Obama on Mythbusters

The President is appearing on tomorrow's Mythbusters to commission Adam and Jamie to look into the myth of Archimedes mirror. For those not in the know, it's a device which was supposedly used to focus the power of the sun to set attacking Roman ships afire during the Siege of Syracuse.

The Mythbusters have addressed this one at least twice in the past. So it's been done multiple times before, they've had minor success, but never found it really workable, and now that Obama shows up the results are supposed to be different? A fine metaphor for modern liberalism indeed.

UPDATE: Great minds think alike, but IMAO has clips.

Hallelujah!

Tamara and Sebastian have already posted this, but I wanted to wait until the Christmas season was actually here.



Plus it's Handel's Messiah so it creates all sorts of wonderful tension between high artistes and the faithful. I'm surprised you didn't see a bunch of liberals sit down during that clip just to show the Christians what for.

Happy Thanksgiving!

And in honor of the holiday, I give you Breda's wonderful idea of brining a turkey in an empty refrigerator vegetable bin. Like most things of the internet it is a wonderful idea that is several days too late to be of use to you. But file it away for Christmas.

Not So Peak Oil

As I mentioned several years ago, the theory that underpins peak oil analysis is not especially sound. The output from a given deposit is bell-shaped. This is a sound empirical rule. You can aggregate all known deposits into a large bell shape. True enough. But this theory is only valid for known existing deposits. It doesn't take into account technology growth that allows for the exploitation of new fields or new sources of petroleum. You know, as is happening now.

Kid Needs a Haircut

Amy and I share Jalopnik's disdain for the annoying kid in skinny jeans and a Christopher Atkins haircut that Toyota is using as their spokesman in at least one current advertisement.

What is really sad is that while Toyota pisses all over the old Buicks in the commercial, they've basically become Buick.

It's a Casserole

This revelation about deep-dish pizza and others at Snowflakes in Hell and Clayton Cramer.

Wisdom for the Ages

Clayton Cramer's post of excerpts from Andrew Jackson's fairwell address contain some amazing stuff. Among the topics he discusses are taxes, duties, the expanding role of federal government, and corrupt politicians or businessmen profit from these.

Math for Everyone

Joanne Jacobs has a discussion about how much math is enough for students. She suggests that frankly, most people don't need everything they're taught even through high school. I think she mostly correct.

When it comes to practical skills for the general populace, the skills list is something like addition/subtraction, division/multiplication, ratios/percentages, and exponents. Any sort of budgeting will require these skills. Any sort of financial planning will require percentages, ratios, and exponents to calculate interest. Anything geometrical will likely require trigonometry sooner or later. Understanding simple concepts like basic computer modeling requires basic algebra, probability, and statistics is very useful for figuring out what people are talking about on the evening news.

I have a Bachelors and a Masters in Mechanical Engineering. I know a fair amount of higher math. About the only thing I use on a regular basis are prob/stat, trig, and linear algebra. I haven't done calculus or differential equations in years. Why? Because in most fields the problem has either been solved and turned into a formula or it is unsolvable in closed form and will require some form of discrete simulation. For that matter a lot of "analysis" is simply reading tables for the proper part sizes.

Future Contestants for the Newlydead Game?

Turns out Bruce Campbell is an ordained minister and will be performing a wedding along with a large renewal ceremony at ZombCon. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at the minister part. If you were Bruce Campbell, wouldn't you want to be able to manufacture holy water on demand?

Are Those Things Loaded?

Alright, I do understand the interest in the bra holster. I am a guy. I like guns. I like boobs. I understand the attraction of combining the two for male gunnies. Even the female gunnies can use it to give purpose to all those worthless empire-waisted tops that make them look pregnant.

But why I can understand why it received a lot of blogger buzz, I don't understand everything. How do you get gun into the thing without sweeping something important? One of the reasons the universal nylon belt holster is anathema is because you have to sweep a hand to reholster. Breasts might just be flesh wounds, but a bullet in a vital organ in your chest or abdomen would really suck.

Ages of English

When I was in middle school, we did a unit on Chaucer. We were given the original Middle English text and had to translate it into some semblance of the modern tongue. At one point my teacher read the Prologue to Canterbury Tales. It sounded cool but is barely intelligible.

What surprises me about this clip of Shakespeare in the appropriate Elizabethan dialect was how intelligible it is. It's definitely not Olivier's English though.

Petting the Kitty

Matthew Inman's instructions on petting the kitty is great. The part about belly rubs is especially true:

Bashing Meghan McCain

While I don't doubt that her book is completely daft, some of Leon Wolf's scathing review is also startlingly ill-researched. For instance:

I defy Meghan McCain to identify a conservative candidate who acted or behaved in this way towards the party after a primary loss.

Peg Luksik in the PA governor's race in 1994. Both Ridge and Single were total centrists and after losing to Ridge in the primary, she ran as a Constitution Party candidate. For that matter current Tea Party darling Christine O'Donnell ran a write-in campaign in 2006 after coming third in the Senate primary to both Jan Ting and Mike Protack. And these were just two I could think of off the top of my head, they can't be the only ones.

Insofar as I can even tell what that sentence means, I am pretty sure it indicates that Meghan McCain does not know what white noise is, or that it has nothing to do with oversaturation.

McCain's statement is that "these days, the name Ronald Reagan – as well as his legacy – has become oversaturated, just white noise." Yes her metaphor is a bit mixed here. But her point is that devotion to Reagan is pure political rhetoric and formality. It's is everywhere and in everything, therefore it is devoid of meaning. Even liberal Democrats do it. Meghan even does it in an example Wolf cites a few paragraphs later.

But if Wolfs excerpts are accurate, I can't dispute that Meghan McCain isn't especially smart, has a weak understanding of politics, and an even weaker understanding of proper sentence construction.

9/11

Nine years ago I retired to my hotel room to practice my presentation for the conference I was attending at Virginia Tech. It was on some variant of Resin Transfer Molding I think. I turned on the TV to take a break and found out the world had changed. I went downstairs and everyone was just standing in the lobby watching the news.

Suffice it to say I didn't practice after that and my presentation sucked. No one particularly cared though. I think the biggest collective tragedy in my lifetime probably takes the cake for worst intro act ever. Public speaking got a lot easier after that.

Oh and I'm with most of the gunblogosphere, why the hell is there still a huge hole in Lower Manhattan? The best tribute we could give those people is putting up something on that site.

Delaware Primaries

I've been receiving multiple robocalls per day from the O'Donnell and Castle campaigns for the last week. We're really sick of them and they are not convincing anyone in my family to vote for a particular candidate. I'm already voting for Castle. O'Donnell doesn't have anything to recommend her other than conservatism. Conservatism won't win her the general election. On the other hand my politically neutral wife is pissed off enough that she probably won't vote in the primary. If the Republicans keep it up, she might vote Democrat to spite them.

It has me wondering if the Delaware Republicans even know how to campaign properly. Two years ago, my long-incumbent state representative Vince Lofink lost the election to Democrat Earl Jaques. This is largely because Jaques and his wife did their legwork. They went door to door. He hit every HOA meeting in the district. People knew who he was and voted for him. Two years later and Earl has already knocked on my door and will almost certainly be at my HOA meeting. The Republican candidate? Still haven't met him. I expect Jaques to win re-election quite handily unless things change after the primaries.

Campaigning requires real legwork. Robocalls are fake legwork. This is why people are annoyed.

Quick Changes

I thought this video of people swapping engines on a HMMWV was pretty cool the first time I saw it:

Then I saw this video of 6 Canadian guys field stripping a '52 Jeep:

Via Jalopnik.

ChahzCake?

What gun for Zombie Golden Girls?

Miss Universe

The wife and I caught the end of the Miss Universe Pageant this year. Unfortunately we missed the swimsuit competition. Somehow I also missed the retiring Miss Universe, who hails from Venezuela, subtly snub Dictator Hugo Chavez as she gave up her crown. Good for her. And if you don't understand why, read more.

No Capes!

Wonder Woman has new clothes. This is nothing new. Artists are always fooling around with her costume in little ways. Much like Batman, the devil is in the details. Her divided skirts turned into star-spangled spanks. Shoes became sandals which became boots. Then those lost their heels. Her bracelets enlarge and contract. The shape of various pieces of gold trim shifts. But the basic look of the classic costume is still easily identifiable.

John C. Wright(one image NSFW) correctly points out that this new major makeover makes her look like a high school mallrat. I'm wondering when the bracelets and tiara will show up at Claire's. But hey at least it's not as bad as the black biker shorts from her gritty 90s period. And she kept her powers so Gloria Steinem should stay happy.

Making a Graceful Exit

Though we live in Newark, Amy and I go to church in Wilmington. For a while we've been thinking about joining a small group, but our problem was that my church's couples groups are all in Wilmington. After my commute to Aberdeen, we had no desire to trek up to Wilmington once a week. When a small group finally started up closer to home in January, we decided to give it a try. After seven months, we've given it a heck of a try and we're sick of trying.

I wish I could say that the other couples in the group were horrible people. But they aren't, they're very nice folks. But we've come to realize that they weren't our friends when the group started and aren't going to become our friends anytime soon. We have things in common, but not enough. Very nice just isn't enough and we find it a chore.

So how do we break up with them? I don't want to lie to them, but I also don't want to tell them that we find them tiresome.