Tenser, said the Tensor

Who Would Win?

I'm going to be away for a couple of days, but I'd like to leave you with a question to discuss while I'm gone:

Who would win in a fight, Time Cube or Ninjas?

Have at it—and please, no gouging, biting, fish hooking, or groin strikes.

Hygiene Posters

Check out this collection of early 20th century hygiene posters, searchable by category and date, at the University of Minnesota.  The earlier ones are generally funnier than the later ones, I think, because of the odd mixture of frankness and circumspection.  Some favorites:

• Weirdly sex-positive: "What Sex Brings to the Girl" ("It is the sex or creative impulse which inspires her warmth of affection, her intensity of purpose, her desire to devote herself to the welfare of humanity.")
• But don't forget abstinence: "Beware of Chance Acquaintances"  ("'Pick-up' acquaintances often take girls autoriding, to cafès, and to theatres with the intention of leading them into sex relations.  Disease or child-birth may follow."  Or the disease of child-birth!)
• The importance of proper dance posture: "Danger in Familiarities" ("Conventions are the fences society has built to protect you and the race."  The race?)
• Avoiding those omnipresent STDs: "VENEREAL DISEASE COVERS THE EARTH" (Say...she's kinda hot.  What are they advertising again?)

(via Incoming Signals)

Oldest Domains

A blast from the past: the 100 oldest currently registered .com domains [via ChasingDaisy].  There's a lot of concentrated geek history in that list.  (Kesmai is still around?)

Google Suggest

Check out Google Suggest: it tries to complete your search string for you while you type (try "tenser "—note the space).  I'm not sure how useful autocomplete will be as search engine feature, but it's fun to play around with because it shows you the number of hits for all of the suggestions without you having to search for them individually.  It's a neat little piece of work, especially if you consider the network traffic that must be going on under the covers to keep things up to date while you type.  (hat tip: Sotho)

Word DOC to PDF

Because my thesis has been approaching completion, I've been thinking about putting it up on the web.  The standard format for academic articles seems to be Adobe's PDF (Portable Document Format), but my thesis, along with most of the other papers I've written, are in Microsoft Word's DOC format.  I figured there'd be a simple, free way to convert from DOC to PDF, but that turns out not to be the case.  However, after a bit of research, I figured out a way to do clean conversions from DOC to PDF using only free software.  Below, I describe the steps necessary to get this working on a Windows XP machine.

Axis?

Over at OxBlog, David Adesnik responds to a reference by Fred Barnes to "the Washington-New York-Boston axis", saying:

First of all, who let Boston into our axis? (The axis of yuppie?) There may be a Bos-NY-Wash corridor thanks to Amtrak, but there is no axis.

I suspect that David hasn't read his William Gibson.

1920 x 1200 Wallpapers

Recently, my venerable Gateway 2000 (!) 21-inch monitor began to misbehave slightly, and I decided that was a good excuse to upgrade. After researching and dithering for months, I eventually bought one of these, and it is, in a nutshell, sweet. I've even been using the 90-degree pivot feature, which I hadn't expected to actually be useful. The only problem is that such a nice monitor calls for a really pretty desktop background, and most of the free wallpaper sites out on the web don't have anything bigger than 1600 x 1200. I need 1920 x 1200!

Panther Wrestling

Today, as a part of a research project I'm involved in, I was assigned some audio and video conversion tasks. In particular, a couple of months ago we made about four hours of recordings of people making odd speech-like sounds, and I have to transfer those from DAT tapes into audio data files. Fortunately, there's a new G5 Mac running Panther dedicated to the project, so the conversion was a snap.

Or so you'd think.

Spamicide

After trying various ways to cull out email spam, I recently hit on a very simple and effective method of detecting it. I haven't seen this method mentioned anywhere before, but I can't be the first person to think of it, so I'm not going to claim to have invented it. It's a little too aggressive, marking some legitimate email as spam, but since I've been using it (several months), it has successfully marked every piece of spam as spam.

Gmail, baby!

Thanks to Ryan over at The Audhumlan Conspiracy and to Blinger over at, er, Blinger, I'm now the proud owner of a Gmail address. (Two addresses, actually: "thetensor" for this blog and another with my real name.) Woo-hoo! Now I'm in with the in-crowd!