As They Sow, So Shall They Reap

When you make it a point to try and remove and facility for incrudulity from your followers, it isn't surprising that they think everything is true.

To be honest, I'm not sure this isn't some kind of meta-parody.

I mean, *everyone* knows the Onion is a joke. Right???

here

Best comment in the comment section so far:

I'm pro life, but sweet Jesus you're an idiot. For your next post, how about a passionate speech on the need to immediately free Prince Albert from the can?

The Four Most Dangerous Words in the English Language

Good advice on investing from the Cassandra class:

"The best investing advice is simple, timeless, paradoxical -- and often ignored. Yes, ignored, because so many investors cannot make decisions. Lacking self-confidence, they rely on the random flow of breaking news. That overwhelming rush of new information, all of it short-term, drowns out the investment advice to which we should be adhering. Those timeless principles demand that we ignore breaking news and take personal responsibility, a very scary idea for investors who have lost their self-confidence.
This message has been summarized by the Chinese master Lao Tzu: "Those who know do not speak, those who speak do not know." He offered this investment advice three thousand years ago in the Tao Te Ching. Test it on any guru: Gross, Siegel, Bogle, Cramer, Bernanke, Paulson, and yes, even me. Of course, if investors took Lao Tzu's advice, Wall Street would be out of business. You'd be in command!"

Those words? This time it's different.

The Comics Curmudgeon

This is pretty good.

Business Cards

An interesting view of business cards:

6) Break the rules, particularly corporate ones (but don’t get fired). I had two cards that weren’t approved by the corporate branding department. They always got conversations started (one had a drawing done by Hugh Macleod — I made those specifically for speaking at Google’s Zeitgeist conference. The cards matched my slides I used at that talk. The business cards were so popular that people came and asked for them cause someone else showed them mine).
7) Be different. One of my favorite cards? Matt Mullenweg’s. It says simply “1. Go to google.com. 2. Type in “Matt.” 3. Press “I’m feeling lucky.” (It also has his phone number on it). Or, Kelly Goto’s card looks like a BART ticket (subway in San Francisco).

(via)

I have found this to be completely true. When I got to Microsoft, I had a number of "controversal" cards made up (until the facists in corporate stopped me). One said "Rocket Scientist" and another said "Evil Genius". All in good fun. Then, HR got a hold of me and gave me the following rules:

Allowed:
Name
Standard Microsoft Title as listed in the GAL (Global Address List)
Prefix Dr. or suffix Ph.D. (but not both)
Phone Number
Cell Phone Number
Corporate FAX Number
Corporate Address as listed in the GAL
I am allowed to have cards made in Braille

Not Allowed:
Anything with the words CEO, CFO, Gates, Ballmer, Mad, Evil, Chief, Love, McLove, Mc Sassy, Pope, Sieg Heil, President, Nastiest, Horse, Savage, Bottom, Top, Go-Go-Gaget, Super, Super Science, Super Duper, Father, Reverend, King, Queen, Czar, Master, Commander or Most Brutal

Me, I still think this leaves a *lot* of room. Unfortunately, all my cards orders need to be co-signed by my HR representative.

Sigh....

Blogger Graphics

This is pretty cool, a real time connection mapper for your website.

Here

Here is my art site, TirionGFX

and here is this site

TirionGFX blog

Very cool and useful in webs site design

Rupert Murdoch's MySpace Page

heehee

Time Cube!

Back in graduate school, I was the department librarian. It was a mildly boring chore, but I also got to be the recipient of a lot of "self-published" papers folks felt needed to be seen by the scientific community. Most of these were harmless, a handful wacky and one or two... well... one or two your really had to think about for an hour or two to find the crackpottery. Or at least I did.

PZ Meyers, Science blogger extraordinaire, is getting some interesting mail in the crackpot range:
EVOLUTION IS ENTIRELY FALLACIOUS.
MEIOSIS CASTRATES EVOLUTION.KARYOTYPES DISPROVE EVOLUTION.THE BASIC MECHANISMS SAID TO BE DRIVING EVOLUTION ARE ENTIRELY INADEQUATE,UTTERLY INCAPABLE OF PRODUCING NOVEL KARYOTYPES,NOVEL FEATURES,NOVEL FUNCTIONS.
1)EVOLUTION'S PHYLOGENIES ARE TOTALLY INCOMPATIBLE WITH KARYOTYPES;
2)THERE IS NO MECHANISM TO GENERATE NOVEL KARYOTYPES THAT ARE FERTILE(meiosis,homology,synapsis,centromeres etc.);MEIOSIS CASTRATES EVOLUTION BY FAILING TO PROCEED IF ANY CHROMOSOMES FAIL TO PAIR UP WITH HOMOLOGOUS PARTNERS.SEXUALLY REPRODUCIBLE KARYOTYPES THEREBY FIXED!EVOLUTIONARY PROGRESSION OF CHROMOSOME NUMBERS IS TOTALLY INCOMPATIBLE WITH THE MECHANISMS OF MEIOSIS.
ORIGIN OF KARYOTYPES WILL NEVER BE EXPLAINED BY EVOLUTION.
3)KARYOTYPES CANNOT TOLERATE ADDITION OR REMOVAL OF NOVEL OR NATIVE CHROMOSOMES;KARYOTYPES ARE TOTALLY INCOMPATIBLE WITH EVOLUTION.
4)FULLY INTEGRATED,EXQUISITELY ORCHESTRATED,INTRICATELY INTERLINKED FUNCTIONS OF CHROMOSOMES REQUIRE INHERITANCE OF COMPLETE AND ORIGINAL KARYOTYPES-TOTALLY INCOMPATIBLE WITH EVOLUTION;
5)SHEER SIZES OF CHROMOSOMES DEFY EVOLUTIONARY CONJECTURE
6)EVOLUTION CANNOT PRODUCE NOVEL FEATURES OR FUNCTIONS(too many separate but simultaneous and synergistic mutations would be required-see below)
meiosis renders evolution infertile
meiosis will not reproduce unmatched chromosomes etc.etc.etc.

If follows the standard format for eyecharts, big text getting smaller and smaller as it goes down (with some interesting color variations I've never seen before). You know, just like the papers in PhysRevD. Full text here


One of the readers points out the similarity to a famous piece of internet foolishness:


Judging by his formatting and typographical preferences, I'm surprised he didn't claim that evolution is also impossible because of Time Cube.
Posted by: Sean Foley July 4, 2006 02:57 PM

Okay, so here's what I am thinking: I should start a blog catalog of these type of obscuria nonsensica. Categorized them not by subject matter, but by insanity style:

Category 1: logical conclusion reached by ignoring incontinent facts

Category 2: illogical conclusion reached by false assumptions

Category 3: logical conclusion reached with a pure state of self consistent but wrong assumptions
Category 3a: Must propose new physics/laws of nature/mathematics
Category 3b: 3a + must also be rejected by journals/PhD committee

Category 4: illogical conclusion reached through dogma
Category 4a: Must have interesting fonts/capitalization
Category 4b: Cat 4a + Must contain supervillian-esque rant about the scientific community
Category4c: Cat 4b + Must contain "why won't you respond are you too afraid/stupid/closeminded/offyour meds" rant

Category 5: illogical conclusion reached by setting an epileptic chimp in front of a keyboard and posting the result as "proof"


So, on the Horvath scale, FoxNews weighs in at a mere Cat2 , PZs writer scores a full 4C, and the current administration's war policy comes in at ... well... I think that's kind of obvious.

TIME CUBE!

Two Words

The following is a chain of thought from this morning

Headline:Did They FindNoah's Ark?
Archaeologists Are 'Amazed'
Mark: There's no such thing as Noah's ark. Why would this be news? No sane archaeologist would claim such a stupid thing.
[clicks on article] (June 29) - Texas archaeologists ...
Mark: Oh! *Texas* archaelogists! That explains it.

A Week Late for Father's Day

Still, I know what I want for my birthday...

Brotron

Spiderman 3

The trailer is out, looks pretty good. For those of you who are comicy, it seems like they are doing the excellent Venom story.

For those of you who are not, the Venom story is about ... well...

Maybe you should just see the movie, it should be good. :)

Logorrhea

A kind of amusing take down of bloggers who take themselves way too seriously. In this case, InstaPundit

But what would we-dia actually look like? This is a question that can be easily answered by InstaPundit. Reynolds's blog consists largely of links to news or opinion articles and other blogs followed by comments consisting of such profound observations as "Heh," or "Read the whole thing," or "Indeed." (These are recurring tropes whose centrality can't be exaggerated.) What Reynolds lacks in analysis, he makes up for in abundance of content. On any given day, he'll provide his readers nearly 20 entries--or, if you can stomach it, more.

The blogosphere doesn't universally suffer from this extreme case of logorrhea or vacuity. (Nor are newspaper columnists immune from the latter syndrome.) It contains plenty of experts and thoughtful analysts who excel at precisely the analysis that is hardly the forte of newspaper reporters and eludes old-fashioned pundits. But Reynolds exposes how the blogosphere, at its worst, values timeliness over thought. After linking to an article on congressional earmarks, he'll add, "Well, that's encouraging. Sheesh." Quod erat demonstrandum. Or he'll carp, "Nancy Pelosi, on the other hand, is just dumb"--a point that may be perfectly true but probably requires some explanation or proof beyond the simple assertion. In the end, this method provides the intellectual horsepower of, say, an Andy Rooney commentary. To wit, he wrote in December, "A battery recall on the XM portables. Is it just me, or are we seeing more battery recalls lately." Well, no need for The New York Times, then.

A Terrifying Message from Al Gore

"Yes, I play a streetwise pimp. With a hybrid pimpmobile"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BjrOi4vF24

(kudos to Geoff for this)

A Masterpiece of Sloppy Thinking

[This is my once every few week non-humorous posts]

From Pharyngula:

What else can I think, when reading Echidne of the Snakes, I run across this astonishing gem of self-loathing femininity.
If you could change one thing about the world, regardless of guilt and politics, what would you do? Hoo-boy, this is where I get in trouble, and that starts with "T" and that rhymes with "P" and that stands for "pool." I'd like to jump in a pool right now. Some may tell me to jump in a river for this one: I would remove women's suffrage, and I might even consider making voting rights tied to property ownership.
Well, actually, she doesn't get in trouble: read the comments and everyone is quite supportive, and think that disenfranchising the majority of Americans is simply a wonderful idea. It would clear the roles of all those worthless welfare queens who always vote for Democrats, dontcha know. Women aren't supposed to vote or run for office or do anything other than serve their families.
And they're very, very happy about it all.

Happy indeed. Positively jubulent.
A sample:
I completely agree with both removing women’s suffrage and coupling voting rights with property ownership. I am always hesitant to admit my views on the suffrage movement, but I strongly feel that our nation made a grievous error when we allowed women many of the same “rights” as men. First off, I think that voting should be a family affair with the wife putting in her input, but the man ultimately deciding on which candidate he votes for. I think women are too emotional and often vote for the “bleeding heart liberal” cause because it feels right to them. When I tell folks my view on this they always ask if I vote. Yes, I do because my husband wants me to.

My solution is the same as the solution to the abortion question: if you don't think women should vote, and you are a woman, don't vote.

I'm a little shocked that almost a century after woman's sufferage anyone, anyone at all, can still think like this.

Quote of the Day

"There is nothing that has a greater hold on the minds of people than ignorance fraught with technicalities."

Trying to find who said this, but it's great.
From here

Up Your Funk and Wagnalls

A new word dawns:

: What is “blogofascism”?
A: Blogofascism is a violent online political philosophy and movement. It is characterized by:
A cult of personality built around dangerously charismatic 2002 US Spelling Bee quaterfinalist and apple-cheek’ed nerd despot Markos “Kos” Moulitsas;
A reactionary rejection of all standards of human decency and/or invitations to subscribe to The New Republic;
Many other terrible qualities, TBD.
Q: Is blogofascism real?
A: Realer than anything you could possibly imagine.
Q: Is there any evidence for this?
A: The evidence is right there on your home computer. Open up Miscrosoft Word, and type “blogofascism”. Note that “blogofascism” - the most dangerous political movement in America, bar none - is not even in the Word dictionary! An oversight? Recall now that Bill Gates announced his intention to step down as head of Microsoft - the world’s most powerful computer company - just as blogofascism - the world’s most dangerous computer cult - has come into its own. Is Gates planning on turning Miscrosoft over to “Khairman Kos”, as part of a dastardly scheme to bundle “Halloween III”-style exploding novelty masks with every install of the long-anticipated “Longhorn” operating system? Connect the dots, people! We went through the looking glass a long time ago. We went through the looking glass, walked around the looking glass world for a while, and then went through a couple of looking glass looking glasses we found in there, and we’ve all been flipped inside out and upside down so many times we don’t know if we can believe anything anymore. What does it all mean? Fucked if we know, but if a chronically tardy bunny in a gold-button’ed waistcoat starts waving weird pills at you, for God’s sake, just say no!
Also, we are in the process of forging some really incriminating emails.

The Kind of Thing You'll Like if You Like That Kinda Thing

New episodes of Original Series Star Trek, made by fans with digital rendering.
(here)

I downloaded the first teaser and the first episode. It's not all that bad. Certainly watchable. I was quietly impressed.

One interesting thing (at least for me) is that all the scenes with the ship are rendered digitally with models that are publically available and fan made.

(Update: Fixed link)

The Venture Brothers

are back! Saw Episode 2x01 yesterday and it was pretty good.

Hooray!

(what's he talking about?)

Personality Tests I am Forced to Question

This one:

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

From Doctor Nick

9 Years to the Singularity

So says no less a publication than the Economist:

So what does the future hold? With only five data-points, it is hard to be sure exactly which mathematical curve is being followed. If it is what is known as a power law, then the 14-bladed razor should arrive in 2100. The spate of recent innovation, however, suggests it may be a hyperbola. In that case, blade hyperdrive will be reached in the next few years and those who choose not to sport beards might be advised to start exercising their shaving arms now.



Who knows? After the Rapture/Singualrity, I might finally get a perfect shave!

Touched by an Atheist

George Carlin is still funny.

I need to start volunteering down at the clinic.

Maybe I Should Tune Into Fox Once in Awhile

This is ... well many things. Terrible, unprofessional, unexpected from Fox and... hilarious!

Behold the power of a well shaken can of Whoop-Ass.

Backstory: For those of you who are unaware, the Rev. Phelps and his church became famous in the '90s for disrupting the funerals of AIDs victims with signs, loud speakers and protesters. Really, just-not-done kind of stuff. It made them famous, doubtless got them lots of backing from rich crazy folks and really showed how little compassion some Christians have.

However, the thrill is gone form that. There are, unfortunately, too many AIDs funerals now and, fortunately, most respectable media outlets refuse to give them air time. So they did what any brand-savy media organization does when the market moves, they followed it. Consequently, they rarely picked funerals of AIDs victims anymore.

Now they picket the funerals of Iraq war dead.

Yeah.

Theoretically, that's what Mrs. Phelps is there to discuss.

That Sounds About Right

I don't remember this, but it sounds exactly like what I would do. My mother responds to the sparkler incident:

Hi Mark: was reading your blog never knew about the sparkler incident but I do remember when you about 3 years old we were at grandma's and you decided to see if toilet paper would burn in a circle. so you locked the door and lit the toilet paper then you got scared and wouldn't unlock the door I climbed through the window and got you out you were so scared and looked so sad I didn't even punish you.

Actually, I very vaugely remember my mother climbing in the window of the bathroom to rescue me from something gone wrong. This could be the same incident or it could be after I moved from fire to water as a hobby...

Pinkerton Nails It (again)

This is an excellent guide, although I dont agree with all his choices.

The opening minute of Last Action Hero casts Arnold Schwarzenegger as Hamlet. Arnold Schwarzenegger. As Hamlet.

Okay, that's worth seeing, at least once.

Fractal Foolishness

This is *way* cool. Better even than the Hasselhoff Recursion

Winner: The Egg!

Finally! Closure!

"Therefore, the first living thing which we could say unequivocally was a member of the species would be this first egg," he added. "So, I would conclude that the egg came first."

The same conclusion was reached by his fellow "eggsperts" Professor David Papineau, of King's College London, and poultry farmer Charles Bourns.

Mr Papineau, an expert in the philosophy of science, agreed that the first chicken came from an egg and that proves there were chicken eggs before chickens.

The Central Conceit

Brian Dunbar at Liftport send me over a copy of a book they're working for review, and I, for my part, am going to blog my comments. Liftport is a private company working to build a Space Elevator as a cheap, high tech access to space.

So I got a copy, opened it and immediately looked for the section I care the most about: does the physics of this work? Every story I've ever read on this technology (and there is lots, all well documented in the book) has as it's central conceit, some kind of fudge about the strength of materials involved, i.e. diamond hyper- filament, electrosupported nanocarbon tubes, carbon re-enforced Unobtainium etc. Without some really solid physics backing the engineering, this falls into the bin of Things-I'd-Like-to-See-But-Can't-Happen, like a moonbase or a secular government.

But wait, your saying to yourself, wouldn't most people say, "they are a funded company. Surely smarter, better people than you, say actual, factual certified engineers, have worked this out already. Isn't this just your usual physicist-arrogance. If they have raised money, surely the market has validated the approach. What’s wrong with you that you don’t believe anything?"

Most people would say that, but then, most people didn't work for CertCo.

I raised $35M for CertCo in the last year of the company, and now I've been on the other side of funding decisions. While I don't know what Due Diligence was done for the Liftport folks(likely lots), my experiences have me questioning business plan central conceits. Most people *want* these things to work badly enough to … overlook some of the red flags. Maybe they are really yellow. Maybe some breakthrough will happen etc. Don’t know that this happened here (and given this is hardware not software I suspect the level of DD is an order of magnitude higher), but that’s my concern since I also want this to work. The chapter is very well written and comes with it’s own fairly skeptical caveats as well. Very well done.

So this weekend I find myself re-learning some of the stuff I failed to learn around materials science (I got a C+ at Penn State) and, not having access to Mathematica, I am looking things up in The Russians.

In other words, I'm having the best time I've had in months. Thank you very much Brian! I'm rooting for this to work out.

A History of This Kind of Thing

Promoted from the comments section of yesterday's post involving sticking birthday candles in the toaster:

Actually, I was using the toaster because I was 4 and had already been punished for playing with matches. The way I figured it though, the toaster was acceptable and a source of much needed fire for the candles on my bear's birthday cake.

Later, when this proved also to unacceptable to my parents, I figured the cigarette lighter in the car would also work. I out clevered myself there though and tried to light a sparkler in the front seat of my fathers 65 Thunderbird. I remember thinking it would be fun to light the sparkler, that the car lighter would work (having been chased off matches and the toaster), I remember pushing the lighter in, watching it heat, touching it when it popped out with the heating element a wonderful cherry-red, touching the sparkler to the element, waiting, waiting, waiting and being totally and completely surprised by the unexpected thing which happened next.
The sparkler lit.
I have no idea why this surprised me since it was the goal of the experiment, but I was so shocked when the front seat of the car being filled with white-hot thermite sparks I screamed and .... dropped the sparkler onto the floor of the car! It immediately went under the passengers seat, hissing and burning the whole time. I was about 4 or 5 and had seen enough tv to know what was going to happen next. The car was going to explode. I ran out of the car, locked the doors and shut them (thinking maybe that the explosion couldn’t get out of a locked car??? I don’t’ remember what I was thinking other than “aahaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!”) and ran behind a nearby tree with my fingers in my ears waiting for the car to explode and trying to figure out what I would tell my father. Fortunately the T-Bird was made of sterner stuff and failed to explode. Days went by while I worried they would figure out what I did (and while I waited for the car to explode ‘cause that sparkler didn’t go immediately and maybe there was a similar delayed reaction with the car). Eventually I got back into the car and found the sparkler melted into the (plastic-based) fabric under the front seat. I fished it out and threw it away and never, ever touched the cigarette lighter again.

Because that was the week my father, the welder, brought home his oxy-acetylene torch…

His Own Man

I rarely get inspried by other people's stories, but this one hit me just right. Worth a read.

The Cell Processor

Excellent article in Wiki on the next generation of computer processors. It uses an interesting, multi-node design quite unlike the current generation of RISC processors. It's better at single precision calculation than double (where it takes an order of magnitude hit in performace), so dont expect to see it on your desktop any time soon, but in the world of computational finance, this technology could make huge strides.

Update: In a conversation with a non-technical MSFT person on why this is Bad News for Microsoft.
Mark: "It's like this, Microsoft makes ovens. Ovens are general purpose heating units used for a wide variety of tasks and you dont really know in advance what you're going to ask the oven to do day-to-day. You could heat water, you could broil a roast, you could bake cookies, you could melt pennies on the burners when your Mom isn't home, just about anything."
Dennis: "Okay. Wait... you did what with pennies..."
Mark:"But, you don't make toast with your oven. You could, but you dont"
Dennis: "No, of course not"
Mark:"But you could!"
Dennis: "Yes, but..."
Mark"But you us a toaster!"
Dennis:"Of course"
Mark: "A toaster is a specific purpose machine for making toast and toast-related products. You can't make roasts or cookies or melt anything larger than birthday candles in them."
Dennis, "Why would you put birthday candles in a toaster?"
Mark:"It was an experiement. Thats not important right now. Microsoft makes ovens, but IBM in exploring the Cell design powered by one-off specific implimentations of Linux are making toasters. and microwave ovens."
Dennis:"becuase they are good at a specific function rather than a general one"
Mark:'Exactly."
Dennis: "Oh! I get it! Oh! Oh! This is not good."
Mark: "No, not for Microsoft in Financial Services, no"
Dennis: "Okay, I get it. "


Cell is a microprocessor architecture jointly developed by a Sony, Toshiba, and IBM alliance known as STI over a four year period beginning March 2001 on a design budget informally reported by IBM as being in the range of $400 million. Cell is a shorthand for Cell Broadband Engine Architecture, commonly abbreviated CBEA in full or Cell BE in part. Cell combines a general purpose POWER-architecture core of modest performance with streamlined coprocessing elements which greatly accelerate multimedia and vector processing applications, as well as many other forms of dedicated computation.
The major commercial application of Cell is in Sony's upcoming PlayStation 3 game console which is slated to launch in November 2006. It will also become available in a blade configuration from Mercury Computer Systems. Toshiba has announced plans to incorporate Cell in high definition television sets. Exotic features such as the XDR memory subsystem and coherent EIB interconnect appear to position Cell for future applications in the supercomputing space to exploit the Cell processor's prowess in floating point kernels.
The Cell architecture breaks ground in combining a light-weight general-purpose processor with multiple GPU-like coprocessors into a coordinated whole, a feat which involves a novel memory coherence architecture for which IBM received many patents. The resulting architecture emphasizes efficiency/watt and prioritizes bandwidth over latency, and peak computational throughput over simplicity of program code. For these reasons, Cell is widely regarded as a challenging environment for software development. IBM provides a comprehensive Linux-based Cell development platform to assist developers in confronting these challenges. Software adoption remains a key issue in whether Cell ultimately delivers on its performance potential.

Volcano

This is a cool shot from over at the Astronomy Picture of the Day of the Cleveland Volcano, taken from orbit by astronaut Jeff Williams on the International Space Station.

It's interesting how even the clouds and fog upwind are rolled back by the pyroclastic force.

The Number of the Beast

Today is, obviously, 06/06/06, the number of the Beast. And, not by coincidence, the Beast is publishing a new book today!


Though liberalism rejects the idea of God and reviles people of faith, it bears all the attributes of a religion itself. In Godless, Ann Coulter throws open the doors of the Church of Liberalism, showing us:
Its sacraments (abortion)
Its holy writ (Roe v. Wade)
Its martyrs (from Soviet spy Alger Hiss to cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal)
Its clergy (public school teachers)
Its churches (government schools, where prayer is prohibited but condoms are free)
Its doctrine of infallibility (as manifest in the "absolute moral authority" of spokesmen from Cindy Sheehan to Max Cleland)
And its cosmology (in which mankind is an inconsequential accident)
Then, of course, there's the liberal creation myth: Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
For liberals, evolution is the touchstone that separates the enlightened from the benighted. But Coulter neatly refutes the charade that liberals are rationalists guided by the ideals of free inquiry and the scientific method. She exposes the essential truth about Darwinian evolution that liberals refuse to confront: it is bogus science.

Mentos + Diet Coke

Now this is how you do science!

http://eepybird.com/dcm1.html

The Extreme Diet Coke & Mentos Experiments:

What happens when you combine 200 liters of Diet Coke and over 500 Mentos mints? It's amazing and completely insane.The first part of this video demonstrates a simple geyser, and the second part shows just how extreme it can get. Over one hundred jets of soda fly into the air in less than three minutes.It's a hysterical and spectacular mint-powered version of the Bellagio Fountains in Las Vegas, brought to you by the mad scientists at EepyBird.com.

Like I need Another Hobby...

This place is right around the corner and offers both a studio and classes at a reasonable price. I've always wanted to learn to do this (this and metal sculpture). Seems pretty cool...

Seattle Glassblowing Studio

Popular with the Ladies

For those of you who haven't seen me lately, you should know I've grown a goatee. I do this about once every 3 or 4 years and each time it's a little thicker and much grayer than the time before. This time I've asked a number of women their opinions on it and whether or not I should shave it off. This is a non-trival thing as a) in my youth I did this and it looked terrible and b) I don't want to encourage my son to do this. The Horvath hair growing genes don't kick in until 30 or so and then they merely move the hair from the scalp to the face (and other, less postable places).
So far the verdict is unanimous, 7:0 in favor of keeping it. So, for now anyway, it stays. I'm surprised that there has been *no* decenting opinions on this as pretty much everything I do has some detractors.

So my question is this ladies: what the hell is so wrong with my face that it needs to be covered with hair?????

Noctilucent Clouds

This is very cool:

STRANGE CLOUDS; Last night, sky watchers in Northern Ireland witnessed a vivid display of electric-blue noctilucent clouds. Also known as "NLCs," these clouds float through the outer reaches of Earth's atmosphere at the very edge of space. They are most often seen from far-northern places such as Scandinavia or Canada, but in recent years they have been spotted as far south as Colorado and Utah. Last night's display marks the beginning of the 2006 noctilucent cloud season. Visit http://spaceweather.com for observing tips and a gallery of recent sightings.

Global Climate Change

JS (an old friend from High School who just found my blog, btw) and a few others have asked about my views on global climate change. I'm traveling at the moment, but have had a little time to phrase a short, non-lecture on my views. I'm going to avoid, for the sake of nit-pickiness, a lot of the boring details, in part because there are other resources on the net and in part because I don't want this to be a lecture.

Things I think are true:
1) The climate is changing. Lots and lots of evidence over the last 250 years suggests this is true. We definitely exist in a period of history where the climate is undergoing a change at faster-than-geologic timescales. How it's changing is less clear as is why it's changing right now.

2) It's getting warmer. Yeah, yeah there are studies here and there which show things like increased thickness in some part of the Greenland ice sheet etc. however the overall trend over the past 50 years is towards significant warming. A piece of Antarctica the size of Rhode Island broke off last year for Christ’s sake! The climate is a complex, non-linear system with a so many self-regulating feedback loops we can't make any kind of detailed prediction about local reactions. The Greenland ice sheet maybe getting a little thicker, but clearly the seawater is warmer and overall planetary ice coverage is down. One of the annoying things the conservatives do is equate the little with the big to make it look balanced. Context is everything, and in the context of warming, all kinds of non-immediately intuitive things can happen. It's like doing physics in a non-inertial reference frame. Your assumptions, while often true, are not always true. Climate change is similar

3) Some part of the warmth is due to industrialization. Its very clear that greenhouse gasses cause temperature increase. Yes, some folks at Exxon will debate that but please, the science has been in the bag on this for half a century. In the 50's they were thinking they could build weather control machines based on emitting or absorbing Co(2). Chaos theory put a pin in that, but the science on CO(2) was strong enough to invite that kind of speculation. We’ve dumped a lot of greenhouse gas into the air, there has to be some reaction.

4) We may not be able to do anything productive to halt the change. It's not clear what should be done. I'm guessing if we stop dumping CO(2) into the air at pre-Cambrian rates, it will have some net positive effect, but I don't think anyone knows. I used to think we could scrub out the CO(2) by locking it into solids again. Imagine a car that had a converter in it that actually locked up more CO(2) into a carbon brick than it emitted into the air. Cool huh? However, the Earth's climate system is in full repair mode now. Suddenly removing the gas might cause it to swing too far the other way, resulting in a loss of nearly all greenhouse warmth. This becomes the "white earth" scenario very quickly and all our (admittedly poor) climate models suggest it's hard to get out of the "white earth". It’s not clear yet what to do, how to do it, or even when.

5) The rainbelts will continue to migrate northward as the problem gets worse. Something clear in both the analog and digital modeling of the climate.

6) The earth is not guaranteed to be habitable to our civilization. Sorry folks, it just isn't. Mankind will probably survive anything likely to happen, but civilization is not guaranteed.

7) It will probably take 50-150 years for the bite to really sink in, and it's probably too late to do much about it. The thing about chaotic systems is that, once they switch modes, the new modes look a lot like the old ones for awhile, even though it's too late to do anything about it.

In a short piece, thats where my head is on this. Feel free to correct or debate me.
oh, and

8) No, it's not variations in solar luminosity. The Sun is not a Cepheid variable, is a Zero Age Main Sequence Star (ZAMS). People suggesting this really out to take an astronomy class for actual credit. This one is my pet peeve because people who know nothing about astrophysics throw this off as an excuse not understanding what they are saying.

Deconstructing Al Gore

As you all know, I'm an astronomer by training and one of my areas of concentration was planetary science. When it comes to arguments on global climate change I'm universally dismissive of easy explanations on both sides, i.e. I look at the data and understand this is a high Hausdroff dimension attractor in a non-linear system.

Climate change is, based on the evidence, real. It seems humans are likely responsible for part of it but certainly not all. This is not being caused by sunspots or variability in the Sun (unless the Sun has somehow become a Cepheid variable). It's not clear than we can do anything about it at this point and if we could, what exactly we should do. The planet has been inhospitable to human civilization before and is likely to be again.


All that said, I have met Al Gore's new movie with more than a dallop of skepticism. It a complex issue that doesn't make for good politics.

Here is a professional take down, piece by piece of the movie. Seems like he did a pretty reasonable job.

Best comment of the month on Immegration

From AS:

The Governor of Arizona, Janet Napolitano, says, "A fifty foot wall will create a market for fifty-five foot ladders."

Winner: Best Opening Line of a Blog Entry, Science or Humor Category

From P.Z. Meyers:

Four of my favorite things are development, evolution, and breasts, and now I have an article that ties them all together in one pretty package.

The Blood Rain

This is pretty interesting, although I don't buy into the theory that it's origin is panspermic.


The red rain that fell in the Indian state of Kerala continues to create interest. Are the particles found suspended within it extraterrestrial in nature? The rain first fell on the 25th of July, 2001, but red rain phenomena continued to occur for two months thereafter, although in some cases other colors appeared, and there are reports of colored hailstones. This was no one-shot event. I’ve held off on this story hoping to get further information, but enough readers have asked for details that I’ll go with what we now have.

We know this much: The red color is caused by the mixing of microscopic red particles with the water, the characteristics of which are unusual. As noted by Godfrey Louis and Santhosh Kumar (Mahatma Gandhi University) in their paper on the subject, the particles vary from 4 to 10 microns in size and appear under magnification as red-colored glass beads. Electron microscope work shows them to have “…a fine structure similar to biological cells.”
And although they look something like unicellular organisms, the particles show no nucleus, although dyes reveal ‘…a layered structure after the dye penetration.’ They’re also quite stable over time, showing no decay or discoloration after storage without preservatives for over four years. No trace of RNA or DNA can be found.

Moreover, the major elements found in these particles are carbon and oxygen. The amount of material is substantial: With more than 100 reported cases of red rain, the authors surmise that, at minimum, over 50,000 kg of red particles are involved. They rule out particles washed out from rooftops or trees, and find it unlikely that, given the wide dispersion geographically, the particles are pollen or fungal spores. Nor do they believe a serious case can be made that the red rains were caused by desert dust.

Save the Gases!

I have to admit, I thought this was a joke.

*They* call it pollution, we call it Life!

Appearently, it was made in all seriousness, much like the Mah-ha-ye video.

The Past is Not Really As Good as we Remember It

Thaurloteion: mork and mindy was a spinoff from happy days?
Toast171: yes
Thaurloteion: the show about the 50s? with diners and motorcycles?
Toast171: eerrrrr... yes.
Toast171: also the show that invented the term "jump the shark"
Thaurloteion: how do these two relate?
Toast171: The Fonz fought Mork in a battle of psychokinetic prowess
Toast171: and won
Toast171: we dont speak of it
Thaurloteion: theres a part of me that doesnt believe you, but its fighting with the part of me that believes if a show goes on long enough, things like that will happen
Toast171: oh yes, it's all so horribly true
Toast171: and then there was the Happy Days Cartoon
Toast171: with the time machine
Toast171: and the magic-using ditz blonde from the 23rd century
Toast171: and some kind of pet
Toast171: that was also somehow magical
Thaurloteion: yes Mr. Cool
Thaurloteion: the fonz's dog
Toast171: hmmm.. she wasn't blonde
Thaurloteion: really, how was mork and mindy a spinoff?
Thaurloteion: because i thought it was set in the 70s
Toast171: it was as I said, and yes it was set in the late 70s/early 80s
Toast171: and later sported Johnathon Winters as a baby who aged backwatds
Toast171: TV is much better today
Toast171: even Stargate
Thaurloteion: so this
Thaurloteion: The character of Mork was introduced in an episode of Happy Days titled "My Favourite Orkan". Richie tells everyone he has seen a flying saucer but no one else believes him. Fonzie tells him that people make up stories about UFOs because their lives are "humdrum". Then, while Richie's at home, Mork walks in. He freezes everyone with his finger except Richie and says he was sent to Earth to find a "humdrum" human to take back to Ork. Richie runs to Fonzie for help. When Mork catches up to him, he freezes everyone but finds himself unable to freeze Fonzie due to The Fonz's famous and powerful thumbs. Mork challenges Fonzie to a duel: Finger vs. Thumb. After their duel, The Fonz admits defeat. But Mork decides to take Fonzie back to Ork instead of Richie. Then, Richie wakes up and realizes he was dreaming. There is a knock on the door and much to Richie's dismay, it is a man who looks exactly like Mork except in regular clothes asking for directions. When production on Mork & Mindy began, an extra scene was filmed and added to this episode for subsequent reruns. Mork contacts Orson and explains that he decided to let Fonzie go, and was going to travel to the year 1978 to continue his mission.
Thaurloteion: is accurate?
Thaurloteion: "famous and powerful thumbs?"
Toast171: eech... yes, every word is true
Thaurloteion: and people complain about Simpsons plots
Toast171: no matter how low you fall in life son, shows like this prove there really is no bottom to society. These guys were *paid* to write this. Someone thought it was a *good* idea. Be afraid.
Thaurloteion: but did they only think it was a good idea because they sold their souls to the devil for some cocaine and millions of dollars?
Toast171: dozens of dollars, but yes

A Man in Search of an Argument

Darwin's worst nightmare. A single post and 850+ comments. I read a few.

Weird, but not uncommon. A guy starts a blog solely for the sake of arguing with the millions of folks who must obviously be waiting for him to show up, then seems disappointed when only his friends arrive. So he argues with them perpetuating a self-re-enforcing cycle of loneliness and isolation. I read into the first week or so and they seems, sort of sad.

I see this a lot and was worried for a while I was getting like this. All I can say is that I think folks like this must be very very lonely.

Where to Shave

Go here
Click Main Menu
Click the "where to shave" option.
You can figure the rest out for yourself.

Smirk all day long as you think to yourself: "Roman Gladiator Mask"

Caption Contest

This seems to me to be a particularly fine idea:

As Field Correspondent, I have to admit that all the good stories are being reported. So, as any good journalist will do in tough times, I have decided to submit a manufactured item for your consideration:Based on the photo below, what would be the best caption? The first that comes to my mind is: "I have a WHAT on my WHERE??????" What do you think?

I feel the bony finger of Skeletor!

I was a little too old to really watch He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, but my brother (who later became a wrestler) was a huge fan when he was about 6. I seem to remember Geoff watching this too, but I could easily have confabulated that memory.

It's a priceless take-down:

The best part about rewatching He-Man, after the initial nostalgia-burst, was tracking the show's hilarious accidental homo-eroticism—an aspect I missed completely as a first-grader. In the ever-growing lineup of "outed" classic superheroes, He-Man might be the easiest target of all. It's almost too easy: Prince Adam, He-Man's alter ego, is a ripped Nordic pageboy with blinding teeth and sharply waxed eyebrows who spends lazy afternoons pampering his timid pet cat; he wears lavender stretch pants, furry purple Ugg boots, and a sleeveless pink blouse that clings like saran wrap to his pecs. To become He-Man, Adam harnesses what he calls "fabulous secret powers": His clothes fall off, his voice drops a full octave, his skin turns from vanilla to nut brown, his giant sword starts gushing energy, and he adopts a name so absurdly masculine it's redundant. Next, he typically runs around seizing space-wands with glowing knobs and fabulously straddling giant rockets. He hangs out with people called Fisto and Ram Man, and they all exchange wink-wink nudge-nudge dialogue: "I'd like to hear more about this hooded seed-man of yours!" "I feel the bony finger of Skeletor!" "Your assistance is required on Snake Mountain!" Once you start thinking along these lines, it's impossible to stop. (Clearly, others have had the same idea.) It's a prime example of how easily an extreme fantasy of masculinity can circle back to become its opposite.

Best Student Physics Paper this Year!

Beating hands-down, “Investigation into the Gravitational Hyperforce Actually Measures Number of Cars in Parking Lot on Weekends”, Answer 6”*

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/hall.html

*My Senior Undergraduate Thesis in Astronomy at Penn State

The Fifth World

What if, instead of forming an asteroid belt, the solar system had produced at planet between Mars and Jupiter? How would that have formed, and what would be different?

A new paper explores this hypothesis, Planet Artemis: the case for the formation and delayed destruction of a fifth Solar System terrestrial planet

We investigate the possibility that a fifth terrestrial planet (nicknamed “Artemis”) may have formed beyond Mars’ orbit, in what is now the asteroid belt. Artemis could have formed in a region that was stable before the giant planets’ shift, but unstable thereafter, probably between 1.8-2.2 AU. We simulate the giant planets’ orbital shift to explore Artemis’ demise, varying Artemis’ mass and starting location. In each simulation, the giant planets’ eccentricity jump causes a increase in the terrestrial planets’ eccentricities, sometimes causing their orbits to cross and collisions to occur. In simulations where Artemis is 1/3 Earth mass or larger, Mars is typically destroyed via ejection or a collision, and Mercury often falls into the Sun. In cases with a Mars-mass Artemis, either Mars or Artemis is ejected. However, the remnant terrestrial planets often have higher orbital eccentricities than observed today because of multiple close encounters. Rapid destruction of Artemis is needed to keep terrestrial eccentricities low.

I did something like this (but much scaled down with no simulation) in grad school for my planetary sciences class. I used the Virial Theorem to show that in most cases the binding energy for the solar system causes ejection of the protoplanet, but this anlysis is more subtle and shows cases where the planet either fails to form or is quickly destroyed.

Destroying a planet is no simple feat. The amount of energy required, for example, to destroy the current Earth would take approximately the *entire* output of the Sun for 3 weeks.

Darwin Awards

Here

My favorite so far is the Stubbed Out

DARWIN AWARD (17 April 2006, England) There's always someone who thinks that good advice doesn't apply to them. For example, if advised by a doctor that you are to be covered wtih a flammable material, and the one thing you must not do is go near a naked flame, most people would be able to take this advice onboard, and not strike a match until the flammable material smeared on your body had been taken off.
However, Phillip, 60, decided he knew better. He was in hospital for the treatment of a skin disease, which consisted of being covered with a paraffin-based cream. He was warned that the cream was flammable and that he definitely shouldn't smoke. But Phillip couldn't live without his cigarettes.
Smoking was not permitted in the ward, but Phillip took this setback in stride, and sneaked out onto a fire escape. Once he was in his little hiding place, he lit up... ahh. Everything went well as he got his nicotine fix; things went downhill only after he finished his cigarette, and ground out the butt with his heel.
Unfortunately, the paraffin skin cream had been absorbed by his clothing. As he stamped out the butt, it lit the fumes coming off his pyjamas. The resulting inferno treated his skin ailment, and left him with first-degree burns over 70% of his body. Despite excellent emergency treatment, he died in the intensive care unit.
Using the Darwin checklist:
1.Reproduction -- if he has children, he's not having any more.2.Excellence -- this is one that I'll remember.3.Self-Selection -- he was warned that paraffin and flames don't mix.4.Maturity -- At 60 I'd guess he was old enough to make his own decisions.5.Veracity -- All the major news carriers in the UK had the story.
This ticks all the boxes, and though I feel sorry for the family, I think that it acts as a warning that if a doctor tells you not to smoke, there's probably a very good reason.
There's always someone who thinks that advice doesn't apply to them.
For example, usually if a person was told by a doctor that they were going
to be covered in a flammable material and that the one thing they
shouldn't do is go near a naked flame, most people would be able to take
this advice on board and not set anything on fire until they were told that
the stuff smeared on their body had been taken off.
One man however, Phillip Hoe (60), decided that he knew better. He was in
hospital for treatment of a skin disease, the medication consisted of
covering him in a paraffin based cream. The gentleman was warned that the
cream was flammable and that he definitely shouldn't smoke, however he
decided that there was no way he could go without his cigarettes. There
was no smoking allowed inside the hospital, but Mr. Hoe took this minor
problem in his stride and managed to sneak out of the ward and find a fire
escape. Once this little hiding place had been discovered, he decided it
would be OK to light up. Everything went swimmingly well as he got his
nicotine hit, however things went a little awry when he finished his
cigarette. Mr Hoe decided to dispose of his cigarette in the time-honoured
fashion of dropping it onto the floor and then stamping on it.
Unfortunately for Mr. Hoe the paraffin applied to his body had been
absorbed by his pyjamas, and as he stamped out the cigarette it lit the
fumes coming off the paraffin. The injuries from the resulting inferno
(can't quite get that scene with the candle from Saw out of my head)
left Mr. Hoe with first degree burns over 70% of his body, he received
emergency treatment at an intensive care unit, but unfortunately died.
Using the Darwin checklist:
1.Reproduction -- Don't know if he's got children, but he's not having any more.
2.Excellence -- It's one that I'll remember.
3.Self-Selection -- He was warned that paraffin and flames were not a good combination.
4.Maturity -- At 60 I'd guess he was old enough to make his own decisions.
5.Veracity -- All the major news carriers in the UK had the story.
I think it ticks all the boxes, and though I feel sorry for the family, I
think that it acts as a warning that if someone tells you not to do
something, there's probably a very good reason.

Wrongness is a Fermionic Property

Ha!

An excellent takedown of a foolish, offhand comment from Instapundit. Don't get me wrong, I read Glenn and often think he has a point, but often it's just the usual non-stop blog narcisissm.

I love the idea of the fermionic properties of wrongness too.

Made Out of Meat

Thanks to PZ Meyers for pointing me to one of my favorite short stories from long ago.

The Skyway Arcology

The other interesting thing about Minneapolis was the Skyway system. A big chunk of downtown buildings are linked together by a walkway system, making it possible to walk dozens of blocks without ever going outside. Apartment buildings, stores and business skyscrapers are all linked together in a heated, well-secured fashion. An interesting adaption for a place which is cold and gets that much snow.

Also, while guns are *not* banned in the walkways, they are banned in every building (at least all the ones I saw).

map here

Interesting Free Market Solution

I just got back from a week in Minneapolis, which was kind of interesting. In true libertarian fashion, they have almost no gun control laws. You can take your gun with you to the grocery store, to the playground, to the hospital, to the ATM line or to the porta-potties at the county fair.

However.

Business owners are also free to ban guns from their stores. "No guns allowed on these premises", "ING bans guns in this building", etc. . I thought this was an interesting approach. Not necessarily one I agree with, but interesting. The message is very libertarian, "You can have your toys, just don't bring them in here if you want to do business with me"

In a week of looking, I was unsuccessful in finding a single business (including a gun store) that *did not* have as sign banning guns.

I now need to look at the homicide, manslaughter and accidental gun death statistics on Minnesota and think about this a little more.

The Ardent Atheist

I took this test as suggested by PZ Meyers. I wasn't shocked to find I scored a little lower than he didwith my 70% (vs. his 76%). I thought I was a little soft in some of my answers actually and not all the strident.

Lesson: I'm more of a crank than I think I am.

The test asks for a lot of personal info at the end, so I don't recommend it. I have a special junkmail account I use for things like this.

The Ardent Atheist The results are in, and it appears that you have scored 70%...

You are an atheist, pure and simple. You think God is just one big lie, and consider religious people to be both annoying and beneath you. Ardent atheists will argue tooth and claw for their position, and have no truck with people that won't listen. You think being an atheist is the only way to lead an honest life, and see no reason to accept the pleas of faith. Ardent atheists are the backbone of atheism. Be proud.

My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 58% on pentagrams

Link: The Atheist Test written by chi_the_cynic on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

Comet!

Cool!

73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann is proving to be a far more interesting object than first anticipated. The comet is closing toward the Sun and will swing around it on June 7, passing the Earth along the way at a distance of 11.7 million kilometers. The fascination comes from watching its ongoing disintegration, which has broken the comet into more than 30 separate fragments.

IFX

I'm off to Minneapolis for a week to attend the IFX Board Meeting.
Yawn.

If anyone has suggestions for things to do in the evening , please let me know!

What Should I Major In?

Your Scholastic Strength Is Developing Ideas

You can take a spark of inspiration and turn it into a full fledged concept. You are talented at brainstorming, visualizing, organizing, and independent thinking. You should major in: Natural sciences Computer science Creative writing Math Architecture Journalism

What Should You Major In?

They Have Such Things?

Ok, Ok, I promised I wouldn't get political but I read this and was quite floored.

newly released portions of White House prayer logs show that Bush's praying has actually gone up in recent months

White House Prayer Logs!

(heh!)

McNookie

The world's first, certifiable, medical aphrodisiac:

“A dose of PT-141 results, in most cases, in a stirring in the loins in as little as 15 minutes,” reports Julian Dibbell, “Women, according to one set of results, feel ‘genital warmth, tingling and throbbing’, not to mention ‘a strong desire to have sex’.”
So, what is PT-141?
It’s an odourless and colourless synthetic chemical that you inhale deeply through a small, white plastic inhaler. The compound, produced by Palatin Technologies and currently undergoing regulatory assessment, is a melanocortin-based therapy that seems to work directly on the brain rather than simply stimulating the loins as is the case with Viagra.

Jay Pinkerton Doesn't Care Much for Narnia

I saw Narnia on a flight from Atlanta to Seattle a couple of weeks ago. I was in the fron row and had some work to do, so I watched it with the sound off, peeking up occasionally to see what was going on.

I'm utterly positive that the dialog I made up in my own mind was a great deal more entertaining that whatever was actually said. OTOH, Jay Pinkerton actually watched the whole thing with sound and had this to say:

Narnia, on the other hand, is like the K-Mart discount bin of mythology. Every monster or creature you've ever heard of is incoherently tossed in with the animal kingdom, and now they all talk. I like fantasy as much as the next sixth level cleric, but the bare minimum for me is knowing the author gave his ridiculous shit more thought than I'll have to. Narnia comes off like a shitty Trapper-Keeper drawing by a twelve-year-old who plays Dungeons & Dragons and really likes the zoo. In one scene a pair of badgers have a conversation with Santa Claus, and in another a human on a talking horse does battle with the White Witch of the North while griffins divebomb centaurs, and your head’s just spinning from the random senselessness of it.

Yup, that was my sense of it. I also don't understand the giant ice dam which was causing it to be winter, but fell easily to a group of plucky teenagers. Some kinda metaphor or something...

Next Stop: Interstellar Space

This is an excellent article. Not much to add.

In a paper to be published as a chapter in a book on NASA ‘Vision’ missions this summer, Thomas Zurbuchen (University of Michigan) and a team of researchers discuss the specifics of powering such a probe by nuclear methods and find them wanting. The paper is so rich that I want to discuss several issues from it in coming weeks. For now, though, let’s consider the propulsion dilemma as seen by scientists running the numbers using existing technologies.
A solar sail gets you to the interstellar medium more quickly than the kind of chemical propulsion with gravity assists used by Voyager, but even so the task is daunting, requiring the probe’s escape velocity to be a factor of 3 greater than Voyager 1’s. And existing sail designs deliver speed but at a cost in payload weight.

NASA’s now defunct Prometheus project would have created a spacecraft too heavy and slow for a mission to the nearby interstellar medium — the Zurbuchen paper centers around a nuclear power source in conjunction with electric propulsion fine-tuned for the mission. For a variety of reasons, the best compromise between the various proposals seems to be the radioisotope electric propulsion advocated by Ralph McNutt and the IIE team.

Benevolent Inventor

A little more introverted than I usually score on these kinds of tests. Still, it was better done than most, so it might be more accuracte.

Results here , but you can mose over the pick to see what they mean

Benevolent Inventor

Peeps: Not As Popular As I Thought?

It seems that, despite their sweet taste and charming disposition, some people... well... there's no other way to say this. Some people just plain *don't like peeps!*

Yeah, I don't get it either.

However, the Strawberry Woman send over this video which seems to offer no other conclusion.
WARNING! This video contains scenes of extreme peep disrespect, violence and, in some cases, quirk death. Not for the young or for Peep lovers.

The Value of Human Life

Interesting, my value is almost exactly equal to the amount of money I think I need to have in assets in order to retire.

I am worth $2,787,932 on HumanForSale.com

Thermite vs. Liquid Nitrogen

As you all know, thermite is a complex, inorganic mixture of aluminum, iron and adolescent sexual frustration with a burning temperature exceeding the surface temperature of a M-Class star. In my teens, I performed dozens (but not hundreds) of "experiments" with thermite.

However, I never had the resources to try these experiments.

Kinda Creepy

From those pining away for the days when women were property and "certain folks" knew their place.

The Purity Ball

The Heart to Heart™ program, created by jeweler Joe Costello, differs from other abstinence programs in some important, unique ways. [...]

First, the "key to her heart." This beautiful heart has a smaller heart in the front. Behind that heart is a keyhole. When making the covenant with your daughter, you explain that the covenant is between her, you and God. Since God has placed her in your care as a parent, you and only you can hold the "key to her heart."

God not trusting her enough to let her be responsible for her own heart.

You then explain to the child that you will hold the key to her precious heart until the day of her wedding. On that day, you will give her away like at all weddings, BUT in doing so you will also “give away” the key to her heart to her now husband. The key and lock are actually functional and your son-in-law will place the key in the heart to open it.

Nothing at all Freudian going on here!

Inside will be a small note that had been placed in the heart on the day you made the covenant. That note can say something like, "I do not know your name or what you even look like, but this is my promise to save myself for you this day. Love, Melanie."

Or, the note could say something like, "I've been saving myself for you for many horny years, so the sex tonight had really better be worth it!. Oh, and make sure my Dad gives you the key to my chastity belt too. Love, Melanie."

The New 300, 600, and 1000 Euro Notes

I'm guessing they were designed by the French or the Italians in an attempt to get the UK to switch currencies.

here

The 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference

Register Now!

Like most Nigerians, you're probably finding that it's increasingly difficult to earn a decent living from email. That's why you need to attend the 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference.
"This conference is an investment in your future. Learn to take advantage of modern technology, and make a great deal of money with very little effort. If you have any question, please contact me and I will send you a proposal that may be of interest to you. I await your response by return while assuring you that the transaction is absolutely risk free."
- Dr. Collins Mbadiwe

A Contest I Will Be Entering

This is something I've done in the security lines at airports for the last few years.

And, btw, if you're in the "this kind of thing only gives the terrorist ideas/knowing about the secret wiretap program only aids the terrorists" camp, I suggest you stick you head back in the sand for the duration. It's only through these exercises and through transparency that we improve security.

Announcing: Movie-Plot Threat Contest
NOTE: If you have a blog, please spread the word.

For a while now, I have been writing about our penchant for "movie-plot threats": terrorist fears based on very specific attack scenarios. Terrorists with crop dusters, terrorists exploding baby carriages in subways, terrorists filling school buses with explosives -- these are all movie-plot threats. They're good for scaring people, but it's just silly to build national security policy around them.

But if we're going to worry about unlikely attacks, why can't they be exciting and innovative ones? If Americans are going to be scared, shouldn't they be scared of things that are really scary? "Blowing up the Super Bowl" is a movie plot to be sure, but it's not a very good movie. Let's kick this up a notch.

It is in this spirit I announce the (possibly First) Movie-Plot Threat Contest. Entrants are invited to submit the most unlikely, yet still plausible, terrorist attack scenarios they can come up with.
Your goal: cause terror. Make the American people notice. Inflict lasting damage on the U.S. economy. Change the political landscape, or the culture. The more grandiose the goal, the better.
Assume an attacker profile on the order of 9/11: 20 to 30 unskilled people, and about $500,000 with which to buy skills, equipment, etc.
Post your movie plots here on this blog.

Judging will be by me, swayed by popular acclaim in the blog comments section. The prize will be an autographed copy of Beyond Fear. And if I can swing it, a phone call with a real live movie producer.

Entries close at the end of the month -- April 30 -- so Crypto-Gram readers can also play.
This is not an April Fool's joke, although it's in the spirit of the season. The purpose of this contest is absurd humor, but I hope it also makes a point. Terrorism is a real threat, but we're not any safer through security measures that require us to correctly guess what the terrorists are going to do next.
Good luck.

McSweeney's Reviews of Food

'casue nothing is more amusing than reviews of food.

An Exerpt:

Kellogg's S'mores Pop-Tarts
Submitted by Marshall Norton Jr.
She shoved me under her bed and told me not to move. Her father had gotten home earlier than expected. As the minutes passed, I inventoried the various pieces of dirty laundry and discarded plates under her bed with me.
A little later, her face appeared, upside-down. "They're leaving soon. I'll come back when they're gone. Here, have some," she said, offering me a piece of the Pop-Tart she'd brought up on a plate. I thought it best not to ask about the other plates for the moment.

7-Hour Standoff Ends; Police Discover Nobody In Home

Would that I could make shit like this up.

OKLAHOMA CITY -- A police standoff ended early Tuesday with metro police discovering there was nobody in the house they were monitoring.
A seven-hour standoff near Southeast 59th Street and Bryant Avenue started as a drug investigation of a home in the area. Officers said they were worried about activity in the house, and they called for a tactical team. (emp.mine-Ed)
For hours, according to reports, they tried to make contact with anybody in the house.
At about 3:30 a.m., agents approached the house but found nobody inside. A search of the area did not turn up any culprits; however, agents remain in the area looking for leads.


(via)

They stayed looking for leads but it turned out the stake-out operation was actually the operations office of the Cheney for President 2008.

L

What could be more delicious?

Field corespondent Tara continues to earn the hefty salary I'm not paying her.






According to a spokesperson from Just Born -- the company that manufactures Peeps -- one billion of these squishy, marshmallow delights will fly off the shelves in the weeks leading up to Easter.
Why Peeps for Easter? The tradition dates back further than company history -- way back. Ancient pagans in Europe used eggs, chicks and rabbits as symbols of renewal in their spring rituals. Over time, European Christians incorporated the pagan symbols into their Easter traditions, and brought them to America.

(via)

A Race to The Bottom...

I'm not sure which is worse, lawyers or insurance companies. I received this today:

A Charlotte, NC lawyer purchased a box of very rare and expensive cigars, and then insured them against fire, among other things.

Within a month, having smoked his entire stockpile of these great cigars and without yet having made even his first premium payment on the policy, the lawyer filed claim against the insurance company.

In his claim, the lawyer stated the cigars were lost in a series of small fires. The insurance company refused to pay, citing the obvious reason that the man had consumed the cigars in the normal fashion.

The lawyer sued... and WON! (Stay with me) In delivering the ruling,thejudge agreed with the insurance company that the claim was frivolous.

The judge stated nevertheless, that the lawyer "held a policy from the company in which it had warranted that the cigars were insurable andalso guaranteed that it would insure them against fire, without defining what is considered to be unacceptable fire" and was obligated to pay the claim.

Rather than endure a lengthy and costly appeal process, the insurance company accepted the ruling and paid $15,000 to the lawyer for his loss of the rare cigars lost in the "fires".

NOW FOR THE BEST PART...

After the lawyer cashed the check, the insurance company had himarrested on 24 counts of ARSON!!!

With his own insurance claim and testimony from the previous case being used against him, the lawyer was convicted of intentionally burning his insured property and was sentenced to 24 months in jail and a $24,000 fine.
This is a true story and was the First Place winner in the recent Criminal Lawyers Award Contest

Obviously an Urban Legend, but a good one.

Young Frankenstein Musical Due

From Sci-Fi Weekly. It's not going to be The Producers...

Mel Brooks, who made a monster hit musical out of his 1968 movie The Producers, is adapting his classic 1974 film Young Frankenstein for the musical stage as well, the Reuters news service reported. With no deadline set, Brooks told the news service that he is in the middle of writing the score, including a song for scary Frau Blucher, played in the original movie by Cloris Leachman. When the musical is completed, Brooks says he will make a formal announcement to raise money. Brooks offered Reuters a preview of Frau Blucher's song: "He vus my boyfriend/He vould come home in a snit/He vould have a terrible fit/I am the first thing he vould hit/But I didn't give a s--t/He vus my boyfriend." When he made Young Frankenstein, Brooks said he did everything he could to emulate the 1930s James Whale movie Frankenstein, from shooting the whole film in black and white to using many of the same shots. Now Brooks said that his challenge is to do the musical on Broadway with a black-and-white set, with all the mists, moodiness and laughs of the original movie, plus songs.

Spinning Wheel, Got to Go 'Round

There are 6 currently unclassified methods for enriching Uranium, each more technically challenging than the previous, with *tiny* increases in production.

Slate has a really good article on the basic physics of what's going on in Iran around their enrichment program.

When uranium gas enters the tube and whips around at high speeds, the useful U-235 isotopes get separated out from their heavier cousins, the U-238 isotopes. The speed of the rotor determines how effectively a centrifuge can enrich uranium, and a rotor's maximum speed depends in part on the dimensions of the centrifuge. Since it's hard to maintain a balanced spin in a long tube, engineers have to keep the devices to less than a few meters in length. That means they can enrich only a few grams of material at a time.

Even those few grams need lots of trips through the centrifuge to reach the weapons-grade level. (For more on how enrichment actually works, click here.) Enrichment plants get the job done by connecting hundreds of small centrifuges together, in clusters called "cascades." The uranium gas enters one centrifuge after another, with the enriched gas that comes out of the first getting siphoned off and directed into the next. By routing the enriched product back through the cluster of centrifuges over and over again, you can keep increasing its U-235 content. Given enough time—and enough spins—you'll reach the 3 to 5 percent concentration you need to run a light-water reactor, or the 80 to 90 percent you need to make a nuclear weapon.

Blogging as Narcissism

One of the reasons I took a little blogging break (besides needing to spend time getting my City Of Heros character BluShield to level 50) was because I found my posts getting smaller, pettier and less and less interesting to people in general. I looked at all the stuff I had blogged and tried to see where it was going wrong. After sorting through 2 years worth of good and bad, I made some new rules for what gets posted and how often. In restarting the blog, I decided to highlight the:

Amusing
Entertaining
Transmundane
Weird
Interesting
Science
Father vs. Son conversations

I decided I would only lightly blog about the:
Political
Religious
Personal Medical problems

and I would try to studiously avoid:
what I had for breakfast/lunch/dinner
how much weight I lifted and when
where I was going and who I met (unless it really fell into one of the top categories)
dreams I had
personal information about me, my family etc.
the Iraq War
the president
why other, actually famous bloggers are off their collective rockers and how they should Listen To Me
any diatribe unlikely to be seen by the person I am ranting about (e.g. Ann Coulter, Bill O'Rielly, Travis)

In short, I decided that blogging was an act of narcissism but that even my ego had limits which should be respected.

Why go through explaining all this?

A great example of why I think I was on to something came up today:(via Pharnygula)

You may have heard the disturbing news story about the Oklahoma murderer/pedophile/cannibal—just to make it a little creepier, he had a blog. (I don't expect it will stay up for too long, so read The Insomnia Report for excerpts.)
He says things like this:

I mean it, I really need a girlfriend. It's not just depressing anymore, it's actually starting to have a negative effect on my mental state I think. For example, my fantasies are just getting weirder and weirder. Dangerously weird. If people knew the kinds of things I think about anymore, I'd probably be locked away. No probably about it, I know I would be.

Mostly, though, he comes off as pathetic and banal.

After the *dancing*, Orz think you will make good *special sauce*

It seems there might be a new version of Star Control II in the works!

Pluvius writes "A recent post on GameSpot's Rumor Control blog suggests that there may be a chance for a new entry in the classic Star Control series in the foreseeable future. It would be developed by Toys for Bob, the creator of the first two games in the series, and it is implied that the company already holds the rights for the franchise. Quoting from the article: 'But maybe, just maybe, if enough of you people out there send [Alex Ness, producer] e-mails requesting that Toys For Bob do a legitimate sequel to Star Control 2, I'll be able to show them to [Toys For Bob parent company] Activision, along with a loaded handgun, and they will finally be convinced to roll the dice on this thing.'

For those of you who are now asking yourselves, "Why do I care about this? What the hell is Star Control II and why do I even read Horvath's blog anymore?", this is good news.

Star Control II was one of the finest (and first) computer games ever made. Rich in content, cutting edge (at the time) in graphics, it was a wonderful blend of all the elements of a superlative game. Ask any game player of a certain generation (current ages 20-45) and they will tell you Star Control II is the gold standard by which all other games are measured. And, surprisingly, many modern games fail to reach this standard set in the90s. It was a good blend of a non-linear story, exploration, graphics and playability that's really hard to achieve.

Wiki entry here

Update: Found this in the Wiki entry. I didn't realize this, but it makes perfect sense and is obvious in retrospect. No wonder I like David so much.

David Brin's science fiction series about the Uplift Universe is also often mentioned as inspiration for the Star Control II universe.

Peeps!

What would Easter be without Peeps??!?? Slower, less colorful and filled with fewer diabetic children to start, but why wish for the impossible?

Every year I send some Peeps, usually 40-50lbs worth, to Geoff's mother? Why? Is it because she loves them so much, or becuase I'm a heartless bastard who doesn't know when to quit a joke? You choose, it's all good. Oh how she loves her peeps! But appearently not as much as the folks at the Peep Research Foundation, who have been experimenting with peeps for years and have reached some interesting conclusions with their data.

How People See Your House

Ok, the last posting was was too serious.

This however, while serious, is also mildly amusing.

Fetal Pain

A squirmy, unpleastent question: Can a fetus feel pain?

To my surprise, the answer is, no at least not for until the third trimester.

The thalamus, now, is a relatively low-level structure, the posterior part of the forebrain. To put it simply, it's a kind of relay station that integrates information from multiple sensory modalities and forwards that on to the higher brain centers of the cortex, that stuff that we think of as more significant in generating conscious thought. It's just not where the action is at. Also, at this early stage, the thalamus has not yet sorted out its structure and doesn't have the capacity for much processing. Neither does the cortex; the next important step is for these tissues to organize themselves into layered structures, and for the thalamus to send projections to the cortex. This doesn't happen until the embryo is 23-25 weeks old. That date represents a minimal, rock bottom bare essential level for the presence of any connections that would confer even a remote possibility of sensory function.

After that the answer is less clear. Do you feel pain under anesthetic? Possibly, but you aren't conscience. Does that hold for a third trimester fetus? Possibily, possibly not.

Good question and a good analysis.

Frozen Underwear and Other Parodies

This was over at Something Awful, but picked up by Wonkette.

Odd and just short of amusing (unless you're like totally a 14 year-old. If so, subsitutue out Cheney and put in your Math teacher's name. Bush? Biology. Rumsfled? Oh he's the gym teacher.)

Donald Rumsfeld needs to wear iced underwear because of some medical condition, and he has his secret service detail hold his spares. He was recently getting uncontrollable long-term erections and had to change up his medical treatments. The underwear and the erections is why he uses a standing desk, not because he is some super-man. He also wears nylon stockings, not because he's gay, but to control some vascular problem with his legs which causes him intense pain.

President Bush, when dining at the white-house, does not eat any item of food which has not been first sniffed by a trained dog before being prepared. Think about that.

Word among the staff is that Cheney was drunk when he shot that lawyer, and secluded himself for a day to sober up and avoid felony firearms charges. I don’t have any direct information on this because the guys with him at the time are not talking. This is totally unconfirmed, but I think it is plausible.

There's not really a doubt in my mind that at least some of the factinos are true, but (shrugs) who really gives a rat's ass if Cheney's breath is bad.


Dick Cheney has chronic gum problems and his breath smells like shit as a result. He is also a CLOSE TALKER. He keeps a small bottle of diluted hydrogen peroxide which he rinses with every hour on the hour, and he swallows it instead of spitting. He also picks his nose vigorously (violently) and hums loudly and tunelessly to himself while taking shits.

And, most creepy...

The white house lawn is mowed every other day by the same man humming the same tune.

ahhhh!! And if you say Condi Rice three times in front of the mirror and step backward, she will appear and bite your head off with her horrible alien matnis head!


Kos also repeats this, along with comments from SA, but has the taste to refrain from piling on.
Mostly.

Churched!

Finally, I have been properly churched.

Yeah, I know I've blogged about the FSM before, but reading the hate mail it's generated really got my spirits up. Why? It sort of points out that he's on to something. If real, mainstream Christians can have their beliefs so rattled by a plate of pasta, it tells me they strongly suspect their gods are not as real as they say. Anyone with an ounce of sense would see through this and recognize it as a joke, but these folks are clearly threatened and hostile about it.

Good.

The more they argue the FSM is a threat to their religion, the higher the chance they will be recognized as extremist fools.

Count me amoung the FSM faithful! The Flying Spaghetti Monster, a god we can all agree isn't real.

Papists and Muslims and Quakers, oh my!

I love maps! When I was in 4th grade I got sent home with a note which read,
"Buy Mark a globe so we can have the class' back". I was spending hours with it, looking at foriegn contries, learning cities and countries, etc. It was completely compelling.

Even today I have MS MapPoint on all my computers and have been know to spend an hour or two going over the geography of a country I haven't been to before (or in many cases some I have). I just love them.

Here's a great site mapping demographic data on religion across the country. I was a little surprised that a) the country isn't as religious as I thought and b) Massachusetts is still very religious.
Enjoy