Laurabelle’s Blog

Archie McPhee's Nerd Quiz is the best web quiz I've ever taken, period. Your score is 640. Your rating is 137.05%. Additional Scoring Information: You got an extra 400 points because you are actually running Linux right now. Your environment is: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050911 Firefox/1.0.6 (Debian package 1.0.6-5) But, you already knew that. According to [...]

Someone with too much time on his hands has created a pen name generator. Since the site is in French, here's a (probably slightly inaccurate) translation: As promised, here is a little program that will generate anagrams of your name. The difficulty was in guaranteeing that the first part of the pseudonym would always be a [...]

Wow, some people take Harry Potter way too seriously. (On the other hand, I like the use of Harry Potter to illustrate problems related to trust, since it may help to put abstract concepts into terms more people can understand.)
Personally, it doesn’t surprise me that Rowling’s universe isn’t consistent. She uses magic as a gimmick [...]

Popgadget is my new favorite tech site. It's about new tech gadgets, with a female twist. Recent posts include air mattresses for pregnant women (featuring an adjustable dent), a new online furniture outlet, and an man-shaped ironing board. Popgadget is a great source for new and potentially very useful technology.

I've found a web quiz whose (thoroughly unscientific) result I actually agree with. ILUG (Mensch): The I LUG is that rarest of underlings: the one whom you can trust to understand what you're telling them and then rely on to get the job done. In any organisation, these are the people who actually do the work. [...]

No, I never will grow up. Candybar Doll Maker! It's even more fun than South Park. Do I look like a librarian? Careful how you answer; that tiger looks friendly, but he's got lots of teeth. (Link via LibrarianInBlack.)

Thank you to Jonathon Delacour for enlightening me with regard to the phenomenon of the heavy metal umlaut and also for the marvelous phrase: a scholarly attention to detail applied to an arcane or trivial aspect of everyday life. Of course, that's usually where scholarly attention gets applied, isn't it? What's trivial to one person is [...]

I knew there was a reason I read Neil Gaiman. That's right, I said, and bit the bullet. We were having The Conversation. You were named after a drag queen in a Lou Reed song.

My tagline: Making it up as I go along. Now with extra librarian! My tagline run through Babelfish ten times: The member, as I go to the length. Fullfilled with the additional librarian becomes! Ahhh, the wonders of modern technology!

I can't really say much about this that hasn't already been said here. Halfway through the documentary/drama What the #$*! Do We Know!?, the key question shifts from the scientific (How does our knowledge of quantum physics redefine what it means to exist?) to the self-help (How can I use this knowledge of quantum physics to [...]