K-Squared Ramblings

Spring Haze

On Sunday, March 11, a brush fire struck in the Anaheim Hills area. It was controlled relatively quickly, and by the next morning, the smoke had settled into a blanket of haze over Orange County.

For contrast, here’s a shot from a few weeks earlier (February 23), when it was unusually clear. This was taken from a park in the Quail Hill area of Irvine, looking across the Saddleback Valley from the south toward the same range of hills seen on the left of the picture above.

Click to enlarge

Don’t Hurt the Web

The Mozilla Developer Center has just posted some desktop wallpaper promoting open standards, (and the MDC itself) with the theme, “Please don’t hurt the web. Use open standards.”

Apparently the design was a big hit as a poster at SXSW.

For those who haven’t seen it, the MDC is a great developer resource for web developers, describing lots of standards along with Mozilla-specific information.

(via Rhian @ SFX, who notes that the image is available for use under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. These wallpapers are also covered by the Mozilla Trademark Policy.)

Con Report: Wizard World LA 2007

I went to Wizard World Los Angeles today. I almost went last year, and decided not to—and regretted it when I learned that Sunday (the day I almost went) was sparsely attended. So not only would I have had no problem getting in, but it should be a low-stress experience overall, rather than the insane crowds of San Diego.

The convention itself did turn out to be a nice, low-key experience, and I found some interesting stuff, but getting to the convention was a bit of an adventure. Read the rest of this entry »

Fighting Irish

I caught a story on The World (PRI) today about Los Angeles band Ollin’s song tribute to Saint Patrick’s Battalion (in Spanish, El Batallón de Los San Patricios)—a group of several hundred primarily Irish Americans who, during the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), left the US Army to fight alongside the Mexicans. They fought fiercely for a year, but came to a bad end: most were captured by the US and executed as traitors.

It reminded me of a story Sergio Aragonés told last year in his issue of Solo (#11). In “Heroes,” he talks about growing up in Mexico, where the San Patricios are national heroes. They have statues, memorials, and a commemorative ceremony every year on the spot where they were executed. After telling the story of how he learned about the battalion, he jumps forward a few decades. Living in the US, with his daughter going to American schools, he wanted to see how she would learn about the heroes of his youth. So he looked through her textbook to the section on the Mexican-American war, and found only a fleeting remark about how a bunch of drunk Irishmen deserted the US Army, surrendered, and were executed.

It was a surprisingly serious story from an artist known for his comedy (some of the other stories in the issue are drop-dead funny), and an interesting commentary on how nationalism shapes our views of history, with one side elevating the battallion, and the other trivializing them.

Pro-whaaat?

A piece of spam came across the abuse desk the other day hawking something called “Viagra Professional.” Just as some songs aren’t suited for elevator music, some products aren’t suited for Microsoft-style naming schemes.

Think about it: Outside the pharmaceutical industry, what *ahem* profession would have a use for Viagra?

Opera hits MySpace

Following the trend of musicians setting up shop on MySpace, the social networking site now hosts a profile for the Opera Web browser. (Just kidding about the musicians part.) On a related note, I’ve found that on the rare occasions I’ve looked at MySpace pages, Opera tends to be more responsive than Firefox, which tends to slow to a crawl on the pages which seem to average about 23 MB apiece.

Of course, this brings up a question of serious importance: Opera lists itself as being “in a relationship.” With whom?

(via Opera Otaku)

Who’d’a thunk it? (Uncovering the origin of the Thinker)

After almost 1½ years, my Golden-Age back-issue hunt finally netted a relatively cheap copy of All-Flash #12, the first appearance of the Flash villain, the Thinker. It’s an odd read, because the origin of the Thinker (a mob boss who plans his heists very meticulously) is interwoven with a slapstick story of the Three Dimwits.

The Thinker story is played more or less as a straight super-hero vs. organized crime story. I’d summarize it, but the Comics Archive has already written it up in their article on the Thinker. Now, imagine the first five paragraphs over there interwoven with a Three Stooges film and you’ll get the idea. The Dimwits end up buying a restaurant heavily in debt to the mob, and accidentally make salads out of an alien plant that make people turn invisible.

It’s incredibly silly, but it ties into the other half of the story: The original mob boss’ henchmen are caught robbing the Dimwits’ restaurant, so he calls in the Thinker to solve his problem before they can rat on him. And of course, once the Thinker takes over, he’s mighty interested in these salads that turn people invisible.

And yet, the feel is so completely different that it seems like two different stories.

An unexpected discovery was a reference to the planet Karma, where the alien plant comes from. I’d seen two other references in other Golden-Age Flash stories, so it’s clearly part of the background mythos. This is one reason I’ve been looking for the source material. It’s relatively easy to find info on the leads, or the major villains, but the minor supporting characters who appear in three or four issues—Deuces Wilde, Evart Keenan, Dr. Flura, Ebenezer Jones—are mostly forgotten.

On a related note, while looking up the Thinker’s other appearances, I discovered that one of the non-Flash titles I’d been looking for, All-Star Comics #37, was reprinted in The Greatest Golden-Age Stories Ever Told—a book I already had. I felt bad that I hadn’t actually read the entire book, but that meant I could cross off two items from my wantlist instead of just one.

The Secret Life of the Invulnerable Cheerleader

I was browsing the DVD releases at Target this weekend, and saw the box for Bring it On: All or Nothing. I did a double-take, because right there on the cover was Claire Bennet from Heroes:

Yes, shortly before Hayden Panettiere played a cheerleader with super-powers on Heroes, she played a cheerleader in a direct-to-video sequel to Bring it On. The uniform is even the same color scheme!

She’s probably safe from being typecast, though. She’s done quite a bit of work, and something tells me Claire isn’t going to be cheering—or particularly cheerful, for that matter—anytime soon.

Edit: Forgot to mention, the Heroes Wiki is a fascinating and addictive site.

What people look for

It’s always interesting to see what people are searching for when they find this site. It’s even more interesting to look at the bottom of the list, the long tail full of one-off searches, some of which… can be really strange.

• “what to do with tumbleweeds” — Hmm. Mash ’em, boil ’em, put ’em in a stew. Probably hit one of these.
• “starbucks receipt fraud sandiego” — Now I’m curious. Unfortunately the search results seem to be mostly keyword farms (Only in San Diego)
• “slave girls photos” and variations — I was lazy enough to use Google to pull up the two cosplay photos that tripped this one, and discovered a site called Leia’s Metal Bikini. Proving once again that there’s an interest group for everything on the Internet.
• “can i get some free verse poems” — I’m not sure whether they wanted to get some poems, or read poems about people who want to get some.
• “is raven real?” — No, and she wasn’t two years ago either.
• “what is avocados number” — The number of particles in a guaca-mole, of course.
• “mopee stories” — Thankfully, these have been removed from continuity.
• “hyena pitchers” and “pitchers of the hyena” — These are a mash-up of two hits from the last time I posted on this subject. Oddly, the only other instance of the word “hyena” on this domain isn’t there anymore.
• “free verse poems about me” - Wow… I guess that article on self-esteem programs raising a generation of narcissists was right!
• “hentai raven starfire teen titans” — You people scare me.
• “where can i find free video for bare feet” — Um…. okaaayy.
• “toe orgasm” — … I really don’t want to know.
• “diy laptop battery” — Because nothing saves money like putting a homemade acid bath inside your computer.
• “herakles pumpkin” — This could only pull up an archive page with unrelated posts.
• “hot dogs logos” — They probably weren’t looking for the flying hot dogs Flash logo.
• “do not play these songs at a wedding” — good idea.
• “evil comics csa com” — well, there’s a Crime Syndicate of Amerika, but I didn’t realize they put out evil comics.

WordPress 2.1.1 Security Alert

Sometime in the last 3-4 days, someone managed to alter the download for WordPress 2.1.1, adding a remotely exploitable security hole. The WordPress team has declared the release “dangerous” and has issued an update, WordPress 2.1.2, taken from the clean source plus a few fixes. If you run WordPress 2.1.1, upgrade ASAP!

Things worth noting:

• The SVN source that the developers use was not altered.
• Older versions, such as 2.0, don’t seem to have been affected.
• If you downloaded 2.1.1 when it was first released, it’s probably okay.
• 2.1.2 also includes a fix for a cross-site scripting vulnerability discovered a few days ago, so it’s worth updating anyway.

I still had the tar archive of 2.1.1 from when I grabbed it the day of the release, so I compared its contents to the 2.1.2 archive. The two files mentioned in the announcement, feed.php and theme.php, aren’t any different, confirming that the initial release was unaffected. That’s also where I saw the changes for that XSS bug.

*sigh* It’s always something…

February 30 and the Seven-Day Week

An NPR story about an archaeological site in Peru mentioned that the ancient Andean calendars used a 10-day week, and I started wondering what other measurements various societies have used. The seven-day week is (almost?) universal these days, developed independently in both the Middle East (spreading to the West) and in the Far East, but past societies have used anywhere from three days to ten.

Unlike the day, year, or lunar month, there’s no natural unit of time corresponding to the week. So it’s hardly surprising that different societies have chosen different lengths. Ten is one obvious choice (there’s a reason we refer to number places as digits, after all). But aside from the obvious Biblical origins, why seven?

Well, seven days roughly corresponds to a phase of the moon. But humans have long had a fascination with the number seven, no doubt influenced by the seven heavenly bodies: the sun, the moon, and the five visible planets. Sunday, Monday (moon day) and Saturday (Saturn day) are obvious in English, but Tuesday through Friday are a little less clear: you have to work out which Norse god the name comes from—Tyr, Wotan, Thor, Frigg—and convert to the corresponding Roman god—Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus. It’s much clearer in Romance languages, as I discovered when I studied Spanish a few years ago. Wikipedia also has a nice table of weekday names in various languages.

On a related note, if February were a full month, today would be February 30. It turns out there’ve been a of those in relatively modern times, including an extra-long leap year in Sweden in 1712, and two in 1930-1931, when the Soviet Union tried to use a “revolutionary calendar.” (Funny how those never seem to catch on.)

Lunar Eclipse Tomorrow

There’s a lunar eclipse tomorrow. It looks like we’ll only get to see the tail end of it here in California, right at moonrise. Europe and Africa get to see the whole thing.

Interestingly, the map of where the eclipse will be visible manages to cover the major land masses almost exactly. The only region that won’t see it at all is the Pacific Ocean.

(via SANS ISC)