Ads

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Fat kid quote.

"Bacon. Mmmm... That's my favorite. Um ... chicken , steak, sausage," the boy told the camera.
article


Wow. I love bacon. But I wouldn't let my love of bacon make me die. I think a medium value of bacon over a long period of time is much better than a high value of bacon over a short period of time.

Stock market fall

The best way to describe yesterday is with a picture.


OUCH.

I got burned also, I was hoping to turn a quick buck on some earnings reports. I bought into the market yesterday, it actually jumped over my stop.

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Units Discussion

By popular demand, I will give an example of the units problem.

In propulsion, in the United States, they supposedly use almost every unit known to man. We were told that metric units were the devil.

Imagine: ft-lbs, ft-lbs/hr, ft-lbs/s, hp, hp*hr, hp*s, BTU, BTU/s, BTU/hr, ft/s, mph, mps, ft/hr, slug, slugs/second, lbf, lbm, lbm/hr, lbm/s, inches, feet, ft/s, ft/s^2, in/hr, in/hr^2, fathoms, rod/s, and furlongs
in ONE equation. (well, not the last three)

Squirrel attack and Link

First link: Story about white squirrel.

Story:

So I was walking to Chaos one morning, and I stopped under a tree waiting to cross the street.

...

Waiting. The light just turned green.

...

Waiting...

Look both ways



"wtf!?"

A squirrel had fallen out of the tree that I was standing under. He hit the concrete about 1ft from me with a sickening sound. Scared the crap out of me. He was ok, cuz he ran away very quickly. I don't think he was expecting it, it sounded like he belly flopped onto the concrete.

I remember it like it was last week.

Monday, February 19, 2007

And the money shows cracks...

Follow the money.

Article

Basically, Iran missed a payment to Russia on the new reactor, so Russia has stopped work.

Iran switched from paying in dollars to paying in Euros. (side note: if neither country can pay in their own currency, then both should be rethinking their economy more than weapons...) They also only paid 25% in January. Is Tehran feeling the pinch? Saudi Arabia seems intent on keeping the price of oil around $60 a barrel.

They also ran into some trouble with their centrifuges and seem to be wasting a lot of money and weapons on "manoeuvres" (war games or test firings) designed to show off their military power.

The whole thing could be the result of switching banks, but that seems very weird to me. Anytime you are talking about pieces of billions of dollars, the bank isn't going to say, "Damn it, teller A didn't put in the numbers right". They are going to bend over backwards.

Monday, February 12, 2007

Chalk and Dry Erase

I was originally going to write this post about happenings in my Chaos class, but the story got better so I am adding to it.

My chaos class has a clock. And this clock you see, it is very annoying. The second hand continuously marches. CONTINUOUSLY. No satisfying tic, toc, counting down time in a discrete manner. Oh no. It has to just swoosh through time.

When I first noticed it, the light was also flickering. I HATE flickering lights. So I had this smooth clock hand, strobed by the flashing light, so it was almost tic-toc-ing.

resolution? Don't look at the clock, and pay attention in class.

On to the meat!

We had a grad student teach the class last Thursday. He was using the chalk, and like most people, he rubbed out a mistake with his hand. That was his first mistake. His second mistake occurred when he then rubbed his chin with the same hand. Instant yellow goatee. The guy went through about half the class with a yellow chalk goatee. It was almost as funny as my Math professor that would get chalk on his hand, and stick it in his pocket. Every class he would recoat the rim of his pocket with chalk.

So, I was chuckling at the dude most of the class. Fast forward to Friday afternoon. I got called up to the board for "Open Mic Fridays" in propulsion. I had to help Mike figure out some unit conversion (btw, only one unit per dimension! we don't need 4 units for length, and 3 for mass!) I did the exact same thing. I was erasing some stuff with my finger, and got my hands coated in the black dust from dry erase boards. I then proceeded to rub my chin in thought as I stared at the board.

I finally realized that I was smearing black dust all over my face.

Luckily, I hadn't shaved, or else you would have been able to tell. I don't think anyone noticed, but I felt pretty dumb, doing the same thing I had said I would never do when watching the guest lecturer.

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Minimum Wage: Who would have thought?

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0210biz-teenwork0210.html

Hmmmm, who would have thought?!

Payroll budgets have risen so much that they have cut hours, instituted hiring freezes, and layed off employees.

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Food Shortage in Venezuela

So, Venezuela is relearning the lesson that they could have learned from history.

Meat, sugar scarce in Venezuela stores

There is no excuse for a government to make this mistake. You can not regulate prices to make them lower than would be profitable. If the inflation is that bad, maybe you should look at other reasons why. A government that only responds to crisis and does not take steps to avoid them is in trouble.

Looks like socialism and dictatorship aren't working out too well. Who would have thought?

The same thing is happening in Mexico, with many Mexicans unable to buy tortillas. The government tried to regulate prices, but that just means that no one will sell any because they won't make any profits. Interesting about the tortillas, is that our attempt to use green-er fuels has caused poor Mexicans to go hungry. The push for corn to ethanol drove up the prices of corn.

If you are going to try and regulate the price of a good, to at least have a chance you have to subsidize the good so that people continue to profit. The thing about subsidizing it is that you have to get the money from somewhere, guess where?! the people! You might as well just let prices rise, because in the end the people pay for it. If you just let the price rise, you don't incur the cost of having the money go through the government.

Not just Iranian Schools....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY-vXw7XKzg&eurl=

but Britain also
The books that they teach out of are the ones that they use to teach in Saudi Arabia.

I can not believe that lady. She personally could not say that she didn't believe in those remarks. What a bunch of bullshit! That school should be shutdown and rules to catch this sort of thing should be in place. The books should be removed. I could not teach out of Playboy at a school. BUT, using her logic, its "just for the articles". The students obviously wouldn't turn the page and check out the centerfold.

Interesting thought, are these types of schools an argument against unregulated public schools?
Can I teach my kids whatever I want? Or do the kids deserve to have the choice to learn about the world? If I taught my kids to kill anyone that wasn't me, is that legal?

Saturday, February 03, 2007

Iranian Schools

http://today.reuters.com/News/CrisesArticle.aspx?storyId=L30464650

All I can say is... wow. I mean, we talk about how the schools are brainwashing the kids to prepare them for battle and etc, but to read passages...

People need to realize what sort of enemy that we are fighting. The longer we wait, the more people exist that are indoctrinated.

Friday, February 02, 2007

God, I hope so (SPRING!)

Ground Hog Day

I hope that he is right! I can handle some spring heading my way.

Web 2.0

I hate web 2.0. Many sites use those concepts to make my overall experience on the internet slower. To log into blogger, I clicked a button to get the google login. It took about 10 seconds to get the form to login.

The web page didn't refresh! OH! I am so happy!

NOT.

Don't get me started on the new yahoo mail interface. They are trying to make it like an email application. Except that it takes a lot of bandwidth and is very slow. You also can not do what you want with it, like, actually open up tabs. It has tabs within the window itself!

Comcast has had horrible! service lately, all over the city of Atlanta. The large bandwidth pages a lot of times don't even have the time to load in such an environment. The internet used to be designed so that you could use it with a intermittent connection. Not anymore! We should not assume that you have the internet connected at all times, and that you need to keep a "live link" to the user. That paradigm is important for some things, but definitely not email or blog posting.

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Surge

So, I was thinking about the "surge" in the shower today. I realized that everyone is only focusing on one thing. The number of troops. We haven't really had time to even move the "surge" into Iraq. Things are already changing though. I think that the change in rules of engagement, and standing up to Iranian influence in Iraq will have, and is having, a bigger effect on the outcome than the number of troops. The number of troops is important, but now that we are going after every group, and really going after them (or so it seems), things are changing.

Since the announcement, we have had hundreds of dead enemies, 2-3 leadership positions in the enemy ranks that need filing, and prevented an attack on a religious holiday against a ... surprisingly well armed group. (surprisingly means I think that they had some help... )

Examples:
Stops travel to Iran and Syria

blah, my internet went down. This post is going to be incomplete.

CATS - WILL LAUGH

http://www.flightpad.net/cats.htm

COULD NOT STOP LAUGHING