, then found again. Look, I’m beautiful! Uh, well, at work anyway. My identicon at home looks like one of the bugs from the movie “Starship Troopers.” Update: Since you wondered…

State senator sues God – Peculiar Postings – MSNBC.com Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chambers has had it up to here with the terroristic threats God makes against His creations, not to mention 5000-plus years of floods, famine, plague and pestilence. Since God is everywhere, He can be sued in Douglas County, Nebraska for the untold psychological damage His irrational actions have done to Senator Chambers’ constituents. Chambers is seeking a permanent injunction forbidding God to engage in further terroristic activities.