Monthly Archives: May 2011

(WARNING: No naked chicks below.)

– Boxing: Andre Ward looked sharp against a tough opponent to look sharp against in Arthur Abraham on Saturday night. Ward won the Super Six semifinal by unanimous decision and awaits the winner of Carl Froch versus Glen Johnson on June 4th. (For those that don’t know, the Super Six is the super middleweight tournament that started up in 2009. Now you know.)

– Mythbusters: You can blow your own sail. Also, the sounds silencers make in movies can sometimes be the real thing, same with rattlesnake sounds. Explosions and punches, not so much.

– The future will not be televised: It will be paperized? Probably not what we’ll call it. Anyway, they are making some progress with electronic paper (again, since scientists can be lazy, it’ll be called e-paper) that should allow for your milk carton to tell you exactly when your milk is spoiled. You know, instead of the “hey, does this smell bad to you” test.  (Discovery)

– USS Ballin’: UNC will take on MSU on the deck of the USS Yet-to-be-named. I’ve heard of boxing matches and Cher concerts on aircraft carriers, but not college basketball.  (Wired)

– Space: I could explain what’s going on here, but that would be boring:  (New Scientist)

– Vampires cure strokes: Not really, but the saliva from a vampire bat can thin the blood clot caused by strokes.  (Geekologie)

– So now what? Offshore wind farms are causing “stress” to fish. Nature: we give up. Oil pollutes, coal pollutes and kills people digging for it in mines, getting natural gas out of shale taints our water, nuclear power scares the shit out of everyone, solar power is inefficient, and now wind farms kill birds and annoy fish. Awesome.  (New Scientist)

– Lab salt: Coming on your Lay’s potato chips in 2012. Pepsi (owner of Lay’s) has designed “15 micron salt”, which is saltier than salt, and that means less sodium, same saltiness.  (Gizmodo)

– How to cook unborn babies: Boing Boing has a few links to articles on how to best cook (and crack) eggs. (I know they aren’t fertilized so they really aren’t unborn babies… but still, think about it.)  (Boing Boing)

– Nanoflowers may return sight to blind: I have no way to summarize this in one sentence:

These flowers are not roses, tulips or columbines. They will be nanoflowers seeded from nano-sized particles of metals that grow, or self assemble, in a natural process — diffusion limited aggregation. They will be fractals that mimic and communicate efficiently with neurons.

…

Eye surgeons would implant these fractal devices within the eyes of blind patients, providing interface circuitry that would collect light captured by the retina and guide it with almost 100 percent efficiency to neurons for relay to the optic nerve to process vision.

How fucking futuristic is that shit? Nanotechnology is so many years from being a part of our regular lives, but damn. One day…  (Institute of Nanotechnology)

– Higher education bubble: I have no idea what a college collapse would equate to for us. We saw what a real estate bubble could do (for those that just read HuffPost, the “real estate bubble” is what you may refer to as the “financial collapse”, but you couldn’t have had the financial collapse without the real estate bubble bursting so, oh fuck it, like you care). Here’s the increase of price tuition compared to the prices of everything else. Notice the “crash” of housing prices:

Hopefully it would just mean we’d stop putting such a stupid emphasis on college education, the price of which is summed up nicely by rapper J. Cole in “Home for the Holidays” (yes, that’s as white of a sentence you’ll see about rap):

Hey if you’re listening,

We got into school, but who will pay our tuition man?

These niggas crazy,

one year cost bout the same as a Mercedes,

four years cost a white crib and a baby.

Would love to hear what other people think would happen.  (Carpe Diem – for the chart, not the rap song)

– Remade Swiss Army knife: I missed this back in February when Core77 posted it, but Gizmodo just got around to it this week anyway. This knife is made from “surplus military horseshoe nails melted down and recast as knife scales, packaged in reclaimed original coated paper box that held the nails.” And it looks like this:  (Gizmodo)

– “Orgasms unlock altered consciousness”: Well, duh. A reporter got herself off in an MRI all in the name of science.  (New Scientist)

– The Marks’ Financial Update:

• MFL – Mark Lee keeps his rally going as he rose to $13.42, up from April’s close of $13. Just a nice, steady rise from Mr. Lee. Much like his penis.
• MDH – Harter also kept rising since his April close of $2.85, closing at $3.04 on May 13th. This is a good jump for Harter since his recent bottom of $2.63 on April 27th.
• MAB – The last update for Bunk as a single man, but investors are liking the announced partnership. Bunk has gone from $12.59 on April 29th to $13.24 on May 13th. We’ll see if investors follow the old adage of “buy on the rumor, sell on the news”.

– Hiatus: I will not be posting next week as I’ll be down in Florida for Bunk’s wedding. I promise I will not be a drunken fool for the toast nor, if I have to hold it, will I lose the ring. I will not be a drunken fool for the toast nor, if I have to hold it, will I lose the ring. I will not…

– Boxing: Manny Pacquiao looked pedestrian in shutting out Shane Mosley Saturday night. Nothing worse than expecting a bad fight, paying for the fight, and then getting a bad fight. Oh well.

– Starry night: Nick Risinger did a lot of traveling and took a lot of photographs to come up with an interactive picture of the Milky Way. Here’s a still shot:

But that’s tiny and doesn’t do the rest of the picture, which is the largest ever “true color” survey of the sky, justice. Here is Nick’s site for you to get a better idea of how awesome this is.  (Boing Boing)

– Turning Japanese: Want to make out with someone miles away? Try the kiss transmitter:  (Yo! Japan)

– Onions! A lot of people have been blaming those damn oil speculators for the rise in oil and gasoline prices this year. What you don’t hear them complaining about are the onion speculators. That’s because there are none, thanks to good ol’ Gerald Ford. So, if we think speculators are creating big swings in the price of oil, then clearly no speculators in a market would make for a nice stable line. Let’s go to the data:  (Carpe Diem)

– It does what it says it does: This toilet paper is supposedly from China:  (Kornfeld)

– 3D street art: I know I’ve posted a picture like this before, but they are always cool to me. 49 more of them here.  (Hongkiat)

– The future: PopSci has 12 predictions, some they don’t necessarily agree with, for technology by the year 2020. One prediction they do agree with is that most computer screens (this includes smartphones and tablets) will be paper thin OLED. Too early to gloat and shit, but I did say that’s where we’re going. Now they just need to work on stretchable screens and I’ll have my “take it anywhere” television.  (The World’s Best Ever)

– I have no idea what this means: Some scientists have made cloaking materials that make objects invisible in the terahertz range.  (Institute of Nanotechnology)

– Happy belated Mother’s day: Gabby Quinteros wished you all a happy Mother’s day:  (Gabby’s Twitter feed)

(WARNING: No naked chicks below.)

– Boxing: Manny Pacquiao fights Shane Mosley this Saturday on Showtime PPV. I’d laugh so hard if Shane won. Maybe that’s the only way to get Mayweather to come out of retirement. If he sees Manny lose to Mosley, he can come back and beat on Mosley’s old ass again, or finally step into the ring with what he’d see as an inferior Manny.

– Rainbow-colored shit: Literally:  (Discovery)

(It starts at ~1:10.)

– Apps, and I don’t mean poppers: According to Gizmodo, here’s every iPhone app, Android app, and iPad app you must own. The only application listed for all three is HBO Go, which lets you watch movies and all episodes of their TV shows for free (if you’re already a subscriber).  (Gizmodo)

– They are watching you: So your iPhone records every cell phone tower it has ever pinged. A little creepy. You can go to this site to download their free software that displays that data for you. All cool-like.  (Core77)

– “Super-civilizations”: This guy’s theory sounds so sci-fi stonerish to me. Or a lot like actual science-fiction books I’ve read. Anyway, since the universe has been around for billions upon billions of years (allegedly, if you’re religious), there’s a chance there are civilizations that have evolved for billions of years. And since they are so evolved, they would obviously harness blackholes for their power source. Here’s a cool space picture that comes with the article:

I don’t even know what that is.

And really, who doesn’t laugh at this line: “Having mastered control over space-time, a super-civilization might want to fabricate their own black holes for a variety of tasks: waste disposal, starship propulsion, hyper-computing, maybe even time travel.” If I started to say that to you in making a point, how far before you stopped me?  (Discovery)

– Is grass-fed beef a performance enhancer? Possibly. At least athletes think so.  (CNBC)

– Don’t want to offend the squirrel bloc: Please stop using “wildlife” and start using “free-living”, as calling animals “wild” insults them. For reals. It was in a published academic journal. Animals shouldn’t be called pets either, and us humans are the “human carers” of our “companion animals”. Eat a dick, academics. This is why no one wants to listen to you.  (Wooten)

– Walk faster: We walk slower today than when they originally planned crosswalk signs. 3.5 feet of ground per second today versus 4 feet of ground per second in the 1950s. Fucking fatties.  (Carpe Diem)

– Sticky chair: This is a chair made out of candy:  (Core77)

– The eye: Bunk knows the guy that drew these eyes:  (Bunk)

– Jell-O: Anytime I think of Jell-O, I think of Bill Cosby. Anytime I think of Bill Cosby, I think of Eddie Murphy impersonating Bill Cosby telling Eddie that he “could NOT… say fuck… in front of people.” And then I think of Eddie recalling that Richard Pryor told him that “next time that motherfucker calls, tell him I said to have a Coke, and a smile, and shut the fuck up.” And here’s some Jell-O dropping in slow motion:  (Gizmodo)

– The Marks Financial Update:

• MDH – Harter was at his highest on 4/20. (Ugh, that’d be funnier if this were high school.) He did hit a two-week high of $2.92 on April 20th, then came down to $2.63 on the 27th. He finished the month at an easy $2.85.
• MFL – The turnaround that started on April 13th continued, as Mark Lee finish April at $13. Coincidence?? Yes. Get excited for the summer, Mr. Lee. Investors are.
• MAB – Not sure what to make of Bunk’s chart, as he just kinda moved along. He closed out April at $12.59, down from his April 15th close of $12.62.

For those wondering which Mark has the best performance year-to-date… take a guess… it’s Harter:

Bunk in last place, Mark Lee in second.

– bin Laden’s dead: “Osama bin Laden? Why don’t they call him Osama bin HIDING.” Thanks, Dave Chappelle. That’s all I thought about today. “I got warrants!“