Quote of the day
From Bob Park’s What’s New:
Putting astronauts on space stations is like putting little human tellers inside ATM machines.
About that cliff…
President Obama’s comments yesterday:
We can’t embrace the losing formula that says only tax cuts will work for every problem we face; that ignores critical challenges like our addiction to foreign oil, or the soaring cost of health care, or falling schools and crumbling bridges and roads and levees. I don’t care whether you’re driving a hybrid or an SUV — if you’re headed for a cliff, you’ve got to change direction.
In case you’re wondering, here’s what that cliff looks like. (From House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, via swampland.)
Meanwhile, Republicans are doing their damnedest to scuttle the bill entirely, or at least to convince everyone that what this economy needs is even more tax cuts! Because, you know, they’ve worked so well so far.
I’ve heard speculation that the only thing the remaining Republicans fear more than a complete economic meltdown is the possibility of Obama getting credit for saving us from one, and they’re willing to screw the entire country to avoid that fate. Me, I’m guessing Republican leaders have secretly cornered the market on generators, kerosene and ammunition, and plan to make a killing once everything collapses.
Update 2/10/2008: Justin Fox and William Polley have put up some more complete versions of the graph.
Diet Coke and Mentos Traps
As many of you know, since 1990 my friend Jay and I have exchanged Christmas gifts that have been booby-trapped in some way. Since last year around this time I was getting married (and have thus been a little distracted from blogging), I’ve fallen behind in posting details of these traps. I hope to be a little faster in posting this year’s traps, but in the meantime I’ve finally posted Jay’s trap from last year: a particularly nasty trap that sets off ten individual bottles of diet-coke-and-mentos geysers on any would-be MacGyver who triggers it. I’ve also posted my own version of his trap which, while it’s not as pretty on the outside, does win out when it comes to the size of the mess it leaves behind. Enjoy!
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H.M. dies after 55 years of living in the moment
Henry Gustav Molaison, the amnesiac known publicly only as H.M., died on Tuesday at age 82. Molaison’s inability to create new memories since a brain surgery 55 years ago has greatly contributed to our understanding of how memory works.
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Do your blog posts reveal your personality type?
Typealyzer claims to be able to determine the Myers-Briggs personality type of someone just by analyzing their blog. It’s still in beta, which may be why they list me as an ISTJ (“The Duty Fulfillers”) — the exact opposite of how every other Myers-Briggs personality test classifies me.
Do your blog posts reveal your personality type? Read More »
New fashion accessory?
Seen at The Gap: it’s always nice to have mannequins set up so you can see how clothing will look on you…
…so long as you don’t mind a little back pain.
New fashion accessory? Read More »
Nice to know where I stand
Mark Oppenheimer in Slate gives odds about what the next minority group will be to win the White House. Looks like even without those Burning Man photos floating around the Net my chances are slim:
The atheists: When the lion lies down with the lamb, when the president is a Republican Muslim and the Democratic speaker of the House is a vegan Mormon lesbian, when the secretary of defense is a Jain pacifist from the Green Party, they will all agree on one thing: atheists need not apply. A 2007 Gallup poll found that 53 percent of Americans would not vote for an atheist for president. (By contrast, only 43 percent wouldn’t vote for a homosexual, and only 24 percent wouldn’t vote for a Mormon.) As Ronald Lindsay, executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism, told me in an e-mail: “Atheism spells political death in this country.”
Indeed. Only one current congressman has confessed to being an atheist: Rep. Pete Stark, a Democrat from the lefty East Bay region of Northern California. If he ever ran for president, he would need God’s help just as surely as he wouldn’t ask for it.
I suppose I can take solace that Stark happens to be my congressman. So at least I’m represented. 🙂
(Via Political Animal)
Nice to know where I stand Read More »
New media criticism blog: Medialogy.net
Medialogy.net is a new media criticism blog started by Geoffrey Alan Rhodes (my brother), Blinxia Yu and Christopher Ernst:
:|: Medialogy.net is a new net criticism initiative publishing micro-essay insights into current trends in media and visual culture. It is an open forum for new critical voices; we are continuously seeking articles and comments with fresh perspectives on emerging media phenomena. Medialogy.net was begun with the desire to distribute, expand, and textually manifest a rolling conversation between young media researchers and artists globally networked through the university and gallery system. We seek to match a cynical perspective with critical intelligence, and a constant willingness to pull down old paradigms and icons of media philosophy and cultural criticism.
It’s especially interesting to see discussion about the same media trends and subjects I tend to link to (OK, when I’m posting at all), but from the perspective of people who come first from the media side (in this case film) and second from the technology side rather than the other way around.
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iCandy
My lab has just released a beta of iCandy, an application for Mac and PC that lets you associate an image and a two-dimensional QR bar code with any iTunes song, YouTube video or Flickr photo, and to print them out as postcards, business cards, posters or photo albums. Then you can just hold the barcode up to a webcam to automatically bring up the photo or play the song or movie.
The app itself is pretty cute (we’ve been using it internally for a few months now) and they’ve recently set up a community network site for sharing your playlists and media pics with others too. The online Flash-based version seems to be broken at the moment, but check out the app.
Wolverine costume with retractable claws
This year’s theme for Halloween was super heroes, so around the beginning of October I set out to design a Wolverine costume. The outfit is based on the X-Men movies, because it’s a lot easier to look cool in black leather than yellow spandex. The claws I based on the comic books, with thin claw-like blades coming out of studs on the backs of my hands rather than knives coming out from between my knuckles as they did in the movies. That was both because I like the more animal look of the original and because it made it a lot easier to make the claws retractable.
For more pictures, video and step-by-step instructions on how to design your own, check out my Instructable at instructables.com.
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