You’ve probably seen pictures and diagrams of Microsoft’s super-duper Jetson’s-style port-a-potty of sorts plastered all over the web. Well, it appears it was a gag… though a poorly orchestrated one. This News.com article discusses the various peculiarities in both timing and coordination between the UK MSN office and Redmond.
Would you really use one in the first place? I mean, seeing the stability any version of Windows has makes one wonder what the 7th push of the ‘flush’ button would do — a fecal-filled nightmarish possibility you can scare your kids with now.
And since I’m on a roll, I’d like to point you to this humorous Salesman story. No furry woodland animals were harmed in the blogging of it.
The Britons have all the fun and get all the play:
A new lifestyle business in York is offering crash courses in striptease to give women more confidence.
The firm, called City Lets, City People, is offering one-off 90 minute courses with a top professional stripper.
Participants are taught the history of striptease before learning a basic erotic dance, reports the Yorkshire Evening Press.
Cathryn Houghton, who set up the firm with partner Carol Carter last month, said: “It’s not seedy but a lot of fun, and all about learning a new life skill.
“It’s designed to make women feel good about themselves and give them more confidence.
“The instructor has taught people of all sorts of shapes and sizes. We think it will be very popular, particularly with hen parties and housewives.”
She said women who enjoyed the course could take their interest further by enrolling for a full course in stripping.
The firm also arranges other services including gardening, foreign holidays and house letting.
“As long as it’s legal we can arrange just about anything,” Cathryn said.
I whole heartily endorse this educational move and implore other adventurous and cosmopolitan women to pursue similar courses. Hehe, alright alright stick with the Cotillions, they are quite useful in the remote chance you find yourself stuck in a Five-Star Restaurant with a hoity toity beaux, and vice-versa.
Note: if you want to goto a Five-Star Restaurant I promise not to be hoity or toity. Maybe a little freaky deaky though.
If you’re gonna beat your foes and critics to the punchline, why not do it with some style and a big bang? That’s what Joe Szilagyi and his significant other Andriette accomplished. They didn’t even half-ass the attempt, as they brought in true genius: the comic bookstore owner from The Simpsons to endorse their forum.
I bumped into their Worst Weblog Ever after looking through the Organica index (which shows which blogs link to yours). I’m not sure how I managed to snooker them into linking to my blog, I certainly am proud of my lack of trying.
Anyways, from their blog I found a laugh-out-loud parody of both higher education and the Borg from Star Trek (I wrote a similar parody last year I’ll link to when the archives are up): the Borg Institute of Technology where ‘Graduation is Futile!’ Actually, the more I look at it, I can see how it appeals only to a certain kind of demographic group. So, if you are a fan of The Next Generation and/or lampooning college, check out their frat: Rho Iota Phi (R.I.P.) — their tuneless Frat Song has a nice tune to it too.
Which brings me to the Dullest Blog Ever. I mentioned yesterday, various ways on how to make your blog popular and stated that one should not talk about brownies or orange cats all day. Well, in short order, the Dullest Blog Ever presents itself as the perfect example of what not to do. A few poignant examples:
Looking at my watch - I was busy doing some things and began to wonder how much time had elapsed. I glanced at my watch and saw the time displayed, thus providing an answer to my question.
And if you found that entry exciting, you’ll love this:
About the correct temperature - As I was sitting down I became aware that the temperature was neither too hot nor too cold. This being the case I made no adjustments to the temperature control on the central heating.
How do you make sure your blog does not devolve into something similar? First, look at your blog right now. Are the entries remotely similar in excitement, freshness and originality to the entries quoted above? Imagine if you will (if you can’t then that could be a problem) being a random visitor to your blog, are you captivated by what you have to say? Do you talk about how yellow your toe nails are or how you’ve switched to a different brand of toothpaste? If you do, you might want to rebrand your blog as a journal at this juncture.
In fact, a few geeks at Slashdot pointed out that difference (between blogs and journals) today while discussing the hype surrounding Google and blogs.
If nothing else, be more like Mike.
I was snooping around, looking for some information on Richard Feynman (I mentioned him a few days ago) and bumped into a speech he gave in 1959 entitled: There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom. In trademark fashion, Dr. Feynman discusses the cutting-edge of physics in a personal down-to-earth yet professional manner.
What he discusses is nanotechnology, where it is (as of December 29th, 1959) and where it can go. He uses the Encyclopedia Britannica to illustrate what miniaturization could eventually evolve into, nothing short of ‘Honey, I Shrunk the Kids‘ (sans Anty).
While the math and physics he discusses require many chalkboards to prove, I wanted to discuss the challenge he gave at the very end of his speech regarding the exciting prospects of miniaturization:
Perhaps this doesn’t excite you to do it, and only economics will do so. Then I want to do something; but I can’t do it at the present moment, because I haven’t prepared the ground. It is my intention to offer a prize of $1,000 to the first guy who can take the information on the page of a book and put it on an area 1/25,000 smaller in linear scale in such manner that it can be read by an electron microscope.
And I want to offer another prize—if I can figure out how to phrase it so that I don’t get into a mess of arguments about definitions—of another $1,000 to the first guy who makes an operating electric motor—a rotating electric motor which can be controlled from the outside and, not counting the lead-in wires, is only 1/64 inch cube.
I shot an email off to the Foresight Institute, to see if they knew of the individual(s) who may have completed the challenges and will keep you posted as to my findings. In the meantime however, I was wondering what existing labratories could be utilized to complete the two challenges. So who did I ask? Yup, my mathemagic physicsologist handy man: Jason Ditz.
The conversation went something like this:
Jason: Suppose a letter was 1 cm in the original document, or 10^-2 meters: 1/25000 smaller, 4×10^-7, or 0.4 microns or 40 nm. So if it was a 15 point font… we’d need to make dots at 3 nm intervals. Okay, consider this: what would you write it on, or rather, with…? 3 nm wavelength lasers don’t grow on trees. And moreover, what’s the diameter of an ink molecule?
Me: Avogadro’s number [useless].
Jason: [unfazed] Carbon is 0.182 nm, so if you could have a hyperdense [highly scientific word] carbon crystal… and just pick out pieces in the shape of letters. Or what we do is, we use mirrors. Focus the image down to a magnification of M=1/25000. There, now I’m thinking like an optical physicist [that’s what his other degree was in].
I don’t know if they’d consider that against the rules, but I could definitely reflect it onto a size that small… in such manner that it can be read by an electron microscope. That I’m not sure… Actually, you’d probably need some further equipment. Consider this:
Red light = 6.33 x 10^-7 m
6.33 * 10^-7 * 25000 = 1.5 x 10^-2 m
So if we shrink something down to 25000 times, we can’t resolve anything smaller than 1.5 cm dots. So, unless he printed the original article on a giant tablet…
Me: Let’s use a muon microscope [useless]
Jason: [unfazed] What you’d need to do is use very very ultraviolet light to shrink… but then, you’d need a way for the electron microscope to resolve it… since we can’t see light with that small a wavelength.
Me: Chicks would dig that [useless]
That’s pretty much how it went, though he did add that the 2nd challenge could be accomplished with a simple magnetic impeller, which can rotate and has fewer parts than a gear system I was thinking of (using one of those Swiss made watches as an example).
And yea, I’m pretty useless when it comes to any sort of serious physics conversation; I usually go off onto some meaningless tangent which is counterproductive and usually results with some sort of urbanized warfare.
Anyways, if you see anything Jason failed to see or if you know of useful conjecture I should’ve countered with or added or twisted in some sort of funky Cubist way, let me know. Can either be done at all today? And sure, we might not win the $1000 prize, but as I continue to emphasize, chicks dig it (who wouldn’t?).
Remember-if-it-doesn’t-say-MicroMachines-it’s-not-the-real-thing!
