palindrome (just for kicks)

Heard on the Roe Conn Show, on 8/31:

go hang a salami I'm a lasagna hog!

Bogus science tell-tales

"The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science"

Another Pilgrimage to Lambeau

Bill Simmons, of ESPN.com, visited Wisconsin a few weeks ago, and blogged his experiences in the Badger State to a column.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/060825

Point of order: is the verb "to blog" transitive or intransitive? I'll look into it....

How common is your last name?

An offshoot of a PBS project, find out from the Census Bureau records how common your last name is, ranked in order.

http://www.nwdocfinder.com/4846

How common is your last name?

An offshoot of a PBS project, find out from the Census Bureau records how common your last name is, ranked in order.

http://www.nwdocfinder.com/4846

Geekpress 8/24/6

A treasure trove this week from Geekpress. Warning beforehand, the video site is an easy way for a lot of time to disappear, especially if you grew up in the 80s.

"Your Brain Boots Up Like a Computer".

The Economist has an interesting article entitled, "How to make digital photography more trustworthy".

Swiss Army Knife overkill. Only $1200! Includes the following features:

1. 2.5" 60% Serrated locking blade
2. Nail file, nail cleaner
3. Corkscrew
4. Adjustable pliers with wire crimper and cutter
5. Removable screwdriver bit adapter
6. 2.5" Blade for Official World Scout Knife
7. Spring-loaded, locking needle-nose pliers with wire cutter
8. Removable screwdriver bit holder
9. Phillips head screwdriver bit 0
10. Phillips head screwdriver bit 1
11. Phillips head screwdriver bit 2
12. Flat head screwdriver bit 0.5 mm x 3.5 mm
13. Flat head screwdriver bit 0.6 mm x 4.0 mm
14. Flat head screwdriver bit 1.0 mm x 6.5 mm
15. Magnetized recessed bit holder
16. Double-cut wood saw with ruler (inch & cm)
17. Bike chain rivet setter, removable 5m allen wrench, screwdriver for slotted and Phillips head screws
18. Removable tool for adjusting bike spokes, 10m hexagonal key for nuts
19. Removable 4mm curved allen wrench with Phillips head screwdriver
20. Removable 10mm hexagonal key
21. Patented locking Phillips head screwdriver
22. Universal wrench
23. Laser pointer with 300 ft. range
24. 1.65" Clip point utility blade
25. Metal saw, metal file
26. 4 mm allen wrench
27. 2.5" blade
28. Fine metal file with precision screwdriver
29. Double-cut wood saw
30. Cupped cigar cutter with double-honed edges
31. 12/20-Gauge choke tube tool
32. Watch caseback opening tool
33. Snap shackle
34. Telescopic pointer
35. Compass, straight edge, ruler (in./cm)
36. Mineral crystal magnifier with precision screwdriver
37. 2.4" Springless scissors with serrated, self-sharpening design
38. Shortix key
39. Flashlight
40. Fish scaler, hook disgorger, line guide
41. Micro tool holder
42. Micro tool adapter
43. Micro scraper-straight
44. Reamer
45. Fine fork for watch spring bars
46. Pin punch 1.2 mm
47. Pin punch .8 mm
48. Round needle file
49. Removable tool holder with expandable receptacle
50. Removable tool holder
51. Multi-purpose screwdriver
52. Flat Phillips head screwdriver
53. Flat head screwdriver bit 0.5 mm x 3.5 mm
54. Spring loaded, locking flat nose nose-pliers with wire cutter
55. Phillips head screwdriver bit 0
56. Phillips head screwdriver bit 1
57. Phillips head screwdriver bit 2
58. Flat head screwdriver bit 0.5 mm x 3.5 mm
59. Flat head screwdriver bit 0.6 mm x 4.0 mm
60. Flat head screwdriver bit 1.0 mm x 6.5 mm
61. Can opener
62. Phillips head screwdriver
63. 2.5" Clip point blade
64. Golf club face cleaner
65. 2.4" Round tip blade
66. Patented locking screwdriver, cap lifter, can opener
67. Golf shoe spike wrench
68. Golf divot repair tool
69. Micro straight-curved
70. Special tool holder
71. Phillips head screwdriver 1.5mm
72. Screwdriver 1.2 mm
73. Screwdriver .8 mm
74. Mineral crystal magnifier, fork for watch spring bars, small ruler
75. Removable screwdriver bit holder
76. Magnetized recessed bit holder
77. Tire tread gauge
78. Reamer/awl
79. Patented locking screwdriver, cap lifter, wire stripper
80. Special Key
81. Toothpick
82. Tweezers
83. Adapter
84. Key ring
85. Second key ring

1500 of your favorite 80's music videos.

The Beloit College Class of 2010 Mindset List is now out. Some highlights:

1. The Soviet Union has never existed and therefore is about as scary as the student union.
6. There has always been only one Germany.
15. They have never had to distinguish between the St. Louis Cardinals baseball and football teams.
16. DNA fingerprinting has always been admissible evidence in court.
19. "Google" has always been a verb.
23. Bar codes have always been on everything, from library cards and snail mail to retail items.
70. They have always "dissed" what they don't like.
75. Professional athletes have always competed in the Olympics.

Kockumskranen

A ginormous shipyard crane from Sweden, that was dismantled and sold to a South Korean firm. Warning: Swedish site not for the faint of heart, or those with dialup.

http://www.varvshistoria.se/kranens-webbsida/bilder.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kockumskranen

Quote of the Day

"Try not to do anything that would likely change the first line of your obituary."

Jim Johnson, Roe Conn Show, 890 AM WLS 2:12 PM, August 16, 2006

9/11 conspiracies debunked

In a similar genre to the theories that men never walked on the Moon as a result of the Apollo program (and Gemini and Mercury before that), a proportion of the populous carries the idea that the horrific atrocities of 9/11/01 were the work of groups within the U.S. government. A thoughtful discussion and refutation of a number of these theories is found at

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/defense/1227842.html

Two signs of the impending end of Western Civilization

First, the fortune cookie I received with my lunch had a self-serving fortune within:
"A good way to keep healthy is to eat more Chinese food."

Then, I found this in GMSV today:
Don't forget to wipe
From the No Good Deed Goes Unpunished Department, generous souls considering donating their old computer to an underprivileged country might consider first performing a .45-caliber wipe of their hard drive. Taking advantage of the fact that deleted files are not truly deleted, the BBC reports, Nigerian scamsters are pulling private banking data off PCs dropped off for recycling in Britain, saving them many hours of crafting e-mail bait for greedy suckers. Remember, in these times when everybody else seems to be playing fast and loose with your personal information, there's no need to make things easier for the crooks.

"It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine..."

Sports Signal-to-Noise Ratio

I was all ready (after 22-ish miles on the mountain bike) to go into a deep discussion of philosophy, but because it's Sunday, a circuit breaker tripped on that train of thought and the following resulted.

Being an American male of the species, I have an interest in the sports teams from the geographic region in which I was raised. (Note: I didn't say 'grew up,' because that process is often optional, and doesn't necessarily occur in the same location as one ages the first 18 or so years. But I digress....) Being an engineer, and of a certain intellect, I tire at times of the often-spewing-forth discussion regarding the success or failure of teams in the major sports, often based more on emotion than anything else. (In the engineering trade, emotion is to be subjugated to the facts as often as possible, with logic (as backed and guided by ready and reference information) providing the path to results. That doesn't mean that you don't end up out over your skis on occasion, guided by gut instinct and past experience, but the management of that risk (based on logic and facts) is what provides success or failure. Digression ^2 ....)

In contrast to that, as we approach the college and National Football League seasons (with the NFL Films' "The Power and the Glory: The Original Music and Voices of NFL Films" in my car CD player, my annual reading of David Maraniss' "When Pride Still Mattered" Lombardi biography underway, and the fantasy football draft I partake of each year less than two weeks off), I present a site. I came across Football Outsiders a couple years ago; it's written from the perspective of taking an analytical view of football, with a statistical view that's off the beaten path, but providing sound data.

Sidebar 3: Signal-to-Noise Ratio is a term from communications, capturing in a number the quality of a link between transmitter and receiver. Higher is better, by definition (more signal, less noise), and below some value, the link won't work anymore.

Along with FO, for information on the game of the duoconical spheroid, I also regularly read Tuesday Morning Quarterback, previously referred to, and columns on college and pro football from the usual national suspects, ESPN, CBS Sportsline, and NFL.com, of course.

My daily consumption of sports (outside of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and Chicago Tribune for daily doings of teams in my previous home and my expatriate surroundings, respectively, listening to 620 WTMJ when I'm in listening range, and to ESPN Radio in whichever city) includes ESPN's Daily Quickie, a page-sized digest of the morning's sports news published about 8:30 Central each morning written by Dan Shanoff.

Quote of today

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke, "Profiles of The Future", 1961 (Clarke's third law)
English physicist & science fiction author (1917 - )

Information Junkie Fix

To paraphrase a friend's blog mission statement, "a miscellaneous compendium of (almost-) useless information"

http://www.telacommunications.com/misc/facts.htm

How to open a beer bottle with a piece of paper

Video of the day: "How to Open a Beer Bottle with a Piece of Paper". (Via Fark.)

Internet routing explanation, tracers

With apologies to the Internet Tourbus e-mail newsletter, here's a (lengthy) excerpt from a recent column explaining how internet traffic is routed, with a couple links to allow folks to see how the information they're seeing got to them.

Back in September 1981, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn wrote that

The internet protocol treats each internet datagram as an
independent entity unrelated to any other internet datagram.
There are no connections or logical circuits (virtual or
otherwise). Source: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0791.txt

What does this mean in English? Well, in all deference to Alaska
Senator Ted Stevens, the internet is neither like a dump truck nor
like a series of tubes. Rather, the internet is a lot like the United
States Interstate highway system with one major addition: there are
weigh stations at every major junction.

--------------
Interstate 101
--------------

To travel from point A to point B on the United States Interstate
Highway System, you get on the Interstate via an on-ramp and then head
in a certain direction until you reach either a junction or your
destination's off ramp. For example, if we want to get from Irvine,
California [Symbol: Q], to Universal Studios in Hollywood, we'll take
the following route:

I-405 north to
I-605 north to
I-5 north to
US-101 north to
Universal Studios Blvd exit
[See http://tinyurl.com/jfgw3 ]

Now imagine if you had to make that same trip without anyone behind
the wheel. You'd hop on I-405 north, put a brick on the gas pedal,
and hope for the best ... much like the way I drive to work each
morning. [If you are from the California Department of Motor
Vehicles, the California Highway Patrol, or Mercury Insurance, I
assure you that I am KIDDING! Please don't arrest me.] Actually, you
wouldn't have to hope for the best because at each junction on our
pretend Interstate there is a weigh station where each vehicle pulls
over, is inspected, and then is automatically put back on the
Interstate headed in the right direction [or at least in the direction
that has the least amount of traffic.]

So, in reality [or at least in augmented reality], our trip from
Irvine to Hollywood will be a little more like:

I-405 north to the first weigh station at the junction of I-405
and CA-55

The weigh station will inspect our car and then put us back on I-
405 north headed towards the next weigh station at the junction
of I-405 and CA-22

The next weigh station will inspect our car and ... yadda yadda
yadda.

On a really long trip, our car could pass through dozens or even
hundreds of weigh stations before it reached its final destination.
On a cross-country trip, some of these weigh stations may be owned by
California, some by Arizona, some by New Mexico, and so on.

By the way, what are the weigh stations inspecting for? They really
only care to see that your car isn't missing a wheel or two and that
your car knows its final destination. The weigh stations don't care
one bit, though, about what is inside of your car [as long as what's
inside of your car isn't damaged beyond all recognition] or who owns
your car. In the eyes of the weigh stations, Patrick Crispen's car,
Bill Gates' car, and the Popemobile are absolutely identical.

Got it? Now, let's apply this analogy to the internet.

------------
Internet 101
------------

To send an email or a web page or any sort of information from point A
to point B on the internet, you connect to the internet through an
Internet Service Provider [an "on ramp."] The Internet Service
Provider puts the text of your email into an internet packet called a
datagram [a "car"] and pushes the datagram onto the internet [the
"Interstate"] in the correct direction. At the first network junction
your datagram encounters, the datagram is pulled of the internet by a
router [a "weigh station,"] and inspected. The router doesn't care
what your datagram contains or who sent it. It only checks to see
that your datagram isn't broken or improperly addressed. If your
datagram passes inspection, it is placed back on the internet headed
either in the right direction or in the direction that has the least
traffic. At the next router, the process repeats itself. Yadda yadda
yadda.

Your datagram passes through dozens of routers along the way, each
potentially owned by different companies. Eventually, though, your
datagram makes it to its final destination, usually within a few
seconds of your sending it. [Did I mention your "car" was fast?]

You can actually see the whole routing process happen right before
your eyes. Just point your web browser to

http://visualroute.visualware.com/

You have to have Sun's free Java tool to be able to use this, but if
you type in a web address in the Enter Host/URL box and then click on
Start Trace, you'll see the route your datagram[s] takes as it goes
from your computer to the final destination. If you are in the United
States, try a trace to the Vatican at www.vatican.va just for grins.

---------------------
Old School Traceroute
---------------------

By the way, if you don't have Java, you can still run a text-based
traceroute on your PC or Mac [if your firewall will let you.] In
Windows 95, 98, 98 SE or ME,

1. Go to Start > Programs > DOS Prompt
2. Type TRACERT WWW.VATICAN.VA and then press the Enter key on
your keyboard
3. Close the window when you are finished.

In Windows 2000 or XP,

1. Go to Start > Run
2. In the Open: box key in CMD and click the OK button
3. Type TRACERT WWW.VATICAN.VA and then press the Enter key on
your keyboard
4. Behold the magic that is traceroute.
5. Close the window when you are finished.

In MacOS X

1. Open Hard Drive > Applications > Utilities > Terminal. [You
can also use the Network Utility program instead.]
2. Type TRACEROUTE WWW.VATICAN.VA and then press the Enter key on
your keyboard

Differences between male and female brains

Differences between male and female brains: A nice overview of the known science.

Basically, the author provides (as I've previously read and understood) that the default setting for people is the female form, and the introduction of testosterone at times during the developmental process provides the activation necessary for the conversion to the male form.

Misc 'Net

From GMSV, and others. Enjoy.

Synchronized treadmill dancing:
http://www.sugarjar.com/media/49236/

Letterman's tribute to Bill Gates:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NoGbLI3ePA

Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager (episode 2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPVlljVWqBg

Darth Smartass:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5blbv4WFriM

How to fake being a geek

Self-explanitory article; for those who are geekery-challenged, it's informational

http://penguinpetes.com/b2evo/index.php?title=how_to_totally_fake_being_a_geek&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

Highest Railroad in the World

Here's a long thought path, good luck following it:

A couple years ago I came across the writings of Gregg Easterbrook, Brookings Institution visiting Fellow, in the form of his Tuesday Morning Quarterback (8/1/6 new season catchup column), a 5000+ word-length column that comes out weekly on (surprise!) Tuesday mornings during the half-year that the NFL is in session, and covers the action on the gridiron, associated (and not-so) stories, and general goodness. Known as a general time sink and office productivity killer throughout corporate America, it's one of my standby reads on Tuesdays, and I've followed his writing of it from Slate.com (where I first found it), to ESPN.com, to NFL.com (after a run-in with ESPN's Disney corporate types), and now back to ESPN.com.
Anyhow, he's an advocate of rail travel among his other interests, and this week he wrote of a visit he made to General Electric's Locomotive assembly facility in Erie, PA, among other things. The motive power currently under production there includes engines for the Chinese national railroad, which is undertaking construction of a new route from the mainland into Tibet which includes the highest mountain pass crossing of any railroad in the world (official site here; BabelFish use recommended for those who can't read Chinese).
So, on the page of a site meant for wide consumption, what graphic would be used to illustrate the map of the train's route? A caricature of a 20-year-old Amtrak train!
Back to your regularly-scheduled program....

HAARP

Excerpted from a discussion on one of the online lists. The folks who espouse the anti-HAARP opinion sound like they'd fit in well with thie Art Bell show crowd. FWIW, ERP is effective radiated power, a radio-frequency antenna metric of interest. I followed much of this due to my having been in Alaska earlier this summer.

Background:
HAARP Official site: http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/

The Wikipedia entry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Frequency_Active_Auroral_Research_Program

http://www.haarp.net/
http://www.earthpulse.com/src/category.asp?catid=1
http://www.earthpulse.com/src/subcategory.asp?catid=1&subcatid=2
from the latter (same authors as haarp.net)

Not exactly...the Anti-HAARP crowd are using the ERP numbers to
suggest that the DOD/whoever is going to blow up the ionosphere and
harm us all. This includes the son of Alaska representative Begich,
who was lost in an airplane over some huge glacier between Anchorage
and Valdez.

But what these folks do is use the ERP as the basis for their heating
calcs, not realizing that ERP is a fiction and basically says: this
transmitter of 1000 watts with a 20 dB gain antenna is equal to a
100,000 watt transmitter feeding a dipole. It doesn't mean that
there's now 100,000 watts of power available to heat the atmosphere.
It means there's 100x what the fraction of the 1000 watts that the
dipole would radiate into the same segment of the sphere. The
equations that were done for dipoles take into account the
directional factor of the transmitting antenna if you use the ERP.

Could They Short-Circuit Earth?
Earth as a spherical electrical system is a fairly well-accepted
model. However, those experimenters who want to make unnatural power
connections between parts of this system might not be thinking of
possible consequences. Electrical motors and generators can be caused
to wobble when their circuits are affected. Could human activities
cause a significant change in a planet's electrical circuit or
electrical field? A paper in the respected journal Science deals with
manmade ionization from radioactive material, but perhaps it could
also be studied with HAARP-type skybusters in mind:

"For example, while changes in the earth's electric field resulting
from a solar flare modulating conductivity may have only a barely
detectable effect on meteorology, the situation may be different in
regard to electric field changes caused by manmade ionization..."

Finally, there's this totally whacked-out scenario (especially
considering beam angles and ERP vs real power arguments):

http://www.brojon.org/frontpage/HAARP_Columbia.html

Ten (almost-) Truths About Tiger Woods

After the fashion of the "Chuck Norris" e-mail chain, and inspired by the sports guy for one of my favorite morning shows (Bob and Brian, from 102.9 in Milwaukee) compiled a list of Tiger Woods' exploits and talents on the golf course.

http://www.onmilwaukee.com/sports/articles/tigertruth.html

One of my favorites: Tiger only brings one sleeve of golf balls to each tournament, and proceeds to give two away to needy children.


Speaking of Chuck Norris, a bridge in Budapest, Hungary is under construction, and the powers that be decided to have an on-line vote as to what to name it. Well, the citizens of the 'Net being who they are, the current leading contender for the name is none other than Mr. Texas Ranger himself. Full story here, including a link to vote (which currently is down (8/4 2:52 GMT); hopefully we've not crashed an important Hungarian web server in the process.