Check out Gizmodo's post: Wolfram Alpha: A Bit Racist?

Searching for the word "dumb" brings up "results for Racist synonym trees that associated the word dumb with black."

W|A explained this essentially as follows:
"One thing Wolfram|Alpha gives is synonyms for dumb. An example is "dim".
...So, "dim" is a synonym of "dumb". But what are synonyms of "dim"?"

What this doesn't explain, in my mind, is the results and synonym trees for the "N word."

Better yet, contrast that with the the synonym tree for "honky":

Now can someone please lexicographically explain the fuck out of that shit?

Total damage: 9,400 Baht (about $300 US)

An unwelcome expense but much much better than losing my car. Plus the aircon compressor was replaced and a new fan installed so the cooler works better than even some new cars I've been in. And the compressor is now tuned to the engine so it no longer stalls when the RPM suddenly dips like it did before.

A is for Ackbar, B is for Bantha...

LINK

Just as I left for work in the Kuj today, not even half a kilometer from my house and still inside our neighborhood, the air conditioner (under dash box unit) cut out and black smoke started pouring out from the dash. I stopped the car and cut the engine, but smoke continued to pour out and I could hear either the sound of something shorting out or the sound of plastic burning from the cable bundles under the steering column that are encapsulated by the dash. Then, through the hole where the original ignition was mounted (it's now on the steering column like a modern car), I saw flames.

All I could think about was how much it was going to suck watching my car burn... There was nobody around, and no cars were passing by... I couldn't put out the fire with the water I had in the car because I couldn't get it directed under the dash.... I could call Nam to bring the big fire extinguisher from the house, but it would take a couple minutes and this fire wasn't waiting for anybody...

Then I remembered I had a small fire extinguisher in the trunk. I got it out, popped the cap (it's a little spray can type thing), pushed the spout into the aforementioned ignition hole and pushed down on the top. There was violent hissing as the fire was extinguished, and white steam started appearing with the black smoke. Within thirty seconds of directed bursts from the extinguisher, the fire was out, but there was still something shorting out so I got a ratchet set from the trunk, remembered the nut on the battery terminal as a #10 metric, and successfully pulled the positive battery cable.

The rest of the story is kind of anticlimactic... Nam went to call a mechanic, who came and identified the shorted wire and tied it off. The car was no worse for the wear appearance wise, and still drivable, so I took it to my pal Ot's sound shop to fix everything (rewiring the lot, replacing broken air con parts/possibly replacing the compressor, replacing a broken brake light switch, isolating the problem air con wiring from the rest of the cable bundles). It should be ready tomorrow, after he determines whether he can make a new part for the old compressor (no spares to be had) or just replace it. I'm just happy nothing really bad happened and that I still have a fucking awesome ride.

///////////////////////

THE MORAL OF THIS STORY IS: BE PREPARED! AND ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT FOREST FIRES!

Nah seriously, that fire extinguisher saved my ass today, and it was an impulse purchase six months ago. I'll carry one in every car I own for the rest of my life.

I know this is all backward because you usually watch a trailer before a game is released or you actually play it (and I know I found about about all this so late), but Fallout 3 is so good... The last time I felt even close to this way about a game is when BF1942 was first released.

No, I'm sorry, it just is.

And all the people who called it a "Google killer" are also retarded (in an " isn't sure what to do with your input" sense, that is).

* don't worry - like all post-1999 web sites it will "learn over time"

As the title indicates, I noticed a sudden problem today in Firefox (on Windows XP) when checking Gmail - all of the text was bold. So I fired up Chrome to see if FF was the problem and all of the text in Chrome was in italics... These two problems together indicated a corrupted system font.

If you have ever have this problem, you need to reinstall the Arial font family (TrueType). The executable installer can be found here or here.

Max and mommy went to his grandparent's house so daddy took the time to organize five years of DVD (originally all DVD-R but more recently DVD+R for Improved! Error! Correction!; everything important is on genuine "That's" brand Taiyo Yuden 16x media, everything else is on TDK or SONY 8x or 16x [end historical optical media note]) backups.

I must say, we are in a fairly sucklical state of backup media at this point in history. Optical media like CDs and DVDs (and presumably BluRay Disks as well) apparently degrades in a matter of a few years in extreme cases, and keeping things on a form of media (HDs) that constantly spins at thousands of rpm and can die at any moment can hardly be considered a safe archival system.

WANT INVINCIBLE 100TB NAS TO FALL FROM SKY ONTO MY HOME NETWORK LOLZR!!!

Linky, linky: The Ultimate Lock Picker Exposes Weak Military Installations, Corporate Systems

Wired arranged a picking test for the best locks Medeco had to offer, and filmed the results.

After having the baby, I ran out of money to complete my list of thing to do with the Kujira Crown. Since I reverted to stock tires I alleviated bottoming out problems and can hence wait on any suspension upgrades. She needs to be stripped and repainted, though, before the rust gets too bad. I don't think of it as overly humid here (compared to Japan or even Bangkok), but paint started flaking off as I used the Kuj every day and rust started appearing in those places as well as under the paint in some spots.

Additional victims to the humidity were my plugs. Behold:

I can't even believe the car was still running - I noticed sputtering on the low end and suspected the plugs since they were the only consumables I hadn't changed - but there was no indication that they had degraded this much. This car is a witch. And now she runs so smoothly...

Popular Science breaks down the science of it here, but after the first couple paragraphs it just started to look like blah blah blah blah blahblahblahblah...

On Sunday we went to an outdoor market in a park downtown where many fresh produce vendors gather. It's an excellent place to find strange new (to me anyway) fruits and veggies, and sometimes even plants for our garden. This day proved to be no exception and we found a lady selling what looked like Japanese aojiru powder (green juice powder made from barley and other healthy crap) from a bucket. Upon closer inspection the granules were too large to be aojiru and were also quite damp. The old lady didn't really explain what it was that well to Nam, so we had our nanny go ask. Nanny already knew what it was and said she could prepare a soup with it, so I of course bought some, about a pound, for 15 Baht (45 cents).

It turned out to be some kind of vegetation that grows on the surface of a pond, or as I like to call it, pond scum.

The soup she made was quite good; it smelled pleasant and tasted hearty with a hint of lemongrass, and the texture of the scum was like miniature flying fish roe, or soft grains of sand. Nanny said it would have been better if she'd had pork belly to add to it, but really, what food couldn't benefit from some pork belly?

It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but homeboy gets points for pseudo-fundoshi and giant Garfield flying kick cop-out.

The new Danger Mouse album is going to turn the record industry on its head - mark my words, this is the tipping point.

http://kimigayowachiyoniyachiyonisazare-ishinoiwaotonaritekokenomusuma.de

Although in this photo, he's just omnomnomnom.

Mommy and I sit on the floor a few feet apart and make him walk alone back and fourth, and he does that just fine... But he's not quite comfortable walking instead of crawling yet. Friends tell me that any spare time I've enjoyed while the baby's awake will no longer exist after he learns to walk.

For future reference: An impressive anagram generator

The first two that come up for "Max Yoshida" are:

• Shady Axiom


• Dismay Hoax

As far as I can tell, Twitter is filled with rich people who made their money online and inexplicably want to share their secrets to success with EVERYBODY!

////////////////////////////////////////

As I re-tweeted a while back: "For a small fee, I can teach you how to make money on Twitter asking for a small fee."

1. Do you use Google Reader?

2. Do you know the Konami Code*?

Try inputting 2 when in 1.

////////////////////////

*

///////////////////////////

UPDATE: I got this off of this page, which you also need to input the Konami Code into in order to view at all.

This is perhaps my favorite entry on the whole Cake Wrecks blog:

If somebody asks you why there are so many gays in the NE of Thailand, and wonders if it could possibly be the food turning them gay, and then you confirm that it is indeed the food and specify it as "sausage," does that make you a bad person?

Cause I feel baaaaaad.

Oh, Microsoft!

In October 2005, an internal Microsoft proposal blocked the term "Dzongkha" from all company software and promotional material, substituting the term "Tibetan - Bhutan" instead. The International Campaign for Tibet cites the memorandum as saying Dzongkha "implies affiliation with the Dalai Lama, which is not acceptable to the government of China". The Bhutanese, who have never been under the rule of the Dalai Lamas, even if they revere the 14th Dalai Lama, were dismayed by the decision. Linguists have pointed out that the word "Dzongkha" has no particular association with the Dalai Lama. Ironically, the government of the People's Republic of China continues to use the term "Dzongkha" in its official publications.

/////////////////////

* risky (Dzongkha phrasebook)

I'm currently doing some minor freelance work for the government of Bhutan, which has been one of my dreams since I heard than Bhutanese look just like Japanese about ten years ago.

That is all.

UPDATE: This is just editing work, not destroying spam botnets with my magical mango tree. The content is regarding policy for the Royal Institute of Health Science at the Royal University of Bhutan. Still stoked to have been chosen.

Around these parts, mango season comes at the hottest time of the year. This year, luckily, we have been blessed with rain almost every week, which brings down the temperature and gives everybody a nice respite from the dry heat. The first five months or so when I first came, it didn't really rain at all, so it's been nice having a cooler hot season last year and an even cooler one this year.

Back to mangoes, though - everybody seems to have mango trees growing in their yard and a single mature tree can produce perhaps hundreds of fruit every season. So visitors over the past few weeks have kept our fruit baskets overflowing with all different varieties and flavors of mangoes. Combined with the fruit on one of our banana trees ripening a couple weeks ago, Max and family have been enjoying a truly bountiful harvest.

/////////////////////////////

/////////////////////////////

/////////////////////////////

/////////////////////////////

This afternoon while Max slept, it rained again and I sat on the porch with a pocketknife, a plastic bucket, and a few dozen mangoes. I started peeling them one by one and sucking all of the flesh off the pits. Before long, the bucket was filled with pits and skins and sweet mango juice was dribbling down my arms. About the closest sensation I can think of back home is eating fresh peaches: Sweet, sticky fun. The only difference is that mangoes grow all over the place here - it's one of the most common fruits grown in people's yards. Thank god for that.

After I could eat no more, I planted the pits outside our fence to begin a new cycle.

An interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell over at the New Yorker that sort of reads like an inspirational speech: How David Beats Goliath

Thanks for everyone's well wishes and thoughts and prayers; here at cosmicbuddha.com we welcome positive energy of all denominations...

As special thanks, I present all of you with this very, very special video:

If you are a Nagi Noda fan, you know this is one of her best-known pieces of work. The description on the YouTube page is:

It's a word-for-word parody of Susan Powter's first workout video, featuring poodles and a crazy poodle-woman. Absolutely surreal. It was made by Nagi Noda for Panasonic. It was part of 10 films they made for the 2004 Athens Olympics.

Excellent.

UPDATE: Here's the wikipedia article for this vid: LINK

It seems he had a bad reaction to an MMR vaccine two weekends ago. It caused a fever five days or so after the shot and now he's broken out in a rash all over his torso... We are monitoring him closely, and he's been in an understandably grumpy mood for the past five days or so.

Was it a hot shot? Or just a bad reaction?

There's no way to tell. We took every precaution possible, but it still AAAAAAAARRRRGH... worrying about him drives us crazy.

Everything's all right for now though, I think.

Real-life Happy Gilmore.

////////////////////////

Previous colors of Max:
green max
monokuro max
red red max
orange max
sepia max
coppermine max
blue max

Natives Telling Stories

I heard about this last week but I thought it was an anthropologist's joke.

They were delicious, especially the ones rich with roe. Nam made a traditional nam chim dip with lime, chili, vinegar, fish sauce, and sugar. I secretly added pork bouillon for the hell of it, and it turned out very well.