Take a guess, how many golf-cart related injuries do you think take place every year in the US?

Ten? A hundred? Around a thousand?

Nope. According to a Nationwide Children’s Hospital study, 2006 saw an estimated 13,411 cases of gold-cart related injuries.

13,411. In 2006. In the US alone.

I mean, considering that escalators annually injure between 7,500 to 10,000 in the US (depending on whose statistics you believe), 13,411 golf-cart related injuries just seems insane.

And, apparently “[m]ore than 30 percent of golf cart-related injuries involved children under the age of 16.” What on earth were they doing there? Do children under 16 play golf?

I of course did, but there was no chance I would have fallen off a golf-cart there. And in my current golfing career I haven’t even got past choosing what colour hair I want to have, so no chance of falling of golf-carts there.

Which, of course, raises the question how many gaming related injuries occur yearly. Curiously enough, my web search skills (or the lack of them) couldn’t produce any data. Does anyone know? Or is this a dark secret closely guarded by the gaming industry, and am I to expect the front door to be kicked in any moment now?

The full story can be accessed here.

Because if you have, then again look no further than to Luigi Auriemma’s collection of programs. The program you want this time around is called UIF2ISO, and it does a perfect job converting UIF files to ISO.

Now, if only Auriemma could come up with a program that converts dirty dishes into washed-up dishes, and I think I would be ready to marry the guy.

I have. Fortunately, there is a handy little tool called DAA2ISO that works marvels. Do take a look at Luigi Auriemma’s collection of programs. I have so far failed to encounter a DAA file that it could not convert to ISO.

Infocom, of course, is/was the company behind such text adventures — sorry, interactive fiction titles — as the Zork series, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and my personal favourite Planetfall. Baio’s article gives us a piece of history that is Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the unreleased sequel to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

It is a fairly long article, but well worth reading, as are the comments at the end of it. Doubly interesting is the question that it raises, somewhat unintentionally, about what constitutes (good) journalism and what one should do if one were to find a pot of gold like Baio has here stumbled upon.

I have no answers, as usual. Just observations.

Try it out and see if you can beat my current score of 814,305 that gives me a place in the top 50. I’m submitting my scores as “vili”.

I recently got tired of this at our War Game Bunker forums, and looked for a solution to stop the spam. After digging through a list of PunBB plugins and addons, I found a simple way to combat both the forum message spam, a well as subscription spam, the two forms of PunBB spam that you are probably most familiar with.

1. Akismet for PunBB is a PunBB extension that uses the spam filtering service provided by Automattic, the company behind Wordpress (and bbPress, another excellent forum software). After installing it (you also need an Akismet API key, which is free), the messages posted on your forums are run through Akismet’s comprehensive spam filter, which I also use on all of my blogs. After I installed this to PunBB, all message spam stopped. The best thing about the extension is that for your peace of mind you can still review the blocked messages, thus enabling you to rescue messages that have been mistakenly marked for spam. Having said that, though, I have never encountered this problem during the two and a half years of using Akismet based spam filtering!

2. AntiBot, another PunBB extension, will meanwhile stop the PunBB registration spam, i.e. spambots from registering on your forums with suggestive names or homepage links. Note that AntiBot uses Captcha technology which, depending on your user base, may turn out to introduce accessibility problems to some, especially blind users. Perhaps in the future the release will include an audio Captcha to (partially) solve this problem, but in any case at this point I stick with AntiBot, as based on my experience it is the best way to stop PunBB registration spam.

Can you see how it radiates cosmic love, and so tells us relax and take it easy? How it proves that the grass is always greyer on the other side of a big empty space?

New Scientist, of course, has a different focus on the whole story, but don’t believe them. It’s a government conspiracy. They are trying to bury the evidence. But the Truth is still out there. To be discovered by Mulder & Scully in July.

Well, one of our cats does that. The other one simply observes in silence, probably calculating the calories lost while doing what the first cat does, and the rate of impact of the reinforcement that it has on human beings, and deciding against joining its brother.

They are weird creatures, cats.

Since there is a relevant Eddie Izzard clip to every topic, here’s the one that fits this one: Pavlov’s Cats.

However, perhaps an even more alarming fact presented by the study is that around “57 percent [of the world's population] is malnourished, compared with 20 percent … in 1950″. Even if one considers the fact that the world population has in that time climbed from 2.5 billion to 6.5 billion, and that most of the population growth has happened in the so-called “developing countries”, it still sounds quite sad.