The Blog of Harald

What does 120 calories look like?

(hat tip: “Jeremy Zawodny”:http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/)

The no-corn-syrup diet | overstated

I love the venn diagram! (hat tip: “Jeremy Zawodny”:http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/)

I’m not sure if this is irony or hypocrisy. The Carpenter’s Union is outsourcing its picket lines to random people off the street, paying them $1 above minimum wage ($8/hr) to protest … low wages.

Outsourcing the Picket Line – washingtonpost.com

Megan McArdle: Harry Potter: the economics

bq. The low opportunity cost attached to magic spills over into the thoroughly unbelievable wizard economy. Why are the Weasleys poor? Why would any wizard be? Anything they need, except scarce magical objects, can be obtained by ordering a house elf to do it, or casting a spell, or, in a pinch, making objects like dinner, or a house, assemble themselves. Yet the Weasleys are poor not just by wizard standards, but by ours: they lack things like new clothes and textbooks that should be easily obtainable with a few magic words. Why?

An interesting touch on the subject. It seems true that in the Potterverse, magic is free, something that never works very well for story telling. C.S. Friedman just published _Feast of Souls_, the first book in a trilogy based on the opposite extreme; the source (and cost) of magic is life force. in _The Magic Goes Away_, Larry Niven deals with magic as a finite resource, to interesting effect. There are lots of other examples in SF&F literature.

So why don’t we care about this inconsistency in Rowling’s work?

Did the google crawler just hack up a furball or something?

Bandwidth use on all of my hosted sites (except controlledflight.ca, for some reason) spiked in the last 24 hours. The culprit was always 66.249.72.114 (crawl-66-249-72-114.googlebot.com.), which seems to have fetched every page on all of the sites in the last 24 hours. This is much more aggressive than normal for google…

I’m not complaining; I like my google juice! Just wondering if anyone else has seen this…

Update: the flood has subsided. I note, with amusement, that the same crawler fetched this page at 12:27:27 today, a mere 3 hours after I wrote it :)

From Bruce Schneier’s security weblog:

bq. Here’s a “clip”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs3SfNANtig from an Australian TV programme called “The Chaser”. A Trojan Horse (full of appropriately attired soldiers) finds its way past security everywhere except the Turkish consulate.

bq. At least they remember their history.

“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs3SfNANtig”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs3SfNANtig

This sounds familiar:

“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_attention_fatigue”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_attention_fatigue

Not worth blogging individually, here is a bunch of links that I wanted to share:

* “Binary marble adding machine”:http://woodgears.ca/marbleadd/index.html – watch the video!
* “Chore Buster”:http://www.chorebuster.net/ – Web 2.0! enter people and chores, and it will automatically generate a ‘fair’ schedule and email it to you weekly!
* “flotsam”:http://edition.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science/05/28/coolsc.oceansecrets/index.html – rubber duckies travel from the pacific to the atlantic via the arctic ocean! – see also “Beach Comber’s Alert”:http://www.beachcombers.org/
* “War on Clutter”:http://www.43folders.com/2007/07/02/war-on-clutter/
* “Teach Your Kids to Clean Their Own Rooms”:http://www.curbly.com/badbadivy/posts/1058-Teach-your-kids-to-clean-their-own-rooms