Precocious Panda Indeed!

So, I'm at the doctors office looking at random magazines when my eye falls on the June 2006 issue of "The Smithsonian" magazine:

Please note the highlighted headlines...

I immediately started wondering about why a panda would care about Mary Magdalene and what the heck Wyeth was doing in Berlin (and wasn't the wall long gone anyway?)

World's Largest Ball of Paint

No, not a ball of wax... a ball of paint. Lots and lots of it. Neat in a "Get A Life" kind of way.

In unrelated news, here is a very neat comic strip about the sport of paint ball. Funny even for the non-paintball enthusiasts amongst us. I hadn't realized that the hacker ethics was a s firmly established in the sport of paintball, but apparently it is.

Kure Kure Takora

Kure Kure Takora (Gimme Gimme Octopus) is an insane 60s Japanese TV show for kids, starring an octopus and a peanut who are in love with the same walrus.

(I would like to savour that last part a bit... so one more time: "...an octopus and a peanut who are in love with the same walrus..." Mmmmmm. Yeah. Not different walruses, but the same walrus! Ah. The plot complications this opens up are just staggering.)

Wikipedia has it as "...absurd, strange, surreal, indescribable..." so I think we are talking about the same show here.

They are 260 three minute episodes available on DVD. An absolute must if you like sweaty Japanese men in rubber suits -- and who doesn't?

Summer Xcode Tips

Some nice advice:

Summer Xcode Tips:

"[...]I’ve been saving up a few ‘gotta share’ revelations. Are these tips no-brainers? Maybe for some of you. But it took me a while to ‘get it’ and I’m hoping some of you will also giggle with glee when you learn out about them.[...]"

(Via Red Sweater Blog.)

500 lb Potato Battery

The author writes about how he constructed a 500 potato "portable" battery:

It powered a small sound system. With the help of the Red 76 crew I installed the battery and sound system in the back of a U-Haul truck and drove it around town inviting people to enter the truck and take a listen.

(Via Improbable Research.)

Really expensive cat toy

(Via improbable.com.)

Cow

Not much else to say but "Moooooo!"

Not Wanted!

This creep has become the focus of a new website after he falsely claimed to several women that he was a US Marshal. His current girlfriend got an anonymous tip that everything wasn't exactly the way he claimed -- e.g., he is married, has a few kids, and is in actuality a maintenance worker in an animal disease lab -- so she created a website dedicated to scum like him and made him the poster boy in the hunt for more like him.

And who can blame her? Richard Kudlik was busted Tuesday after repeatedly posing as a US Marshal in order to get laid. Apparently he has been doing this for some time and the Feds has busted him for it before!

I don't know about you, but I thought impersonating a federal officer was something worth more than a slap on the wrist and a "don't do it again", but apparently that's the way it is. Compare this to a kid who photocopies a five dollar bill and ends up with a federal felony charge. That sucks!

As his kid put it when interviewed in the New York Daily News: Yeah, my dad most likely is a www.creep

A great a sigh of relief...

I guess the end of the world as we know it didn't come to fruition.

Strangely enough, the "impact" appears to have wiped out nothing but the website about it, except for a few comments by Craig Boswell left here:

UPDATE MAY 27, 2006: A clue to the timing of the anticipated event

Many people undoubtedly think that the announced event has fizzled and may be readjusting their outlook on life and returning their lives to normal. [Nah, I think I was already "readjusted" long before the 26'th -js]

I have trouble doing that when I think of all the dreams and other signs which I have witnessed that point to this event. What would otherwise be the purpose of all these warnings? I know the window cannot be extended indefinitely into the future. Two of the people whom I have seen moved out of harm’s way under the pretext of a social gathering are to return home Sunday night. So I would expect Sunday to be the last possible day.
[...]

(It goes on from there in a less coherent fashion.)

I suspect one of the real drawbacks of being a skeptic is that you miss out on all the rejoicing after these it-was-that-close events.

On the other hand, I don't have to go back and apologize to my boss with a "I'm so sorry about that conversation on the 25'th... can I have my job back... please?"

Darth Vader Calling the Emperor

This is seriously funny.

Towel Day: A tribute to Douglas Adams (1952-2001)

Yes, I will carry my towel today.

End Of The World As We Know It!

Film at eleven!

Update: As it is now after May 26'th, the danger appears to be somewhat overstated. The great impact caused no damage except loss of a bunch of links to Mr. Julien's articles. So sad. I have left the links unchanged below, but due to the impact, most do not work any more. Use the wayback machine or other means to recover the Truth as it was back before 2006-05-26.

So, this guy claims the big meteor will hit in the Middle of the Atlantic on May 26 2006. The resulting 200m waves will wipe out life along the Atlantic coastline. This could be bad.

To prove this, he has pages and pages and pages of "scientific" explanations and diagrams to show the basis for these predictions.


So, given this, should you follow his advice and "Move away from the coasts and to go up on the heights sufficiently early, and even the day before"? Well, if you live on the Atlantic coast, you might want to check out exactly where the comet fragments will hit.

Hm... what's that "Lost City" label in the middle of the map?

Lets read the text a bit more carefully shall we:

It is auspicious to note that the Tropic of Cancer (located at 23° Northern), where the comet fragment would likely strike the ocean, is not very far from a particular site: Lost City on the Atlantis fault. In addition to the particularity of this mythical name (Atlantis), and of this unusually auspicious location (Lost City), this point is only 700 meters in depth! A comet fragment striking at the mid-Atlantic dorsal with a sufficient energy could awaken the chain of the underwater volcanoes there. Hardly 600 kilometres separate Lost City from the tropic of Cancer. In other words, it's a very tender zone for an impact.

Aha... maybe we should check more of the so called evidence:

It was precisely on June 25 1995 that the crop circle called "Missing Earth" appeared at Longwood Warren in the County of Hampshire in England. This crop circle, a gigantic view of the interior solar system, to the belt of asteroids, was designed without the Earth.

OK, sorry folks, false alarm. Just a kook. Nothing to see. Move along.

For an alternative view, check James [The Amazing] Randi's take on this.

I just don't understand sports.

Headline on the radio was "Bonds about to pass Ruth".

Sounded interesting, but then I realized it was a sports story. I thought it was about cannibalism...

They're made out of Meat

All I can say is "Wow!"

The film is based on the short story They're made out of Meat by Terry Bisson. I read it years ago and instantly recognized it once the dialog started, but couldn't place the author until I looked it up. (The web is a nice thing.) (Via lobotomies for everyone!.)

It was 50 years ago...

A great article about the surprise revelation of the Ampex video recorder at the NARTB show in Chicago, April 14, 1956.

Blue Onions

Blue, orange, pink, red, and green onions.

Cute Overload: Pandog

I'm sure I will go to hell for linking to this, but (all together now):

He is sooooo cute!

Helen of Troy

An objective analysis of Beauty:

One helen is sufficient good looks to launch one thousand ships, and to cause the destruction by fire of an entire city. The objective standards of Ship Launching and Arson may now be used to analyze feminine beauty.

--"Helen of Troy" by David Lance Goines

A very funny piece.

The Unknown

"As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know."
-- Donald Rumsfeld
Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing."
-- Socrates

To me, Rumsfeld's musings is not only a clear example of the kind of statement public officials should never make because it is so internally complex that it leaves the listener completely perplexed, but it is also interestingly incomplete.

Let's assume its complexity is self explanatory, so I will deal with the incompleteness.

What he is trying to do, is to enumerate all combinations of facts that are {known, unknown} and the state of our knowledge about the facts.

We can construct a table of all combinations and fill it in with Rumsfeld's quotes, like this:

	What we know about our knowledge of the facts
	We know if we are informed or not	We are not aware of the question
Known facts	There are known knowns. There are things we know we know.
Unknown facts	There are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know.	[...] there are also unknown unknowns, The ones we don't know we don't know.

This leaves us one empty square, things that are known or knowable, but we are ignorant of even the question to ask. Isn't it interesting that that is the very permutation he left out? I think it is symptomatic of the whole administration; There are things that could be known, and might even be known, but the Whitehouse is to ignorant to even ask the question.