"Ever have a bully pick on you in school? I knocked the bully out. That's what it feels like." - Boston Celtics'Kevin Garnett, right after humiliating the Los Angeles Lakers 131-92 in the second-most lopsided blowout in NBA Finals history, capturing their first National Basketball Association title since 1986 in record-shattering fashion.

A Monk In Akihabara

A Japanese monk making prayers at a makeshift altar in the midst of downtown Akihabara one week after the Akihabara massacre 秋葉原通り魔事件, Akihabara Tōrima Jiken.

Codename: Roadrunner

An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second. The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, N.M. It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion. To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D’Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that, "If all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day."

風雲決 AKA Storm Rider Clash of the Evils Trailer

Some crappy pseudo-anime trailer.

Memes.

"Next question might be, does the information have to be molecular at all? Memes. This is not something that I’ve ever wanted to push as a theory of human culture, but I originally proposed it as a kind of... almost an anti-gene, to make the point that Darwinism requires accurate replicators with phenotypic power, but they don’t necessarily have to be genes. What if they were computer viruses? They hadn’t been invented when I wrote The Selfish Gene so I went straight for memes, units of cultural inheritance." - Richard Dawkins, Atheist Extraodinaire, who popularised the gene-centered view of evolution and introduced the term meme. My kinda hero.

H Is For Hypocrite/Hypocritical

Some excerpt from 林奕华's article on the leading Hong Kong paper, Ming Pao. Thought-provoking commentaries on the increasingly notorious tabloid news of the year, with pointers listed in an alphabetical order. H is for Hypocrite/Hypocritical 「虛偽」兩隻字在報章頭條上被放大，首先使人深思的，倒不是被它們指控的當事人（阿嬌）有幾表裏不一、言不由衷，而是兩隻字被看到的背景，以及從中引伸出來的定義。 如果我們都能明白，及實事求是地接受一份報章可以在新聞版道貌岸然，在風月版卻是「大滾友」，那麼，要求一個廿六七歲的女藝人徹頭徹尾是童話中的仙子或公主，便是選擇性地提出指控。因為，藝人明顯是娛樂工業一部份，「童話」的存在是補償現實中不能達成的美夢，只有兒童（天真）或思想不成熟的人（幼稚）才會相信看似童話人物的藝人是活在現實世界中的卡通人物。 為什麼有些人可以一邊如此世故，同時又如此無知？抑或，無知不過是一種偽裝，為的是開脫自己的鋤弱扶強？以譴責阿嬌「虛偽」為例，只要認識問題的本質，任何人都知道她的「虛偽」只是服膺虛偽的娛樂制度，甚至是媒體制度——「她」的「純情」，難道不是由這些制度按照市場需求而塑造？大眾渴望她永遠保持貞潔，但在渴望背後又隱藏着對她的性幻想——何嘗不是出於充滿吊詭和抑壓的慾望？ 不去反思自己的矛盾，偏去怪罪一個平日盡量替大眾「圓夢」，卻因一次意外而打碎集體幻想的藝人「虛偽」，請問是誰的不誠實和說一套做一套對社會造成更大的誤導和影響？ 即便阿嬌真是「虛偽」，她「口不對心」的理由已是人所共知，但在這時候還以道德之名搖旗吶喊要她「全盤交代」者，目的卻是希望消費過程中更多細節（甚至謀利），那就更是典型賊喊捉賊，真的很虛偽。

meme (plural memes) (philosophy) Any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods and terms such as race, culture, and ethnicity. (philosophy) A self-propagating unit of cultural evolution having a resemblance to the gene (the unit of genetics). initiative (plural initiatives) A beginning; a first move. A new development; a fresh approach to something; a new way of dealing with a problem. The ability to act first or on one's own.