Alaska... is that for real??

Well, the Democrats won pretty big last night, with a few astonishing exceptions.

Did convicted felon Ted Stevens really keep his Senate seat, and equally sketchy Don Young his at-large congressional seat???

Apparently they both won... un-effing-believable, especially given that the polling seemed to strongly indicate that both corrupt politicians would lose to their Democratic challengers.

Looks like Oregon Republican Gordon Smith has also managed to keep his Senate seat, despite the long odds in a Democratic wave. He, of course, is a moderate Republican and hasn't been tainted by any scandals, so it's less shocking, but no less surprising given the polls going against him.

Palin gets pranked

From The Huffington Post, with the audio!!!

The AP reports that a Quebec comedy duo, posing as French President Nicolas Sarkozy, have successfully prank called Sarah Palin.

Okay, this is certainly not the highest form of political discourse we have, but it is so freakin' funny. My favorite parts are the incredibly, brazenly ridiculous pop culture references in French. So here's my annotated transcript with translations of the hilarious French bits.

I just donated money to a couple of political campaigns...

... for the first time in my life. Thanks to this nasty, nasty innuendo-filled ad by Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, against her rival Kay Hagan.

Who uglified iGoogle?

Awww, crud... who decided to change the iGoogle home page? It's now totally ugly and hard-to-read, with all kinds of tiny text coming from my RSS feeds.

Can anyone at Google make an option to re-enable the old format??

Surveying scientists' use of computers

Here is an interesting survey for all the scientists out there.

And here is an explanation of it:

Computers are as important to modern scientists as test tubes, but we know surprisingly little about how scientists develop and use software in their research. To find out, the University of Toronto, Simula Research Laboratory, and the National Research Council of Canada have launched an online survey in conjunction with American Scientist magazine. If you have 20 minutes to take part, please go to:

http://softwareresearch.ca/seg/SCS/scientific-computing-survey.html

We’d also be grateful if you’d spread the word through any mailing lists, blogs, or bulletin boards you have access to. Thanks for your help!

Programming languages I know

There's an interesting post making the rounds on planet.python.org about what programming languages people know and in what order they learned them.

My list (bold for the ones I still use and know well):

Opening a MasterLock

Don't you hate it when you lose a lock combination? I always feel wasteful throwing 'em out and getting a new one.

There's a website that shows you how to crack a MasterLock.

Use the info on that page to get the third digit, then there's an algorithm to figure out the 80 possible combinations... or you can use this spreadsheet to figure them out. Then just try them till it works... there are only 80 possibilities, so on average it will take only 40 tries.

I was able to open my lock that I hadn't used all summer, woohoo!! I <3 my internets.