So what did I do for this year's Halloween?
It's ME!
THAT'll make the neighborhood kids think twice before knocking on the door for candy! :-P
People with a particular gene variant performed more than 20 percent worse on a driving test than people without it - and a follow-up test a few days later yielded similar results. About 30 percent of Americans have the variant.And we are now one step closer toward understanding my family :-P"These people make more errors from the get-go, and they forget more of what they learned after time away," says Dr. Steven Cramer, neurology associate professor and senior author of the study published recently in the journal Cerebral Cortex.
This gene variant limits the availability of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor during activity. BDNF keeps memory strong by supporting communication among brain cells and keeping them functioning optimally. When a person is engaged in a particular task, BDNF is secreted in the brain area connected with that activity to help the body respond.
Previous studies have shown that in people with the variant, a smaller portion of the brain is stimulated when doing a task than in those with a normal BDNF gene. People with the variant also don't recover as well after a stroke. Given these differences, the UCI scientists wondered: Could the variant affect an activity such as driving?
"We wanted to study motor behavior, something more complex than finger-tapping," says Stephanie McHughen, graduate student and lead author of the study. "Driving seemed like a good choice because it has a learning curve and it's something most people know how to do."
The driving test was taken by 29 people - 22 without the gene variant and seven with it. They were asked to drive 15 laps on a simulator that required them to learn the nuances of a track programmed to have difficult curves and turns. Researchers recorded how well they stayed on the course over time. Four days later, the test was repeated.
Results showed that people with the variant did worse on both tests than the other participants, and they remembered less the second time. "Behavior derives from dozens and dozens of neurophysiologic events, so it's somewhat surprising this exercise bore fruit," Cramer says.
In Monrovia, Liberia, there's a guy taking the matter of a lopsided, state-run media and reshaping it into a free-of-charge, independent news-aggregator—all accomplished with dry-erase board and couple markers. (Sorry, internet!) Each morning, at 10:45 AM, Alfred Sirleaf wakes up and heads down to his bulletin board to post the day's news, culling together a slate of stories his countrymen might otherwise never see. Grateful readers line up in droves, on foot and in cars, to read these updates, in what has been described as the country’s—and probably the world's—only analog blog.Hit the above link for video of Mr. Sirleaf and his unique "website"!
Be mindful of that before you click this link.
Remember: it's your choice. Consider yourself duly warned.
Crash here for the tale of Daniel East, his sister Tevyn, and how they inadvertently brought Tricky through a harrowing eight-hour scenic tour of the desert wasteland of Utah and Nevada.
Tricky not only lived, but he suffered just a few minor scrapes on his paws.
(And methinks Tricky should sign an endorsement deal with ACME while that iron is still hot.)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation - which many of y'all will remember came to the aid of Yours Truly two years ago during that very bizarre situation with Viacom - is now setting out to document "the worst of the worst" of bogus copyright complaints. Hit here for the Takedown Hall of Shame, featuring outrageous acts of DMCA abuse by Warner Brothers, the Nation Organization for Marriage and many more!
(By the way, in my opinion there are few finer organizations out there than the Electronic Frontier Foundation: those guys really go all-out to defend the rights of content creators. If you're feeling so led, ya might wanna consider making a contribution to 'em 'cuz they definitely more than earn it :-)
And you'll still have plenty of time for trick-or-treating, too!
And it looks like things have gotten even worse in the ten years since the events of BioShock...
BioShock 2 beckons us back under the sea on February 9, 2010.
Originally buried in Mt. Sterling in North Carolina, Popcorn's widow Pam Sutton cited "problems with vandalism" as the reason for moving and re-interring Popcorn's casket at Resthaven Memorial Gardens in Dandridge, Tennessee: not far from Popcorn's home in Parrotsville.
The move was scheduled for this past Saturday. A public memorial service was also held, attended by hundreds of people including country music legend Hank Williams Jr.
An old-fashioned horse-drawn hearse then brought Popcorn Sutton to his final resting place.
WBIR has more about the service for Popcorn Sutton, including a rather intriguing comment from Hank Williams Jr.
And here are three videos of the service, courtesy of aliciajose on YouTube (thanks aliciajose!)...
And if y'all wanna know why so many of your friends and neighbors have found Popcorn Sutton and his craft so endearing and enchanting, I cannot possibly recommend enough Neal Hutcheson's award-winning documentary The Last One. This has become the most-watched DVD of my collection in the past year (mostly 'cuz of all the people who keep asking to borrow it! :-)
The Nazi lizards from outer space invade again for the first time next week, November 3rd at 8 p.m. ET/PT on ABC.
Per the reckoning of a group of scientists being reported in a Dutch journal (link goes to English translation) the popularly-held belief that the Maya calendar predicts the destruction of the world in 2012 is a miscalculation and doesn't even have anything to do with the end times whatsoever. The real end of the Maya cycle of time, according to what these researchers have found, is around 2220... and then the calendar just goes back to the beginning, even as ours ends on December 31st and goes into January 1st.
So like Lt. Commander Susan Ivanova of Babylon 5 once said: "No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There is always boom tomorrow."
(But if this kind of thing floats your boat, we've still got Sir Isaac Newton's prediction of a 2060 apocalypse looming before us :-)
I can't remember the last time that I went to a GeoCities-hosted page. But once upon the time they glittered across cyberspace like sand on the seashore, mostly for "personal home pages". Those are dying out now, being supplanted by blogs like this one.
It can't be said enough though, that a lot of us today took our first steps into that larger world with GeoCities. Mark Milian writes a fine send-off for the service at the Los Angeles Times site and if you want a tribute to just about every GeoCities page that ever got created, click here.
And I have to report to all two of this blog's faithful readers that much to my surprise, I enjoyed Twilight more than I had anticipated. So far as vampire fiction goes I'm still going to consider Dracula to be the high bar, along with Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles (the first several books anyway). But in Twilight I found a satisfying fulfillment of something I hadn't realized there had been a dearth of: a thoroughly modern-day American vampire mythos.
And that's the thing that makes me want to read the other books in the Twilight series: Meyer does establish quite a deep and empathetic lore in her tale of Bella, Edward and the Cullen clan of vampires. Yeah, they're vampires. I can finally buy into that. Up 'til now, what little I'd known of the vampires in the Twilight books had caused me to muster up a "meh". I mean, "vampires" who aren't afraid of sunlight, aren't repelled by garlic or crucifixes, etc.? Those aren't vampires, those are people with severe eating disorders at most. But having the read the book I kinda like this updated take on the vampire physiology, just as I thought Anne Rice had a brilliant and even sensible basis for vampires in her literature.
In other aspects, Twilight reads much like any romantic novel aimed at adolescents and young adults... and that's fine too. Vampire fiction cuts across a huge swath of genre. In this case it didn't detract from my personal appreciation of the novel at all, and I don't foresee it being a hindrance in my reading the other installments of the Twilight series either.
So if, like me, you've been wandering the bookstore aisles and inwardly debating whether Twilight is a book worth sinking your teeth into (or at least sinking into your wallet and plunking down money for), I'll have to give it a good recommendation.
And maybe sometime I'll even draw up the courage to watch the movie...
What sort of funny are we talking here? Captain America was just on the phone while wearing a Confederate outfit, discussing the re-enactment he's on his way to: "Hey it's the Civil War, what's the worst that could happen?"
Looks like I've found something new to DVR (in addition to those reruns of Are You Being Served? on PBS :-)
That's the grim scenario envisioned by Cracked.com, which asked its readers to send in their Photoshop-ped submissions depicting an Internet-addicted society suddenly having to make do without things like Twitter, Nigerian scam e-mails and online porno. At the link you'll find the top twenty entries, each hysterically funny... and clever!
That's a helluva over-reaction to something that otherwise hasn't been inordinately differently from the typical garden-variety influenza. But to hear it from some people, it's already akin to the 1918 pandemic that killed millions in a very short period of time.
ComingSoon.net has just posted this pic (click to significantly embiggen) of Bradley Cooper as Lt. Templeton "Faceman" Peck, Quinton "Rampage" Jackson as Sgt. "B.A." Baracus, Sharlto Copley as Capt. "Howling Mad" Murdock, and Liam Neeson as John "Hannibal" Smith - along with the team's signature van - from the upcoming film adaptation of the beloved Eighties television series. The movie is out this coming June.
Maybe if we're good boys and girls we'll get a teaser trailer by Christmas :-)
In layman's terms that's about 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text.
The engineers made their breakthrough using the process of selective doping, in which an impurity is added to a material whose properties consequently change.Click here for the official press release from Dr. Jagdish "Jay" Narayan and his team at N.C. State., including how the processes they've discovered can also be applied to fuel economy, reduction of heat in semiconductors and engine design.Working at the nanoscale, the engineers added metal nickel to magnesium oxide, a ceramic. The resulting material contained clusters of nickel atoms no bigger than 10 square nanometers -- a pinhead has a diameter of 1 million nanometers. The discovery represents a 90% size reduction compared with today's techniques, and an advancement that could boost computer storage capacity.
I'm already giddy about the thought of one of those chips in an iPod...
And with that fateful decision, the world would never be the same again...
Along with millions of his fans throughout the world, The Knight Shift blog and its proprietor wishes a very HAPPY BIRTHDAY today to "Weird Al" Yankovic!
God bless you and yours Al. Can't wait to see what the next fifty years bring from ya :-)
(And while we're on the subject, why not celebrate Al's birthday by giving him some hard-earned royalties? Mash down here to order The Essential "Weird Al" Yankovic 2-disc CD set, due out this coming Tuesday!)
Anderson has now plead guilty to a DWI charge. The judge has sentenced him to two years of probation.
(That is definitely a new one for the "Hold muh beer and watch this..." file!)
Okay well what I wanna know is: does the Wal-Mart in Patrick Springs carry white-space routers already??
Ehhhh... personally I'd rather have official Gears of War Underoos :-P
And if you buy extra boxes of chocolate chip, the Girls Scouts will even give "protection" for your place of business.
It can be safely said, that the last time a great nation destroyed itself through its own hubris and economic folly was the early Soviet Union (though in the end the late Soviet Union still died by the economic hand). Now we get the opportunity to watch the Americans do the exact same thing to themselves. The most amazing thing of course, is that they are just repeating the failed mistakes of the past. One would expect their fellow travelers in suicide, the British, to have spoken up by now, but unfortunately for the British, their education system is now even more of a joke than that of the Americans...Twenty years ago communism collapsed under its own weight and today the people of the former Soviet Union get to watch the same thing happen to the United States, slowly but surely. Those folks know of what they speak probably better than most anyone else on the planet.(snip)
That brings us to Cap and Trade. Never in the history of humanity has a more idiotic plan been put forward and sold with bigger lies. Energy is the key stone to any and every economy, be it man power, animal power, wood or coal or nuclear. How else does one power industry that makes human life better (unless of course its making the bombs that end that human life, but that's a different topic). Never in history, with the exception of the Japanese self imposed isolation in the 1600s, did a government actively force its people away from economic activity and industry.
Even the Soviets never created such idiocy. The great famine of the late 1920s was caused by quite the opposite, as the Soviets collectivized farms to force peasants off of their land and into the big new factories. Of course this had disastrous results. So one must ask, are the powers that be in Washington and London degenerates or satanically evil? Where is the opposition? Where are the Republicans in America and Tories in England?
There's plenty more harsh truth in the rest of Mishin's essay.
GeekTyrant has more thoughts from Feige. And also from Batman & Robin scribe Akiva Goldsman, who demonstrates enough sincere repentance about the mess that was Batman & Robin that maybe we should finally forgive him and Joel Schumacher for their involvement. In retrospect Warner Brothers was hellbent on making an overblown toy commercial, and not a real movie...
(But it also goes without saying that others before have also claimed that "we were only following orders".)
Considering that once upon a time Sesame Street did a parody of Twin Peaks starring Cookie Monster, can't really say that I'm surprised Children's TelevisionSesame Workshop would also adapt what is currently one of television's hottest shows for pee-wee appreciation :-)
Next month begins Sesame Street's fortieth season. Wonder if they could do a send-up of House or Lost sometime...
Well friends and neighbors, tonight I get to grin a big 'un: Sequoia has inadvertently released the source code of its voting machines and... wonder upon wonders... already the code is shown to be breaking election law!
"Sequoia blew it on a public records response. ... They appear... to have just vandalized the data as valid databases by stripping the MS-SQL header data off, assuming that would stop us cold. They were wrong. The Linux 'strings' command was able to peel it apart. Nedit was able to digest 800-MB text files. What was revealed was thousands of lines of MS-SQL source code that appears to control or at least influence the logical flow of the election, in violation of a bunch of clauses in the FEC voting system rulebook banning interpreted code, machine modified code and mandating hash checks of voting system code."Want to examine the code for yourself? studysequoia.wikispaces.com has whatcha need!
And truth be told, right now I'm kicking myself for having nearly flunked-out of that C computer programming class I took during my first semester at Elon. But I harbor no doubt: better minds than mine in such matters are going to be picking out a bunch of interesting - and quite possibly very illegal - stuff from this code.
Click here for more product and ordering info, would you kindly?
Incidentally, here's my review from a few days ago of Star Wars: Death Troopers. This book has fast found an enthused audience: some are saying that it's one of the freshest Star Wars stories in quite a long while. And ever since I finished reading it, it's been in my mind that Lucasfilm is sitting on a huge opportunity here for a Star Wars "side franchise". I'm talking 'bout video games, action figures, more books... lots more stuff inspired by this newly-minted horror facet of the saga. Hey, maybe even a full-blown Star Wars horror TV movie on Syfy or Cartoon Network: that would sooo rock!
(It would be better for the entire country and our posterity if it had been dumped into a trash can instead.)
S. 1796 has been filed. The Senate's version of "health care reform" is one thousand, five hundred and two pages long.
What the hell is inside that thing?
Here's the link to a PDF file of this monstrosity if you're so inclined.
I don't know what's scarier: this ad's production values, or that once upon a time children and at least one too many adults found this toy even mildly amusing...
Meanwhile the ninety-ninth federally-insured bank this year has gone under.
Looks like I'm gonna have to begin stockpiling some more "breadlines" photos to use...
...for Sony and Microsoft, motion controllers are their next-gen consoles. And it's a damn sight easier than launching Xbox 720 or PS4. They can debut these peripherals without needing to engineer completely new boxes for consumers, potentially bundle them over time, and they have a much better chance at getting exclusive games, thanks to the specificity of the hardware (something that's happened a lot for the Wii). Thus, both hardware manufacturers and publishers like EA see these controllers sparking new interest in Xbox 360 and PS3, which will delay the next dreaded console transition for another few years.It also means that we won't have to be dreading the adoption of a next-gen console anytime soon... so that'll save some coin in the short term :-)
Does it look like Rover got a massive upgrade, or what?
The Prisoner beckons us back to The Village on November 15th.
Sounds like a winner to me. We could soon see the day when these things are powering our cars... and we can then tell OPEC, literally, to go pound sand :-P
Yeah, the kid from Colorado who was thought to have taken a ride in that balloon yesterday and then cryptically said on national television "We did this for a show".
Here is "Up, Up and Away" by The Fifth Dimension...
Now, let us never speak of this again.
I've already shared with y'all some Japanese prank videos. But this next one is definitely over-the-edge darkly hilarious: a Japanese hidden camera "reality" television show fakes a sniper attack on an unsuspecting contestant. Panic Face King is kinda like Candid Camera meets Scare Tactics.
Watch the mayhem! And this is the sort of thing that, for once, you don't need to worry about a translation :-)
The 24 countdown timer sound effect is a particularly nice touch :-P
According to two physicists, the LHC's mission to produce the hypothesized and long-sought Higgs boson is damned to failure by its own future. The reason? Because the Higgs boson "might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather". And according to Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, this "predestination" from the Higgs particle goes far beyond screwing up a laboratory experiment: the failure of the United States government to finish building the Superconducting Supercollider is cited as possible evidence that the Higgs boson is wrecking havoc across spacetime from the future.
Here's that link again, if you still dare to look further into the abyss.
Death Troopers however, is the first-ever stab at blood-curdling horror in that galaxy far, far away.
So... did author Joe Schreiber pull it off?
Death Troopers is the kind of Star Wars story that I've been wanting to enjoy for a long time but didn't realize until I'd finished reading it: a good, solid stand-alone tale rife with action and without the baggage of moral dilemma or political metaphor. As a horror novel, however...
I've no doubt it's probably just personal taste. The perfect kind of horror in literature, in my mind, is the kind evoked by writers like H.P. Lovecraft, or Richard Matheson. The sort of gnawing uncertainty about being cast alone and adrift with no idea what the hell is making that god-awful sound behind the walls.
On that note, Death Troopers almost satisfies completely as a horror story in its own right. Not quite all the way though.... but enough that I have to note that I am very much looking forward to Schreiber's next Star Wars horror novel (which he is already writing). Death Troopers is certainly the most visceral Star Wars story in a great many moon. Some of the stuff that Schreiber came up with is maximum gross-out: nightmarish in our "real" world but put it in the Star Wars universe and the effect is particularly disconcerting. I liked that!
Death Troopers isn't that totally perfect horror entry for the saga, and it doesn't have to be either. This was the first time anything like this has been tried... and with Death Troopers Schreiber has definitely proven that there is a very rich potential of horror genre for Star Wars that has until now not been tapped into.
For a Star Wars novel, I enjoyed Death Troopers immensely and would recommend it to all of my fellow saga geeks out there. And I'm not gonna let this review go without saying that I for one would love to see LucasArts consider a Star Wars horror video game inspired by Death Troopers! There's a real BioShock/Dead Space kinda vibe that Schreiber evokes in this book, and it would translate brilliantly into a first-person shooter :-)
Zachary Christie is a six-year old Cub Scout from Delaware who was sentenced to 45 days in reform school. His "crime"? Bringing a spork (combination spoon and fork) to school so that he could use it to eat his pudding.
Fortunately however, the ensuing public uproar embarrassed administrators enough to bring Christie back to his regular school. And Whalen has been assured by West Point Military Academy that his situation will not be a mark against him when he applies for admission (something he has dreamed of since first grade).
It's "zero tolerance" craziness like this that has contributed a lot to a loss of faith in America's public education system. What the hell is going on when we as a people are getting indoctrinated from an early age to fear things like plastic knives?!
But at least Matthew Whalen has nothing to be worried about. Before too long, he'll be strutting proudly across campus... carrying a machine gun!
Here's Grizzard's press release...
Halloween Book BurningWell, at least they'll also be serving fried chicken...
Burning Perversions of God’s Word
October 31, 20097:00 PM – Till
Great Preaching and Singing
Come to our Halloween book burning. We are burning Satan’s bibles like the NIV, RSV, NKJV, TLB, NASB, NEV, NRSV, ASV, NWT, Good News for Modern Man, The Evidence Bible, The Message Bible, The Green Bible, ect. These are perversions of God’s Word the King James Bible.
We will also be burning Satan’s music such as country , rap , rock , pop, heavy metal, western, soft and easy, southern gospel , contempory Christian , jazz, soul, oldies but goldies, etc.
We will also be burning Satan’s popular books written by heretics like Westcott & Hort , Bruce Metzger, Billy Graham , Rick Warren , Bill Hybels , John McArthur, James Dobson, Charles Swindoll , John Piper, Chuck Colson, Tony Evans, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swagart, Mark Driskol, Franklin Graham , Bill Bright, Tim Lahaye, Paula White, T.D. Jakes, Benny Hinn , Joyce Myers, Brian McLaren, Robert Schuller, Mother Teresa , The Pope , Rob Bell, Erwin McManus, Donald Miller, Shane Claiborne, Brennan Manning, William Young, etc.
We are not burning Bibles written in other languages that are based on the TR. We are not burning the Wycliffe, Tyndale, Geneva or other translations that are based on the TR.
We will be serving Bar-b-Que Chicken, fried chicken, and all the sides.
If you have any books or music to donate, please call us for pick-up. If you like you can drop them off at our church door anytime. Thanks.
Seriously though folks, I thought there was something way familiar with Grizzard's litany of hate. So I went looking and sure enough: Marc Grizzard's church comes highly recommended by David Cloud. Anyone with even passing knowledge of "King James Only-ism" will be familiar with that name. David Cloud, through his Way of Life Literature website, has been a longtime worshiper of the King James Bible. Yeah, I said "worshiper" because these people have put their interpretation of the Bible in a place above that of Christ Himself. And King James-onlyists adore David Cloud: they have itching ears for whatever vile vitriol he cranks out against... well, everything that's not "Bible-believing Baptist".
Grizzard, Cloud and their kind have literally made an idol out of the King James Bible.
Ironically, as much as they claim to follow the King James Bible, they seem awfully ignorant of the words of the 1611 Authorized Edition's own translators in their preface to the book...
"Now to the latter we answer, that we do not deny, nay, we affirm and avow, that the very meanest translation of the Bible in English, set forth by men of our profession, (for we have seen none of theirs of the whole Bible as yet) containeth the Word of God, nay, is the Word of God."Grizzard should be rejoicing that the Bible is so available to everyone. As it is, Grizzard and people like him trust in their own feeble understanding more than they trust God to draw people unto Him.
And in the end, what Grizzard is doing will only repel people from Christ, unfortunately.
Fear not! The aliens aren't coming (yet anyway) but this luminous halo over western Moscow a few days ago has sparked worldwide curiosity. Many are saying it looks a lot like the arrival of the giant ships from the movie Independence Day. But meteorologists on the scene are reporting that it's merely a very peculiar effect of sunlight shining through the clouds during a convergence of an Arctic air front over the city.
Putting it into perspective, Nate Anderson has composed a very good piece over at Ars Technica titled "100 years of Big Content fearing technology-in its own words". In it Anderson documents a century of hysteria on the part of copyright holders that in retrospect is absolutely laughable: everything from fears of the photocopier after World War II and how some dreaded the coming of the VCR, on back to John Philip Sousa's screed against player pianos and gramophones (pictured). It's only too interesting to note that in spite of all of the "warnings", that there has been no evidence at all that technology has stifled creativity... or that the copyright industry has done anything to encourage creativity, for that matter. Quite a rollickin' good read no matter where you're coming from.
But I've no doubt what it was that I saw here in Rockingham County, North Carolina a short while ago. At a national conference for the Boy Scouts of America's Order of the Arrow in Colorado years ago I got to see a Bald Eagle way up close: those birds are positivalutely HUGE!
I spotted the Bald Eagle from my car at about 3 p.m. this afternoon, just off U.S. 158. Soaring at not too great a height over a field off to my right. I've never seen a beak that brilliantly yellow in these parts and that's what caught my eye. That and the wingspan. It soon glided off west into the woods and I lost sight of it. But I'm not gonna soon forget seeing it :-)
I don't think I've ever been jazzed about an upcoming Pixar movie as I am finding myself to be about Toy Story 3.
And this first trailer is making me even more stoked about it.
No YouTube for this one folks. It's the rare trailer which demands that you behold it in full vivid Quicktime.
