Saturday, May 01, 2010

A(nother) geek's interpretation of the "boobquakes"

Over at Ars Technica, they have an analysis of one woman's attempt to test the validity of a Muslim edict about women's modesty - or lack thereof.
Assumption #1: The earthquake arbiter has good aim. What good would an earthquake punishing us for indecency be if it couldn't a) be felt in a populated area, and b) kill someone? Therefore, we only count earthquakes of a magnitude of 5 or more that have a death toll of at least 1 person. If looks can kill, then they should.

Cutting to the chase:
It turned out that there were four earthquakes with a 5.0 or greater magnitude on Monday, which is an average number, and none of them were lethal. That is to say, the Boobquake claimed no lives. And since the pure chance of a deadly earthquake was low anyway, this style of analysis casts the effects of cleavage, exposed ankles, and elaborately coiffed hair on earthquakes as inconclusive at best. By these standards, the Boobquake was a disappointing scientific, as well as geological, failure.
[emphases added]

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Friday, March 05, 2010

Ok Go!


These guys have a lot of fun with their music and videos. This one took a long time to set up.

(ex)SNL Star talks and sings of Obama


Victoria Jackson, who seems to be or have become a Christian, talks and sings at a Tea Party demonstration.

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Ultimate hacking...

not easy, but doable... Eh, Bert?
clipped from www.nzherald.co.nz


Using off-the-shelf chemicals, Tarnovsky soaked chips in acid to dissolve their hard outer shells. Then he applied rust remover to help take off layers of mesh wiring, to expose the chips' cores. From there, he had to find the right communication channels to tap into using a very small needle.

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Wednesday, January 27, 2010

how-to-use-your-friends-hobbies-to-your-advantage


http://basicinstructions.squarespace.com/storage/2010-01-28-friends-hobbies.gif?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1264645204864

Monday, January 25, 2010

It seems obvious, but...

it's not what you might think.

National Geographic Daily News


Flashier Great Tits Produce Stronger Sperm, Bird Study Shows

A male great tit.
When male great tits have brighter breasts, they also have more resilient sperm, a new study says.
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Friday, January 22, 2010

Cartoon from Michael Ramirez

via CFIF
clipped from cfif.org
click to enlarge (+)
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What you can learn from a slime mold

(And it's not something icky and scary like you'd encounter in Dungeons and Dragons. Also, note that they used the word "design." ;^)
clipped from esciencenews.com

Slime design mimics Tokyo's rail system

This is the network formation in <i>Physarum polycephalum</i>. (A) At t =0, a small plasmodium of <i>Physarum</i> was placed at the location of Tokyo in an experimental arena bounded by the Pacific coastline (white border) and supplemented with additional food sources at each of the major cities in the region (white dots). (B to F) The plasmodium grew out from the initial food source with a contiguous margin and progressively colonized each of the food sources. Behind the growing margin, the spr
Image courtesy of Science/AAAS

"Some organisms grow in the form of an interconnected network as part of their normal foraging strategy to discover and exploit new resources," Tero writes in the report. "Physarum is a large, single-celled amoeboid organism that forages for patchily distributed food sources... [It] can find the shortest path through a maze or connect different arrays of food sources in an efficient manner with low total length yet short average minimum distance between pairs of food sources, with a high degree of fault tolerance to accidental disconnection."

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Thursday, January 21, 2010

What's your password like?

Apparently most people's aren't very good...

Analysis of 32 million breached passwords

Top 10:
1. 123456
2. 12345
3. 123456789
4. Password
5. iloveyou
6. princess
7. rockyou
8. 1234567
9. 12345678
10. abc123
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Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Monday, January 18, 2010

What to do with the change that's accumulating on your dresser...

In case you had a bit more than you might need for a rainy day, here's something to ponder.
clipped from www.wired.com

$5M Buys the Ride of Your Life

flanker16800t
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Friday, January 15, 2010

Craig Ferguson

Sometimes when I'm at the gym, I have to take a few moments to listen to Craig Ferguson's monologue. Here's one that demonstrates that he's not the typical thoughtless standup comic:

Monday, January 11, 2010

Friday, January 08, 2010

Thursday, January 07, 2010

Evidence...



http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25546334

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/07/07/iraq.uranium

To see the video, click on "Leftists vs the facts" below.

TEDTalks: Charles Anderson Discovers Dragonflies that Cross Oceans : Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted)



16+ minutes of info followed by a little commercial from IBM detailing how they've implemented the eyes of Stockholm's Big Brother traffic taxing system in Stockholm, SWEDEN.