The Null Device

2003/8/21

Disgraced right-wing politician and larrikin-wowser hybrid Pauline Hanson will need protection in prison, as the large Aboriginal populations behind bars hadn't forgotten her anti-Aboriginal rhetoric, a Democrat senator has said.

australia bigotry pauline hanson politics prison schadenfreude 0

A study in Wales has apparently found that domestic violence doubles on days of international rugby matches, and goes up eightfold if Wales are beaten by traditional enemy England. Though the Ananova article is light on details and the whole thing sounds like a rehashing of the Superbowl Sunday urban legend, which Snopes says is false. Wonder which it is. (via Found)

domestic violence rugby society sport testosterone wales 0

The Gender Genie is a CGI implementation of the Koppel/Argamon algorithm for determining the sex of the author of a piece of text. The results are mixed; it accurately determined that Graham and Jim are male and that Beth, Beth and Shauna are female, though it also pegs Cos, Grant and Charlie Stross as female. It also thinks most of my blog entries are either female or sexually ambiguous (hmmm); however, my LiveJournal reads as unambiguously male. Odd...

gender language sex 0

It turns out that DJs may not be the rock stars of the new millennium after all; dance music is in steep decline in the UK. Some factors blamed: ravers who got into it during the Acid House Summer of Love/the superclub boom of the 90s getting older (and developing a tolerance to MDMA), the kids of today being into NME Back-To-Basics '70s-Style Rock, and backlash against the cult of the superstar DJ (quite understandable, IMHO). I wonder whether this will affect the content of electronic music magazines; can we expect to see the virtual-analogue synth/groovebox reviews in Future Music displaced by reviews of guitar-performance stompboxes and tutorials on recording live bands?

Meanwhile, a scathing critique of club culture, also in the Graun:

Around the same time the south London superclub The Ministry Of Sound marketed a range of clothing while admitting that anyone who wore those clothes was unlikely to pass the dress code in the club itself. It was as if the DJs and club promoters who "ran" dance music simply assumed that audiences were too befuddled by the drug ecstasy to realise they were being ripped off.
(via Rocknerd)

commercialism dance music dj culture ministry of sound rave 9

The winners in the nerve.com pickup line contest, with the usual ones like "I may not have gotten your virginity, but can I at least have the box it came in?", as well as a few more interesting examples:

He asked, "If you were offered the chance to have one year of perfect bliss, but you would have to forget everything at the end, would you take it?" I hemmed and hawed, asked technical questions. I finally said yes. He leaned in to whisper in my ear: "Well, you've already had your year of perfect bliss." I pricked with curiosity. "You were wonderful." He swore he made that up. I had gotten so into the mind game, it worked. He got the hookup.

And some of the lines put to the test. Can you guess the results?

dating humour pickup lines sex wit 0

Microsoft to lock third-party clients out of MSN Messenger, to protect market share prevent freeloaders from not viewing ads crush the opposition upgrade security and protect you from viruses/terrorists. (After all, everybody knows that software not from Microsoft is a security risk, right?) This will happen from the 15th of October. Unless Gaim manage to not get kicked off (and if this is about protecting MS's ad revenue, that's unlikely), chances are I won't be using MSN after that.

im lock-in microsoft msn 2

A technological solution for the next blackout: glow-in-the-dark lightbulbs. 15 minutes of incandescent light from the filament will charge the bulb so that it glows for the next 24 hours. (via Techdirt)

glow in the dark tech 1