Talk nerdy to me — Science Friday: Inaugural edition

Science Friday doesn’t need an explanation, does it?

via my panda.

Besides being the first essentially man-made element, Technetium, lucky number 43 on that there ol’ periodic table, is radioactive in every form. Hot, hot, hot! Now I just want to spend the rest of the day drawing the elements as stripper robots on a stage in some kind of a ho-bag element competition, with big blonde teased wigs and Halloween red rubber lips: Technetium sashays up front and melts the pole to wild applause …

Why are the elements robots? Why not? Next you’re going to ask me why they’re strippers. This is the way Mendeleev dreamed it would be. Why don’t you stomp on a dead man’s dreams?

Movie Millisecond: Mass-production

via.

Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976).

Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: E’s notes from the All-Star Game

So I try not to bring it up here because I am such a baseball psycho and if I were to start, I fear the whole blog would be in quick order given over entirely to ball, but I actually watched on television the MLB All-Star Game and fell in to my old habit of taking notes during. I will bore you only with the page where I passed my Tipping Point — which is to say I enjoyed too much beer during commercials to do after a certain time anything other than yell at the ‘casters and any players who incurred my wrath through sloth, gluttony, or other Deadly Sins. The following is my 3rd page of notes, which occurred somewhere around the 5th-6th inning.

By me, of me, for me. Click to enlarge.

In case you need transcription of my dreadful scrawl which makes even the hastiest of doctors wrinkle their brows, it runs like this:

“Sprint Commercial EVO 4G ‘firsts'” (started strong showing great inventions through mankind’s history but then depressed me with how much fucking garbage the 20th century with its built in obsolescence and rapid shedding of outmoded technology has wrought upon the earth — fields of smashed crt televisions and busted hi-fi systems)

“Eyebrow guy — name?” to which I later appended “BRAUN” (dude is cute)

“hole in defense by 2nd, wtf?!?” (this in reference to balls getting past the AL infield and inexcusably eluding my boys, the normally slick-as-shinola Robinson Cano and you-may’ve-heard-of-him-No-Big-Deal Derek Jeter; clearly the only explanation is a gypsy curse.)

“David Wright is still g.d. adorable as hell” (hate the Mets —sorry Jon Stewart— but I love tiny-but-mighty Wright)

“does our radar gun go to 100?” “um — yes.” (conversation between idiotic commentators; of course the gun goes to 100 and up, you fucking idiot and as an aside, just because you are paid to comment does not obligate you to talk incessantly)

“The Things We Make Make Us, Jeep with robots really?!?” (this in reference to a particularly heinous Jeep commercial featuring assembly line robot arms that I think was intended to uplift the ingenuity of man and our sovereign genius or something but inadvertently took the opposite effect for me.)

He may be metal and small and not judge you at all but to me your robot friend is merely the harbinger of the Terminator apocalypse. You can’t fool This Guy!

PSA: The road to respect from your peers

PSA: The road to respect from your peers runs smooth and straight through the battery-powered legs of a robot stuffed animal. Did You Know?

via comically vintage on the tumblr.

Aces, dude. No one will laugh at you now.

Long story short, this is where Teddy Ruxpin came from.

Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: Bender Bending Rodriguez and Baum edition

Page @ Pierce, San Francisco.

“Who knows?

Our big world rolls over as smoothly as it did centuries ago, without
a squeak to show it needs oiling after all these years of revolution.
But times change because men change. The impossibilities of yesterday become the accepted facts of to-day.

Here is a fairy tale founded upon the wonders of electricity and
written for children of this generation.

Dortman, Germany.

Yet when my readers shall have become men and women my story may not seem to their children like a fairy tale at all.

Perhaps one, perhaps two–perhaps several of the Demon’s devices will be, by that time, in popular use.

Who knows?”

(L. Frank Baum, Introduction, The Master Key. Bowen-Merrill (Indiana): 1901.)

There is a bright flash, and a being who calls himself the Demon of Electricity appears. He tells [young protagonist and electrical experimenter] Rob that he has accidentally “touched the Master Key of Electricity” and is entitled to “to demand from me three gifts each week for three successive weeks.”

Rob experiences adventures exploring the use of the Demon’s gifts, but eventually concludes that neither he nor the world is ready for them. Rob rejects the Demon’s gifts and tells him to bide his time until humankind knows how to use them. The Demon leaves.

With a light heart, Rob concludes that he made the right decision, and that “It’s no fun being a century ahead of the times!”

(the wiki.)

Who knows … ?






*”‘Others’ may read it.” rad.

Monocle Monday: Monocle application by Idea Machine edition

Monocle is a simple search tool that puts a universal search field at your disposal. When you want search, you can choose from a number of engines to perform the search in different places. Monocle comes preloaded with engines for Google, Wikipedia, Windows Live Search and Yahoo! Search. You can easily add your own engines by performing an example search inside a web browser window in Monocle. (source)

This is in no way an endorsement of that Mac App. I have never used it and likely never will, as I have had the same phone since 2005 and will probably continue to have it until it literally falls apart in my hands because I have grown to believe that I, myself, am built-in obsolescence personified, and everything I learn to use and grow accustomed to must immediately fall out of human use and knowledge, so that I remain freakishly anachronistic in my understanding of technology.

Et tu, Bender, my metal and small and doesn’t judge me at all robot friend? Then you can all keep your fancy-dancy iPhones and droids, and be sure to bite our shiny metal asses.

I believe there is always a person like this in every group that is behind the crest of the trend by deliberate choice, a lone cowboy on an uneasy horse at the edge of the horizon, never quite part of the pack of trailblazers, always slightly at a remove from the rest of society just in case this next invention is that society’s downfall, and in this generation among those I am close to, I apparently have taken on that mantle. Mmm, Apocalypse Bean Soup — with hamhock, even? Wow, thanks, cowpoke! Just like I like it!

So, yes, I know nothing about this newfangled Monocle app folderol. I just like the ads, don’t you?