Mock Away Thursday, June 16, 2005

Did we learn nothing from the Star Wars Kid? Okay, let me just spell it out. If you're a fat kid, never create a video of yourself doing something emabarassing, because it will be posted online for people to mock you.

An Argument I Won Wednesday, June 15, 2005

So I bought a cigar the other day and said to my friend, "This thing will smoke all year."

My friend says, "That's a little bit of an overstatement."

"Not really."

"Not really?" she says, incredulous.

Then I started thinking about it. How much of an overstatement was it?

So the cigar ended up smoking for say about an hour, so the way I see it, I was off by a factor of 8,760. An error on the fourth order of magnitude is a pretty egregious error.

But then let's examine what the question really is about, here. She says it's a "little bit" of an overstatement, a statement to which I disagreed. So the question is whether my estimation of the cigar's smoking time was accurate to the yardstick of some mysterious "bit" in its small variety.

I can quantify my statement with perfect accuracy, as I have just demonstrated. This "bit" here, however, is rather vague.

"How much is a bit?" I ask.

"I don't know," she says.

Since she could not quantify her statement in any way and yet still avers an assumption of some quantity, it was clear that what she was saying was nonsense.

I win.

In the Immortal Words of David Lee Roth Wednesday, June 15, 2005

This is the most ridiculous thing I have seen in quite some time. Okay, okay, it's not quite as ridiculous as Tatu fighting a warthog to save orphans, but it's still pretty friggin ridiculous. The organizers of World Jump Day plan to stop global warming by organizing 600 million people around the world to jump at precisely the same moment, thus shifting the Earth into a new orbital path.

Pshaw. The idea that 40 million metric tons of human flesh can move nearly 6 sextillion metric tons of Earth is simply laughable.... right?

All You Need is a 2 Liter of Shasta Monday, June 13, 2005

I know at least one person other than me will think this is cool: The Ultimate Rush FAQ. It has tons of little bits and pieces of trivia, explaining such eternal questions as "Why does he say Absalom at the end of Distant Early Warning?" and "What does (for Mongo) after "Anagram" on the "Presto" album mean?" And you thought this blog couldn't get any geekier.

It's Friday night, I got no date, a 2 liter bottle of Shasta, a pocket full of quarters and my all Rush mix tape, I'm ready to get it on.
—Fry

Why Intelligent Design Isn't Monday, June 13, 2005

Markus posted this article from The New Yorker, which I had to repost because it cuts straight to the heart of the issue:

Biologists aren’t alarmed by intelligent design’s arrival in [schools] because they have all sworn allegiance to atheistic materialism; they’re alarmed because intelligent design is junk science.

If we pander to these unquestioning, unthinking sheep, we will have undermined our own ability to educate our children, and jeapordize our future as a nation.

It's Raining Spine Wednesday, June 08, 2005

A leg, with hip and spine still attached, crashed into some poor bastard's lawn yesterday. Eew.

Cuke, I am Your Father Monday, June 06, 2005

Sad that the most faithful Star Wars parody to date features Cuke Skywalker and Darth Tater pushing organic foods. Check out Store Wars.

If You Like Fat Goth Chicks Saturday, June 04, 2005

Then you'll love 665, an oldy-but-a-goody if there ever was one. My personal favorite is this brilliant piece, featuring orphans, a warthog, and lesbian pop stars in plaid skirts.

Expressions and their Origins Thursday, June 02, 2005

Ever wonder where those expressions like "hair of the dog" or "close but no cigar" come from? Wonder no longer. BusinessBalls.com explains them all.

ZabaSearch Wednesday, June 01, 2005

For those who have not yet heard the buzz, there's a new search engine called ZabaSearch. But unlike Yahoo! or Google, this search engine finds people instead of pages. But unlike its lame predecessors (such as the Yahoo! People Search) that return results no better than your white pages, Zaba takes advantage of the enormous amount of public information available through government agencies and the like. According to Robert Zakari, president of ZabaSearch.com, the data is comprised mainly of

[i]nformation collected by the government, and information that individuals put it out into the public domain. Court records, county records, state records, information that becomes publicly available after you buy a new house or go to the post office and file a change-of-address form.

This, of course, means that the information is often out-of-date, but that doesn't mean it isn't useful to the enterprising snoop. For example, when I searched my own name, it didn't list my current address, but it did return every other address I had lived in since I left college. That was almost a little eerie.

I think ZabaSearch is a good thing for several reasons, and that's only partially because I think it will be useful to me. A public resource such as this one cannot help but bring privacy and information-sharing issues into public view. Hopefully it will spark meaningful dialogue so we can decide, as a society, how much free information is too much.