From Kevin at Smallest Minority: street legal bumper cars.
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March 11th, 2010The Gipper Versus The One
March 9th, 2010Ronald Reagan explains exactly what Obama is doing, and Obama explains exactly what he’s doing. Amazingly, the explanations match up perfectly. Reagan has Obama nailed.
Via Riehl World View.
It’s the Endarkenment, folks, writ plain, writ loud and proud. Obama’s accomplishing exactly what he and his mentors intended.
“Trepanazine” Needs a PDR Writeup, Stat
March 9th, 2010So, your friendly neighborhood Ambulance Driver describes a malady for which “220 grains of Trepanazine” is the recommended treatment regimen.
You arrive on the scene for the unconscious male lying in the roadway, cruise slowly past the police cars blocking traffic, and without even getting out of your ambulance, you roll down the window and bark, “Leon! Get your ignorant ass outta the road! Someone runs over you, you might damage a perfectly good car!”
And not only does Leon obediently cease being an impediment to traffic flow, he also hobbles meekly to your ambulance and climbs aboard. You should have seen the face of the cops who called us.
Which is indeed educational, but WTF is “Trepanazine”? A Google search turns up no dosing info, no link to the manufacturer, no….Oh, wait.
“Trepanazine” as in “trepanning“, right? Drilling a hole in the skull to let out the evil spirits, or “remove the stone of madness”?
Slight risk of lead poisoning with the dosage I believe AD refers to.
And I note that the 230 grain dose for close-range injection is far more common than 220 grains.
“Honey, Does This Saddle Make My Ass Look Fat?”
March 9th, 2010Of course, any male who saw Disney’s Fantasia in his adolescence has a bit of a centaur filly fetish.
It may be a sign of my geekiness, however, that even as a besotted teenager, I had a bit of literal “refrigerator logic”. To wit, “How do they eat?”
Today, with the Webz and all, I had the opportunity to work out some rough calculations.
To start with, A 1000 pound horse requires about 15,000 Calories a day, that’s big-C Calories. Horse digestive tracts are very inefficient, and require about 25 pounds a day of mixed fodder, that is, forage (hay) and concentrate (oats, molasses, corn, and the like). Obviously, there’s no way for a human mouth, with human teeth, to chew through 25 pounds a day of horse feed.
And let’s not talk about grazing with a flat face.
Of course, the far more efficient human digestive tract can eat much more concentrated foods, like meat. Maybe that helps. Accordingly, the following numbers are based on scaled-up human internals.
A pound of sugar is 1760 Calories. That means that a centaur eating pure sugar needs about 8-1/2 pounds of sugar every single goddamn day.
A pound of fried bacon is 2448 Calories; a carnivorous centaur would want about 6 pounds a day. (I choose bacon because a] it’s tasty and b] it’s a nice mix of protein and fat.)
Then there’s fiber. A human on a 2000 C/day diet needs about 25 g/day. Converting to pounds and scaling up to 15,000 C/day yields about 1/2 lb/day of pure, indigestible fiber. “I buy ‘er books and buy ‘er books and she just eats the cov… uhp, nope, just swallowed the whole damn thing. ”
Hah, hah, nobody eats books! So let’s look into apples…. Holy, uh, crap. There’s about 0.7 g of fiber in an apple. Converting to pounds, that’s in excess of 320 apples a day to keep the vet away.
But at least you now have an excellent excuse to wash down your meals with, yes:
…A bacon beer mug, which will help a little with the 8 or 10 gallons a day of water a lightly worked horse will need. Or, hey, splurge, and have a candied bacon ice cream float for dessert.
Of course, no body eats exclusively any one kind of food.
A Big Mac is about 540 Calories. Now, a Big Mac contributes to nutrition in several different ways, but going by calories alone, my hooved belooved would not be a cheap date: she’d need about 27 a day, at a cost of around a hundred bucks.
If she wants fries with that, she’d need about 13 Big Mac meals with medium fries and Coke. That’s a bit of a savings, only $80.
The dietary math is a little easier if your centaur chassis has a pony form-factor. Multiply everything by about 0.7, but remember, equines can only carry about a fifth of their weight. I’m too heavy for a 1000-lb horse; only a very lean young man, weighing at most 125 lbs, could ride his 700 lb pony girlfriend.
[update]
And speaking of ponies, note that Disney’s fillies are not only very small ponies, but lack the pot belly evident on real ponies. They have human digestive systems, not equine, and indeed, they later appear at a human-style banquet — although not with centaur-sized portions.
I was referred to Celesta, a photo-morphed image by “The Phantom Inker” of a lady centaur. Note how her human torso seems way too small for the horse body. She would be better proportioned as a pony. I may have to fool around with that.
[/update]
Then there’s breathing. The breath-to-breath measurement is called tidal volume.
For humans, tidal volume is about 0.5 liters.
For horses? About 6.0 liters, twelve times what a human needs. That means nostrils, and a windpipe, about four times the diameter of a human’s. And those are resting values.
So, conclusion?
No. Hell, no. You can’t eat like a horse, or even breath like a horse, through a human mouth.
Update:
Heh. I’m pointed to this episode of The Wotch. The young lady is a centaur who hides her equine body with an invisibility spell; we, of course, are not affected.
Music Video of the Year
March 6th, 2010I seriously doubt anyone will top OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass” Rube Goldberg Machine.
My comments posted over at Twenty-Sided:
A very big Thank You! to those evil capitalists at State Farm. Good neighbors, indeed.
It pays to download the HD version of this and single step through certain scenes. It’s hard to see how some of the stuff works in the regular YouTube window.
Some of my favorite bits:
At 00:23, when the big finger turns on the iPod playing the song, the speaker kicking out the ball bearing is reminiscent of another famous Rube Goldberg machine: Honda’s “Cog”. [01:39 Here.] That one had to be filmed in two takes, because it was too big to fit in the available space.
The sequence starting at 1:40, right after the piano falls (you can see scraps of wood from previous drops) and the shopping cart of film cans rolls down the ramp: a plastic saint ascends into heaven, which triggers the coming of an actual morning, portrayed by a yellow umbrella (umbrellas are a recurring motif), flying birds, and sprouting flowers, synched of course with the “when the morning comes” chorus.
Then, at 1:54, after the balls roll down the pin board (used in the classic demo of a “random” process generating a Gaussian curve): A small streamer flies over the flag-waving mousetraps to trigger the big red ball. I suspect the streamer had more predictable timing than the mousetrap chain.
The water machine at 2:15: there’s a little shiny weight swinging back and forth in time with the piano dinging
Forensics digression:
There’s a video out there claiming that the opening curtain covers a continuity break. A light can be seen through the curtain when it’s closed, but when it opens, the actual light is in a different place.Stepping through frame by frame in HD, though, you can see that the first light is actually a specular reflection off the very shiny fabric. For two or three frames, after the light turns on, both the reflection and the actual light behind the curtain can be seen simultaneously.
Everybody sees the wrecked TVs behind the rolling globe — but at 2:36 you can see three or four reserve TVs, bound and gagged for sacrifice.
The car at 3:06 is the Make:Way race car from Make Magazine.
At 3:18, you can just see some of the gang graffiti that the crew painted over when they occupied the building. They had to rewire the place, too: the gang had stolen all the copper.
Finally, the big finale, after the flying dummy triggers the rain of umbrellas and the flock of paper airplanes at 3:20. (Just before the airplanes, you can see somebody standing up in the balcony.) The chorus is echoed by a string of painted boards unfolding like that little magic trick where the wooden cards, bound by cloth tape, seem to fall through themselves. The song ends in that wonderful crash starting from when the falling kitchen stove triggers the silent falling balloons.
At 3:32, off to the left, you can see painted silhouettes from a previous take.
Remarkable.
There’s another real time video for this song, done with a marching band and…but that would be a spoiler. The thing I love about that one is the kids beating on the drum at the end of the take.
When You’re A Jet
March 6th, 2010Photo record of the building of a model SU-27 Sukhoi jet.
There’s a lot of them. No one or two does this justice; just go there and start scrolling down.
Real Hope and Change From…Where? New Jersey?
March 3rd, 2010Am I getting this right?
Kevin Baker at the Smallest Minority points to this amazing video of the new Governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, lecturing 200 mayors on what he’s going to do to insure that he’s a one term governor: mostly whack state spending, with an axe, to get out of the way of private business.
[Original link is generic, and will probably go away after the next episode airs. I'm hoping this embed will stay up.]
It’s twenty five minutes of inspiration. If Christie can make it work in Joisy, without ending up dead in a dumpster somewhere, it can work anywhere.
Obamaoids, watch out. Christie’s just another scout. There’s more like him, and worse, moving through the forest, ready to ambush you on your road to Commieville.
[Link note: Updated the link to what appears to be a permant archive. The embed is not currently working. 2010/03/08]
[Update: Killed the autostart. Sorry about that.]
Quote of the Day: The Goreacle
March 2nd, 2010Over at Protein Wisdom, Darleen Click takes apart Al Gore’s op-ed in the Fish Wrap of Record, the New York Times, in which Gore inadvertently tells the truth, and pulls aside the progressive curtain. It’s a must read.
Click highlights this immortal line as a pull quote:
From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.
[Correct Darleen's name; see comments.]
Smart People
February 28th, 2010Increasingly, I’m coming across articles on the fundamental contradictions of the liberal view. And increasingly, the root of the liberal view is that smart people are liberals, and liberals are smart people, and that smart, liberal people know better than everyone else how we all should live our lives.
The problem is, “smart” and “liberal” aren’t synonyms, and worse, far worse, “smart” doesn’t trump “local” and “personal”. A dumb man swinging a hammer on the scene very often trumps a smart man answering an email a thousand miles away, because the local guy knows intimately exactly what his situation is.
M.K. Freeberg, in The House of Eratosthenes, draws attention to yet another thread in the same hangman’s noose:
What we have here, I think, is a confusion between wisdom and irony. If you listen to these people prattle on for a good long time, you’ll notice something rather shocking: The “smart” decision, with regard to each and every question that comes up, is never, ever, ever ever ever the simple one.
Global warming is more dangerous than radical Islamic terrorism.
Queen Latifah is sexier than Beyonce Knowles.
To keep from going broke, we’ve got to spend more money.
A real man is in touch with his feelings and isn’t afraid to cry.
If there is a problem, the best thing to do is to make sure no one can ever make a profit producing a solution to it.
If innocent people could be harmed by a terrorist act, and it could be prevented by bringing physical pain to an evil man, decent people will make sure this doesn’t happen and let the innocent people go ahead and die.
If you’re a baby and you’ve crossed that Magical Vaginal Finish Line you’ve got rights to womb-to-tomb health care, a living wage whether you’re competent or not, a vote in all our elections whether you have common sense or not — but if you’re not there yet, then you don’t even exist as a person. It’s a matter of inches, and that’s just the way it is!
This is the part that scares the hell out of me. These people are not capable of recognizing or responding to the situation in which the simple, common sense answer is the right one. Right, as in — go ahead, put on a magical thinking cap and boost your IQ by a thousand points, you’ll still decide it the same way. This doesn’t work for them, because in their world you have to show off your smarts by deciding the opposite.
Therefore, when this happens they will consistently demand the choice that is made by these smart people, is the wrong one.
Read the whole thing. Freeberg is a very smart guy; he just doesn’t assume his smart is better than yours.
Don’t Listen To Ayn Rand; She Worshipped A Killer.
February 28th, 2010Instead, wear T-Shirts celebrating kind, decent friends of the people like Che, Marx, Lenin, and even Stalin.
Not a “text book sociopath” like Ayn Rand.
There’s something deeply unsettling about living in a country where millions of people froth at the mouth at the idea of giving health care to the tens of millions of Americans who don’t have it, or who take pleasure at the thought of privatizing and slashing bedrock social programs like Social Security or Medicare. It might not be as hard to stomach if other Western countries also had a large, vocal chunk of the population who thought like this, but the US is seemingly the only place where right-wing elites can openly share their distaste for the working poor. Where do they find their philosophical justification for this kind of attitude?
It turns out, you can trace much of this thinking back to Ayn Rand, a popular cult-philosopher who exerts a huge influence over much of the right-wing and libertarian crowd, but whose influence is only starting to spread out of the US.
One reason why most countries don’t find the time to embrace her thinking is that Ayn Rand is a textbook sociopath. Literally a sociopath: Ayn Rand, in her notebooks, worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used this killer as an early model for the type of “ideal man” that Rand promoted in her more famous books — ideas which were later picked up on and put into play by major right-wing figures of the past half decade, including the key architects of America’s most recent economic catastrophe — former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and SEC Commissioner Chris Cox — along with other notable right-wing Republicans such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.
The loudest of all the Republicans, right-wing attack-dog pundits and the Teabagger mobs fighting to kill health care reform and eviscerate “entitlement programs” increasingly hold up Ayn Rand as their guru. Sales of her books have soared in the past couple of years; one poll ranked “Atlas Shrugged” as the second most influential book of the 20th century, after The Bible.
Does the author of this piece, Mark Ames, wear T-shirts emblazoned with Che, Marx, Lenin, or Stalin? Beats the heck out of me. But it’s clear from his article that far worse, he embraces their ideas, and thus the mass murder of millions.
Even if Rand burned candles to William Edward Hickman, the man she’s accused of admiring, her ideas have caused nowhere near the slaughter that Marx and his worshippers committed, and continue to commit to this day.