The world's most boring publication

A classic from 1955, courtesy of the RAND Corporation: A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates. It's hard to believe that, at one point in time, a book containing nothing more than an obscenely long string of random digits was a genuinely significant contribution to humankind, but be not deceived: effective random number generation is hard. It's hard enough to require a 131-page specification courtesy of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. And in in an era when one couldn't count on having a cheap, fast PC to run well-established algorithms on, a book like this was indeed a blessing. I'm tempted to buy this to read on airplanes, just to creep out the person sitting next to me.

Pop producers are now sampling C64 MOD files

for their hits. Example: Timbaland blatantly ripped off a Finnish MOD writer for a Nelly Furtado song, and failed to give credit where it was due. (Link contains MP3s for comparison.) It wasn't just a minor sampling; pretty much the entire melody line was borrowed. How easy would it be for an average hobbyist like this guy to defend his copyright? Since copyright owners have gotten vigilant about sampling royalties, and court decisions have changed things to the point where famous albums couldn't have been produced today, perhaps they'll be opting to borrow from artists who aren't in nearly as good a position to defend their copyright claims. (Via Waxy.)

At bat: Theleft ... fielder.

The title of this post will make absolutely no sense to no one except myself and one other person on the face of the earth. OK, so does anyone out there remember Earl Weaver Baseball? It was a great game for the Commodore Amiga from the late 80s, and it had a great synthesized voice that announced the players, as in

At Bat: Jose Canseco.

except that, in this case, it invariably pronounced his name as "Joe's Can-sicko" unless you changed the "Phoneme" entry for him.

And while I'm on the subject, does anyone have a link to a good web interface to a voice synthesizer? I'm thinking of a cheesy old-school one like the old "SAM" program for the Commodore 64; I would love to find one.

Other random tidbits:

This post covers the issue of exactly why some cities' lame efforts to attract creative people and young professional are so lame. Sadly, I find my list of desired locations to live as I prepare for the job market rather small and limiting, precisely because I'm afraid of finding no neighborhoods that I can genuinely enjoy living in, and trying to cultivate these synthetic little urban petting zoos designed to trick plastic-frame-wearing hipters into thinking your town is a mecca of creativity and fun just doesn't cut it.

Here we have a story of a man who was banned from his gym for grunting while lifting weights. The horror! Someone actually exerted themselves during a workout! If they ever pulled this at my gym, I would cancel my membership. Immediately.


Finally, I have lived on pumpkin pie as my Thanksgiving dessert of choice, which has left me ignorant of the sweet potato pie. I'd love to try some sweet potato pie, even though I won't be able to take it on a plane, apparently.