Flikr pointer

tolook

Cartoon

"Yoga for inflexible people"

Funny Microsoft Ad (BANG!)

Funny. (Believe it or not). They really should do this more often.

Hoosiers Aspirations

You can be Jimmy Chitwood or Norman Dale if you want, but someday I'd like to be that Dad in Hoosiers who hauls his kid back into practice, makes him apologize, and then tells the wannabe coaches to leave. He was great.

In closing, don't get caught watching the paint dry, boys.

Can I get a Bayonet on that 357 Magnum?

YouTube - The Food Photographer. I kept thinking of Wes Anderson's AmEx commercial. You know, I'm going to miss YouTube once they're done burning through their startup VC.

DIY DNA Extraction

Don't trust your local DNA lab? DIY.

How to argue effectively

One thing about the blogosphere is that it is full of arguments that are calmly and eloquently debated and which then come to a rapid and satisfying for all conclusion. When that doesn't work, you can learn "How to argue effectively." The second thing about the blogosphere is that the name blogosphere is teh ghey.

APOD: Comet

Comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 Passes the Earth

Update: More.

DeathWaltz

Yeah sure, it's got a beat, but can you dance to it?

I'm dumb. Now you know.

I had trouble sleeping last night. Not getting things done at work, etc. Perhaps these have something to do with it:

1. Star Wars Song Book
2. 10 Things I Hate About Commandments
3. Image Savant
4. Mental Health
5. Platinum, FMD
6. Steel Cut Oatmeal
7. Evolution of Dance

Yet more etc and so forth.

ID Theft Recovery

How to get through identity theft.

Tony Hawks is not Tony Hawk

But he gets emails for him anyway. 16 pages and counting. I'm thinking of changing my name to Satan Claus. [via Thomas Hawk]

Bullet: 4 score &...

Gettysburg Power Point Slides. Learn from the master, folks.

Seemless Pictures

More of Rob Gonsalves's work.

Take that, Dewey Decimal System

Octomatics. Why? No idea, really. I like ten. I know ten. Ten is a friendomine. But they carried this through to a point where it's become linkable. No comment yet from Dr. Octagon.

Charting Felix Henandez

The Seattle Mariners haven't been fun to watch this year. I drift back with hazy fondness to May of 2001, but then I blink and 2006 comes back into focus and it's all, "What up, bitch?" Ah, the dog days of, er, May.

There's no crying in baseball, but neither is there an extended sugar-high. Yankees suck. So, in that jalopeno-eatin' vein, it was intersting to read this pitching analysis of Felix getting hammered by the A's. By the frickin' A's. They of the Mendoza-line team batting average.

I'm digging the Doyle-O-Meter, too. Well played USS Mariner.

Speed Limits

Interesting. As cars improve people adjust their behavior to maintain the same risk. The 55 mph limit on 270 is ridiculous, and is only there because the PoPo go bounty hunting each 29th/30th/31st.

DIY Coffee Roasters

I am close to threshold on this one... I'm still trying to come up with a good dynometric tamper design, and ordering a second porterfilter head and cutting out the bottom is on the to-do list.

Paris gunmen demand Champions League Final Tickets

So, they're retarded, right? NOTE: Rhetorical question.

My Continuing Effort to Make XP Better

Actually, it's other people's efforts. I like Visual Task Tips for that slightly Macish feeling. Plus, I've been playing around with Google Notebook. Duly noted. Meanwhile, Bloglines and Del.ico.us, sit in the corner wondering what all the fuss is about.

Finally, if your computer lacks a mincing villainous je ne sais quoi*, I give you a Skeletor desktop:


I picked it up somewhere out in the wastelands.. It's great for convincing your colleagues/bosses that, yes, just as every outward visible sign already indicates, you are a hipster dipshit.

*ps, when I was typing that, not adding "certain" was like holding two magnets 1/16th of an inch apart.

Nerd Link of the Day

Slide Rules.
Slide Rules rule.
NIB, not that I care (NIC).
If I cared,
This would be a Haiku.
Woot!

Today's Science Hoon

"Never mix alkaline metals with water."

Sfere d'ottone

Pardon my google italian, but this guy had a pair. I'd be curious to see what name he signed.

Sa leppa pattadina - The folding knife from Pattada

I need to be straightforward: except for Grazia Deledda (and some other authors who wrote very few books, for example Emilio Lussu and Sebastiano Satta, and I must say that I know little about the contemporaries) there is no Sardinian who is a great literary figure. It is not difficult to understand, given the small number of people that always have lived in the island and the regime of isolation in which they lived for centuries.

So most of the poetry is improvisational, and I think also the good one which is not improvisational retains the themes of the impromtpu one. Here you are an excerpt, I am aware that the critical review is mixed, but I think it captures something of the feelings. The whole poem is based on memories of an old man of his younger life, in which the knife was a tool for his work as a shepherd and for shaping nice objects out of wood and reeds to give as presents to his young wife. So the knife had served him well, and now the knife is old, as well.

Sa leppa pattadina

...
sempre lughente, parias de prata,
segaias che su pensamentu,
ispilinde sa pedde in unu bentu:
giughias fogu in s'asta.

The folding knife from Pattada

...
always shining, you seemed made of silver,
you cut as sharp as a thought,
shaving sheepwool like the wind:
you had fire in your blade.
...

Antioco Casula, known as Montanaru (1878-1957)

Have you ever run into a dream?

This is Volkswagen's garage, for real. It's strange how seeing something I've always wanted is both great and slightly disappointing at the same time. I believe it's like getting married.

Debugging

From Cool Tools, Debugging:

Change One Thing at a Time
On nuclear-powered subs, there's a brass bar in front of the control panel for the power plant. When status alarms begin to go off, the engineers are trained to grab the brass bar with both hands and hold on until they've looked at all the dials and indicators, and understand exactly what's going on in the system. What this does is help them overcome the temptation to start "fixing" things, throwing switches and opening valves. These quick fixes confuse the automatic recovery systems, bury the original fault beneath an onslaught of new conditions, and may cause a real, major disasters. It's more effective to remember to do something ("Grab the bar!") than to remember not to do something ("Don't touch that dial!") So, grab the bar!

Free online science journals

Here's an post on Ars Technica about a bill to make all the published results of all science research freely available. In my view, most journals are dying. The sorting function mentioned is actually somewhat less valuable than you might think. It's based on peer-review, and peer review has serious issues with political cross-talk and lazy reviewers. Many scientists use aggregate journals like the APS/AIP's VJ-series, and sort the articles themselves with a quick scan through the titles and abstracts.

What actually is more important is that it has served as an evaluation method for scientific output (hence the cross-talk). This result is like google vs google bombs. I have suggested that there is a place for science eunichs/drones, whose role would be to serve as professional journal referees. I still like that idea.

The Art of War

Wretchard channels Sun Tzu.

Duck Hunt 2k6?

Duck Hunt is coming for the new Nintendo. Which is great, but I want to know if there will be a new 3D rendered smirking dog and if I can shoot him (still).

For those about to rock XP

Launchy, I salute you.

Pasta

"Home-made pasta" Waiters strike me as very angry people. You tip them like you're trying to appease a vengeful god.

"The last time I played a 60-second nonstop drum roll was never"

World's Fastest Drummer Contest. But there's always a hater:

Some in the crowd don't see the point of the contest. "It offends me musically," declares Jim Gifford, a rock-soul drummer from Chicago.

Me? I'm all set to become the worlds fastest blogger. Check this out:

zsdfljkhfsdlkflkuj1`3097w0etiofjlsdknfv,msdv o23uy5piwejflm anq4i9u0[9uetolkfmned.

Less than a second's work, dude.

Muttos - rhyming words

Sos muros de presone
fattos son de granitu
bagnatos de piantu.

Sos muros de presone
A su mancu ogni tantu
mandami unu iscrittu
de consolazione

Fattos son de granitu
De consolazione
a su mancu ogni tantu
mandami unu iscrittu

Bagnatos de piantu
Mandami unu iscrittu
de consolazione
a su mancu ogni tantu.


These are made to be sung; so that structure is particular in that each of the first three verses rhyme with one of the other three. The first three verses are then repeated one at a time, and the other three are sung afterwards with their order changed so as to complete the rhyme.

A (not literal) translation into english is

Prison walls
are made in granite
drenched in tears.

At least now and then
send me a couple of lines
to cheer me up!

Another one that I like is

Sa cristallina funtana
canta sa sua canzone
falenne in sa rocca dura.

Ti mando in donazione
amica gentile e pura
de muttos una collana

that needs to be set up in the same way as the other one, and in english would be

The crystal clear springwater
sings her own song
by falling on hard rock.

I shall send you as my gift,
my pure and kind friend,
a poetry collection.

This is a farce, right?

CrustaStun - the World's first humane electronic crustacean stunner.

Getting traded for 1 pallet (60 cases) of Budweiser

RHP Nigel Thatch was traded for Budweiser. Nigel must be demoralized, but I'm curious about the thinking behind the deal. If you had his contract and didn't want it, why not get some beer? But who wants a pitcher you can get for beer? Weird.

Gas Cap recinded in Hawaii

Turns out, it didn't work! Who could have seen that coming?

FedEx Video

Cool time lapse video of a Dopler radar showing FedEx planes rushing to land before a heavy thunderstorm hits the airport.

DIY Tamiflu

Personally, this simplified approach to making Tamiflu still pegs the difficulty meter for me, but feel free to break out the test tubes and beakers.

Savin' Gas

Easy things to do to save gas, which I guess would leave more money for things that rhyme with gas, like, er, glass or a delicous bass. Smooth, huh.

Space Pen

Behold: The Billion Dollar Space Pen.

[LMS] Russian ark

Russian Ark, by Aleksandr Sokurov (Russia/Germany 2002)

The idea of this movie is, by and large, to portray the history of St. Petersburg, which means an important part of the russian history, by walking around in the Hermitage of St. Petersburg. The whole movie is filmed in only one take, and this can be interpreted as symbolizing the continuity of history: there are no cuts in life and history.
The result is a movie which is quite challenging to follow.

I would say this: it is extremely difficult to communicate through culture in a synthetic way, because in this case culture is necessary both on part of the director and on part of the public. My suspicion is that the emotions that this movie transmits are more precise and ample if the viewer at least recalls something about the historical facts and their context.

This said, it is still possible to perceive something, in an attenuated way, even in the middle of some disorientation ... it could come from the russian way of talking, that to me sounds as a mixture of calm, vaguely proud and somewhat resigned, or maybe from the fluttering movements of the camera (as if that was the viewpoint of a ghost), or maybe from the theatrical movements of the extras with their beautiful clothes and of course from the wonderful art in which the whole movie is enveloped.

In conclusion, in order to watch this movie one should be prepared to suffer a little bit through the parts that are hard to understand ... but it can be a good investment of one's own time.

Electric Unicycle

Perhaps an electric bike is just too easy for you. Perhaps you like the comedic stylings of Gallagher, or his brother, or Carrot Top. Perhaps you need a German built fuzzy-logic controlled unicycle. Needless to say, it's DIY.

DIY Electric Bike

Here's a nice write up on building your own electric bike. The discusison about various problems with motors, gear ratios vs chain speed, power controller ratings, and various suppliers for all of the parts is very good. If the traffic wasn't so lethal around here, something like this would fit my bill for my daily commute (2.5 miles). However, six months ago a researcher here was killed riding his bike across a street at a cross-walk by someone running a red light, and many of the roads here are 4-6 lanes and sometimes lack even sidewalks. That's a little too Road Warrior for me to chance it - unless you mount machine guns/rocket boosters or something. Then it would be safe.

Bacon up that Sausage, Boy!*

For my Schwarzbein, uh, -ian (ish?) folks - the Bacon-Wrapped Tomatoes and Fried-Egg Salad. Personally, I'd add a dash of Tabasco sauce in the vinaigrette.

*"But Dad, my heart hurts!"

Forget Benjamins

It's all about the Salmon P. Chase's (2nd place, the Madison's, which despite the 1/2 denomination hit, rolls of the tongue a way easier and ends with "son" for rhyming purposes) ("Bitch acted like she'd never seen a Madison befo'e.")(Which she hadn't.)

Update: It's the Wilson's. Which is absurd.

Sleepy time

So, my sleep schedule has been weird the last few weeks. This week I have awaken unprompted at 4-5 am, except this morning, when I woke up at 8:30. Yeah, I know, "Thanks for sharing, Mike." But this has spurred a couple of thoughts:

1) My daily life doesn't really have any fixed times in it, so I haven't used alarm clocks in about five years. I haven't worn a watch in 15. I wake up when it gets light enough in my room. Which is a fixed time in the sense that I don't operate on a 27 hour day, but still, there's a 1-3 hour swing in things. This obviously varies with the weather and season. I like the, um, "gradualness" of this approach, though, since you tend to wake up at a natural point in your sleep cycle. I'm thinking of putting a small lamp on an timer circuit with a dimmer control set to ramp it up over 20 minutes. But it also occurred to me that what you need is an alarm clock that knows what point of your sleep cycle you in, and times things within a window so that you wake up maximally refreshed. I realize this trajectory might end up with me sleeping in a pyramidal oxygen chamber and then having to move to Dubai, so a little hardship isn't a big deal. Still, I'm not sure if there's a good signal that such an alarm could use to measure your sleep cycle. If you have an idea, besides attaching the Doc Brown electrode helmet to your head, let me know. If I work something out, I will patent it as the Big Brother or Santa Claus Alarm Clock.

2) I think the weirdness in schedule is related to the huge amount of pollen that every living plant seems to be pumping out around here right now. There is a fresh thick coating that shows up each morning on any glass surface you care to look at, and somehow I think this is affecting me. Or not. Still, I was discussing this over the morning coffee with my colleagues and the ones who live in this vicinity are also all having sleep issues. Usually this is all stress, but I don't particularly feel stressed right now.

So back to the pollen theory. Perhaps this is something for MythBusters, once they get done blowing up their test dummy for the four hundreth time. One of the coffee drinkers said that cities have been planting only male trees because there's a lot less cleanup from the lack of fruit. Which would explain the super-abundance of pollen. I was unaware that trees were male and female, and I'd like to do a little internet research on it, but I'm not going to type "tree sex" into Google at work.

Camera Truck

I thought my SLR was unweildly, and a friend thought his large-format camera was big. But how about a pinhole camera made out of a freakin' delivery truck? BTW, a pinhole camera has infinite depth of field, although diffraction blurs the image enough to sort of render that moot. Still.

Plus, I forget where, but some guy built pinhole cameras in NYC apartment rooms to photograph the skyline.

Star Wars

In a continuing series of personal development related posts: This is hard for me to process, but if this happens, George Lucas may actually get some (more) of my money.

Sometimes you know things aren't going to work out from the very beginning

It's like being dropped from a B-52 while riding a John Deere Lawn Mower Tractor. You are going to hit the ground no matter what you do with the steering wheel, throttle, hand-brake, and mower blade height adjustment lever (especially the mower blade height adjustment lever).

Wireless Car thieves

Well, this sucks. "Security through obscurity" doesn't last long if someone decides you're not obscure any more*. If your hoopty is worth something to you, or more pertinently, to someone else, you might consider an anti-theft device like this. Apparently it works.

*Note to Apple guys - virii are coming your way.

A Story as Old as Cain and Abel

Sure, you can always go for your basic The Night of the Hunter tatoos:



But you don't have to wear this shirt for the rest of your life either, and that has to make job interviews a little easier:



Ha, take that Threadless.

Tricks of the Trade

Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools and Makezine's Blog are two of my favorite websites; Tricks of the Trade is the lifehacks version.