Marcellus Wallace poster

/Film:

The Oatmeal has created this helpful checklist so that you know what Marcellus Wallace looks like.

The worst job of the 19th Century: nipple pinchers vs. anal tobacco blowers vs. tongue pullers in reviving the dead

Boing Boing:

“John Ptak, a dealer in rare science books, writes about all the different ways that people in days of yore used to make sure dead people really were dead.

Perhaps the most spectacularly extension of the nipple-pincher was the tongue-pulling idea of Dr. J.-V. Laborde (1830-1903), a research physician with wide credentials, who reasoned that a continued regimen of advanced and strenuous pulling of a patient’s tongue would over time bring them back to life if alive. This is what leads us to the point of this post: Laborde established a mortuary, and in this mortuary, where the dead were waiting to die, he employed a man whose job it was to pull the tongues of these bodies. In the misty picture of all of this that is painted in my mind’s eye, the fellow working his way from body to body pulling their tongues with a heavy pincer seems far worse than nipple squeezing or even being an anal smoke blower, though to choose between the three in a twisted Purgatorial mandate would be hard to so. Although the nipple pincher wasn’t replaced by anything mechanical, the smoke blower was (by a powerful bellows), and so was our friend the tongue puller, who after complaining of the boredom of his task was pushed aside by an electrical device. I am loathe to report that I cannot find a picture of the machine.”

The Worst Job of the 19th Century? Tongue-Pullers, Nipple-Pinchers & Anal Tobacco Blowers Try to Revive the Dead.

Super-Social Networking: Superhero Facebook Status Updates

Oh my god I’m rolling over here…

Comics Alliance: “These days, everyone in the world seems to be on Facebook, including our bosses, parents, and the people we hated in high school. So what would it be like if superheroes like Batman, Spider-Man and Superman were updating their statuses, taking quizzes, and commenting on each other’s profiles like the rest of us? Chris Sims of the Invincible Super-Blog takes a closer look into the Facebook feeds of our favorite heroes.”

Disturbing Google suggestion

/Film:

“It’s official: Twilight has doomed us all.”  [TDW]

Google Sync Updates with Push Gmail Support

Lifehacker:

“Google Sync, released earlier this year, keeps your calendar and contacts synced between your mobile phone and Google account. Now they’ve added that great, final bit of ultimate sync support by pushing Gmail to your phone.

If you’re sporting an iPhone/iPod Touch, Windows Mobile phone, or Nokia S60 phone, you can now set up Google Sync to actively push your email to your device, ensuring you’re never stuck waiting around for an update to see what’s new or wondering if various work-around alternatives will follow through. From the Official Google Mobile Blog:

Sync works with your phone’s native email application, so there’s no additional software needed. Only interested in syncing your Gmail, but not your Calendar? Google Sync allows you to sync just your Contacts, Calendar, or Gmail, or any combination of the three.

Check out the full post at the link below to see how to get Google Sync if you’re not already a user and how to enable Gmail syncing if you’ve already got a Google Sync account.”

Google Sync: Now with push Gmail support

Thief Nabbed After Forgetting To Log Out Of Facebook During Robbery

Gizmodo:

“Joining our ever-increasing pantheon of stupid criminals, we have one 19-year old Pennsylvania man who was nabbed after forgetting to log out of his Facebook account at the scene of the crime.

Why the hell would someone stop to check Facebook on a computer owned by the person you’re robbing? Facebook addiction is a serious problem folks. Mark my words—its only a matter of time before some idiot felon gives a play-by-play tweet session of a crime in progress. Hell, it’s probably already happened.” [Mashable]

Pigeons faster than DSL

Boing Boing:

“A South African IT company got so fed up with the national telco’s notoriously poor Internet service that they decided to set up a race that pitted the telco’s network against a carrier pigeon. The pigeon won.

Now, this is very funny, but I think that over pigeon-traversable distances in which latency isn’t an issue, the pigeon will always win. A random web-page promises that a carrier pigeon can bear loads of up to 1.7 oz or about 48.2g. My postal scale says that my 64GB SD card weighs 2.05g. Which means that a pigeon could carry 23 64GB SD cards, or 1.472 terabytes. In the Telkom race, the pigeon traversed 40km in 2 hours.

I think that even the best commercial ISP in the world would be hard-pressed to deliver 736GB/h between two customer DSL end-points. Likewise, I think that even the greatest pigeon on the world would be hard-pressed to deliver even one bit of information from Cape Town to New York.

A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country’s biggest web firm, Telkom.

Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles – in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data.

Telkom said it was not responsible for the firm’s slow internet speeds.

The idea for the race came when a member of staff at Unlimited IT complained about the speed of data transmission on ADSL.

He said it would be faster by carrier pigeon.

“We renown ourselves on being innovative, so we decided to test that statement,” Unlimited’s Kevin Rolfe told the Beeld newspaper. “

SA pigeon ‘faster than broadband’ (via Engadget)

Music downloading penalties are harsher than arson, theft, or starting a dogfighting ring

Boing Boing:

“Jesus Diaz looks at the $1.92m fine Jammie Thomas faces for downloading 1700 songs and compares it to the penalties for other crimes in America (valuing jail time at $50,233, the median US household income in 2007):

• Child abduction: Fine of $25,000 and up to three years in prison, which can be accounted as $50,233 per year (that was the median household income in 2007, probably down because of the economic crisis). Total: $175,699.

• Steal the CDs: A total of $275,000, $52,500 fine for the CDs.

• Steal a lawnmower from your neighbour: A total of $375,000.

• Burn someone’s house while playing The Doors: Another $375,000.

• Stalk a Gizmodo editor (yes, you know who you are): A Class 4 felony that will result in just $175,000.

• Start a dogfighting ring: $50,000.

• Murder someone on the second degree, a Class 1 felony: $778,495, which accounts for a $25,000 fine and four to 15 years in prison.”

Second Degree Murder and Six Other Crimes Cheaper than Pirating Music (via O’Reilly Radar)

Microsoft Poland Photoshops Black Guy To White One

Slashdot:

“If you look at Microsoft’s Poland business solutions Web site, you will probably not notice anything odd about the main picture. However, when you compare it with the original English version, you can see that someone decided that showing black people in Poland is probably not going to be convincing to business. They just Photoshopped the head of a white guy in for the black one, in an amateurish way, leaving his hand unchanged. (Here’s a mirror in case something should happen to the original.)”

We noted a few months back that the city of Toronto had done something similar.

How to Fix Annoying YouTube Jumpiness in Firefox

Lifehacker:

“Ever notice an annoying, persistent lag every ten seconds or so when you’re watching a YouTube (or other) video in Firefox? Reader Bernard Sandberg has, and he’s written in with a smart about:config that solves the problem for him.

Although Bernard’s talking specifically about YouTube, this tweak should help fix any similar jumpiness in Firefox.

Many users, myself included, visit YouTube on an almost daily basis. Ever since Firefox version 2.0 implemented the session restore function, when you are watching a video on YouTube (perhaps on other video sites as well, I haven’t really tested that), you may notice a tiny freeze-up of the video every 10 seconds or so. This happens because the session restore is by default set to save all open tabs every 10 seconds. This is especially noticeable if you happen to have a lot of tabs open at once.

The quick fix for this problem, at least for my own sake, is to increase the time between each of the saves performed by session restore. By opening about:config in your Firefox address bar, then typing browser.sessionstore.interval in the filter box, you’ll see a value of 10000, which is in milliseconds. (Meaning your session is saved every 10 seconds.) I changed this to 300000, or every 5 minutes, as I don’t have the urgent need for tab restoration. If you feel like being more on the safe side, try increasing it to something a bit lower, say 120000, or every 2 minutes.

We did a bit of research, and it looks like Bernard’s not alone with his solution. I’ve experienced this problem plenty in Firefox, so it’s great to see a relatively simple solution, even if it does mean sacrificing a bit in the way of up-to-the-minute session saving. If you give it a try, let’s hear if it does the trick for you in the comments (assuming you’ve experienced this problem in the first place).”