4/24/2007
If you never participated in prank calls, you need to relive your childhood again. This is a perfect example of why. Oops.
I heard a Jimmy John’s ad the other day on the radio and remembered when the late stand-up comedian Mitch Hedberg used to be the spokesman. Here is one of his last gigs on Letterman before his untimely demise (is there such as a thing as timely?).
Tupac is still alive and crackin’ in this West Coast Bad Boys video.
Attorney Stephan Kinsella and others have discussed at length their theories of bullying, here is Peter Griffin taking one to task.
Much like Uri Geller this German mind-reader fails the nail test.
And my friend Robin pointed to these two creative works: Detroit is Equal to Iraq and The Impossible Quiz
4/23/2007
So Mike, my webmaster, pointed me to an interesting story around Google’s foray into the 411 information/listing business.
While I don’t fear the same fire and brimstone that the VC writing the post does, I think it is an innovative and brilliant execution of the crowdsourcing concept (like Mechanical Turk).
On that note, be sure to also check out the story behind Google’s Image Labeler originally developed as the ESP Game.
4/22/2007
Miller’s High Life is perfectly illustrated in this dramatic series of thought-clouds.
Two decades ago, Matt Groening did a fantastic job illustrating the life and times of a graduate student.
This week The Onion tackled the ever important issue of building a moat filled with grimy goo and sea monsters around the US.
What if the Beatles were Irish? by the always witty Roy Zimmerman.
And certainly not least, this Weng Weng rap video is both funny and superbly edited.
4/18/2007
Some goofy and sometimes comical videos:
- Will Ferrell in a viral clip called: The Landlord (watch out for Pearl)
- I saw one in a the zoo as a kid: Even Stephen Colbert Loves Knut!
- I wish my professor’s didn’t make these presentations: Life after Death by Powerpoint (see also Seth Godin’s thoughts on the matter)
- The original Movementarian.com had a motto of “We Plagiarize From the Best,” it appears that the creators of The Office did something of the same thing: Always Steal From The Best
4/16/2007
Unless you are a serial killer or mercenary, today was a pretty fucked up day for college students everywhere.
I know at A&M something like the Virginia Tech shootings could have easily occurred simply because we are used to seeing hundreds of ROTC/military clad people marching around with fake guns.
To cheer you up, here is a funny video of Jay Leno’s infamous segment: Jaywalking in Las Vegas.
4/12/2007
Despite the fact that he calls plays for a rival school (Texas Tech), Mike Leach is probably one of my favorite coaches.
Smart, witty, and innovative to boot.
If you get a chance, be sure to check out the NY Times in-depth overview of this polymath.
One of the better quotes in there is his fascination with the Corps of Cadets at A&M:
“How come they get to pretend they are soldiers?” [...] “The thing is, they aren’t in the military. I ought to have Mike’s Pirate School. For homework, we’ll work pirate maneuvers and stuff like that.”
He has also pulled a Mark Cuban/Dairy Queen switcheroo.
Several years ago, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban criticized the officiating crew in a game, essentially saying they couldn’t manage a Dairy Queen. And a few moons later, in one of the better PR stunts, Cuban put on an apron and spent a day making and handing out ice cream at a local Dairy Queen (the line was packed all day).
Apparently Mike Leach had similar feelings about the forecasting ability of the weather team up in Lubbock, so he jumped into the studio and candidly described how to accurately predict the weather each day. And the lead meteorologist seemed to have a good time with it, as he was allowed to call a couple of plays at the Red & Black scrimmage game.
That’s what I call, putting your mouth where the money is.
And I’d like to see Bobby Knight do the weather.
[Note: a lady friend of mine has pointed out that real cadets only come from West Point. I'll let you guys squabble over the No True Scotsman]
4/11/2007
If you detonated a grenade near private property within moments you would probably learn a lesson in personal accountability.
Unfortunately for entrepreneurs, the same can not be said for outer space.
While the private industry can be blamed for some of the mess, space is littered with hundreds of thousands of objects capable of puncturing and destroying resources and disrupting communications.
And this problem would be much more manageable if it were not for two problems.
Since day one, the State has attempted to militarize the cosmos, filling it - at whatever cost - with a smorgasbord of weapons and spy satellites. And in the process, they have cluttered the sky with countless pieces of potentially damaging widgets that every resident of space must precisely track and counter against.
For instance, earlier this year the Chinese military shot down an old satellite, sending up to 300,000 pieces of shrapnel through space. As a result, satellite operators must now spend extra resources trying to maneuver their own property away from the deleterious matter.
In addition to destroying property (private and public), various militaries have permanently altered the Van Allen belt (Project Starfish) and unnecessarily placed humanity in harms way through nuclear experimentation (1 2).
And it can continue to get away with it due to the fact that it is not accountable to anyone, and is exceedingly difficult to hold it responsible for its actions.
Spatial disorders
Interestingly enough, over the past several decades, there have been numerous pieces of self-imposed legislation proposed to prevent and curb the spread of weapons in space.
Most notably is the Outer Space Treaty currently wandering around the halls of the UN.
While it enunciates peace as the modus operandi for all nations in space, it also places objects such as the Moon under the legal principle of “res communis� – that these objects belong to everyone. In terms of private property and commercial development, this of course creates a problem.
It is through this communal means (e.g. Moon Treaty) that the State has attempted and succeeded in preventing private ownership of space.
As a result, you have scenarios such as the above continually play out because there is a tragedy of the commons because no one can own “space” in space. [Note: in practice no one has thus far been directly prevented from mining the Moon, asteroids, etc.]
The easiest solution for this would be simply to enforce the principle of homesteading, a familiar concept that has been successfully used on both land and sea for millennium (first come, first served).
In some ways this has been practiced by many private firms (such as telecom providers) over the past several decades, however, organizations like the military impair its de facto status.
[Note: Earth is not the only planet to feel the uncalculated wrath of the State; see also "Why Socialism Causes Pollution"]
4/8/2007
I received a couple emails regarding my post on the light-year and creationism.
One of the individuals noted that the trigonometry and mathematical calculations involved in currently measuring the stellar distances is flawed. Coincidentally, a Mormon TA I had back as an undergrad said the same thing in a Meteorology class.
So how exactly can you test this conspiracy theory?
Perhaps the easiest at-home experiment everyone can do is via satellite communications.
Want to know why it sucks to surf the internet or play twitch games with a satellite dish? Because of the lag time, the distance the signal must take to travel into geosynchronous orbit (22,000 miles away) and back.
This round-trip effort takes about 250 milliseconds and is the reason why talking to someone on a sat phone blows. It is the same reason why people in other far away countries on TV look semi-retarded for their awkwardly long response after a question is asked in live interviews.
Another doable experiment is bouncing a laser off a fixed target in space, such as the Moon. Back during the Apollo missions, this was done by NASA in a series of projects called the Laser Ranging Retroreflector Experiment. The Moon is about 240,000 miles away and based on the speed-of-light it should take about 1.3 seconds to go one way. And it does.
If you believe these results, then take the following leap of faith: to Mars.
Again, the distance between this void can be measured based upon how fast the signal is going (e.g. speed-of-light) and how long it takes to go from one place to the other. Thus typically, the signal from the various robots and rovers hovering on or around the Red Planet ranges from anywhere between 3 minutes to 22 just to travel one-way (remember, we are at variable distances throughout the year).
And if you believe that hocus pocus, then you might hitch a ride through the outer planets — Holst’s Grand Symphony, with a last stop beyond Pluto and Sedna. [See also Grand Tour]
Now that they have reached beyond the interstellar medium, when Pioneer 10 & 11, along with Voyager 1 & 2 were still talking to us, it would take 12+ hours just to have their signal bounce one-way between our rock and themselves. Voyager 1, the farthest man-made object, is nearly 14 light-hours away.
And perhaps in the near future, these deep-space probes will ultimately bump into the cabal, some nefarious dragons, the real machinations behind this conspiracy. In the meantime, you can check out other types of astronomy such as radio, x-ray, and good ol’ fashioned optical — too pierce the veil, the shroud for any shenanigans.
Maybe it is what Condoleeza Rice discovered in the East.
If you think that the Moon is the only satellite currently orbiting Earth, you would have offended 10,000+ objects racing haphazardly around our humble abode. Heck, it’s not even the only natural heavenly body captured by our collective gravity.
Granted, most of these are immeasurably smaller than a few centimeters, but hundreds are the size of kitchen appliances and small Mr. Bean cars.
Either way, it is seemingly impossible to detect these paint chips, metallic splinters, spliced wires, and a cornucopia of hi-tech wares from the ground with visual scopes. US Space Command catalogs them through the use of radar.
And interestingly enough, when humans do detect these objects, they are usually reported as a UFO – because we are still unaccustomed to their alien existence. [Each year, the ISS along with Venus are typically the most confused objects in the sky]
With that said, for hundreds of year’s humanity and perhaps other optically-inclined creatures have been able to look at our solar neighbors, to see what is cracking each evening.
From empirical observation, what we do know is this: like a teenage heart throb, several other bodies such as Jupiter and Saturn have groupies that follow them around everywhere. Saturn, much like Justin Timberlake, has countless carbon-based objects of unusual sizes and dimensions orbiting it perpetually.
But where did these city-sized rocks and snowballs originally gestate from? When did they become fans on an elliptical tour throughout the cosmos?
Despite all of the advanced wizardry various institutions and observatories have pointed up at the celestial body, these questions still remain unanswered.
That is not to say that the solution is to jump to a supernatural mover either.
In fact, over the past fifty years alone, various researchers have discovered several other, fainter rings around Saturn. And it seems as if the ring system may be in constant flux.
Contributing to this peanut gallery are moons such as Io whom eject mass into space through volcanic processes. In addition, other variables should be considered, like long and short period comets’ blazing through portions of the solar system, captured bodies from the Kuiper Belt, Oort objects that missed the taxi after last call, and random stragglers from the asteroid belt.
Of course, another hypothetical idea that has the same amount of proof and validity as a supernatural mover is that natives of Saturn were bored. And with their idle hands they somehow erected and launched a pile of rocks into their atmosphere accomplishing about the same as NASA’s manned program does today.
Does it look like the photo on the box?
There is a bigger picture, one in which our own planet and neighborhood is itself a raging fanboy of. For better and for worse, we are in the Orion sector of a wispy arm, one arm out of half-a-dozen that comprise a spinning mass of millions of lead singers, drummers, and one-hit wonders – real bonified Stars.
And the question then should be asked, how long did it take for us to get in this spinning line?
That question can be answered one of two ways. The first, through scientific measurements such as the decay of metals found in stars vis-Ã -vis spectrum analysis, the Hubble Red Shift, or my personal favorite: the use of trigonometry in determining the distance between star systems.
Or you can deny the existence of galaxies in general, the Milky Way in particular and claim that what I see on the other end of the telescope is a fiction. Because it either took a measurably long time (i.e. more than 6000 years) for all of the star dust to organize like it did, or it is a supernatural test of my faith in Zeus and his mysterious ways.
[Special thanks to Alex Temal for a couple of the links.]
4/7/2007
Rap has come a long way since it was first popularized by slam lyricists Shakespeare and Chaucer.
And with the release of Timbaland’s most recent single, “Give It To Me,” this hallowed tradition continues.
Which does a better job jabbing someone, Timberlake’s track or Furtado’s?
See also this parody of “My Humps,” which was recently lampooned by Will Ferrell in Blades of Glory, who notes that “no one knows what it means.” Oh, and pass on that movie, it is about a D-. While it has some great one liners (”remember when they were alive?”) it was formulaic and way too over the top.
My friend Ray sent me the original link to this flamboyant image.
While these elevators are still far off into the future, another engineering marvel is coming off the drawing board: wind farms.
I have mentioned a couple of ways firms are trying to harness wind energy to complement traditional generation sources (such as big kites).
This past week, The Economist details this nascent industry in an interesting article, including a San Diego firm that plans on placing the familiar wind turbines 10km up in the atmosphere.
And if you are in the mood I came across a critique of sci-fi economics and eschatalogy from physicist Gregory Benford, entitled The Real Future of Space; it also discusses some mega-scale feats such as mining asteroids.
The Onion has launched a new fake video news service that is just as good as its written counterpart.
I kind of like the premise of the illegal Mexican CEO skit. And the history of the network is laughable too.
See also this textual classic: World’s Scientists Admit They Just Don’t Like Mice — and don’t forget everything that can go wrong.
4/3/2007
I mentioned those Marty McFly shoes a few months ago.
The guy behind it cracks me up, because you guessed it: he made a spiffy fan site.
I typically wear white boat shoes and/or flip flops, yet I’d buy them if they came out.
4/1/2007
I went to Chilifest this past weekend — it is like Woodstock for rednecks.
While I did not watch a single band play, I did take part in what I considered the most smash-mouth tackle football game ever.
It was raining. The field was littered with cans and bottles. And there was absolutely no mercy.
About a dozen of us played, two were sent to the hospital with broken noses.
Cops showed up and worked crowd control, they estimated that about 250 people stood around rooting for yet more carnage.
I mention this because it was video taped by some random guy who said he would put it on MySpace. Unfortunately for all of us, the name he said he would use “Fonzo” is not at all helpful. In fact, it is near impossible to really limit and categorize the search results for recently uploaded videos.
I would like you to prove me wrong though, there is a finders fee involved if you find this bone-crunching video.
Oh, it took place at 4am and Fonzo (from what I recall) was a Hispanic probably in his early 30s with some holiday weight.
Note: perhaps the perfect illustration of how football reigns supreme in Texas, the cops wantonly approved of the brow-beating mud-filled gladiator fight, yet when a slip-n-slide was erected, they asked to have it removed.
Years ago, a friend of mine said that I spoke in hyperlinks.
