Jamie Dee photos

[Thanks to Joe]

Jamie Dee photos.

What progress comes from

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
- Samuel Butler

How to Tow a Building-Sized Iceberg

How to Tow a Building-Sized Iceberg, article.

French engineer Georges Mougin has a big idea. He wants to go to Antarctica, tie a big rope around a six-million-ton iceberg, drag it back to Africa and melt it into fresh, drinkable water.

They don't talk about whether they'll try to cover it to reduce the melting. I'd have thought that would be an important question.

How about pumping seawater into a desert and let the sand filter out the salt, then pump up drinking water from below? Wonder if that could work. Would probably be a long line, and maybe the sand wouldn't get out all the salt. Perhaps too there'd be too big a loss of water over the process. And probably the energy expense would be huge, as well as the environmental impact.
This article says that salt is very hard to separate from water, so maybe sand simply wouldn't do the trick. Well, I was just spitballing.

Trying googling for this, I found this small-scale, but smart method.

Saturn seen from the dark side

[Thanks to TCGirl]

Hard to believe this is an actual photo, but that's what they say.

Here is a short fly-by movie composed from photos taken by the same space probe, Cassini.

Pendulum waves

[Thanks to Lou] 

Don't miss this one, it's surprisingly beautiful.

Alizee flaunting what she's got

[Thanks to Dave]

It's interesting to see the stiff-faced older women (judges?) in the audience at Alizee's concert. They probably suspect that she's playing off her sexuality a leeeetle bit.
They may also suspect that all the men there would trample over their bodies like wildebeests to get at Alizee, and they don't like it a bit. It's a jungle out there.

 

Emma Watson hawks perfume

She doesn't look at whole lot like Hermione now, eh?

 

Rethinking the 'Never Unsubscribe' Rule for Spam

Rethinking the 'Never Unsubscribe' Rule for Spam, article. 

I've come to the same conclusion as David Pogue. Recently I decided to revive my old classic address. I put it on hiatus and heavy spam filtering (SpamArrest) years ago. But I figured some of the spam had died away and spam sieve would deal with the rest. And it works pretty well. But one thing I did notice is that a lot of otherwise respectable companies have taken advantage of "found" addresses, and send me promotion. But these usually have an Unsubscribe button at the end of the email, and it works. 

I also found out at some point that from what I could glean, many more addresses are distributed wrongfully from when you sign up with some company or site, compared to those picked off web sites by robots. So for years I've been using a special "throw-away" gmail address for signing up for newsletters and companies which demand it to sell me something, but who I didn't care *that* much for, so that if the spam ever gets too much on that address, I can dump it. 

But by the way, Gmail is genius at filtering spam, I get almost nothing to gmail addresses. I've heard it's 'cuz they are web-based, they can check links in the mails and see if they lead to known or reported spam or virus sites. 

.xxx rated: internet's red-light district has arrived

[Thanks to Tommy]

.xxx rated: internet's red-light district has arrived, article. 

A lot of fresh money for the product-less registar business. 

The bit I fear is this may eventually lead to a lot of pressure to make all porn sites use XXX domains and only XXX domains. But how about nude art sites, and oddities like Domai, will they be forced into this "shameful ghetto" also?

Also, just the idea that you need a special domain for sexual content really strengthens the feeling that this kind of thing is shameful and immoral. It could be a very big step backwards after all the progress the West has made in recent decades in tearing down the artificial barriers between erotic culture and "proper" culture. 

Ghost Town with Téa

In the series of actresses I worship: Téa Leoni.
And this one is serious.

Watched her in Ghost Town. Lovely and funny film.
Finally a part which made me like Ricky Gervais better, instead of creeping me out.

(Again I wonder why it so often is so hard to find good photographs of people who are both beautiful and famous. They are either poor paparazzi shots or glamour shots which make the subject unrecognisable.)

I think part of Téa's appeal is that she feels like she's missing the defensive barrier that most people, especially beautiful people, have. The "don't come *too* close or I'll have to defend myself" barrier. It's very rare to have very little of that, and it's very pleasant for others. Based on primal fear, I guess.

Leno drives a Bugatti

[Thanks to tOP. There's another guy who has strong interest in many things.]

I admire people who have strong enough interest to have an impact in more than one area. Take Jay Leno, TV star, comedian, and car nut. Here he talks about an amazing Bugatti 37A racer. He actually drives it too, from around nine minutes into the video. Like Mike says in his post about roadsters, hardly anybody ever talks about driving these things.

Lenka - The Show

We're many who enjoyed the find of Lenka's Trouble Is A Friend, so I looked for one more of hers, and I was not very surprised when I liked the first one I tried. She's fun.