Canadians against snowball fights.
I crap you not.
Kaukinen said that to avoid such dangers students are reminded that snow should stay on the ground and not become an instrument of violence.
Though when it stays on the ground, it’s supremely useful for rubbing people like Ms. Kaukinen’s face in. (OK, that last bit was mean.)
We may have covered this already, but there’s a decent bit over at Slate on the ethics of colonizing Mars. The author seems mostly for it, but has a couple of exceptions in the event we find ANY life on Mars.
To heck with that, I say. Unless we find sentient life on Mars, on the order of, say a stoned comparative lit major at a second rate state school (not looking for much besides the realization of something besides basal instincts), I’m not too concerned about what we as a species do to Mars.
I can understand environmentalism on Earth, to a point, as this planet is pretty well evolutionarily tuned ot our survival, and it’s in our best interest to keep it that way. But isn’t that all out the window once we leave the planet, provided we’re not infringing on another sentient species? What would be our interest in, say, keeping the moon desolate and barren? Or in not draining the methane seas of Io (if that’s the right moon of Jupiter) to provide for interstellar rocket fuel?
(Let me know when you’re done with the Beavis and Butthead laughing. I’ll continute then.)
Interactive art is something I’ve been fascinated with ever since I caught an exhibit at the Whitney which allowed you to download a Palm app directly from the exhibit itself. That work let you teach a dancer different dance steps and eventually to put on a dance show. This work is hard to describe (as is most of this stuff) but it has to do with dropping balls and setting up platforms for them to bounce on. Mesmerizing and addictive.
This game is making the rounds. You aim your cannon and fire at an active opponent (computer or true MP) to decide who is Cannon Fodder — anyone brave enough to sign up and play me?
As I’ve stated before I used to have a secret web crush on Tara from ikeepadiary.com. My crush was entirely derived from her Holly Hobby lingerie and cool new tat, so it’s a visual thing. Actually, I still do have a crush and now that she’s moving to Houston it will be harder to hide our love from my wife (who still gives me dirty looks when I mention Tara’s updates at IKAD.)
I’ve got a new secret web crush, and this is almost entirely based on intellect. Jami runs Whatever, Whenever and regularly updates it with short intelligent essays and cool little themed photography collections. The best part is that she lives in Brooklyn, but doesn’t seem as self-agrandizing about it as Lindsay Robertson (who’s cool and all, but not as cool as Jami.)
I never knew how much math airline pilots were involved in, although after reading this story I have to question how good they are at it. In mid-1983 a manual mis-calculation of available fuel forced Boeing 767 pilots to use their passenger-filled plane as a glider in search of a runway. The pilots and flight controllers scrambled through several more calculations trying to determine how to save the plane.
Scary stuff.
Here’s a little home improvement back-story on how WD-40 came to be.
It took them 40 attempts to get the water displacing formula worked out. But they must have been really good, because the original secret formula for WD-40—which stands for Water Displacement perfected on the 40th try—is still in use today.