Since I’m in Minnesota, I shouldn’t be surprised that it snowed yesterday or angry at April (seeing as the only month during which Minnesota has NOT seen snow is August), but I am. So I decided to find other reasons not to hate April, and discovered that this month is:
Autism Awareness Month
International Guitar Month
Keep America Beautiful Month
National Child Abuse Prevention Month
National Frog Month
National Garden Month
National Humor Month
Mathematics Education Month
National Poetry Month
Stress Awareness Month
In honor of the penultimate distinction on this list, I think it’s appropriate to share a wonderful poem by Michael Ondaatje:
“Application for a Driving Licence”
Two birds loved
in a flurry of red feathers
like a burst cottonball,
continuing while I drove over them.
I am a good driver, nothing shocks me.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Comparing politicians to computers…
God Obama must be hella overpriced pretty full of all kinds of snobbery and ego…
Whereas Hillary just breaks a lot. So if Linux runs on both, who or what is that?
Oh I got it! Linux is the democratic party and the republicans are type-writers.
Analogies rule.
"Wild Octopuses Have Complex Sex"
“A male octopus (right) deposits a sperm packet into a female in this photo taken during a field study and released on Monday.”
The headline really says it all. According to National Geographic (April 3), a recent study has “found that wild octopuses engage in ‘jealous murders,’ gender bending, and once-in-a-lifetime sex—unlike their seemingly shy, unromantic captive brethren.”
The study was done by the University of California, Berkeley; scientists watched the “baseball-size Abdopus aculeatus octopus species” (found off Indonesia) several weeks and recently published their findings:
“The team witnessed picky, macho males carefully select mates. The octopuses would then guard their newly domesticated digs jealously—occasionally going so far as to use their 8- to 10-inch (20- to 25-centimeter) tentacles to strangle romantic rivals to death.
“‘This is not a unique species of octopus, which suggests others behave this way,’ said Berkeley biologist Roy Caldwell, who co-authored the new study.
“The researchers also observed smaller males put on feminine airs. Some would keep their brown stripes—a male trait—hidden, perhaps to lull females into a false sense of safety before setting the scene for ‘seduction.'”
Pregnant man… sort of
Okay I have an idea. What if we take the manliest actor of all time and play his machismo against itself by getting him pregnant. It’ll be super funny because then 9 years later he could be governor of 15% of the United States. Funny right? But totally unrealistic. “Or is it?”:http://thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article989859.ece#OTC-RSS&ATTR=News
Interactive anatomy
The “Visible Body”:http://www.visiblebody.com/ site is probably the coolest web 2.0 thing we’ve profiled in a while. On this site you can interact with human anatomy in a way that really was never possible before. Using intuitive controls and an easy to navigate menu system, anyone interested in just how our bodies are put together can learn the whole thing from phalanges to the xiphoid process (pictured below) at the very end of the sternum. Did you know there are 206 bones in the human body?
Once logged in (which you have to do with Internet Explorer) you’ll need to install a plugin from “Anark”:http://www.anark.com/downloads/download_1.aspx and then wait a tick to download all the various bits and baubles that make up our bodies. There are a LOT of bits and baubles in the human body. This may all seem like a huge pain in the ass but in the end it is worth it. The level of detail and interactivity with what is apparently a very accurate anatomical model like this is just plain mandible-dropping amazing. It’s almost enough to make me want to go to med school. Almost.
To read about some fantastic things we humans do with our bodies, check out the “human tricks”:http://duenos.net/article/human-tricks category. Thanks yet again to the lovely people at “Infodoodads”:http://infodoodads.com/?p=293 for finding this gem of a resource.
Rules of Thumb
In the movie “Boondock Saints”:http://imdb.com/title/tt0144117/, one of the main characters makes a feminist gaffe by referring to a something as a “rule of thumb.” A woman who overhears him gets pretty irate and cites a “since debunked”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thumb#Origin_of_the_phrase rumor that the origin of the term comes from a British judicial decision and if memory serves me correctly, punches him in the face.
Whatever its origin, a rule of thumb is a useful and easy to learn guide not to be taken literally. Every field uses rules of thumb in some way and this very useful “website”:http://rulesofthumb.org/ has some of the best. For example, here are two rules picked from disparate fields:
Anthropology:
??The number of people occupying a house in a preindustrial culture can be estimated at one person for every ten square meters of enclosed dwelling space.??
Astronomy:
??You can describe the location of objects that are low in the sky by holding your hand in front of you at arm’s length. With your palm facing in and your pinkie on the horizon, the width of your hand covers 15 degrees of arc above the horizon.??
Nymbler – your personal baby name assistant
http://www.nymbler.com/nymbler/ is an extremely cool web2.0 application that generates baby names from a list of desired family/ethnic names. I'm not exactly sure how it works but it is fun to play with.
It's also one of the many cool things that fellow writer Jeff put me on to through "infodoodads":http://infodoodads.com/?p=295, another fun blog worth reading when you have the time.
Internationalisation of sport
!http://duenos.net/images/alex/OpeningSeriesJapan.gif!
As many of us were groggily hitting the snooze alarm for the 2nd or 3rd time this morning, the first pitch of the 2008 Major League Baseball season crossed the plate at the Tokyo Dome, home to Japanese powerhouse “Yomiuri Giants”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yomiuri_Giants. The Boston Red Sox and the Oakland Athletics have been touring Japan for the last week playing exhibitions against Japanese league teams but this morning’s battle was the real deal with the two American League teams bringing in the new season in style. The game took ten innings but the defending champion Red Sox pulled it out 6-5 thanks to a Manny Ramirez two-run double in the last.
If you want to learn more about the game I suggest you take in the volumes of information being offered at “MLB.com”:http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/events/opening_series/y2008/index.jsp, but the reason I included this post today is that I think it’s very cool that Major League Baseball decided to play its opening games in Japan this year. This is just part of a trend of internationalisation happening in American sports that I’d like to see continuing. Last year we also saw the Super Bowl champion New York Giants play at “Wembley Stadium”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_New_York_Giants_season#Week_8:_at_Miami_Dolphins in London and an increased presence of very good “non-American players”:http://www.nba.com/players/international_player_directory.html in the NBA.
Biblical Badassery
II Kings 2:23-24: ??And Elisha went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up that way, there came forth little children of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; Go up, thou bald head. And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood and tore forty and two children of them asunder.?? No, not in that sad holocaust way of thinking about it, but you know – the building blocks of it – your job, your family/friends, car, house, hobbies, etc…
That’s been one of my favourite extracts from the Bible ever since my sophomore year religion class when we were taught the Old Testament. It’s also ranked number 8 in Cracked.com’s “9 Most Badass Bible Verses”:http://www.cracked.com/article_15699_9-most-badass-bible-verses.html . This article is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time and clearly I’m not the only one as it has received over 6000 “Diggs”:http://digg.com/odd_stuff/The_9_Most_Badass_Bible_Verses_2.
Just in case you don’t believe my 5 star rating for humour, here’s some of what they had to say about the above passage:
??Christians are constantly asking for prayer in schools to help get today’s kids in line, but we beg to differ. We need bears in schools. If every teacher had the power to summon a pair of child-maiming grizzly avengers, you can bet that schoolchildren nowadays would be the most well-behaved, polite children, ever. It’s a simple choice: listen to the biology lesson, or get first-hand knowledge of the digestive system of Ursus horribilis.??
This entry was posted in Uncategorized on .
How much is your life worth?
Turns out a man is selling his life on Ebay. The sale, a result of his wife leaving him, is remarkably complicated, and flushed out on his website.
I nabbed this post from the Inquirer so you best read more about it there.