05-11-2008

Andrew: I just had an idea
since these sex scandals seem to hit everyone nowdays, we give everyone a mulligan
if you're a democrat, one free hetero sex scandal
if you're a republican, one gay one
everybody gets one
Dennis: what about the green party
Andrew: like anyone would have sex with them?
Dennis: good point

Well I guess it’s been out for a while but I just found it on-line. Star Control 2 for Panasonic 3DO was bad ass! One of my favorites! Awesome space RPG. Anyways check it out, it’s a worthwhile game!

Star Control 2 from Sourceforge.net

A possible florida state record… 850 lb mako shark! I didn’t catch it… but my buddy Capt. George McElveen on the Reel McCoy did with his crew. Pretty neat. Oh yeah they found half of an estimated 80 lb tarpon in it’s belly, among other things!

A group of influential doctors have come up with a set of guidelines to be issued to hospitals that dictate the criteria for treatment in case of a mass pandemic and scare resources. Sometimes we forget the grim task doctors are faced with. Surgeons and ER doctors must make decisions that will involve life and death, ideally based on knowledge and objectivity. Perhaps this is why the criteria is so necessary. When an emergency like that hits, being cold and objective will be the most merciful, even if cruel on an individual level. By having a guideline ahead of time, the doctors are relieved of some of the moral dilemmas and emotions that might be associated with such decisions.

The criterion of those who won’t be saved:

-People older than 85.

-Those with severe trauma, which could include critical injuries from car crashes and shootings.

-Severely burned patients older than 60.

-Those with severe mental impairment, which could include advanced Alzheimer’s disease.

-Those with a severe chronic disease, such as advanced heart failure, lung disease or poorly controlled diabetes.

Some people gasp when I tell them I don’t have a TV. In fact, I haven’t had one since I graduated college. As a recent email from the alumni association reminded me, I’m only a year away from our five years reunion. Yes, I’ve lived without TV for four years and have never missed it. That’s not to say I’ve not watch any TV shows in those four years. When I’m traveling on business trips I’ve turned on the TV when I check into the hotel. Every time I’ve done that, I received confirmation of my original decision. Also, I’ve been downloading a few shows online such as Family Guy, Southpark, Mythbusters, Battlestar Galatica, Scrubs, and Firefly. My friend also gave me a copy of the Sarah Silverman Program. I also watched clips of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. So I haven’t been completely devoid of TV but it would definitely total less than 2 hours per week. To be honest, if I could, I would pay for HBO and just HBO because of the good programming on there. However, 98% of the time TV is just brain dead and makes me despise humanity. I’m pretty sure I would have been a lot less charitable towards people if I had watched TV all those years. I couldn’t bring myself to deal with cable companies and shell out money to waste my time on something that I generally despise.

Recently, I discovered Southpark Studios and have been following all the new episodes. The occasional ads are quite tolerable. This was it. This is the wave of the future. Shows on the Internet. I can watch it when I want to and skip the 98% that I consider crap. Then my friend pointed me to hulu.com. It’s like Southpark Studio but with many of the shows on TV. Give it a try. Most of the shows on there are crap but you can easily ignore them, unlike television. Hopefully this new power of choice will drive producers and writers to create better shows and be able to tell what’s good and what’s not. Maybe we will even see the rise of writers and actors independent of studios since the infrastructure cost for Internet TV is much, much lower.

An Obama supporter has reimaged the proposed Federal gasoline summer tax cut as a Nigerian scam. I’ve always thought of it more of an insult to my intelligence. Sure, a tax break during the summer is nice but really, how much am I saving? The amount is tiny. Once the elections are over and what then? More importantly, it’s not the Federal taxes that are driving the cost of gasoline up so how is a temporary tax cut going to help? What an insult.

Go Obama! For being the only candidate who doesn’t treat us like morons. Who’s being elitist and condescending now? Honesty is not condescension. Trying to fool us is.

http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2008/05/relative_dog_motion.php

Tuesday night’s show at the Culture Room was incredible. The three bands on the tour all take different approaches to heavy metal and progressive music, and I think there was a good overlap in their fanbases.

First up was a death metal band from Saskatchewan called Into Eternity. They have lots of melodic riffs and intense drumming, but what really sets them aside is the mix of vocal styles that lead singer Stu Block effortlessly belts out, sometimes going from guttural Montreal-style death vocals to a Rob Halford falsetto to a black metal screech all in one verse. Their sound mix was weak compared to the night’s other bands, but you could tell everybody was playing/singing their balls off. They started with a new song and it seems like a good omen for their upcoming album. I was gladly surprised to hear people in the crowd singing along to tracks like Severe Emotional Distress and Endless Winter, the token ballad.

Symphonic gothic metal from the Netherlands was brought to us by Epica. Although they were short a lead singer due to a nasty bout of MRSA for mezzo-soprano Simone Simons, they had a great replacement in longtime vocal collaborator Amanda Somerville. In addition to the lush orchestration, the interplay between operatic female vocals and the growls and grunts of guitarist Mark Jansen helped temper beauty and aggression. The group used a lot of backing tracks for the orchestrations and choir stuff, and it even seemed like there were a few moments when all the strings and vocals were coming from the tape. Amanda was dead-on except for one or two places on the early material. She was great with the crowd and even headbanged a bit, though not quite as vigorously as Simone. The last time I had seen drummer Ariën Van Weesenbeek, he was playing with God Dethroned, and I was glad to see how well he handled the Epica material. Here’s Amanda’s tour diary from that night and a fan-filmed clip of The Obsessive Devotion.

The American progressive power metal band Symphony X was almost note-perfect musically, and singer “Sir” Russel Allen’s vocals sounded better than on the albums. Their set was heavily weighted towards the new album Paradise Lost, with all but two songs from it. There was lots of first-rate shredding from guitarist Michael Romeo and the rest of the band were also pushing the envelope for technicality and power. After Russel told us about some older folks that thought they were a classic rock band, they then proceeded to play the first half of the Immigrant Song. Although my chant of “Odyssey” caught on before the encore, they declined to play the 24 minute epic. There are a couple of youtube clips out there including the first half of Paradise Lost and a chorus section with an audience singalong (including a key change!)

It was great to see three different and diverse bands in a small club like the Culture Room where you can really appreciate all that’s going into the performances. Most of the musicians were cool enough to be hanging around the venue after the show. My neck still hurts, which is usually an indication of a great concert experience.

Thanks to Scott for the pics.

With 24 servos and all movable surfaces, this A-10 R/C plane is incredible. Did I mention it’s powered by two micro turbines?

Come on, admit it. Most of us never talk about our moms. If you’re anything like me, you also dread calling your mom. Well, apparently, don’t feel so guilty. The separation works both ways. Mothers want their sons to be independent. While we start distancing ourselves from our mothers they do the same. Likewise, a man who is too close to his mother appears dependent and needy. The author raises an interesting point, wondering if men are just intermediaries in the rivalry between women (i.e. mother and wife, which as we all know, never really get along).

Harper’s have a really good article on the debate over pasteurization, modern farming techniques, and bacteria’s role in human health. What struck me are these facts:
1. Pasteurization wasn’t really necessary until modern times and the lost of farmland to cities. There were no pastures left. Cows went put into stalls and feed corn instead of grass.
2. Human breast milk naturally contain antibiotics that destroy harmful strains of bacteria. More importantly, it contains substances that are not digestible by humans but are digestible by beneficial bacteria that live in our stomach.
3. The link between unpasteurized milk consumption and allergies is quite substantially. Kids who grew up on raw milk have less allergies. This also coincides with another study I read a long time ago about children who play outside and in the dirt are less likely to have allergies. Both of them add evidence to the hygiene theory.
4. Dannon, a major yogurt company, is starting to add beneficial bacteria back into its yogurt after pasteurization.

Lastly, from personal experience, raw milk taste different from pasteurized milk; it tastes much better. Luckily, Whole Foods around here carry raw milk from Organic Pastures, one of the people mentioned in the article.

Quite a dilemma:

Do you stop or keep going?

Chinese students are really making themselves unwelcome in other countries. In South Korea, groups of Chinese students surrounded and attacked protesters against the Olympic torch run. Just because you don’t believe in freedom of expression and democracy, it doesn’t mean other people don’t. Go home China! Go and rot with the rest of your barbaric country.

Google is more intelligent than you thought, if only you asked the right question.

Just check out these signs. They’re hilarious.

I found this to be particularly funny:

Ever wondered how much gold is there in Goldschlarger? The good people at Cockeyed.com answer these and other questions by painfully doing the experiments and tallying up the results themselves.

This is the video footage captured by the camera of a Georgian UAV as it was being shot down by a MiG.

I bet that’s a question that constantly pops into your mind, “which fictional animal is kosher?“

A new study shows that caffeine in small but frequent doses keeps a person more calm and alert than a single large dose. Caffeine with carbohydrates works better than either substance alone.

With the shrunken board, thus much lower complexity, a supercomputer was able to beat a Go master. The complexity of Go on a full board is believed to be greater than the number of particles in the universe.

There’s a newish music site called thesixtyone that features some tasty scripting and a sleek interface. Functionally, the site seems to fall somewhere between Digg and Pandora. What’s unique about t61 is a music scouting game that drives the community charts and playlists:

How does it work?

Musicians upload their music for listening, but rather than allowing the Simon Cowells of the world decide which songs go on the homepage, the listeners do. How, you say? If you like a song you’ve found on thesixtyone, just click the “bump” button to increase its bump count. Doing so will cost you points, but if songs you bump get bumped by others, you can earn more points! Collecting points increases your level and reflects your skill in picking top songs in your favorite genre!

There is a leveled system not unlike some RPGs and the more points you get can unlock features for higher levels including multiple bumps on the listener side, more uploaded songs for the artists.
I started an account last week and put some music up here. If you do manage to give this site a try, please put TheForgotton in as a referral so I can get more songs on there.