Solipsism Gradient

I forgot to say that the conference sprang from the warped brain of John Walkenbach. Thanks John!

I’ve just looked at other items on his J-Walk Blog, and there’s lots of interesting stuff. For instance, if I still were in the age range for building a new house, I’d read the Earthship site very carefully. Rather than linking to practically every post, I urge you to run, not walk, to J-Walk. Highly recommended!

Mario Jorge Passos directed me (by e-mail) to Fastfame‘s website, apparently a Taiwanese manufacturer of PC motherboards, LCD monitors, and other goodies:

Fastfame is a professional manufacture of PC hardware process and assembly computer motherboard and interface card for electronic and communication as well as others.

At the bottom of the page there’s the company’s slogan:

Futer we make it brighter.

From the official site of The 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference:

I am Mr. Laurent Mpeti Kabila, a senior assistant leader of the Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone.

I present to you an urgent and confidential request: I request your attendance at The 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference. This is an excellent opportunity to meet your distinguished colleagues, learn new marketing techniques, and spend your hard-earned money. Attending this conference demands the highest trust, security and confidentiality between us.

…Keynote Address:

Dr. Hamza Kalu’s adds some historical perspective in his keynote address is titled, “From Postal Scams To Email Scams: We Have Come a Long Way Infant Child”.

…Workshop:

Grammatical errors: What’s the optimal number?

…”I AM FIRMLY CONVINCED THAT USING UPPERCASE LETTERS MAKES MY WRITING MORE EFFECTIVE.” – Mr. Ibrahim Ahmed

Now why didn’t I think of that…?

Yes, that’s the actual name of this page, where you can find cat clothes – or rather “transformation kits” for your cat. Among other hilarities, there’s marvelous Engrish like this:

1. You need to dress a cat. And you will say to a cat together with a family. “It has changed just for a moment”. [ “it being very dear” or ] You will pass pleasant one time.

2. If a family and a cat become fortunate, you will take a commemorative photo! Therefore, please photo your cat lovelily with much trouble.

3. If it finishes taking a photograph, you will make it remove clothes from a cat immediately. You will say then, without forgetting the language of gratitude to a cat. “– be flooded — a way — good — having done one’s best — ! — “

I’d quote more and post one of the photos, but at the bottom they say:

Unapproved reproduction of a report, a photograph, voice data, and image data is forbidden found in this special feature article.

Many thanks to Karen Marcelo for posting this at Boing Boing.

For some time I’ve been trying to recall favorite sites I used to visit in my pre-Mac OS X days; not easy since my old bookmark file went to that great bit bucket in the sky nearly two years ago.

Anyway, an errant neuron just coughed up one of those URLs: Outrageous On-Line Uncle Al: New Weapons of Mass Consumption. Alan “Uncle Al” Schwartz, an industrial chemist by trade, publishes vitriolic essays on varied subjects – he’s at #345 at this writing, and a subscription to “the collected wisdom of Uncle Al” is available. He’s a curmudgeon’s curmudgeon, with the additional infuriating habit of often being right. As they say here in Brazil, when he dies he’ll be buried in two coffins (the second one’s for his tongue). He also was the original inspiration for my disclaimer. (I hasten to disclaim that Uncle Al’s political and philosophical orientation may not be congruent, parallel or even orthogonal to my own.)

Uncle Al’s site’s HTML contains this line:

<META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”Luxuriate in surreal mentality, indulge in wicked and delicious excess. We have come for a piece of all mankind!”>

Come to think of it, this probably was one of the first weblogs, in intent if not in format. His list of search engines and power user links has been invaluable to me in the past.

Herewith some excerpts to give you an idea:

One is Officially informed that the Food and Drug Administration exists for benevolent safeguarding of US citizenry…

I purchased a 148 milliliter bottle of McIlhenny tabasco sauce amply free of anything your body needs – hence its voluptuous palatability. Printed on the box flap was this warning:

“The Food and Drug Administration’s suggested measure is 1 teaspoon.”

The folks who won’t let you smoke marijuana to prevent blindness from glaucoma, or ameliorate 24 hours of projectile vomiting from cancer chemotherapy, or lessen screaming in Burn Wards recommend you use tabasco sauce by the teaspoon. Shake a drop (1/50 of a teaspoon) on your tongue. What is wrong with this picture?

…As your FDA minimum recommended dose of a full teaspoon of Tabasco explodes within your face, foments massive sensory erosion down all forty feet of your gastrointestinal tact, and finally exists with a searing scream… look at the bright side. Fruits like grapes and peppers contain resveratrol, especially in their skins. Said 3,4′,5-trihydroxy-trans-styrene is the apparent anti-carcinogenic principle of red wine. Those who indulge in tabasco’s searing siren song may be prolonging their life and improving every second of its enhanced duration.

If that is not a valid reason for the FDA to ban the stuff, I cannot imagine what is.

Finally, he also apparently wrote a paper about “Parity pair tellurium test masses will violate the Equivalence Principle in Eötvös experiments” which contains such assertions as

Unitary groups U(1), SU(2) and SU(3) parameter spaces are isomorphic to (in one-to-one correspondence with) the circle, the sphere (a surface) and the “three sphere” (not a ball) respectively. Fields with non-abelian symmetries divide into “electric” (curl-free; e.g., gravitational) and “magnetic” (divergence-free; e.g., inertial) fields as do abelian electromagnetism and the linearized form of Einstein’s field equations for weak gravity and slow matter.

And that’s in the preliminary arguments, where I think I understood all words, if not the entire sentence…

Der Schockwellenreiter quotes a marvelous cautionary paragraph from Daniel Steinberg‘s article Transforming iCal Calendars with Java:

This code is presented as an example. Do not use it on data for which you don’t have a copy. It hasn’t been widely tested. Consult a professionally trained computer scientist or a twelve year old child before attempting anything difficult on your own machine.

I planned originally to post at length about another topic, but got mesmerized by Tolkien Crackpot Theories. So that’s it for today…

Thanks to Dori Smith for this link. I think.

This was too good to pass up:

from Uren.Dagen.Nachten, thanks to the Schockwellenreiter.