4/30/2006
Or does it simply depend on where you are? Admittedly I have only seen a couple episodes of The Colbert Report, but from what I have seen, it is fairly well-written and original. Somehow Stephen was invited to not only attend the annual White House Correspondent Dinner, but he was allowed to give the keynote speech. He grilled, lampooned and otherwise chastised the 4th Estate for being a sycophant of the Administration. I found a copy of it on YouTube — I should warn you however, the definition is fairly low-quality but the audio comes through great. Part 1, Part 2
Reminds me of the South Park episode involving the 1st Amendment. See also Truthiness.
Update: Here is an overview of the evening from the Washington Post.
4/28/2006
Remember those relatively old cells discussed earlier this week? Well, now comes word that various soft-tissues have been found residing in the bones of our friend Mr. T Rex. At 68 million years of age, I think we have a certified senior citizen. (God I really wanted to say bonified there). Oh and our ID friends try to spin this data like a record from DoA.
I wish the students at A&M’s Mays Business School oozed this much creativity.
Picture of the day from our friends at the EFF.
4/26/2006
And you thought solitaire was a distraction (lawsuits over surfing on the company doll). Now the developers of Facebook are rolling it to the corporate world.
I wonder when they will let you upload a resumé, work history, references, cover sheet and otherwise your complete CV. That would be very useful considering the fact that many employers already look at your profile (not sure entirely why, most profiles show off your goofy side and/or visually illustrate how much alcohol you can consume on the weekends).
Ever heard of an organism that is an extremophile? It is something that can live in relatively extreme conditions (i.e. pressures from the deep, hot acidic gases from geysers, cold arctic frosts, etc.). Well, the BBC has an interesting report on what is thought to be the oldest organism still alive: microbes discovered in water droplets which were contained in salt crystals dating to 200 million years of age. That’s alot of candles. And no, this is not a real case of an extremophilia, I just wanted to throw that in for good measure.
Other age-related factoids:
Some bowhead whales can reportedly live to be 200+ years old.
Galapagos tortoises can also hit 125+ years as well. In fact, Harriet, the tortoise that Charles Darwin originally captured on his voyages to the Galapagos islands, is still alive and kicking at the ripe age of 175.
I’ve previously mentioned the music video from A-ha called “Take Me On” which utilizes an artistic technique known as rotoscoping. Here is a great parody of it from The Family Guy.
I swear everyone was forced to watch this video at some point in their early childhood. And I still have no clue why they count to 12 and not 11 or 13. See also A-ha and rotoscoping.
After watching this, someone should tell Kirk Cameron that banana’s were domesticated by humanity and not a deity.
4/25/2006
Most podcasts are like typical blogs, they aren’t very original and otherwise suck. There is a reason most video podcasters do not have a contract with the local tv station as an anchorman, it usually involves a lack of personality and/or being horribly unphotogenic.
A friend pointed me to zefrank: the show. This one man army is fairly witty, has original jokes and isn’t a complete tool bag. Good stuff.
As I reported earlier, UC Berkeley has been testing the podcasting abilities of Apple’s iTunes service. Now it appears they have joined at least six other large institutions in fully integrating this initiative for mass consumption.
Also, Ars has an intersting write-up on Google Scholar’s citation ranking algorithm. It was supposedly spurred on due to competition from Microsoft’s new Academic Live service.
4/24/2006
I’ve been wanting to put together another Mises article on network neutrality, as previously mentioned. I’ve got several projects and finals coming up though, so here are a few more opeds on the matter. Note: I think there are a number of misconceptions all stemming from State intervention.
I’ve been using computers for nearly 20 years. The last 15 of which I have used some form of Windows. I’m not sure at what point I thought this, but I never really considered my system secure from virus writers, script kiddies and the like. At the same time I am not a professional programmer (…I do know how to write programs in various languages), but I do understand the mundane difficulties it must take to close every imaginable hole in a large and complex operating system — it is nearly impossible. All of this said, I nominate the following as the comment of the day:
Jim Alchin, Brian Valentine, Partners in Windows, please show the world that you trust Vista’s security…put your social security number, personal bank account numbers, and personal credit card numbers a on a Vista machine configured by Dell with a publically accessible and un-firewalled IP address and announce that IP address to the world.
Again, I always assume my system is insecure. Perhaps this might move me over to the Mac once more. And no, don’t try to convince me to use desktop Linux. Been there, done that numerous times — if it is too complicated for my mom to use, then I really don’t want to invest more time into it.
4/23/2006
If you’ve ever met members of the Student Government on campus, odds are you think they are completely worthless (both in terms of utility and personality). This is empirical QED. Note: the guy goes to USC not A&M (we have our own Deutsch’s here).
You never know when you can use the Chewbacca Defense in an average workday. I get to try and use it with Terry Tate for a law project.
4/22/2006
These have to be some of the best voice impersonations I’ve heard.
4/21/2006
Since I am prevented from writing a whole lot with this gimp hand, today is film day. First is a demonstration of how engineers use the Darwinian principle of natural selection to modify fan blades. It’s narrated by monsieur Richard Dawkins. Another video shows how the eye could have evolved naturally and not through some supernatural hocus pocus (i.e. Irreducible Complexity).
Speaking of Darwin, you might also enjoy Penn & Teller’s rip on ‘Intelligent Design‘ - Part 1 2 3
Lastly, I came across an interview with Richard Feynman, of Cargo Cult Science fame (among others). He illustrates some great points, including knowing how something works in detail versus simply identifying it (rote memorization) without grasping the underlying mechanics.
Addendum: a friend just sent me this great WSJ overview of how several prominent politicians and pundits have mistakenly put their allegiances in the intellectually vacuous movement of ID.
4/20/2006
Yet another IEEE standard was ratified, 802.11s — it’s for creating a wireless mesh standard. Looks like LanLinkup was 3 years too early.
4/19/2006
So, for the next 5 weeks I have the pleasure of wearing a cast on my right arm. Turns out I broke a dinky bone in my palm. How, you ask? I was playing a hardcore game of “Broomball.” For the uninitiated you play this sport on ice. However, instead of wearing skates, you wear normal street shoes. As the name of the game suggests, you run around on ice with little brooms and attempt to hit balls (smaller than their soccer equivalents) into the goal. It’s much more difficult than it sounds; twice as dangerous and ten times the fun of regular hockey. I was body-checked and tried to catch myself with my now gimp hand.
Don’t feel sorry for me though, I was planning on amputating it anyways — having two hands is such high-maintenance. And yes, this will probably negatively affect my ability to blog as often as I want… the hunt-and-peck method is insanely slow; plus I am was right-hand dominant.
