News You Can Bruise for 2006 February 23

I just recycled a Honey Nut Cheerios box which has a cartoon on the back about a baseball game played by bees (probably against the bees of another hive). The Honey Nut Cheerios mascot, a worker named Buzz (I guess they'd all be named Buzz) has to save the game in a Casey at the Bat style scenario, but she's[0] been illicitly dipping into the hive's honey supply and is a little... buzzed.

Actually no. I'm just making stuff up to make the comic more interesting while keeping it in its chosen genre of dumb comedy. There's a really interesting idea here about how team sports would work when the players are all part of a hive superorganism. But the actual cartoon takes up the entire back of a cereal box and the payoff is a dumb sight gag and a couple lame puns. Plus it violates the rules of baseball. I may ask Jack Masters for another metaconstrained comic that does this idea better.

[0] The cartoon refers to Buzz as "he", but "he" has a stinger => worker bee => female.

I had an idea. Can you make ghee in the microwave? Yes you can.

Today's cool things: Ruby encryption libraries! Crypt, which is pure Ruby, and EzCrypto, a wrapper around the user-unfriendly OpenSSL bindings. Dunno why I didn't think of an encryption recipe until so late in the project. Also, only today did I really put all the pieces together about how public-key encryption works. The only difference from single secret key encryption is that there are two ways of getting to the key. Is that right?

Update: I don't know anything.