Abstruse Goose

Over the past weekend, I discovered the webcomic Abstruse Goose. It's totally awesome. Here are some of my favorites:




I think that I heard a sermon like this once, except that the speaker arrived at the same conclusion through a somewhat different route.


A long time ago, I realized that people didn't change after junior high; they just became a bit more discreet.


I've thought the same thing about environmentalism for years.

Star Wars Street Art

Interbent has a great collection of Star Wars-themed street art.

Link via Neatorama

Super Emo Friends

Artist J. Salvador lampoons Emo culture with this summation of the laments of superheroes.

Link via Popped Culture | Artist Website

If R2D2 Had Been Built by Hewlett Packard

From the webcomic Abstruse Goose, via Gizmodo

Pop Culture Wedding Invitation

Image: Maureen Alarid

Maureen Alarid of Off Beat Bride created this invitation for her wedding, featuring Admiral Ackbar's prudent advice about marriage. Alarid writes:

The wording [on the back] is my favorite part. It reads: '[We] request the honor of your presence as two geeks save the princess, resist the dark side and pledge their lives (extra, or otherwise) to each other.' And we snuck a Hyrulian crest in there too!

Link via Geekologie

Star Wars Facebook Updates

Yeah, but they're teddy bears that eat people, so don't feel too bad. Brian Murphy of CollegeHumor put together five Facebook update pages as though they had been written by Star Wars characters.

Link via Hell in a Handbasket

Che Trooper

In a juxtaposition of totalitarian imagery, artist Derek Fridman creates busts of Che Guevara and stormtroopers from Star Wars.

Link via Nerdcore

Time Traveler Essentials

Image: TopatoCo

In an episode of The Twilight Zone, a businessman travels back in time and buys land where he knows oil was later discovered. But he's unable to capitalize on the purchase because the drilling equipment necessary to extract it hasn't been invented yet. Although he knows how to use the equipment, he doesn't have the ability to built it.

Such is a common complaint of time travelers: they know how to use modern technology, but have no idea how to duplicate it in a world that knows nothing of such marvels. So be prepared by keeping this image in your pocket at all times. It'll tell you the basic information you'll need to partially reproduce modern sanitation, medicine, measurement, and chemistry.

What would you add to the poster?

Larger Image and Product Page via Nerdist

Thanksgiving Bingo

Via Ace of Spades

Being Flexible

From the webcomic Calamities of Nature.

Video Footage of Man Marrying Video Game Character

(YouTube Link)

When I first heard this story of a Japanese man marrying a fictional girl in a video game, I thought "How sad. He's so disconnected from reality that he can't have a normal relationship -- and there's no one his his life who can jerk him out of his fantasy."

But then Alex Santoso pointed out: "A wife with an on/off switch! I don’t know if this is crazy or genius...."

Well, there's one advantage, for sure.

Your Kid, Your Responsibility, Our Ears

Amy Alkon relates the story of a woman and her screaming 2-year-old son, who were thrown off a Southwest airlines flight (before takeoff) for causing so much noise. Southwest eventually apologized and gave her a free flight voucher. Alkon expresses my own opinion:

I know, I know -- because I am not a parent I cannot possibly understand how hard it is to keep a child from acting out. Actually, that probably has more to do with the way I was raised -- by parents I describe as loving fascists. As a child, I was convinced that I could flap my arms and fly, but the idea that I could ever be loud in a public place that wasn't a playground simply did not exist for me [...] It really does come down to this: Your right to bring your screaming child on a plane ends where the rest of our ears begin.

There have been times when I've had to leave a public place because my daughter was out of control. It's inconvenient, but my screaming kid is my problem, and other people shouldn't have to put up with her noise.

A parent has a duty to deal with his/her misbehaving child. No one else does.

HT: Instapundit

10 Modern Measurements

John Madden of GeekDad relates the story of how the 'smoot' became a measurement of distance:

Way back in 1958, the MIT chapter of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity used pledge Oliver R. Smoot to measure the Harvard Bridge in Massachusetts, coining the smoot as a unit of measurement in the process – one smoot equaling five feet, seven inches. Smoot (the man) lay down on the bridge, his position was marked, and he moved on (or was moved on – eventually he so tired from the movement that his frat brothers carried him), until the bridge was established as being 364.4 smoots, plus or minus an ear, in length. Appropriately, Smoot would later become chairman of the American National Standards Institute.

Madden then passes on ten more recent forms of measurement, including some of his own devising. These include the milliwheaton (number of Twitter followers), the Warhol (fame duration), the milihelen (beauty sufficient to launch one ship) and the Emmet (power). The latter comes from the movie Back to the Future:

1 Emmet = 1.21 Gigawatts, or the amount of power required to operated the flux capacitor in a modified DeLorean DMC-12. GeekDad note – when describing the Emmet, it’s pronounced ‘Jigga’ watt. There was briefly some debate as to whether this should be called a ‘lloyd’ or a docbrown’, But for simplicity (and to honour the character rather than the actor - though don’t get me wrong, Christopher Lloyd rocks) I’ve gone for ‘Emmet’.

What measurements would you suggest be added to our lexicon?

Stained Glass d20

John F. Talarico of the podcast show Bloodthirsty Vegetarians created two 20-sided dice out of stained glass and black and copper patina. The orange one is called "Fire." There are more detailed images in the flickr photostream.

Image via d20 Blog | Flickr Stream | Official Website

Visualizing the Rise and Decline of Four Empires

(Video Link)

Pedro M. Cruz, a graduate student in information visualization and interaction design, created this time-elapsed representation of the rise and decline of the British, French, Portuguese, and Spanish overseas empires from 1800 to 2000. He writes:

The data refers to the evolution of the top 4 maritime empires of the XIX and XX centuries by extent. I chose the maritime empires because of their more abrupt and obtuse evolution as the visual emphasis is on their decline. The first idea to represent a territory independence was a mitosis like split — it’s harder to implement than it looks. Each shape tends to retain an area that’s directly proportional to the extent of the occupied territory on a specific year. The datasource is mostly our beloved wikipedia. The split of a territory is often the result of an extent process and it had to be visualized on a specific year. So I chose to pick the dates where it was perceived a de facto independence (e.g. the most of independence declarations prior to the new state’s recognition). Dominions of an empire, were considered part of that empire and thus not independent.

via Hit & Run

A Song About the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual

“Monster Manual” is a song by the band Mixel Pixel. It tells the tale of a role-player’s struggle with a particularly brutal Dungeon Master, who is throwing just about every creature in the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual at him.

via Popped Culture

Wanna Come Back To My Cave?

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Question of the Day

What is it?
	hero sandwich
	submarine sandwich
	grinder
	hoagie
	poor boy
pollcode.com free polls

Congratulations to Jeff the Baptist

...on bagging his first deer.

When I Grow Up, I Want To Be A...

Career aspirations that I had at various points of my childhood:

1. Submarine captain
2. Fashion designer
3. Zookeeper
4. Explorer

How about you?

How Blogging Has Changed

This post was written in July, but it's still quite relevant. Laura McKenna has been blogging for six years and reflects on what changes she's seen in the medium during that time. In various updates to the post, many big-name bloggers leave their thoughts on the subject.

McKenna notes the decline of linking and blogrolling. I think that this is because of the staggering size of blogosphere. It's no longer a community in any sense, and only very specific niches can maintain a sense of community, where people know each other beyond blog name in the header.

four years ago, when I taught classes on blogging, I said "Blogging is a communitarian activity. Don't just write stuff and expect people to link to you unless you link to them. Don't expect people to read you unless you read them. Don't expect people to blogroll you unless you blogroll them."

To an extent, this is true. And it's especially true for new bloggers who have yet to develop an audience. But eventually, the monkeysphere grows too large and interesting content matters more than relationships.

I state this with some hesitation, however, because the blogosphere is so large that it's impossible to get a grasp of it from the tiny inkling of what I can encounter (example: until I found this post, I had never heard of Laura McKenna, even though several big-name bloggers refer to her as an important voice).

Which is why I make this further hypothesis with even more hesitation: blogging has become more of a commercial enterprise. Not everyone can blog effectively, even fairly talented print freelance writers. When newspapers and magazines began giving their print journalists blogs, they couldn't compete with independent bloggers because the print journalists weren't able to write effectively in the new medium. When they began hiring people who could blog to blog -- and began making money off the effort through ad revenues -- established media companies began to thrive in the medium.

Which is why, I suspect, there has been a decline in hat tipping. At least, that is my assessment from a very limited perspective. In a more niche communitarian model (such as the Methoblogosphere), not hat tipping will hurt a blogger's reputation. In a commercial model, hat tipping hurts your bottom line by suggesting that readers visit your competitors.

But, as I've said in caveats, it's hard to know with any certainty because the medium has become ubiquitous. The plural of anecdote is not data, and there's a need for comprehensive quantitative research to make any solid assertions about blogospheric evolution.

In your time reading blogs or actively blogging, what changes have you noticed?

HT: Grow A Brain

What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs

HT: JohnnyCat

The Utility of Twitter

David Harsanyi has an article in Reason about Twitter. He's not a fan:

Pressed by personal, professional, and cultural forces, I sporadically deploy short missives for fear of becoming one of those cantankerous technophobes who is too dense to recognize the miracle of letting "followers" know he hates raisins or that he loved the finale of Mad Men.

Now not only am I expected to transmit this minutiae mere seconds after I think it but also some 20-year-old in California has decreed that I must do it within the brevity of 140 characters. This need for conciseness, in fact, induces normally articulate friends of mine to write in Prince lyrics—recklessly using "2" and "4" and "U" as words[...]

Now, admittedly, Twitter can be entertaining on occasion, as it turns out that 140 characters offers a great chance to be misunderstood—and an even greater chance one will expose his inner troglodyte.

In these past few weeks alone, a clueless Colorado state Sen. Dave Schultheis tweeted, "Don't for a second, think Obama wants what is best for U.S. He is flying the U.S. Plane right into the ground at full speed. Let's Roll." NFL running back Larry Johnson took time out from his busy day of stinking at his job to ridicule his coach and question the heterosexuality (crudely) of a critical tweeter. He lost his job.

So you see, though only a reported 11 percent of Twitter's users are actually teenagers, nearly everyone who participates may end up sounding like one.

So far, the only use for Twitter that I have found is for delivering one-liner comedy, such as Favrd. Otherwise, I'm not sure what it has to offer. How about you?

Recipe: Spotted Dick

Spotted dick is an English dessert which consists of raisins and other sweetened filling material wrapped around a roll of dough and then steamed.

Ingredients:
6 oz raisins
3 oz brown sugar
1 tablespoon of lemon juice
8 oz flour
4 oz vegetable shortening
2 oz milk

Mix the raisins, sugar, and lemon juice together and set aside. Then blend the flour, milk, and shortening into a ball of dough. Smooth it out into a square on a lightly floured surface. Spread the filling on the dough and roll from one end.

Wrap the roll in a cloth, tie and both ends, and steam for two hours.

It's quite tasty.

Remembering Wendy Sunderlin

Wendy Sunderlin, had she lived, would have been 32. But she is, as her memorial page describes "forever 19".

It was a slightly chilly November day in 1996 on the campus of Ohio Wesleyan University. I went into a my history class in Elliot Hall with Dr. Bill Walker. He informed us that a classmate, Wendy Sunderlin, had committed suicide.

He wept, long and loudly.

It was a small university -- just 2,000 students. So Wendy's death had an impact. But I didn't know her, even though she was in my class.

Still, every now and then, I think about Wendy.

Her friends mourned for a time, but the grief passed, and they moved on. We all moved on. And that's good, but it's also sad, in a way. For it seems that we die twice: when our heart stops beating and then later, when we are forgotten -- when no one thinks of us anymore.

And it is sad that this girl, who could be alive today, could be forgotten to all but her family.

I think about Wendy, and I think about her parents. About the hole in their hearts that continues to hurt, long after people have stopped bringing over casseroles and asking (and really mean it) "How are you doing?"

There comes a point when your grief can no longer be public; when you're expected to move on, suck it up, and not lean on others or express your agony.

It must be very hard for Wendy's parents to continue, to remain silent when they still hurt but are no longer allowed to grieve.

I heard stories about Wendy's sorority sisters. Sometimes dark stories about the revenge they sought against the man they blamed for her suicide. But I can also imagine that they supported Wendy's parents, expressing compassion and empathy to them, for a time.

For a time.

And then, gradually they moved on, finished school, went their separate ways, and moved forward with their own hopes and dreams. But Wendy and her parents did not. They were stuck in time, forever 19; in a time, a place, and a life that her mother refers to simply as "after November 12th." And her parents may have wondered if people were forgetting who Wendy was; if, over time, Wendy would cease to be even a memory.

No, Mr. and Mrs. Sunderlin. She won't be forgotten.

The New Star Wars Gangsta Rap

ALL NEW! Star Wars Gangsta Rap: Chronicles

Pretty cute -- especially the bit about R2D2. HT: Topless Robot

Here's the old Star Wars gangsta rap from a few years ago.

Question of the Day

If you could only have one type of beer for the rest of your life, what would it be?

Philosophy in Science Fiction

Kenny Pearce is developing a bibliography of works of science fiction that are particularly noteworthy for expressing a philosophical worldview or premise. He presents several categories, such as Mind, Solipsism, and Sex and Gender. Some of the stories that he lists are available online, like Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question" -- a confrontation with entropy.

Kenny asks readers for suggestions. What would you add to the list?

The Moral Vacuum in Objectivism

In one of Reason magazine's many retrospectives on Ayn Rand, Shikha Dalmia neatly summarizes a major problem in Objectivist ethics:

This has profound and unfortunate political consequences. On the practical level, it makes it difficult to build a strong and growing anti-government movement based solely on Rand's philosophy, because the older cohort of her followers is falling off on a regular basis. On the theoretical level, Rand's ideas offer no real possibility of developing robust civil society responses to address the needs of those down on their luck. It is difficult to imagine a Randian qua Randian, say, volunteering in a soup kitchen to feed the hungry, or even founding the Fraternal Order of Fellow Randians to provide free health coverage and housing to jobless and homeless Randians. Since misfortune and distress are a normal part of the human condition, a philosophy that offers no positive, private solutions to deal with them will just have a harder time making the case against government intervention stick.

Rand held that charity was not only not morally obligatory, but was immoral because it placed the needs of others above those of the self. I've always found this to be an inadequate ethical premise, if for only pragmatic reasons.

Eventually, each one of us will find ourselves flat on our back and helpless, like a flipped-over turtle. We'll be down, crushed, and broken, and we'll need someone to pick us up -- with no expectation of remuneration. The Objectivist would simply pass by without stopping. And a society wholly comprised of such individuals will degrade over time because members would not get assistance when they need it. Some altruism is necessary.

Of course, a society in which there existed a general social contract -- you pick me up when I'm down, and vice versa -- could be said to espouse selfishness as the fundamental motive.

A Resume Modeled After a Dungeons & Dragons Character Sheet

Sean McNally, a 15th-level artist and 7th-level animator, created a resume (click for larger image) that looks like a character sheet from Dungeons & Dragons. He claims to have a Base Art Bonus of +11, of which I am skeptical. But maybe a little exaggeration is expected on a resume.

via Geekologie

Harpallica -- Metallica Performed on Harps

Harptallica is a duo consisting of harpists Ashley Lancz Toman and Mollie Marcuson. They primarily perform Metallica covers, as this rendition of "Master of Puppets":




via Urlesque

Question of the Day

Should convicted felons, having completed their sentences, have the right to keep and bear arms? Why or why not?

UPDATE: James Rummel kindly links and shares his own thoughts on the subject.

Pop Culture Alignment

This chart shows the moral alignments of nine pop culture characters using the Dungeons & Dragons alignment system. Rorschach as Chaotic Good? I think that Chaotic Neutral is more likely. And Neutral Good for John Locke at best.

Top row, left to right: John Locke of Lost, Dwight from Sin City, Rorschach of Watchmen.
Middle row: Indiana Jones, Niko Bellic of Grand Theft Auto 4, Tyler Durden of Fight Club.
Bottom row: Darth Vader, Anton Chigurh of No Country for Old Men, and the Joker.

I'm not sure who's responsible for this chart -- it's been floating around the net. I found it via Jeremy Barker's Popped Culture.

Way back in my gaming days, I often thought of Palladium's alignment system, which accepted selfishness as a factor in human behavior, instead of a pure good-evil duality.

A couple of years ago, I would have thought of myself as Neutral Good. Right now, I'm moving firmly in the direction of Chaotic Neutral. Appropriately, Fight Club to be a movie that spoke to me in a powerful way.

What's your alignment?

On the Value of the Ph.D

(YouTube Link)
Professional skeptic James Randi speaks at CalTech about the value (or lack thereof) of the doctorate, much to the amusement of the students in attendance.

Randi is noted for his standing offer a $1 million award to anyone who can demonstrate a psychic ability under laboratory conditions.

Things People Say But Don't Really Mean

How Superman Defeated the Ku Klux Klan

Mark Juddery of Mental Floss brings us a fascinating story from American history. After World War II, the Ku Klux Klan was thriving. Writer Stetson Kennedy infiltrated the organization in the hopes of writing an exposé about its activities and beliefs. Unable to find a outlet willing to publish the story, Stetson approached the producers of the Superman radio show:

In a 16-episode series titled “Clan of the Fiery Cross,” the writers pitted the Man of Steel against the men in white hoods. As the storyline progressed, the shows exposed many of the KKK’s most guarded secrets. By revealing everything from code words to rituals, the program completely stripped the Klan of its mystique. Within two weeks of the broadcast, KKK recruitment was down to zero. And by 1948, people were showing up to Klan rallies just to mock them.

via io9

SpatSolver

(YouTube Link)

SpatSolver is a handy gadget for resolving marital arguments. Just tap on it to activate.

HT: Bits & Pieces