What’s up Cuz
July 3rd, 2006Er, wow: Roots of human family tree are shallow
The math is so obvious I never thought about it:
It’s simple math. Every person has two parents, four grandparents and eight great-grandparents. Keep doubling back through the generations — 16, 32, 64, 128 — and within a few hundred years you have thousands of ancestors.
It’s nothing more than exponential growth combined with the facts of life. By the 15th century you’ve got a million ancestors. By the 13th you’ve got a billion. Sometime around the 9th century — just 40 generations ago — the number tops a trillion.
But wait. How could anybody — much less everybody — alive today have had a trillion ancestors living during the 9th century?
The answer is, they didn’t.
Meat Tubes
June 28th, 2006Yes, friends and neighbors, it really is possible to be a “professor of meat sciences.”
This article is full of awesome phrasology:
- processed meat product (wait, what’s baloney?)
- in vitro meat
- industrial-size bioreactors
And hands down, the most repulsive sentnece of all:
To get a similar arrangement of cells, lab-grown meat will have to be exercised
and stretched the way a real live animal’s flesh would.
Vegetarians like myself are going to have an identity crisis somewhere not too far into the future, methinks.
iSlave
June 26th, 2006Lemme tell ya, when you break labor laws in China, you KNOW something is askew.
Apple Schmapple.
Did I miss something here?
May 18th, 2006Manila Bans, India Clears ‘Da Vinci Code’ - Yahoo! News
…in the Philippines — with Asia’s biggest Christian population — the Manila City Council passed a resolution banning [The DaVinci Code], effective Friday.
The movie “is undoubtedly offensive and contrary to established religious beliefs which cannot take precedence over the right of the persons involved in the film to freedom of expression,” the resolution said.
Except it does, so they’re banning it?
Confusion ensues.
If you’re gonna try to be a mindcontrolling uberstate, at least say what you mean.
No wait, on second thought…
Sean figured it out: ‘they missed out “nonetheless, this film sucks so: banned”‘
Well, I agree with that that assessment is probably accurate! Nonetheless, I feel compulsion to see the damn thing.
Wikipedia will Eat us All
April 26th, 2006I was reading somebody’s description of their job interview at Google, and apparently they asked him something to do with the birthday paradox:
you are at a party with a friend and 10 people are present including you and the friend. your friend makes you a wager that for every person you find that has the same birthday as you, you get $1; for every person he finds that does not have the same birthday as you, he gets $2. would you accept the wager?
And I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be funny if the birthday paradox had its own entry in Wikipedia?
Birthday paradox - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Honestly, it’s becoming a little frightening.
North Dakota Here I Come (Okay not really but…)
April 24th, 2006Not Far From Forsaken - New York Times
There was something strangely seductive about the description of North Dakota in this article. It has the highest rate of emmigration in the country, and it’s filled with ghost towns — increasingly so. The stories about cities unincorporating are downright shocking when all one seems to read about in the news is urban and (even more often) suburban sprawl.
On the other hand, I think that somewhere down the line, a place like North Dakota could really be in for a revival — once we get the transportation thing worked out (hybrid robotic cars, stuff like that (no, I’m not kidding)). Open, beautiful spaces, friendly neighbors, living expenses such that even my month-to-month generation could afford to buy (gasp!) a house…
Yeah, I have to admit, when they said they were more or less giving land away, I thought about it for a second.
My home is the internet, anyway.
Dana Boyd for President
April 17th, 2006You got Bill O’Reilly to have a downright rational conversation!
You’re my hero!
I HAVE THE FACTS AND I’M VOTING DANA.
ps go bears
I hate cars.
April 9th, 2006No, really. There is nothing I like about cars.
When I see people standing in front of magazine racks looking at Car and Driver, I have no idea what they’re thinking.
Cars are so dumb.
And have I mentioned I don’t like cars?
Cars are mostly good for killing people, which they do exceedingly well, especially pedestrians.
Cars suck.
Having a human being, with reflexes that evolved for a human being–which is a thing that can run maybe a few miles per hour–behind the wheel of a hurtling missile, is dumb.
Really, really dumb. It’s kind of a death wish, in fact. In fact, it’s not a death wish, it’s death by design.
Which is why I really can’t understand why people get all excited about the design of cars.
Get back to me when cars are safe. That is to say, when cars are automatic, which, by any rational analysis of reality, they must be.
Until then, I look at a car and I see a death trap, not pleasant design.
