I just finished Portal. Part of the OrangeBox, it's been out on PC and XBox 360 since October, and was just released on PS3 this month. If you have access to any of these platforms, I strongly urge you to do what you must to acquire and play this game. It is fun.
It's not a long game, 19 puzzle-like levels, and I probably finished it in about 3 or 4 hours. All I can say is that on about the second or third level you begin to realize that you're playing a game like no other before. And that feeling only intensifies throughout the game, up to and including the closing credits.
Which is my real reason for posting. Have I mentioned Jonathan Coulton before? Oh yes, here and here. I read several months ago that he had been asked to write the music for a video game, which I thought was awesome. Then I learned that it was only the music for the closing credits, which seemed less awesome. So I forgot about it.
When I finished Portal, I was impressed by the song at the end, but it didn't jog my memory. It was only when I played the game again with the developer commentary turned on (that's another thing about this game, it has built in commentary like a DVD--how cool is that?!) that I learned that it was Jonathan Coulton, and then I was all, oh yeah...
I've seen several studies cited recently that show that kids perform better in school when they are taught to focus on effort rather than talent. A recent article in Scientific American reaches the same conclusion.
The students who held a fixed mind-set, however, were concerned about looking smart with little regard for learning. They had negative views of effort, believing that having to work hard at something was a sign of low ability. They thought that a person with talent or intelligence did not need to work hard to do well.
I wouldn't say I had "little regard for learning," but I can definitely identify with the disdain towards effort. In my high school, all of us smart kids knew who the "workers" were, and how many of them had usurped our rightful places at the top of the class. In fact, the ultimate betrayal was when, around sophomore year, one of our own became a "worker," instantly shooting to the top spot with his unstoppable combination of effort and talent.
Of course, the "workers" were the ones that got into med school.
After watching Melissa run her 5K I got motivated to start running again. Along with that I've been trying to eat better and lose a little weight.
I found two websites that are pretty useful if you're wonky like me about this kind of thing, and like to keep track of all your calories. FitDay will let you get as detailed as you want as far as nutrition and exercise, but the interface is a little bare bones. It sure beats the Excel spreadsheet I was using before, though. Sparkpeople is probably just as detailed, but it's a bit more user-friendly and community oriented. It will tell you exactly what to eat every day if you want it to. It reminds me of the online nutrition and workout plans you get with some gym memberships, but it's free.
These sites will track all your exercise info as well, but I use other sites for that. I log my bike riding at My Cycling Log, and my running at Log Your Run. (Both sites will track both activities, as well as others, but I like each for the one it specializes in.)
Each of these sites have cool modules that allow you to plot your routes on Google maps to determine mileage. Or you can do the same thing at Gmaps Pedometer.
And finally, I'm using a training program from Cool Running, (I'm doing the Intermediate 5K), and the calculators at Running for Fitness. Active is also useful for looking up local races. It has other sports, too, so check it out if you're looking for a local volleyball tournament or something.
Now then. In the mid-eighties my parents bought my little brother one of these things. I don't know that he ever got all that attached to it, but he seemed to like it enough. What I do remember about My Buddy was that my older brother and I beat that thing mercilessly.
I still don't know what it was about that toy that caused David and I to succumb to violent tendencies we never knew we had. We never abused any of my sister's toys like that. (Sure, Super Grover spent more than his fair share of time up on the roof, but he was supposed to fly.) All I can tell you is that there was nothing more cathartic than grabbing My Buddy by the ankles and smashing his head into the metal bunk bed frame. Over and over and over...
I'm sure it started as a way to annoy my little brother. You punch his toy in the face, he gets mad, a good time is had by all. But it grew into something much bigger. Maybe it's because he really was indestructible--and he was the perfect size for such manhandling--so we took it as a challenge to see if we could really damage him. (I don't think we ever did.) Or maybe there was just something about his face that provoked our wrath.
Anyway, I was reminded of all of this by a blog post that claimed that My Buddy was for kids whose parents thought GI Joes were too violent. I had plenty GI Joes, but they never once inspired the kind of blood lust that My Buddy did.
Trouble At' Mill will be another thirty-minute film like A Close Shave and The Wrong Trousers.
Wallace and Gromit have a brand new business. The conversion of 62 West Wallaby Street is complete and impressive, the whole house is now a granary with ovens and robotic kneading arms. Huge mixing bowls are all over the place and everything is covered with a layer of flour. On the roof is a 'Wallace patent-pending' old-fashioned windmill.
No word yet on when it's expected to be released, but Nick Park has said that he's using faster production techniques now than he has on his other films.
Someone out there has a blog devoted to anthropomorphic food characters. Huh.
Anyway, if you don't recognize the Del Monte Country Yumkins, it's probably because your mom fed you generic canned green beans instead of the good stuff.
Don't feel bad, I'm sure they were just as healthy.
I've blogged about Jonathan Coultonbefore, but he rates another mention. Probably several more.
This is the video to a song called "Flickr," which is really just a bunch of random phrases strung together about random pictures people put on Flickr. Trust me, it works.
His acceptance speech is long, but very good. He can't resist rhyming and using cliches, but he's so sincere, you love him anyway.
(Originally the video cut out some of his remarks about torture, but in the end it appears that the level of irony involved in censoring a Liberty Medal recipient was too much to bear.)
Did you see this video during combined PH/RS meeting yesterday?
Melissa did. She wasn't sure if it was a church-wide thing or if it was done on a local level, but she told me that she won't soon forget hearing the voices of Chris Parnell and Amy Poehler in the chapel.
Here's a guy who doesn't want to bother calculating the tip on his restaurant check, even though he probably has a palm pilot or laptop or cell phone out during dinner (judging by the importance of wifi access) and could easily use the calculator in said device.
So he rounds everything to even dollars, only to realize that he could be using those precious cents digits to communicate a wealth of information to himself about each meal. Simple addition, subtraction, and multiplication are too much to bother with, but binary/decimal conversions are de rigeur, apparently.
No less remarkable is his discovery that restaurants seem to be pretty lax about the total you write on your receipt.
It looks like an old card game from the 60s, and it really ate up my afternoon. Just place cards on the board in such a way that your guests are sitting next to people they like.
So I signed up for some Facebook. Everyone else needs to sign up now so I can have some friends.
It's a pretty slick interface, far superior to MySpace, as far as I can tell. I'm still not sure about the whole social networking thing, though. It's clearly geared toward kids who are still in school, so I find myself thinking about old friends I haven't contacted in years.
Still, Steve was asking me about a way to aggregate everyone's blogs, photos, videos, etc. this summer. Something like Facebook would be very useful in that regard.
Okay, it's a toothbrush with a concave back that is designed to redirect a stream of water just like a drinking fountain. So you don't have to use a cup (or other less sophisticated means) to rinse after brushing.
This is so two years ago, maybe I even linked to it before, I can't remember. It's "Since U Been Gone" covered by Ted Leo. Something reminded me of it today, and now my brain is craving it like heroin.
I've been thinking we need some new music at our house. Maybe Ted Leo and the Pharmacists is just the thing.
This one is about Stuff. I feel like I've been saying this stuff to myself for years. And yet I keep accumulating more stuff.
"What I didn't understand was that the value of some new acquisition wasn't the difference between its retail price and what I paid for it. It was the value I derived from it. Stuff is an extremely illiquid asset. Unless you have some plan for selling that valuable thing you got so cheaply, what difference does it make what it's "worth?" The only way you're ever going to extract any value from it is to use it. And if you don't have any immediate use for it, you probably never will."
I have been looking for this for a long time, a way to play the old Oregon Trail game that we all played on Apples in elementary school. I've download stuff and tried to get it to run with no success. There are more modern versions available which are no good.
Now someone has set up a Virtual Apple II emulator that lets you play Oregon Trail on the web. I think you have to have Windows and Firefox for it to work.
(By the way, I found the link at MentalFloss, another highly recommended site.)
Yesterday we were talking about how we needed to upgrade our stereo system, and Melissa mentioned the Bose store we saw at the mall.
I told her that Bose sucks.
She was incredulous, so I offered to post a few links. It's a lot to read, but by the time you're done you will be amazed at the sheer power of marketing.
Stuff like this always makes me wonder what else I'm assuming is good or true, not because I've examined it, but because some rich, powerful company or organization has spent a lot of money honing my perceptions.
I've heard of people who stop by Ikea every morning for breakfast, and others who choose to simply hang out there on the weekends, but now you can elect to stay overnight if you just can't bring yourself to leave.
There's an article about Junie B. Jones books in the New York Times. Apparently, some parents object to Junie's grammar, afraid their kids are going to start talking like her if they read too many of these books.
I don't buy it. The arguments I thought of as I read the first few paragraphs show up on the second page: Mark Twain and Shakespeare. I think exposure to non-standard English, in either direction, can only be educational.
So the Asian kids are using their piano skills to play the guitar. They just crank up the volume and play one-handed hammer-ons (to use a term I recently learned from Guitar Hero).
And hey, since you only need one hand, that frees up your other hand to play ANOTHER GUITAR!
You enter your address at this site, and it tells you how walkable your house is.
Except, there's been so much traffic at the site I haven't been able to try it yet. The way it's supposed to work, as far as I can gather, is it counts up the number of businesses, schools, and other services within walking distance (1 mile) of your house.
I have to imagine that my address has a pretty good walking score. I think we have every kind of business imaginable within a mile of our house, plus two schools and two nice parks. Maybe we should start walking more.
UPDATE:
So I finally get in and find out that my house has a walk score of 35: Unwalkable. That's bogus, man. Actually, it didn't see a lot of the businesses in my area, so I might have had a better score had I been able to update the information.
This pic should remind you of a scene from Wayne's World. "Denied!"
It's funny because it's true. When everyone who walks into the store plays the same song, it can really get on your nerves.
My friend Lars and I somehow got roped in to working a Freshman Orientation booth at BYU in Fall 1995. It was some kind of travel theme, all of the incoming freshman had passports that they were supposed to get stamped at each station. Ours was karaoke, and after listening to kids sing the same blasted song for about the tenth time, we posted our own sign:
According to this research, female tennis players' performance tends to deteriorate in critical situations, while men do not tend to play any differently as the stakes rise.
Then they go on to question whether this has anything to do with the gender-wage gap in the labor force, which is an interesting question.
This guy, Eric Young, teaches a film class at Dixie State. Every year he has his students write a secret on a 3x5 card, resulting in something like PostSecret, but from a single demographic: college-age Mormons.
He has about 800 cards, and posted this sample on his blog.
Charles Darwin said it first: "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." But Dunning and Kruger designed some experiments around the idea and quantified the Dunning-Kruger effect, which states that incompetent people tend to overestimate their level of skill, and that you actually have to have some degree of skill before you can begin to perceive your lack of it.
It might well be called the Dilbert effect, as much as Scott Adams talks about it. (Not to be confused with the Dilbert Principle, which states that companies intentionally promote incompetent people into management to limit the amount of damage they're capable of.) The one problem with the world, he claims, is that most of us are dumb about most things. Because of that, not only do we fail to recognize our own ignorance--and therefore inflate the importance of our own opinions--but we also fail to recognize the genuine skill and knowledge of those who aren't dumb about those particular things, and therefore we wind up discounting their opinions because they are usually different from our own.
Not to be outdone, the guys at Car Talk put out their own list of commandments (I count 17). Besides the obligatory "Thou shalt not drive like my brother," my favorite is "Thou shall keepeth thy 17-year-old son bound to the slowest and ugliest 1979 Volvo which hath presenteth itself on the list of craig."
Everyone's favorite free online game has hit the big time. Paul Preece, creator of Desktop Tower Defense, was recently interviewed by the Wall Street Journal.
What started as a hobby for Mr. Preece has blossomed into a full-time career.
This article includes a map that shows the childhood mobility of three generations in a family. The great-grandfather was allowed to wander six miles from home when he was eight, while the current eight-year-old is allowed to stray only 300 yards.
So Microsoft has this new technology that turns a tabletop into a touchscreen computer. A co-worker of mine was all excited about it, while I couldn't figure out what it would be good for. Like so much tech, it strikes me as a solution in search of a problem.
Though we try to avoid it, at times our stairs become overrun with shoes. Because the stairs are right by the front door, and they are natural little storage shelves, they usually have at least one pair of shoes on them.
Too bad our stairs are carpeted. But I am definitely going to think about this.
Have you ever noticed how fast Wikipedia updates? Whenever there is some breaking story in the news, you can usually go to Wikipedia to get the latest information.
Wikiclock takes that phenomenon to the extreme. It's a clock that runs solely on wiki technology. So far I haven't seen it off by more than 15 minutes.
When we were kids, and we would ask our parents if we were poor, the answer we always heard was that we had enough money to keep shoes on our feet. Obviously, that meant nothing to us. Of course we had shoes.
As I look through these colorized photos from the 1940s, the thing that stands out are all the barefoot kids. Especially this one. Even though I know that the kids with shoes are probably jealous of the kids that get to go barefoot, it's still kind of sad.
Have I mentioned that they know how to do TV in Japan? (Of course, I'm only seeing the highlights. For all I know their typical daytime lineup makes ours look like the Renaissance.)
Anyway, believe me when I tell you that you will enjoy this video of a secretary taking care of some routine paperwork.
So this guy wants to create a video of Michael Jackson's live performance of Billy Jean, that's just his white glove, right?
And instead of writing a program that looks at every video frame and isolates the glove, he figures it would be easier to get 10,000 or so people on the internet to do the work for him.
So if you want to help him out, go to White Glove Tracking, draw a box around a white glove, and click to submit the frame. Hey, do two or three while you're at it--it's fun!
Bond Girls are a cultural icon. They are often cheesy, over-the-top caricatures (just look at the names: Pussy Galore? Holly Goodhead? Xenia Onatopp? Sheesh.) so like everything else cheesy, sometimes they work and sometimes, not so much. And so I give you:
Who knew? The opposite of Absolute Zero is the Planck temperature, 10^32 Kelvin, the temperature beyond which the molecules of matter become black holes unto themselves, or something.
Some scientists believe that we, or at least our universe, have already experienced the Planck temperature, although it went by so quickly you may have missed it. It occurred at 10^-43 of a second after the Big Bang, the great cataclysm in which the universe was born. (10^-43 of a second, in case you're not hip to the notation, is an incredibly tiny fraction of time. Time enough to create the universe, but not, as a University of Chicago physicist was once at pains to explain, time enough to get off a disputed last-tenth-of-a-second shot against the Chicago Bulls.)
So we have this hot tube that came with the house. We used it once or twice that first year and haven't bothered with it since. I've filled it up and cleaned it out a few times since then, in case we ever wanted to use it, but we just haven't.
So this week we decided to get rid of it.
Melissa suggested we list it on Craiglist and see if someone will come haul it off for free. I can't believe anyone would want it, though, so I decide against it. I figured it would take about $500 to get it all fixed up and usable at this point, and I can't believe anyone would want to put that kind of money into it.
Today I asked my dad about borrowing his trailer so I can haul it to the dump on Saturday, and he suggested Craigslist as well. This time I decide it couldn't hurt, so I go ahead and list it. I mean, if someone really wants to come take it off my hands, that would be great! I'm staring at a major project this weekend, and I'm even considering hiring some company to haul it away.
I posted the listing at 12:00 pm. It's now 1:26 and I've received 14 responses from people who want to come pick it up tonight!
Please, do me a favor and check out the listing. Have I failed to communicate what bad shape this thing is in? Or have I simply underestimated the demand for dirty, run-down hot tubs in the Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex? I'm baffled.
UPDATE:
I've taken the ad down. Too many responses. Plus, Melissa tells me that if you search Craigslist in DFW for "hot tubs," the listing right below mine is for a free hot tub removal service. Doh!
This one includes an excellent quote from Schopenhauer: “A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills.”
I agree with Adams that an idea as simple as "We don't know as much as we think we know" can change the world. It reminds me of another of his posts from November, we he suggests that one way to magically solve all of the world's problems would be to simply "imbue us all with the knowledge of who is smarter than ourselves on any given topic."
Check out the new sport that's all the rage in Europe right now.
Parkour's founder and chief practitioner is David Belle. It supposedly stems from French military training during the Vietnam War era, which made extensive use of obstacle courses.
While thy seem very similar on the surface, practitioners cite significant differences. Parkour is very similar to martial arts. It has the practical applications of escape and reach, and is also meant to be a kind of life philosophy. The goal in Parkour is to get from point A to point B in as fast and efficient a manner as possible, with an emphasis on problem solving and overcoming obstacles.
Free Running, on the other hand, is more like an extreme sport, with its emphasis on tricks and "going big." It lends itself more readily to commercialization and competition, and is more concerned with the beauty of a particular move than its usefulness or efficiency.
This opinion piece was written at the U of U a few years ago, so maybe some of you Utah people have seen it. But it was new to me.
Basically, the author argues that pi should be the ratio of radius to circumference, rather than diameter, because that would make all the formulas look prettier. I have to agree that, once you get beyond elementary geometry, it's all radius, all the time. So why is this famous number based on diameter?
Most of us have probably taken our fair share of personality tests on the Internet, but this one had an interesting format. You give your responses by moving an arrow on a slider, plotting a point on a coordinate plane, and other analog stuff like that.
It felt like it was just the right length and asked things in several different ways, so even though I felt like I was contradicting myself at times, the results seemed to be pretty accurate.
I just bought this bike. It's on backorder, so it won't be shipped until May 5.
If you look at my profile, I'm sitting on the bike I just bought for Michael. It's a 20 inch Haro, compared to the 16 inch Huffy he's currently riding. It fits him, technically, but he's not as confident on it, and the smaller bike is just more fun for him right now. And let's face it, fun is what it's all about.
So I've been riding the bike I bought for Michael, leading Melissa to suspect that this was my plan all along. (I feel like I need to say something about a hockey stick here.) Anyway, it has always been my plan to buy a BMX bike to ride around with the kids, as the road bike just doesn't work well for that. I figured now was as good a time as any--Michael's new bike is really too small for me and I don't want to wear it out before he decides to start riding it.
About a year ago we had some sales people come into our office and give a presentation on this cool electronic whiteboard that would let you save whatever you wrote to a computer.
This was attractive to us because the financial planners use whiteboards a lot in their presentations, and this would allow the client to take home a copy of all the diagrams and notes and stuff. And it would be useful for other things in the office, too. I won't get into all of it.
Anyway, when I first encountered this website, I thought it would be a demonstration of this kind of technology.
A recent comment on Clark's blog made the following claim:
Brigham Young once commented on the weather in St. George with a statement something like this: "If I only had a house in St. George and a house in hell, I'd summer over in hell."
I've heard similar quotes attributed to various people, mostly about Texas (because I live here) but also about various other places. I suspected the comment had been made about nearly every state and city in the Southwest, so I googled "live in * and rent out *" (because that's the way I've heard it most often) with interesting results.
My favorites:
"...I'd live in Hell and rent out Texas/Arizona/San Antonio/Houston/Brooklyn/Vegas/Arkansas/Oklahoma/South Africa/Memphis/Louisiana/New Guinea/etc."
"...I'd live in California and rent out Heaven."
"...if I were a UN peacekeeping force and owned Bosnia-Herzegovina and Tombstone, I’d live in Bosnia-Herzegovina and rent out Tombstone."
My limited research indicates that the original quote was about Texas and was first attributed to General Phillip Sheridan in 1866, but I'm open to argument.
UPDATE:
It appears the St. George quote is most often attributed to J. Golden Kimball (Jeffrey Holland cited it once in a 1974 speech), which makes sense. Kimball was a GA from the 1890s until his death in the 1930s, so he could have heard the Sheridan quote and adapted it to St. George during that time.
Pat Venditte of Creighton University is one of only a handful of ambidextrous pitchers to ever play the game. He uses a custom glove that fits on either hand so he can switch arms in the middle of an inning.
A switch-pitcher facing a switch-hitter could make a fine Abbott and Costello routine. Against Nebraska last year, a switch-hitter came to the plate right-handed, prompting Venditte to switch to his right arm, which caused the batter to move to the left-hand batter’s box, with Venditte switching his arm again. Umpires ultimately restored order, applying the rule (the same as that in the majors) that a pitcher must declare which arm he will use before throwing his first pitch and cannot change before the at-bat ends.
Scouts are considering him as a possible late-round pick in this year's draft.
Yet another Flash game. This one is called Disorientation, and it's just what it says: disorienting. All you have to do is move your guy from point A to point B, but the board tends to move around in ways that make that more difficult than it sounds.
Still using Google? Lame! Don't you know that these days, savvy web-searchers trust their queries to none other than Kevin Federline?
Actually, even if you choose to search with Kevin, you'll still be using Google. A company called Protege has made its "Search and Win" portal available to A-list celebrities while giving us all a chance to win prizes with every search!
Emily Haines is the lead singer of Canadian indie band Metric, and for some reason tonight I find myself mesmerized by her voice.
Besides the intoxicating voice, she's also a brilliant songwriter and not too shabby on the piano. Metric's two CDs, Old World Underground and Live It Out are your typical hipster indie fare, with shades of electronica and math rock.
But recently she released a solo album called Knives Don't Have Your Back which is much more mellow and gives her a chance to sit at the piano.
You can download a recent concert of hers in its entirety from NPR if you're interested.
This is a pretty impressive graphic of every star, planet, moon, asteroid, and TNO in the Solar System (over 200 miles in diameter) all lined up in size order.
I think you'll agree that Mimas, Saturn's smallest moon, is actually the Death Star.
Ok, I've been reading xkcd for I don't know how long, maybe a year. Just today I noticed that if you hover your mouse pointer over the comic for a second, the title of the image pops up as a comment. It's like a second punchline for every joke!
For example, in this comic about Ender's Game, the comment says, "Bean actually sabotaged it just to give Dink the excuse to make that joke."
Has anyone else noticed this? Am I the last to know?
Now I feel like I need to go back to the beginning and read every single one.
Again.
By the way, if some of them are too long to read, you can see the entire text by right-clicking on the image and going to Properties.
In January I posted about MIT's OpenCourseWare program, where they intend to eventually offer every class in their catalog online for free.
This is another example of what I think is a great emerging trend of free educational sources on the Internet. Richard A. Muller, a physics professor at UC Berkeley, has been uploading his weekly physics lecture entitled "Physics for Future Presidents" to Google Video for over a year now.
To his own surprise, he has since garnered a worldwide audience. I think it's awesome that there is such a demand for this kind of thing.
My brother-in-law Dan hosts a NCAA basketball bracket at CBS Sportsline each year, and this year I took first place out of 16 participants. (Although the tournament's not over yet, at this point no one can catch me.) I should clarify that there were only 14 serious participants, because two people picked BYU to go all the way.
Now, what makes this so fun for me is that Dan, my brother-in-law, is such a sports fanatic. And although his dad, Rick, actually hosts a sports radio show, his uncle Doug claims to know more about sports than either of them. So it's safe to say that these guys are all into it.
I, on the other hand, have not watched a single minute of college basketball this season. Ergo, these brackets are 100% luck.
So my dad is becoming quite the bowyer. He does the whole deal with the wood and the fiberglass and the carbon fiber and he bakes it all up nice in a homemade wooden oven in his garage.
So I'm playing this game after dinner last night, and Melissa casually wanders by and asks about it.
Next thing I know, she's in my spot, playing it.
I go about my usual Monday evening routine, buying airline tickets to Utah and uploading videos to YouTube, and she's still playing it. I think she played it until 12:30. It's funny because I never thought it was the type of game she would be interested in.
But there you go. If you find that you, too, have become compulsively addicted to this game, here are some others in the same vein:
He always said that he would quit doing The Show on March 17, 2007, I just never thought that day would come.
So sorry to see it go. Still, between all the episodes I missed and his upcoming projects--whatever they may be--I'm sure there will be plenty of Ze Frank in the future for all of us.
Spring is in the air, so the bikes are out of the garage. I told Michael that if he learned to ride without training wheels, I'd buy him a new bike. I figured it would take months of bribing along these lines to get him to take the plunge, but I was wrong. He immediately called me on it.
I didn't do a lot of snow fort building as a kid, but this article represents a growing genre that is close to my heart: the "Wow, with my grown-up brains, muscles, and money, plus access to tools like the Internet, I can do all my favorite childhood activities so much BETTER!" genre.
I've been known to apply this thinking to video games, Legos, riding bikes, coloring books, skateboarding, cartoons, and comics, to name a few.
Someday when I'm really old I hope to apply the same kind of thinking to activities I undertook in my twenties. Like college.
I never heard of most of these bands until well into the 90s or later (I didn't hear of Bauhaus until my mission. Of course I waited until I was released to actually listen to the tape.)
Some of them (Durutti Column and Teardrop Explodes) I've still never heard of. Well, now I have. Barely.
Suzanne's post about Starbucks hot chocolate reminded me of The Firearm, a humorous periodical that circulated on the BYU campus during the '01-'02 school year. I never saw it in print (although that was my final year as a student, I wasn't really "on campus" much) but I heard about it and read all the issues online. It's funny stuff, and if you haven't read it before, I encourage you to do so. If you were around BYU at the time, you've probably read them already.
The inaugural issue is classic for it's treatment of Mochas and hardcore boardgaming.
Volume 1, Issue 3 introduced Chimptech, which is still in use in our office today.
As near as I can figure, there are seven issues in Vol. 1 and six in Vol. 2.
"I want to help people. I want their life to be a better life. I want them to have what I have. A whole range of guns. Made from office supplies."
Scott and I came across this site years ago, but I had forgotten about it until a binder clip to the back of the head suddenly jogged my memory this morning.
It all started with this site: How many of the 50 states can you name in 10 minutes?
I saw it a couple of weeks ago, but didn't post about it because I wasn't really impressed. First of all, it was kind of easy--I named all 50 in less than 5 minutes. Then you had to wait for the time to run out, and then it didn't even verify your answers. It just popped up a list of the correct answers and you were supposed to check them yourself. Boooring.
But apparently the Internet thought it was the greatest thing ever, because similar tests started popping up everywhere. And the copycats are much better. First of all, they are more challenging: World Countries, African Nations, UN Member States. Also, they sport a much improved interface. The correct answers are verified as you go, and it keeps a running tally for you of how many are left. Very nice.
Not to be outdone, Ironic Sans went back and spiffed up their original States quiz, so now it's high-tech like the others.
I remember one of my music lesson books had a diagram of Rachmaninov's hands. It showed him comfortably playing a C octave with the 2nd and 5th fingers of his right hand, and his thumb on the G below that.
Anyway, Asians are renowned for their musical prowess but also for their sometimes diminutive stature--which is to say, their piano prodigies don't always have the biggest hands.
This video is one man's attempt to compensate for that.
According to this article, there is a 1 in 30,000 chance that an asteroid will collide with earth in 2036.
Considering that the odds of a person dying in a terrorist attack are 1 in 88,000, I think this justifies a War on Asteroids. Or two or three.
And since the impending attack is scheduled to occur at least ten years before Social Security goes bankrupt, and fixing that was such a priority in 2005, well, you can see that we should have begun worrying about this years ago.
Another oldie but goodie from the vast archive of tech support horror stories of the early 90s. Remember when computers were new and people were idiots?
The first time I heard of Regina Spektor was in January 2006, when her video for 'Us' appeared at number 21 on Good Weather for Airstrikes' list of the Top 65 Videos of 2005.
GWFA is a top-notch blog for indie music, if you're into that kind of thing.
Anyway, that list introduced me to a lot of new bands, notably Hot Hot Heat, Sigur Ros, The Decemberists, and Bloc Party, among many others. I highly recommend it. The number one video, Glosoli by Sigur Ros is particularly good.
I can't find a way to link to the post, so here's what you do. Go to the Good Weather for Airstrikes homepage, and search for "Spektor." The last result should be a link to the top 65 videos of 2005.
This flash game measures your reflexes by timing how long it takes you to shoot a tranquilizer dart at runaway sheep. (Because that's the most obvious method that springs to mind, right?)
After several attempts my best average is 0.1772 seconds--a Rocketing Rabbit!
Your typical list of crazy laws, still on the books but rarely enforced, broken down by state.
I liked this one, which was never actually a law:
A Utah legislator proposed a resolution urging that each TV weather person be required to provide an ice cream cone to every member of the state House of Representatives whenever the forecast was wrong. The resolution failed, perhaps on First Amendment grounds.
Very interesting (and long) piece in the New York Times on food and the advent of "nutritionism."
Unfortunately, the bulk of my diet is comprised of highly processed items that, in Michael Pollan's estimation, hardly qualify as food.
"There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these."
Oh well, there's always Lean Cuisine, right?
"Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They’re apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best... When Kellogg’s can boast about its Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars, health claims have become hopelessly compromised."
I've never even heard of anyone shoplifting meat before. I would have guessed it was some kind of clothes or accessory item at the mall, or possibly gum. (Hasn't every six year old stolen gum from the grocery store? Maybe it doesn't count as shoplifting if your mom makes you return it.)
Neat Google Maps pic of an SR-71 sitting on the deck of a docked aircraft carrier.
So many questions. First of all, they don't look like they would be able to take off from aircraft carriers, and are these planes still active anyway? Maybe it's someone's souvenir or something.
The Spelling Bee was today, and Michael got out on his first word.
I'm very disappointed, and I can't stop thinking about it in order to get any work done. Which surprises me.
I'm surprised by how excited I was leading up to the event, how nervous I was sitting in there waiting for it to start, and how disappointed I am that he got out so early. I did the Spelling Bee once as a fourth grader and I got out on the first word, too, and I didn't care, so why do I care about this?
I guess it's because he studied so hard and he knew all those words. When he came home a few months ago and said he was going to be in the Spelling Bee, I didn't think much of it because he's just a first grader. How well could he possibly do? But as he studied those words, I was amazed at how well he learned them. Once he got them right he remembered them. I started thinking that he actually had a shot. When we arrived at the school there was some buzz among the teachers and parents that there was a first grader in the Spelling Bee this year.
But there's a reason they don't usually let first graders in the Spelling Bee. They are just squirmy little kids. They don't really have the composure to get up there at the microphone in front of the whole school and say what they know. They lack the gravitas, if you will.
Michael's word was "massage." I knew that was one that he studied, and he knew how to spell it. But he repeated the "g." He did it in such a way that nobody thought that he intended to put two g's in the word. He just stopped for a second, thought about it, and then picked up again on the last letter that he was on. (Which I think you are allowed to do, according to my viewing of the documentary "Spellbound.") Anyway, at first the judges told him he had it right, and he punched the air victoriously and took his seat. Then they discussed it for a while, then they went to the tape and reviewed it, and after what seemed like forever they walked over and told him that he had to leave the stage. He was visibly disappointed, and I felt crushed.
I wanted to get out of that auditorium as fast as I could, for some reason. I didn't want to hear any other kids spelling or misspelling words that I knew Michael knew.
MIT is offering a ton of free courses online. You can't get credit for them, and you won't have access to faculty or anything like that, but anyone is free to download the syllabus, lecture notes, assignments, and exams. No registration required.
If you were really motivated you could get the rough equivalent of an MIT education for a fraction of the cost! I guess you would still have to buy all your books, though.
UPDATE: Turns out OpenCourseWare is not limited to MIT, but actually consists of a consortium of several outstanding universities, such as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Notre Dame, ...and UVSC.
Flickr photos tagged with 'faketiltshift' demonstrate an interesting photo editing technique where the immediate foreground and background are blurred. The resulting effect gives the appearance of miniature scale models being photographed up close.
You know how sometimes you're walking along, or driving to work or whatever, and you think to yourself, "Hey, I wonder what Art Garfunkel was reading in August of 1991?" And you just had to be content not to know, because even in this information age there are still some crucial bits of knowledge that lie just beyond our grasp?
Well, not anymore. Thanks to the Garfunkel Library, you can finally be at ease, secure in the knowledge that while Paul Simon was promoting his latest album with another free concert in Central Park, Art was reading Oscar Hijuelos' The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.
This guy collected samples of all different kinds of food in 200 Calorie portions, took pictures of them, and then posted them in order of Calorie density. Nothing we didn't already know, of course, but it's an interesting visual.
Ze Frank's "The Show" has to be one of the most informative and entertaining things on the Interweb right now. Unless you count The Daily Show and the Colbert Report, but I think they still technically count as TV.
Another strangely compelling online game that is extremely addictive. Seriously, don't start playing it unless you have a significant chunk of free time available.
Well, Christmas break is over so it's time to get back to blogging. These first few days of work have been particularly busy ones, but hopefully things will die down once the year gets underway.
For the first post of 2007, I give you fifty great TV commercials from the 80s.
I still quote from No. 1 regularly.
The 80s commercial I quoted most in high school isn't in this list though. You can find it here. It's the second one. "Pardon me, guys." Never gets old.
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Sunday, December 23, 2007
