When I saw this page at Propping Up the Mythos, I knew immediately who I'd be making a Deep One embryo in a bottle for - Derek Pegritz, the Crawling Chaos Himself. Pegritz's encyclopedic knowledge of the works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft never ceases to amaze or impress me, and I know he'll get a kick out of it.
I started off by finding a jar of some kind that would be ideal for holding something roughly fist-sized, like an embryo of one of Lovecraft's creatures. I eventually found a suitable container at Wal-Mart, of all places, for just a few …
Here is a picture of the book just after being bound together The covers are two layers of cardboard cut from a box that were glued together and then cut slightly larger than the size of the pages used, which puts it at about nine inches in width by twelve inches in height. The holes were drilled with a 0.25 inch diameter masonary bit and an electric power drill. The pages were stacked on top of the back cover, the front cover was added to the stack, and I started boring the holes one by one. They aren't perfectly …
143.7000 MHz: Internal radio net of a Fairfax hospital, I think. Every once in a while you'll hear a radioteletype.
152.1750-152.6250 MHz: Radioteletype
153.0550 MHz: Interesting conversations. Short, sweet, and to the point.
154.1550 MHz: Fragments of conversations. Buzzer. Occasional musical notes (more complex than simple tones). Not much traffic during the normal workday.
It seems that winter has finally come to Washington, DC. Temperatures have been bouncing around between the low twenties Farenheit and the high thirties, finally coming to a bone-chilling low of 30 degrees Farenheit late last night. I finally got home about twenty minutes ago, after going out to run a couple of errands, and had a hell of a time getting home because of the snow now covering the ground and the road. More's the point, it's freezing on the roads; I discovered this the hard way when I almost spun out on the highway on my way home …
The first pressing of the DVD boxed set of Doctor Who, season 28/2 has a strange glitch in it: Footage from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre It seems that the master tapes were used for the movie as well as New Earth, so partway through the episode you'll get to see someone having their legs cut off. Also, the special features on that disk are inaccessible because the content just isn't there, and some of the descriptors appear to be corrupted. So far, this has only been seen on copies rented from Netflix; it isn't clear if anyone of the …
Physicists at the University of Rochester have made a breakthrough in data storage technology, namely, they've been able to store an entire image within a single photon using holographic techniques. An image of the UofR logo was cut into a stencil and a beam of laser light was passed through a beam splitter (classic holographic imaging technique); then a single photon from that beam was passed through the cut out portion of the stencil. Due to the nature of quantum mechanics, that photon passed through every region of the cut away part of the stencil (or at least, that's how …
With regard to the bill yesterday that either could or could not have forced webloggers to register as lobbyists inside the beltway, the bill didn't pass.
It seems that LA police completely missed something shady happening that was not only reported by the public but recorded by a securicam: J. Random Stranger poured a bottle of mercury out on a subway platform, and the hazmat crew arrived eight hours later to clean up the spill. The Joint Terrorism Task Force says that this wasn't even a criminal act, which it probably wasn't but for future reference it actually is because mercury is toxic, and in fact there are special procedures that must be followed to clean it up. However, the guy who spilled the mercury hunted …
The handlers over at the Internet Storm Centre have been noticing a disturbing trend lately, namely, seeing the DNP protocol appearing on the open Net. You probably don't care about this because you've never heard of it before, but the protocol called DNP is used by process automation systems (SCADA) that control things like power generators and substations, pipelines, and other systems that have points of control scattered far and wide, systems in which a problem in one place can cascade into major problems everywhere downstream of the first problem. Now, maybe it's just me, but I find it worrisome …
At this time, there is a bill before Congress that will change how grassroots lobbyists are treated, namely, requiring them to register on a quarterly basis as lobbyists inside the beltway. This press release has been picked up all over the Net - just about every cause you can think of that would ask people to write in to push for things to go one way or another has noticed this bill. So many have that I had a hell of a time finding the actual text of the bill in question at the Library of Congress. Well, here's the gotcha …
