Nice grab by Vallegwag illustrating how our sensitivity training—and our automatic sensitivity filters—can make for some amusing untended bleeping. In this case, Digg.com’s automatic naughty word filter thought homo erectus sounded as dirty as it, well, really sounds.

If you didn’t pay much attention in science class, homo is the same unfortunately humorous prefix as the one in homo sapien, which refers to you and me—hey! Don’t swing at me, brudda. Blame the Greeks. Homo erectus is considered the earliest the human species.

Even funnier is that when Digg edited out the word homo in this instance, it made the headline dirtier and funnier than before:

Erectus Crosses the Open Ocean.

Oddly, that reminds me of my teaching days in Japan. Find a group of native Japanese speakers and get them to tell you the story of the attempted assassination of the President of Taiwan.

It was Election Day. They had to apply pressure to stop the bleeding.

A couple of transposed r’s and l’s and you’ve got hilarity for the rest of the day.

The threat of a DNS cache poisoning issue found by security researcher Dan Kaminsky scared the virtual pants off the technology industry, who responded well to the situation.

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Heck, I’m ready for any kind of football, even if it means having to hear about Brett Favre every single day for the rest of the summer.

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Facebook still has strength among the post-college aged crowd, but those in school may think Facebook isn’t cool any longer.

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Once the province of Ask Maps before IAC gutted the project, Google Maps picked up the walking directions banner and made that feature available on its service.

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Norwegian browser maker Opera Software said in its ‘State of the Mobile Web’ report that nearly 40 percent of global mobile web traffic hits the likes of MySpace and Facebook. It’s even higher in the United States.

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If Internet users held a particular position about a candidate, Stanford University’s Management Science & Engineering department probably caught their opinions in a bubble.

Through the use of real-time data firm Wise Window’s software as a service for qualitative data, Stanford constructed a tracking tool for the 2008 Presidential election.

As the Democratic primary continues to grind across the country (we get our shot at voting next Tuesday), more news items emerge about its two candidates, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as the Republican candidate,John McCain.

Stanford built its tracker to express the opinions surrounding candidates in a visually-friendly way. One may visit the Bubble Tracker and see how positive or negative recent commentary appeared about the candidate.

Green bubbles mean good comments, while purple ones reflect bad ones. Visitors to the Stanford site make click on one of the bubbles to see a link to the story driving that opinion.

Viewing past opinions and the bubbles they made may be done through the use of a slider control below the bubble window. Each change with the slider alters the bubbles for each candidate.

And when you pass the mouse pointer over the candidate’s window, the bubbles begin to circulate. So cool! Links we observed hit news stories appearing on Topix and Diggin our unscientific look at Stanford’s bubbles.

The bellowing fellow now immortalized as Mr. Angry Overreaction Man demanded a photographer not put his raging visage online. You can guess what happened next.

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Rumors of a $399 PC that can run Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard began circulating, but we’ll be surprised to see the Apple clone business being reprised.

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It looks like Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook will pay off ConnectU’s creators to make a lawsuit over Facebook’s genesis go away.

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