Hardened Oyster Saliva that Reflects Very Little Energy in the Visible Spectrum.

So guess what's harbored in Redondo Beach right now? Guess who got to see it?

No, not me :(



Check out more pictures at Dark Knights of Doomshire (more like Dork Knights of Dumbshire if you ask me).



Almost as impressive a ship as the Black Pear, the flagship of the dread pirate Jaque Finch, who defeated the Evil Marquis de Montalban, rescued four of his long-lost relatives, defeated the nine most infamous pirates, recovered the buried treasures of all nine pirates, found the four fabled lost Indian cities, acheived the rank of Count with the English, French, Dutch, and Spanish, wed the beautiful daughter of the governor of Nombre de Dios, and retired to the rank of governor with over 150,000 gold pieces.

Underwear Declared National Wildlife Refuge.
UPDATE 1: Briefs destroyed in firefight with National Guard

A local pair of briefs was declared to be a National Wildlife Refuge, following the discovery of over 14,000 different types of flora and fauna living within it, of which more than 3,000 are unique to the underwear and previously unknown, and another 5,000 are endangered.

Shortly after scientists for the EPA discovered the underwear, they began the study and classification of the many organisms living within the briefs. After three days of study, the scientists knew that the briefs needed to be declared a protected wildlife refuge before energy companies bought the rights to harvest the methane gas stored within. According to the EPA report, there was enough methane contained within the fabric of the briefs to power the city of New York for six months. Said one EPA scientist, "any effort made to harvest the energy would have lead to irrepairable damage to the underwear's ecosystem and could have wiped out as much as 99% of the lifeforms."

Citing an intense desire to continue studying the vast and complex new ecosystem, as well as the numerous new species of plant and animal wildlife, the head EPA researcher petitioned an emergency session of congress to declare the underwear a Wildlife Preserve, thus making it off-limits to harvest energy resources.

The declaration was made official by Congressional bill THX1138, passed by both houses of Congress and signed by President Bush.

--UPDATE--

The underwear has tragically been destroyed following a tense stand-off and battle with Police and the National Guard.

Early Saturday morning, the briefs apparently became sentient and escaped from the EPA labs. Police responded to numerous 911 calls concerning a rampaging article of clothing. When police initially arrived on the scene, the saw the underwear rampaging down the street, destroying many cars and buildings. The Police ordered the underwear to halt, then opened fire when it did not. The briefs seemed unharmed by the small-arms fire and retaliated, using its insidious telekinetic powers to kill 3 officers and seriously wound 8 others.

The Police Commissioner ordered the remaining officers to withdraw to a safe distance and maintain surveillance on the briefs, while the Governor was alerted and the National Guard was deployed. Arriving from a nearby Army National Guard station, soldiers used shoulder-fired missiles and artillery to contain the underwear and prevent it from advancing further. The tense stand-off continued for several hours, while the briefs and National Guardsmen traded fire.

Eventually, the National Guard deployed an experimental Electromagnetic Pulse device, developed by the DoD, and used it to disrupt the underwear's complex brain waves. While the underwear was confused and disoriented, F/A-18 Super Hornets deployed from a nearby Marine base were able to neutralize the underwear with incendiary warheads.

"This is a great tragedy all around," said a scientist who specializes in Spontaneous Development of Sentience. "Our previous experiences with SDS had been limited to small quantities of Potato Salad. We could have learned so much from this underwear. But the tragedy is ten-fold worse for the underwear itself. It had its whole life ahead of it and could have accomplished anything it wanted to, had it used its powers for good."

Poincaré Solved.

Sorry if that's old news to anyone. The new news is this:
Highest Honor in Mathematics Is Refused - New York Times


Dr. Grigory Perelman

Maybe he couldn't accept the award because he could not, heh heh, add to the number of prize winners! Hehe! Haha! HaHAHAHA! MUHAHAHAHA! HAHAHA! AHAHAHAHA!

(Sorry, Half-Life 2 joke.)

Tom called it first.

Jack Sparrow is... Guybrush!

Conspiracy Theory of the Day/Week/Month.
I wonder if this guy's ever called Michael Medved?

This is actually from an e-mail that someone I was providing technical help for sent me two years ago. I helped him with a problem setting up [the company I work for]'s software, and he was so grateful he sent me what he called "a present" and said I'd made a friend. A little backstory is that he was doing some graduate work on safety or something, and wanted to do a safety analysis on one of the original Space Shuttle designs.

I got a good laugh then, but didn't think to post it on the blog until recently when he sent me an invitation for some WAYN network or something. At the time, I thought he was your average 30-year-old graduate student with no knowledge of the real world, but his WAYN profile says he's 54. So he went from disillusioned college student to creepy old guy in my mind.


Anyways, the e-mail.
<<
Like the lion and the mouse, I am grateful for this, so when you are done read the rest of this email. I am trying to help get the US out of a mess, so want everyone to know what I am telling you in this email. Be careful though. (some people will believe you and some don't want to believe you.) d.r.

Just realize the shuttle is a deathtrap as it was designed without safety, but with cost in mind. All the safety went out the window when von Braun resigned in 1972 saying "America is not committed to a manned space program", and he designed the saturn v which took us to the moon. After 1969, america needed money for the war in nam and the war on poverty for lbj, so nixon and lbj cut the nasa budgets. von braun died in 1977, first shuttle launched in '81. the rest is history but there is the Columbia Accident Investigation Board report on the net at caib.us, just search for "caib" and take the second hit from google.com and you'll find six volumes of what is wrong with the shuttle. If you just read the introduction and the first chapter you will be appalled.

In any case, I promised you a present. You have helped me very much, so I am giving you the name of a man who used to make thirty grand a month as an israeli intelligence officer, Victor Ostrovsky. I have read his two books which you can find at amazon.com, but which are summarized at his site at: users.cyberone.com.au/myers/ostrovsky.html called: How Mossad Got America to Bomb Libya and Fight Iraq There is another one on the marines who died in beirut from a car bomb, taken from his first book. The mossad used him as a scapegoat in an op he tried to warn them was a trick but they did not listen and wanted him dead. So he escaped to canada where his father had been born, so he had a canadian passport, and he got his first book published there which was a bestseller in 1990, By Way of Deception (we shall wage war) the motto for the mossad. He says that it was mossad who gave us the false baloney about iraq and saddam going nuclear which was all a lie to get us to get rid of iraq's big army after the iran-iraq war, during which the mossad sold weapons to IRAN! through germany and killed anyone who got in its way, including Premier of Schleswig_Holstein, Uwe Barschel, after they ruined him politically.

Also find, in his second book, The Other Side of Deception how and why they helped overthrow Gorbachev which caused the collapse of the soviet union which reagan got credit for, but the cia did not even know was going to collapse.

By the way, NASA built a lot of solid fuel rockets with the air force for the cold war, for the ICBM's, von braun designed the V2 for germany in WW2, and was the head of one of our space centers back in the 1960s-early 1970s. The solid fuel is ammonium perchlorate and powdered aluminum, both of which are explosive. powdered aluminum is used in fireworks and gun powder, flash powder, and by the way, the shuttle's framework was mostly aluminum alloy which melted in the columbia disaster, in the left wing which had a hole knocked in it from a piece of 28 inch long, 3.5 inch wide bolt which held the solid fuel booster to the external tank, which was blasted off, and the bolt-catcher was never designed to take 100% of the blast, so it failed and radar shows a piece of a bolt hitting the wing which hole in the wing let in the 2900 degree heat of re-entry, at 18times the speed of sound, which melted the aluminum after it got to 1000 degrees. So the wing disintegrated, then the whole shuttle disintegrated. Remains of all of the crew have been found. I really liked the captain, a guy named william, who was born in 1961. He was a friendly looking guy, wide-eyed and bright. And he did not deserve to die that way.

So I am taking this personally, along with the other americans who have died in iraq. By the way, mossad agitated between kuwait and iraq to start the first war over there, and killed a kuwaiti political cartoonist and made it look like iraq did it. israel has enough nuclear weapons to destroy the entire mideast, at dimona where they build them. Mordechai Vanunu was put in solitary confinement for 18 years, for revealing that to the brits and the russians. kidnapped from england he was tried and put in prison where he still is. mossad wanted their enemies to know they had the nukes, but did not want the vanunu around to answer questions so it could not be verified, but he had photos he gave the old ussr, and they were published in britain in the paper before he was kidnapped, shipped in a box back to israel. etc. And they have chemical/biological weapons they test on palestinians who come in illegally to israel, at Nes Zionyya, a place so secret they erase it from all maps, and even from satellite photos they manipulate. But what you have to know, is there is a secret group in the mossad, called AL, which means Top or Upper, which is operates illegally in the US, out of toronto or montreal canada, which collects sex or drug scandals on US congressmen, or their aides, to blackmail them into supporting israel.

mossad tried to stop ostrovsky from publishing, tried to kill him in canada, but he got away because he knew ottawa better and was trained by mossad to escape anyone tailing him.

AL is so secret that even ordinary mossad operatives do not know they exist. AL infiltrates the cocktail circuit Washington, DC and mossad also gets info easily from NATO countries.

Ostrovsky says as long as US supports israel there will be no peace in the mideast, and mossad does not want peace, but war or unconditional surrender.

It thinks if there is peace israel will lose its weapons and then the arabs will attack. Has aided extremist muslim fundamentalists in afghanistan and the hamas, etc, to make it impossible to have peace. Has killed israelis who tried to start peace process. Another site by ostrovsky has Rabin as killed by internal security allowing a fanatical zionist to shoot him because he was bringing peace to the region.

Mossad thinks that if your country was not burning jews during world war 2 then it was helping those who were. And Iknow from jewish sources in Austin, that head of US immigration during WW2 was anti-semitic so did not allow jews to escape from holocaust, and jewish immigration was restricted by congress during the 1920s due to 3 million polish jews wanting to come to america, and the redscare after 1917.
>>

I like how he's able to shift from NASA/Shuttle to Iraq and to Israel in the same paragraph.

Now granted, there are a number of problems with the Shuttle program (Steve Kinney had some interesting stories from Susan's dad, and one of the users from GE in Cincinatti that I trained had done the safety analysis on the release clamps and had first-hand experience). But in my understanding, the main problem with the Columbia disaster was that of beauracracy and politics, not design (other than the bolt catchers). Using liquid-fueled boosters would not have prevented either the Challenger or Columbia disasters, and an ejectable crew compartment wouldn't have saved either crew.

IAU Committee Renames Planets

PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC - Close on the heels of their recent decision, a committee of the Internation Astronomical Union has voted unanimously to rename all the planets in the solar system.

In what is already being called a highly controversial and surprising move, the committee of IAU astronomers voted unanimously to rename the planets after locations from science fiction novels and movies.

The proposal, which still requires approval from the IAU as a whole, would rename the planets as follows.

Mercury: Crematoria
Venus: Perelandra
Earth: Coruscant
Mars: Ceti Alpha V
Ceres: Rura Penthe
Jupiter: Bespin
Saturn: Altair IV
Uranus: Vogsphere
Neptune: Terminus
Pluto: Miranda
Charon: Z'ha'dum
2003 UB313: Milliways

Critics of the proposal complain that not only are the changes superfluous, but would cost schools millions of dollars to purchase new textbooks and charts.

Proponents of the change say that scientific progress should not be hindered by complaints of the cost. "Plus," said one scientist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, "I've always wanted to live on Coruscant, and now I finally can!"

Methinks "Our Universe" needs to be updated.

Astronomers relegate 'dwarf' Pluto to the second division of planets - World - Times Online

Ceres I can deal with. It'll take some adjustment to get used to thinking of Charon as a planet and not a moon. But they need to come up with a better name for 2003 UB313. I refuse to accept a planet named after that gosh-awful, cheesy TV show.

Did you know that?

If you were to combine 1 kg of antimatter with 1 kg of matter, the resulting explosion would release 1.8x10¹⁷ joules.
(E=mc²
E=2kg * (300,000,000 m/sec)²
E=2 * 9 x 10¹⁶ kg*m²/sec²
E=1.8 x 10¹⁷ joules)

This is approximately equivalent to a 43 megaton bomb.
(1 megaton = 4.184 x 10¹⁵ joules)

For comparison, the Hiroshima bomb was in the range of 10-15 kilotons. The largest bomb ever detonated, the Tsara bomb, built by the Soviet Union, weighed in at an impressive 50 megatons. The Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona was caused by a meteor that hit with an approximate force of 2.5 megatons.

This 1kg bomb would produce a fireball approximately 4 km in diameter. The blast would level an urban area within 6.5 km and moderately damage buildings as far as 50 km, and the thermal radiation would cause 3rd degree burns to people within 40 km and 1st degree burns to people within 55 km.

So... who wants to help me build an antimatter production and storage facility?

Yes, I was bored today. Can you tell?

Now you know.

/Random

Amazing! See NASA's incredible new discovery here.



St. Michael's 1996 Graduating Class' 10th Anniversary Reunion (with crashers from the 1997 and 1999 classes).



Honey! Look what I got at the store!



The Murloc didn't get this, but I think Mr. Pickles might enjoy it. Scroll down once it loads to view image.

Which Programming Language are You?

San Diego International Comic-Con, 2006

So Comic-Con was three weeks ago. About time I post pictures, in no particular order.


San Diego Convetion Center. You will never find a more dorky hive of geeks and nerdity. We must be cautious. You never know when a Star Wars vs. Star Trek fight may break out.


Yowza. She's hot.


"The Con" is all about anime, after all. This was at the Gentle Giant Studios booth. They had all sorts of models and statues from various things, but a lot of cartoony Star Wars figures.


That's it. I've had it with these ------------ snakes on this ------------ plane!


I don't give a damn! I am guaranteeing that Snakes on a Plane will win best movie next year. Does not matter what else is coming out. New James Bond? No snakes in there. Ocean's 13? Where the snakes at? Shrek the third? Green, but not a snake. No movie shall triumph over Snakes on Plane, unless I happen to feel like making a movie called Mo' ------ Snakes on Mo' ------ Planes.

Mace L. Windu was at the convention. They had a panel on Snakes on a Plane. I saw the previous panel (the Star Wars fan panel with Steve Sansweet). I couldn't convince anybody to stick around, so we left. The Star Wars panel was cool. They talked about the Original Star Wars on DVD (they handed out "Han Shoots First" buttons), Celebration IV (CIV) in LA, the new Indy game and the new Star Wars game, as well as the two new Star Wars TV shows (one CG, one live action) and the two Star Wars floats in the 2007 Rose Parade. Cool stuff.


"When you marooned me on that god forsaken spit of land, you forgot one very important thing, mate: I'm Captain Jack Sparrow."


Yowza. More hotness. Only thing hotter than a Pirate Chick would be a Pirate Chick in Space.


More Pirates. Of course, the only thing cooler than Pirates is Pirates in Space.


More Captain Jack Sparrow. Of course the only thing cooler than Captain Jack Sparrow would be Captain Jack Sparrow in space.


Or Aragorn. In space.


This is at the Sideshow Collectibles booth. They had all sorts of cool stuff.


Don't tell it your name is John Connors.


"Two for 'That-Place-You-Go-To-When-You-Die-If-You've-Been-Bad-Boy'"


Oh, the comic book version of Mystique.

While we're on the topic of PVP, the artist, Scott Kurtz, was there with the Image Comics booth. He was not at the booth when I stopped by, but I did get to meet his lovely wife. I ended up buying a Captain Amazing comic book, to support one of my favorite web cartoonists. It wasn't until after the Con I found out they had Skull the Troll Plushies. And I really want one too.

(You may remember me mentioning Kurtz in my BlizzCon article.)




The R2-D2 and C-3PO were just statues. Sorry, no fans there were that devoted.


This Slave Leia is the famous Christie, who recommended the seamstress where Rie got our BlizzCon costumes made. She is one of the better Slave Leias.


Yes, Dave. I know you disapprove of the costume. Your objections are noted.


She's actually very cheerful and friendly. Our friend Brit the Photographer/Military Nut/Disney Stalker claims to be friends with her and wants to start dating her. However, I think he's making the whole thing up, as I've never seen both Brit and Christie in the same place at the same time. Were it not for these pictures, I would say that Christie is a mere figment of his imagination the way Liz does not actually exist and was made up by The Blue Fox.


While we're on the topic of Leia....


Luke, we are your fathers.


Will & Fetts. The new sit-com about life as a gay bounty hunter.


Of course, Rie dressed up for the first day we were there. Made us late (as usual).


Of course, it wouldn't be Comic-Con without legions of Stormtroopers/Clonetroopers. There were a lot. I mean, a lot. Dozens, if not hundreds.


They tend to personalize their costumes.


Hey, who let them in? Cool, though, both types of Klingons.


He's not a real doctor, but he played a holographic one on TV.


Not much to say here.


For all you Stargate fans. Try to control yourself Mom. They were handing out Stargate key chains at the Sci-Fi booth. I didn't get one. :(

We did come up with a cool idea for a rotary phone, where the dial is the Stargate.


Full size Hot Wheel.


Because two engines are better than one.


Good grief, it's like they put my entire childhood in one room.


Cool. Only way to make him cooler would be to build him out of Legos.


Oh, wait. nm. In space maybe?


Of course, the other cool thing about Comic-Con is it's in San Diego, which is soooo much cooler a city than LA. The only way San Diego could be cooler is if it were in space.


Back of an F-111 on board the USS Midway at the San Diego Naval Museum.


F-14 Tomcat.


F/A-18 Hornet.

During one night, Blackhawk helicopters from the Naval base (actually, they were probably Seahawks) kepy buzzing the convention center. I couldn't see them but the afformentioned Brit could tell what they were by sound. I told you he's a military nut.


Boat!

Of course, one of the coolest things about Comic-Con is the T-shirts. You will never find a more dorky hive of geeky T-shirts. Next year, I think I'm going to devote a day to just taking pictures of the different T-shirts.

Alien Impregnation!!!

Anytime I see something screech across a room and latch onto someone’s neck, and the guy screams and tries to get it off, I have to laugh, because what is that thing?
- Jack Handey, In Humor/Jack Handey

Real funny for you to say Jack, but then your wife isn’t going to die when some monster comes bursting out of her chest to sing “Hello my baby, hello my darling, hello my rag time gall”





As you can see from the photographic evidence, Ileana Adams, is said to only have until March 12th until the little alien bursts forth in a quest to destroy humanity. Ileana, is said to be host to the alien for about 9 weeks this Thursday, August 10th, 2006. Ileana and Tom have yet to name the terror to be unleashed, nor do they know its sex or its hive role (worker, drone, etc). Among the few details known about the supposed Xenomorph, it’s temper can be quelled with Beef Bologna and Kraft American Cheese on potato bread with Miracle Whip.

Updates of the apocalyptic horror will be posted as they are known.