Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Category: News

  • Hey Z21…

    Could you try not to ruin whatever TV show is currently broadcasting by cutting in with no warning to report on tepid election results? I mean really, that’s just inept; every other station is able to scroll the election results in a marquee on the bottom of the screen, or even shrinks the main program picture to show off the fancy graphics of same. In fact, you used to do that! What gives?

    So barring the technical ability to scroll a text overlay, maybe you could do the special reporting thing during a commercial, or at least some time when I’m not missing key points to the plot of “Law & Order.” Both shows.

    Yeah. Just a little irritating. Especially considering that the “news” of the election results was so lackluster (I already said “tepid”) that it could have waited until the 11 o’clock news anyway.

    I’m just sayin’.

  • Where there’s smoke, there’s fire

    Last night, as I reported on my Hack Bend blog, the house across the street caught fire. It wasn’t terribly serious, as these things go: some hot embers from the chimney landed on the wood shake roof and sparked into flames. But the fire department came out in full force; there were four engines, the fire chief’s (or whomever’s) SUV, an ambulance, and police closing off the street.

    The weird thing is, we didn’t hear any of the emergency vehicles arrive, but other people in the neighborhood told us they heard them coming. Instead, around 6:20 I started noticing a rumbling noise coming from outside, but we were eating dinner and I didn’t think much of it—nothing that couldn’t be checked until we were done, anyway. It was my wife who took something out to the garage that heard the noise, too, and went to the window to see what it was.

    Imagine our surprise!

    So we ran outside and rubbernecked along with the rest of the neighborhood. Smoke was still rising from the roof next to the chimney while we were there; our neighbor next door told us she had seen the flames when she came out. They were still hosing the roof down, but got the smoke under control pretty quickly. After that, they tore out the chimney and the part of the roof that was (presumably) still hot and/or smoldering.

    Nobody was hurt. According to the KTVZ article, the fire did $25,000 worth of damage, with minor smoke damage inside the home.

    Here’s some of the pictures I took (when I finally had the presence of mind to run back in the house for the camera):

    Fire trucks on the scene

    Fire hydrant pumping water

    Fire fighters clearing the roof after a house fire

    Fire fighters clearing the roof after a house fire

    Fire fighters clearing the roof after a house fire

    Apologies for the mediocre quality of these pictures… it was dusk and the low-light conditions along with the zoom was enough to get the point, but some came out shaky. And actually, when it was starting to get really dark, they brought one of the engines over with a set of bright spotlights to illuminate the scene:

    Fire truck at dusk lighting up the scene

    You can see the light pole sprouting up from the top of the truck. And here’s a shot of the lighted-up scene at full dark:

    Fire truck lighting up the scene at night

    I actually think this last picture is kind of cool. Unfortunate set of circumstances, but you know what I mean.

  • The truth about vampires

    I realize I’m about a week late blogging this item (should have been around Halloween), but I just can’t resist: Count Dracula not in the numbers, physicist says. A scientist is playing Scully to scientifically disprove the existence of monsters—vampires, zombies, ghosts, and so on.

    Articles like this make me amused and irritated at the same time. I always get a kick of out it when a goofy, kooky topic like this shows up in the “serious” mainstream news, but it annoys me when they purport to have The Answer to things and get their science and logic wrong.

    Case in point: his proof against the existence of vampires is flawed:

    [Costas] Efthimiou takes out the calculator to prove that if a vampire sucked one person’s blood each month — turning each victim into an equally hungry vampire — after a couple of years there would be no people left, just vampires. He started his calculations with just one vampire and 537 million humans on January 1, 1600 and shows that the human population would be down to zero by July 1602.

    Now I’m not saying that vampires do exist, but that’s weak. Yes, you’ve shown us that repeatedly doubling a number increases it exponentially very quickly, but this “proof” is hardly proof. First of all, why the assumption that vampires always make more vampires? If the vampire doesn’t kill you outright, then you become a vampire. I think it’s up to the “source” vampire. No exponential increase.

    Second, couldn’t some of these vampires be feeding on animals instead of humans? (Digression: wouldn’t vampire cows be funny?)

    Third, I’m sure vampires are reasonably intelligent enough to have figured out that if they keep making vampires, there’s no more food left. I imagine they plan accordingly.

    Fourth, where did this “one person per month” figure come from? That seems rather arbitrary.

    So his reasoning is flawed. I think he would be better off arguing against the more implausible vampire myths, such as the physical impossibility of their not casting reflections in mirrors.

    Or, you know, doing real science.

  • An appropriate image?

    I’m not sure what this might say about me, but when I was reading this KTVZ story about the utterly ridiculous Measure 37 claim on the Newberry Volcanic Monument, I couldn’t help but think the image filed with the story looks like a skull:

    Newberry Volcanic Monument

    See the eyesockets? Yeah, that’s messed up.

    Oh and FYI, Measure 37? Only one of the most brain dead ballot measures ever passed in the state of Oregon.

  • The Dirty Screech

    Screech!On the one hand, I want to say, “who knew it would come to this,” but on the other, well, it figures: Dustin Diamon, AKA Screech from “Saved by the Bell,” is the latest celebrity to have a sex tape released to the public.

    See also stories on TMZ.com here, here, and here. That last link purports to have a preview. Consider all of it NSFW, kids.

    This is an incredibly weird story… mind-boggling, really. TMZ describes the tape as:

    The tape begins with Diamond in a bathtub, narrating what’s to come. It ends with Diamond introducing one of the women to a “Dirty Sanchez.” Suffice it say, it is unbelievably graphic.

    …I have to say, I never thought the phrase “Dirty Sanchez” would ever appear on this blog. You can look it up on Wikipedia if you like, but I ain’t gonna link to it.

    The cynical theory is that since Diamond is supposedly flat broke, and his career is stalled out due to the Screech typecast, this video not only breaks him out of that stereotyped image but also kicks-starts the PR on his career.

    If that’s true, that’s pretty hardcore. (Pun intended.)

    See also: my post from over three and a half years ago.

  • Compare and contrast

    Compare and contrast this:

    Global warming over the coming century could mean a return of temperatures last seen in the age of the dinosaur and lead to the extinction of up to half of all species, a scientist said on Thursday.

    With this:

    The earliest civilizations were not a product of favorable conditions but rather a last resort in the face of dramatic shifts in the weather, a climate scientist said on Thursday.

    I’m trying to decide if these are complimentary or contradictory. Or maybe I’m just randomly amused, correlating the climate crisis faced in one article with the results mentioned in another…

    …what we tend to think of today as civilization was an accidental by-product of unplanned adaptation to catastrophic climate change. Civilization was a last resort…

    Interesting stuff.

  • Much Ado About Pluto

    More geeky space news! This is more mainstream-popular, though, as I’ve seen it popping up everywhere. Pluto is no longer a planet. I’m actually a bit surprised at the uproar this seems to be causing; Slashdot has more on this.

    Me, I guess I’ve always been suspicious of Pluto; I mean, the thing has this wildly weird orbit that goes above the plane of the ecliptic and that swings inside Neptune’s orbit. And, it’s smaller than our own moon. And, its own moon, Charon, doesn’t actually orbit around Pluto; rather, they orbit around each other (with the center of axis somewhere between them rather than at Pluto’s center).

    All decidedly un-planetlike.

    So I think reclassifying it is a good move. It doesn’t make it any less mysterious or interesting. I guess I just don’t see why this is such a big deal; Pluto itself didn’t go anywhere.

    So, my two cents.

    And, getting even geekier (possible?), the Wikipedia article on Pluto mentions it “is the prototype of a yet-to-be-named family of trans-Neptunian objects.” Trans-Neptunian? No no no. It should properly be classified as a Kuiper Belt Object. Right up there with other KBOs like Sedna, Quaoar, and the like. (And the name “plutino” is just stupid.)

  • They don’t make ’em like that anymore

    Okay, I’m a little behind on news, but I thought this story was extremely cool: Voyager 1 passes 100 AU from the sun. I guess this is only of interest to you if you’re a space and astronomy geek.

    (Some quick Wikipedia references: Voyager 1, AU.)

    It’s just amazing to me that a spacecraft built with 1970s technology has been able to go so far and outlast a lot of other junk that’s been introduced to the world since then. It’s currently the most distant man-made object from Earth. Signals from the spacecraft take more that 13 hours to reach us.

    The spacecraft [both Voyagers] are traveling at a distance where the sun is but a bright point of light and solar energy is not an option for electrical power. The Voyagers owe their longevity to their nuclear power sources, called radioisotope thermoelectric generators, provided by the Department of Energy.

    Voyager 1 is now at the outer edge of our solar system, in an area called the heliosheath, the zone where the sun’s influence wanes. This region is the outer layer of the ‘bubble’ surrounding the sun, and no one knows how big this bubble actually is. Voyager 1 is literally venturing into the great unknown and is approaching interstellar space. Traveling at a speed of about one million miles per day, Voyager 1 could cross into interstellar space within the next 10 years.

    Via Slashdot.

  • Killer Kangaroo!

    Now, this story is just silly: Fanged killer kangaroo roamed Outback.

    Forget cute, cuddly marsupials. A team of Australian palaeontologists say they have found the fossilized remains of a fanged killer kangaroo and what they describe as a “demon duck of doom”.
    …
    The species found at the dig had “well muscled-in teeth, not for grazing. These things had slicing crests that could have crunched through bone and sliced off flesh”, Hand said.

    I have this absurd image of saber-toothed kangaroos hopping around… Hey, maybe somebody will make a horror-thriller-scifi-Jurassic-Park type movie where killer kangaroos are brought back to life and terrorizing Australia! And if you can come up with a dumb enough name, Samuel L. Jackson will star in it!

  • What the hell was that?

    When I started writing this post, the video in question actually existed… but now the link they had goes to the Visitor and Convention Bureau site… hmmmmmm.

    The title of this post might as well be “How not to do viral marketing.” It concerns a new animated ad campaign, detailed in excruciating detail in this Bulletin article, launched by the Bend Visitor & Convention Bureau… I’m actually at a loss for words.

    Okay, I’m not really. Nor will I mince words: at best, this video makes me embarrassed for Bend.

    My wife sent me the link in the morning, without explanation. First of all, it took forever to load, which is not a good sign. Finally, it started, and I was immediately sorry it did; my first impulse was to turn it off. When I first glimpsed something that sort of resembled Pilot Butte in the background, I thought, Is this supposed to be about Bend? It couldn’t be, it doesn’t even make any sense. But lo and behold, it turned out to be about Bend after all.

    My next thought was that somebody had gone out of their way—poorly, I might add—to make fun of Bend. It’s certainly not something that would ever entice me to visit.

    Finally I saw the Bulletin article, and things started to make a perverse sense. Here’s a clip:

    The Bend Visitor & Convention Bureau has launched an edgy, animated online marketing campaign featuring a video the bureau hopes is so entertaining that viewers will e-mail it to friends, family and colleagues.

    The video is sort of like Bend meets The Simpsons.

    Locals will recognize scenes in the lighthearted production and presumably chuckle at the characters and lyrics.
    …
    “The video is funny and entertaining,” Glover said. “But, there’s also a message that shows what we have here – the river, rafting, skiing, etc. We hope that people will be entertained, then watch it again or pass it along via e-mail.”

    Ultimately, the video’s goal is to interest more people in visiting Bend.

    According to Glover, the video is the first of its kind to market a destination such as Bend through an emerging form of advertising known as viral marketing.
    …
    Glover already considers the campaign a winner, thanks to a marketing coup that will allow friendster.com, a video downloading site popular among iPod owners, to send links to the video with endorsements to more than 1.25 million of its subscribers.

    “Just through that, the campaign is a success,” Glover said.

    Are you kidding me?

    There’s nothing “edgy” or Simpsons-like anywhere in that video. In fact, it’s some seriously shoddy art and animation work happening there. (I know—well, I hope—the people behind it can do better.) And being a local, trust me when I say there’s no chuckling going on, and the “recognizable” scenes are barely even that.

    Here’s a hint about viral marketing: it tends to work best when it’s not directed. Don’t hold it out there and proclaim it a success; either it’ll happen on its own or it won’t. You have no real control over the matter.

    And they think hooking up with Friendster is a marketing coup? Really? Friendster is on the wane in a big way. They would have been far better off leveraging MySpace (with 86 million users) and YouTube. Then you’d see some real numbers.

    Oh and by the way, pick a better domain name next time… “where-the-hell-are-we.com” just lacks that, how would you say, convenience and ease of use in passing around a link.

    I will concede that this video is viral in an avian flu sense—it’s spreading around the local blogosphere and everybody I’ve shown it to hates it. But that’s not the kind of viral you’d hope for.

    Postscript: And it’s gone… I wonder if that was intentional, or there was too much backlash?

    Post-postscript: Yes, you’ll notice I didn’t actually link to the video directly… I debated it. But since it appears to be gone anyway, oh well.