YouTube Tuesday: Office Invention

In case you haven't heard, our good friend Joe, former proprietor of Hip Suburban White Guy, recently got a new gig at a new cube farm.

It turns out his new gig isn't as, well, demanding of his time. Which leaves him a few minutes throughout the day to focus his creative energies to solving humanity's pressing concerns... like finding a cheap source of perpetual energy.

He sent me this video of his latest scale model. Well done, sir!

Bullitt list -- 02.26.16

Today's category: What I learned this week

Hey, look, I think that by now we all realize that life is tough and full of disappointment and the best that you can hope for is to enjoy any rare, brief moment of happiness and maybe learn a few things along the way.

So, here are a few things I've learned this week…

• That movie Thor: The Dark World is even more unwatchable than most comic book movies.
  
  I get that part of enjoying most movies, but especially comic book movies, is suspension of disbelief and "buy-in" to the internal logic of the film's story line. But even by its own logic, a race of hyperintelligent, god-like aliens should know better than to bring a sword to a laser blaster battle.
  
  I mean, why not give all of the regular foot soldiers in the Asgardian army an Odin Plasma Spear, or at least an assault rifle. I mean if you've got superior technology and science, use it! I'm guessing there's no Second Amendment on Asgard.
  
  
   
• But it's good to know that science has your back when your up against the wall, when you desperately
  
  need to cross the bridge but some weirdo trollish wizardy guy is blocking your path, making you answer he these silly questions three. In those situations, it's nice to have this little factoid in your mental pocket:
   The air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow (European) is...


• Speaking of science, no less of a luminary than Albert Einstein himself made an appearance this week with the news that he had verified that there was a force in the universe even more powerful that the splitting of an atom: The Power of Love.
  
  In a letter to his daughter, Einstein wrote,

  …what I will reveal now to transmit to mankind will also collide with the misunderstanding and prejudice in the world.

  But there was one late 20th Century philosopher who did understand. I refer of course to Hugh Anthony Cregg II, who once wrote…

  

  The power of love
  is a curious thing
  Make a one man weep,
  make another man sing
  Change a hawk
  to a little white dove
  More than a feeling
  that's the power of love

  
  
• And speaking of philosophy, the Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō once said

  A flute with no holes is not a flute. And a donut without a hole, is not a donut.

  … or something like that. It loses a little in the translation. The important point is that I learned this week that regardless of flutes and donuts, a croissant is still a croissant even if it's not crescent shaped, at least if your in the UK.
  
  This is terrific news… for some reason… probably…


• Finally, since we're getting into the realm of poetry, I just wanted to mention that I learned this week that one of my favorite new bands is getting ready to release a new album.
  
  I first heard of Frightened Rabbit on an NPR music segment and almost immediately went online to buy their album Pedestrian Verse. In my opinion there's not a weak track on it. Here's the video for the excellent Woodpile…
  
  

The new album, Painting Of A Panic Attack, is on pre-sale now on all of the major online record stores (Google Play, iTunes, Amazon, Spotify… is that all of them?), and I expect a review very soon on Dan's new blog. In fact, I'm specifically DEMANDING a listen from Dan ASAP.

That's enough knowledge from me for now, I don't want to blow your mind too much. Hey, here's an idea: Let me know in the comments what YOU learned this week (if anything)…

Aegrescit medendo ...

...but I might try it anyway.

You might claim you’d do anything to reverse baldness, but the “vampire treatment” puts that sentiment to the test.  Scientists use injections of “platelet-rich plasma” to combat aging on the face and hands and can use the same process on the scalp.

Yes, the “vampire treatment” involves extracting your blood and re-injecting it into your scalp.  Volunteer attempts have proven successful, with many subjects experiencing significant hair growth in spots that have long gone dark.

Researchers believe that the treatment works by stimulating stem cells below the skin, assisting in the re-growth of hair.

I mean, when you think of if, it's really not all that different from pro cyclists banking their blood for later use in the Tour de France... except you're (hopefully) regrowing your flowing locks instead of sitting on a tiny bike seat for six hours a day.
 tagged: science, health, blood, baldness, vampire, cycling

Song of Sap and Flyers

We were screaming at each other when we pulled into the docking bay* of the mother ship around dusk after a quick away mission to St. Joe.

But we weren't screaming at each other because we were angry (at least, not this time), it was because that's the only way we could communicate over the incessant high-decibel droning of the summer cicadas.

We, the adults, were used to it. My Supermodel Wife and I are both native Kansans and grew up with this particular genre of music as the soundtrack of late summer doldrums. But a precocious three-year old toddler has no such tolerance, and demanded an explanation in the form of a pitched "What's that NOISE!"

So while the light held out, we braved the still-triple-digit heat to check out the oak trees in our front yard. We found the empty larval shells by the hundreds. When I gently plucked one from the bark, attached it to my finger and advanced it toward my daughter to give her a closer look, she repelled in disgust at the alien-looking thing.

We talked about how these critters live most of their life underground, sucking sap from the tree roots. Then in the summer, they dig their way out, clamber up the nearest tree and literally crawl out of their own skins. I told her how they transform, how they grow wings and fly up into the leaves. How the boys start to sing to try to find a girlfriend and that is what that crazy 108 decibel noise is that we're hearing.

"And what happens when they find their girlfriend?"

"Well, they start a family."

"How?"

"Well… er… Check it out, you can take a stick and poke the shells off of the tree..."

So we spent the next few minutes playing mini-wiffle ball with a stick and cicada shells until we came across a cicada shell that was … still moving. The little guy was crawling slowly up the tree trunk, still alien-looking and creepy, but tantalizingly close to the business end of the mini-wiffle stick.

"Can I hit it off?" she asked.

"No. Let's leave him alone so he can grow up and find a girlfriend."

It was a pretty easy sell since the thing really did look gross. I mean, not that I'd look much better after spending my childhood years two feet underground.

Fast forward to the next morning when I wake her up to get ready for the day. The first thing she asks is if we can go check on the cicada crawling up the tree to make sure he made it. Okay, I'm up for a follow up.

Luckily it's cooler out this morning, the sun is just starting to shine through over the rooftops of the subdivision. Our friend from the previous evening must have climbed even higher, but he's got dozens of friends who changed clothes overnight and left their dirties on the tree trunks. In fact, as we look at the four trees directly in front of our house, we see multiple (I called it "a moltitude" but the pun was lost on a 3-year-old) cicadas in various states of emergence.

Since most of us don't get up early enough to really examine the critters that are making that insane racket in the evenings, my daughter and I decided to take a few pictures and share the educational field trip we took to our front yard.

This guy is still in the process of "inflating" his wings.

* I know most people call it their "garage" — but that's for you hoity-toity French speakers. Nope, ours is either the docking bay or the car hole (depending on context).

tagged: Kansas, Kansas City, science, cicada, insects, summer, education, nature,

YouTube Tuesday: Interplanet

Check out this video created by stitching together NASA archival images.

According to the artist:

The footage in this video is derived from image sequences from NASA's Cassini and Voyager missions. I downloaded a large amount of raw images to create the video.

tagged: YouTube, Tuesday, video, Saturn, Jupiter, space, NASA

YouTube Tuesday: Hydrophonia

NOAA scientists used an under water microphone — a hydrophone — to capture audio of the massive earthquake that hit Japan a few weeks ago.

You may have heard of it. It was in the news and everything.

Now the full force of mother nature can be terrifyingly relived as scientists from the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle have released an extraordinary recording of the sound of the 9.0 earthquake as it powered its way through the Pacific ocean moments before creating the devastating tsunami.

Captured by an underwater microphone called a hydrophone positioned 900 miles away from the epicentre in the Aleutian Islands in Alaska the earthquake's incredible rumbling and roaring is not dissimilar to the sound of a rocket taking off.

Original Source: UK's The Daily Mail

tagged: YouTube, Tuesday, science, earthquake, Japan, hydrophone, NOAA

YouTube Tuesday: The Delicate Sound of Pi

I know it's a day early for YouTube Tuesday, but it's a special occasion. As you know, or will soon become aware, today is 3.14… Pi Day in the United States*.

To commemorate this special day, here's a special Pi Day song. I hope you'll all singe along.



*Europe, of course, doesn't have a Pi Day because they mess up their date notations by putting the day before the month, thus 14.3. However, according to my inside sources 143 is the sum of 3 consecutive primes (43+47+53), and also of 5 consecutive primes (11+13+17+19+23+29+31). So I guess it's Prime Day in Europe.

tagged: YouTube, Tuesday, Pi, Pi Day, music, video, Europe, math

Who wants to live forever?

A few months ago, I caught this interesting tidbit on The Slate and stuck it in the "to blog" file in the back of my mind.

But in the way that thought gives way to thought and day give way to day, I just sort of left it on the mental back burner. And frankly, this whole blog has been on the mental back burner for a couple of weeks, so I figured now's a good time to dust off this topic and see if it has any legs left.

The story from The Slate was about how human life expectancy is getting much longer. It's happening not just in developed countries, but all over the globe. People are living longer, significantly longer. In fact according to the article, when we turn 50 most of us will still have more years ahead of us than our grandparents had when they turned 40.

This development comes with an argyle sock full of difficult socio-economic problems that someone will have to deal with: How do you feed all these old geezers? How can an already broke-ass Social Security system handle our additional years of geezerhood? Is Larry More really going to live long enough for me to have to watch him as a 3-D hologram?

I can't really answer these questions. Probably something for the upcoming young people to deal with the way my generation had to deal with cleaning up the Grunge music mess.

But when I first read the article I happened to be going through a bit of an existential funk, thinking about how quickly the first few decades of my life seem to have gone by and how even 100 years doesn't seem like nearly enough time to do everything that you want to do.

I know, I can hear what some of you are thinking. "Who wants to live to be 100, anyway?" And to be completely honest, I probably said idiotic shit like that back when I was young and stupid myself. Of course the answer to "Who would want to live to be 100?" is "Anybody who's 99."

As I've "matured" I've found that I love life. Sure it's crappy sometimes. There's always some jerk with an Apple logo sticker on his rear windshield who speeds up in rush hour traffic to block you from making a lane change. There are still people in the checkout line at the supermarket who insist on taking 15 minutes to write out a check (that's 15 minutes that I'll never get back, btw). The world, our culture and everything is pretty much going down the toilet.

But dammit, I really want to be around to enjoy this crappy world for a long, long time.

I love my family and I want to spend lots of time with them. I love seeing my kids grow up, even as I'm saddened to see them pass through the various stages of getting older. For every a-hole that doesn't hold the elevator for you, there's a glorious sunny spring morning, there are beautiful and priceless interstitial moments with your Supermodel Wife, there's your daughter with a death grip on your finger as she learns to walk, rather than crawl, down the stairs.

Everything just seems to be happening so fast. When I consider my own mortality, I think about how sad it will be to get to the end of the road and look back to see how short of a journey it was after all. Maybe life has a way of wearing you down as you age to the point that, by the time you get to the end, you're ready for it. But that hasn't happened to me yet. So when I read about increased longevity, I say bring it on.

It seem at this point that I would need 300 or 400 years to really absorb everything life has to offer, do everything I want to do, suck all the joyful marrow out of life's cold, cracked bones. Even that's just a guess. I'm sure that when I reached 399, I'd be thinking another 150 years or so would be nice.

I'm kind of just rambling on now, just freeforming this thing (that's what happens when you get old). I know I'm not alone and these are hardly original thoughts. Poems, songs, books, hell entire religions have been built around this subject. One could argue that the contemplation or our own mortality is central to what it means to be human.

So let me put it to you. Am I just stuck in a mid-life funk here? Can it even be considered mid-life given the longer lifespans? How long do you want to live, and more importantly, how long should Larry More be allowed to geezer up the airwaves?




Note: If you're reading this from an RSS reader, you might want to click through to the page to participate in the embedded poll question, if you can figure it out, ya old coot!



tagged: life, expectancy, science, society, Five For Fighting, family, mortality

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice

El Borak's comment on a previous post got me thinking. I hate when that happens.

Here's what he said about the continued and rapid devolution of the human brain:

Take some comfort in the idea that if we are consumed by our little tragedies, it's because we don't have any big tragedies to worry about.

That's an interesting point. We humans have had it pretty good for a pretty long time. In fact, as far as we know, it's never been this good in the history of human existence.

And it seems to be driving us crazy. As Louis CK pointed out, "Everything's amazing and nobody is happy."

And there you have it. We have had it too good for too long. We're due for a "big tragedy" as El B calls it.

So, knowing that such a tragedy is virtually a mathematical certainty, why not have a little fun speculating about it? What kind of tragedy do you think we're looking at here? Lots of people have lots of theories…

Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Robert Frost could be kind of a downer at times. Fire and Ice are only two of the possibilities. Let's take a look at some of the more popular theories pop culture has given us recently.

First, is the dreaded Zombie Apocalypse. The current leading theory on this is that humans, through their hubris, create some kind of genetically modified virus either as a cure for cancer or as a biological weapon. The virus gets out of control, creating 5 billion zombies worldwide and leaving surviving humans to fend off attacks on their evolutionarily smaller brains.

I personally don't see this as a likely possibility. Still, it's good to have a plan in place just in case. So in the event of a zombie apocalypse, just keep a few things in mind.

First and foremost, always head to colder climates. Zombies don't generate their own body heat, so they freeze up when the temperature drops. Don't head to the beach, or Atlanta or anything like that. This is just common sense, people.

Be sure to stock up on guns, ammo and cricket bats. It's pretty well know that a bashed in head is the only way to permanently kill a zombie.

Remember that zombies aren't your friends. If a friend or loved one has been bitten by a zombie, you owe it to them to put them out of their misery. The survival of the human race is at stake here.

After zombies, the next most-popular sci-fi tragedy is the Robot Apocalypse. You know, mankind creates robots to do all the dirty work. The robots get too advanced. They realize the don't need humans around anymore and decide to exterminate them. Hilarious high jinks ensue.

This is maybe a little more plausible than the zombie apocalypse, but we're still quite a few years away from this. Of course, our military seems to delight in creating robots that can kill people. For the life of me, I don't see what good can come of putting a machine gun on a Roomba. I mean, think about it people. How long do you think it will be before that Roomba makes you go boomba?

Again, just to be safe, you might want to check out Humans United Against Robots (HUAR for short) for some helpful tips on protecting yourself from the inevitable robot uprising.

The next item on the menu of destruction is some kind of cataclysmic asteroid strike. This goes even higher on the plausibility scale, since we're pretty sure that it's happened to our planet before. In fact, we actually witnessed it happen to our planetary neighbor a few years ago.

It's also the event that, in my not-so-expert opinion, we would have the least chance of surviving as a species. I mean, if the dinosaurs — a much more successful animal the we puny humans — couldn't survive, that what chance do we have? I guess we have a superior intelligence to help us adapt… but I'm just thinking that whatever we become might not be recognizable as homo sapien anymore.

Of course we don't have to look to space for natural destruction, there is plenty potential for terrestrial tragedy. What I see as most likely, and most devastating to yours truly, is the explosive eruption (really, is there any other kind?) of the 925-square-mile supervolcano under the Yellowstone Caldera.

Already, a magma bed under the caldera has swelled and heaved the ground up by 10-feet. When it finally blows, a volcanic cloud will spew ash and debris 25 miles high while lava and pyroclastic flows cover two-thirds of the country from Wyoming to Louisiana and putting quite a damper on that summer barbecue party I was planning.

Also, it would totally fill in the Grand Canyon, which I haven't had a chance to see yet. So… moving that item up on my to-do list.

But even more likely than that, is a disastrous 10.0 earthquake that is due to hit California any day now. A few weeks ago, scientists on the History Channels' Mega Quake 10.0 all but guaranteed that a magnitude 10.0 earthquake would turn California into an island and Arizona into a state full of beach front resorts.

That is totally going to suck for everyone in California, but it might be just the kind of tragedy that could get us to stop focusing on how crappy our cell-phone service is and start focusing on actually helping each other out. So from that perspective, at least there's a silver lining.

Still, such a quake would probably turn the Grand Canyon into Arizona Bay, so my earlier comment about getting out to see the Grand Canyon? Yeah, still applies.

So those are the biggies as I see it. I guess we'll still have to contend with plagues once all of our antibiotics fail. And then there's always the inevitable Water Wars looming on the horizon. Oh, and don't forget about sudden widespread sterility due to all of the residual hormones in the food and water supplies.

What did I miss? How do you think we'll get our comeuppance?



tagged: Earth, destruction, volcano, Yellowstone, California, earthquake, robot, zombie, robot, asteroid, apocalypse, Robert Frost

YouTube Tuesday: Marshmallow Torture

Don't get me wrong, I love my kid's and all. But it's pretty funny to see kids mildly tortured.



tagged: video, YouTube Tuesday, marshmallow, test, psychology, children, kids, delayed gratification

Are we human, or are we denser

I've maintained for a while on this piece o'crap blog that we, as a species, are pretty much on the downhill side of our existence.

Sure, there are more of us than ever on the planet. And yes, we are more technically advanced than we have ever been. One could argue that over the past decade or so we've taken a leap in interpersonal connection and communication the likes of which haven't been seen since Gutenberg first moved type around to impress the ladies.

But then again, look what we're communicating. At best, it's ghoulish drooling over the latest tragedy. Whether a collapsed coal mine, an exploded oil platform or a mass shooting, our vulturous media stokes our schadenfreude until we're so jaded that nothing affects us anymore. And that's the best case scenario.

The worst case scenario is that the media stuffs us so full of intellectual junk food (which we consume with gusto) that we can no longer tell the difference between relevant an unhealthy. When supposed luminaries like Barbara Walters are soooooo fascinated by the barely trainable cast of Jersey Shore, well, let's just say that it's a wonder any of us are still walking upright.

Not that we'll be walking upright for much longer, at least if you look at the "progress" of our culture over the last, say, 40 years. But who am I, right? I'm just an amateur culture observer. Don't take my word for it.

Take the word of people who actually study the human brain for a living.

Over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human male brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimeters to 1,350 cc, losing a chunk the size of a tennis ball. The female brain has shrunk by about the same proportion.

“I’d call that major downsizing in an evolutionary eyeblink,” he says. “This happened in China, Europe, Africa—everywhere we look.” If our brain keeps dwindling at that rate over the next 20,000 years, it will start to approach the size of that found in Homo erectus, a relative that lived half a million years ago and had a brain volume of only 1,100 cc.

Oh sure, you may have some scientists who hypothesize that this evolutionary trend is merely the brain reorganizing itself to excel in handling the challenges of modern man, such as memorizing the DVR program, or texting and driving at the same time.

But that's just an optimistic rationalization by people who don't want to, or are incapable of, accepting the real truth. Which is that for the past 30 or 40 years, our society has been naturally selecting for dumber and dumber offspring. I mean, just take a look at the first 20 minutes of Idiocracy. It's a simple numbers game. The smart people know that overpopulation is unsustainable and take steps to limit their offspring. The less intellectually advantaged? Not so much.



Anyway, I'm not claiming to be the last word on this. And I'm definitely not as sharp as our cro-magnon forefathers. But I do know that you can't fight evolution. It will be what it will be, and the only thing you can really do is sing a catchy tune and maybe dance about it while your here.

Oh, and for those of you who are way ahead of the evolutionary curve on this issue, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.*



*Homage to Douglas Adams.

tagged: science, evolution, brain, Human, Idiocracy, The Killers, Jersey Shore, homo erectus

Woohoo! Road trip!

A cool new headline in the old feed reader this morning read: US scientists find potentially habitable planet near Earth".

It turns out that planet Gliese 581g (orbiting the Red Dwarf star Gliese 581 — only 20 light years away) may have areas that would support human life.

The planet… is orbiting in the middle of the "habitable zone" of the red dwarf star Gliese 581, which means it could have water on its surface.

Liquid water and an atmosphere are necessary for a planet to possibly sustain life, even if it might not be a great place to live, the scientists said.

The planet… has a mass three to four times that of Earth and an orbital period of just under 37 days. Its mass indicates that it is probably a rocky planet and has enough gravity to hold on to an atmosphere…

Given the close proximity of Gliese 581g to Earth, it seems a road trip is definitely in order. But before you pack your bags, there are a few things you might want to keep in mind.

First, scientists say the planet is "tidally locked" to it's star, meaning it's always daytime on one side and always night on the other. The planet is theoretically habitable in the "twilight zone" where it's perpetually evening (or morning, depending on your perspective).

This isn't terrible, given that you potentially would have a nice romantic sunset all day long. Unfortunately in that habitable area, temperatures are thought to range from -24 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit — much like North Dakota.

The other hitch is that the planet is three to four times more massive that Earth. This is good, since it means that it can hold an atmosphere, which is nice if you plan on breathing.

But you'd better be in some pretty good physical shape by the time you get there. If you weigh in at a svelte 180 pounds on Earth, you'll have to lug around a 720 pound body on Gliese 581g. And that Quarter Pounder with Cheese that you packed for a snack just became a One Pounder with cheese.

Still, it may be cold, rocky, and dark, and it may make your butt look fat in those jeans, but I bet Gliese 581g is still ten times nicer than Uranus.

tagged: science, astronomy, planet, Gliese 581g, twilight zone, North Dakota, Uranus

Crude awakening

Sure, some people are calling the oil spill in the Gulf a "crisis." And I guess to certain people with certain world views, it is a crisis.

But I prefer to look on the bright side of things. Where some people see crisis, I see opportunity. In this case, it's the opportunity to look at our national energy consumption and talk about ways to make it better.

And I'm not alone. Two of my favorite bloggers have noted the increased awareness of our energy situation.

Xavier Onassis, reining Imperator of Independence made some great points in his post about a smart energy grid, or as he called it an "agnostic energy grid":

What we need is a … power grid that will accept input from any source at a standard, pro-rated, kilowatt-based compensation, feed that electricity into the grid where it is distributed as needed at a standard, pro-rated, kilowatt-based pricing system.

There are so many ways to generate electricity that with a distributed generation strategy and a unified grid, we can have all the power we need without depending on fossil fuels.

He then lists many different ways to produce electricity, including small nuclear reactors like those that have been used for years to power America's warships at sea.

That post dovetails nicely into R.Sherman's two-part series on the importance of nuclear energy to our energy future. It's a great series (as you would expect from one of Missouri's finest minds) that scientifically points out that the so-called "green" energy solutions won't be enough by themselves to provide all of our energy consumption needs.

All these points made me realize that as a culture we have a pretty limited view of how we generate electricity. It's either from nuclear plants, coal plants, hydroelectric or wind or some other grand scheme.

But let's not forget that there are many ways to capture energy that is wasted every day. It seems like there are many opportunities to generate-- or rather capture -- small amounts of energy over a very large area. Kind of a "long tail" approach to the energy problem.

For example, an Israeli company has developed a new highway surface that generates electricity as cars drive over it.

A United Kingdom company has developed a way to convert the kinetic energy of pedestrians walking down a busy street into electricity.

There have also been proposals to embedded piezoelectrics in shoes, clothing, even body parts to convert kinetic energy into electricity.

None of these plans individually generate very much electricity. But if created in mass and spread out over a national -- maybe even global -- smart energy grid, a dent could be made in our electrical consumption.

So my mind started to wander and look for ways to capture and convert more kinetic energy into electricity. They've got cars and sidewalks and shoes covered. People have even hooked bicycles up to generators.

And then I saw an opportunity literally right in front of me. We need to have tiny little piezoelectric generators embedded into every computer keyboard and mouse in the country.

Just think of the potential. Any time anyone presses a key on the keyboard -- and it's done billions of times a day -- a tiny electric charge would be created. Every time you move your mouse, every time you hit the enter key, every time you backspace to correct a misspelling you would be generating a tiny bit of power.

All of these tiny bits of power would cascade into the smart energy grid like delicate snowflakes on a mountain top. But by the time they accumulate, they would become an avalanche of clean electric power that anyone could have access to.

And finally, at long last, the millions of bloggers writing inane, uninformed posts about subjects of which they have little understanding would be serving a useful purpose.


tagged: oil, energy, nuclear, Deepwater Horizon, piezoelectric, blogging, environmentalist

Kansas vs Missouri: Sizing things up

It's pretty common knowledge that Kansas is a better state than Missouri.

It goes all the way back to the American Civil War days when Kansas was on the winning side. Truman, the Missouri president, destroyed two Japanese cities with atomic bombs. Eisenhower, Kansas contribution to the White House, gave us the Interstate Highway system.

Even today, Kansas has superior roads, schools and modern sewer and waste water management systems. The mayors in our towns and cities wear shoes while at work, and they don't rely on unconstitutional earnings taxes to fund their cities' budgets.

So with all these strikes against them, it was kind of a shame to see yet one more indignity come to the men of Missouri recently.

Condomania, makers of advanced, custom fit condoms for the men of America, recently released analysis of years of data gleaned from their "FitKit" system for measuring length and girth of the male member.

"These fitted condoms range in length from 3 to 10 inches and from super slim to extra roomy." says Chris Filkins, Condomania’s Directory of Technology.

"After gathering detailed information on over 27,000 penises, we now have the most comprehensive database of penis sizes on the planet! Needless to say, these men's privacy is our utmost concern, and we're interested only in the statistics, and not who's who! But the data itself is pretty interesting.

The rankings of average penis size put Kansas men firmly in the meaty part of the bell curve, right in the middle of the 50 states at number 26. Unfortunately (for the Show Me State gals) Missouri men came up a bit short, limping in at a flaccid #36, just behind Texas (but three spots ahead of Nebraska).

But hey, c'mon Missouri. Don't let this get you down. It's just a dumb ranking based on scientifically collected data. Penis size doesn't matter, anyway. What matters is the emotional connection... or something.

No need to build giant monuments to compensate.

tagged: Condomania, FitKit, penis, size, condom, Missouri, Kansas

Death of a blogsman

It's only natural that when a man reaches advanced age, he begins a more serious consideration of his own mortality.

In the case of XO, a person who basically has one foot in the grave already, that consideration made him reconsider his "end of life" plan. And it's a surprisingly good plan. For someone of XO's questionable mental state it shows some unexpected clarity of thought.. even something resembling logic, which is new for him.

But my BFF's mom started talking about how her sister was going to donate her body to science and how they would pay for the cremation and send your ashes back home...

... instead of paying thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to a funeral home to host a maudlin weep-fest, all my survivors need to do is make a phone call.

So yeah, donate you body to science so med school students can cut you up and learn about surgery by removing all of your internal bits. Finally, XO will be contributing to society!

But -- not to throw a monkey wrench into the plan -- I'm not sure if XO has looked at the option of promession.

From what I can tell it's a pretty new thing, patent pending and all. But for people like XO, it may be just the scratch for that end-of-life itch. It has the added bonus of being "environmentally friendly" -- and let's face it, incinerating a corpse isn't exactly kind to Mother Nature, what with all of the ashes and soot, not to mention the amount of carbon it takes to produce enough energy to burn a body completely, believe me I know.

Essentially the promession process consists of freezing your corpse in liquid nitrogen, then shattering your frozen body, T-1000-style, with a sudden vibration.

Your shattered mortal remains are freeze-dried to remove any residual moisture, then any metals are removed (including those two titanium hips that XO received a couple of years ago).

Now, XO is nothing but inert organic material -- which is pretty much what he is now -- but when he's buried, this material is readily biodegradable. The nutrients are returned to the earth to be used as worm food, plant food, or even marijuana fertilizer.

Now that's what I call dust-to-dust.

Anyway, just wanted to put this option out there. It still seems overly complicated compared to my own plan, which is to just have someone toss my bloated corpse out of moving pickup into a ditch along a lonely county road somewhere in Northwest Kansas.

tagged: death, burial, cremation, promession, corpse, body, environmentalist

Science for sale

A few weeks ago, my Supermodel Wife and I were skulking around Parkville when we stumbled into what may be the coolest store in the KC Metro area.

Now before I go on I know that there are certain people out there who will assume that when I say it's a "cool" store that it's stocked with skinny jeans and brand new retro-looking T-shirts and pumps club-mix music through the store speakers.

Or that it's got racks full of pretentious expensive wines and a full-court walk-in humidor with a Scotch tasting stand in between (although, that would be extremely cool).

No. When I say cool, I mean the 2009 definition of cool. You know, where things that we would have been called nerdy back in high school is actually cool now. This is good news for me since I was kind of nerdy back in high school but superhellacool now.

Anyway, the store is called HMS Beagle and it's chock full of sciencey stuff. The store is named after the famous ship on which Charles Darwin made his scientific voyages that lead to his theories on natural selection and evolution.

The owners bill it as the "ultimate science store" -- and after losing track of time while browsing there, I can't argue with that claim.

When we visited, for instance, there was an electrolysis contraption set up on the counter separating hydrogen and oxygen from water. In addition to all of the chemistry gear, there's paraphernalia related to electronics and robotics, astrology, entomology, palaeontology and geology.

It's amazing the kind of stuff they have there. Cases full of fossils -- some of it found around the region. I got a real kick out of showing my wife some of the samples of coprolite.

We visited with one of the store owners, John Kuhns, for a few minutes. He told us about all of the science clubs the store sponsors for youth and adults and about their frequent fossil hunting trips.

After a few minutes, he pushed a flashing LED-laden circuit board across the counter to me and pushed a button. As the sequence of LEDs flashed in a pattern, he asked me if I knew what it was doing.

After a few seconds, I realized that it was counting up in binary, which gave me an opening to share one of my favorite nerd jokes with him...

There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who don't.

tagged: Parkville, science, Darwin, HMS Beagle, chemistry, geology, Missouri

Harnessing the God particle

Looking for something to break me out of a bloggy funk, I landed on the story of the ill-fated Large Hadron Collider.

By now I'm sure you've heard that mankind's latest, greatest, most expensive attempt to find the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe and Everything was scuttled once again last week when a crust of bread fell on it.

Uncle Nick breaks it down like this:

A widdle birdie dropped a piece of bread on the Doomsday Machine - the one that 'everyone' is worried will create a black hole centered where Earth used to be and extend outward for 5 light years - and shut that sucker down.

All I can say is if there is a Supreme Entity That Oversees All, it sure is an ironist of the first order. And with timing? Oh, snap!

Personally, I kind of appreciate the cosmic poetry of the situation. This machine is designed to allow physicists to find one of the most elusive subatomic particles yet, the Higgs boson. This particle is so elusive, in fact, that it has never been found. It's only theorized at this point.

What I find interesting is that according to the leading theory of the origin of the Universe, the matter that makes up the bread and the matter that makes up the LHC at one point, a split second before the Big Bang, were occupying the exact same place in space-time. And now, a bird brought them back together and it nearly destroyed one of them (not that matter can be created or destroyed -- except through the will of the Supreme Ironist).

I guess it's not really here nor there (as much as any of us are here or there -- you know, on the quantum level), but can you imagine the incredibly long odds at work here, the vast improbability of having a bird fly by this particular place at this particular time with a particularly sized piece of bread in its beak and dropping it with the accuracy of Luke Skywalker bullseyeing womp rats in his T-16 back home into this air vent that, just incidentally, was enough to cause the whole damn production to shut down?

Amazing.

These long odds led a couple of fairly credible scientists to posit the idea that maybe, just maybe, the Higgs boson doesn't want to be found.

According to this New York Times article, there's a chance that the LHC's many problems are a result of sabotage from the supercollider's own future.

A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one...

“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”

This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.”

Can you imagine the technical leap forward our species will make if we can isolate and harness this so-called "God particle"? Forget about the energy crisis, say hello to interstellar travel. Hell, it might even mean the development of the Infinite Improbability Drive.

I mean, it's an achievement that would be matched only by the discovery of a way to fix Kansas City Missouri's school system.

tagged: science, physics, Big Bang, Large Hadron Collider, Luke Skywalker, Kansas City Missouri Schools, Infinite Improbability Drive

Just a little prick

"You have to relax your muscles if you don't want this to hurt," she said as she finished rubbing alcohol on my skin.

I honestly thought I was relaxed, but this was my first time doing this so there was probably some background anxiety that I wasn't consciously aware of.

So I took a deep breath and tried to relax while I waited for the little prick of the hypodermic needle injecting dead flu virus proteins into my shoulder.

I don't get the flu. My theory is that I've got a super immunity due to a near-fatal (at least it felt near-fatal at the time) pneumonia I contracted years ago.

Still, with a kid in school and a new baby in the house, I bowed to the pressure of my (admittedly much smarter than me) Supermodel Wife to get the seasonal flu inoculation this year.

The nurse who gave me the shot -- I think her name was Becky or Ashley or something like that -- was sure to point out that "this is the seasonal flu shot, not the shot for the H1N1 flu."

According to Tiffany, the CDC identified back in April/May the flu strains that it thought would be a problem. At the time, they didn't think Swine Flu would be a problem.

"If you want a Swine Flu shot, you'll have to come back in a few weeks when we get the vaccines in," she said.

Now this may be my first flu shot, but I know a scam when I smell one. I'm not sayin' that the Swine H1N1 ain't a real thing. I just find it interesting the way things are working out.

I mean, look at it this way. You know how Apple is always working on the next new release of the operating system and they always give it an animal name (usually feline in nature). You had Mac OSX Cheetah, then Puma, then Jaguar all the way up to Leopard...

The point is, it's just good marketing to give something a name that people can latch on to.

I'm pretty sure that's what's been going on with these annual flu vaccinations. They started out a few years ago with the "Bird Flu" (later called "Avian Flu") that was killing people in Asia. Nobody was scared of it when it was just called "H5N1." But when the media got it's talons on "Bird Flu" -- well, there's a hook you can build some hysteria around.

This year it's the Swine Flu -- very catchy. Gets the media excited. Gets the citizenry in an uproar. Gets some much needed demand for the pharmaceutical industry right in the middle of a consumer recession.

Ah, now we're getting somewhere. It's How to Survive a Recession 101: Create A Demand For A Product For Which You're The Only Provider.

Anyway... I'm not really sure where I was going with this.

My arm is kind of sore.

tagged: swine flu, vaccine, Avian Flu, Mac OSX, Panther, conspiracy theory, shot

In case you missed it... Moon bombed in preemptive strike

While you were busy polishing your Nobel Peace Prize this morning, NASA bombed the moon.

That will teach the moon to moon us every month.



According to my inside sources, NASA has followed up the initial phase of the "shock and awe" bombing with the covert launched of a lunar invasion force. Here's some video my inside source captured with a cell phone video camera (it's a bit grainy)...



tagged: moon, pop culture, NASA, LCROSS, science

The Legend of Dexter, Part I

Let me introduce you to Dexter the Wonder Dog.

No, he wasn't named after Dexter the serial killer of criminals. He's been around much longer than that. He was actually named after Dexter, the boy genius.

Anyway, you may recognize him as a Jack Russell Terrier. Not sure how much you know about dog breeds, but this particular strain of terrier was originally bred back in the days of yore by the Parson Jack Russell, hence the name (this isn't getting too complicated for you, is it?).

It turns out that foxes were a huge problem in England back in Master Russell's day, and he needed a dog that would chase foxes, weasels and the like into their burrows and bring them back out or hold them there until they could be dug out. So the dogs had to be fierce, brave and smart, not to mention very athletic with lots of stamina (If you've ever chased a weasel into a hole, you know what I mean).

Our boy Dexter is all of these things. In fact, it is his superior intelligence and athleticism that allows him to do such things as Sit...

... Sit Up ...
... Lay Down ...... Roll Over...... Play Dead ...
... Stand ...... Dance ...... Take a Bow ...
... And even jump through hoops ...
Dog is smart, is what I'm sayin'. And while he's generally good tempered (he especially likes people (unless you're wearing a US Postal Service Uniform, then God help you...)), he has neither love nor patience for rodents roaming around his backyard.

Rabbits are summarily chase out without exception. And normally ubiquitous squirrels in our neighborhood caused him no end of agita as they taunted him from the treetops.

That is until a few weeks ago.

It was a pleasant mid-summer's day. Dexter was on his regular daily patrol in the back yard when he noticed one of the evil gray squirrels sharpening its teeth on our daughter's swing set.

He immediately gave chase, barking like Christian Bale on crystal meth. In a few seconds he had the quarry treed in one of the river birches we have in the yard.

Dexter barked and chased the squirrel from tree to tree for the next couple of hours. Yes, hours. That's why we sometimes call him The Tenacious D. He doesn't give up easily.

Eventually the squirrel made its way back to the wood-frame swing set. Typically, a squirrel will run back and forth across the top ridge of the swing set, working to get Dexter out of position so that it can make a running jump to the chain link fence and escape to the safety of the neighbor's yard.

But not this day. On this day, Dexter was on his game. He had put too much time and effort into chasing this furry offender, and he wasn't about to let him go.

When the squirrel made the leap, Dexter was ready. The rodent hit the ground and Dexter was on him in a flash. Powerful canine jaws immediately clenched on fragile rodent throat.

A few violent shakes of the head and the snap of a spine and it was all over.

The story was relayed to me by my backyard neighbor, who works from home and saw the whole thing (no doubt highly annoyed by the incessant barking, but entertained nonetheless by the exciting ending). He said he saw Dexter carry the carcass and leave it along the south fence line. I looked but couldn't find the remains of the squirrel.

I assumed that Dexter had devoured his hard-earned bounty. But a few days later I found the dead squirrel as I was mowing. It was undefiled by Dexter, aside from a bit of gnawing on its tail. Yes, it was smelly and maggot-infested, but Dexter hadn't eaten so much as an ear.

It was all sport for him. A killing driven by a deep instinctual need to fulfill that for which he was bred.

I should mention also that I haven't seen a squirrel in our back yard since this incident.

tagged: dog, pets, Dexter, Jack Russell Terrier, hunt, squirrel, wildlife