Here is a great parody of Prisoner of Azkaban:

HERMIONE: Moooove closer. Move your body real close, move closer. Till we feel like we’re really making…

RON: Yes, Hermione, but what are you really trying to say?

DRACO: Hi, Weaselby. I thought I’d ruin the moment.

AUDIENCE: *incredulous stares* *Weaselby*?

DRACO: I know. I’m such a dork.

HARRY: *throws snowballs because Cuaron got overexcited about the mudwrestling and had to be taken home for the day*

DRACO: Oh my God, I’m being manhandled by invisible forces! … I knew my Russian fur hat would make me a sexual dynamo. Father was so wrong to advocate tasteful chiffon.

HERMIONE: Ron fancies that barmaid. So tonight she must die.

RON: I feel like I’m missing something here… Aha! I know!

HERMIONE: My love, you do?

RON: Harry! He just sneaked into the pub!

HERMIONE: Men. Can’t live without them. Am too smart for anyone to believe I killed them by accident.

The new Yeti sports game is up. It’s as addictive as the rest with a lot of behaviors to discover. I won’t ruin the surprises. My high is 2550.

Senator Orin Hatch has introduced the INDUCE Act which will make it illegal to induce others to commit copyright infringement. That doesn’t sound so bad does it. Well, here is a fake complaint that could be brought under this act if made into law which would sue Apple for making the iPod, Toshiba for making the hard drives used in iPods and CNet for giving the iPod a positive review. All this can happens since the iPod “induces” people to copy music infringing on copyrights. This is pretty scary.

Cool Beatles Flash.

Very interesting.

Believe it or not, this is a question I’ve been asked before. Many people wonder how key parts of civilized society might continue after a post-apocalyptic Dawn of the Dead / Night of the Comet / Omega Man / Teletubbies Go to Paris scenario. Your question has two possible answers depending on which scenario of zombie conquest you envision.

In Dawn of the Dead, the zombification process doesn’t happen all at once. We can imagine a gradual scenario in which the infrastructure systems controllers plan ahead for shortages of personnel and try to keep the power going as long as possible. Alternatively, zombification could happen fairly quickly – say, over a few hours. I’ll address the second, more dire scenario in detail first, then the first, slightly less alarming one briefly.

How long the power supply would last in the most critical zombie situation depends on two key factors – first, how long a given power plant can operate without human intervention, and second, how long before enough power plants fail to bring down the entire transmission grid. I’ll ignore the side issues of whether the zombies would want to try to run the power plant themselves, or if they would be a union or non-union shop.

…

Focusing on individual plants doesn’t give us the whole story, though. The North American power grid is a classic illustration of a chain being only as strong as its weakest link. As we saw during the blackout of August 2003, a relatively minor event or series of events can, under the right circumstances, bring down large portions of the whole system. During the August blackout, despite massive non-zombified human intervention, enough parts of the system failed to result in the loss of more than 265 power plants and 508 generating units within a few hours. As bad as the blackout was, without human intervention to shut down plants safely, balance load, transfer power to different lines, and disconnect salvageable chunks of the system from those that had totally collapsed, it could have been much worse. Quick intervention allowed isolated “islands” of power to remain in service – one large island in western New York supplied nearly 6,000 megawatts and was used to restart the power grid days later. But without humans working to isolate it, that island would not have been formed in the first place.

Bottom line? My guess is that within 4-6 hours there would be scattered blackouts and brownouts in numerous areas, within 12 hours much of the system would be unstable, and within 24 hours most portions of the United States and Canada, aside from a rare island of service in a rural area near a hydroelectric source, would be without power. Some installations served by wind farms and solar might continue, but they would be very small. By the end of a week, I’d be surprised if more than a few abandoned sites were still supplying power

Two great weeks of PvP comics about City of Heroes. He definitely nailed it.

Take the test. How well did you do? I got 10 out of 10 – but I really had to think about one.

Here’s Bruce Sterling’s Wired column on a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists “that the Bush administration has suppressed or distorted the scientific analyses of federal agencies to bring these results in line with administration policy”, a the White House reaction. After some probing into politics early in the life of this blog I’ve really managed to avoid it, but come on, even science is getting perverted. The guy has got to go.

Cool Flash animation of Soundwave, my favorite Transformer.

From the Slate article:

Dan Harrington dropped the poker face as he shuffled out of the 35th World Series of Poker last Friday. Forget that the pasty, 58-year-old, Boston-raised pro had just won $1.5 million by finishing fourth in the world’s premier Texas Hold ‘Em tournament. The former World Series champion, with his unbent green Red Sox cap pulled low and mouth turned down, looked like someone had just killed his dog. The truth was even worse: Harrington, the last remaining professional poker player in the tournament, had been outplayed by a 23-year-old college student.

…

Most of the newcomers were young—four of the nine players at the final table were under 30. Two even honed their card-playing skills by mastering the consummately nerdy game Magic: The Gathering.

Cool! I’ve been watching the poker on TV and I’m oddly fixated by it. It seems like something I should be good at. But I downloaded a Palm poker game and went broke over and over again – but I still want to play for real.

it’s difficult to follow all of the article. Here’s a scary quote:

…the Federal Reserve has confirmed our Stock Market Crash forecast by raising the Money Supply (M-3) by crisis proportions, up another 46.8 billion this past week. What awful calamity do they see? Something is up. This is unprecedented, unheard-of pre-catastrophe M-3 expansion. M-3 is up an amount that we’ve never seen before without a crisis – $155 billion over the past 4 weeks, a $2.0 trillion annualized pace, a 22.2 percent annualized rate of growth!!! There must be a crisis of historic proportions coming, and the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States is making sure that there is enough liquidity in place to protect our nation’s fragile financial system. The amazing thing is, the Fed’s actions mean they know what is about to happen. They are aware of a terrible, horrific imminent event. What could it be?

Here’s a very extensive but easy to complete geet test. How did you do?

My score is 40.63% – Major Geek.