Weird Stuff Online

Prepare yourself, tomorrow, April 1st 2009 is Internet Annoyance Day. No, it’s not funny anymore. Please remember to celebrate through abstinence.

Ed Rabbit kindly suggests that you pledge to abstain.

You know this is serious business when Mike Monteiro decides to take the day off.

Merlin Mann weighs in on the arrival of the jackasses.

If any of you upload any “Internet Annoyance Day” posters or graphics on Flickr, leave the link in the comments and I’ll try to post them here.

UPDATE: There is now an official blog for Internet Annoyance Day and Twitter account.

images via T.bias, Ed Rabbit & Mike Monteiro

This is a blog post from Laughing Squid.

For more content like this, subscribe to the RSS feed, Twitter & FriendFeed.

Internet Annoyance Day (April 1st), Celebrate Through Abstinence

Related posts:

- FriendFeed Comments on Laughing Squid

- Fail Whale Ate My Balls, Celebrate Twitter Downtime With Style

- Anger Is the Swiss Army Knife of Emotions T-Shirt

- Laughing Squid’s Pre-ROFLCon Drinkup, April 24th in Cambridge

- FriendFeed, Aggregate and Share Web Content With Friends

Star Wars remixed as the opening sequence of the televsion series Dallas.

via Star Wars Blog

This is a blog post from Laughing Squid.

For more content like this, subscribe to the RSS feed, Twitter & FriendFeed.

Star Wars Remixed As Opening of Dallas TV Series

Related posts:

- Star Wars: Live on Stage Featured on The Official Star Wars Blog

- Star Wars & Marvel Comics Stamps

- Star Wars Opening Credits Animated In The Style of Saul Bass

- Star Wars Crawl, Make Your Own Custom Star Wars Intro

- Photos of Star Wars: Live on Stage at The Dark Room

The Dynamics of Cats blogger has noticed something fishy at a "large west coast bank, relatively well known including for some recent financial games with the Feds" -- tellers are pushing "direct deposit advances" that let you access deposited checks in real time for the low-low APR of 120% :

This time, the nice lady at the counter asked me if I needed immediate access to the deposit? Huh? Said I. Looking at the payeee - "I think the check will clear..."

Oh, it is not that, said she, it is just that some people need immediate access to their deposits, like same day, or tomorrow, and if you did we can expedite it.

Oh, that's nice, thought I, and said "no thanks, got enough balance to cover any outstanding transactions thanks, but been there..." so, I wandered off, and suddenly though - well was prompted by my better half to think - "expedited? at what price?"

So, I checked online - there is nothing about expedited access to deposits, rather a guarantee that deposits before 4pm are available same day... or next day. Unless: several reasons, none of which apply to me, nor, I sincerely hope, the payee.

But, there is "direct deposit advance". Interesting:

"The Finance Charge is a one-time transaction charge and is not dependent upon the length of time the advance is outstanding. The Finance Charge is $2.00 for every $20 that is advanced, which equates to an Annual Percentage Rate (APR) of 120%."

120% APR

Vampires can't be real or they'd be everywhere -- Laura McLay's ground-breaking research into vampire population dynamics demonstrate a dismal Mathusian character in vamp-growth that put the lie to the sucker:

This argument becomes even more overwhelming if you model a vampire population as a branching process or birth-death process and assume that each vampire in the population has probability Pj of producing j offspring (with j=0,1,2,… ). The vampire population would either explode or die out, depending on the expected number of offspring per vampire. But if you take into account the fact that vampires live many, many generations (they’re virtually immortal) and may create thousands of offspring, the population explodes (if you assume that each vampire creates at least one vampire, on average, before it dies). With those numbers, vampires would not be living under the radar–they would be everywhere!

on vampires and stochastic processes (via Futurismic)

(Image: Vampires are real, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike image from Eyelash_divided's Flickr stream)