Author: Roy Berman

Taiwan’s pigs grow ever more fearsome

You may have already heard that researchers here in Taiwan have just perfected the technology of genetically modifying pigs to glow in the dark. This is apparently going to be very useful for research, since every scrap of pig material also glows green, and I imagine lets you more easily locate bits that you’ve dropped on the floor.

According to the report, “In daylight the researchers say the pigs’ eyes, teeth and trotters look green. Their skin has a greenish tinge.”

There is no word yet on how bioluminescence will affect the God Pig industry. According to a report last year in the Taipei Times “some farmers even pour metal into their pigs before a contest in order to increase the swine’s weight.” All said, we seen to be well on the way to one-ton partially metallic bioluminescent god pigs. All it takes it one minor lab accident and we’re in the middle of a 1950’s horror movie.

More Kabuki

Meaningless charade

The moribund hearings have been as predictable as a Kabuki drama. Barring a major miscue, Alito’s inscrutability will carry him to the Supreme Court

As predictably as a Kabuki drama, the media is using the metaphor of a kabuki drama to describe boring politics.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the Daniels/Eichwenwald Kabuki dance reflected a conscious effort to avoid invoking the homosexual angle in the story.

Newsbusters refuses to watch gay kabuki.

International dialing

Figuring out exactly how to dial a phone number in one country while in another country (particularly if neither one of them is a country with which you have much telephonic experience) can be a huge pain in the ass.

Just a few minutes ago, while making sure I was telling someone in Japan the correct way to reach my apartment line, I stumbled across this very handy website. It lets you specify a dialing and target location and very conveniently breaks down the entire dialing sequence into whatever international, national, or local dialing prefixes apply.

Windows uptime

I was just wondering how long it had been since I reset my computer (which I tend to do rarely if I can possibly avoid it) and remembered that at some point I had a simple command line utility that would tell you exactly that. After a quick search I found Uptime.exe over on the ancient Windows NT 4.0 server page.

\\MUTANTFROG has been up for: 8 day(s), 11 hour(s), 57 minute(s), 6 second(s)

WordPress 2.0

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.0. It’s still using the same theme (for now) so nothing should look any different on the user end, but the administrator’s interface is radically different, and pretty nifty. I haven’t explored it enough to actually say what practicaly changes there have been, but it should be fun to mess around and see what it can do. If anyone finds any bugs or oddities caused by the upgrade, make sure to email me.

Mahjong

I was playing mahjong last night with some people and decided to look up the proper and complete rules on the internet. There are of course many, many variants of the game in different countries/regions, only some of which seem to be easily findable online in English. I did manage to find a good set of Japanese style rules here, and an explanation of the Taiwanese style points system here.

Supply and demand in isolated Burma

I wouldn’t be surprised if most people reading this Washington Post article didn’t make it to the end. After all, we’re so used to getting a constant stream of news on the wretched conditions of people living in some third world nation that a certain level of fatigue sets in, and economic sanctions against Burma doesn’t have the same zing as the Yellow menace of rising China, the endless Middle Eastern wars, or the delicious scandals unfolding in Washington. But for those who did make it to the end of the article, or those watching this page, there is a paragraph at the end that I would say is quite literally jaw-dropping.

The import of automobiles, for instance, is so tightly restricted by these well-connected businessmen that Burmese say a 15-year-old Japanese sedan might sell for more than 20 times its value elsewhere and the supply of mobile phones is so limited that they can cost more than $2,000.