Permanent accounts are on sale, folks, if any of you are interested.

See this post on news for further details. They'll be on sale on the 7th-8th June, so no need to panic just yet.

Misc

After a few minutes of searching for something which was too obvious not to exist, I found musicrename. It's about a page of Ruby which takes a whole pile of mp3s and oggs, renames them according to their ID tags (format tweakable to user's will) and sorts them into directories accordingly. A little temperamental about what it'll accept in the way of tagging, but it seems to do the bit of the job that Prokyon doesn't, so I'm happy.

Apparently Pat Buchanan has called Mark Felt a traitor. I think this says more about him than about Felt.

From this page (found via Gaiman) :

Getting killed because I’m an American, at home or overseas: bad. Spending money and resources to protect me from getting killed: good. Maintaining a strong military, at least until planetary utopia breaks out and there are free Jill Johnston posters for everyone: really good. Making all of that far harder, and increasing my likelihood of getting killed, because some politicians and pundits needed to “look tough”: really, really bad. Likelihood that I’m going to take my cues on “national security” from those politicians and pundits: low.

At times it all seems like some sort of Bizarro World faith-versus-works argument. Liberals wind up being the ones pointing out, endlessly, that national security is provided by actual practices, not just by holding your face right. Meanwhile popinjays like Joe Biden desperately file their chins to razor-sharpness in the probably vain hope that the electorate, having sometimes demonstrated a preference for strutting phonies, will mistake them for one.

Compare and (fail to) contrast with popular British ideas on criminal justice. Someone in the paper yesterday said he thought that Britain has the most vindictive society in Europe apart from Turkey. While hyperbolic, it's got the usual grain of truth. I like the phrase "faith-versus-works argument", but unfortunately I suspect that a fair number of people would buy into the Faith side and to hell with the works. Or, at least, they'd fail to see that their faith fails to guarantee results, or not realise that there was any important difference between intention and outcome. See also interminable arguments on judicial and penal policies with WD, archived by those nice Google people (but only if you don't value your sanity - I argued with him once, but I think I got away with it *twitch*).

A mail's just gone around work asking for some rabbit anti-sheep antibody. I can't quite get my head around the idea of a rabbit with a sheep infection. Maybe if they were very small sheep it would work. Or a very big rabbit.

The BBC's reporting that some historians have found a sketch allegedly made of a German Second World War A-bomb design. It's here. I don't suppose that someone with a little German[1] would care to tell me what the labels say? I've managed to figure the one that says "Plutonium" out already, though, so don't bother with that one.

Also, of course, it says Plutonium when the article implies they were after building a uranium bomb.

It looks a bit sus to me. The first thing that occurs to me is that it was drawn by someone who'd heard of cannon and implosion mechanisms but hadn't been told that they were entirely separate, because it looks to have both.

I don't think I want an epitaph. An unmarked grave, or one marked only by a tree, sounds more worthwhile.

[1] Go on. You know you want to.