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.