A View of the Future (From the Past)

From MR: Predicting the iPhone back in 1910 (!).

Honestly very impressive.

I'm sorry to have to tell you this

But "the internet is over".

Thank you, Artist-Formerly-Known-as-the-Artist-Formerly-Known-as-Prince-not-to-mention-the-unpronounceable-symbol-thingy.  I appreciate you telling us.  Now I can go back to my 1980's life, just like you.

I am saddend and dismayed

And I had such high hopes for today's youth.  But not anymore.  Not anymore.

Quote of the Day: "Gangs are posers, they just want attention.  That's why they go and attack stuff.  The pack, we're a family."

The best-selling book of all time

I found this interesting.  The best selling non-religious/non-political single-volume book of all time is the Chinese dictionary.  After that....

A Tale of Two Cities.  200,000,000 copies sold since first published in 1859.  Wow.

Following that, the Scouting Handbook, Lord of the Rings, And Then There Were None (Agatha Christie mystery), The Hobbit, and Dream of the Red Chamber (an 18th century Chinese novel).

The best selling multi-volume series of all time will surprise none of you:  Harry Potter, with over 400,000,000 served.

(h/t Marginal Revolution)

This Made Me Laugh

Powered by oranges.  Nice.

Everyone else is doing it, so why can't I?

In no particular order, my favorite super bowl commercials from last night:
1) Dodge Charger - Man's Last Stand - my #1 favorite
2) TruTV - Punxsutawney Palomalu
3) Doritos - Snack Attack Samurai
4) VW - Punch
5) Monster.com - Casual Friday
6) Denny's - Screaming Chickens.  (Yes, I know.  But I laughed.  Twice.)
7) Dove -  The Journey to Comfort
8) NCIS - Head Slap

Most of the commercials were crap.  I absolutely hate E*Trade's baby commercials.  Go Daddy makes me sick.

I will see Robin Hood and Prince of Persia in the theaters.

The Who was bleh.

The game....oh, yeah.  The game.  Exciting.  I was glad New Orleans won.

Honesty

You can't hurt his feelings. So go ahead and say no.

Well of course it does!

I haven't posted here in a few weeks, so it only makes sense that my first post back would be something stupid.
What English Sounds Like to Non-English Speakers (It's a music video, natch).

The dancing at 1:27 of the video cracks me up more than anything else.

Oh, and there's a harmonica.

Scary

It really is.

Be sure to mouse over the picture to read the subtext.

Marching to Her Own Drumbeat

I find this story, about an 85-year-old metalhead grandma, entertaining. Not that I'm a Metallica fan at all, it's just that I appreciate the fact that you can be 85 and still rebel against conventional wisdom ("It's too loud, Junior! Turn that crap down!"). Or perhaps it's that, at 85, you've lived long enough that you ought to be able to do whatever the heck you want.

Either way: rock on, Grandma. Rock on.

The Most Interesting Advertisments in the World

I love good advertising. Emphasis on "good".
This is good.
...and interesting.

Fact of the Day

From 1901 through Wednesday, September 2, 2009 there have been 175,461 regular and post-season baseball games played in the major leagues.

Bonus facts of the day:
Here are eleven feats that have only happened once in all that time.

Everybody's Free (to Wear Sunscreen)

Texas' first "secular camp". Where, as animals ourselves, we can really get back in touch with our roots. But we're not going to push our beliefs (or lack thereof) on anyone.

As an American, I'm obliged to say, you're welcome to believe as you like. As a Christian, I'm obliged to say, I hope you and God can come to some kind of understanding before you die.

Not sure whether to be scared or sad

But I wonder if he got a free-flight voucher or something for being so helpful.

The Quest for Truth That Matters

This article is as good a summary of why it's important to look at both sides of an argument and not just pay attention to what your side is saying.

Today, conservatives and liberals can join vacation tours attended by only their side of the debate or join dating services to court only the like minded. At night, one side watches only MSNBC and the other side only Fox News. And when people are around likeminded individuals, one study found, their viewpoints only become that much more extreme.

And this:

We are ever more polarized today and so may be the conspiracies. The less each base understands the other side perhaps the more outlandish the theories become, in order explain the hold of the other side.

There was a good post up at Behavior Gap the other day about the folly of single-factor decision making. It applies here thusly: people are complex. This is easy to say, out of context, but oddly it's very hard to say when talking about people with whom you disagree strongly. Humans have a tendency to reduce the behavior we find distasteful in others down to one single characteristic: "oh, he's just a drunk", "oh, she's just a bitch", "oh, democrats just are stupid, they just want to take over the world with their socialist agenda". What's wrong with this?
Well, it takes away everything that makes a person a person, for one thing, their history, their family experiences, their religious beliefs, their lifetime of love, hate, hurt, anger, remorse, elation, and sanguinity.
He is not just a drunk. He's manic-depressive because he's gone through more crap in his life than you will ever dream about, and he can't handle it very well anymore. She's not a bitch. She's a single mother, insecure about her position at the company, and she wants to be liked, but she's afraid to be seen to fail lest she lose her job and have no money to feed her children.
As I have said before, the closer you get to someone, the harder it is to demonize them. Throwing stones only works when you stay at a distance. No one of us wants to be seen as one-dimensional. So why, just because you disagree with something someone else believes, would you reduce them to labels like "stupid", "power-hungry", or "elitist"? Because you don't want to take the time to get to know them more fully. Because if you did, you might find that they aren't easy to label at all. You might find that you will change your mind, or at least your attitude.

That's a pretty daunting concept, isn't it?

This is...

...by far the coolest thing I've seen this week, top 5 from this month.



The beat-boxer doing his air-drumming is the best part.

Because I Must

Nerd-credentials must be kept up, you know. Thanks to a friend of mine, I came across this excellent article that uses a lot of words I don't understand to explain something nerds everywhere have loved forever: the warp drive!

Cleaver and Richard Obousy, the other coauthor, propose manipulating the 11th dimension, a special theoretical construct of m-theory (the offspring of string theory), to create the bubble the ship would surf down.

And by golly if that doesn't whet your appetite for this contraption that is probably a few hundred thousand years away, then nothing will!