Category Archives: Misc

The Future Has Arrived

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News from Uncertain Principles. Futurebaby is now in the past tense, and is now Steelykid.

Belated congratulations to Chad and Kate, the proud parents. I’m expecting big things for my Silver Warriors (I’m class of 1980), from whatever sports teams she’s on in 15 years.

(Of course this loses meaning if it was a c-section, but what the heck)

If anybody needs a dose of cute, there are baby pics

Meet SteelyKid, Babies Are Bosons, FutureBaby Betting Pool Winner

(I was visiting family this past week, and all of my small cousins were pretty much terrified of me. I was crushed. No turning kids upside-down or tickling, or if things are going well, both at once. And certainly no splunks — our term for blowing a raspberry on the belly.)

Bloghide!

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Blogrolling, rolling, rolling, keep them blogs a-rolling

Blog Roll How To (howto) at Greg Laden’s Blog.

What does a blog roll do for the blogger? Well, it allows the blogger a way to give and receive link love. Link love is not a form of on line cybersex. It is in part a replacement for one on one professional contact that occurs in Meatland. Entry on a blog roll is a nice thing to do for someone else. If a blog roll is very short, you are either looking at a new blogger or an asshole. (I’m talking about the total length of blog roll, not the displayed portion). I know of several bloggers who have been blogging for quite some time but have fewer than 40 or so sites on the blog roll, three or four of them being links to the blogger’s own sites. Independent evidence suggests in many of thes cases that the blogger is an asshole. The correlation is astoundingly strong.

There are plenty of exceptions, of course. If you are reading this, you are an exception, I assume.

[…]
Most blog ranking services can easily detect and thus devalue links in blog rolls or blog rolling posts, but the truth is that if I put a link to your blog on my site, you get an increase in techorati ratings (and other ratings) …. and visa versa …. even if the link is in a blog rolling post. The ranking sites may devalue (depending) such links, but these links are not meaningless, so I assume that as ranking sites evolve over time, this is recognized for what it is.

(By the way, many bloggers claim that ranking is not important to them at all. Those would be the bloggers with low ranks.)

Linking posts you like or blogrolling blogs you read on any kind of regular basis is win-win, if people return the favor. To quote Chekov (Pavel, not Anton) “. . . and we all move up one step in rank.”

With all this in mind, it’s time to update physics-y blogs I’ve been visiting on occasion that somehow had not been added yet.

Faraday’s Cage is where you put Schroedinger’s Cat
sciencegeekgirl
The Mind of Dr. Pion
Cosmic Variance
Asymptotia

If We Built This Large Wooden Badger . . .

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I remember reading about this last January, and now I see via Bee at Backreaction that it’s in the news again.

Floating banana’s appeal for funding slips

Despite getting about $105,000 from Quebec and federal art-funding agencies, Canadian artist Cesar Saez’s flying-banana project appears to be meeting turbulence. According to his project’s webpage, the Geostationary Banana Over Texas has failed to get enough grassroots funding to ensure its planned launch date in August.
[…]
People can think it’s a hoax,” Mr. Arpin added, “but artists have been doing a lot of interesting things that a lot of people haven’t been able to follow. He [Mr. Saez] is pushing the boundaries and letting people think outside the box – or the fruit basket.”

Maybe some people thought it was a hoax because you can’t get a helium balloon high enough to be in a geostationary orbit, and a geostationary orbit can’t exist over Texas. Geostationary is a scientific/technical term. It has a specific meaning. If you just make crap up, some people won’t take you seriously.

The project’s Web-based fundraising drive says it needs $1.5-million.

Oooh. My badger project needs $1.5 million. I can’t describe how badly it needs it. Pony up, people. Or at least start buying some t-shirts.

Oops, I Did it Again

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Second power outage in two weeks. This time, 12 hours; came up about half hour ago. Stuff makes a bit of a racket when it all turns on at once.

Update: Power went out at work, briefly, in the offices in my part of the building. I’m cursed.

Toys in the Office VII: Adrian's Revenge

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I “won” this a few summers ago at an arcade, after dropping about $5 in quarters into Skee-ball (and unDogmatically keeping the points for myself). I was on vacation, and Claire, a ~5 year-old staying a few doors down had won a similar Spidey inflatable Tombat (not its official name but certainly how it was being used) a few days earlier. Being the exact same age as Claire, this was my chance at escalation and revenge.

At work it has been used as a motivational tool on at least one summer intern.

hammer.jpg

Will Kem 4 Food

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kern4u.jpg

Kerning is the adjustment of the spacing between letter pairs in printing. Improperly done, (overkerning?) this can make letters run together, and e.g. “rn” is difficult to distinguish from “m,” especially for those of us with less-than-perfect eyesight. (And take care not to shove your “L” too close to your “I” since that could be a real FLICK-UP.) This leads to the creation of the term keming: improper kerning.

I yeam for thee, my heart bums when you are dose.

Dangers of keming
MEGAFLICKS
Trick or Treat

The Truth Can Be a Scary Thing

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Mechanization and Standardization

. . . and how some people resist it, thinking manual labor is best.

Given an infinite number of monkeys with Excel, you can produce the client reporting.

(And for those of you who live in 2007 where the idea of having human beings actually touching data is out of the misty past, I bring news from the rest of the world: It’s cold out here, cold as death. The vast majority of business in this country is done in the exact same way your forward-thinking uncle did his taxes in 1986. “That machine? Oh, that machine has the client billing Access database. Don’t touch it.”)

I’m stuck somewhere in that nightmare.

Anyway, the rest of the story is pretty funny.