Blag o' dkam

The BBC ( among others) is reporting that the head of the Catholic Church in Mozambique, reportedly widely respected throughout the country, believes that condoms not only don’t work as a method to stop transmission of AIDS, but are actually infected with the virus as part of a plot by European manufactures to destroy Africa. Abstinence for the unmarried, and fidelity for the married is the only way to stop the infection, according to the country’s head of the Catholic Church.

The BBC’s Jose Tembe in the capital, Maputo, says it is estimated that 16.2% of Mozambique’s 19m inhabitants are HIV positive.
About 500 people are infected every day.

At what point can opinions like this be classified as genocide? The Catholic church needs to accept part of the responsibility for the spread of this disease in countries where it has poisoned public perception of safe sex with its ludicrous propaganda.

So cool. Using genetic algorithms to design oscillating circuits inadvertently creates radio.
Also, Big Explosions are great.

LOLTheist: Blasphemy is Teh Funneh.

What a joke.

Couple of small updates to Bookie, the most interesting of which was to filter the “Recent Searches” list to exclude filthy words. Timo was both the cause of the problem and suggested the solution. Thanks. I think

Here’s how it used to look:

( Note: It’s searching the book prices as they maintain an “updated at” value )

Price.find(:all).sort_by {|p| p.updated_at }.reverse.collect {|p| p.book}.uniq.compact.slice(0..14)

To filter out books with bad words in their title, I changed it to this:

Price.find(:all).sort_by {|p| p.updated_at }.reverse.collect {|p| p.book}.uniq.delete_if { |b| b.title =~ / shit| piss| cunt/i }.compact.slice(0..14)

Adding the following will delete the Books containing rude words:

.delete_if { |b| b.title =~ / shit| piss| cunt/i }

How sweet is that? You can practically read it like a sentence.

So, I wrote a website to compare the prices of books sold in Australia, with the prices on Amazon.com. It took me a while to build and I’ve been quietly telling my friends about it. It’s here. I recently bought 6 books on Amazon. One of the books, I didn’t check on Bookie. You guessed it, it turns out it would have been cheaper to walk into Readings, Collins, Angus & Robertson or Dymocks and buy it here. The name of the book?

Crimes against Logic

Looks like Google has a new feature. Don’t think it’s quite finished yet, but it looks interesting.

From Core Econ.

Found some links via Rob & Ben’s Delicious links on clever image scaling techniques. Sounded boring until I watched the video:

If you’re so inclined you can check out the PDF explaining it more technically.

Insomnia and Action Movies

And yes, we’re home from our honeymoon. I’ll probably write a “We’re home from our honeymoon” post real soon now.