Monthly Archives: July 2007

I love technology.

Christopher Walken shows you his chicken recipe.

It’s a slow day in New York.

Live a species so amazingly primitive they still think digital watches are a neat idea. Here’s a picture.

John Derbyshire’s article doesn’t make me not like Ron Paul.

Quite possibly everything, except lima beans, is addictive. To someone.

Somehow I doubt Paris will suffer, though.

Not that I wanted to see her suffer, of course.

Robbie Williams as the young Captain Kirk. I don’t totally hate the idea, which is a good start.

You should go read this guy’s blog.

Cricket is starting to make sense to me now.

Scented USB drives. Wouldn’t their time be better spent inventing cool new gadgets instead scenting up the old ones?

MST3K guys are back, more or less.

Joel > Mike

The NY Times has you covered, for the next 3 months.

How will we keep track of Batboy?

An interview with a unique Japanese watchmaker. (NSFW language)

Bill Simmons on the NBA’s ongoing troubles.

I find it hard to believe anyone complained about the lack of these comics, much less thousands.

We have to wait until Monday to see how Newt Gingrich is going to save America from excessive bureaucracy.

I must find and try this intriguing new ice cream flavor.

A 4.2 earthquake, which did no damage, is battling with the Harry Potter book release for the lead story.

The first moonwalk was 38 years ago today.

Which reminds me, where is that power of cheese ad about going to the moon?

An interesting tale.

Well, this was great stuff. Not only did I make a very nice profit, I got the best of all possible outcomes: Instead of taking a desperate Harry Potter fan to the cleaners, I got to fleece a media organization. I will sleep with a profoundly clean conscience.

Your iPhone is free to choose different SIMs now.

They’re creating a vast climate controlled climate corridor. I think we call those “zoos”.

Why exploring space is so important. And a bunch of stuff about the Copernican formula.

I like that he’s so precise about the 46 years part. And this quote:

If it’s true that civilizations normally go extinct because they get stuck on their home planets, then the odds are against us, but there’s nothing inevitable about the Copernican Principle.

That’s a pretty big if. If only the Romans and Persians and Assyrians and Phoenicians and Hittites had explored space more, they might have fared better.

The dying honeybee has been dying for at least a decade now.

It’s a slow news day, so I choose to inflict you with the sad details of my life.

At the gym this morning. Doing my thing, I walk downstairs to put away the medicine ball and go do some pullups. Unfortunately there’s one more step than I think there is. My hands were full, so I couldn’t grab the handrail. One second I’m walking along, the next I’m on the floor clutching my ankle. I don’t think it’s too bad, really. I can walk on it, after all.

And right now I’m in need of some caffeine, and other stuff, yet unwilling to walk hobble downstairs to do something about it.

It’s a list of 101 Earth facts. Obviously no editor is going to read that whole thing. Check out #78.

Making real life more like a video game. It ups your dorkiness count, but if you contemplate something like this, it was probably pretty high to begin with.

Sadkermit. (Not safe for happy childhood memories)

I’ll get to it later.

As the time approaches to spend time at the “beach” reading, as opposed to spending time in the basement or living room reading, I give you my summer reading list:

Europe: A History by Norman Davies. Cause everyone should learn stuff, even in the summer. Plus it’s a huge book that will impress all the folks at the beach.

1632 by Eric Flint. Actually, I finished this already. It was okay. Not as good as I was hoping, but not horrible.

Some Honor Harrington by David Weber. I’ve read the first two and I can’t wait to read more. The Short Victorious War is next and no doubt it will quickly be followed by Field of Dishonor. I just wish there was an omnibus edition. If the series doesn’t nose-dive and my money holds out I’ll get through the whole series.

Sunrise Alley by Catherine Asaro.

I also plan to re-read Wizard’s First Rule.

Yep, not a lot of deep thinking, but a lot of hard sci-fi, which I think counts as math and science.

If you want to feel better about the world in general, go read this Heinlein piece.

Would Ike like the iPhone?

The Get Smart trailer.

I admit I laughed, but I still hold out no hope for this movie.

Tim Blair on the Christian sectarian violence that has broken out over the Pope’s recent comments.

So far we’ve torched four Catholic schools, an effigy of Archbishop Daniel Mannix, and a Sopranos DVD. The Orthodoxers briefly captured Peter Costello, but had to let him go when they found out he was some kind of Baptist.

Dissing Muslims and immigration in one little comment.

Of course you do. Driving to the gym this morning, 5:45am, gas at the cheap Exxon $2.74. Darn, I thought, yesterday it was $2.72. That’s what I get for procrastinating. I’ll get gas on my way home.

Go to the gym. On my way home, 6:45am, stop at the same cheap Exxon. Gas is now $2.77.

Forget the whole how does the price of gas go up overnight. How does it go up in the space of an hour? Waiting that extra 25 hours cost me 50 cents. There’s a life lesson in there somewhere.

Would you rather burn up or be covered in raw sewage? Hmmm.

Burdett: “We heard the man in there screaming, so we waited for the police to get there, and police showed up. We asked permission to put the fire out, with the pump truck, and they said ‘Go ahead, and do that’ so we backed the pump truck over there, and put the fire out.”

Clever outdoor lights aren’t going to fool me. I keep my eyes on anything that declares it isn’t a bomb.

I don’t think you get to be a mastermind unless you succeed at at least one of your nefarious plans. Sure, James Bond defeated some masterminds, but they had previously accomplished something evil, making them masterminds.

And remember kids, one day you’ll wish you paid attention to all that stuff you think is useless to learn in school.

A roundup of what all the cool people said about Al Gore Live.

I would like to report that I am enjoying the whole Netflix “Watch It Now” thing. It’s really nice when you don’t want to wait three days for something you’re not convinced is worth it or you’re bored waiting for your next envelope.

A minor flaw is that I have to use Internet Explorer, which means I can’t watch it on my Ubuntu laptop. But other than that, it’s great. It might not quite be DVD quality, but it hasn’t glitched once in the three movies I’ve watched and the quality is good enough not to be distracting.

Big thumbs up to Netflix.

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation….

Stuff like this is why even the little I know about quantum mechanics trips me out.

Drawing on the bizarre principles of quantum mechanics, he suggests that human beings — through the sheer act of observation — may have helped shape the laws of physics billions of years ago.

AllofMP3.com is gone.

Declaration of Independence quiz.

I admit a couple of those were lucky guesses. And I realized that I rely far too much on the musical 1776 for my knowledge of the event. But if a duet between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson can’t get historical facts to stick in your head, what can?

Humans use 25% of the energy stored by plants.

When you’re at the top of the food chain, you get to do stuff like this. The other species should just try harder and evolve faster if they want in on it.

Oddly enough, it’s from San Fransisco.

This country was founded on blowing stuff up, and 231 years later it continues to be the thing that we do best. And yet in the past few decades, almost every Bay Area municipality has banned the use of fireworks within city limits. It’s like we don’t even want to be Americans anymore.

I see two choices: Either we all start learning to speak French, or we bring the Bay Area back to the stocked-with-fireworks glory that we all enjoyed in the 1970s and 1980s.

Read the whole thing. Of course, last night I saw some great stuff my neighbors sent up, and it’s only going to get better, because I don’t live in San Fransisco. My cats didn’t appreciate it, but I did.

Fred Saberhagan, author of the decent Berserker series, among other things, may or may not be dead.

Scalzi is on the case. I enjoyed his Old Man’s War immensely.

Uganda bans the use of plastic bags because they’re polluting the place. Now, the sensible thing to do would be to improve garbage services instead of everyone just piling their trash on the sides of the roads, but banning the bags is, no doubt, cheaper.

Environmentalists say discarded bags, which pile up on roadsides and unused land, spread disease and hurt wildlife.

In Uganda, the only exception is the scavenging Marabou storks who thrive on the bags.

Scariest. birds. evar.