A recent study determined that when “casual gaming” was combined with videogames, more women partake than men.

Of course I don’t buy this study, but it seems worthy of a smile following a post about hating cilantro.

Note to single Hmm readers: 65% women vs. 35% men aged 25-34. So forget about dimly lit bars and neon flashing dance clubs, if you are looking for a date in this age range just point your horny self on over to pogo.com (emphasis mine):

Through their Pogo.com subsidiary, EA snagged one million gamers willing to pay a monthly rate of $2.49 to $4.99 per month. Three fourths of these customers are female. Microsoft also chases both hardcore and casual gamers via software that runs on the Xbox, PC, MSN and mobile phone platforms.

If you add the recent study that said nerds made the best lovers, then break out those pocket protectors boys because you can really score at Pogo.

I bet the folks that run ihatecilantro.com aren’t lining up to get their salsa bowls filled. This site is twisted — in a good way.

Nice how they are blending the popular sites such as the ability to find other cilantro haters courtesy of Google Maps, a IhateCilantro MySpace annex, stories of “cilantro victims recount their tales of heartbreak and tragedy” and more.

I guess I’m not a “normal functioning human being” because I not only consider cilantro edible, but an important ingredient in salsa. Getting some salsa cravings just thinking about the food. Still, I found this joke site rather tasty. Ban cilantro? LOL.

Valleywag a valley tech gossip rag is silly, stupid fun. While reading serious tech-related pieces all week it’s nice to blend in a little humor here and there.

I noticed this last week a number of Beatlesq titles following the story about them opening up their libary (soon finally) to legal online download stores. My favorite of which I mentioned on the last Hmmcast (you listened, didn’t, you?), but didn’t remember the exact title (doh!). Turns out it was Yesterday, Beatles Downloads Seemed So Far Away by Techdirt. Valleywag noticed the same brief trend and thinks there wasn’t enough headline creativity and seeks to add a few of their own:

Could we get a little more original, dig into the better Beatles titles? Such as:

* Got to get you into my pod
* Back in the AAC
* Being for the benefit of Mr. Starr
* Now you can buy me love
* Yoko in the sky with royalties

The Yoko Ono blast made me chuckle. I like catchy headlines that actually have something to do with the story. Fellow blogger readers, spend a few minutes thinking up some creative titles, it can get you some additional mileage.

This Titanic 2 sequel parody isn’t as funny as PacMan as a pill popping junkie, but it is worthy of a chuckle. Jack’s back, alright. This is the kind of stuff that YouTube is really good at showcasing: parodies and spoofs.

Just what math nerds need: a way to figure out who has the nicest butt:

(S+C) x (B+F)/T = V where … S is the overall shape or droopiness of the bottom, C represents how spherical the buttocks are, B measures muscular wobble or bounce, while F records the firmness. V is the hip to waist ratio, or symmetry of the bottom, and T measures the skin texture and presence of cellulite.

I’m not sure how to comment on this one, but it made me go hmm enough to dial up some famous women’s butts in Google Image and try to work out the formula.

This picture of Jennifer Aniston seems to be making the rounds, pardon the pun. I halfway thought about whipping up some PHP code to work out this formula … ok, why not.

I’m not coming up with a perfect 80 even when using 5 for all (comes up as 20 and Jennifer Aniston by my assement is a 14) in these so my assquation must be borked. I didn’t read closely enough to convert the code correctly. Feel free to debug in the comments, just leave off the > and < or the comments might eat your calculations.

Thanks Metafilter.

In Talk Nerdy to me, Glee Magazine uploads to the rest of the world what the spouses and significant others of geeks already know:

Nerds not only have the brains, but they also have the most powerful possession of all, the love touch. These guys and gals have taken the time to do their homework, and they’ve mastered the geography, chemistry and mathematical formulas of how to make your body scream. Ready to smarten up and become the ultimate seducer? Then put away those shades and pick up a pocket protector because your about to get lesson 101 in love.

This gives me a chance to mention how great the movie Revenge of the Nerds was and how increasingly worse the sequels were leading up to the last one which flirted with some sort of smellovision during Valentine’s day for a TV-only movie. Just know the sequel meal train is dying if you see it as a made-for-TV movie come along.

This seems to be a morning of abortions. I checked and Scoble hasn’t dug into this one yet. Curious when/where the Channel 9 interview is and/or will be on this story?

Microsoft just loves change. And this wouldn’t be so bad if some of their product names weren’t so nonsensical like Windows Live. And if a product isn’t doing well, they just nuke the product line and come up with a new name. God help us all if they don’t change the code when they change the names.

Soon we’ll be able to credit the Redmond lumberjacks with giving the exe by “late 2006″ to FrontPage:

After nine years of being an award-winning Web authoring tool, FrontPage will be discontinued in late 2006. We will continue to serve the diverse needs of our existing FrontPage customers with the introduction of these three brand-new application building and Web authoring tools using the latest technologies, Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Designer 2007 for the enterprise information workers, Microsoft® Expression™ Web Designer for the professional Web designer and Microsoft® Visual Studio 2005 for the Web developer.

It is so “award-winning” that they are discontinuing the line. Funny.

Is this a good move? FrontPage is almost universally despised by hosting companies and developers alike as not playing well with other programming so this move does give Microsoft a chance to pump some fresh into the space. Let’s hope they learned from their mistakes. And I wouldn’t touch their Frontpage extensions with a ten foot pole (on a Linux box) if it wasn’t sometimes part of my job. Never mind what type of code surgery is needed when mixing with PHP and other scripting languages in the editor. Not into BDSM, sorry.

I will admit (blasphemous, I know) occasionally using the FrontPage editor for roughing out tables visually, but I still rewrite most of the code and pull out all the garbage FrontPage adds. This is a bad habit I’ve been unable to shake, especially with better WYSIWYG editors out there. And the version I’m still using? FrontPage 98. That doesn’t say much for their numerous upgrades. Think I bought FP 2000 and promptly uninstalled.

Now what’s up with the name of their replacement program? Expression Web Designer? I dislike the name already. Maybe the program rocks but the name is weak. Of course if the program is good they can call it whatever they want and I’ll still use it, so who am I to namebash? Still, I wonder what do they do up there in the naming department? Sit around and think up the worst names they can use for something? FrontPage might have been tainted, but it had a better name and a history, albeit a rocky one.

Now, seriously, what other WYSIWYG editor should I switch to so I can cast off FrontPage editor forever from my coding toolbox? Something that works good with CSS since I do more of that these days than straight HTML and doesn’t hose code snippets.

Ok, I’m creeped out by the word emphasized in the Reuters piece below, emphasis mine.

Unrelated people who kiss each other on the lips for more than five minutes at public places in the Indonesian city of Tangerang will face arrest, local media said Friday.

First of all, kissing someone related for more than a brief second on the lips is odd to me. If they are going to break out the stopwatch on kissing in Tangerang then at least do it in that case, please.

This is a good place for me to rail on a bit about people who feel the need to make out excessively in public. Look, a brief affectionate kiss is one thing, but get a room if you need to break out your tongue on your significant other in public, please. It’s one thing at the movies or some quiet semi-private getaway or perhaps at an amateur porn shoot or swinger’s party and quite another in the middle of a mall.

I remember this one couple of business professionals who were always kissing each other in every photo taken at company events. It became a bit tiresome and a joke among others. Look, take some pictures in the workplace when you are not kissing. Do they have faces? The camera could never seem to separate the lips.

Of course I have nothing against kissing and I think this law in Tangerang is ludicrous. I like kissing and look at the category to gauge how serious I really am here if concerned. But do I need to kiss my wife/significant all the time in public to tell the world how much I like it? Do you?

I hope I’m alive long enough to take a trip into the future. I’d like to see if we all are controlled by apes or have nuked the human race out of existence in a few hundred years.

via physorg:

… according to Einstein, whenever you do something to space, you also affect time. Twisting space causes time to be twisted, meaning you could theoretically walk through time as you walk through space.

“As physicists, our experiments deal with subatomic particles,” said Mallett. “How soon humans will be able to time travel depends largely on the success of these experiments, which will take the better part of a decade. And depending on breakthroughs, technology, and funding, I believe that human time travel could happen this century.”

As for going into the past? Not much interest there, especially if Mallett’s theory is accurate about going back into a parallel universe and not the past that we know and are a part of exists.

I’m down for a good April Fool’s joke but so far what I’ve seen has been unconvincing. Scoble and Zawodny moving to Google? Please. Matt Cutts from Google moving to Yahoo? Yawn. The Register reporting China buys Google? I’m glad I unsubbed them last week, they suck even when they are serious.

Surely there is more creativity than this? The pink Slashdot motiff and Blogoscope’s Google Room thing complete with Playboy at least drew a grin.

A good fool means something deceptive and fuzzy, not something obviously bogus. And if you are wondering what I’m up to? The answer is nothing. I’m armchair quarterbacking this whole thing. Grandstander, guilty as charged, I’m not trying anything on any of our sites (yet). Better to do something really shocking than to do something lame. If one can’t come up with something good — and that’s where I’m at — I’ll just cast stones into the pond and take up the critic role.

With that said, I’m totally expecting to be fooled by something today. Not so far though. You?

Update 4/5/2006 7:17am PST: Here’s a list of April Fool’s 2006 jokes played out by domain.