The internet has everything

I like to include pictures with my posts. I was never one to just read a huge wall of text, and I’d like to think that the pictures add a bit of fun to the content of this site.

That being said, the internet has a picture of literally everything. I was recently chatting with my friend over e-mail about a dream I had that included raining cotton candy. My stance on the issue was that cotton candy from the sky is a scary topic – his was that it was more delicious than scary. I decided to show him just how scary it could be, and sent him this image:

Pretty scary right? But I digress.

The picture above took me approximatley 4 seconds to find on google. I actually just typed in “cotton candy” into the image search and found that picture on the first page (try it yourself: Cotton Candy Image Search

This got me thinking – I’ve never had an issue finding pictures for this page – not once. So I decided to just randomly make up an image, and search for it, and see what I’d find:

The first one: Cats Ninja Fighting:

The second one: A boy riding a fish:

The third one: A cow swimming like a dolphin:

The world is indeed a strange place. I am reminded of a quote form Charles H. Duell, Comissioner of the US patent office in 1899, who said “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” Obviously he was an idiot, but I can kind of see how he feels now. Try looking on google for random stuff, you’ll be surprised with what you find.

Seed Banks

Sometimes the genius of man really astounds me.

Imagine for a second that Ronald Reagan was not the stand up guy we all knew him to be, and that the Cold War ended up in a full-scale nuclear conflict. Nuclear winter would settle in, and many of the species we know about would likely die or become scarce. Not that it would really matter too much because people in general would become scarce as well, but for the sake of argument, lets say that available food was not, um, available…yeah.

Well, some geniuses came up with the idea of a Seed Bank. These structures are basically safe houses for…you guessed it – seeds. There is one in Norway that just recently opened (pictured below) that is so far north that it is likely to be untouched by pretty much anything we throw at it (including, apparently, a direct hit with a nuke). Any country can come make a deposit of seeds and withdraw them at any time, and apparently because they’re kept at -4 degrees farenheit, the seeds are good for up to 1,000 years.

Actually wait up a second. How in hell does a scientist actually know how long something like a seed would last? There weren’t scientists doing this kind of experiment in the year 1008, so where is this notion coming from? My guess is that people were looking for a number and one of the scientists (”seedologists” – a phrase I just coined) just came out with “about 1,000 years” and it stuck. Anyway here’s a picture of the facility:

No wonder the seeds are fucking cold. I bet I would piss yellow ice out there.

They also have guards, naturally. Talk about probably the single most boring job in existence. I mean, seriously, who is going to rob a fucking seed bank? Here’s one of them:

Kind of looks like a guard from the N64 game goldeneye.

The picture below is not a dog

…it’s a FETAL WOLF.

Yes. You read that correctly.

We all know that before humans bred animals into domestication they were wild. Dogs are no different in this case, and in a lot of situations they still exhibit their wild side (i.e. attacking and actually eating people. It happens. I swear. Seriously.)

And even if you’re one of those purist “evolution doesn’t exist” people, you can’t deny that with dogs at least, breeding has led to their domestication from wild animals.

Come to think of it you probably can deny that, even in the face of cold hard evidence. You know what? if you actually think evolution doesn’t exist, navigate away from this page and go to hell, asshole. And I only say “go to hell” because it’s likely that you believe that hell, a completely abstract thing that no living person has ever seen or been to, does exist. Fuck you and your circular logic. And if by this point you haven’t navigated away, I offer this picture as proof that dogs used to be wolves or something:

That dog will fuck you up.

For the rest of you (believers), I have an interesting tidbit. The dog at the top of this page is of the “toy dog” variety. You often see sluts like Paris Hilton toting one of these ridiculous creatures around like it’s some kind of fashion accessory and not an actual living being.

How, one might ask, did a dog of this size actually make it in the wild before its domestication? What was it hunting, mice?

The truth is, they actually weren’t competing with much because they didn’t exist. Toy dogs actually have many traits of you guessed it, fetal wolves. They got this way through selective breeding, and over many generations, retained features that are only usually seen in ultrasounds when wolves are pregnant. The term used to describe this retention of juvenile traits is Neoteny.

Imagine if you were to tell Paris Hilton that she was carrying around a wolf fetus.

On second though, she probably doesn’t know what the word “fetus” means.

Mushihimesama

So I think it’s safe to say that pretty much every male from the age of 13-30 has played video games, and has most likely even owned a couple consoles.

We see from time to time kids that have become “professional” gamers, and admittedly there is some money in it. Some of the top players of their kind have not only won hundreds of thousands of dollars playing games, but launched an entire empire (see Fatal1ty ). But, for the most part, people play them for fun.

What I am about to show you, though, is just ridiculous. The game is called Mushihimesama (are you surprised its Japanese? No, I’m not either). Its basically an updated version of space invaders (seen below):

However, as with all old games, it has been updated. A lot. This is a screen shot of Mushihimesama:

I don’t blame you if you can’t tell what is going on. Essentially the purple/pink blobs are bullets that need to be avoided, the boss is at the top of the screen, and the player’s ship is at the bottom. It’s much better if you watch a video of it:

A video of Mushihimesama in action

This begs the question – how did someone get this good at this game? How does anyone?

Two months later…

So yeah, I haven’t updated in two months.

I’d love to say that I have been so busy that I haven’t had any time at all to update, and that life is moving so fast that it’s impossible to keep updating this website.

It’s not true, though.

The truth of the matter is, I have just been doing nothing as of late, and it’s not because I’m depressed or anything, it’s because there is nothing to do where I live. I’m sutdying for my Series 7 license (check here for info: http://www.investopedia.com/professionals/series7/). So, I come home after work, work out, study for this stupid test, and go to bed. Not much room for an exciting lifestyle.

That being said, I think it’s time for a change. I am just getting sick of doing the same day-to-day stuff that everyone else is doing, because I know I could be doing so much more. This is the end of this phase of life, that’s for sure.

And to inspire myself, I have included the following picture as a testament to my new outlook on life:

I don’t really get motivated from this picture, I just think it’s hilarious.  Also, I have decided to name the kid in this picture Bradford (Brad for short) because well, it just seemed so fitting.

Anyway, expect to see more from me soon, I promise!

A random thought

So a co-worker of mine was talking to me a few minutes ago about her schedule.  Apparently, she goes to bed at 10:30pm every day, and doesn’t require an alarm to get up.

Personally 10:30 is a bit early.  I feel as though I would be “wasting” a couple hours in the evening if I went to bed at that time, and I’d have a hard time turning my brain off.  I typically go to bed anywhere from 12:30-2am, with 2am being pretty much the cutoff point (usually only if I’m watching the end of a movie or something).

If we get up at the same time, which we do, that means that I get 2 more hours of “awake time” than her.  Let’s add that up:

365 x 2 = 730 hours

730/24 = 30.41666 days.

So, by going to bed two hours later than her each evening, even though I am not actually doing anything “productive” (honestly how much do you get done between the hours of 10:30 and 12:30?) I am still awake a full month more than her every year.  I suppose you could argue that she gets a month more sleep than I do, but I can function on 6-7 hours of sleep without a problem. 

The moral of the story?  If you want your life to seem longer, don’t go to bed so damn early.  You might not live as long, but it will sure feel like you did!!

Space Elevators

So I have no idea how people come up with ideas like this, which is why I’m posting it. 

A woman I work with has a son who did a project on a new sub-planet that was discovered recently.

 The planet is called Ceres, and it’s in the asteroid belt.  Apparently it’s mass is 1/3rd that of the entire belt iself.  It’s big enough to have a spherical shape (unlike oblong asteroids), and scientists claim that there might be liquid water on the surface. 

 Reading about this planet, I stumbled across an article about how humanity will eventually want to colonize other planets and objects.  Targets in our Solar System include Jupiter’s moons, Mars, the Moon (Luna) and this new planet, Ceres.

 One of the major obstacles to us colonizing space isn’t that we don’t have the technology, because we do.  It’s more a question of cost.  It costs between $3,000 and $15,000 for every kilogram of weight that’s blasted into space by conventional rockets.  So, how do we solve this issue?

 Enter the Space Elevator.  The concept is so wild and strange that it just might work.

I know you’re probably thinking “well, an elevator has to be attached to something, so that can’t possibly work” and you’d be right. 

Imagine holding a string with a baseball on the end.  If you spin around very quickly, the string will be taught.  This is the idea behind the space elevator.   Scientists want to elevate a cable with a counterweight so high that the rotation of the earth keeps the cable tight.  Here’s what it would look like:

You essentially would have a little car riding up and down the cable, which after a certain point wouldn’t need any power because of inertia. The Counterweight could even be a Space Station.

The one problem with this is that there is no substance that is strong enough and light enough to be able to do this. Earth based weather is also an issue.

They are, however working on a substabce that will be strong enough. They’re called Nanotubes and I’ll be damned if I am going to try and explain them.

Convergent Evolution

You know how on Star Trek every one of the aliens is just some stupid actor with a really messed up looking face?

For example, take Worf:

Now, I’m not a fan of star trek, but this theme has bled over onto other types of science fiction. For example, Star Wars is full of aliens that look like humans but with weird facial traits, like our friend Bib Fortuna:

And, I was recently playing a game called Mass Effect that has various alien races, each with some kind of weird looking trait differences, but overall pretty much human:

I’m bringing this up because for a very long time I thought that science fiction writers and designers were either limited with their choices of make-up (i.e. Star Trek) or were just somewhat uninspired. Either that or they found it too difficult to work with something that didn’t have similar body structure to humans. I never really thought too deep into why this choice was made. But are we really expecting aliens to have similar traits to humans? I realize the idea is far fetched, but what if we did make contact with a species from another world?
Do you think they would walk upright and have two arms and two legs?

My answer? I think that the idea is at least plausible.

The reason for my thinking is due to something I read recently called Convergent Evolution. The definition (taken directly from Wikipedia):

“In evolutionary biology, convergent evolution is the process whereby organisms not closely related (not monophyletic), independently evolve similar traits as a result of having to adapt to similar environments or ecological niches. It is the opposite of divergent evolution, where related species evolve different traits.”

By the way, Monophyletic in that sentence means that they do not have the same ancestors.

So, take a planet similar to Earth, high in water and that has carbon-based life. Through evolution, that planet just might produce some of the same kinds of things as we have here, due to a similar environment. A perfect example of this is these two cacti:

One is an African plant, and one is an Asian plant. They are 100% completely unrelated to one another, yet evolved in almost exactly the same way. Because the only life we know about is sourced from a planet like ours, it’s absolutely conceivable that if we ever do come across an alien species that they might look like us. Or at least, they will look like something we are familiar with.

I personally can’t wait to meet aliens that look like huge platypuses.

Ride your music

There is a program you can download called Steam. Essentially, Steam allows you to purchase video games from companies without having to buy the CD’s – you just download them and install. It’s pretty cool and if you have friends who have it, you can see what games they’re playing (and join in, if you also have said game). In that way it’s somewhat like xbox live, but for the PC.

I was on Steam last night and they were advertising a new game called Audiosurf. The tag, like the title of this post, is “Ride Your Music.” I’ve always been a fan of music rhythm based games (like Dance Dance Revolution) so this piqued my interest.  At only 10 bucks, it’s a pretty decent deal.

Essentially you get a little spaceship that is traveling along a little highway.  The highway’s turns and gradient are based on the music.  You use the mouse or arrow keys to guide your ship into colored boxes that appear, which then go onto the grid below your ship, which translates into points.

Here’s a screenshot (note, this is squished down from a fullscreen shot, I promise it looks much more crisp):

So yeah, it’s an interesting game, right?

The thing that makes it so cool is that  THIS GAME USES YOUR OWN MUSIC COLLECTION!!!

That’s right, the game is smart enough to take any mp3 that you own, and convert it into a level, and it does it very well.   Kind of a very fun way to listen to your music on your computer.

Did I mention you can compare your scores to other people who have played the same mp3?

Sweet.

The Body Farm

I recently got an HDTV.  It’s 50” of gorgeous plasma.  If you don’t know much about HDTV I won’t go into a lot of detail, suffice to say that you need to get a new cable box so you can get HD channels.

Unfortunately, you don’t get a lot of choice, there are only about 35-40 HD channels.  This problem is compounded by the fact that once you get HD, you are totally spoiled and don’t want to watch “regular” tv, because it looks like shit.

What the hell does this have to do with the title of this post?  Over the weekend I was flipping though the HD channels and I came across the National Geographic channel.  I don’t know exactly when this happened, but apparently now they are trying to appeal to a younger crowd by calling themselves NAT GEO.  Anyway, they had this program on called Taboo.  Sounds…naughty!

(Before I continue, if you’re squeamish, don’t continue reading)

So I flip it on, and the first thing I see is a time-lapsed video of some guy decomposing.  No jokes, a real dead guy, really decomposing.  A few days crammed down into about 30 seconds.  He gets all bloated and gross and then like liquifies, and eventually ends up a pile of bones – and oh the insects!

Now, my first reaciton to this was complete revulsion.  Especially because it was being shown in HD.  However, my second, more logical thought was “how the fuck did they get a time-lapsed video of a body decomposing?”  Then the show started talking about The Forensic Anthropology Center at the University of Tennessee.

What happens is people literally donate their bodies to this place (they get about 30-50 a year), whereupon they are dumped in the backyard in various places.  Some of them are in cars, some are in shallow graves.  Others are exposed completely, sometimes with clothes, sometimes naked.  As I’m sure you’ve guessed, they are there because the scientists are using them to gather information on how people decompose, in order to solve murders.

I realize this kind of thing needs to be done.  They even gave an example of one of the many ways they can determine how long a body has been there.  This example involved looking at the size of the maggots.  If there are no maggots, and the body is pretty much intact, it hasn’t been there long.  If there are small maggots, then it’s been there a few hours to a few days.  If there are large maggots, then it’s been there even longer, and if there are no maggots (they hatched into adult flies) and the body is very decomposed, then it’s been there a very long time.

So it’s necessary.  But I can’t imagine the type of person who would be into this.  Well here is his picture:

“Hi.  I like watching dead people decompose.”

You know what?  I take it back.  This creepy old guy is exactly what I would think of if someone said “imagine the kind of person who would want to study dead people.”

/puke