FolkWolf.Net

I found this quote on the Burning Man/DPW blog, and I really think it fits.

They say Burning Man is about community or art or expression... and it is, but behind most of that is some really hard core engineering, planning and logistical dynamics, and elegant execution of these feats under the worst possible conditions.

This has to be the most obscure form of humor, but it's fucking funny to me. The list of Cautions on the Jeppesen map is funny, as well as the X-Ray advisory.

create your own visited countries map

Update: Apparently I should add zambia to that map, according to my mom.

This NY Times article talks about a study that once again, and in new ways, refutes any claims to a cold remedy.

Some cool quotes.

The study, being published today in The New England Journal of Medicine, involved 437 people who volunteered to have cold viruses dripped into their noses. Some swallowed echinacea for a week beforehand, others a placebo. Still others took echinacea or a placebo at the time they were infected. Then the subjects were secluded in hotel rooms for five days while scientists examined them for symptoms and took nasal washings to look for the virus and for an immune system protein, interleukin-8. Some had hypothesized that interleukin-8 was stimulated by echinacea, enabling the herb to stop colds. But the investigators found that those who took echinacea fared no differently from those who took a placebo: they were just as likely to catch a cold, their symptoms were just as severe, they had just as much virus in their nasal secretions, and they made no more interleukin-8.

Now, with increasing evidence that echinacea does not work for colds, scientists are confronting a problem, Dr. Sampson said, in that "there is no 'demarcation of the absurd,' a point at which it is unwise to pursue an investigation further." For Dr. Turner, that point is here. "We should assume that echinacea does not work until somebody proves it does," he said. That, he added, "is the flip side of where we've been."

We need one of these for our drive down to Burning Man

Alexander Vinokourov has signed with Liberty Seguros. An excerpt from the article:

Alexander Vinokourov has signed with the Spanish Liberty Seguros cycling team in the belief he will win the Tour de France in the next two years.

Vino single-handedly made the Tour De France exciting this year, especially considering the dominating power of the Discovery team, and managing to single-handedly beat out an entire peloton going flat out at 60 km/h. I've never seen anything like that.

As some of you may know, liz and I often drive down to burning man in Nevada. It's a straight haul from Gary, Indiana to San Francisco, and every year, one of the most unpleasant things about the drive is the weak-ass dishwater that truck stops along the I80 try to pass off as coffee.

So I decided to look up locations of starbucks in towns along the route. This makes me stupidly happy.

see below for version 1.0

this is a little snippet I wrote to monitor the bugzilla server at work, and put a tray icon in my GNOME panel to tell me that there is a bug in the queue.

the code is below. there's probably some wordwrap issues.

The huge todo list. Properly deal with when someone reassigns a bug out of the queue, and kill the notification. properly background the process, so that I can just run it out of the gnome session manager. have the ability to configure the icon have the ability to pass in the filename containing the url on the command line, or pass in the url on the command line. Later on: Properly deal with more than one entry in the queue, and print out a list of bugnumbers and summaries. I already set up the dictionary to do this right, but I can't figure out what to do with it. I probably should look at porting libnotify to python, if no-one else has.

Cool write-up too. It's nice to see that "sausage-fest" comment getting the attention it was intended to get.

NOW!