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Link Dump
Various links for your enjoyment:

• The Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique: Like the Boy Scouts, but for Scientists. Aside from the goofy name, they've got an ingenious and hilarious list of badges, including: The "my degree inadvertantly makes me competent in fixing household appliances" badge, The "I've touched human internal organs with my own hands" badge, The "has frozen stuff just to see what happens" badge (oh come one, who hasn't done that?), The "I bet I know more computer languages than you, and I'm not afraid to talk about it" badge (well, I used to know a bunch), and of course, The "dodger of monkey shit" badge. ("One of our self explanatory badges."). Sadly, I qualify for less of these than I'd like. Of course, I'm not a scientist, but still. I'm borderline on many though (for instance, the "I blog about science" badge requires that I maintain a blog where at least a quarter of the material is about science - I certainly blog about technology a lot, but explicitely science? Debateable, I guess.)
• Dr. Ashen and Gizmodo Reviews The Gamespower 50 (YouTube): It's a funny review of a crappy portable video game device, just watch it. The games on this thing are so bad (there's actually one called "Grass Cutter," which is exactly what you think it is - a game where you mow the lawn).
• Count Chocula Vandalism on Wikipedia: Some guy came up with an absurdly comprehensive history for Count Chocula:

  Ernst Choukula was born the third child to Estonian landowers in the late autumn of 1873. His parents, Ivan and Brushken Choukula, were well-established traders of Baltic grain who-- by the early twentieth century--had established a monopolistic hold on the export markets of Lithuania, Latvia and southern Finland. A clever child, Ernst advanced quickly through secondary schooling and, at the age of nineteen, was managing one of six Talinn-area farms, along with his father, and older brother, Grinsh. By twenty-four, he appeared in his first "barrelled cereal" endorsement, as the Choukula family debuted "Ernst Choukula's Golden Wheat Muesli", a packaged mix that was intended for horses, mules, and the hospital ridden. Belarussian immigrant silo-tenders started cutting the product with vodka, creating a crude mush-paste they called "gruhll" or "gruell," and would eat the concoction each morning before work.

  It goes on like that for a while. That particular edit has been removed from the real article, but there appears to actually be quite a debate on the Talk page as to whether or not to mention it in the official article.
• The Psychology of Security by Bruce Schneier: A long draft of an article that delves into psychological reasons we make the security tradeoffs that we do. Interesting stuff.
• The Sagan Diary by John Scalzi (Audio Book): I've become a great fan of Scalzi's fiction, and his latest work is available here as audio (a book is available too, but it appears to be a limited run). Since the book is essentially the diary of a woman, he got various female authors and friends to read a chapter. This actually makes for somewhat uneven listening, as some are great and others aren't as great. Now that I think about it, this book probably won't make sense if you haven't read Old Man's War and/or The Ghost Brigades. However, they're both wonderful books of the military scifi school (maybe I'll probably write a blog post or two about them in the near future).

This post is part of the Kaedrin Weblog. It's been categorized under Arts & Letters , Computers & Internet , Science & Technology , Security & Intelligence , Video Games and was originally published in February 2007.

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I love wiki vandals.
Sort of.

Once, I looked up Jupiter, just to read about it, and there was this crazy section about "Life on Jupiter" that talked about floating jelly-fish creatures that hunted the upper regions of the atmosphere, or something like that. It was pretty effing weird.

I think the Count Chockula incident is an interesting one, because while it was out there, it got a lot of attention (kottke.org apparently linked it, which meant it spread pretty darn far throughout the blogosphere) and there's now a debate as to whether or not it should be mentioned in the actual entry (i.e. this article was famously vandalized with a fictional history of Ernst Choukula, or something similar.)

I haven't memorized all the wiki vandalism (yours sounds pretty funny too), but I can't think of one that attained such popularity our of such a silly idea (there was the Stegenthaller(sp?) bio, but that was much more serious).

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Excerpt: And now for something you'll really like: WWII Squadron Patches. H/T Tom McMahon Badges? We don't need no stinking badges gringo. Order of the Science Scouts of Examplary Repute and Above Average Physique. The title says it all. H/T Mark...
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Tracked: March 9, 2007 12:50 PM

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