The reading advocacy people tend to gloss this stuff over, but reading has some serious downsides.

Scooby Demotivator Literacy by ~Jaguaro on deviantART

Gavroche’s recent discovery of the The T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project conducted at Rice University in 1995 stirred some memories. I recall seeing this web site a few years ago, while looking for references to “Peep Jousting” and other “Peep Research“. On the one hand, I’m surprised the site is still around if it’s not been receiving any maintenance. On the other hand, it simply must at least as popular as the Peep sites, so I guess it’s not too surprising.
Giving the site a quick look, I noticed a possible flaw in the conclusions of the the Turing Test they administered. (Yes, they apparently administered a variation of the Turing Test to a Twinkie.) Given the length of the critique, I felt it would perhaps be better to comment here rather than on John’s site.
In their description of their testing methodology, the researchers note a procedural error.

When asked to assign himself and the Twinkie the designations A & B without telling us which was which, the human promptly replied “I’ll be A.” However, we decided to continue the test.

(Under normal circumstances, the researchers should have abandoned the test and attempted the experiment again with another set of subjects. Their willingness to overlook the error may be forgiven as they had already abandoned a previous attempt and the test was taking place at a relatively late hour during the final exams period. As an additional consideration, had they abandoned this test, the procedural flaw may not have been discovered and important data lost for all time.)
Note that according to the researchers, it was the human who replied to that instruction. Because both subjects were behind a sheet, it’s not clear how they determined the reply originated with the human, but we’ll have to assume they somehow knew this to be the case.
Next, examine the pattern of the responses:

Q (cg): What would you describe as the purpose of your existence?
Subject A: (no answer)
Subject B: To woo women.
Q (ts): Describe where the other subject is, relative to you.
Subject B: On a chair.
Subject A: (no answer)
Q (cg): Describe the last meal you ate.
Subject A: (no answer)
Subject B: These chicken chunks (after joking about eating subject A)
Q (ts): How do you feel about your mother?
Subject B: She gives me money, I like her.
Subject A: (no answer)

Subject B: (ostensibly the Twinkie) is the only one to respond! The same pattern occurs during the free association portion of the test, again, only the Twinkie responds.
After examining the test data, the researchers reported their conclusions:

After careful study of all responses, we determined that subject A was the Twinkie, and B was the human.

This conclusion however completely contradicts their earlier observations!
This leads me to some rather startling conclusions of my own.
If Subject A was indeed the Twinkie, then we have to face up to the reality that Twinkies are capable of speech. The ability to speak is a sign of intelligence. The fact that said speech took place in a manner which initially led the researchers to conclude they were speaking to a human means the Twinkie in fact passed the Turing test.
If Subject B was the Twinkie, then we have to face up to the reality that the Twinkie was intelligent enough to make the researchers believe they were conversing with a human. Again, this means that the Twinkie passed the Turing test.
Either way, the social, religious, moral and dietary implications are quite staggering. To be blunt, Eating Twinkies constitutes murder. Consider too that Twinkies do not occur in nature, coming instead from industrial bakeries. Apparently the Hostess company has been playing god all these years.
I would offer one closing thought: The ability to distinguish a human from a Twinkie should be at least as significant as the ability to hold a conversation when determining whether a subject is sentient.
Although it’s dangerous to draw generalities from a single data point, the conclusion of the T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. project’s Turing test would seem to suggest that Rice University students don’t qualify as sentient life forms.

I think April Fools Day is my favorite holiday. Granted, it’s not a day that you get off from work (unless it happens to fall on your day off), but it is a day when people tend to take things a little less seriously.
For the past several years, my personal celebration of April Fools Day has involved some minor edits to the web site for the Shore Leave convention. For example, this year, Shore Leave is announcing the appointment of a new Web Maven, Ms. Sai Cadowlic.
I’d originally planned that particular modification for last year. April 1 fell on a Sunday that year and would have corresponded with the STAT club’s monthly meeting and given me a chance to see reactions on the day of the hack. Sadly, I instead spent that weekend at my aunt’s funeral and just wasn’t really in the mood to play the prank.
The original plan was to change the colors and add the background image of a certain hotel’s carpets. Giving the update another year to ferment allowed me to come up with the text announcing Sai and add the in-joke about her background as an interior designer for the hotel industry. (Said joke is a minor dig at what some consider to be the world’s ugliest hotel update.)
It’s not as clever as the time I announced Shore Leave was moving onto the Battlestar Galactica, but I doubt anyone’s going to be expecting such a broad palette of colors.
So what surprised me about it? It’s hard to make a web page look that bad.

I know a few folks who are so certain in their political convictions that they’ve already decided how they’re voting in November. (Some probably made up their minds as far back as this time last year.) As for me, I’m nowhere near making a decision yet.
Right now though, one candidate who’s getting a lot of attention is John McClane. He’s a little rough around the edges and a bit of a maverick, but maybe that’s what we need right now. He does have a proven record against terror (Nakatomi Plaza in LA, Dulles Airport, the bombs scattered around New York, and most recently the Internet-based terrorists who were trying to steal financial records).
If nothing else, you have to agree that it would give people pause if the President of the United States ended all of his speeches with his trademark “Yippie Ki Yay” line.

Once you start sending out Christmas letters, you feel obligated to send one every year. I didn’t realize that when I sent out my first letter back in 1997, but I’m not sure I can stop now.
When I was preparing my 2002 letter, I had an encounter with writer’s block and struggled to put it together in time. Finally, on December 23, I realized the letters just weren’t going to go out on time. So I decided to send them on April Fools Day. It was a good plan, but the way it worked out was that my letters went out in mid-August. It wasn’t until 2006 that I managed to have my Christmas cards (the 2005 edition) arrive on April 1.
Of course, by then, people were expecting my Christmas cards to arrive off-season, so there was only one thing to do: My 2006 Christmas cards arrived just in time for Christmas.
Changing the dates around gets kind of predictable after a while. Folks know the cards going to be off-season, they just don’t know exactly when. So this year I decided to send them out at Christmas for the second year in a row.
But have you ever thought about the fact that the term “Christmas Card” is ambiguous? (Likewise for “Holiday Card.”) Aside from Hallmark, who says it has to be a greeting card?