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Planet Dave! Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Brilliant Writing
If you don't already know about Penny Arcade, it's probably not your style of humor. But I'm a big fan of Gabe's artwork, and that Tycho guy, he can WRITE. I somehow came across this little gem in their archives, in which Gabe re-posts something that Tycho had written in ages past. I now re-print it here without their permission. (Don't sue me guys, I've got like, 3 readers.)
Originally posted by Tycho on January 14th 2002
Long story short, I'm getting my chicken soup on, it's Sunday afternoon, and Gabe's reading some Preacher in the Den, which is also the living room, the bathroom, and the foyer. I am interacting with pasta dough in what I think is a stern way, when I hear him say that he might like the soup better if it were, in fact, carrot cake. It hits us, hits us both, simultaneously, like a semi made out of lightning which is also a professional boxer. Carrot Cake Soup. You cube the carrot cake, some pieces have frosting and some don't, and you put a handful of these chunks into a bowl full of milk. So let's go do it. We'll do it later this week, he says. But I know that's the same as not doing it. Why not now, I say? I know a store where we can get all the stuff. You can just buy it, the way you can buy stuff in the household cleaners section and make a bomb big enough to kill God. The stuff is just lying around there and nobody's doing anything with it. It's not a crime to buy them separately, and what we do at home isn't any of their fucking business.
I think someone might have been following us as we pulled into the parking lot, we walked toward the grocery store and tried to keep the conversation natural. We certainly didn't discuss carrot cake or the soup one might make by cutting it into cubes and swimming islands of it in cold milk, pleasure islands, like you'd see in a magazine. At the bakery counter, a woman asks if she can help me, and I'm so nervous that as I'm pointing to the carrot cake behind the glass, my finger starts to tap in Morse Code that reads:
I AM ABOUT TO COMMIT A CRIME AGAINST GOD AND MAN STOP
And where is Gabe with that Goddamn milk? There he is, in the self-checkout. Idiot. There's cameras all over that thing, it's like a Goddamn surveillance tree. It doesn't take a genius to put two and two together. A red light flashes on, and off in my mind. At another checkstand, I pay with untraceable cash, assuring the woman that I will eat the cake by myself, without assistance from cows. I smirk. This woman has no idea that she's just sold me the trigger to a flavor gun. Carrot Cake Soup is like the taste of watching girls make out. It has an extraordinary power that oscillates between gentle and overwhelming, between light and dark, between pleasure and more pleasure. When it was over, I realized that I was panting. I was in possession of carnal knowledge. And I knew that, somehow, every taste beyond this point was in the service of the one that still lingered, waited, to remind me that nature has laws, and those that break them are criminals, and though they roam free enough the knowing will hold them, and keep them, until the last.
(CW)TB out.
PlanetDave HowTo: The 10 most useful circuits for DIY
The ten circuits that are most commonly needed by a do-it-yourself-er.
Chimps Beat Children in Reasoning Test
From /., "The New York Times has a story on how chimpanzees seem to exhibit a better understanding of cause and effect than human children. While training chimps to perform a routine task with redundant steps, the chimps were able to figure out and eliminate the redundant steps, while the human children routinely performed them despite their evident uselessness. It says something about the way we learn compared to chimps and should be interesting to cognitive scientists and those interested in computational learning theory, at the least."
BugMeNot.com has a login/password of "bugmenonono" for nytimes.com.
PlanetDave HowTo: Pop Can Van de Graaf
Saw this over at BoingBoing. It's a set of instructions to make a Van de Graaf generator from a pop can.
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Beginner's Guide to Quantum Entanglement
From /., "Einstein called it 'Spooky action at a distance.' This article describes, in scientific layman's terms, how spooky action is created."
Papercraft Puzzles
Ok, this is an interesting website. It's got a few papercraft projects that you can print out and put together. Down the page a bit are some 3D puzzles.
Thursday, May 11, 2006
Music that speaks to the masses.
The programming masses, that is. Here's a song from Jonathan Coulton, who brought you the folksong Baby Got Back cover. This one is Code Monkey. It's got kind of a Stacy's Mom Has Got It Goin' On feel to it. Speaks to me. Go check out his other stuff while you're there.
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
Don't try this at home.
You know what, don't try this anywhere. If you've never heard of Le Parkour, (How do you pronounce that?) you need to watch this. I wonder how often each of them jacks up an ankle.
Animated Knots
There's lots of web pages diagrams for tying different knots. But this one animates them!
The Cthulhu Circus?
This is cute. It's The Family Circus cartoons with captions replaced by quotes from Lovecraft stories.
Thursday, May 04, 2006
Steven Colbert at the White House Correspondents' Dinner
If you haven't seen it yet, check it out here. C-Span had it pulled from Google Videos and YouTube for copyright reasons.
Your Star Wars link of the day
Marty sent me this. Turns out I don't need to pirate the Star Wars movies from the laserdics. The theatrical versions will be available on DVD in September! Woohoo! ... About damn time.
Monday, May 01, 2006
The guys from Slayer are still alive?
Not only alive, but still touring. Apparently on June 6th (That's 6-6-06, by the way.) they'll be in San Diego. They've named that date the National Day of Slayer. Incidently, it's also the day the remake of The Omen comes out.
Remake, remake, remake. When the Hollywood writers went on strike about ten years ago, did they ever come back?
Funky Cool Papercraft
From BoingBoing, "Peter Callesen is a sculptor who makes amazing papercraft fantasies out of single sheets of A4-sized paper." Here's the Korean site, and the official UK site. Crazy, crazy stuff.
Rubik!!!
Ok, I can solve a Rubik's cube. And I can solve it faster than this guy. See, I save time by not memorizing it first. But I kinda need to see mine.
20 shocking facts about US elections
This is kind of old news, but you may still not know it. It's a list of some scary facts from our last election. Keep those in mind for the next one.