A Shocking Revelation About Mario

Small Mario: 3 fingers and a thumb.

Big Mario: 4 fingers and a thumb.

English Dropped All The Cool Letters

After the English language stopped using runes for letters, they switched to the Roman alphabet. However, there was no J, K, Q, V, or Z. But, the Old English alphabet had some pretty awesome letters in it, which we dropped, sadly.

æ
This letter sounds like a mix between a and e. Who knew? You can still find it kicking around from time to time in English, but Danish, Icelandic, and Norwegian still use it constantly.

ð
This letter, eth, sounds like the th in "them". It still exists in Icelandic and Faroese.

ᵹ
Insular G was basically a second g, borrowed from Ireland. It still can be found in traditional Gaelic.

ſ
Long s was basically a second s for if there was an s at the beginning or middle of a word. Its cousin, the German letter ß, is all the rage.

þ
Thorn (it even has a great name) is like the th in thick.

ƿ
Wynn was basically a holdover from the rune days. It lost out to W, since they eventually had the same sound.

The Correct Way to Spell Spinal Tap

Spinal Tap, the greatest fake/real band ever, is typically spelled incorrectly. The official spelling contains umlauts over the n and no dot over the letter i. However, there is no Unicode n-umlaut (or n-diaeresis), so you can't exactly type it. Somehow, Wikipedia managed to do it. (Note: diaeresis would be more accurate versus umlaut, since the umlaut represents a change in the sound of the letter.)

N-umlaut does occur in three languages: Malagasy (spoken in Madagascar), Jacaltec (a Mayan dialect spoken in Guatemala and southern Mexico), and in Cape Verdean Creole.

The dotless i, or ı, occurs in Turkish, in addition to a dotted i. So of course, there are dotted and undotted capital i's as well: İ & I. The dotless i also occurs in Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Tatar, and (traditional) Irish (which has no dotted i).

The Truth About the Salvation Army

Note: I'm not (just) writing this because those damn incessant bell ringers make me violent.

The Salvation Army is a right-wing evangelical Christian organization that actively discriminates against homosexuals. During the Bush administration they were trying to get the White House to issue a regulation that would allow them to be exempt from any local antidiscrimination laws so they wouldn't have to hire any gay people. Gay people who just want to help the less forunate. When people found out about this and complained, the White House immediately changed their minds.

They could almost make the point that because it's more or less a "church" (Where are their churches exactly?) the Civil Rights Act of 1964 allows them to discriminate due to their religious beliefs when hiring people. But these aren't people answering phones at some backwoods hate-filled funeral-protesting church. The Salvation Army is a highly visible, worldwide charitable organization whose churchiness is nowhere near the level of their charity.

The Salvation Army cares so much more about hating homosexuals than helping the poor that when New York City proposed a law that would require any organizations doing business with the city to provide equal benefits to unmarried domestic partners, the Salvation Army threatened to close all soup kitchens in New York City. I guess they think in god's eyes, it's more important what you're putting into your ass than whether you have anything to put into your mouth.

Fuck the Salvation Army.

Mercury is Smaller Than Some Moons

Mercury is the smallest planet (unless you still count Pluto). Its radius at the equator is 2440km. This means that it's smaller than Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede, as well as Saturn's largest moon, Titan. Mercury is just barely larger than the second-largest of the Jovian moons, Callisto.

Small world, eh? HAHAHAHAA.

Autostereograms

Want a headache? Read about autostereograms.

To be able to see these images, your eyes have to pretend they're looking far away but focus on a closer object. If you are looking at the image normally, your eyes are focused and converge at the distance the image is from you. To see the autostereogram's 3D image, your eyes are focued at the correct distance, but are converged at a different distance (infinity), making the image hit your eyes at the "wrong" angle. Each eye is looking at a different part of the picture, which is why the edges never look right. Your brain sticks everything together, thinking that you're seeing a 3D image but in reality you're just looking at it all wrong.

In a simple "wallpaper" type of autostereogram, they take a repeating pattern or two to trick your brain into making you perceive them as being on a different plane than the background.

The tiger is repeated every 120 pixels, the shark every 130 pixels, and the person riding the tiger every 140 pixels. So, when your eyes go all crazy, the tiger seems closest, the shark is farther away, then the person riding the tiger is on the background plane.
Then if you mess with size and spacing and such, you can do all sorts of crazy things. For example here is a bunch of tigers at different depths. This image shows you how the spacing of the pattern affects the depth you perceive.

So of course no one wants to sit down and make these, so they made a computer program that builds these images for you. This program takes a grayscale image of the image you will see in 3D and a random dot pattern, then figures out how to adjust each reiteration of the pattern to make you see the 3D image.

And of course, someone figured out how to go too far with this.

Mail Goggles

Mail Goggles is a Google Labs feature for Gmail that makes you solve math problems before sending an email late at night on a weekend. It's set up so you don't drunkenly email people you probably shouldn't be talking to anyway. More often than not, I end up sending real emails on purpose on weekends, so Mail Goggles doesn'r help much.

Plus, it turns out that I can still do math when I'm pretty drunk.

(No, there's embarrassing story to go along with the above statement.)

Grocery Store Brands

Okay, I know Stop & Shop and Giant have been owned by the same company for quite some time now (stupid Dutch), but is it really necessary to make them identical right down to the smallest detail? At that point, why do they even have different names? And why does Giant-Carlisle get off scot-free from all this homogenization? It's owned by the same evil Dutch company!

Hmmmmmmmm....

Mike Portnoy = Pirate

Ever notice how Mike Portnoy from Dream Theater looks like a pirate?

Some of his favorite songs include "The MirrARRRR" and "Space-Dye Chest."

Anyone have any more they can think of?

Portnoy Photo Source

The Golden Ratio

The Golden Ratio is everywhere. It's pretty ridiculous.

The Golden Ratio is defined as:
    φ = (a + b)/a = a/b
Since a = bφ, you can easily show that
    φ = (1 + 5^1/2)/2 ≈ 1.6180...

It can also be expressed as:
    φ = 1 + 1 / (1 + 1 / (1 + 1 / (1 + /(etc)))) 

Yeah, it doesn't look like much, but it's hiding in all kinds of places.

Some things that have the Golden Ratio include:

• Stonehenge (the radii on the concentric circles, not the triptychs)
• The Egyptian Pyramids (the angle between a and b below is about 51°, which makes a/h = φ)
• Acropolis of Athens
• Notre Dame de Paris

The text area of Medieval books are also designed to the Golden Ratio as well.

Pentagrams follow the ratio as well:

The colored line segments are in the Golden Ratio to eachother.

It's heavily used in architecture and design for one reason: because it looks so damn good. Seriously.

Oprah Winfrey Ruins Life

This is great. The new nature documentary Life is going to be released in the UK with David Attenborough narrating and in the USA with Oprah Winfrey narrating. It's no surprise to me that Attenborough's version gets 5 stars whereas Oprah's gets 1.5 stars. Whose decision was it to not use the no doubt perfect soundtrack provided by Attenborough and replace it with OPRAH? Ugh.

Industrial Music Makes You a Violent Extremist

I'm sure it's well known that I hate news organizations, particularly Fox News. Here is yet another reason why: Road to Radicalism: The Man Behind the 'South Park' Threats

Basically, some religious nutjob threatened (although it doesn't sound like a threat to me) the creators of South Park for depicting the "prophet" Muhammad... in a bear suit, which (SPOILER ALERT) turns out to actually be Santa.

However, the article repeatedly mentions certain interests of his:

"He was very into violent industrial music, borderline Satanic bands and stuff like that. He had dark undertones in his interests."

...there were "dark overtones in his interests" for years...

Okay were they overtones or undertones, Fox?

Chesser's interests -- hardcore industrial music, Goth and Satanic materials -- appear to have translated "pretty well to violent extremism," the classmate said.

Okay, last time I checked, Muslims hate Satan, too. This article manages to suggest that Muslims are Satanic. Furthermore, it doesn't bother to suggest any sort of reason why he became radical other than suggesting that violent industrial music and Satan are somehow linked to it. How about investigating how exactly it is he became brainwashed by religious extremists? No?

And correct me if I'm wrong here, but he hasn't commited any violence yet. He's not a violent extremist, just an extremist.

I also noticed they spelled Muhammad different ways within the article.

Bonus tidbit:

She said she will maintain more of a distance from the Chessers now, "because we're Christians…. It's kind of sad that American people are falling into this. It's sad that he would be influenced to try to hurt people."

Right, because Christians would never do things like this.

Chatroulette

So I was going to make a series of chatroulette posts like I did with Omegle, but I logged on and the VERY FIRST person I was connected to was a dude jacking it. Too bad I vomited off-camera.

I did learn pretty quickly that if people know you're a guy they will hit Next pretty much immediately!


I did have one good conversation though (click to embiggen):

The Seven Seas

So what are the Seven Seas exactly? According to a sentence from Wikipedia (that needs citation), the Seven Seas were:

• Mediterranean Sea (including "marginal seas")
• Adriatic Sea
• Black Sea
• Red Sea (including the Dead Sea and Galilee Sea)
• Arabian Sea
• Persian Gulf
• Caspian Sea

Today, the International Hydrographic Organization recognizes over 100 bodies of water referred to as "seas," including the Chesapeake Bay, which we can all agree is the best sea in town.

And now for the obligatory nondescript "sea" photo (which I took near the Bahamas):

The Southern Ocean

The Southern Ocean?! When did this happen?!

When I was in school, there were only 4 oceans:

1. Arctic Ocean
2. Atlantic Ocean
3. Indian Ocean
4. Pacific Ocean

But in 2000, they decided to officially add the Southern Ocean. Yes, officially. They were trying to add the Southern Ocean since 1937! Who are "they," you ask? "They" are the people who name oceans, the International Hydrographic Organization, of which 68 nations are members. (The Democratic Republic of the Congo is suspended from the IHO, probably because they realized it has less than 25 miles of actual coastline. Also, they misspelled "ocean" on their application form.)

The IHO sent out surveys in 2000 to its member nations, asking if they wanted to define the Southern Ocean as a new ocean. Twenty-seven nations responded "hell yes!" Argentina (and only Argentina) responded with "fuck no!" The other 40 countries probably had actual work to do.

So, as a fuck you to Argentina, we now have 5 oceans.

I thought of two good ways to end this post, so go ahead and take your pick:

Ending #1:
I bet this is how people in Medieval times felt when they found out there are more than seven seas.

Ending #2:
Maybe they felt bad about taking Pluto away from us, so they gave us a new ocean.

Here's What's Wrong With America

These are single serving sweet potatoes.

Let that sink in. I'll wait.

They SHRINK WRAPPED, PRE-WASHED sweet potatoes

It's a wonderful thing they make this product! Otherwise, I'd have to get a regular sweet potato and wash it! AHGAHGHAGHAHGHAGH!

It would take longer to unwrap this thing than it would to wash one yourself!

This is what cooking in America has come to. We're doomed.

THE OCEANS WILL BOIL OFF IN THREE WEEKS!

If there's anything reading the news has taught me, it's that you can create a news story regarding global warming without consulting experts to prove any point you like! Further you can use local data sets collected over a short amount of time to make your point and as long as you throw in the word scientists and leave out the phrase peer-reviewed journal.

So, after extensive research, scientists such as myself have come to the startling revelation that THE OCEANS WILL BEGIN TO BOIL OFF ON FEBRUARY 6, 2010!

Just look at this scientific graph:

I collected my data from NOAA's 3-day forecast. I noticed an alarming warming trend! Since this will continue, the oceans will begin to boil on Saturday, February 6, 2010!

EVERYBODY PANIC!

Snow? And It's Still Global Warming?

If you pretend this article is satire, it's amusing. Sadly, it doesn't appear to be so.

SNOW CHAOS: AND THEY STILL CLAIM IT'S GLOBAL WARMING

This article has no data to back up its claims and frightening-sounding numbers that aren't compared to any averages. This is the epitome of poor journalism, poor science, and poor thinking.

How can I put this more simply?

Weather ≠ Climate

Metro's Ongoing Attack On Humanity

Article: Metro worker killed during repair work (WTOP)

The worker -- a 25-year veteran of the transit agency -- was struck by a ballast regulator, which is a track unit that deposits and spreads ballast onto the track bed, Metro says.

Previously: Metro Continues To Try To Kill Us, Metro Is Trying To Kill Us

Metro Continues To Try to Kill Us!

Previously: Metro is Trying to Kill Us

Article: Red Line trains delayed after man struck, killed (WTOP)

From the article:

A man who was struck and killed at the Forest Glen station was on the tracks intentionally, Metro says.

I don't think we should be listening to anything a sentient train says. Remember how it worked out in Stephen King's Dark Tower series?