You don’t expect the Steampunk Workshop to have an opinion on women’s shoes, but then rather a lot of people don’t expect me to have an opinion on women’s shoes, so I’m not about to complain if they weigh in on the subject. Besides, the contrast between wholly up-to-date and totally retro is what makes steampunk work in the first place, and finding actual vintage footwear can be tricky, says the Workshop’s Libby Bulloff:

It can be very difficult to acquire antique footwear that fits a modern foot — our predecessors often had shorter, narrower feet — or that hasn’t been worn to death. I am fortunate enough to own a pair of 1930s oxfords that fit my slender feet, a set of antique leather roller skates, and some killer scarlet pointy-toed punk boots from back in the day. However, if you’re not so lucky as to have a real vintage shoe collection, lots of modern shoes still nod at the past in their design (and fit bigger feet).

One example of such a modern shoe is “Open Up” by Nicole, seen here in a color called “Velvet Brown,” which for me immediately triggered the memory of Enid Bagnold’s 1935 novel National Velvet, a childhood favorite of mine. There’s also a gunmetal-grey version. It’s not quite a perfect replica of shoes gone by, from 1935 or elsewhere (elsewhen?) — there’s perhaps more of a dip along the sides of the upper than you might expect, and the heel stops at a modest two inches — but it works on its own terms, and for the moment, it’s on sale at Zappos, the price varying with the color chosen.

And if you don’t care for these, Bulloff will happily show you several other styles.

The acronym isn’t even the worst thing about it.

If you still want good health-care coverage when all is said and done, Jennifer has some career advice for you:

[B]ecome a drug dealer undocumented pharmacist. That way your income will be off the books. The investment in your home business won’t qualify for the additional tax. And it can be assumed that you aren’t selling major brand pharmaceuticals. Just don’t expect your *ahem* employees to have a tan.

This is probably more open a field than you think, since the current trend is to outlaw anything you might actually like, inevitably resulting in the demand for more, um, distributors.

The California state excise tax on a 750-ml bottle of wine is four cents. Signatures will soon be taken for a ballot measure to raise this tax to seven cents twelve cents more than five dollars:

A measure that would raise the excise tax on a 750 ml bottle of wine from 4 cents to $5.11 has been cleared for circulation by the Secretary of State. Proponents can begin collecting the 433,971 signatures needed to put the initiative on the November ballot.

The measure would push the tax on a six-pack of beer from 11¢ to $6.08, and raise the total tax on a 750 ml bottle of distilled spirits from 65 cents to $17.57.

The full text is here [pdf]. The proponents must collect 433,971 signatures in 150 days to get the measure onto the ballot.

Personally, I think that if California is in such dire financial straits, they should enact an excise tax on ballot initiatives.

(Via Dr. Vino, who wonders if Trader Joe’s will end up selling seven-buck Chuck.)

Yours truly, about a month ago:

One bank around town (and most towns in this state, I surmise) offers a forced-savings deal: use your debit card or pay a bill with their online gizmo, and they’ll bump a quarter or two out of your checking account into savings. They’ll even match some of it (all of it for 90 days, then 5 percent). This won’t make anyone rich, but it helps out with the Pay Yourself First premise.

I mentioned this, among other reasons, because I was setting up accounts at said bank; I opted for the 50-cent version of the program. So far, it’s set aside $9 for me, not counting accrued interest (which is as close to nothing as imaginable these days) or the eventual bank match. Again, this is no way to get rich, but my previous version of forced savings — once the jar is full of pennies, take it to the machine — seldom netted me $9 in a whole year.

Back here on the Sarah Jessica Parker thread, I observed:

Besides, you guys would get sick of constant Zooey Deschanel pics.

On the off-chance that I might actually be right, here’s another Zooey Deschanel pic.

To your, um, health.

Something like this is what we’re looking for:

I already turned in my census. I felt slightly dizzy and disoriented afterward. I was proud to fill it out for the first time. I still lived at home with my parents in 2000.

I asked my husband if he’d like to be Person 1 or if I could be. I could not believe how much he didn’t care. It was the same kind of indifference he gave about who would bring in the mail. Some people just don’t know what exciting is.

Yeah, but the ones that do insist on being Person 1.

This week, the Carnival of the Vanities, the 367th in the series, has “a hint of spring,” not a bad thing to have this time of year.

Despite being born in early April, designer Vivienne Westwood is no spring chicken, but her clothing empire brings in something like $367 million a year.

In the current Goldmine (#775), Dave Thompson picks twenty-five great British Invasion singles by twenty-five bands, limit one per band. I was amused to note that I’d bought 23 of them when they came out; the other two, while worthy (“Rosalyn” by the Pretty Things and “What’Cha Gonna Do About It” by the Small Faces), didn’t chart over here and didn’t get any airplay where I was living, or I’d probably have them on vinyl also.

What was most interesting, though, was Thompson’s pick for Numero Uno: perhaps not obvious, but highly cherishable. We’re talking “Bus Stop” by the Hollies, from 1966:

A Graham Gouldman jewel, one in a stream of hits for Graham Nash and company, but bedecked with such glorious harmonies and magnificent melody that nothing else they ever did came close.

Gouldman also wrote #8, the Yardbirds’ “For Your Love,” a song that annoyed Eric Clapton greatly enough to induce him to quit the band entirely, which assures its inclusion here. (The next Yardbirds single, “Heart Full of Soul,” was also a Gouldman tune.)

The Hollies followed up “Bus Stop” with “Stop! Stop! Stop!” This wasn’t a Gouldman tune — the band came up with this one themselves — but weirdly, Gouldman wrote and recorded a song called “Stop Stop Stop,” without the exclamation points, that same year.

By Steven Rodrig, via Adafruit Industries. The manufacturer cannot guarantee 100-percent compatibility.

(I am now averaging three or four shoe suggestions a month from the readership. I can’t guarantee they’ll be used, but I do read every one.)

My daughter-in-law posted this to her Facebook account:

While driving to Girl Scouts this evening Laney [she's seven] asked me if there were sidewalks when I was born, or if it was just grass and no roads. Wow, not even 30 yet and my daughter has me growing up on the wild open plains. :)

Eventually, you’re able to joke about it. “Yes, we were required to take just two semesters of American History. Of course, back then there were only 19 states, instead of 57.”

Most of us, I suspect, would not have kind words for the likes of Fred Phelps, which means we probably would not have thought of this:

Instead of meeting hatred with hatred, the kids of Gunn High School in Palo Alto organized a sing-in where they organized peacefully to sing Spirituals, old protest songs, and wear T-shirts with slogans of acceptance. They were joined by teachers and parents who were equally non-violent, in a show of support for all people who would be targeted by Phelps’ hate.

Up in San Francisco, perhaps inspired by a certain group’s love of old Hollywood musicals, the students at Lowell High School, staged a “Dance Away Hate”. Again, parents and teachers showed up in full support.

The criterion for stone-throwing, come to think of it, remains unchanged.

I suspect Smitty’s not-so-vague suspicion of his local “Congresstool” could be echoed by rather a lot of us:

[I]f you asked me to assign a probability to the likelihood that my Congressman is innocent of any shenanigans with respect to stimulus money, I fear I would be duty-bound to return a low number.

Then again, if J. Spendy Constituent calls in and demands “Why aren’t we getting more stimulus money?” the odds are that none of our current Congresscritters will tell him to go pound sand; this sort of thing is simply Not Done.

The Anchoress explains why she remains a Catholic:

The question has come my way several times, in the past week: “How do you maintain your faith in light of news stories that bring light to the dark places that exist within your church?”

When have darkness and light been anything but co-existent? How do we recognize either without the other?

I remain within, and love, the Catholic church because it is a church that has lived and wrestled within the mystery of the shadow-lands ever since an innocent man was arrested, sentenced and crucified, while the keeper of “the keys” denied him, and his first priests ran away. Through 2000 imperfect — sometimes glorious, sometimes heinous — years, the church has contemplated and manifested the truth that dark and light, innocence and guilt, justice and injustice all share a kinship, one that waves back-and-forth, like wind-stirred wheat in a field, churning toward something — as yet — unknowable.

The complete essay was written for NPR; you can read it here, or download it as a podcast.

At least, that’s the message I get from the front end of this Renault.

If you should hear about some Europolice department that suddenly lost bazillions of ticket records, I’ll have to assume that this scheme actually somehow worked.

(Via QA Hates You.)

Lifted intact from Tim Blair:

July 2009, England:
Prisoners on the run from Holleseley Bay prison cannot be identified because it would breach their rights to privacy, the Ministry of Justice has said. Civil servants have refused to name inmates who have fled prison …

April 2010, Australia:
Police and immigration officials are searching for a man who escaped immigration detention while on an excursion to the Melbourne Aquarium last week.

[A Department of Immigration and Citizenship] spokesman, who declined to be named, would not confirm details of the man’s nationality or the reason he had been detained, citing privacy reasons and said he could not give a description of the wanted man.

Steve Lackmeyer, earlier this week:

I’ve been at The Oklahoman for 20 years. I’ve seen elected officials bought and paid for, I’ve seen state employees misspend thousands of dollars on their purchase cards on personal shopping sprees, I’ve seen DHS workers abuse the faith placed in them to protect the downtrodden, I’ve seen folks in higher ed forget whose money they are spending.

So, do you want to know if DHS workers have criminal backgrounds? Do you want to know if employees driving state vehicles have DUI records? Do you want to know if state employees trusted with overseeing the expenditure of public funds have been convicted of fraud or financial malfeasance?

Good Lord, Steve. Don’t you have any respect for these people’s privacy?

The ’11 Bimmer you buy will have HD Radio, whether you want it or not:

BMW of North America, LLC today announced that the launch of the 2011 BMW 5 Series Sedan marks the first time BMW’s entire product line is equipped with standard digital HD Radio Technology entertainment systems. Most of the 2011 BMW model lineup featuring the upgraded technology started production this month and will be available at dealerships by June 2010.

The usual putative benefits are trotted out:

BMW customers hearing HD Radio broadcasts will experience CD-quality FM sound and FM-quality AM clarity with fewer static, pops or hisses.

And we all want fewer static, right?

Truth be told, I’d be happy with AM-quality AM clarity. That Other Band is capable of far better sound than most receivers can be bothered to provide, even without the digital trickery. Besides, as Scott Fybush wrote last year:

HD on AM radio? While the corpse hasn’t quite stopped twitching yet, the AM system ended the year looking awfully stiff, with only a handful of broadcasters (most notably CBS, Crawford and New York’s WOR) still pushing it at the corporate level, even as some of their local staffers quietly admitted that the adjacent-channel nighttime interference issues between closely-spaced stations such as WINS, KDKA and WBZ reduced usable analog coverage and rendered the digital signal all but unusable even within much of their home markets at night.

All of those stations are 50-kw blowtorches. WINS is at 1010 in New York; KDKA, 1020, Pittsburgh; WBZ, 1030, Boston. When you manage to kill the signal of a 50-kw blowtorch, you’ve accomplished something, albeit not something that anyone actually wanted done.

Still, I shrug. By the time (if ever) I’m in a position to buy (or lease) a new BMW, terrestrial radio will be reduced to NPR and its ilk, automated jukeboxes, and Rush Limbaugh.

Not that this will lessen the demand for Zooey Deschanel pictures, but since I have a few such sitting around, so to speak …

Hey, it’s a weekend, and I’m too tired to do anything constructive. (No, an HTML image map does not meet my definition of “constructive.”)

All of these are clickable for embiggenment; the two on the bottom row are Rather Large.

I figured I’d use that title regardless of the outcome in Dallas; only the voice — active or passive — need change. As it happened, the Mavs were on the receiving end of the rolling, as the Thunder squared the season series 2-2 with a 121-116 win and nailed down a playoff slot.

The Dallas veterans and the Oklahoma City youngsters played more or less evenly most of the night; the Mavs got the early lead, with the Thunder going up eight at halftime and stretching the lead to nineteen in the final frame before Dallas mounted a rally to pull within four. Both sides shot over 50 percent and over 80 percent from the foul line; Dallas outrebounded OKC, 39-34.

Dirk Nowitzki got a third of those 39 boards, and 30 points besides. Jason Kidd added 24 points; Caron Butler had 10 rebounds. Shawn Marion departed early with an injury.

Once again, six of the Thundermen landed in double figures, and it wasn’t all the Durant Show; Kevin had 23, but Jeff Green scored 22, and both Russell Westbrook and Nick Collison contributed 17 to the cause. The Thunder blocked only one shot, but they pulled off 11 steals.

OKC is now 47-28, with seven games left. The 55-21 Lakers lead the West; the Mavs, the Nuggets, the Jazz and the Suns are all stuck 5½ games back at 50-27. That leaves the Thunder in sixth, one game ahead of the idle Spurs. The Trail Blazers, in eighth, have already clinched a playoff spot; they will trail San Antonio by about .003 if they beat the Kings tonight.

Tomorrow: back home, against the Timberwolves, followed by a Tuesday trip to Utah and a Wednesday home date against the Nuggets.

Speaking of Tuesday, it’s a Dallas/Oklahoma City rematch — for the NBA Dance Bracket. The Thunder Girls have defeated the dancers of the Timberwolves and the Spurs already, and they’d like your support on the 6th at http://www.nba.com/dancebracket/2010/.

Paul Kedrosky rates the new books on the recent Financial Armageddon based on a simple criterion: the number of F-bombs dropped within the text.

On this scale, the current leader is Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, which contains 15 of this particular expletive, or 0.06 per page. Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail works in twenty of them, but it’s a longer book (624 pages versus 266).

(Via Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution.)

What’s the opposite of an Apple fanboy? This fellow:

The previous generation of hackers didn’t just twiddle the switches, they invented the switches, which required a much more open system than Apple ever marketed. They didn’t use operating systems, they created operating systems, network architectures, languages and oh, incidentally, applications that were used by, ahem, users. User, consumer, whatever: they were a Gibsonesque horror and quite irrelevant from the hacker perspective. It didn’t really matter what you fed users since they would eat anything. They had no taste or comprehension, they merely had appetites. They want more, not better.

As an ancient home brew sort of fellow I’ve never found anything even slightly interesting about Apple. I’ve always tinkered up my machines from cheap off the shelf parts and ran whatever software I could steal, borrow or make. After all, I was just waiting for the cloud to finally mature and at long last realize the lowest level of useful computing while science advanced enough to support the sort of direct linking and mental prosthetics that would significantly change the species.

“Gibsonesque horror”? Cory Doctorow reproduces the quote:

The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a “consumer,” what William Gibson memorably described as “something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth … no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote.”

As Harlan Ellison never said, “I have no mouth and I must buy apps.”

I have to wonder, though, if maybe this sort of scary “consumer” is now the rule rather than the exception. Certainly old hackish types are fading into the background: Ed Roberts, who hacked together the original Altair 8800, died last week, and the two guys who built a version of BASIC for the Altair — Paul Allen and Bill Gates — are now doing, um, other things.

I admit to a certain vague distrust of the cloud: I know bytes are no more tangible on my hard drive than on, say, Google’s, but I feel better knowing they’re only a few feet from my desk. Still, if I’m around twenty years from now, I assume I’ll have adjusted to whatever form of computing exists then. And I suspect Apple will have done likewise.

Women are on display at auto shows, mostly as supplemental eye candy. (Sometimes this doesn’t work quite so well.) As a general rule, we don’t know what’s going through their heads.

Oh, wait, maybe we do:

When I see a large person make a face while climbing in and out of a car, I know this is the first thing they will say to me:

“The seat is too small. You make them smaller every year.”

The seat is not too small. The seat is not any smaller than it was last year or five years ago.

The seat is not too small. Your a$$ is too big.

(Suggested by Bertel Schmitt.)

Apparently it’s now possible to see quantum effects:

A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving.

Andrew Cleland at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his team cooled a tiny metal paddle until it reached its quantum mechanical ‘ground state’ — the lowest-energy state permitted by quantum mechanics. They then used the weird rules of quantum mechanics to simultaneously set the paddle moving while leaving it standing still. The experiment shows that the principles of quantum mechanics can apply to everyday objects as well as atomic-scale particles.

This takes some serious cooling: to below 0.1° Kelvin, which is close to absolute zero. So don’t look for some latter-day Schrödinger to toss an actual cat into a box any time soon.

Still, as Jason Kottke says:

In my day, we were taught, with the help of non-graphing calculators and paper notebooks, that quantum mechanics was a lot of wand-wavey nonsense about wave/particle duality that you never had to worry about because it belonged to some magical tiny land that no one visits with their actual eyes. This … this is straight-up magic. [Cue Final Countdown]

“Sufficiently-advanced technology,” avers Clarke.

I’ve been hacking away at HTML for almost 14 years now, and I’ve never come up with anything even remotely like this.

(Via Dean Esmay. Warming: embedded music plus eyestrain.)

It does not pay to take any team lightly, even the bottom-dwelling Timberwolves: the Thunder ran up a 25-point lead against Minnesota (43 points in the first quarter!), only to see it dwindle to six during the second half. I’m not quite sure exactly at which point they shifted back into Taking Care of Business mode, and as radio guy Matt Pinto said, it wasn’t the most aesthetically-pleasing win, but when you’ve got seven games to play and a playoff seeding at stake, you take any W you can get. OKC 116, Minnesota 108, and that’s a 4-0 sweep of the growlers from Targetland.

In the third quarter, the Wolves ran right at the rim, and while they didn’t connect on all the shots, they drew lots of fouls, resulting in 32 foul shots, 28 of which they made. All the Minnesota starters except Ryan Hollins, who got into foul trouble early on, scored in double figures, as did reserve guard Damien Wilkins, who has been lots of trouble for his former OKC teammates. Ryan Gomes (22 points) wielded a mean long-ball (four of seven); the Wolves shot a respectable 47.4 percent.

The Thunder were inconsistent on the boards, though they did win the rebounding battle, 47-34. Russell Westbrook served up 16 dimes, a new career high, and scored 10; Jeff Green had 16 points and 10 boards; Serge Ibaka had 14 and 9. And that Durant fellow sank two free throws in the waning moments to bring his total to, um, 40.

OKC (48-28) remains in sixth, for now; the Spurs (47-29) beat the Lakers and stayed one game back. The Blazers (47-30) are off until Wednesday. Meanwhile, that logjam right behind the Lakers — four teams knotted at 50-27 — is still in place. If the Thunder are only a game and a half out of eighth, they’re only two games out of second. For now, anyway. Anything can happen in the next few days, and it starts with a trip to Utah on Tuesday.

The stuff you see here is extracted from actual referrals to this site, compiled and edited, and audited to see if it qualifies as interstate commerce.

are there ipads left?  There’s a recession on. Surely there must be a few of them still unsold.

sexy sluts in iowa:  This is the sort of thing that hits you right in Des Moines.

mature sluts wearing ankle bracelets:  Will you accept applicants from Iowa?

“clarke street” “wichita” “named after”:  Chances are, it was someone named Clarke, but you never can tell with those wily Kansans.

i am losing my social skills:  Perhaps you should seek help, um, away from the computer?

democrats tend to drive:  So do Republicans, though they’re not so defensive about it.

why are donkeys called jackasses:  You need to watch more C-Span.

toads are annoying:  You will be reported to the Hypnotoad (all glory to him).

why cereal so soggy:  If you wanted it crunchy, you shouldn’t have poured milk all over it.

japanese tentacle porn:  It’s always perplexed me that there was never any Ukrainian tentacle porn.

some day I will get trashed at prom:  By all means, announce it now, so they can keep an eye on you that day.

“descendant of Mr. Pibb”:  Oddly, there’s not a single Dr. in the bunch.

Loose Mama With Truly Mind-Blowing Enormous Melons:  And they said the urban-gardening trend would never amount to anything.

Nothing puts the fear of God, or at least David, into an Amazon Marketplace seller quite like the threat of bad feedback:

I ordered an item from one of the Amazon Marketplace shops about a month ago. It never arrived. Seems UPS couldn’t find our house. Now, we’ve had the same address for a number of years and received innumerable packages from Amazon including those delivered by UPS. I started sending emails to the seller. No response. Nothing. Not even a thank you for your inquiry roboresponse. I finally read through the Amazon process for filing a complaint. I filled out the form, noting the problem and the lack of response from the company. Within 12 hours I had not only 2 emails but a live person on my voicemail. They are sending out my package today. The fear of a bad rating on Amazon to be read by the rest of the Davids seems to have worked wonders.

I’ve never had any issues with Amazon sellers — or, remarkably, with eBay sellers either — but it’s something of a comfort to know that going through channels might actually work.

Ferris Bueller’s Ferrari is up for auction:

A replica of the Ferrari 250GT Spyder California specially created for the 1986 Paramount hit film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is to be sold at Bonhams Collectors’ Motor Cars and Automobilia auction at 11am on 19th April at the RAF Museum, Hendon.

Only around one hundred genuine 250GT Spyder Californias were created by Ferrari between 1958 and 1963. Existing examples are very rare and expensive so Paramount chose to commission and build a replica for filming purposes.

Bonhams expects the ersatz 250GT to bring somewhere in the £30,000 to £40,000 range. (Call it $45-60k US.) A real one will command seven, even eight, figures. Still: if you had access to a car like this, would you take it back right away?

(Tweeted by @deepglamour.)

But funny, just the same:

TrustoCorp, when they’re not mocking commercial products, also do quality street signage.

(Seen at the Consumerist.)

You make the call:

Girl A—“I’m so happy to be with my new boyfriend.”

Girl B—“That’s great, I’m so happy for you. How do you know this one is different?”

Girl A—“Well, he says hi to my parents and my ex never did, and he doesn’t even deal drugs anymore.”

Girl B—“He sounds great.”

Two possibilities, says Julie Zucker:

1) Some women don’t feel that they are worthy enough to strive for the best guy so they settle for someone subpar, or 2) our standards have just dropped altogether and our new definition of a “great guy” only consists of someone who is capable of saying hi to the family and doesn’t deal drugs.

I have to wonder, though, just what sort of douchebag Girl A had been dating before she met up with Mr. Wonderful here.

Aside: Firefox’s spellchecker thinks “douchebag” ought to be two words, or hyphenated. What a great spellchecker.

If you’ve wandered over here because of something by me that showed up on the op-ed page of the Oklahoman, this is the full article from which the excerpts were obtained.

That page doesn’t allow for feedback, but this one does.

Cue Jimmy Dean:

Then came the day at the bottom of the mine
When a timber cracked and men started cryin’
Miners were prayin’ and hearts beat fast
And everybody thought that they’d breathed their last

And everybody thought this was the sort of thing that happened fifty years ago, not today.

Hugh S at Wizbang notes:

Roof collapses are rarely survivable because the event is sudden and injuries are often blunt force trauma that incapacitates the miner at the moment he has to make critical life saving decisions (such as finding an air supply and escape route).

And if that doesn’t scare you, perhaps this will:

I keep straining my ears to hear a sound
Maybe someone is digging underground
Or have they given up and all gone home to bed
Thinking those who once existed must be dead

Outside of its pop-song context, it frightens the hell out of me.

One of the fashion mags — Bazaar, I think — has a regular feature about Looking Fabulous at Any Age, where “Any” falls somewhere between the 20s and the 60s. Of course, this is top-down stuff: you’re being given your dressing orders from on high.

And there’s the other side of the coin, which reads like this:

“I think it would be very interesting to get guest posters from different age ranges (20s, 30s, 40s, etc.) to discuss style and style evolution, body image evolution, how they address trends, what they find work appropriate, etc. At 37, I’m not a kid anymore, but I’m infinitely more confident and have style that I never had in my 20s.”

The participants ranged from 23 (almost) to 56, and each of them had something interesting to say. For instance, Audi from Fashion for Nerds — she’s 40 — contributed this bit of wisdom:

I’d say that my current style reflects more facets of my personality than it ever has before; I’m no longer afraid to be stylistically schizophrenic and have embraced the fact that I have many sides, which will translate differently into my outward appearance on any given day.

I found this through Une femme d’un certain age, who is a participant in that survey.

For now, she’s simply “Geminoid F”:

Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro unveiled today his latest creation: a female android called Geminoid F. The new robot, a copy of a woman in her 20s with long dark hair, can laugh, smile, and exhibit other facial expressions more naturally than Ishiguro’s previous androids.

Ishiguro, a professor at Osaka University, is famous for creating a robot replica of himself, the Geminoid HI-1, a teleoperated android that he controls remotely. The new Geminoid F (“F” stands for female) is also designed to be remote controlled by an operator.

Bet she is, say no more, say no more, say no more.

Incidentally, the android is the one on the left.

(Via RoboInstapundit.)

The professor has an unscheduled encounter with a student:

I came back 20 minutes before lab today — to put some notes on the board and generally get ready — and caught one of my students, Leatherman tool in hand, trying to PICK THE LOCK to get into the classroom.

Seriously, I think I blurted out, “On what planet do you think this is appropriate?”

He claimed to be “impatient” but dangit — *I’M* impatient and even I wouldn’t try a stunt like that. Go for a walk or something. Or study. Or something.

“Hello, Professor? This is [name]. Is there any chance the lab is going to be open early? I have some stuff I need to tend to.”

Now really, how hard is that?

Unless, of course, he had, um, Other Reasons.

Being out of the (Inner Dispersal) Loop, I missed this particular mailing:

A couple of days ago someone sent out an apparently pseudonymous email attacking a local media personality. This email was sent to a whole bunch of local bloggers, activists, publishers, and competing media personalities, challenging us to have the courage to publish his allegations and expose this person as a phony: “Let’s see which of you have the stones to expose the truth about [media personality].”

News flash: it’s 2010 already. You should not feel so all alone. Everybody can get stones:

If you have confidence in this information and want it made public, publish it yourself. If you think it’s important for the public to know, put it on the web where Google will index it. Sure, if it turns out that your information is false and you know it, putting it on the web would be considered an aggravation of libel, but you’ve already committed yourself by sending the email to a couple dozen media people, so if it’s that important to you, prove it by publishing it yourself instead of expecting someone else to take the risk for you.

Besides, in this day and age, you hardly need character assassination by proxy: just wait a few days, and often as not the target will blow the whistle on himself. If there’s any reason for the whistle to be blown, that is.

And there’s one other reason not to send out “apparently pseudonymous” emails of this sort: the recipient might be sufficiently irked to go to the trouble to ascertain the identity — and, by inference, the objective — of the sender.

Well, isn’t this lovely:

Today, Nissan recalled 25,024 cars in Japan because some of their accelerator pedals have caught the stickyness sickness, and may not want to come back to idle once you take the foot off the gas.

Cefiro, Bluebird, Sunny, Primera and Tino models built between October 1998 and August 2002 are affected by the recall, Nissan said today in a recall notice posted on the Japanese Transport Ministry web site.

Don’t recognize any of those nameplates? I do. The Nissan Cefiro of this era was sold over here as the Infiniti I30/Nissan Maxima.

The I30 I own, a 2000 model, was built in late 1999.

Will there be an American recall? Too early to tell.

I’m almost afraid to mention this idea of April’s, fearing that somehow I might help reify it:

A reader suggested that we start the Free Candy Party, a place for the apathetic fringes of the Tea Party movement to integrate with the 26 year old children living off mummy and daddy as they slide from familial dependence to the governmental variety. Our key tenet is the “right” to a reasonable income — say, $100,000 a year. We’d like it in large bills, please, tax-free. But we’ll take $100,000 after tax, if we must.

I’d also like a clothing allowance, as I believe that it is my right to own several pairs of Louboutins and designer jeans.

Let’s hope Harry Reid doesn’t read this. And I suspect that in the long run, it would be cheaper for all of us to buy a pair of Louboutins and mail them to her.

It didn’t seem too likely that the Thunder would beat the Jazz four times this year, but at no point did they concede: down 13 with four minutes left, OKC tied it up at 129 on a Jeff Green trey at 0:08. And with five seconds left in the overtime, once again Uncle Jeff delivered, putting the Thunder up 139-138. But ultimately, this was Deron Williams’ night: he got the game-winner at 0.011 — over a double-team! — to finish with 42 points, a new career high, and though Kevin Durant apparently got hatcheted on the last shot of the game, no foul was called, and the Jazz escaped, 140-139.

It’s not like they didn’t have to work for it for 53 minutes. Utah relied almost entirely on its starters; the bench contributed only 20 points, 15 of them from Paul Millsap, who fouled out. Power-packing Carlos Boozer had 28 points and 15 boards — and one technical, for getting overly cocky. And then there was Williams, who also served up 10 assists and turned the ball over only once. A team like this oughta be in the playoffs.

Then again, Williams wasn’t even the highest scorer on the premises, and guess who was? Yep. Kevin Durant had 17 points in the fourth quarter and finished with 45. Russell Westbrook picked up 27; Green’s timely buckets brought him to 20. Rebounds were even at 43; the Jazz shot 52 percent, the Thunder 50, and treys were everywhere. (The Jazz got 12 of 21; the Thunder, 13 of 30.) Seventy-eight foul shots were taken; 66 were hit.

I shudder at the thought of playing a best-of-seven against these guys, but it could happen.

Tomorrow: at home, against the Nuggets. Life doesn’t get any simpler, guys. Meanwhile, the Thunder Girls face the Mavs Dancers in the Dance Bracket for the rest of the night. They, too, could use a last-minute run.

Britain will elect a new Parliament next month, and both parties have hinted that the UK’s version of Daylight Saving Time is about to get heavier:

[B]oth Labour and the Tories are considering including in their election manifestos a plan to move British clocks permanently forward by one hour. Thus, at present the country lives on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) in the winter and [the last Sunday in March] will leap forward to British Summer Time (GMT+1). Under the new proposals, there would be no reversion to GMT this autumn, after which the usual cycle would resume. Britain would move between GMT+1 for winter and GMT+2 for summer.

Emalyse says this is a “fanciful notion”:

… which would see many Scottish schoolchildren see the sunrise whilst in their classrooms and experience an 11:10pm sunset in the summer months. As far as I’m concerned can we please just adopt one time over the entire year and stick with it? Maybe I can adopt GMT+2 myself and just force everyone else to adapt to my personal timezone.

Or, conversely, why stop at one hour?

Why don’t we move the calendar forward by two weeks in the spring, and back two weeks in the autumn. Then we would get an extra month of summer!

It makes exactly as much sense.