Sunday, May 31, 2009

Manhattanhenge 5.31.09!

Well, I'm back from 42nd street and 2nd. Tonight was Manhattanhenge, the magical day twice a year when the sun sets on the median of the Manhattan cross-streets, illuminating the length of the street with golden light.

Last year, we only had about a dozen people. But check out the turnout this year!

A police car stopped by to see what the commotion was about, and they ended up taking pictures along with everyone else. A lot of people simply showed up because they saw the crowd, and they walked away with a new tidbit of trivia about New York. Hooray!

Here are some pictures by yours truly:





See you all June 11!

Thursday, May 28, 2009

The Onion is Funny

The title of this post is a tautology. Here's is the proof:

Oh, No! It's Making Well-Reasoned Arguments Backed With Facts! Run!


I…I think it's finally over. Our reactionary emotional response seems to have stopped it dead in its tracks. If I'm right, all we have to do now is smugly reiterate our half-formed thesis and—oh, no! For the love of God, no! It's thoughtfully mulling things over!

Run! Run! It's making reasonable, fact-based arguments!

Quickly! Hide behind self-righteousness! The ad hominem rejoinders—ready the ad hominem rejoinders! Watch out! Dodge the issue at hand! Question its character and keep moving haphazardly from one flawed point to the next!

All together now! Put every bit of secondhand conjecture into it you've got!

Goddamn it, nothing's working! It's trapped us in our own unsubstantiated claims! We need to switch fundamentally unsound tactics. Hurry, throw up the straw man! Look, I think it's going for it. C'mon…c'mon…yes, it's going for it! Now hit it with the thing that one guy told us once while it's distracted by our ludicrous rationalizations!

Gah! It's calmly and evenhandedly deflecting everything we're throwing at it. Our deductive fallacies are only making it stronger! Wait…what on earth is it doing now? Oh, no, it has sources! My God, it's defending itself with ironclad sources! Someone stop the citing! Please, please stop the citing!

The language is impenetrable! For all that is good and holy, backpedal with all your might!

Where are the children? Someone overprotect the children! They cannot be exposed to this kind of illuminative reasoning. Their young, open minds are much too vulnerable to independent thought. We have to shield them behind our unshakeable intolerance for critical thinking.

What?!? Noooooooooo! Richard! For the love of God, it's convinced Richard!

No time for tears now. Richard's mind has been changed forever. But we mustn't let it weaken our resolve. Mark my words, our ignorance will hold, no matter the cost. Now, more than ever, we have to keep floundering ahead with blind faith in our increasingly fallacious worldview.

For Richard's sake.

What's that? Now it's making an appeal to reason? Never! Do you hear me, you eloquent, well-read behemoth? Never! We'll die before we recognize what we secretly know to be true! The cognitive dissonance only makes our denial stronger!

We have but one hope left: passive-aggressive slights disguised as impersonal discourse.† Okay, everyone, careful now…careful…if this is going to work, we have to arrogantly assume that it won't be smart enough to catch on to our attempt to salvage some feeling of superiority and—oh, God, it's calling us out! Quick, avoid eye contact and stammer an apology! Tell it we were just joking! Tell it we were joking!

Arrgh! Our pride! Oh, Lord, our pride! It burns!

All is lost. We don't stand a chance against its relentless onslaught of exhaustive research and immaculate rhetoric. We may as well lie down and—Christ, how it pains me to say it—admit that it's right. My friends, I would like to take these last few moments of stubborn close-mindedness to say that it's been an honor to dig myself into this hole with you.

Unless…wait, of course! Why didn't we think of it before? Volume! Sheer volume! It's so simple. Quickly now, we don't have much time! Don't let it get a word in edgewise! Derisively cut it off mid-sentence! Now, launch the sophomoric personal attacks! Louder, yes, that's it, louder! Be repetitive, juvenile, and obstinate! It's working! It's working!

We've done it! It's walking away and shaking its head in disgust! Huzzah! Finally—defeated with a single three-minute volley of irrelevant, off-topic shouting!

Ironic, really, isn't it?

Friday, May 22, 2009

Fun with Kings

"Kings", after only one season, is being canceled. The complex plot of the corrupt world behind a absolute monarchy actually makes for a great narrative. I'v eben watching the season on Hulu, and I've caught two things so far:

1. Kings runs Windows



Apparently, the press uses the Windows Logon screen and Windows Media Player 10 to take notes on the escalation of war with Gath.

2. Gossip website!
In Episode 3, the princess clicks on a link to 200meters.com and sees Captain Shepherd kissing outside a nightclub.

As it turns out, someone at NBC actually registered 200meters.com, and set it up for Kings. That's actually rather cool.

EDIT: But did I mention that she opens 200meters.com in INTERNET EXPLORER 7? No wonder there are so many problems!

Atheists and Kiva

You know what warms my heart? This warms my heart.



Atheists are FIRST TO DONATE TO KIVA.ORG.

Thursday, May 21, 2009

wimp.com Download Bookmarklets

More fun with bookmarklets! This one lets you download videos (.flv format) from wimp.com.

wimp.com download

Yay!

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Wolfram|Alpha: Hope you liked your soul.

Yesterday Skynet 0.1 Wolfram|Alpha went online. I have been trying out different searches, and it's very cool. It was cool, at least, until I saw this:



WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE

Friday, May 8, 2009

Interesting combination

emo + hemophilia = emophilia?

I'm terrible.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Sweet, a Proxy -- Bookmarklet!

I wanted one, so here is a bookmarklet which will automatically change your links to redirecting through 6a.nl:

6a.nl proxy!

You're welcome, world. I also made a program which gets around my school's idiotic nanny system, but since it won't work for 99.9% of nannified users, don't bother to use it.

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Sweet, a Proxy!

My current favorite proxy: "*.6a.nl/*". Basically, take the URL:

www.google.com/voice

and add the ".6a.nl" after the .com suffix but before the /whatever subdomains:

www.google.com.6a.nl/voice

Hooray!

Monday, May 4, 2009

Come Explore the Future with Me!

I recently read that our Local Group of galaxies is moving towards the Virgo Supercluster at 375 miles per second. That's very fast. After doing the calculations, I came to the conclusion that due to time dilation, every day on earth we move 0.7 seconds in the future relative to the rest of the universe. That means in the 4.6 billion years the earth has been around, it has catapulted itself a whopping 37283 years into the future.

That's not all. Universal Time was defined by the International Meridian Conference on October 20, 1884 as GMT. However, in the 45,487 days between October 20, 1884 and now, the earth has jumped 8 hours, 50 minutes, and 53 seconds into the future ahead of actual universal time! Therefore, at time of posting (10:30 PM EST) UT should actually be Monday, May 4, 2009 at 6:39:07 PM.

Sunday, May 3, 2009

Viva la Evolution! Update

Hooray! Although I originally lost it, I have been reunited with the .fla file behind my Flash program! In a fit of joy, I added a population size slider, which lets you choose between 4, 16, 36, 64, and 100 creatures. (Two points if you can figure out why I used those numbers. One point if you can figure out what the smallest population size follow 100 I could use.)

Also, I have now uploaded the .fla file for all to enjoy! Go forth and spread the good word! (But still, please, lemme know what you're gonna do with it.)

Friday, May 1, 2009

A little swine humor

First, a note: Texas refused "porkbarrel" spending to fight "swine" flu.

Also, I made this: