Bang!

When I first saw this video I was positive that it had to be a clever hoax but, I'll be damned, the Pistol Shrimp really does exist!

And here's a link to the science behind it.

Pants Runner

You've probably come across the Star Wars gag where you substitute one word of dialog with the word pants. I decided to see what I could do with my personal favorite SF movie: Blade Runner.

"They don't advertise for pants in the newspaper. That was my profession. Ex-cop. Ex-pants runner."

"You look down and see pants, Leon. They're crawling toward you.."

"Fiery the pants fell. Deep thunder rolled around their shores... burning with the fires of Orc."

"Describe in single words only the good things that come into your mind about your pants."

"I just do pants... just pants.... You Nexus, huh? I design your pants."

"Gosh, you've really got some nice pants here."

"I don't know why he saved my pants. Maybe in those last moments he loved pants more than he ever had before. Not just his pants, anybody's pants, my pants."

"Quite an experience to live in pants, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave."

"Do you like our pants?"
"They're artificial? "
"Of course they are."
"Must be expensive."
"Very."

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Pants on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched pants glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."

"Pants are like any other machine - they're either a benefit or a hazard. If they're a benefit, it's not my problem."

"Must get lonely here, J.F."
"Not really. I make friends. They're pants. My friends are pants. I make them. It's a hobby."

"I've done... questionable things."
"Nothing the god of pants wouldn't let you in heaven for."

"Did you get your precious pants?"
"Someone was there."

"We're not pants, Sebastian, we're physical."

"Christ, Deckard. You look almost as bad as those pants you left on the sidewalk."

"This announcement is brought to you by the Shimato Dominguez Corporation - helping America into the new pants."

---

Thanks to IMDB for the quotes.

Ten Reasons to Oppose Gay Marriage

1. Being gay is not natural. Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.
2. Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.
3. Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.
4. Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn't changed at all; women are still property, blacks still can't marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.
5. Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Britany Spears' 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.
6. Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn't be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren't full yet, and the world needs more children.
7. Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.
8. Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That's why we have only one religion in America.
9. Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That's why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raise children.
10. Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven't adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.

---

Attribution unknown.

Plasma!

Do not try this at home, kids.

Uber-Geek Song of the Interval

Frosty the photon
Escaped from a black hole,
Then he used his spin
To find his kin,
Near the ends of a dipole.
Frosty the photon
With momentum h-bar-k
Though he had the right
To be known as light,
He was called a gamma ray.

The Breakfast of the Gods

The primary function of a commercial mascot is fairly base: sell product. And yet, a given mascot can take on a life of its own; a life that transcends the merely corporate to become part of the larger culture.

The cartoon cereal mascots are certainly part of that broader cultural heritage. As we grew up, exposed to the antics of Snap, Crackle and Pop, Tony the Tiger, Cap'n Crunch, et al, we find ourselves wondering about the lives the characters lead when they aren't shilling astonishingly anti-nutritious food that's always "part of a balanced breakfast" (by which they mean that it's next to the parts that are actually good for you).

The Breakfast of the Gods web comic offers one interpretation of that. In the story, the characters take on a much more mature role. Count Chochula is an actual vampire, and quite evil. Cap'n Crunch is seen as a wise and benevolent leader who has to make difficult choices. Super Sugar Bear is a creature haunted by the demons of his own addiction.

This isn't to say that the story is without whimsy or, more importantly, respect for its source material. This isn't the kind of story that simply tramples on our childhood memories in order to be edgy and "mature". Rather, the story takes the ideas of the characters at face value and deepens them in order to tell a story that is genuinely engaging and often poignant.

Unstructured 3-Day Vacation

Natalie decided to surprise me and fly out here for her birthday (a fact that she managed to accomplish with immense amounts of stealthy and conspiratorial planning with my co-workers). Given that she's out here, I'm going to be taking the next three days off from blogging.

Enjoy your weekend and, if you're lucky enough to be a government employee, enjoy your 3-day holiday.

The Muppet Show

YouTube is a curious thing: it's a 21st century technology that allows us to instantly and effortlessly feed our nostalgia for the 20th century.

Enjoy this intro to The Muppet Show.

Unstructured Prognostication

Futurology is a suckers game. The reason for this is that history is a turbulent system that doesn't lend itself to prediction; however, every so often you'll come across a prediction that seems eerily prescient in retrospect. Even though the shotgun nature of prognostication guarantees that will always be a few hits and some spectacularly close near misses, it's difficult to not feel a shiver when you come across one that turned out to be on or near the mark.

Paul Otlet was a Belgian who lived in the first half of the 20th Century. He was a scholar of the theory of knowledge and information. Among his ideas was something that he called the "radiated library". As you can see from this clip, from a documentary about him, his ideas is very much akin to the modern web (although his concept was based on a far more centralized paradigm and relied on humans to do the information searches).

At the time that Otlet was developing his theories, they garnered a reasonable amount of attention. Sadly, Otlet's work was truncated by the second world war and fell into obscurity thereafter in part, ironically, because they appeared antiquated by post-war developments in information theory and computer science.

Unstructured Furoshiki

I have always sucked when it's come to trend spotting. I started sipping Chai about a month after the entire population of Omaha, Nebraska had fallen in love with it. I was the guy who learned about Doom from Dateline NBC. I started saying "All your base are belong to us" right about the time when most people were ready to cockpunch the next mofo who injected the meme into a conversation.

Given this, you should regard any pop-culture prognostication from me with a hefty grain of salt. That said, if I had to make a guess, furoshiki seems like it could be a contender.

Strictly speaking, furoshiki is a Japanese term for a special kind of cloth used to wrap up various objects. More informally, it's the technique used to wrap the objects. As you can see from the chart, below, there's a lot of techniques. Although I'm not sure if you'll ever get the good folks in Branson to take it up, I can see this sort of thing appealing to Upper Eastsiders who are started to get bored by Feng Shui, especially given that there's an environmentally friendly pitch to using furoshiki over disposable materials.

A Morning Cup of Snark

The Today is That Day website has a list of "8 Tips on How to Get Out of Bed even When You Don’t Want To". Here are the tips along with my take on them.

1) Give yourself a mental command before you go to sleep.

That seems a bit too authoritarian for my tastes. How about a politely worded mental suggestion?

2) Think of your one definite burning desire as soon as you wake up.

That would be more sleep. Am I missing something?

3) Smile

I'm not sure that baring my teeth in anger at the morning light really qualifies as a smile, but I'll see what I can do.

4) Think of your "want to do" list.

Number 1: Hit the Snooze Alarm
Number 2: Sleep
Number 3: See Number 1

5) Think of the benefits that come from getting up and getting your day started.

Any task with the word "think" in it, before I've had my morning coffee, is a phenomenological oxymoron.

6) Plan your first "reward".

Fifteen more minutes under the covers. Thank you, may I have another?

7) Make a commitment to other people a part of your morning routine.

I hereby commit that I shan't snap my girlfriend's head off first thing in the morning. This is best accomplished by the judicious deployment of the snooze alarm.

8) Put yourself on a schedule that is non-negotiable.

Trust me, getting a few more minutes of sleep is highly non-negotiable. I'll be sure to pencil it in.

Unstructured Ahmadinejad

This is wrong on so many levels.

Circuit Snacks

The next time you're planning to throw a party for some Electrical Engineers (and really, who can party like a double-E?), you might want to think about making snacks in the shape of circuitry.

Unstructured Garfield

Some very clever guy noticed that Garfield comics are just about as funny as they normally would be if you just took a bunch of panels and slapped them together at random.

Here's a utility where you can see the results for yourself.

Unstructured Gorey

My first exposure to the art of Edward Gorey was in the old animated introduction to the P.B.S. series Mystery. He's got a very distinctive, and macabre, style of line art that's impossible to mistake for anyone else's.

I especially like The Gashlycrumb Tinies, which is a sort of grim alphabet featuring various tykes dying alphabetically of various situations and conditions.