A reminder that for most other places that didn't get a record seasonal snowfall May is still bike to work month. And even in the municipality May 18 is supposed to be Bike to work Day. There will be fun and prizes and all that shit I'm sure.
On a side note, here is seattle the captains get a party thrown for them by Pikes Brewery. Since most hardcore cyclists are the type of dudes with less than 3% body fat they get wasted off of a single beer. I always manage to score several extra drink tickets, makes for an interesting ride home...
Looking, always looking... for bike related toys and gear and whatnot. Anyway I found this on a deal website and I'm pretty sure they didn't intend for the product description to come out this way. This is for a bike light.
"The Light & Motion Stella 300 blasts out a full 300 lumens to light up the night trail like a spaceship and keep you riding for four hours after the sun gives up. And that's on the high setting. If you feel the need to conserve battery, the 300 will last all night (think Alaska's summer nights)."
The last bit in the brackets doesn't make sense, we all know that Alaska Summer nights consist of maybe an hour or two of twilight. Does that mean the light magically turns shitty and dies on you?
Got my bike pump replaced, tires aired up, and my tire spokes wrenched.
I have tasted of the cheese of accomplishment (ashow.zefrank.com).
I'm not familiar with this guy (ze frank?).. apparently he used to have a show, or an online video series? Anyway, I like the inspirational message, and didn't find it campy or trite. It has some mocking notes that come off as less chiding and more of "I've been there," with a consistent underlining serious tone. I think I'll find it useful for focusing on personal objectives.
Narrated Amnesia: The Dark Descent play-through videos (www.youtube.com) tend to be my favorite way to experience the horror game genre. Mostly because they are hilarious.
Oh dear. I just got flashbacks of a public viewing of Rocky Horror Picture Show (www.youtube.com). I hope, for your sake, it wasn't that bad.
Or, perhaps, more nightmarish (www.youtube.com).
I was working from home this Sunday, and got to thinking that I hadn't heard the water coming off the top of my house (as I would expect, given that it's been 40F+ the last day or so).
When I went onto my back porch to check things out, I was made even more worried, as all I could hear was the sluice of water coming from my neighbors drains, and not my own. I held my ear up to the drain nearest me: nothing.
I backed up further to see what could be blocking the drainage from my roof. And I saw that my roof had already melted, and all but a small bit hanging on below an exhaust pipe was what was left of this year's terrible snow.
We've almost made it. We're almost there.
Writing an essay on Utilitarianism. I realize most of you all are out of the essay-writing stage of life, and onto the actual-work-for-a-paycheck stage. Regardless, trying to write an essay on any ethical theory is fantastically annoying. Mainly because it results in hours of "how do I make decisions?" "Am I a moral person?" "How is morality defined?" and other such questions wreaking havoc on a worldview.
Adlai Stevenson:
We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave—to the ancient enemies of man—half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.
Interestingly enough, the internet makes me think this is a real photo. This was during the testing phase of the English Electric Lightning. The pilot is George Aird, who landed in a greenhouse. He received warning lights on final that he deemed spurious. By the time he was on short final, the airplane started doing uncommanded and uncontrolled movement of flight control surfaces, so he ejected due to minimal speed & altitude. A newspaper reporter and photographer were there to interview the farmer, who all happened to be in the right place at the right time.
So, Ed Harris' first movie (www.imdb.com) looks fucking ridiculous (blog.thephoenix.com). Must. Watch.
Turkey attempted to block Twitter by changing all of the twitter.com domain name queries to return incorrect, redirection IP destinations.
This isn't a block, per se, it only changes the DNS answers for the DNS servers that the Turkish government controls. Normally, your computer is given a DNS server to use to satisfy DNS queries (usually provided by your ISP). However, nothing stops you from issuing DNS requests to other servers. Google happens to host a free DNS service (8.8.8.8) that is free, and isn't beholden to the Turkish government. So, effectively, this is graffiti telling people to use Google DNS to get around the Turkish government's Twitter "block."
I thought it was cool.
So I randomly watched the ESPN documentary about the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan knee jealously (The Price of Gold). While Tonya Harding was and still is a pyscho, it is a rather tragic and depressing story. Also, I have no doubt that this type of energy weapon would have been used had it been in Harding's arsenal. But, alas, all she had at her disposal were a bunch of goons.
There are a bunch of really interesting class/genderism issues at play in the Harding/Kerrigan scandal. They were both born poor, but Nancy was much better at appearing rich. Her interview demeanor, her physical appearance, everything gave the appearance of a rich girl and skating is a sport that rewards at least the appearance of affluence. Harding outskated her, but Kerrigan got the media attention and the lucrative endorsement checks. Nancy was America's delicate princess while Harding was a brashy blond tomboy from the trailer park/wrong side of the tracks.
Besides the class issues (everyone knew Harding was poor, most people didn't know that about Kerrigan), there's this entire thing about how America wants our female athletes pretty and polished and not too athletic looking. Kerrigan hit that sweet spot, but Harding was too muscular, too unapologetically athletic, not feminine enough. Anyone who is interested and I can link you to a bunch of feminist blog stuff, including links to differences in endorsements received by female athletes.
You definitely hit the nail on the head with this post. The story is incredibly fascinating, and hard to believe it really happened the way it did. Like I said, Tonya Harding's story is tragic, and, in a lot of ways because she is the product of the environment she was raised in coupled with how she was pretty much ostracized by her skating peers prior to the scandal breaking out. She practiced in a fucking mall in Portland for fuck's sake!
A real downer story. But super interesting!
Weirder shit has certainly happened. I'm not sure why they'd intentionally set something like that ablaze, but there's a whole sector of the industry (made popular by Red Adair (www.youtube.com)) that specializes in getting these uncontrolled releases back to a safe(r) state. Thankfully, as our understanding and technology has gotten better, it seems that these events have tapered off a bit from the "cowboy up" days of yesteryear.
Given the guy's distractingly bright red FRCs, my money is that this was very likely a Boots and Coots (www.halliburton.com) well control intervention. Then again, I want as little do with the things that happen out in the field as I can possibly get, so...yeah.
Related note: depending on reservoir characteristics/well type/etc, it might have been almost exclusively crude oil or some mix of crude/natural gas/water/sand/whatever. Just like kids and pets, some wells are better than others :)
Nah, it was Kris Straub's guest strip for Penny Arcade.
However... might have crossed any parent's mind. Who knows.
I tried out a multitouch keyboard on Android with the recent phone. Intriguing idea, for sure, but there was something inherently awkward about it. It feels like you are just mashing around on the keys.
Also, either from my own inexperience, or poor prediction/detection, it didn't work particularly well. I ended up going with Swype, which focuses on one-finger no-lift typing with a heavy emphasis on pattern recognition, prediction, and learning from your/its mistakes. So far, it's been useful when I needed it, and gotten out of my way otherwise.
Also, somewhat relevant:
From his article:
Sometimes, I wonder what it will be; what unassailable tower I’ll retreat to once they’ve dismantled every blessed signpost and all the language I use to live.
Man... watching Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan (www.imdb.com) and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (www.imdb.com) is an exercise in elation and then massive disappointment.
I made some bad dietary decisions today, for which I needed to ride my exercise bike... for at least an hour and 56 minutes. So I watched this again.
I still maintain that this is a better movie than most folks give it credit for. It's still goddamn bizarre, though: sloppy and haphazard in some places, intriguing in others. Maybe less than the sum of its parts, but watching again after so long, it comes across as a rough rendering of what Joss Whedon would eventually turn into Firefly. At the very least, fun to watch from that perspective.
Makes me wish the Firefly universe supported androids.
Man, that is probably my second favorite Original Star Trek movie behind Undiscovered Country. I'm not joking when I say I love whales. That movie has a fond place in my heart from my childhood.
Critically, it's not a very good movie (cheese galore), but I still enjoy it. lololol they're on the CVN-65 Enterprise, get it!? PAID FOR BY THE US NAVY, UNITED STATES NAVY A GLOBAL FORCE FOR GOOD.
Since the weather was looking to be rather niceish today I decided it was time to break the bike out and ride some of my commute today. Being somewhat slow in getting up and miscalculating the amount of time needed to get down to where I wanted to start riding from I ended up getting going an hour later than I should have.
On my commute, which I decided I should keep to the 20 miles one way route I discovered that in the 5 months since I last rode, a major bridge is now gone. What I hoped to be a good break in to riding turned into a late morning dash to find an alternate route that didn't put me on roads that with cars whizzing past with no shoulder or sidewalk. Suffice to say, I'm tired and I have to do it all over again on the way home tonight.
Well, Mark Strong is already in fucking everything, so I will assume you mean you want to see more movies in general ;)
All kidding aside, I of course want Daniel Day-Lewis to be in more things, because he is incredible. Other than him, perhaps:
Jon Bernthal (Shane from Walking Dead - want to see if he could do other stuff well, I liked his Shane)
Lynn Collins (she was SO HOT in John Carter but hasn't been naked yet, so I want to see her in more stuff until she gets naked... also, an aside: John Carter is getting unfairly raped at the box office, but two things: 1) Why was this a Disney movie?? 2) Why was this a single movie and not some sort of series?)
Jeremy Irons (I may watch The Borgias because of him)
That's all, off the top of my head.
Given my recent (shared) infatuation with Sherlock, I thought this was appropriate. However, when I think otters and Benedict Cumberbatch, let's just say this is not what my first thought was. It is, without question, more family friendly than what I had in mind.
Otters That Look Like Benedict Cumberbatch (redscharlach.tumblr.com)
Our network, lets use that term loosely since I have no concept of what an actual network is, got upgraded recently. So randomly a bunch of websites that were at one time blocked, now are not. Yesterday while taking care of some random soft science bullshit, filling things, labeling things, I was able to sit and watch south park episodes while doing so. I have never felt so good about misusing company internet.
Though to be fair I think I was more productive that normal since I didn't get distracted ever 5 or 10 minutes or so and check things on the web thus stopping what I was supposed to be doing. Also it made the afternoon go by pretty fast.
Anyone have a similar experience to this at work?
I am almost always more efficient when I am multitasking. I think for me it is because I am so ADD that f I am doing something that does not require 100% of my mental attention, I get distracted by anything and everything going on around me. But if I'm doing multiple things that don't require my full attention, then I can do them all better and quicker. I definitely find this at work. Hence why I spend so much time on gchat some days!
My brain craves novelty. And without it, unless I'm incredibly focused and interested in something, I need something for my novelty fix. The Internet helps with that.
Sometimes it's work related. Sometimes it's not. I measure my guilt towards the latter with how much more or less productive I am than some of my coworkers. As long as I exceed said individual's work output greatly, I feel less like I'm stealing company resources. Plus, if I happen to be screwing off as programming on personal projects, I can think of it as industry research. Or sharpening my tools.
John Carter
Went to see John Carter with my father this evening. We both walked out with the rare notion that we liked a science fiction action movie, and felt that more people should see it.
I felt that the story was imaginative, honest, and well-constructed. They had impressive pacing, to the point where I was pondering on the implications of various character and plot developments at the same time I was enjoying the subsequent action scene.
This is for JD and Josh, you hipsters you:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amhttp://www.youtube...&v=hgCqz3l33kU# (www.youtube.com))
This sounds legit as hell (www.sciencedaily.com), but I'm not exactly keen on what they're describing here. It sounds like they've identified a plausible storage mechanism for information within 'microtubules' within brain cells.
Can anybody comment?
Microtubules play a key role in cellular structure and function. Wikipedia explains it much more succinctly than I can. The takeaways are that microtubules give many cells structure, proteins bind to microtubules, microtubules are used to transport intracellularly, and that they play an important role in mitosis.
I would also point out that they are typically dynamic in cells, in that the growing end is capped, cut, extended, etc. which is critical to the information storage function that article describes (and would be permanent, it seems). So they would essentially encode a 'state' that could be reproduced. Very interesting article, good find.
Any idea what they mean by: "Using molecular modeling, Craddock et al reveal a perfect match among spatial dimensions, geometry and electrostatic binding of the insect-like CaMKII, and hexagonal lattices of tubulin proteins in microtubules.
A "perfect match" seems like a weird thing to say in a scientific article.
Sounds to me like a complex way of saying, "Modeling showed it fit like a lock and key!"
This shows a bunch of structures of CaMKII, probably determined by x-ray crystallography. Then, they modeled how those structures would fit together with tubulin proteins. A 'perfect match' would indicate sweet binding site interactions.
I watched both DS9 and Star Trek: Generations this evening.
I watched Generations because I wasn't sure if I'd seen it or not. I had.
Generations... is barely a passable movie. If you aren't thinking about it. At all.
Red Letter Media goes over it (redlettermedia.com) better than I can.
Man, I know my mother fucking loved Generations. But she loves campy movies regardless, fully aware of her predilections. We watched the shit out of the Generations VHS, relishing each and every time Soran turns around to realize he's facing not one - but two!- Enterprise captains. Woah-ho! Bad. Ass. I loved that shit.
In retrospect, I was a stupid child.
Neil Young has been banging (www.wired.com) around (www.usatoday.com) on the interwebs recently bemoaning the state of the musical recordings. While I'm not sure that aging hippies who have smoked way too much weed really know that much about technology, he does raise an interesting point. The quality of the music (and the medium) we are using for music today is pretty shitty. Over half my music collection is stuff that was ripped at 128 kbps by old-school encoders in the early 2000s that left the songs riddled with artifacts. Coupled with the fact that most people are terrible at backing up their hard drives in general, we're all on the verge of losing our Third Eye Blind collections every. freaking. day.
All is not lost, however. An overly dedicated audio nerd wrote a pretty comprehensive article (people.xiph.org) about how music is recorded, how sample rates and whatnot affect what you hear, and how everyone probably really just needs to chill out and buy a decent pair of headphones.
Which gives me a little hope that maybe, just maybe, we'll all be able to forget about the Spice Girls with one more hard drive crash and really focus on those high quality Lady Gaga singles going forward. Or is that just me?
