378 MetaFilter comments by tiamat (displaying 1 through 50)


An author admits that significant portions of their debut novel were plagiarized, in a "plagiarism atonement essay" [archive link] that itself plagiarized from Plagiarism Today.
comment posted at 5:45 PM on May-12-22



Guardian: “The most surprisingly contentious subject? Toilet roll orientation.” Daily Mirror: “Perhaps you've ended a relationship or even disinherited a family member based on their toilet roll orientation.” The related Wikipedia page, the cat complication, Christmas ruined and some science. What to do if faced with this problem? Toilet paper facts e.g. “Seven percent of Americans steal rolls of toilet paper in hotels or motels.” MetaDebate: clockwise or counter-clockwise? MetaNostalgia: Izal and Bronco: shiny side on cheeks or away from cheeks?
comment posted at 7:58 AM on Jul-15-21


Someone is faking publisher email addresses to get access to unpublished manuscripts. It’s been happening a lot. There is no apparent effort to monetize the manuscripts. It seems to me that it would be a simple thing to add a warning to email when the address is similar to an existing address. Not extremely simple, but quite feasible with modern computing power. [NYT]
comment posted at 6:14 AM on Dec-22-20


A UK business decided to make a splash with their corporate name = by formally registering a cross site scripting (XSS) attack as one, waiting to confound anyone who read the list of corporate names without sanitizing the results. (SLRegister)
comment posted at 2:11 PM on Oct-30-20
comment posted at 2:28 PM on Oct-30-20

No-Instrument Mixing Board is a full-length album of manipulated feedback by Japanese musician Toshimaru Nakamura, whose instrument is a mixing board with its output plugged into its input. (Track 4 has some very high frequency tones; you may want to skip to 25:20 when those show up if you still have your hearing up there.)
comment posted at 4:35 PM on Oct-22-20

Two short, exciting scifi stories in which underdogs fight battles. "The Hard Quarry" by Caleb Huitt, published this year, has a solo asteroid miner outwitting pirates: "The only statement the regs make on going extravehicular at speed is not to." "Corporate Robo Renegade Piston" by Nicholas Sugarman (2017) has an underfunded mecha pilot strapping in to fight a kaiju: "it hurt his pride knowing his face was plastered onto a waffle iron. He sighed, comforting himself with the knowledge that at least he wasn't on the kaiju cleanup team."
comment posted at 9:13 PM on Oct-17-20

Bennett and I discuss joining the Illuminati. "These are text messages I exchange with my 17-year-old cousin Bennett... one of the most unintentionally funny and brilliant souls on the planet. He has no idea I do this blog. Yes, this is 100% real." [NSFWtext; TumblrFilter]
comment posted at 8:50 PM on Dec-1-11


“Star Wars: The Solo Adventures” (2D) Also: The Solo Adventures (3D). This is the winner of "Best Animation" from the Star Wars Fan Film Movie Challenge, sponsored by Lucasfilm. “Star Wars: The Solo Adventures” by Daniel L Smith tells the story of why Han Solo “Dropped his cargo at the first sign of an Imperial Cruiser”.
comment posted at 2:01 PM on Sep-12-10

UVB-76 has sent a new message.
comment posted at 6:18 PM on Aug-24-10


Cat-Scan.com is one of the strangest sites I've seen in some time. I have no idea how these people got their cats wedged into their scanners, or why.
comment posted at 4:19 PM on Jul-15-10

Fede Alvarez, a Uruguayan filmmaker, posted a short live action/CG video on YouTube back in early November (prev). The short, which features mysterious robots destroying Montevideo and cost approximately $300 to make, received interest from Hollywood days after being online. By the end of November, news spread that Alvarez signed a deal with Ghost House Pictures, reportedly worth $30 million. For now, Alvarez has a six-figure holding deal to wait while Ghost House hires a high-end scribe to turn the idea into a feature. The six-figure deal will be applied against a seven-figure fee if Ghost House makes the film, though Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert are already set up to produce the film. (via)
comment posted at 11:38 AM on Dec-17-09

I never left the unlockable motorcycle for long on the street and never out of my sight. One day I parked it on the sidewalk in front of the house beside the iron grill that was attached to the house but without chaining it. Broad daylight. A middle-aged man wearing a suit was seen by various neighbors riding down the street on my blue chopped Harley into history, while I sat inside reading Rilke. The neighbors said it was very odd to see a man in a suit riding a big Harley, but then it was my motorcycle, so of course! I never saw the bike again. —Frederick Seidel, About Motorcycles
comment posted at 1:50 AM on Dec-17-09

Several Twitter-based games were launched during the world's first Literary Twestival: Flash Fiction, Collective Nouns, Pass the Plot, and Project Twutenberg (via).
comment posted at 5:58 AM on Aug-22-09

Secure existing OpenSSH installation This post provides you with the instructions how to make your OpenSSH daemon secure and usable as possible.
comment posted at 4:46 AM on Jul-13-09

So say TMZ and Reuters
comment posted at 2:54 PM on Jun-25-09



The Morning Glory might be the coolest cloud on the planet.
comment posted at 4:46 PM on Feb-18-09

Home of the Underdogs is no more. Although in decline since 2006 or so, it was once *the* place for abandonware. HotU hosted 5000+ game reviews (by contrast, the "next-best-thing-still-around", abandonia has around 1000), the majority of them with the games available for download, including some titles that are now incredibly difficult to find.
comment posted at 9:46 AM on Feb-18-09


A clinic nurse first removed her intrauterine birth-control device without permission, says the patient in a federal action, then told her that "having the IUD come out was a good thing," because "I personally do not like IUDs. I feel they are a type of abortion. I don't know how you feel about abortion, but I am against them."
comment posted at 4:19 PM on Jan-20-09

Before moving on to House (Laurie) and being bloody awesome (Fry), even before Jeeves and Wooster, but after Blackadder I think, Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry appeared in an amazing sketch show called A Bit of Fry and Laurie. Fry, in particular, has a way of taking any bit of linguistic madness at all and turning it into something that sounds almost respectable.
To start off, these are calculated to make your brain explode: Tricky Linguistics and Part 2, Buying an Engagement Ring, and The Haircut
comment posted at 11:45 PM on Dec-24-08

UnNerfed - the Nerf dart blaster overclocked to 500 rounds per minute.
comment posted at 12:25 AM on Dec-23-08


Crossing Borders with Laptops and PDAs. I am about to go on vacation and just learned (Guardian.co.UK) about a recent US Circuit Court ruling (PDF) that your electronic devices, including laptops and PDAs, are subject to search and seizure for just about any reason. Does this worry anyone else as much as it does me?
comment posted at 5:52 AM on May-18-08

A new campaign plans to relocate polar bears to Antarctica to protect them from the effects of climate change. Based on the rates of ice melt in the North, scientists say most polar bears will be gone by 2050. The first bears will be moved on Earth Day, April 22. The relocation will be the initial step in a planned five-year program to migrate 3,000 polar bears from the Northern Arctic to the southern continent of Antarctica. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans to rule soon on whether to list polar bears as endangered species; however, it has indicated that relocating polar bears would be much less expensive to taxpayers than listing them under the 1973 act.
comment posted at 11:06 PM on Mar-31-08

Canadian Citizenship Practice Test. Who were the United Empire Loyalists? Why is the British North America Act important in Canadian history? List four rights Canadian citizens have. Which province is the only officially bilingual province? On what date did Nunavut become a territory? What do you call the Queen’s representative in the provinces? And more.
comment posted at 8:35 AM on May-25-07

Surprising findings in Pew study of US Muslims. The interweb is all atwitter over some of the findings of a Pew Research Center study of the attitudes of Muslim-Americans (the most comprehensive one done yet). While most of the findings should be welcomed (US Muslims are well off, appreciate being here, have non-Muslim friends, shun extremism, etc.), there is one troubling statistic: 6% of US Muslims - and 15% of US Muslims under 30 - believe that "bombing and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians" are "often or sometimes justified". Sounds bad, but what happens when you ask the same question of non-Muslim Americans? Turns out that 24% of all Americans agreed - four times the 6% of US Muslims who share that view. So are US Muslims more peaceful than their non-Muslim neighbors?
comment posted at 1:46 PM on May-23-07

Bare naked travel? (Previously on MeFi: here, except now they're actually doing it, and here). The TSA wants to see you naked. Just don't paint "Kip Hawley Is An Idiot" on your torso in Pepto-Bismol before you go to the airport.
comment posted at 8:10 PM on Dec-3-06


When Library and Archives Canada placed online images of the 1901, 1906 and 1911 census, Automated Genealogy provided opportunity for volunteers to transcribe names into a database. Now the two early documents (1901, 1906) and most of the 1911 are fully indexed and searchable with links to the original image pages. Further projects are underway to link names between the documents and to other online sources, such as The Halifax Explosion Book of Remembrance and the British Home Children.
comment posted at 7:36 PM on Aug-16-06

The U.S. Naval Observatory Library features high-res scans of images from antique books dealing with astronomy and navigation. Wallpapers, ahoy!
comment posted at 9:33 PM on Jul-13-06

Brad Neely's Washington YouTube link. Very possibly NSFW. Simply fucking incredible. I want it on t-shirts. BTW, apologies in advance if you have seen it before, I searched, and I don't think it's a double...
comment posted at 9:39 AM on Jul-12-06

help me find this crazy fish toy. When I first met my wife, she was crazy about this little fish - it swims around the tank by way of a magnet, and it makes this weird little noise as the magnet bounces up and down... she called it her "wacka-wacka fish." So anyway, the fish's tail fell off. It's lasted 13 years, so I guess it's had a good life. I managed to find the toy online at this website, but can't seem to find it for sale online anywhere..... Although you see a lot of these cheapy little fish tanks at flea markets and such, I've failed to come across one like this. Can anyone help me find another "whacka-whacka?"
comment posted at 8:04 PM on Jun-29-06

at
comment posted at 7:49 PM on May-29-06


Prime Minister Stephen Harper says he'll no longer give news conferences for the national media, after a dispute led a number of journalists to walk away from an event when he refused to take their questions.
comment posted at 6:05 PM on May-24-06

Amazon S3, now for the masses. Amazon S3 has been discussed previously, but several user-facing services have appeared in the last few weeks that allow ordinary non-programmer end users to take advantage of it. One of the most useful of these appears to be Jungle Disk, a free front-end (free beer!) that lets you use S3 as a webdav-mounted disk drive. It works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and there's GPL code available (free speech!) that lets other people develop alternative compatible front-ends.
comment posted at 1:51 PM on May-18-06

Guy Kewney is interviewed by the bbc. The look on his face is classic.
comment posted at 3:42 PM on May-16-06

Pepsi Blue
comment posted at 3:27 PM on May-15-06


Darfur reality: More killings, more rapes | Despite a cease-fire, the horrible situation in Darfur persists. Based on Google Trends data, it appears that, as of January, people are becoming interested in Darfur again (or at least they're researching it more), which may be a catalyst for politicians to act. Or maybe not...
comment posted at 2:25 PM on May-14-06

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