Shared Google Reader Items, 3/31/2009

It's only been a weekend and a day since my last update of shared items from Google Reader. Maybe I can get back to a daily schedule!

Education:

• Lifehacker ran through the Top 10 Tools for a Free Online Education. Many of them are very specific, but there's definitely some cool stuff out there.
• Campus computer labs are dying, morphing instead into wifi hotspots. As a former nearly-full-time resident of the CCLI at MTU, that's a little sad. I'm not sure we would have all ended up there for a wifi hotspot.
• Toddlers can't plan for the future much, even when told to do so; they need negative reinforcement showing them why such planning is necessary. In other words, they aren't ignoring your warnings because they're obstinate, it's because their brains don't work that way. Well, not just because they're obstinate.

Atheism:

• This sign at Beryl Baptist Church pretty much says it all. I did the link that way hoping to push Pharyngula up in searches for "Baptist church," because that would be both funny and useful.
• The UN is calling religion a pussy again, claiming it can't survive people making fun of it. Poor religion. So useless, so ridiculous, so unnecessary. I'm sorry, though; I'll continue to call a spade a spade, and a religion a harmful, steaming pile of bullshit.

Politics:

• Gates says no quick end to "don't ask, don't tell." Liberals see no quick end to thinking maybe keeping a Bush appointee was a bad idea.

Science:

• Playing certain types of videogames (specifically first-person shooters) improves vision. Damn. I generally hate those things.

Technology:

• My mecha is one step closer. Honda has developed my control system for it.

The Internets:

• Ah, browser user scripts. Is there anything you can't do? Lifehacker gave me two new things you can do: auto-hide message labels in gmail (for screens where they don't fit as well), and fix the mess that is the new Facebook. Don't believe it when Lifehacker says those things are "Firefox only." I think IE is the only browser left that doesn't support them, as long as you're using the beta Chrome 2... and even IE 8.1 is rumored to support them.

Random:

• Thanks to a camera phone, the end of the rainbow has been found and photographed. I'm pretty sure that SUV ran over the leprechaun and scattered his gold.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

Shared Google Reader Items, 3/2/2009

Here are my shared items from Google Reader. Enjoy!

Science:

• Synthetic life is neat. It will help us understand how biology works, and also offers an alternative version of biotechnology that has a much lower chance of, for example, crossbreeding with bugs in the wild. Neat stuff if we can get it to work.
• A webcomic called cowbirds in love realized something I'd never thought about: Mad scientists aren't really scientists, are they?
• A study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that weight loss and relapse rates on any of several diets were identical, regardless of what the particular diet targetted. In other words, it comes down to the First Law diet: eat fewer calories than you use, and you lose weight.
• Doctors are not scientists, and often don't really understand the process. That's why it's awesome that the stim bill includes $1 billion to investigate comparative effectiveness of different treatments for the same conditions, in a bid to increase both efficiency and effectiveness of medical treatments.
• Speaking of efficiency and effectiveness of medical treatments, Merck has launched an open-source pharmaceutical initiative. Awesome.

Technology:

• Penn State and Virginia Commonwealth U researchers have found a new trick for producing hydrogen gas that sounds very, very interesting. This could potentially be a world-changer. From what I gather, it sounds a whole lot like seems-free-but-isn't-technically-I-guess energy, which makes me skeptical, but goddam does it sound interesting.
• To go along with that potential alternative energy neatness, solar panels have reached $1 a Watt.

Digital Rights:

• Amazon agreed to pull text-to-speech from the Kindle 2 on a per-book basis. I want to find a way to easily check whether a given book has pulled those rights, so I can choose to not buy from such an idiot.

Entertainment:

• Apparently Netflix's new "watch now" player sucks, and they kinda sorta trick you into using it. Watch out for a tricksy beta opt-in.

Random:

• RIP, Paul Harvey.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

The Curious Case of Jon the Stamper

It began innocently enough. I was, as is often the case, chatting with my older sister. "Any idea what this film is?" she asked, sending me to a stamping blog she frequents called Cinema Saturday. I was intrigued. I'd tried to play along before, but this time they claimed to be doing something special. I got sucked in.

The next morning, when the movie was revealed, one of the women who runs the site posted, "Jon and Libby - i love that you have made this a family affair - now Jon, we are expecting you to play along - can't wait to see your card!!!" I have no desire to work with scissors and ink, but, after some consideration, I got an idea. I could use the challenge to play with some CSS and Javascript tricks.

The result is here, with a small version to the right. Over at the site, you can click to hide/reveal each individual element of the card, to see how it's put together.

The pieces are:

• A gear cut out from this clock at The Clockworks Unlimited. Cutting out the gear was more tedious than I hoped, so I just cut out the top-left corner of the gear and the center, then duplicated the spokes to build a gear (you can tell if you note the repeating white spots). All three gears are the same image file, resized on the fly as necessary.
• Brown paper from an Australian stamping store.
• A vintage calendar that was way too hard to find, and then I closed the tab that had it, and now I can't find it again!
• A clock from the awesome Clipart, Etc project at the University of South Florida. If you are or know a student working on a school project, that site is great. I wish that had existed when I was in school.
• A plain HTML/CSS block for the text, using the Papyrus font if you have it, but defaulting to other fonts if you don't.

Please click through to see how it's all put together. I'm really happy with how it all came out.

Today's Shared Google Reader Items, 2/12/2009

Here are today's shared items from Google Reader. Enjoy!

Science:

• Woot, anti-vax lost in court today. This ruling makes no difference on reality (science figures that out, not lawyers), but it's nice to see the law (and, judging from the stories I've been seeing in the last few days, public opinion) matching reality.
• Speaking of anti-vax, the jackass who started it all may have done so to try to sell his own vaccine. This is a very special kind of evil.
• Um. Stem cells may have cured AIDS. Holy shit.
• A biologist has conducted another study of the "25 Random Things" meme on Facebook. I love memetics, it's awesome to see it becoming a thing.

Atheism:

• The LA Times has a pretty good editorial about atheism today by Sam Harris. It's worth a read.

Politics:

• Obama has dumped Republican Senator Judd Gregg as potential Secretary of Commerce. The statement about it is beautiful.
• Iowa is considering a bill to send all of its electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, with the bill only going into effect if 270 electoral votes worth of states enact similar measures. It's a neat way to get rid of the electoral college without a Constitutional amendment, but it's weird to be coming out of Iowa. If all you needed was the majority of votes, would you bother visiting the state ranked 30th in population? Weird.

Random:

• Lifehacker has a tip on reducing rent. Interesting.

Technology:

• An MIT team has developed shocks that recharge car batteries, thus saving fuel for hybrids. Neat.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

Today's Shared Google Reader Items, 2/11/2009

It's technically 2/12 now, but close enough. Here are today's shared items from Google Reader. Enjoy!

Politics:

• Americans might get reminders about the fact that people actually die in Iraq. It's nice that it's finally happening, but I think people are already starting to understand that.
• Twitter is great for political organization. The tweets calling for volunteers as needed during this election cycle were great. It turns out Twitter is even more useful when Republicans learn how to use it.

Technology:

• This story about a wearable tech demo at TED makes me happy. It's almost the future!
• A pair of satellites collided today in orbit. This could be a big problem. We don't know yet. I'll be watching this story closely.

Random:

• Get your forever stamps now. The price of stamps is going to go up again soon.

Digital Rights:

• Dammit, Authors' Guild. Stop being stupid. Text-to-speech is not a "performance" of your work.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

Welcome Pickles

When I moved into my current rental house back in July, the previous occupants had left many things: spices, cleaning chemicals, even a vase in the bathroom full of some sort of scented oil. The thing that weirded me out, though, was a large, unopened jar of pickles in the fridge. Why would you buy a large jar of pickles just before you moved out? And pickle juice isn't exactly a color that instills trust. I threw out the pickles.

A few months later, I was watching a repeat of the sitcom How I Met Your Mother. In this episode, two of the characters moved into a new apartment, and were starving after the move. One of the characters complained that there was nothing in the fridge, not even pickles.

Wait, what? Are the pickles a thing?

I decided that, regardless of whether they were a thing, they're a thing now.

The next time you move, leave a jar of unopened pickles in the fridge. I recommend labeling them "Welcome Pickles," and possibly even attaching a note to the new occupants of your former home. Let them know the tricks and quirks that it took you a while to figure out when you moved in, such as tips on how to get the thermostats to play nice with the changing weather, or a warning that the guest toilet doesn't flush properly unless you hold down the lever for a couple seconds.

We can make this a thing.

Interlude: Trivia at Pluckers

I've long been a trivia addict. In the last few months, some friends and I have started attended pub quiz trivia at Pluckers Wing Bar, a local Austin wing chain/bar. The trivia is normal pub quiz rules, in this case a $50 gift card for the first place team after 8 rounds of 10-12 questions each, each round with a theme (TV, TV theme songs, movies, sports, etc).

However, Pluckers has a special way to break a tie: the wing-off, with a member of each tied team racing to eat five of their "Fire in the Hole" wings. I tried a batch early in the night to see if I'd be up for it, but decided they were the kind of thing you want to take slow.

My teammate Phil was up for the challenge when we tied, though. Here he is gloving up to begin the wing-off, already looking forward to the beer he'll drink triumphantly when he wins.

Pluckers serves these extraordinarily hot wings drowned under the sauce. Clearly they didn't pay attention during Saturday morning cartoons when they were a kid. I believe this stuff qualifies as "goop."

Phil attacked the wings with style. He chose to go one-handed when one of his opponent's gloves ripped.

Unfortunately, his opponent used two hands, and kicked Phil's ass... winning the third-place $15 that we had tied for.

Phil finished the wings anyway, and came to regret it. He didn't even finish the beer.

The Question

Bear with me. This combines almost all geekery into one thing.

I just noticed that, in leet, "42" is "AR". As anyone who would be likely to actually read this probably knows, 42 is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. Since the question was answered by an advanced computer, it isn't unthinkable that it would answer in leet. So let's take it that the answer is "AR."

There are a couple possibilities for the sorts of questions that could lead to that. While the self-referential "From what state did the 42nd President of the United States hale?" makes me giggle a little, I prefer the idea that the true creator is a fan of Talk Like a Pirate Day, and, therefore, the question is virtually every pirate joke ever!

Stupid Ways I've Injured Myself

Looks like I have one to add to the ongoing list of stupid ways I've injured myself:

1. Standing too close behind my sister pretending to be the catcher when I was 5, got smacked in the eye by her bat (required stitches, still have a bit of a scar)
2. Burned wrist in an ironing catastrophe (I've always wondered if there were suicide rumors floating around my high school about this one, since I had a bandage on my wrist for several days)
   
3. Removing a wooden form from a snow statue, smashed hand (required stitches, and came very, very close to bigger damage; the nerve swelled up, which fortunately meant it didn't hurt that bad, 'cuz I was numb)
   
4. Carrying a box into a dorm, scratched the hell out of my hand on the plate thingy on the door (I still have a scar from this one)
5. Ice skating with improper socks, cut the backs of both legs on the tops of my skates (it was impromptu ice skating with skates that were in my trunk, but still)
   
6. Sleeping, hurt back/neck/knee (several occurrences)
7. Dodging a grackle, twisted knee
8. Didn't see dentist for 11 years (even after a filling fell out I waited 2 years), needed root canal to repair the worst pain I've ever experienced.
   
9. Dragging garbage can to curb, gouged a rather large chunk out of my ankle (the latest; not quite stitches-level, but pushing toward it)

(edited to add a bunch, including the tooth thing after Charon asked why it wasn't there)