Chuggnutt!

Month: May 2005

  • Treknobabble on Slashdot

    In the science fiction world, “technobabble” refers to the use of technical or scientific jargon strung together so that to listeners unfamiliar with the language, it sounds like made-up nonsense. When relating to Star Trek, a derivative and more derogatory concept shows up: “treknobabble,” which, in the words of Wikipedia, “is used humorously by fans of the various Star Trek television series, and disparagingly by its critics, to describe the infamous amount of pseudoscientific gibberish inserted seemingly at random into many episodes of these television series.”

    Well, on Slashdot tonight this article contains the most ridiculous real-world treknobabble I’ve ever seen:

    A one-dimensional [Bose-Einstein condensation] in an optical lattice is rapidly rotated, causing a quantized vortex to form. The bosonic part of the superstring consists of this vortex line. Inside the vortex, they would trap an ultracold cloud of fermionic atoms. Hopefully this will allow observation of the supersymmetry between bosons and fermions, thus providing the first experimental evidence to support superstring theory.

    That makes no sense to me whatsoever, and yet it’s the funniest thing I’ve read all day.

  • Friday the 13th

    You gotta love superstition. It’s widely considered to be the unluckiest day of the year today, but does anyone really know why? Wikipedia has a good article, and Snopes debunks most of the myths. The conclusions? Nobody knows for sure.

    I’ve always rather liked Friday the 13th. I don’t believe there’s anything inherently lucky about it—good or bad—any more than any other day. Although today I walked downtown to get my haircut and got caught in the rain walking back—without a jacket. Bad luck? You decide. :)

  • Stranded on a desert isle…

    I guess this post spins out of watching the TV show “Lost” and a post by Isaac Laquedem a while back. The question is, what three books would you take with you if you were stranded on a desert isle? (Isaac’s post considers five books; do that if you can’t keep yourself to three.)

    My tentative picks would be:

    Of course, if I were practical, I’d choose an all-purpose survival guide, a book on identifying plants (edible and poisonous), that sort of thing.

    Or, better yet, go with this book:

    Stranded on a Desert Isle for Dummies

  • Things about Bend that I don’t like

    So, continuing in my “Things I X about Bend” series:

    I don’t like…

    • …the traffic; the disproportionate amount of congestion and the bad drivers.
    • …not having a mass transit system.
    • …how the north end of town is a stripmall/boxstore eyesore.
    • …skyrocketing real estate prices.
    • …the roundabouts. Actually, I’m kind of on the fence about them; they’re not inherently bad but do we really need so many of them?
    • …overpriced “public” art. Like the “gateway to Bend” thing on the parkway made from rusty scrap metal.

    What else?

    See also: Things about Bend that I miss, Things about Bend that I like.

  • 20 questions

    Okay, so I must be easily impressed. From this post on Boing Boing I found the 20Q.net site and began trying to stump the system. I can’t do it. No wonder; the guy that created the neural net (a type of artificial intelligence software) started it back in 1988, and it’s been “learning” ever since, entirely by people playing 20 questions with it. Crazy.

    I remember having a 20 questions “A.I.” game that came with the Logo programming language for the Commodore 64 (way back in the day). Same deal, it was preprogrammed with maybe three items, but as you played it, it remembered every new item you fed it and got “smarter” each time it played. The only drawback was that on a Commodore, you couldn’t really save the state of the program, so it would “forget” everything each time you started it up.

    Funny part is, I remember the first time I played it, I figured I’d stump it with “ostrich.” I just about fell out of the chair when, after about five questions, it says, “Are you thinking of an ostrich?” I was hooked, but ultimately didn’t fully capitalize on that for another few years… at the time, I simply considered it to be an exotic toy. Now I write software for a living. Go figure.

  • INTJ

    My friend Kerry at work had a bunch of people take the Jung Typology Test to determine personality types and see how well they applied to the real world. I’m not really sure why, perhaps as a group-building exercise. Whatever the reason, they’ve been good for a laugh, but the best part is the analysis of each profile, with lists of famous people—real and fictional, amusingly enough—that match that personality.

    My own score came up INTJ, which is “Introverted Intuitive Thinking Judging.” It’s more or less accurate, in broad strokes. You can read the full profile here, but here’s some of the fictional INTJ’s—characters I share personality types with:

    • Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, from Hamlet.
    • Gandalf the Grey (every geek’s dream come true, I’m sure)
    • Professor Moriarty… Sherlock Holmes’ arch-nemesis. I can see that, I guess.
    • Hannibal Lecter… what the—?

    The best (worst?) part was that someone else, after finding out I shared a personality profile with Hannibal Lecter, looked at me with an appraising eye and said, “Yeah. I can see that.”

  • Followup to the Time Traveler Convention

    Wired News has a followup article about the time traveler convention that I blogged about the other day. Apparently no one from the future showed up.

    But when attendees gathered outside for a raucous countdown at 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, nothing appeared on the makeshift landing pad at the coordinates Dorai set for the time travelers….

    It’s actually a blessing that no one from the future showed up on Saturday night, said David Batchelor, the NASA physicist who wrote “The Science of Star Trek.”

    Speaking on his own behalf and not for NASA in a phone interview, Batchelor noted the same potential risks mentioned by speakers at the convention, such as the displacement of matter in a finite universe caused by the introduction of someone from another time. He also touched on the paradoxes arising from such acts as going back in time and killing one’s own ancestors.

    “We should breathe a sigh of relief,” said Batchelor, who considered his decision not to go to the convention a safe bet. “It means we were protected from the chaos that would result if someone came back and changed something.”

    The thought that struck me as I read this was, if time travelers came from the future to attend the convention “after the fact”—wouldn’t our memories change to match the altered timeline? In other words, we wouldn’t know that no one from the future appeared, because they in fact did and time was changed.

    Alternatively, travelers from the future did attend the convention, only that spun off into an alternate timeline and our own timeline is undisturbed.

  • Waxing

    Holy cow… you must go read Jack Bogdanski’s blog entry titled The short hairs!

  • Morse code wins!

    I thought this was funny: Morse code trumps SMS in head-to-head speed texting combat.

    93-year-old telegraph operator Gordon Hill delivered a resounding ass-whoopin’ to his rival, 13-year-old Brittany Devlin, using Morse Code.

    Man, there’s retro, and there’s retro.

  • 15-pound burger

    This is crazy; a 15 pound hamburger is being offered free to any two people who can eat the entire thing in one three-hour sitting.

    the “Beer Barrel Belly Buster” weighs in with 10 pounds of meat molded into a 20-inch patty on a specially baked, 17-inch bun.

    The balance of the weight comes from 25 slices of cheese, a head of lettuce, three tomatoes, two onions, plus copious quantities of mayo, ketchup, relish, mustard, and peppers….

    The 15-pound burger can feed a family of 10, according to Liegey. He has sold two so far to teams of two people, and neither team did much more than put a dent in it.

    Wow. Just wow.