if you needed more reasons to be disapointed in humankind here is a recent study on basic science knowlenge. particularly troubling are the percentage of people who don't understand evolution (47%), the big bang (67%), or how long it takes the earth to go around the sun (46%).
egad
the other morning i was in the shower here. the facilities in these old buildings are of the big horse-shower type design: they have two shower heads at opposite ends and a curtain in the middle. there is a locking door that opens into the middle of the stall. i was performing the morning cleanliness routine on one side. shampoo. rinse. minding my own business. repeat. then, out of nowhere, some jerk comes in and says, "hey man, let me get in there?"
horrified pause.
this fellow wants to get into the small shower area with me, separated by only a thin “curtain” (finest of all privacy devices), with the intention of becoming naked and soapy within 3 feet of yours truly. to say the least, i'm not really into that idea. so in the most incredulous tone i can muster i reply, "uh, are you sure about that?"
"i've got to get to class," he retorts, sounding not at all surprised by my reluctance to accept a scenario whose unremitting horror is not expressible in words.
needless to say, i was forced to cut my shower short because of this marauding jackass.
this is my 6th straight year living in a dorm and i must admit, it’s beginning to wear on me slightly. i don’t try to get into showers with other guys, i wait or use the one on another floor. nothing is so important that i need to get within 3 feet of another naked man. we don’t have to be savages here. i am getting pretty tired of living around these idiots. it is just so wrong to go around forcing people to either give up shower time, or participate in what could pass for the opening scene of a gay porn flick.
better to remain quiet and be thought a fool than to have your personalized cell phone ring speak for you and remove all doubt.
it may interest you to know that there exist fish with a “sense” of electricity. in addition to the usual five (and yes, fish can “smell”…i’ve done experiments) they possess the ability to detect slight aberrations in an electrical field of their own creation. these “weakly electric fish” live, obviously, in dark highly conductive waters and set up a 1 volt field around the electroreceptor in their tails (the “weakly” comes from comparison with their better-known counterparts, the electric eel and those ilk who can set up 600v potentials). they can then judge the resistance and conductivity of other sea creatures that enter their field, thus identifying them. the waveform emitted by the electric organ can even be used to communicate with friends. there is a great article about them here.
i bet my goldfish wishes he had a sense of electricity the way that people wish for sixth senses like x-ray vision or telepathy. these intrepid aquatics have one going for them, but to enjoy it they have to live in the gloomy depths.
of all the crackerjack things the soviets did over the years, this has got to be one of the most crackerjack ones. in an apparent attempt to impress everyone with the architectural splendor of communism, plans were drawn up in the 1930's to construct a gigantic "palace of the soviets" in the heart of moscow larger than the empire state building. capped off with a likeness of none other than lenin himself (chubby edition of course), 100 meters high. each of his legs would have been the same size as the statue of liberty and the entire structure would have been the tallest structure in the world. i hope that they were planning on having that plane fly circles around the thing all day long, with moving spotlights pointing up at it from the base.
of course, like everything else the communists did, this worked out exactly according to plan. after blowing up some famous church to lay the foundation, the builders discovered that the land was too marshy to construct a stupendously large monument. as they were about to fix it, world war two started and they gave up, turning the left-over cement basin into a glorious "swimming pool of the soviets" instead:
it just goes to show you: if you ever want to erect a scary-looking palace of ridiculous proportion, make sure that you're truly committed to building it, or you'll end up with a big ditch full of wet commies. and nobody wants that.
an astronomer named john dubinski has been making n-body simulations of galaxy collisions. particularly of interest is movie #1, the impending milky way/andromeda impact (set your vcrs for 3 billion years from now, it should be quite a show). it is probably best enjoyed by simultaneously playing the 2001 theme. of course, the third movie about cluster formation has its own music...its own inappropriately creepy music.
by the power vested in me by the state of rhode island i now officially declare the era of the livestrong bracelet over. i can appreciate the exploitation of a stupid trend for charity, and to the extent that this is the main accomplishment of the yellow bracelet people i can tolerate it, but with the duplication of the fad by innumerable other organizations i feel i have to draw the line. yesterday i saw a girl with no fewer than 5 such wristbands, all of differing colors. message to other charities: you need to come up with your own promotion. plus, the people who wear these things are so goddamn phony. you gave 100 cents to charity! here’s you metal, it’s yellow and it goes around your wrist!
don’t misunderstand me, there is absolutely nothing wrong with giving only one dollar to any charity. the cancer people will use it better than you, you know? but advertising the fact that you gave one dollar, like this makes you some kind of philanthropist? lame. not to mention that the people who wear these things seem to be saying “i know that this trend is ugly, but i am doing it for charity and that makes my nonchalance noble.” yes it’s a step up from the usual “i know this trend is ugly but i am doing it to look nonchalant and that makes me cool,” but not a big one. so in my eyes, the fact that the cancer research people were taking advantage of this attitude was clever on their part. but now we’ve got thousands of groups copying it. tsunamis, other diseases, goddamn student organizations. the bracelet proliferation has to stop. what was marginally (and probably unintentionally) clever when used by one group is now dreadfully aggravating when ripped off by a bunch of clones. i mean is a bracelet for the space shuttle really necessary?
i agree with the shuttle people*, but you won’t be able to take advantage of those humanitarians who want help looking altruistic the way that livestrong does. plus, what does “demonstrating your commitment" to the space shuttle accomplish? no one who sees you wearing the thing will be able to do anything about it. at least if someone is inspired by your cancer bracelet they can give money to cancer research.
i think we need a bracelet that demonstrates the wearer’s commitment to getting rid of these bracelets. it should be clear or something.
either that or a bracelet showing devotion to the building of a teraelectronvolt collider. we could call them liveelectroweak bracelets and they would be the color of particles.
*not because the shuttle is any good itself. the “research” is bs, legitimate scientists aren’t interested in whether you can grow toothpick potatoes in zero-gravity, but because fixing the hubble telescope if we need to is really important.
in my formative years, when i was yet a mere sapling to the mighty oak that stands before you today, he was a cub scout. with the pointless little projects and silly uniforms i hated the experience itself but tangentially encountered one of the most influential forces of any young boy's childhood.
for you see, all cub scouts had an automatic subscription to boy’s life magazine, and boy’s life magazine had a certain advertisement in the back of every issue that no cub scout can ever forget. here, seared into the memories of millions of former scouts is the baffling photo from that ad:
a hovercraft. the weird triangular structure, large circular anti-gravity pads, and silvery mystery cylinder on the front. how could any seven-year old leafing casually through the “gifts and gimmicks” section fail to be captivated by such an outlandish contraption? yet, as soon as these youngsters inspected the description closely they would find that it was not, in fact, an actual “hovercar” for sale at around $5, rather an instructional booklet of how to build such a hovercar using only, of all things, an “ordinary vacuum cleaner.” now, if the panel had simply read “hovercar” with no picture or further elaboration most american males aged 6-40 would still probably remember it, but there are two reasons that it was the most deceptive advertisement of our generation. the first is the kid’s expression. he appears to be inspecting it, as though he just found it hovering outside his bedroom window one morning. like he didn’t just spend the last 6 months of his life in the garage with his dad’s welding torch. the second is that the hovercar appears to be about 2 feet off the ground. impressionable flying enthusiasts are led to believe that this thing hovers above houses and trees. over time i recall learning, in this order, that: you had to build it yourself, it remains a fraction of an inch above the ground at all times, that ground has to be perfectly flat and smooth, and it requires a power cord. not the futuristic vehicle that we envisioned.
i only bring it up since i thought about the hovercar yesterday after years of the memory slumbering in the back of my mind and realized that it is probably the most universally recognizable icon of many childhoods; the holy grail of many a young cub scout’s life.
bad taste is a cruel mistress. i believe that there is something fundamental to the nature of certain things that marks them unerringly as low and classless. something deep within the essence of inanimate objects that whispers “i belong at a stock-car race.” the color turquoise, paraphernalia with the budweiser logo on it, and pretty much every occurrence of the male pony tail (sorry guys) are prime specimens of this unalterable taint. black jeans, gold chains, vinyl siding, you get the idea. i could spend all day listing this nonsense (which was all napoleon dynamite seemed to be, sorry again guys), but perhaps the eternal pillar of tackiness and the subject of today’s derision is the word ‘baby.’
yes, ‘baby,’ subject of a thousand pop songs. to me at least, there is just coarseness to the word that i can’t put my finger on and can’t get comfortable with. maybe it’s the “ee” ending. maybe it’s the comparing grown women to infants as a way of expressing affection. whatever it is, use of that word, especially by characters who seem to demonstrate decent elocution at less cringe-inducing points of a film and parents addressing their over-3-year-children, gets under my skin like the shrill chattering of adolescent girls.
in all of the english language it may be my least favorite noun. it has only three appropriate uses:
1. in reference to a newborn
2. the ironic george costanza fashion: “i’m back baby!”
3. gauging the classlessness of people who use it in the unapproved fashion.
anything else deserves an interaction with my aforementioned punching-squad. its up there with the non-ironic 'mama,' 'daddy' and 'doggy.' there's something about those youngster words ending in vowels. guys, once more, my apologies.
over 150 planets have been discovered so far by looking at wobbles in the paths of the stars they are orbiting. but, of course, since the planets themselves don't emmit radiation it has been impossible to observe them directly, until now. some astronomers believe they may have gotten a photograph of a planet orbiting gq lupi at a distance of 100 au. it must be pretty big to be visible from reflected light at this distance, since 100 au is 2.5 times as far away as pluto and the star itself is at least 400 lightyears away. the spectrum seems to indicate that the object is cool, but more analysis of the mass will be needed to show that it isn't a brown dwarf. amazingly, this star with its companion was already photographed in 2002 and 1999 by sky surveys done with hubble and subaru but no one had noticed it until this march.
a while ago i noticed that my fingerprints on either hand were the same for matching pairs of fingers, except they were reversed in direction (as though in a mirror). the loops go left on my left hand and right on my right. this is pretty much what you would expect since everything else is symmetrical on people. and this is indeed the same for all my auxiliary fingers and thumbs—except for the pointer finger on my right hand, it goes left! the pointer looks the same on both hands. in physics terms: fingerprint parity is not conserved. here is a helpful diagram:
in fact, so strange was this to me when discovered that i conducted a survey by electronic mail and found that that everyone (of about 10) had this non-mirror conversion aspect. one person even had a ring finger with the same problem. why would my hands go through all the trouble of reversing themselves on a finger-by-finger basis and then screw up on the most important finger? does dna really leave this kind of thing up to chance? most importantly perhaps, why is it irregular? why does almost everyone have just one finger that does this, and is it always left hand uniform, right hand finger backwards? please leave a comment with your fingerprint specs, i don't want to look this up.
i think i just heard a cat food commercial narrated by david duchovny. now seems like about the right time for his carreer to hit its nadir, but he's really taking his decline seriously, i mean, cat food. that's going out with a bang!
i also just saw a commercial with cars riding on only the front two or back two tires. "why have four wheels if you don't use them?" the message being: this is what non-4-wheel drive is. well, it's not, but that isn't what i noticed. there was one of those tiny messages on the bottom of the screen that said "professional drivers, closed course. do not attempt." how would anyone watching even know how to go about attempting it? "yeah, i was thinking of filling my trunk with cement and just driving around with the front of my car 6 feet in the air. i saw it in this awesome commercial and since there weren't any warnings, immitating it must be ok!"
"extrasolar planets have been detected and it is known that they exist in our solar system"what is the trip to venus that requires the least amount of energy? draw if nessasary
"extrasolar planets have been detected through syncrotron radiation"
"least energy orbit to venus is at the solstice when the sun's gravity is least"
"follow the gravity pulls from planets and let the spaceship ride that wave from one side to the next"and about 50% of the rest said something gleamed entirely from science-fiction movies and never discussed in the course like,
"use a gravity slingshot by going around the moon"ok, that last one was made up, but the rest are actual quotes.
"slingshot around the sun"
"gravitational slingshot..."
"take a slingshot and hit me between the eyes with a sharp rock because i'm a retard"
