A tool called Gender Genie tries to tell whether you are male or female by analyzing your writing. I’ve tried a few pieces, and so far I’m hitting 50% male, 50% female. Interesting thing is, though, my email messages tend to be more “female,” according to the algorithm, while my blog entries are more “male.” Hmmm, might explain why I keep getting spam that reads like this: I’m a hot girl who’s coming to your town and would like to meet up. Send me an email at [email address]. - Steve ...

I’ll agree this sounds strange, particularly as the first paragraph in an article about sports: It’s easy to discount the spiritual impact of basketball crowds if you haven’t attended a playoff game with special fans before. There’s no way to understand it unless it definitely has happened to you. Then you know. As strange as this sounds, it’s like a woman being unable to tell whether she’s ever had an orgasm. If she thinks it might have happened, or it felt like it kind of happened one time … it didn’t happen. When it happens, they know. Then they feel stupid for all the other times when they thought it had happened. ...

Are you ready for some Canadian Football? :)

Google Reader now includes the ability to send an entire article in an email, so I’m trying it out again. I still wish you could rearrange the feed categories, but that’s not a huge objection.

From Anil Dash’s Cats Can Has Grammar: But a few distinct categories have sprung up that have helped amplify and popularize the phenomenon. I’M IN UR X Y ing your Z. This construct, based on i’m in ur base, killin ur d00ds has morphed into a catch-all structure for annotating cat pictures. Invisible Item. Variations on the seminal Invisible Bike, these are images of cats, usually in midair, with captions that prompt us to fill in imaginary objects or actions that complete the scene. There’s something brilliant to these images, speaking to our mind’s ability to intuitively extrapolate unseen details. Kitty Pidgin. And finally, the newly dominant lolcats, of the family I Can Has Cheezeburger? These seem to be spawning nearly infinite variations, and have exploded in popularity since being named “lolcats” instead of the more general “image macro” or “cat macro”. The rise of these new subspecies of lolcats are particularly interesting to me because “I can has cheezeburger?” has a fairly consistent grammar. I wasn’t sure this was true until I realized that it’s possible to get cat-speak wrong. ...

Scientists have simulated a mouse’s cortical hemisphere on a supercomputer, running at about 10% of the speed. It doesn’t really have the structure of a mouse’s brain yet, but I suspect with one mouse wandering past the Do Not Enter signs, and one lightning strike, we’ll have an Artificial Mouse Intelligence any day now. Maybe we can use it against the human-brained, cyborg mice? Link courtesy of Boing Boing.

According to this test site, The Phantom City is blocked in China. I feel almost famous…along with hundreds of thousands of other sites that are probably just blocked due to pattern-matching. And just to make it a good Friday… Meme Cats.

Virginia Tech teacher and filmmaker Paul Harrill on the media spectacle surrounding the shootings, before NBC decided to air the videos. Link courtesy of Boing Boing.

Nikki Giovanni: We are Virginia Tech. We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning. We are Virginia Tech. We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly, we are brave enough to bend to cry, and we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again. We are Virginia Tech. We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy. ...

President Bush: Governor, thank you. President Steger, thank you very much. Students, and faculty, and staff, and grieving family members, and members of this really extraordinary place. Laura and I have come to Blacksburg today with hearts full of sorrow. This is a day of mourning for the Virginia Tech community – and it is a day of sadness for our entire nation. We’ve come to express our sympathy. In this time of anguish, I hope you know that people all over this country are thinking about you, and asking God to provide comfort for all who have been affected. ...