• It turns out computers can figure out what language you’re speaking without actually hearing you.  In at least some controlled circumstances, anyway.  (NewScientist, via Monochrom)
• “Astonishingly”, (1) people forget their passwords all the time, but (2) the ever-helpful “secret” “questions” are not really either — at least, not as far as security is concerned.
• If I had a car I needed to get into on a regular basis (as in, for driving), this would be wicked awesome.  It’s not everyone who can open a car with his shoes.
• And this video montage is just kinda sweet.
• This post is a good example of why I’m recently drawn to reading Tetrapod Zoology on a regular basis.  The lead-in sentence (I think) sells itself:
  

  I used to receive random unsolicited emails from an individual who strongly promoted the idea that birds could not not not not be dinosaurs, that the entire dinosaur family tree was screwed up beyond belief, that ‘dinosaurs’ had evolved from random assorted diverse archosaurs, that cladistics was rubbish, and that all mainstream palaeontologists were idiots.

  Read on.

• I am still waiting for these business cards made out of meat to get real.  (No, not like that.)
• Without having perused it much, Ficly at minimum stands out as an interesting concept — a place for collaborative story-telling (in a time & place where social networks are, weirdly, moving us away from that kind of collaboration).  (via SimpleSpark)

…wait till May 18th to make your resolutions.

via io9, a graphic showing the steady-ish uptick in the frequency of zombie movies, and “mapping” it (very roughty) to incidences of war (click below for a larger image):

Correlation not being correlation, blah blah blah, everything else aside, it’s still a fun chart.

(via io9)

Last year at this time I was 81% Jazz; this time around, I’m 84% Optimus Prime.

Things are looking Up.

(Nothing against Jazz, mind you.)

A book’s journey from one language into another can be perilous. The Russian title for J. D. Salinger’s classic tale of adolescence translates as “Above the Precipice in the Rye.” A clerk in a Yokohama bookshop once told John Steinbeck’s wife that yes, he had a copy of Steinbeck’s “Angry Raisins.” Has this bumpy road gotten any smoother in recent years? Let the following quiz be your guide.

…

3. James Finn Garner dedicated his best seller “Politically Correct Bedtime Stories” to his wife, Lies (pronounced “lease”), which is the Dutch equivalent of Elizabeth. In the Norwegian edition, the book’s dedication reads:

a) “This book is dedicated to Untruths, for everything”
b) “For Dissembling, my everything”
c) “For Rental Unit, my north star”
d) “Lies Flat, I can’t live without you”

(via NYT: “Transloosely Literated,” by Henry Alford [6 Jul 2008])

Mysterious, but not.

Forget the Golden Gate Bridge and House of Nanking and Zeitgeist on a summer night — the heart of San Francisco beats loudest on the carpeted second floor of that South Van Ness building you thought was Bank of America.

…

“Thank you for calling San Francisco 311, this is Kyle speaking, how may I help you?”

Kyle Sutton is one of 50 or so customer service representatives, or CSRs, asking this question 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The free service launched in March not just to funnel 2,300 government phone numbers into a single line, but to give the city more of a service orientation. About 6,000 calls come in every day, and program director Ed Reiskin says 311 is on track to answer 2 million a year.

Officially, the purpose is to supply a handy route to non-emergency government services and information. Unofficially, it’s a glimpse into the funny inner mind of the city.

“Hello, how long does it take to build a cable car?”

“There’s cocaine all over my clothes! There’s cocaine everywhere!”

“My roommate has been passed out for two days.”

“There’s pig balls on the street.”

Ideally, every call would be like these and our city would have the best dinner parties ever. In fact, most people call about the bus. How do you get to Justin Herman Plaza? I’m on Clement and 8th Avenue, where’s the 2? My driver didn’t stop for me.

(SFGate: “Pig balls and stuck skunks: A 311 customer service rep has a window onto San Francisco’s secret heart,” by Chris Collin [4 Sept 2007])