WON'T GET FOOLED AGAIN [till the next boo-boo] - I thought BigO wasn't one of the "subversive" Singapore mags. Oh well. Tis always enlightening to see how the Straits Times changes its tune.

"Repression... is a habit that grows... an intimidated press and the government-controlled radio together can regularly sing your praises, and slowly and steadily the people are made to forget the evil things that have already been done, or if these things are referred to again they are conveniently distorted and distorted with impunity, because there will be no opposition to contradict."
- Harry Lee, Oct 4 1956


Accept Jesus Christ and Get a Free Playstation 2 - From the always amusing Landover Baptist Church

Drug user accused of faking urine test - A drug-using shoplifter tried to outwit his probation officer by wearing a strap-on device that puts out a drug-free urine sample, but John Gatanas found out The Original Whizzinator turned out not to be as "foolproof" and "undetectable" as its creator promises.

Prison officer sacked for Bin Laden jibe (because there were 4 Arab visitors there) - Political correctness goes too far. As usual.

Quarantining dissent / How the Secret Service protects Bush from free speech - Shameless, really.

Fontifier - Make your handwriting into a font.


More Trivia

- Scientists at Australia's Parkes Observatory thought they had positive proof of alien life, when they began picking up radio-waves from space. However, after investigation, the radio emissions where traced to a microwave oven in the building.

- In the early 1800's John Dalton pioneered the concept of atoms of chemical elements - what did he die of?

"Dalton ... was convinced that atoms really existed - hence his violent objection to the terminology Berzelius was to introduce, in which an element was denoted by one or two letters of its name rather than its own iconic symbol. Dalton's passionate opposition to Berzelius's symbolism (which he felt concealed the actuality of atoms) lasted to the end of his life, and indeed when he died in 1844 it was from a sudden apoplexy, following a violent argument defending the realness of his atoms." (Uncle Tungsten, by Oliver Sacks)

- What is unusual about the paper The Computation of Pi to 10,000,000 Digits published by Academia Sinica Computer Centre, Peking - authored by Wei Gong-yi, Yang Zi-quiang, Sun Jia-chang, Li Jia-kia?

A9 - The answer, from Pi Unleashed (Springer-Verlag, 2001):

* The article made clear the trouble which the four authors had had with their calculation and how they had finally overcome the problems. The article naturally contains a list of references. One of these is another article which sounds familiar, The Computation of Pi to 29,360,000 Decimal Digits by David Bailey, 1988. It would seem that the direction or progess is not always forwards.


Wrestling with perl and cgi for my quote of the day script is very irritating.