Long-time Law and Order star, Jerry Orbach, has died from prostate cancer at 69. I love that show, and the character was just so dang witty and sarcastic. He’ll be missed.

/me pours a beer on the curb

You know I love statistics/numbers/trivia. Last night in the gym, the UConn football game was on, and it’s got me in the mood for Superbowl XXXIX. Clicking around, reading about some football stuff, led me to a fantastic list of Peyton Manning’s amazing season. He broke the record for most touchdown passes in a season; but read the article. He’s broken all kinds of records in stupendous fashion, and has been an amazing Quarterback his whole career.

"So far this year, Manning has more touchdown passes than the Giants, Ravens, Bears, and Cardinals combined (44). He has more TD passes in 15 games this season than the Giants have in their last 50 games (48). If you split Manning up into two quarterbacks, he would rank third and fourth in touchdown passes among AFC quarterbacks with 25 and 24."

The Torino Impact Hazard Scale was created in 1995 to categorize near-Earth object impact hazards. Until last week, no object had been scored higher than a 1 (out of 10). The asteroid 2004 MN⁴ has been given a 4. NASA is reporting that there is a 1 in 37 (2.7 percent) chance that the 390-meter rock will hit the Earth on Friday 13 April 2029. More at Wikipedia.

Walking every block of Manhattan. Somehow, I’m always captivated by obsessive projects like this. Check out his web page, too.

Dear spammers: I had been perfectly satisfied with allowing you to plop your online gambling and pharmeceutical links in my blog from time to time. Every couple of weeks, I’d take a look at the comments interface in Moveable Type and delete anything that didn’t look like a legit comment. Then you had to go and ruin that by posting 300 spams Christmas Eve.

Now I’ve installed MT Blacklist. It’s got about 2500 spam filters defined, and when I see one sneak through, it reports it to a central server and everyone else who uses MTB gets to know that you’re blog spamming.

I hope you got a lot of click-throughs for those comments, because you won’t be getting many more.

The newest Nintendo Revolution rumor is that the new console will not have a D-pad or buttons on the controllers. Anyone’s obvious first thought is: “touchpad?” A totally dynamic controller would be pretty cool, if it was still comfortable.

Also, Nintendo has confirmed that the console will be shown at E3 2005.

Do not buy a portable breathalyzer and bring it with you on a night on the town. It will be your undoing.

As a birthday gift, I was presented with this lovely message on my Freeipods.com account this morning:

5 of your referrals must sign up and complete one offer. Currently 5 of your friends have joined and successfully completed one offer.

Thanks to Brian, Chris, Manish, Nomad, and Mari for making this possible. Hopefully you guys aren’t suspicious-looking frauds, and they’ll approve my free iPod!

Update: They decided that Chris and Mari, who now live together, were the same "household", and thus cancelled their referrals. I felt really crappy about this yesterday afternoon, but then my parents gave me a 175G SATA drive, and I feel better now.

Honda’s fuel-cell car, the FCX, is now very close to large-scale commercialization. It’s got 272 Nm of torque, which is almost as much as the Subaru WRX. According to the article, the 55% “torque energy efficiency” is double that of a hybrid car and triple that of a gas-only car. I can’t wait for these to hit the US.

When typos go wrong

Plutor’s word of the day: zeugma /zoog'-muh/ n. 1: the use of a word to modify or govern two or more words, usu. in such a manner that it applies to each in a different sense.

Half of me is offended by what the movie I, Robot does to Isaac Asimov's universe. The heart is in the right place -- to a certain extent -- but it messes up some characters and it throws a huge monkey wrench into the pre-Empire timeline. But, I did get a kick out of the references to his stories. I can think of three off the top of my head. (Warning: Spoilers ahead.)

1. Near the beginning of the movie, Dr. Calvin and Detective Spooner are trying to find the "malfunctioning NS-5" in a warehouse of 1000 other non-malfunctioning but otherwise identical NS-5's. In the Little Lost Robot, Calvin is trying to sort a robot with a modified First Law from a group of otherwise identical robots. Her proposal in the movie - interviewing each robot and correlating their responses - is what she first tries in the story. Even more amazing, the model number for the robots in the short story is NS-2.
2. Sonny's dreaming, and the dream itself, are taken almost verbatim from the story Robot Dreams.
3. Viki's interpretation of the three Laws (and thus the very climax of the movie) is very similar to R. Daneel Olivaw's development of a Zeroth Law in the Empire series.

Add to that the very prominent position of Dr. Susan Calvin, Alfred Lanning, and Lawrence Robertson in the movie (not to mention the Three Laws and the title itself), and you have a movie that borrowed pretty heavily from Asimov's work.

Update: Damnit, IMDB's trivia page for I, Robot listed all three of my references.

In the New York Times on Election Day 1996, the crossword puzzle correctly predicted the winner of that day’s presidential election. And the story behind why is absolutely phenomenal. (I only wish it didn’t include the words “tour de force”)

Final 2004 election tally: George Bush, 286 electoral votes; John Kerry, 251 electoral votes; John Edwards, 1 electoral vote?

An anesthesiologist has discovered that allowing children to play Game Boy for a few minutes can be used as a replacement for pre-anesthesia tranquilizers. Imagine playing wireless multiplayer DS with your brother in the waiting room. That would be the best surgery ever.

For those of you who don’t still read Sluggy Freelance on a daily basis, I would recommend putting aside an hour and reading the storyline that just ended last week. It wrapped up at least a couple loose ends, and was quite gripping. Far better than “Kitten 2”, and much easier to follow. You should start at May 19.

Since the Saturday strips are being done by a guest artist as a sorta-parallel story, only the first one is really pertinent to the story. You can skip the rest unless you like mediocre silliness.

Shopping for video games in Osaka, or, why I’m trying to convince M to get a residency in Japan.

I just said “Holy shit”. Aloud. At work. Why? Google just unveiled a new Beta project: Google Suggest. It’ll suggest autocompletions of your search. In realtime. Really goddamn fast. I’m almost beyond words, here.

Half-Life 2. Ravenholm. Hard difficulty. Done in 2:28 [WMV, 44MB]. Amazing. Those gravity gun jumps are great. This is just a small portion of the larger HL2 Done Quick project.

Boston is allowing anyone who got a ticket on December 1, 2, or 3 to pay for it in toys. Toys for Tots, that is. This is the best decision I’ve ever heard, and I imagine the only reason it’s not being done on a larger scale is that the Police Department probably depends on the income to pay its officers.

Too bad, really. I’d bet they see a much higher “payment” rate for those three days.

One of the things that’s a little upsetting about the Half-Life story is that you’re pretty much in the dark about what’s been going on between the two games. And even if you knew that, you’d be missing the big picture story. What’s the G-Man’s motivation? Who the hell is he, anyhow? What’s the relationship between the Combine and Xen? Well, someone’s mixed everything we’ve been told or shown with a little creative speculation, and come up with the Half-Life Saga Story Guide. Amazing.

I’ve imported some ancient plutor.org blog entries from a text file I came across this morning. Now, you can start from the boring beginning!

I talked about self-destructible DVDs before, but I could never analyze its big downfall as well as this MeFi comment.

A cereal restaurant. Fucking brilliant. Goddamnit that’s a good idea.

Check out this video of the guy who created most of the Gnome icons creating a new one. The high-speed version is great and only a minute long.

Somehow, his style (at least the style of this icon) reminds of Chris' drawing.