Now this takes coolness to several levels: stackable refrigerator modules under the name “Flatshare Fridge,” by Stefan Buchberger, a design student at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. The concept consists of a base station and up to four customizable modules.

How it’s supposed to work:

This design proposes clever solutions under three different categories — lessening the cold air that escapes from the fridge while it is open, storing different food groups under customized environments to save energy, and having stackable compartments for different people sharing the same fridge. That’s accomplished with style by the Flatshare as each fridge brick (resembling a Lego block) is much smaller than a traditional fridge, thus not only requiring lesser input energy to cool but also allowing lesser cold air to escape each time you open the door. And the bricks are stackable, meaning different compartments can be assembled (each fridge can hold up to 4 stackable compartments) and allocated to different people, say room-mates, making food storage personal and hassle free.

No word on when, if ever, there will be production models, but I have to admit, this is one cool concept.

You might expect to see something like this:

I am a carpenter. I make chairs. My chairs are very comfortable and pleasant to look at, and they cost a pretty penny.

I have found a way to treat the wood so that they degrade and are unusable after six months of use. This is because I would like you to buy more chairs from me. What good is a paying customer if he doesn’t keep paying you?

There is nothing inherent in the money-for-chair transaction that says you should be able to sit on that chair for as long as you want. If I have to come in the middle of the night and confiscate it from you after six months, I will.

That is my right as a carpenter. As a consumer, you have no rights. So buy my chairs every six months and stop whining.

As Cory Doctorow notes (same link, top of post):

It’s hilarious that the same yahoos who argue for perpetual copyright (implying that copyrighted works have value forever) also argue for time-limited ownership (implying that people who buy copyrighted works should be content to enjoy them for a few weeks or years until the DRM stops working).

They need to start buying chairs. Lots and lots of chairs.

Judging by the size of the front-page headline, apparently it was yesterday when the Oklahoman discovered “sexting.” This sort of thing is amazing only if you’re not paying attention.

Big WordPress story this week: “The WordPress 2.0.x Legacy Branch is Deprecated.”

Considering they’re up to 2.8.2 and are known to be working on 2.9, this isn’t all that surprising. (And who’s still running 2.0.x? Besides Bill Quick, I mean.)

Then again, “deprecated” is one of those words which is easily misread if you’re as sloppy as I am: you might see it as “depreciated,” or worse. Besides, who the hell knows what “deprecated” means, anyway?

Oh, right. McGehee does:

[I]t still works but people who still use it get nasty things said about them at the cool kids’ table and they always get picked last for kickball.

I expect someone with 100-percent W3C validation on every one of his stinking pages to show up here and point out that the cool kids quit using tables about the same time they quit using the <BLINK> tag.

What they were talking about, apparently, was first swine flu (bad for you), followed by tanning beds (really bad for you), but truth be told, I just liked this particular shot, not least for the fact that both of these women are very close to my own age, the sort of thing that makes me feel better about said age.

(Video capture courtesy of SceptreX42 at SuperiorPics.)

Or maybe “dehancements,” if you’re not so impressed.

Two pages that used to be buried under several layers of menu have now been promoted to the top navbar: OAQ, a collection of Occasionally-Asked Questions, and Legalese, which includes copyright considerations, what passes for a privacy policy around here, and what I think about cookies. (Short version: if you don’t like the one I set that keeps your personal data handy for the comment form, feel free to delete it; I don’t do anything else with it.)

How come we have such low unemployment here in the Big Breezy? Conan O’Brien gets to the heart of the matter.

I can personally vouch for, um, some of those findings.

In 2005, original Procol Harum organist Matthew Fisher filed a legal action to be named as one of the composers of “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” alongside Gary Brooker and lyricist Keith Reid. A court found in Fisher’s favor and awarded him 40 percent of the subsequent take from the song, though no back royalties; an appellate court later ruled that Fisher had waited too long and while he would remain on the credits, he would receive no money.

The House of Lords has now overruled that court’s decision and reinstated Fisher’s percentage of the receipts, which apparently are substantial: every time BBC Radio 2 plays the song, says the report, they have to fork over about $120.

It is not recorded whether Fisher, upon being advised of the Lords’ ruling, skipped a light fandango.

From the last time we got into the discussion of passwords:

I believe “@#$&!” is what I say when the “Your password will expire in 14 days” message comes up after a mere 30 days. We’re allowed to slide by on a mere eight characters, but we must include at least one from each of the Three Basic Mistyping Groups.

It appears I am not alone in this vexation:

I keep getting that warning that my password is going to expire. Apparently they are taking it off life support and are giving it that end of life care that consists mostly of painkillers and popsicles. Or maybe painkiller popsicles. On Wednesday I received the first warning that it was to expire in 11 days. Yesterday it was 10. Today the dire warning is of nine. more. days. Nine days to craft some clever combination of CAPITAL LETTERS, lowercase letters, and rand0mly in53rt3d numb3r5.

If I do not, my existing password may turn and go sour like that gallon of milk in the fridge. But I would never dream to throw out the milk prior to expiration.

I have adopted the policy of Letting The Damn Thing Expire; the service involved allows one last connection, at which time you must come up with a password to their liking.

Sometimes, the yutzim on the freeway get themselves into lockstep, and a slow lockstep at that. It’s times like these that call for action, of the sort that gets you honked and/or yelled at. But the benefits are genuine:

According to the latest physics research, rule-breakers — drivers passing you on the wrong side or changing lanes too close to the intersection — actually help smooth the flow of traffic for the rest of us. “The interesting finding is that if most of the people are law-abiding, and you have a certain amount of people who are breaking the rule, then you are actually getting the minimum chance of a [traffic] jam,” said Petter Minnhagen, a physicist at Sweden’s Umea University and an author of the paper published in the journal Physical Review E.

Weirdly enough, this started out as a study of pedestrians:

Physicists at the school uncovered this phenomenon while constructing a computer model of how a crowd of people move across a confined space, such as a pedestrian-only street. They divided the space into squares, like a chessboard, and randomly placed pedestrians in some of the squares. Like real people, the model pedestrians had a certain small probability of momentarily pausing, as if they had run into a friend or had bent down to tie a shoelace.

To make things more interesting, the researchers then tossed a few mavericks into the mix, who didn’t follow the rules the other pedestrians used. The physicists ran the simulation over and over, each time boosting the percentage of rule-breakers. At first pedestrian deadlocks worsened. But as more and more rule-breakers joined the fray, something entirely unexpected occurred: traffic flowed best when only about 60 percent of pedestrians were obeying the rules.

Simple interactions of individual cars, people, or molecules add up to large patterns in a system. The high concentration of pedestrians in a small area increases the chances of a jam, but rule-breakers made the crowds spread out.

No surprise there, really: with almost anything in motion, there’s some sort of sweet spot, and it takes a little effort to find it sometimes.

Morris Flynn, a University of Alberta professor who uses computational methods to study car traffic, agrees with the explanation. Because rule-breakers “carve out their own path,” Flynn said, they dilute large concentrations of rule-abiders moving in the same way. He pointed out an example familiar to anyone who has driven on a two-lane road: breaking the speed limit to pass a slow vehicle prevents a long chain of cars from forming.

Which I had to do Friday morning to get around a sleepy-headed Camry with its cruise control set on a stolid 58 mph. (“The letter kills, but the spirit gives life.”) In this state, incidentally, they can bust you for doing that in the left lane, much to the surprise of the Anti-Destination League.

An abstract of the study can be found here.

(Seen at Autoblog.)

This is a job for Azzedine Alaïa:

Style Spy tells the tale:

They’re Alaïa — satin with pink croc heels. I was parading around in them at the Neiman’s outlet last weekend where they were having a ferocious sale and I had just about decided I couldn’t live without them when I rounded the end of a rack of shoes & nearly bumped into a darling friend who wrestled them out of my hands (once I’d taken them off) and insisted on treating me to them as an early birthday present. (Such treats, I assure you, I do not deserve.) The shoes are described as gunmetal gray, but they read as black. The toe is perfect — exactly in-between round and pointed and thus will never go out of style. The ankle strap is also perfectly in the ankle strap sweet spot — not so skinny it’s too dainty and not so wide it’s bondage-y. Very sexy, that ankle strap. I really think everything about these shoes is perfect and destined for immortality. An ankle strap d’Orsay pump can never be wrong. J’adore beaucoup ces chaussures. They’ve been living on my bedroom dresser since I got them because I want them to be out where I can see them instead of hidden away in the closet.

What’s telling about this description is its Goldilockean understanding: the toe and the ankle strap are not too this, not too that, but Just Right. (And it doesn’t hurt that the transaction price was well below the putative $1285 list.)

I am also intrigued by “…but they read as black.” We’ve all, I suspect, had experiences with garments that appeared to be one color in the store but looked ever-so-slightly different when included in an outfit, possibly due to proximity to other colors: you’d have to be wearing something very dark indeed for these shoes to register as grey.

It’s Monday morning, so let’s open up the Giant Ball of Search Strings and see if there’s anything the slightest bit amusing to be found.

Sarah Palin in panty hose and high heels:  Find a suitable picture of Tina Fey, and use your imagination.

margaret trudeau crotch:  I’m afraid not even Tina Fey can help you here.

mount rushmore fiction bureaucracy:  Try to get a permit to film there, and you’ll see what I mean.

dame rose macaulay chose oblivion:  Well, good for her. Usually, oblivion is chosen for us.

how far below 130 can IQ be and still be gifted:  Look at the Federal government. Geniuses all — just ask them — yet they’re dumb as a post.

Cantonese phrase “man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do:”  That’s funny, it doesn’t sound Cantonese.

White Anglo Saxon Protestant gangs:  You’ll recognize them immediately: their graffiti is stylish and grammatical.

columbus indianapolis similarities cities:  For one thing, neither of them has any substantial number of beach houses.

is it ok to feed chihuahua string chees?  Hey, if they can live on Taco Bell, they can eat anything.

statistics on nude sunbathing in your own backyard:  In my backyard? Number of participants: 1.

things that apparently cause cancer:  Too much sun, not enough sun, red meat, white meat, blue meat, green eggs and ham, hot dogs, cold pizza, Marlboro Lights, Bud Light, incandescent lights, fluorescent lights, this, that, the other thing, and anything else not listed.

Some time between Now and Then, Hoshi Sato, who speaks somewhere around forty languages, will put the finishing touches on the linguacode matrix which makes the Universal Translator possible.

In the meantime, we have this contraption:

The Trinvo TR01 Talking Translator is a handy device that is the globe-trotting traveler’s new best friend.

The translator can cross-translate in 12 languages, including Arabic, Chinese (Manadarin), French and Spanish to name a few. It comes loaded with 750 commonly spoken travelers’ phrases, 2500 words for each language, and 8 categories of “fast search desire questions.” Each spoken in a clear, easy to understand human voice, eliminating the time-intensive, frustrating and often embarrassing experience of trying to get your point across in a language you can barely pronounce. It also has nifty sightseeing tips for each language.

And it beats the heck out of lugging the Rosetta Stone around.

If this thing does Turkish, here’s a phrase I want to try out: “Hoverkraftimin ici yılan balıǧı dolu,” which means pretty much what you think it means.

In the absence of a better explanation, such as this one:

Cleaning up my desktop … will probably take months, because for months I’ve been recklessly downloading .pdfs, .jpegs and .tiffs onto it and leaving them there. It must be putting a terrible strain on my computer. What a jerk! Turns out on this issue of OSX you can riffle through documents very quickly, blow them up with a mouse click, check them out, and trash those you don’t want with another click.

Is this a Mac thing, or are Windows (or, for that matter, U**x) users equally disposed to piling things up on their desktops? I don’t look at other people’s machines if I can help it, but I’ve counted sixty-six icons sitting on my desktop at home, though this total inevitably includes the sort of stuff that Windows expects you to keep at hand. Worse, I have folders under the desktop, mostly for temporary storage of pdfs and jpegs and stuff like that there. (I see tiffs mostly at work.)

And this box doesn’t seem to be running slower as a result of all this accumulated junk, except for those times when Windows decides it needs to refresh the screen and all those icons have to be repainted. (Before you ask: I have a GeForce 6600 video card with 256 MB of RAM, running at 1152 x 864.) I suspect any recent Mac will take this sort of thing in stride.

A Half Sigma commenter named Turambar advances a new form of disclosure:

I think that the country would be much better off if any celebrity who made public pronouncements had to have a list of their medications and illicit drugs listed next to the story.

I think it would provide great explanatory power to the reader of HuffPo if we could see what cocktail of meds allows their authors to propound such advice to the country.

If there is going to be a government press bail out, publishing a list of meds with it should be stipulated as a reform. “Ok Tim Russert is on statins, no big deal”. “Uh oh, Bill Maher has a mixture of coke, seconol, zoloft and mango vodka in his system. Maybe I’ll skip his analysis on the GM bailout”.

This would explain a lot about Bill Maher, anyway. (The late Tim Russert, alas, is beyond the help of statins, assuming you believe statins are any help in the first place.)

That said, in the interest of full disclosure, here’s what I take on a daily basis:

• Two blood-sugar controllers (Metformin, Glipizide)
• One antihypertensive/diuretic (Losartan/hydrochlorothiazide)
• One, um, statin (Simvastatin)
• One tranq (Lorazepam)

I figure regular readers already know this, since I’ve often discussed my health, and the occasional lack thereof, on these very pages, but it’s probably a good idea to set an example for the mountebanks and wannabes cluttering up HuffPo. (And, after seeing this outburst, I really have to wonder about Glenn Beck.)

There are 88 keys on a piano.

There are 88 counties in Ohio.

Coincidence?

I don’t know anything about music, but holy crap, I have to make a map based on this coincidence.

And so I did, bit by bit, gradually descending into madness in the process. It has no purpose, really, apart from being an experiment in some sort of weird artistic musical cartography.

Nor is it exactly perfect:

A couple final caveats: 1) the piano sounds are exported from GarageBand and on the high end don’t seem to sound great, and 2) this little application is not at all idiot-proofed, so my apologies if you are an idiot. This is just a demonstration of a ridiculous concept; it’s hardly worth the effort to make it a well-designed, smoothly functioning application. For now, no stop buttons, nothing to keep you from playing a cacophony of all the options at once… go nuts, it’s kind of more fun anyway.

I leave to actual Buckeye State residents the question of where the pedals should go.

(Found at Boston.com, and designated for a Fark Photoshop contest.)

A task force of governmental and quasi-governmental types in New Hampshire objects to the 200-year-old state motto:

“The state lacks a brand that connects with a younger audience. The Task Force received several comments regarding the issue of branding the state in a way that would help attract and retain young workers. Through input and discussions, there is strong sentiment that the ‘live free or die’ slogan does not connect with this demographic and that something else is needed.”

More precisely:

“Our State portrays an unfriendly message that every individual has to succeed on their own, rather than count on a support system for assistance (Live Free or Die is not a friendly, supporting message that appeals to young people)”

Let’s fix that for them: “Live Free or Die is not a friendly, supporting message that appeals to governmental officials who’d be out of a job if every individual did in fact succeed on his own.”

But then, they could be just blowing smoke:

The task force claims that there was “strong” sentiment against the motto, but I can’t find it. Out of 13 town hall meetings the motto only showed up in two of them — just 15 percent. It would be fair to say that more people believe the moon landing was a fake than believe that “live free or die” should be replaced. In fact, whenever actual young people were involved, the motto wasn’t an issue.

I suspect that whatever “strong” sentiment existed actually emanated from transplanted Massholes former residents of Massachusetts.

Marko, like me (but in no wise in an imitation of me), does a Monday-morning weird-search roundup, and he had this seriously choice (bordering on prime) item this week:

conservation of mass and werewolves
Werewolf fiction that respects the law of conservation of mass works around the rule that the mass in a closed system remains constant. For werewolves, that would mean that a 120-pound person would be a 120-pound wolf — no transforming into some hulking 600-pound monster. Werecritter stories that respect the law of conservation instead of just waving the “It’s Magic!” wand tend to center around critters that are roughly similar in mass to adult humans: wolves, jaguars, leopards, cougars/mountain lions, and so on. No werebears or weretigers, since a 600-pound weretiger or 1,200-pound weregrizzly would be incredibly obese in human form.

Closest I’ve ever come to this premise was back in the fall of ‘06, as follows:

A few eons ago, Sheri S. Tepper wrote of Mavin Manyshaped, one of a clan of shapeshifters, who, once her powers develop, flees from the family compound, lest she be abused like the other women in the clan. Mavin takes her younger brother with her; to speed the process along, she assumes the shape of a horse.

So far, this is a fairly routine fantasy concept, but Tepper is never routine. If you think about it — obviously she did — the Mavin/horse is going to have to eat, and eat a lot, during a long journey like this, and once she returns to human form, well, what’s going to happen to all that bulk she was carrying as an equine?

Yep. Don’t go there if you can help it.

John Salmon is approaching one of the following:

Gafferdom.
Decrepitude.
Fossildom.
Geezerland.

Having gone into Coot Overload myself several years ago, I know this turf a bit too well.

Then again, my first impulse is to dance on it. The day after I turned 50 was the day I took possession of the palatial estate at Surlywood; the last five years, while they’ve had their excruciating moments, were a hell of lot less painful than the five years immediately before. (I was arguably better off financially back then, but my mental state was agitated and then some, and frankly, I feel a whole lot better being smug and complacent.) “You must not forget to live while you are trying to save your life.”

Best advice I can give, with 56 creeping up on me, is this: If you need to ask if your time is up, it isn’t.

And, if available in your area, take advantage of Cash for Codgers.

We tip the ol’ blog chapeau — not to be confused with the Chapeau Blog Awards — to Gael Fashingbauer Cooper at Pop Culture Junk Mail on her tenth blogiversary; I’ve been reading her for pretty much that entire decade and cribbing links during most of it. (Seriously. My very first link to PCJM was in 2001.) I hope to be republishing this post with minor emendations ten years from now.

Smart’s lone model is the fortwo, which can be had with a fixed roof or a drop-top. Either way, it seats two. For a while, they built a larger car with four seating positions, named, with disarming simplicity, the forfour: it was produced fortwo years and then discontinued for lack of sales.

Still, smart hasn’t given up on the idea of a slightly-bigger model: parent Mercedes-Benz has apparently filed for a patent for a three-seater version, which would inevitably be called the forthree. It’s a one-plus-two: the driver’s seat is up front, the passengers share the back half of the car.

If you covet this little darb but you’ve found the fortwo a bit confining, you should hope that smart gets around to building this thing forthwith.

Received overnight — precisely eight hours apart, for some reason — the following drug (or, from the sound of them, drug-induced) offerings:

During viagra saturnalian handiwork, if you adorn come of feather-headed or sickened, or suffer with wretchedness, numbness, or tingling in your strongbox, arms, neck, or jaw, barricade and reprove your doctor lucid away. You could be having a of disturb side influence of sildenafil.

A warning worthy of the FDA on a bad day. Me, I tend to distend risible at these things:

During viagra suggestive trade, if you distend risible or misled to far-out’s subscribe to, or endure distress, numbness, or tingling in your caddy, arms, neck, or jaw, stopping up and personage your doctor right-minded away. You could be having a heinous side cut of sildenafil.

O, that the purveyors of this dreck could be cut to the side. Heinously.

News Item: The Tulsa 2020 Committee on Tuesday presented the City Council with the idea of the city making a bid to host the 2020 summer Olympic games.

Top Ten things that will happen before Tulsa hosts the Olympics:

10. A phone booth in Grand Island, Nebraska becomes an independent nation
9. Walmart trades the remains of General Motors to the Chinese for two pallets of paper towels
8. NBA expands to Shanghai, Guam, Tel Aviv, and Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan
7. Monument to Ted Kennedy opens at the New England Aquarium
6. The last Twitter tweet is sent; it’s a retweet
5. Chuck Norris dies, gives St. Peter roundhouse kick, returns to earth aged 22
4. Congress, fearing the wrath of voters, cuts the top marginal income-tax rate back to 50 percent
3. Bill O’Reilly embarks on his new career as a monk
2. Facebook announces its first nuclear test
1. Sally Kern and Jim Inhofe lead the OKC Pride Parade

Don’t expect all of these things to happen at once.

(Seen here.)

Something is rotten in the state of Indiana, reports Roberta X:

I discovered my (new) home lender, the guys who picked up Countrywide (who’d bought the note from my original lender), reviewed my real estate taxes (which are just plain nuts in Indiana of late and did go up — should drop next year, once my various exemptions finally kick in) and decided, oopsie, they didn’t really think they had enough in escrow and cranked up their reserve to the maximum amount permitted by law; so they have jacked up my house payments nearly 130% and to keep them from going up 150%, I’m gonna have to front ‘em something over $2K by 1 September.

This is my punishment for gettin’ a nice, conservative fixed-rate loan. Gee, thanks.

If I’ve read this correctly, it’s actually worse than it sounds, since Indiana bills twice a year, but one year in arrears, so Weasel & Co., which presumably has to pay big this fall, will continue to collect big toward a smaller tax bill for much of next year.

I suspect, though, they’d have done the same had our heroine somehow been duped into one of those wicked ARM schemes.

Funny, when my employer asked everyone to pleeeeze forgo a raise this year, times being tough and everything, we all went along; but ask government or a homelender the corresponding question and they’ve suddenly gone deaf. Umm, d000ds, don’t you think you have bled the middle-class turnip just about dry?

They’re in cahoots. Ask Chris Dodd, beneficiary of this sort of cahootery.

Some of us, apparently, are easily distracted:

I often dress in a cleavage displaying manner, for two reasons: 1) I have a great rack and 2) I look like an apple on sticks if I do not define my bustline. I do not mind when men (AND WOMEN!) look at my cleavage; like great art I WANT it to be admired. However, like great art, there is also a look but don’t touch policy.

I admit to being somewhat torn on this matter. I’m certainly not about to touch; but I tend to avoid even looking, though not as assiduously as I avoid looking like I’m looking. (Gaucheness, unlike virtue, is not its own punishment.)

Are we supposed to hide our sexuality and display it only for those we are going to have sex with? Also, why can’t you look at my boobs AND listen to me talk? I enjoy sending and receiving sexual energy from other people, even those I am not intimate with. If this bothers you, just move along. But don’t dare think that you are smarter than me because cleavage distracts you. Because if you think my tits are big, you should see my brain :)

Now that belongs on a T-shirt. I’d have to read it at a distance, of course.

This is one of several maladies affecting GM product planners, says Peter M. De Lorenzo:

Some of their key new entries are just too damn heavy, example No. 1 being the new Cadillac SRX, which weighs more than 4500 pounds. And that’s in a more compact overall package with no V-8.

Not that this problem is any way confined to GM:

Mercedes-Benz, Audi, BMW and to a slightly lesser extent Porsche are all guilty of egregious weight gain, and it’s screwing everything up. It’s real simple, folks. The manufacturers are putting — and we’re far too accepting of them doing it too — too much stuff in our cars. All this techno-wonder crap is just that — crap.

Then again, much of that crap is something other than techno-wonder stuff. A 2000 Nissan Maxima weighed in at a semi-svelte 3186 lb; by the time it was glitzed up enough to wear an Infiniti badge, it was up to 3342. Seat heaters don’t weigh so much, and I figure the rear sunshade counts for four or five pounds max: most of the difference, I suspect, is the filler material they use for sound-deadening. The 2009 Maxima, however, comes in at 3557 lb. (All figures from ConsumerGuide Automotive for consistency; other sources quote slightly different numbers.)

And the Maxima isn’t exactly tiny, which makes De Lorenzo’s plaint even more apropos:

Let’s get this straight, 4,000 pounds is not okay or acceptable for an “average” vehicle. It’s flat-out unacceptable in my book. Weight is the enemy of all good things when it comes to actually enjoying driving, unless, of course, you stopped enjoying driving. In that case we just can’t help you. Too much weight negatively affects handling, responsiveness, “feel,” fuel economy, braking, performance, basically everything when it comes to the enjoyment of our vehicles. So don’t tell me that 4,000+ pounds is “acceptable” for an SRX or any other allegedly “more compact” crossover. Because it isn’t. Period.

I feel slightly better now about my low-grade vehicular lust for Infiniti’s EX35, which even with AWD gear presses down on the earth with a presumably-acceptable 3975 lb.

“On the Waterfront” screenwriter dies at 95. He coulda had class. He coulda been a cadaver.

(Linked to this. Farewell, Budd Schulberg.)

Twitter’s been unreachable for the last 45 minutes or so. I expect full-scale rioting in the next fifteen minutes.

(Except, of course, from Dawn Summers, who is too cool for that sort of thing.)