Whoa! Tiny pictures on microchips. Some of these are really crazy. (via geekpress)

Mrrrrehhgh!

Oh good gravy. If I ever decide that becoming a broodmare sounds like a good idea, somebody promise they will shoot me. Please?

So I normally don't respond to these weird little survey thingies. However, Susan decided to make me thought I'd have fun with it, so I guess I'd better... Here's the deal: go to Google's image search, and search for the name of the town you grew up in, the town you live in now, your name, your maternal grandmother's name, your favorite food, favorite drink, favorite smell, and favorite song, posting the results.

Here we go

So, Middle Earth (or at least the Shire) was really in Indonesia? Well go figure.

Oh my god! A substitute teacher mistook a low-insulin alarm on an insulin pump for a cell phone and tore it out of a student!

Gmail addresses untaken (as of this writing):
man.from.nantuckett@gmail.com
williamshakespearester@gmail.com
young.goodman.brown@gmail.com
necrophiliac.4.ever@gmail.com
sex.lube@gmail.com
down.the.eustacian.tubes@gmail.com
molester.stache@gmail.com
numbed.nuts@gmail.com
loop.of.henle@gmail.com
nutria.madness@gmail.com
droll.diatom.mover@gmail.com (an anagram for I am Lord Voldemort)

Ahh... the city:

Who in their right mind would want to live here? Granted, some of this is smoke from those fires, but still...yech.

Also from over the pond - Welsh Scrabble. 'n fawr cellwair!

Rolicking good fun at the Last Supper? Those wacky Irish...

Those crazy kids nowadays with their crazy leetspeak. This "language" has become pervasive enough now that I originally thought this billboard was either advertising Alaskan beauty or suggesting Alaska was a bawdy state. But no, not so much...

Joining the ranks of celebs who give their children strange names: Nick Cage

So I got in my first car accident. A mean old SUV(of course) went to change lanes, and whoops! I was there. I had to slam on my brakes and I swerved out of control and hit the curb. I came out of it all with a flat tire, and no licensce plate of the jack ass that wasn't paying attention. It's all right, we needed new tires anyway.

I was sitting around watching TV for a while today. On the Discovery channel they were playing a program called something like "When Surgical Tools Get Left Behind," and it was HORRIFYING!!! People with 14" x 2" stainless steel retractors left. In. Their. Abdomen. Gah. I have to go wash my eyes.

Check out the Perry Bible Fellowship. It is freaking hilarious:

A fun article likening NYC to ancient Rome.

Fun with concept cars. Well, one concept car, anyway.

Scholarship opportunity for megan!!! It's for the art institute for fashion design, and what I have to do is design and create a garment; shirt, pants, shoes or handbag, send it in, and it gets judged. If I win nationally, then I get a full tuition scholarship and a trip to NYC fashion week! AWESOME. Chances are slim, but it is still cool, eh?

This is a movie just waiting to be made.

Okay, I like The Sims, and I like The O.C. well enough, but this is just silly.

Good. Freaking. Gravy. How this puppy survived swallowing a 13" knife I cannot imagine.

Band name (courtesy Max and Demetri): Squawktopus.

Two jokes:

A penguin walks into a bar and says to the bartender:
"Have you seen my dad?"
To which the bartender replies:
"I don't know- what does he look like?"

A woman went into a bar and asked for a double entendre. The bartender gave it to her.

Ever want to disguise yourself as a soda machine? Ninjas can help you out here. Via Linkfilter.

Comics like this one are the reason I love Toothpaste for Dinner.

Cool gallery of high speed water droplet photos. There are some really neat pictures!

Fun with dead languages

Here's a tip: don't let Microsoft Word's spell-check feature change a priori to a priory. While the resulting text is amusing, these two phrases are not equivalent.

Boy, those Gambians love them some soccer...

Wow, this is pretty neat (at least to those of us who don't deal with this sort of stuff for a living...). The Aussies have figured out how to stop light, trap it in a crystal, and then release it again after a second or two. (via geekpress)

Volkswagen's Bugatti Veyron: I'm gonna just go ahead and refer to this as "the Farscape car."

Upon exiting a church service, a reporter asked Calvin Coolidge the topic of the sermon.

Coolidge said the sermon was on sin.

The reporter asked what the preacher had said about sin.

Coolidge replied: "He said he was against it."

Remember when you were a kid and decided you'd try to dig a hole to China? Well, apparently you can only accomplish that if you start somewhere in South America. Most holes begun in the USA would end up somewhere in the Indian Ocean, as this nifty tool shows. (again, via geekpress)

Magical pi...you can use this tool to search for any sequence of digits within pi, out to 3.2 billion places beyond the decimal point. (via geekpress)

From Pollkatz, a reminder of public opinion over the GW Bush presidency (this is percent approving minus percent disapproving)

Geekpress linked to a page depicting some "alternate keyboards." A lot of them are your standard ergonomic split models, but there are some freaky-weird ones, too.

50/38% would vote for a Democratic/Republican congressional candidate (Newsweek poll).

Anybody see Vic Henley? That guy is freakin' hilarious.

Things Hagrid would say if he served Jesus instead of Harry Potter.

This is just great. Way to be clever, Brits. (via geekpress)

Ha. This is pretty interesting. I didn't know whales ate birds. I should think those feathers would be undesirable. (via geekpress)

My new word (I just thought of it) to describe Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, et al: theodactyl.

Here's hoping for an extinction (metaphorical, peoples: I'm not as big a butthole as those guys).

Wow: the patent office is no good at its job.

That would be "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their repective Writings and Discoveries," of course. (cf Article 1, Section 8)

Neat excerpt from an article at GeekPress. Really, you should check it out. Draws a clever parallel between the emergent complexity in markets and biological systems.

Cats in sinks. Some cute cats, some less cute sinks.

Proof by intimidation is a concept that ought to be familiar to anyone whose nose spent much time buried in math-heavy textbooks. A particular sub-class of this argument is the following type of footnote: No confusion should arise from the double of N and n in |N) = |n)|ν)|γ)

Of course this actually isn't too confusing. What's more confusing is when you've got a load of 's and ~s differentiating quantities.

Elvis Costello says:

Even in a perfect world
where everyone was equal
I'd still own the film rights
and be workin' on the sequel...

I'm shocked, SHOCKED, to hear that Art Garfunkel has been detained on pot charges for the second time in as many years. When will Art learn that entertainers are role models for the childredn? I'm sure that many a wayward youth will be driven only further along the path of drug abuse and "alternative" lifestyles by his implicit endorsement of this most dangerous of gateway drugs.

Gmail hijinks...

So my current gmail address sucks. I'm not at all happy with the address johnson.thomas.j[somewhere near]gmail.com. Therefore I decided to burn an invite and try to get another, more superior handle. By the by, if anybody wants a gmail address, let me know, as I can get you one (I've got five more to hand out).

Of course, none of the good options remain (Thanks a lot, Mom and Dad. Would it have killed you to throw out a more singular name, like Trout, or Bucky?) and their automated suggestions are... unsatisfactory. To wit: my desired handle is "tjrj," but they seem to want to make me into a SNL sketch character with names like "tjrjster" or "tjrjenator."

What Would Jesus Donate? (A piece in Slate explores the Son of Man's remarks at a Republican fundraising event.)

If I had known we'd get the House, the Senate, and two consecutive terms in the White House (APPLAUSE)—if I'd known all that, I would have had an easier time that Friday on the Cross, let me tell you. (LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE)

But seriously, folks (LAUGHTER)—no, seriously, that day did pass, and then two more. Then I rose from the dead. (CHEERS, APPLAUSE) Thank you. I rose from the dead and I flew up to Heaven. But first, you'll remember, I made a little side trip to Hell (SCATTERED BOOS) just to get a look at how they do things. And I'm here to tell you, Hell is just like Heaven (AUDIBLE GASPS)—but with taxes. (LAUGHTER, CHEERS, APPLAUSE)

Via Geekpress (via McSweeneys): Klingon fairy tales. Here are some of my favorites...

"Goldilocks Dies With Honor at the Hands of the Three Bears"

"Snow White and the Six Dwarves She Killed With Her Bare Hands and the Seventh Dwarf She Let Get Away as a Warning to Others"

"There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe With a Big Spike on It"

"Hansel and Gretel Offend Vlad the Impaler"

"The Hare Foolishly Lowers His Guard and Is Devastated by the Tortoise, Whose Prowess in Battle Attracts Many Desirable Mates"

In a similar vein, my officemate Chris points out the following scientific nursery rhymes. See if you can translate them. Example:

A human female, extremely captious and given to opposed behavior, was questioned as to the dynamic state of her cultivated tract of land used for production of various types of flora. The tract components were enumerated as argentous tone-producing agents, a rare species of oceanic growth and pulchritudinous young females situated in a linear orientation.

Japan's apparently working on a next-generation SST. Looks pretty crazy.

Hehe. This was a pretty sneaky idea for a sting.

Man, NPR is great. Weekend America does these little weather reports for various random burgs and villages throughout the country. At the end of this one the announcer commented that it was a "perfect weekend to be a nature lover or pollen."

Oh, jeez. Those peoples at NPR are irritating. Now they're interviewing a movie-house organist. And that's not nearly as dirty as it sounds.

Huh. This is interesting. Saturn's rings not only have their own atmosphere, but the composition of that atmosphere is quite different from that of the planet itself.

CNN headline: Tiger kills Kansas teen during photo pose.

Now, I try to be sensitive about other peoples' tragedies... but my first thought here was "I know he did badly at the PGA championship, but what the heck?!" In my defense, I'd like to say what the hell are you doing, posing beside a freaking tiger? It is a giant wild carnivore, and you are made of its food! I mean, come on: look into maybe getting photoshop!

Sorry, lady. We have reason to believe your infant just might be a terrorist mastermind.

Anybody else hypnotized by the new menus on the sidebar? I'm digging 'em.

Lightning from this morning captured on the Mt. Wilson Solar Towercam.

Last night, around 2:30am, we had some great big thunderclaps, followed by a sudden lovely rain. I think the rain lasted until about 3, though I fell back into sleep before then. Quite nice.

Paintball!

One of my lab-mates is getting married tomorrow. In lieu of a bachelor party, he decided to invite his groomsmen and the guys in our research group to go to a paintball park and riddle each other with welts.

The park is a little bit of a way off. Past Magic Mountain, even, and immediately contiguous (possibly locked in by) to what I think is a prison workfarm. To get in you have to be shuttled by folks with special passes from the prison parking lot up to the paintball park. No stopping allowed on the approximately one mile drive, keep your doors locked.

Despite some early difficulties locating the shuttle-point (didn't expect to have to go into the prison parking lot), we got there with little trouble. After a bit of a wait getting all the waivers signed and guns handed out and crappy field-clothes put on we had a good ol' time.

There were thirteen (!) of us and so we divided up into a team of seven and one of six. I was on the short handed team, and we wrapped crazy pink ribbons around our arms to differentiate the folks. We squared off in a variety of venues, including a strange small course with big inflatable geometrical solids, another small course with a variety of barrel-structures, another, larger one on a hillside, with only tires piled into, well, piles, for cover, and a big fake bombed out city (a la Beirut)...

It was good fun. I didn't get "killed" many times- though I had a number of balls hit me and not burst. Fortunately it seems I didn't welt up too much. More often I went out for technical reasons. E.g., my gas canister came undone one time, and a few more times I ran out of paint.

However, being out of paint didn't stop me from faking some guys out, making them surrender by charging up to them and yelling: "Surrender! Surrender! Surrender!" I had a few great shots- nailing folks in the head from far, far away, hitting a guy in the butt, etc.

All in all, it was great fun, but I was intolerably dirty by the end. I came home and showered twice. Not really. Once sufficed- after all, I use soap.

Band name from an actual work document: Thrust Leaders.

"Did someone say something about a meteor shower? I'm all set to watch, man."

The Mt. Wilson solar towercam will be pointed upward for the next few evenings to watch for Perseid meteors. Might get some cool shots.

Saw a preview for a horrifying movie: Grizzly Man. Just... really disturbing. It's a documentary about an unbalanced fellow who lived with bears in Alaska for a number of years...

Anybody like the renovations?

Fafnir's got it right. Things are bound to be a lot better once we start really studying Intelligent Design. Just imagine what we will discover!

I've heard of B-roll, but this is just damn ridiculous. Authorities caught some fugitives and CNN puts up a photo of crap in their hotel room. Inspiring journalism!

This food was left behind in the room where officials say Jennifer and George Hyatte stayed.

Amusing word from Hugh Brogan's The Penguin History of the USA: squirearchy.

Ha! McSweeny's strikes again, this time with Lesser-known Movie Prequels.

Come on, Google. Buck up, some.

A picture's worth a thousand...excuses?

Check out the Mt. Wilson solar cam.

Gah! I don't know if the statistics in this post are correct, but if they are...gah!

22 percent of Americans are certain that Jesus will return to earth sometime in the next fifty years. Another 22 percent believe that he will probably do so...Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 68 percent believe in Satan.

Check out these optical illusions having to do with color (or rather, colour). They're pretty crazy. (via geekpress)

If Bigfoot is blurry, do you think his hairs are extra fuzzy, too? (via geekpress)

"Scott McClellan said documents won't be released from Roberts's time as deputy solicitor general because ``you're talking about attorney-client privilege'' that shouldn't be violated. Making such papers available ``would really stifle'' candid talks between government lawyers as they plan arguments on behalf of the U.S. government, he said." (Bloomberg news service)

Here's a thought: the U.S. government shouldn't necessarily have the privelege of secrecy when it comes to arguing legal cases. It is, after all, us.

From the annals of poor acronyms: ARSAC. It stands for "Alliance for a Regional Solution to Airport Congestion." They don't want LAX to expand. They way they pronounce it is really unfortunate.

Wow. Even NBC thinks that watching their bad tv this last year was like getting an enema.

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif., July 24 NBC's plunge last TV season -- from first to fourth place among the young viewers advertisers covet -- was "like a colonic" for the network, NBC's entertainment division chief, Kevin Reilly, said Sunday.

David Brooks, ordinary guy:

Anybody who thinks it takes a village to raise a child has never sat near a crying baby in first class. In these circumstances, if it were up to the village, somebody would be stapling the brat's mouth shut and somebody else would be locking mom in the overhead storage compartment.

(Italics mine)

speaking of ipods, i just got one for my birthday yesterday!!! i love it, but my only complaint is the earbuds are too big for my ears!

Wow: In Between Days, by The Cure, has come on the iPod three times already this morning.

O'Reilly is a punk! He should be fired!

Hehe. This bar code clock is cool. (Via Geekpress)

Bald eagle! Moon! Gah!

This is just lovely:

In a study spearheaded by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) in collaboration with Commonweal, researchers at two major laboratories found an average of 200 industrial chemicals and pollutants in umbilical cord blood from 10 babies born in August and September of 2004 in U.S. hospitals. Tests revealed a total of 287 chemicals in the group. The umbilical cord blood of these 10 children, collected by Red Cross after the cord was cut, harbored pesticides, consumer product ingredients, and wastes from burning coal, gasoline, and garbage.

The Base Realignment and Closure Committee "has some reservations about parts of the Pentagon's proposal to restructure domestic military bases, including its plan to disband or move dozens of Air National Guard units."

But of course they do! How ever will the children of the patriarchy dodge any coming drafts, if they can't get strings pulled for them to join the (Texas?) Air National Guard.?

Sophocles never wrote about this. But he should have! (there's a video you should play there)

Colorado republican congressman says we might destroy Mecca if nuclear weapons are used on us.

I'd say that's fine: if Saudi Arabia attacks us. Otherwise, WTF?

Halloween in July?
This morning, Tom & I were clicking through the TV channels, and we came upon an episode of Monk in which Monk and a kid were out trick-or-treating. A few channels later, we landed on an episode of Spongebob Squarepants that featured Sponge Bob and his starfish buddy dressed up as steaks for some kind of Halloween-related prank. Then this evening, the rerun of The Simpsons was one of the (you guessed it) Halloween specials! What the devil is going on?

Not long ago Susan and I went to Target to buy ice cube trays. As our apartment came with a dilapidated old refrigerator sans ice cube trays, and the weather was getting a tid bit warmer, we had decided that our very sweaty limbs needed the cool-me-off...

So we went to the section of the store where we guessed these thingies would be- near the other kitchen implements. We searched high (me) and low (Susan) to no avail. Finally, while we were in the frozen food section, picking up some delicious, low-fat, Skinny Cow Ice Cream Sandwiches, we spotted an employee.

We asked the fellow where we might find these ice cube trays, and he was flummoxed. He thought they might be "right up this aisle" and pointed us onward to the glorious culmination of our quest- maybe.

His directions prov'd correct, though it was more than a little strange that the ice cube trays were located near the tupperware. I guess the organizational scheme made sense if you consider ice cube trays to be a form of storage for water. Like individually-partially-wrapped-bite-sized aliquots of water...

As we made our way to the registers (and the inevitable hassle of waiting behind people who've never used credit cards or ATM cards before- evidently they always previously payed with sheckels, or virgin daughters, or something) we decided we ought to thank the helpful employee...

We swung back through the section where we'd last seen him, looking pretty carefully for the fellow or any traces with which to track him. To no avail. The man had disappeared faster than the Roadrunner from Wile E. Coyote's traps.

I felt like the guy in that old campfire story. You know the one, about the dude who picked up a hitchhiking young lady, only to have her sweater left in his car? Then he tracks down her mother and finds that the sweater did belong to her daugher, but she'd been dead for years?

It was like that. With ice cubes. Without the sweater. Or hitchhikers.

I'd like to reiterate, people: there's a bald eagle landing on the moon. And all I get is guff from Susan and silence from the rest of you?! Intolerable, I say!

Okay... this is really weird. Eisenhower has (had) a dollar coin. On the obverse is, well, Ike. On the reverse? An eagle landing on the moon. An eagle landing. On the moon. The same design is on the reverse of the Susan B. Anthony dollar, which prompts us to ask: what the hell were they thinking?

Hey Megan- what're you listening to, these days?

Jumping cats!

Bathing Mt. Rushmore. (I wonder if they'll find a secret "Team America" base while they're up there...)

Interesting article about Southern American English. Y'all might could give it a look-see!

Three posts in a row began with the letter "O." So I guess this post is brought to you by the letter "T," appropriately enough.

They're fertilizing the campus grass, again. Yesterday, or perhaps the day before that, the grounds staff scattered dried manure everywhere, creating a lovely little brown smog of our own. It hung around for part of the day, and the smell reminded me of late summer at Upper River Road. My friends complained about the smell; I laughed and enjoyed the reminder.

This morning they watered the lawns, and the smell reminded me of mid-spring, maybe early summer in the same place. This time, however, the reminder was so strong it was like a body blow. Since I've been here in Southern California, each passing year has made the place more home-like, slowly erasing the sense of being in a land foreign to me. Though they do this fertilization every year, this is the first time that I've been so affected...

And I realized that after all this time, I'm still homesick.

Our "fearless leader" turns another year older today. Interestingly enough, so do:

The Dalai Lama
Sylvester Stallone (born the same year as Dubya)
rapper 50 Cent (fiddy cen')
Kenny G
and Nancy Reagan

Tsar Nicholas I would also have celebrated his birthday today if he weren't, you know, dead.

Once again, Fafblog summarizes the state of political discourse, as typified by the President's recent speech.