Chatter
tfk | June 20, 2007It's been a while since I did one of these:
"Crush On You" by Bruce Springsteen from the album The River (1980, 3:11).
"Carrot Juice Is Murder" by The Arrogant Worms from the album Gift Wrapped, The Best of the Arrogant Worms (2002, 3:29).
"Might" by Modest Mouse from the album This is a Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About (1997, 1:31).
"Fooled Again (I Don't Like It)" by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers from the album Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers (1976, 3:51).
"Brain Damage" by Pink Floyd from the album Dark Side Of The Moon (1973, 3:50).
"Vegetable" by Radiohead…
tfk | June 20, 2007I love Threadless, I love Seed magazine, and apparently, Seed loves Threadless. We're all a big happy family.
Threadless, for those of you out of the loop, is a website where users can post t-shirt designs, other users can rate the designs, and they print and sell the top-rated shirts. Our overlords at the Seed Global Command Center sponsored a design competition with Threadless for shirts based on the Seed motto: "Science is culture."
Congratulations to the designer, Budi Satria Kwan, and to anyone who buys a shirt.
tfk | June 19, 2007The computer I usually blog from is having technical issues, so TfK is going to be intermittent for a little while while I sort things out.
tfk | June 17, 2007J.D. started blogging 5 years ago yesterday. Go wish him many happy returns.
For those keeping track, TfK will turn three years old on August 4, and will celebrate our anniversary at Scienceblogs on August 20.
j7uy5 | June 13, 2007I
used to read computer magazines a lot. I would chuckle when I
picked up a copy of PC Magazine, or whatever, and it had, it large red
type: XXX releases the Fastest Desktop Ever!!!
Next month someone else would be making the Fastest
Laptop Ever!!!
What, you think they are going to start making them slower?
Now:
Bush
job rating hits record
low in NBC/WSJ poll
Wed Jun 13, 2007 9:51PM EDT
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush's approval
rating has dropped to 29 percent in an NBC News/Wall Street Journal
poll released on Wednesday, his lowest mark ever in that survey, which…
j7uy5 | June 13, 2007
HT to
href="http://markmaynard.com/index.php/2007/06/06/theo_jansen">Mr.
Maynard for pointing this out. (He also pointed out
the Corner
Brewery,
which is an even more remarkable invention.)
The creator is
rel="tag">Theo Jansen:
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Theo Jansen, artist,
studied science at the
University of Delft Holland. The first seven years being a artist he
just made paintings. Then he starts a project with a big flying saucer,
which could really fly. It flew over the town of Delft in 1980 and
brought the people in the street and the police in commotion.…
tfk | June 9, 2007Peg Britton has been blogging about Kansas for 5 years. She estimates that she's the oldest daily blogger in blogtopia (as skippy calls it), and I believe her blog would be the longest-running political blog in Kansas (by six days).
tfk | June 5, 2007Just so I'm clear, what role does the Spanish Civil War play in Pan's Labyrinth? Is there a deep allegorical link, or could an American version set in Bloody Kansas have worked equally well? A woman and her daughter have married Quantrill or some other border ruffian, but their farmhands are secretly Free Staters. The girl finds fairies in a corn maze. The Wizard of Oz meets Cold Mountain.
To be clear, the issue here is whether there are subtleties of the Spanish Civil War, its cultural relevance in modern Spain, and the importance of aspects of the Spanish Civil War that non-Spaniards…
goodmath | June 5, 2007So today's my thirteenth wedding anniversary. And what did my lovely wife buy me as a present?
Yes, a Klein bottle coffee mug.
Does she know me well, or what?
j7uy5 | June 4, 2007
These kinds of images were making the rounds a couple of years ago.
Kind
of cute. But now, at least a few people in Vermont are taking
it seriously:
href="http://www.mytelus.com/ncp_news/article.en.do?pn=oddities&articleID=2690258">Vermont
secessionist movement gains support
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
MONTPELIER,
Vt. (AP) - Disillusioned by what they call an empire about to fall, a
small cadre of writers and academics in Vermont want the state to
secede from the United States.
The secessionists hope to put the question before citizens in March.
Eventually, they want to…
tfk | June 4, 2007The only actual submission to this week's carnival of Kansas blogging comes from emaw, who has found more creepy crawlies – a spider he has some interesting ideas about:
Given the radon levels in our basement, this quite possibly could be the kind of radio active spider that gave Spiderman his powers. How cool would it be to go to work the next day fit and trim and casting webs all over the joint.
Visit emaw's to find out whether it worked, and click through here to find out what else is going on in Kansas.
Elsewhere, ...JustCara considers the soon-to-be female police officer in Kansas City.…
tfk | June 3, 2007Mousie Cat points out that you can finally vote for the Eight Wonders of Kansas. It may be cheap promotional tourist nonsense, and you have to give them your email address, but it's still a nice look at what makes Kansas unique. I don't know why L. L. Dyche's diorama in KU's Natural History Museum didn't make the cut, but the other selections are pretty good.
My votes:
Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve & the Flint Hills: An astounding part of the natural and cultural heritage of Kansas and the nation.
Monument Rocks and Castle Rock: To my mind, less culturally significant, but an…
omnibrain | May 26, 2007Here's what PsyBlog has to say about Omni Brain:
Best humorous (but still scientific) psychology blog
The danger with mixing science and humour is slipping into the 'geek trap' where clever people try to be too clever. Omni Brain easily avoids this. Funky finger pictures on this post about sexual orientation and finger length.
Just to let you guys know... the only way we avoid being too clever is by not actually being very clever ;) haha...
Thanks for the props!
Check out the rest of their psychology blog reviews (which are great!) here.
Oh, and the beanie baby Freud doesn't have anything…
tfk | May 24, 2007Via Peg Britton, we learn that this Sunday you too could enjoy the Annual Testicle Festival at Al's Bar and Grill in Wilson, KS (right off I-70):
For $20.00 you can have all you want to eat from the buffet of Rocky Mountain oysters, fried fish, salads, French fries, beer and music. It starts at noon and goes until they run out of food. Now…that’s something to do in Wilson.
Does Al have the balls to pull this off, or is he just nuts? Speculate in the comments.
goodmath | May 22, 2007 My father died on sunday.
To some degree, I'm still in shock. Even though we knew it was coming, when something like this happens, no amount of preparation really helps. He'd been sick with an antibiotic resistant infection since November, and on thursday, refused to let them give him a feeding tube. So we really knew, almost to the day, when he was going to die. And yet, when it finally happened, it was still a shock.
We buried him yesterday. I didn't speak at the funeral, because I couldn't. Every time I try to talk about him, my voice just shuts down. But my fingers don't. So if you'll…
tfk | May 21, 2007Apologies for the long absence, I've had some personal issues and a period of a lot of work to contend with. Back to regular bloggery shortly.
omnibrain | May 11, 2007Hi Everyone,
I'm off for my three day drive to San Francisco this morning so probably won't be posting much in the next week or so. I'm planning on a trip to the Exploratorium sometime next week so if anyone would like to meet up with us feel free to shoot me an email! (steve@omnibrain.org).