Please enjoy my 2009 music wrap-up. I'm slacking this year: no mixtape, no micro-reviews. However, it is a list of 40 fantastic albums that I advise you to acquire at your early convenience.

Anniversary of a cosmic blast

The sheer amount energy generated is difficult to comprehend. Although the crust probably shifted by only a centimeter, the incredible density and gravity made that a violent event well beyond anything we mere humans have experienced. The blast of energy surged away from the magnetar, out into the galaxy. In just a fifth of a second, the eruption gave off as much energy as the Sun does in a quarter of a million years.

Oh, and did I mention this magnetar is 50,000 light years away? No? That's 300 quadrillion miles away, about halfway across the freaking Milky Way galaxy itself!

And yet, even at that mind-crushing distance, it fried satellites and physically affected the Earth. It was so bright some satellites actually saw it reflected off the surface of the Moon! I'll note that a supernova, the explosion of an entire star, has a hard time producing any physical effect on the Earth if it's farther away than, say, 100 light years. Even a gamma-ray burst can only do any damage if it's closer than 8000 light years or so.

Bugs Inside: What Happens When the Microbes That Keep Us Healthy Disappear?

The human body has some 10 trillion human cells -- but 10 times that number of microbial cells. So what happens when such an important part of our bodies goes missing?

With rapid changes in sanitation, medicine and lifestyle in the past century, some of these indigenous species are facing decline, displacement and possibly even extinction. In many of the world's larger ecosystems, scientists can predict what might happen when one of the central species is lost, but in the human microbial environment -- which is still largely uncharacterized -- most of these rapid changes are not yet understood.

Meanwhile, each new generation in developed countries comes into the world with fewer of these native populations. "They're actually missing some component of their microbiota that they've evolved to have," Foxman says.

Previously, previously.

Exercise 4-13. Write a function reverse(s) which reverses the string s by turning the mind inside out, converting madness into reality and opening the door to allow the Old Ones to creep forth once more from their sunken crypt beyond time.

Slumming on lolfbmoments.com:

• "Ladies and Gentlemen... my sister is a whore."
• "Werewolf."
• "Thundercats."
• "Sunglasses."

Overtime by Charles Stross.

I almost never actually visit the Facebook web site: I follow it through a feed reader (in my case, NetNewsWire) along with all of my other feeds.

Besides the obvious benefits to this, one great side effect is that you never, ever see the output of applications (e.g., quiz results) or the other useless noise like "so-and-so is now friends with someone else you already know". The only drawback I've found is that you also don't see notifications about photos that your friends have uploaded. (You do see links that they post, however: just not Facebook-hosted photos. It's a bizarre omission.)

Anyway, I just had to explain to someone how to accomplish this feat, which made me realize how completely non-obvious Facebook has made this. Finding these feeds is a complete pain in the ass. They've really gone out of their way to hide the URLs you need to use.

So. You have to subscribe to three or four different feeds.

1. Posts: Find the Posts feed by going to http://www.facebook.com/posted.php. On the upper right of the page is a gray box, and at the bottom of that box is a link entitled "My Friends' Links" with the RSS logo next to it. Copy that URL. Subscribe to it in your feed reader. This is the RSS URL for any links and (external) images that your friends post.

2. Notes: Find the Notes feed by going to http://www.facebook.com/notes.php and repeating the above. This is the RSS URL for things that your friends post via the "Notes" app, which is (I guess) the more blog-like way of posting long things to Facebook.

3. Notifications: Find the Notifications feed by going to http://www.facebook.com/notifications.php and repeating the above. This is the RSS URL for things like "so-and-so commented on your status". You might not care to subscribe to this one because you can get all of these kind of notifications in email.

4. Status Updates: This is the RSS URL for the "What are you doing?" Twitter-like part of Facebook. This is the one you probably care about, and it is trickier, because Facebook no longer links to the feed URL! Nice one guys. You have to construct this URL by editing one of the above URLs. E.g., take the "Notes" URL and change the part of the URL that says "friends_notes" to "friends_status". Keep the parts of the URL before and after that, including the magic numbers at the end.

There. Wasn't that SIMPLE?

Previously: How to use Livejournal with a feed reader.

dnalounge update

DNA Lounge update, wherein the holiday cheer continues apace.

Bug powder causes male bedbugs to stab each other to death with their penises

Male bedbugs will schtup anything, and when they do, their stabby little penises can do great damage to one another. Female bedbugs have some "down there" armor that absorbs the punishing blows of the bedbug's love-spear, but males lack this protection. A pheromone discovered by a Swedish researcher can cause male bedbugs to kill each other with their penises through uncontrolled shagging.

Previous torture phalluses.

Eighth Graders In Oral Plea

A pair of Georgia eighth graders this week copped to public indecency charges after they engaged in oral sex while a substitute teacher was helping other students at the front of the classroom. [...] As part of the plea, sodomy charges against both students were dropped, and a probation violation count leveled against the boy was dismissed. After being held at a youth detention facility, the girl was released to her parents's custody. The boy, however, remains locked up, according to a law enforcement official.

I saw that in the latest PS3 OS update, they added Facebook integration. Now, there's one and exactly one thing that could possibly be useful for, right? You've already thought of it in the time it took you to read that sentence. The one useful thing would be to unify your friends lists, so that your PS3 can automatically know which of your Facebook friends are online without you having to search for and then manually enter all of their Playstaion Network IDs.

Guess what, it doesn't do that. All it does is make it so that the PS3 can spam your Facebook Status every time you buy a game, and every time you upload a trophy. Who would ever, ever want it to do either of these things?

I'll bet a "Social Media Consultant" was involved.

Fortunately the utility belt that was provided for him contained shark repellant.

A civilian passenger in an air force display plane accidentally activated the ejector seat while reaching for something to steady himself during a mid-air manoeuvre. It is thought he activated the ejector seat after lurching forward during an aerobatic manoeuvre and accidentally pulling on the black and yellow emergency handle between his legs.

Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones

Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.

Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes' systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber -- available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet -- to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.

The potential drone vulnerability lies in an unencrypted downlink between the unmanned craft and ground control. The U.S. government has known about the flaw since the U.S. campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn't know how to exploit it, the officials said.

Today, the Air Force is buying hundreds of Reaper drones, a newer model, whose video feeds could be intercepted in much the same way as with the Predators, according to people familiar with the matter. A Reaper costs between $10 million and $12 million each and is faster and better armed than the Predator. General Atomics expects the Air Force to buy as many as 375 Reapers.

Our work here will not be complete until every Wikipedia page contains an "In Anime" sub-section.

• Crucifixion - In Anime.
  
• Asperger syndrome - In Anime.
  
• Previously, previously.
  

Is there a blog that highlights the stupidest Wikipedia events? I subscribe to the RSS feed of the Lamest edit wars article, but I find that insufficient.

Hellfire holidays: Round 2 of the Pervert's Grand Tour.

A creative leap of imagination is needed to picture Covent Garden, now given over to flower markets and Body Shops, as the city's most sordid red light district, where, in the seedy Shakespeare's Head, waiter-pimps would set gentlemen up with ladies like Oyster Moll, who would "open the wicket of love's bear garden to any bold sportsman who has a venturesome mind to give a run to his puppy."

netik

You might be wondering what they did about that.

The answer is absolutely nothing.

John called SFPD, went down to the police station in person and filed a report (case 091-062-114), and after several followup phone calls over the next few weeks was told:

Apparently prosecuting hit-and-run drivers is beneath the notice of our police department, and the piece of shit driver who almost killed us both gets off scott free.

Which brings us to this story I came across yesterday:

Streetsblog: A Troubling Story of SFPD Bias Against Bicycle Riders

And now to the very disconcerting part about the police. As I tried to get information from three SFPD police officers on the scene of the crash, two of them showered me with unadulterated disdain for bicyclists and pedestrians. One officer said she thought bicyclists and pedestrians are always at fault in crashes and that they are stupid for not watching out for drivers. She was very upset with cyclists running red lights. She told me the bicyclist was at fault in this crash without any knowledge that a witness was saying the opposite.

Another officer complained that bicyclists should be ticketed a lot more, then he said that he thought San Francisco bicyclists should all be moved to Treasure Island, where presumably they wouldn't be in the way. [...] When it dawned on him that his bigotry might make it into my story, given the bright pink SFPD press badge dangling around my neck, he made a slightly menacing reference to memorizing the information on my pass.

In a follow-up interview today, Corujo said that when he was being interviewed by the officers they seemed to have a preconceived idea of what happened, and were fixated on confirming whether the woman had lights on her bike.

"It seems like they were trying to bias the story to even out the score or something," said Corujo. "I don't know if they were even listening to the idea that [the driver] had made an illegal turn."