brainwagon

Volcanic unrest, that is. It appears that Mount St. Helens is rumbling a bit, enough so that scientists have posted a warning of volcanic unrest.

Seismic activity at Mount St. Helens has changed significantly during the past 24 hours and the changes make us believe that there is an increased likelihood of a hazardous event, which warrants release of this Notice of Volcanic Unrest. The swarm of very small, shallow earthquakes (less than Magnitude 1) that began on the morning of 23 September peaked about mid-day on 24 September and slowly declined through yesterday morning. However, since then the character of the swarm has changed to include more than ten larger earthquakes (Magnitude 2-2.8), the most in a 24-hr period since the eruption of October 1986. In addition, some of the earthquakes are of a type that suggests the involvement of pressurized fluids (water and steam) or perhaps magma. The events are still occurring at shallow depths (less than one mile) below the lava dome that formed in the crater between 1980 and 1986.

Shake, rattle and roll.

I remember observing the eruption from the relatively safe area around Portland, but we still got inches of ash on the ground. Quite a mess. Let’s hope for a more mild show.

Somebody had an idea that I had a long time ago: to use evolutionary techniques to evolve a better keyboard layout that QWERTY or even Dvorak. I sense a certain logic of design in the Dvorak that seems absent in the best of his evolved designs, but the evolved designs look pretty good overall.

Wherein your host apologizes for his inept speech habits, reviews the Star Wars trilogy DVD collection, yaps a bit about graphics hardware and Moore’s law, and looks forward to Shaun of the Dead.

Cory Doctorow over at boingboing drew my attention to the classic Hand Shadows by Henry Bursill. Does your kid want a new Playstation 2 to keep himself amused? Hand him this book instead.

Quad-City Times Newspaper Online reports that a local man who wished to remain anonymous found that the recently uncovered bicycle lock vulnerablities apply just as strongly to the gun safe that he uses to keep his kids away from firearms.

Yeow.

Wherein your noble guide to all things brainwagon rants about taxes to support the music industry, on copyrights and patents, elucidates Tom Duff’s musings about Zipf’s Law, and a brief operatic interlude.

Some day, um, you know, I’ll, um, stop, um, sounding, um, you know, stupid.

Oh, good, Lord.

Gizmodo : The Amazing Breast Enhancing Ring Tone

Is there even one person this stupid?

The book Smalltalk-80: BIts of History, Words of Advice is now available for free download as a PDF file. Cool!

Got this off the Blogdigger WMV feeds: 99: Boots of Escaping can’t compare to Boots of Striding and Leaping, imho…

I’ve got the boots of escaping, I’ve got the boots of escaping!

Direct link to the WMV file

Wherein your noble host explains about ipodder, ponders the demographics of weblogging, gives his brief thumbs up for Doom3, hints about betta fish, and endures a thunderstorm, all for your amusement.

Dave Slusher was musing about a peculiar statistic of his audio blogging experiments: all the commentors appear to be male. That set me to wondering what the statistics of your average blogger was. Luckily, Livejournal maintains statistics that I found rather interesting.

Despite Dave’s experience, on LiveJournal only one in three bloggers who chose to identify their sex claimed to be males: women outnumber men 2 to 1. 98% of them use free accounts. The age distribution is heavily skewed towards teenagers. Only 1.1% of them are over age 40 (like myself). The most popular age for bloggers is eighteen.

This explains a great deal about the popularity of my blog.

Free Reads has a collection of short fiction read by their author Jim Kelly. More food for the insatiable ipod!

My latest audioblog which consists of musings about the role of weblogs and audioblogs, my best baseball story, my experience with my new creative writing course and a song. Inexplicably, there appear to be a number of short drop outs which have never troubled me before: I’ll try to figure out why they appeared.

My email server has been up for just four days, and is mentioned only in a single post on my weblog. Today I received the first of what I suspect will be many spam emails. Their product?

Advancement of your business by direct e-mail marketing.
We offer e-mail mass mailing to any country.

In other words, spam. What a surprise.

Try reading this chilling report of one reporters experience during the RNC: 2004 Republican National Convention in NYC.

Maybe we should start spelling Amerika with a K.