Habanerocouscous

Metabrainz is the charity that oversees Musicbrainz, a free/open music metadata service that has gained in popularity since Gracenote took all the audio metadata its users keyed in by hand and enclosed it, denying all but the top bidders access to it. Musicbrainz is free to use, but has a premium, higher-availability service for commercial operators, like Amazon.

For three years now, Metabrainz has been chasing an unpaid invoice at Amazon. Metabrainz is a tiny, charitable nonprofit that relies on grants and donations for the majority of its operating capital, but commercial operators are also key to its survival. And Musicbrainz is an integral part of the plumbing of the Internet at this point, a powerful check against one player achieving dominance through a chokehold on a key resource.

So Metabrainz sent Amazon Headquarters a birthday cake, celebrating the third birthday of good ol' invoice #144. As a volunteer board member for the charity, I'd mightily appreciate it if someone at Amazon would take the time to nudge this invoice through the system.

We just delivered this to @amazon HQ in honor of a 3 year overdue invoice. Can we please get this mess fixed? --ruaok

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happy turkey day!

Josh Morgan wouldn't stop for interview. "Coach said I can't talk. Coach said I can't play football and I can't talk."

— Mike Jones (@MikeJonesWaPo) November 17, 2013

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In the final minutes of Friday night's win over Columbia, the Michigan State student section provided a new counter to the ball-controlling, time-eating Princeton offense: chant a phony countdown that forces a shot-clock violation.

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Oh, Jason Snelling.

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Yes, Halloween was almost two weeks ago, but Leslie Barrett's strong Halloween costume skills must be recognized.

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The regulatory system we have in the US for selling herbal supplements is screwed up. I've thought so for many years, and we're not the only country that fits that description, either. The system is screwed up in so many important ways that it's hard to know where to start, but how about back at the very basics - quality control?

Try this paper from BMC Medicine out (open access) and see what you think. The authors, from the DNA barcoding initiative at Guelph, tested 44 different brands of various herbal supplements, purchased in both the US and Canada. They found ridiculous levels of contamination. In fact, contamination is not the right word: one-third of the samples had no detectable amounts of the herb on the label. Instead, there were invasive weeds, ornamental plants from China, ground rice, soybeans, what have you. 10 of the 12 companies whose products were tested had at least one in this lovely category; 4 of them had nothing but.

This brings up several interesting questions: for one, how come this garbage continues to sell? Could it be that many of these preparations are of no benefit other than the placebo effect, which means that lawnmower scrapings will indeed work just as well? Second, who's ripping off whom? I would assume that some of these companies are buying from middlemen and repackaging, in which case, they're getting hosed (and passing the hosing along to you!) Doesn't anyone have even a passing interest in seeing if they've been sold the right material, or do they just not care, since it sells anyway?

When drug companies sell products of poor quality, the roof should come down on them, and I'm glad when it does. But these sleazeballs - is there even a roof to bring down? Now, I realize that some people will look at my background, and say, sure, this is someone who works in the pharma industry, of course he's going to put down these safe, natural, effective herbal medicines. Why, those would put his kind out of business if people just realized how wonderful they were! But I'm not denying that some herbal preparations can be used as medicines. If they can, though, they should have to prove it (the way we do in the drug industry), and they should have to actually sell what it says on the label, the way we do. Selling people a bunch of ditch clippings from a Chengdu compost pile is not acceptable, and if you're a big proponent of herbal remedies, you should be even more upset about this crap than I am.

More: Here's the New York Times on this story.

Somebody stole Guy Fieri's car and then (allegedly) attempted to murder someone. Guy had to testify in court. Someone else had to draw a picture of it. And now the horror of murder (and the lesser horror of auto theft) has been mitigated ever so slightly, by the most wonderful illustration of all time.

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The beers! The paunches! The ridiculous facial-hair arrangements! It's the Great American Beer Festival, brought to you by Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. Personal favorite: "Besides craft brewing, how long have you been pursuing Moby-Dick?"

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That's right, reader Erik went on StubHub today and purchased a ticket to Game 1 of the World Series at Fenway Park for $6. The seat, located in right field box 97, was listed at $3.00. Presumably the seller screwed up (at the very least) the decimal placement on the listing because the cheapest ticket in that section is now listed at $759.00.

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In 1985, Reds catcher Johnny Bench made a series of ads for Kool-Aid that masqueraded as mini-lectures on how to play baseball. Since we're on the Kool-Aid beat today, we thought we'd bring you a few bloopers from the production of those spots.

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This animated gif of a chain-making machine is mesmerizing.

(Via Rafael R.)

Reader Kevin sends along this photo from, of all places, a pumpkin festival in Virginia. Nobody mourns the end of shorts weather more than this guy.

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What are the United States' best regional foodstuffs? Its worst? These are the questions that bedevil the mind of man—but no longer! For here, we have ranked them. Rigorously scientific (not), ardently researched (nope), and scrupulously fair (not even a little bit): this is the Great American Menu!

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Derrick Rose recently threw a costume party for his son PJ's birthday, and it looks like everyone was really into the theme. PJ appears to be in a much better mood than the last time we saw him around these parts, and Rose is rocking a pretty great Willie Robertson costume. I would not have guessed that Derrick Rose watches Duck Dynasty.

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That's about three seconds longer than I usually brush my teeth, so this is a step backwards.

The Blizzident custom 3D-printed toothbrush is a bizarre-looking toothbrush alternative that promises a 6-second scrub of your pearly whites. There is no one-size-fits-all Blizzident. Each one is custom-made to fit an individual’s mouth. The process starts with an impression or 3D-scan of your teeth… Using the Blizzident involves popping it into your mouth and making biting and chewing motions. It looks furry, but the plentiful soft bristles are angled to clean your gums and get between your teeth for quick cleaning.

I haven't eaten at a KFC since it was called Kentucky Fried Chicken. But now I want to take my kids there just so I can do this.

(via Bits & Pieces)

After Barilla chairman Guido Barilla announced in a radio interview that "he would never do (a commercial) with a homosexual family," his competitor Bertolli started posting delightfully saucy images to promote itself as a gay-friendly pasta manufacturer.

The term "gonzo journalism" gets thrown around pretty loosely, generally referring to stuff that's kind of shouty or over-the-top, but really gonzo stuff is completely, totally bananas. Case in point is James Mickens's The Slow Winter [PDF], a wonderfully lunatic account of the limitations of chip-design that will almost certainly delight you as much as it did me.

I think that it used to be fun to be a hardware architect. Anything that you invented would be amazing, and the laws of physics were actively trying to help you succeed. Your friend would say, “I wish that we could predict branches more accurately,” and you’d think, “maybe we can leverage three bits of state per branch to implement a simple saturating counter,” and you’d laugh and declare that such a stupid scheme would never work, but then you’d test it and it would be 94% accurate, and the branches would wake up the next morn- ing and read their newspapers and the headlines would say OUR WORLD HAS BEEN SET ON FIRE. You’d give your buddy a high-five and go celebrate at the bar, and then you’d think, “I wonder if we can make branch predictors even more accurate,” and the next day you’d start XOR’ing the branch’s PC address with a shift register containing the branch’s recent branching history, because in those days, you could XOR anything with anything and get something useful, and you test the new branch predictor, and now you’re up to 96% accuracy, and the branches call you on the phone and say OK, WE GET IT, YOU DO NOT LIKE BRANCHES, but the phone call goes to your voicemail because you’re too busy driving the speed boats and wearing the monocles that you purchased after your ­promotion at work. You go to work hung-over, and you realize that, during a drunken conference call, you told your boss that your processor has 32 registers when it only has 8, but then you realize THAT YOU CAN TOTALLY LIE ABOUT THE NUMBER OF PHYSICAL REGISTERS, and you invent a crazy hardware mapping scheme from virtual registers to physical ones, and at this point, you start seducing the spouses of the compiler team, because it’s pretty clear that compilers are a thing of the past, and the next generation of processors will run English-level pseudocode directly. Of course, pride precedes the fall, and at some point, you realize that to implement aggressive out-of-order execution, you need to fit more transistors into the same die size, but then a material science guy pops out of a birthday cake and says YEAH WE CAN DO THAT, and by now, you’re touring with Aerosmith and throwing Matisse paintings from hotel room windows, because when you order two Matisse paintings from room service and you get three, that equation is going to be balanced. It all goes so well, and the party keeps getting better. When you retire in 2003, your face is wrinkled from all of the smiles, and even though you’ve been sued by sev- eral pedestrians who suddenly acquired rare paintings as hats, you go out on top, the master of your domain. You look at your son John, who just joined Intel, and you rest well at night, knowing that he can look forward to a pliant universe and an easy life.

The Slow Winter [James Mickens/Usenix]

(via JWZ)

(Image: MYK78 Clipper Chip Lowres, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from travisgoodspeed's photostream)

That's L.J. Scott of Marion (Ohio) Harding High rumbling for a 50-yard touchdown run last Friday night against Bowsher (Ohio). You'll notice that an official threw a penalty flag. The penalty was against Scott. His run was too good for high school football.

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Okay, this is the best beer belly any one of us could ever dream of having. A 61-year-old man found himself getting drunk without ever drinking alcohol because he had brewer's yeast in his gut. Basically, whenever he ate any carbs, the man's intestinal tract would start turning that into beer and make him drunk. He had a brewery in his belly.

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I can't… I don't… I can't even. Here's a clip of Breaking Bad's breakout star Aaron Paul making a surprise appearance on The Price is Right waaay back in the year 2000. He was psyched to be there.

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Remember part 1? Here's part 2, in honor of the new season starting next week. Still great.

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No, yeah, this is a totally reasonable thing to do. Of course it's the Old Firm.

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