Yes, you have been warned that it will not help your productivity, but you’re experimenting with RSS anyway. Did you know the Feds can add to your addiction? FDA Recalls, my man! If I could add Restaurant Closures, my day would be perfect.

It seems to be hard to convert food waste to oil without it stinking.

Apparently the best reason anybody has for not recognizing Pluto as a Kuiper Belt Object and not a major planet is "you’d upset the schoolchildren." This, as it is with conversion to the metric system, is an imaginary problem that will sort itself out within a generation (granted, with the metric system, you’ll probably have to replace some road signs earlier than you would otherwise). Take a look at the orbits: Pluto is far more elliptical in its orbit than the genuine major planets and more like a comet than a major planet in its inclination (here’s the inner planet orbits chart for comparison).
Your assignment: find a better mnemonic than "My very excellent mother just served us nachos" (in order to qualify as "better," it must have a substantially different structure).

Hey! Since when has there been a spy museum? It sounds so my speed that I’m astounded I haven’t heard about it until now. They also have a new book coming out in May called I Lie for a Living: the Greatest Spies of All Time.

According to Publisher’s Weekly, Warner Bros is making a movie out of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, set to be directed by Spike Jonze and adapted for the screen by Jonze and Dave Eggers. It will be live action with lots of CGI. I think my head just exploded.

Once in a while, I wander through the web server logs, to see who’s a bot and who’s not, and whether the bots are well-behaved. I’m not all that strict—I don’t even have a robots.txt file (yet)—but I don’t like bots that suck all the pages down extremely quickly or display other anti-social tendencies. One of the bots I have banned is from an outfit called NameProtect, since any mentioning of trademarks anybody on this site will be doing will be entirely within the bounds of fair use. I’ve left the bot from TurnItIn alone, since I don’t have any particular objection to plagiarists who are using our stuff getting caught (if my understanding of how TurnItIn works is flawed, please let me know). Every so often, though, I’ve noticed a bot that’s pretending not to be a bot. Frequently, these are spam address harvesters, but I’ve noticed occasionally that the IP range from one of the spoofers is owned by these assholes. Today, I finally looked in to who they are and whom they work for, and I’m sorry I didn’t ban them a long time ago.

Following in the footsteps of that other famous "religion," the Roman Catholic church has decided to enforce copyright on its pronouncements. Next up, a fee schedule for the sacraments. Ooh, can’t afford Last Rites (I apparently mean Anointing of the Sick)? Bummer, dude.

I’m not sure we necessarily need to put it in the Stuff We Like area, but we definitely like Jane, and she has a blog.
Update: Nah, we love Jane, so into the permalinks she goes.

I noticed that Outlook Express was doing the wrong thing with the LF character at the beginning of my address, so I’ve changed it to a space. If the spam bots are smart enough to remove the space, I’ll have to do something else. Since they weren’t smart enough to remove the line feed, I’m trying to remain optimistic.
Update: spam bots apparently are smart enough to take out the space. I’m trying a vertical tab character now. Outlook does the right thing; I’ll check OE as soon as I remember. Odds are good I’ll have to change the alias, though, since I have gotten a spam attempt. I’ll keep the mailto links up to date, and try to remember to keep any other in-line mentions clean, too.

Check out Charity Navigator. They haven’t rated everybody, but they have rated many (and if you register (at no cost), you can suggest charities that you would like to see rated).
Another place to check out how well (and not so well) non-profits do with your donations, at least in Washington, is the Secretary of State’s Charity Search.
Two other items worth noting: Charity Navigator has not yet figured out how to objectively measure a charity’s effectiveness in their programs, so can tell you only how much of their revenue goes to programs (I’m willing to believe, until given evidence otherwise, that an outfit with a higher program-to-administrative spending ratio is likely to also have programs that are at least as effective per dollar as the outfits with more overhead); and the Salvation Army is a religion, not a charity, and does not therefore have to file an IRS 990 (and they have declined to make their financial records available).