Hey Kids!

Welcome to CryptoKids, the NSA's children's website!

Don't forget to send those notes about Mommy and Daddy and their funny talkin' friends!

Merry Dies Natalis Solis Invicti

And to spread the cheer, check out the songs that Jesus' General has assembled to hearten the defenders in the War Against Christmas. My favorite is "Let's Put Christ Back in Christmas." How could one not be enchanted by

Jesus the long-haired savior
Had a very shiny glow
And if you ever saw it
You would call it a halo.

Circadian Rhythms in the Arctic

A little off the usual topics, but...

Arctic reindeer appear to turn off their internal circadian clocks. An interesting adaptation summarized here. (Ignore the first third which is a lame joke.)

Oulipo Compendium

Stephen Frug has a short review of the new Oulipo Compendium with lots of links to other Oulipo-related matters. The Compendium is distributed in the U.S. by Make Now Press—no need to order it from the UK.

Constraints on MadInkBeard

A sub-blog devoted to constrained writing, part of a larger site. Good, but partial, bibliography.

Jon Stewart Ripped O'Reilly

...a new one over the "War on Christmas" nonsense. Watch here if you missed it last night (probably not work appropriate).

Cthulhu Walks the Earth

"That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die."

And if you don't know who Cthulhu is, then you clearly didn't properly mispend your youth reading Lovecraft.

The Uncanny Valley

The geography (of a sort) of how people respond to human-like robots. More of the story here along with links to the International Robot Exhibition.

The War Against Christmas

We've been there before:

"And it has become pretty general. Last Christmas most people had a hard time finding Christmas cards that indicated in any way that Christmas commemorated Someone's Birth. Easter they will have the same difficulty in finding Easter cards that contain any suggestion that Easter commemorates a certain event. There will be rabbits and eggs and spring flowers, but a hint of the Resurrection will be hard to find. Now, all this begins with the designers of the cards."

Not Bill O'Reilly, but Henry Ford in his 1921 anti-Semitic tract, The International Jew. Eighty-four years later, and its still the same hysterical rhetoric. And the same "Christian" bigots screaming about some dangerous "minority." More at Newshounds and the very smart Orcinus run by Dave Neiwert.