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There seems to be at least some possibility that Yo-Landi Vi$$er, the tiny female member of brain-wrecking South African dance-rap crew Die Antwoord, could go from being an object of YouTube fascination to the star of a big-budget movie in just a few scant months. Vulture reports (via The Playlist) that Se7en/Fight Club/Benjamin Button director David Fincher might just have a big role in mind for her in the American big screen adaptation of Stieg Larsson's hugely successful crime novel The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

According to Vulture, Fincher has been telling people that Vi$$er looks and acts the way he envisions Lisbeth Salander, the title character of the book. Salander is a hacker punk with Asperger's Syndrome and a tortured past who becomes a private investigator (thanks, Wikipedia!). An Education's Carey Mulligan and Twilight's Kristen Stewart have been rumored for the part.

Vulture says it's unclear whether Fincher actually hopes to cast Vi$$er in the movie or whether he just plans to keep her in mind as a character model. Either way, the possibility is enough to get our heads spinning. Vulture also say that other filmmakers are increasingly expressing interest in Vi$$er's acting skills.

When we interviewed Die Antwoord back in February, they mentioned that they were being flown to L.A. to discuss film projects, including their own movie, "a high-energy, totally next-level, rap-rave feature film called The Answer," which they described as "District 9, but just with more rave and more rap."

Fincher has a history of making some pretty weird casting decisions-- consider, for example, Meat Loaf with boobs. And playing a hacker punk worked out pretty well for Angelina Jolie. Besides, if Vi$$er does get cast, maybe her Die Antwoord partner Ninja could land a part in some future Ninja Assassin sequel, which would obviously be the best thing ever.

Whatever exactly we decide a crash blossom is, we are surely going to want to agree with James Martin, of the Department of Statistics at Oxford University, that this is one:

May axes Labour police beat pledge

James notes that every single one of these six words can serve as either a noun (sample possible senses: fifth month; woodcutting implements; opposition party; constabulary; musical timing unit; commitment) or a verb (will possibly; performs chopping; work hard; oversee; physically chastise; give a promise). So we start with 2⁶ = 64 different assignments of noun or verb status, and start sifting about for a coherent parse that gives us a meaning that could make sense in some context.

If some of us succeed in parsing it, that's quite remarkable. It's a singularly difficult one in isolation, especially if you're not up to the minute with British political news. To satisfy your curiosity about whether you parsed it correctly, go to this article in The Guardian.

If you get to define a "market" you can create all sorts of misleading results. Take, for example, this recent blog post from Microsoft, where it tried to show off just how big the company was using a variety of numbers. Thankfully, Charles Arthur, over at The Guardian went through the numbers in greater detail to point out where and how they were misleading. One example, highlighted by Glyn Moody is the claims of Linux server market share, and how it supposedly "failed" to live up to expectations. Here's what Microsoft had in its blog post (which I recreated by hand, because, as Arthur notes, Microsoft's HTML is full of ridiculous crap):

24%
Linux Server market share in 2005. [source]

33%
Predicted Linux Server market share for 2007 (made in 2005). [source]

21.2%
Actual Linux Server market share, Q4 2009. [source]

Now, this might strikes some of you as not sounding right. After all, most of have have noticed that Linux servers seem to be pretty damn common throughout the world. Most of the biggest online companies in the world use Linux, and it's difficult to think of an online startup that doesn't use Linux. Charles Arthur breaks down how incredibly misleading this is:

This is a really interesting one, because it is a distortion of reality that would have Steve Jobs applauding at its subtlety. You look at those numbers and think: wow, Linux servers really aren't popular. How odd, because you'll notice that you come across Linux servers all over the place: Google, Facebook (which runs F5's Big IP, which is Linux), Yahoo, Amazon, Wordpress.com (which hosts millions of blogs), Twitter... so why such a small number? (The only major site I could quickly find that runs Windows Server is eBay.)

Answer: because those "market share" figures are for Linux server licences sold. Microsoft doesn't count them - and because the market research companies can't count them - if money doesn't change hands. True, this indicates that companies selling Linux servers (principally hardware) aren't making headway against Windows Server. But what it doesn't tell you is what progress Linux is making overall on the web. For that, you need Netcraft. And that suggests that Linux has a really big market share.

In other words, to make these numbers come out this way, Microsoft is pretending that "free" Linux servers are not competitors. This is a silly sort of willful blindness. Obviously, free Linux is a huge competitor to Microsoft's servers, and widely used in place of it. To ignore those numbers to try to suggest Linux has less marketshare is to deny reality.

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Call Apple to have a FaceTime chat and learn a few things about your new iPhone 4. Great idea.

My cousin sent this to me in an email and I had to share it (I don’t know where the pictures originated):

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