How Far Away is the Moon?

To put that into perspective, if you were to line up hamburgers end to end from the Earth to the moon, and then you were to eat those hamburgers, you would be fucking sick of hamburgers.

here

Satan Lurks in Seafood Restaurants!

It seems that god hates crustaceans.

God also hates Brats, Barbers, Vaginas, and Mixed Fibers

So, pretty much, god is a gay man in his late 30s.

Security Theatre

llyImaginary protection from threats you don't have: The Quantum Sleeper.

My first thought: It's made of wood! I could just set it on fire and be done with it.

My second thought: This is a joke of engineering! That thing would never protect your head from lasers.

I showed this to a co-worker who pointed out that the point of safety was to keep one *out* of a coffin.

Star Formation in M83

The outlying regions around the Southern Pinwheel galaxy, or M83, are highlighted in this composite image from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer and the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array in New Mexico. The blue and pink pinwheel in the center is the galaxy's main stellar disk, while the flapping, ribbon-like structures are its extended arms. The Galaxy Evolution Explorer is an ultraviolet survey telescope. Its observations, shown here in blue and green, highlight the galaxy's farthest-flung clusters of young stars up to 140,000 light-years from its center. The Very Large Array observations show the radio emission in red. They highlight gaseous hydrogen atoms, or raw ingredients for stars, which make up the lengthy, extended arms. Astronomers are excited that the clusters of baby stars match up with the extended arms, because this helps them better understand how stars can be created out in the "backwoods" of a galaxy.

(Via Galex)

Contrary to what the text might suggest, many of these stars have no discernable hillbilly accent, and several have indicated they'd vote for John McCain.

UPDATE: Brain suggests, "that galaxy looks like the FSM. More proof of our faith"

Making History

A Delicious Fate

I am going to make this, and if it kills me, I'll die happy.

"I can’t believe the internet allows people like you publish this"

A great opening line and the rest doesn't dissapoint in the flavor department (unlike so many others):

your whole Flying Spaghetti Monster is going to get punctured like a big balloon and come floating down on your heads and completely crush you… and I’ll be there with plenty of spaghetti sauce to eat it up and rid the world of this Satanic idea, except that I wouldn’t do that because then your monster would be inside of me which I totally don’t want. LOSERS!!!! Don’t you get it? You made it all up! YOu are the total opposite of a real religion where God makes it all up, not you.

"where God makes it all up"
So much truth in so much cluelessness...

Nearer My God Than Thee

Priest Vanishes on Party Balloon Flight

SAO PAULO, Brazil (April 21) - A Roman Catholic priest who floated off under hundreds of helium party balloons was missing Monday off the southern coast of Brazil.

Maybe Oral Roberts University should open a flight school...

Some New Art

I have finished 2 pieces, both stylized Art Deco Bridges. The first, Works Progress Administration, is based on an idea had in 1998, when I first started with Bryce 4.0. I did a "draft", but my skillz were weak and I never really got the hang of it. This is much, much closer to the idea I have in my head. The lighthouse-statue in the lower right is actually from my remake of Science.

The other, The Silver Zephyr, was an accident. I had a train in mind for the WPA bridge and spent quite a bit of time building a deco-style model. Unfortunately when I put it in the image, it looked very wrong. It blocked a lot of the detail and added very little. While puzzling out how to fix it, I conceived the second bridge. His hat was going to be an Indian War Bonnet, but it got away from me and is now a kind of comet-thingy.

Enjoy!

'premature AJAXulation'

Awesome talk at RSA last week. The title alone was worth 50 minutes of my time.

Motivational

Why Superman Sucks

pretty good really.

In the movie Superman Returns, Lois Lane writes an article explaining why mankind doesn't need Superman because we should be able to take care of ourselves, and the presence of an omnipotent superhero basically takes all responsibility off the human race and turns us into a bunch of helpless sheep, powerless to do anything but scream for help from our savior in times of crisis. She eventually decides this viewpoint is incorrect if only because she wants to bone Superman so badly, but the argument remains relevant no matter what.

Of course, to beleive this you have to have the opinion that people buy comic books for moral instruction or that they are a post-modern critique of the collective gestalt or some crazy-ass stuff like that.

Most of us read them because, you know, heat vision!

Elite

In a discussion with fellow elitists, a reference was made to the following article in The Nation which talks about the term's origin as an epitaph.

Served up on the same page was this ad:

You just can't write comedy like that.

Amazing Innovation

This is a pretty awesome set of innovations based on existing technology. I'm very impressed.

Not Helping As Much As They Think

HP accidently sent out a USB stick with a virus on it. Not good but, you know, things happen.
So what do they suggest to their customers?

To find out whether a drive is infected, HP recommends inserting it into a system with up-to-date antivirus software. Systems with up-to-date antivirus should be protected from the threat, according to HP.

Sweet Zombie Jesus!

"should be"

So if you are protected, it will clean it. If not? meh! You needed to update your anti-virus anyway!

This was one response from the security folks:

Tony puts hand on hot burner
Tony: OUCH! That’s hot.. Hey Steve
Steve looks up at Tony
Steve: Yeah?
Tony: Come here, put your hand on this and tell me if this is hot
Steve: Okay!
Steve puts hand on the same hot burner
Steve: OUCH! Yeah that’s hot.. Hey Carol!

Yeah, thats about right.

Dumbasses.

Works Progress Administration

Some new art. I;ve been working on this for a while and finally got a long enough break to put in a few hours. Consider it a late draft.

Best Summary of Iraq Hearings

here.

okay, I may have taken liberties with the definition of the word "best"

BTW, I am coming out from under a huge amount of work, so regular blog updates should resume shortly.

8! 8 Chips!

I miss my old Color Computer.

This TRS-80, according to what I could find on the Internet shipped with 16K of RAM. These 8 chips make up that RAM.

I miss my old Model 1 even more though.

the Basic and the OS fit in the 4 KB ROM

with another 4K for the program! Of course, back in the Elder Days, we all knew assembler. It was the only way to write a decent calendar program! We had to save pur programs on an audio cassttee recorder, which only worked when it was snowing during an eclipse. Also, the sound system consisted of an AM radio, through which we could hear the processor ticking away.

Sigh.

You Ruby on Rails folks don't know how sweet you have it.

A Real American Hero (tm)

From GI Joe:

"Actually Mrs. Clinton was too modest. I was there and saw it all. When Mrs. Clinton got off the plane the tarmac came under mortar and machine gun fire. I was blown off my tank and exposed to enemy fire. Mrs. Clinton without regard to her own safety dragged me to safety, jumped on the tank and opened fire, killing 50 of the enemy." Soon a suicide bomber appeared, but Mrs. Clinton stopped the guards from opening fire. "She talked to the man in his own language and got him [to] surrender. She found that he had suffered terribly as a result of policies of George Bush. She defused the bomb vest herself." Then she turned to his wounds. "She stopped my bleeding and saved my life. Chelsea donated the blood."

(via)

Light Posting

Unfortunately the new job puts me in a bad blog bind: I am busy doing things, cool, interesting wildly insane things, and I can't utter a peep about them. I can't even give you a hint about what we're doing, but I can say it's changed my view of the entire internet.

ugh.

Compartmentalized information control sucks.