Back on April 18th I crunched the numbers and determined that at the current posting acceleration rate I should have posted #300 on Friday May 12th. Well, that day has come and gone and in fact I have yet to reach post #250. So yes, the amazing acceleration streak has come to a close. Cynics will believe this to be the "peak" of the blog, when I give up on posting for no traffic. We shall see.
The Japanese have analyzed the Mona Lisa to determine what her voice sounds like. Er, weird. Also silly. They did a similar analysis of Da Vinci and had to make "estimates" due to his beard about the skeletal structure of his face. Does this even work? Have they ever tried doing this with a live person and see how close they can come? Methinks this is just a bogus exercise until they can demonstrate that a slew of people who they only have oil paintings of produce accurate voice reproductions using their technology. (Slashdot.org also weighs in, mostly to trash the timing of the announcement with the Da Vinci Code film coming out)
The Big Picture runs down why not to sign onto "social networking" sites, explaining the security pitfalls and the like. The article also covers Ringo.com's dubious nature, which is of interest to me seeing how I got one of these Ringo "see my new photos" emails. Now you know I'm a sucker for photos of pretty girls, but when it asked for my Hotmail password something clearly didn't seem right. So use a different password, I decided. Well, Ringo.com knew my password wasn't "blah" so I couldn't get past the signup sheet. That didn't matter in the end: just doing that started me on the long road to 50,000 spam emails from Ringo.com -- SpamCop reports on the sad catch-22: companies are spending billions a year to fight spam, and then a bunch of 18 year old girls ruin it all by just giving away their Hotmail passwords and permitting everybody in their addressbook to be victimized.
Bonus links: Contender Ministries highlights 7 of the errors in Brown's novel (which I still haven't read...can't be bothered). An art critic compares Brown's defense to a fiction author using Holocaust-denials as the "thoroughly researched authentic facts" which the story centers around. ReligiousTolerance.org highlights errors on a page-by-page basis, while J.P. Holding extensively retorts many of Brown's claims, particularly when translation comes into play.
