2008-04-01

[ewx]

So what April Fools have people seen?

• LJ has a new team member
• A Push to Stop Swiss Cats From Being Turned Into Coats and Hats
• fanf's modest proposal for the improvement of Daylight Saving
• US to scrap dollar and join the euro
• Penguins
• Binary transport for XMPP
• Unusual banking trojan
• Body Advertising
• Warrington to be demolished
• Teacher's head explodes due to Wi-Fi, mobe radiation
• IBM unveils nano-projector based VirtuaHuman with 1TB of memory
• EDSAC, TITAN, Phoenix and Janet X.25 all DOWN (Java required; screenshot if you can't see it)
• New Hero Class Revealed: Bard
• Quechua conclusively linked to Phaistos Disc
• Youtube's featured videos
• www.chu.cam.ac.uk
• imc is leaving LJ for Facebook and Myspace
• The mechanism of poltergeist activity
• Acid 3: Opera first to 106
• An Inconvenient Truth About Privacy
• GURPS MMO
• SimPE cease-and-desisted
• D&D errata
• Tagging taken to its logical conclusion
• Several fools reported by the Telegraph
• Tauren marines in Starcraft II
• Thinkgeek have a bunch of made-up products.
• Airlines announce new fees for seats, restroom use
• Endless cake items on kotaku.com
• Further commercialization of the Internet
• A joke character encoding specification (that isn't WTF-8)
• A flurry of Google fools:
  • Virgle: The Adventure of Many Lifetimes
  • Google Talk goes green
  • Custom Time
  • gDay

Also various webcomics are fooling around; these may not make sense except to regular readers:

• McAwesome's Parasailing And Chocolate Bakery
• Diesel Sweeties without pixels
• YAFGC in the style of OOTS
• XKCD/Questionnable Content
• Qwantz/XKCD
• Wondermark changes style
• Darths And Droids

(No more please, or at least don't expect me to add them to the list above if posted after the end of April 1st!)

Comments

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

That idea about daylight saving time is actually something I've thought about seriously before—not as a serious proposal for our culture, but as a potential different way of measuring time other cultures might adopt. In the Jewish calendar, days start at sunset, and then the daylight hours are divided into twelve equal intervals between sunrise and sunset. Starting the day at sunrise, but then using standard seconds struck me as a compromise between that system and our own, to enable to use of standard-length time units across the year.