March 2002

I overheard someone talking about SportsFilter at some point during the LA MetaFilter shin-dig last night. This is excellent! It’s a MetaFilter just for sports fans!

"When I’m playful I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales." - Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

Three excellent puns, via eMail, from my mom:

• I used to work in a blanket factory, but it folded.
• Without geometry, life is pointless.
• Condoms should be used on every conceivable occasion.

Poli High - Harry Nilsson

Again, Defendant sold over the counter, without caveat, a product which attached powerful jet engines (in this case, two) to inadequate vehicles, with little or no provision for passenger safety.

You’ll have to trust me and just ignore what you read elsewhere. Pinot Bistro sucks.

But if the mere fact that I can produce from my thought the image of something entails that everything which I clearly and distinctly perceive to belong to that thing really does belong to it, is not this a possible basis for another argument to prove the existence of God?

[click to continue...]

Hey! I didn’t know you could mix and match classes in css!

While advertising as a form of support for independent Web sites has proven about as effective as sugar-frosted dental floss, the Web still manages to serve as a massively multiplayer open mic night for many the aspiring writer/artist/poet/revolutionary. The reason for this is simple: money and fame have historically been a less powerful motivator for creative types than the prospect of receiving oral sex — or at the very least, offers of oral sex — from total strangers.

This guy made a huge bear statue out of ketchup packets, thinking it’d look like it was bleeding when he shot it. It didn’t quite work out. I guess the science of constructing ketchup-packet bears still has a ways to go.

The Game (narration) - Harry Nilsson

A few weeks ago I finished reading The Best American Science Writing 2001. It’s a marvelous collection of all the “best” essays written on scientific topics from last year. One article, “Running Dry” by Jacques Leslie, really shocked me. It’s all about the depletion of the Earth’s freshwater and the (disastrous) effects damming has had on the planet’s ecosystem. There’s going to be a special on The Discovery Channel tonight about China’s Three Gorges Dam (8pm). The tag-line of the special is:

“The Chinese have a plan to tame the large, muddy and unpredictable Yangtze River with a huge dam that measures two and a half miles wide and 650 feet high. Creating a reservoir 400 miles long, the dam will be the world’s largest concrete structure.”

That sounds amazing, right? After reading the article by Leslie, though, to me it sounds downright scary.

The planet accommodates 40,000 large dams - dams more than four stories high - and some 800,000 small ones. They have shifted so much weight that geophysicists believe they have slightly altered the speed of the earth’s rotation, the tilt of its axis, and the shape of its gravitational field. Together they blot out a terrain bigger than California.

I’m of the opinion that anything mankind does to significantly alter our freaking course around the sun is probably not a good idea. Am I the only one concerned about this?

The Discovery Channel web site is really excellent. They are doing so many things right. If you join their ‘community’ you can have them eMail you reminders when certain episodes or specials are going to air. What a terrific idea!
(They could make the site a smidge friendlier to the bandwidth-impaired; I’m only on a 33.6 dontchaknow?)

I found the mack-daddy of all bookmarklets at webgraphics this evening. This just absolutely rocks:

Try it and see!