• Links of interest for 2-26-11

    February 26, 2011 / No Comments

    I’ve been blogging since August of 2000. I remember it because that was when I first got broadband, and the internet was finally fast enough to enjoy it. I have never really taken blogging all that serious. Most of my archives are long lost, and I don’t really care who reads this.

    I mainly blog because I like to have my own place on the internet to call home, and I like to share things that I find cool and interesting on the internet. Sometimes when I find something cool and have a comment about it I will blog it, but most of the time I just post it over there —> in my sidebar. If you are reading this in your RSS reader, you probably aren’t getting my links unless you are also subscribed to my links RSS feed. So now I am going to try and post a recap of the weeks links every Saturday. I’m pretty bad at keeping things like this going, but we will see how it works. Here is the past week’s links:

    Read More

  • Power Balance scam

    February 26, 2011 / No Comments
    via revision3.com

    This weeks episode of Scam School was a great one. Brian Brushwood shows how the Power Balance guys are scamming everybody out of their money for their stupid little bands. I don’t like how he pussy foots around by saying he isn’t sure how the real Power Balance bands work, when we all know they are a scam and work exactly the same as the Placebo Bands do. He was probably just covering his ass.

    Read More

  • American scientific literacy

    February 22, 2011 / No Comments

    Science!On the latest episode, episode #292 of The Skeptics’ Guide the Universe —my favorite podcast by the way— one of their “Science or Fiction” items was that adult Americans with basic science literacy has increased from 10% to 28% over the last 20 years, and it was in fact true! Sure, 28% is pretty pathetic, but at least it’s going up.

    Someone mentioned that it’s probably due to the internet, and I would have to agree. I think I got a pretty poor science education in high school. Mostly what I remember about science class in high school was trying to memorize equations. Even back then I though trying to memorize things that you could look up in seconds stupid, so I cheated a little. I had a scientific calculator that I would program the equations into and it would run them for me. Sure it may have been cheating, but it’s really just something you would do if you had to use those equations in real life. In fact at my current job I did a similar thing with calculations we constantly have to make —I make an Excel spreadsheet to calculate them.

    I was so frustrated of high school science that my first year in college I took a chemistry and astronomy class and found them totally interesting. Too bad I found the rest of my college classes totally boring and dropped out after a year.

    The internet makes it so easy for the people that are interested in science to continue learning. I believe that is where the 28% comes from. The rest of the population that isn’t interested in science just goes on living there lives scientific illiterate. While that in itself isn’t a horrible thing; it’s the people making money off them that I find disgusting. Late night TV and radio is chock-full of scammers trying to make money off of the scientific illiterate. They drive me crazy, but until Americans become more scientific literate, we will all have to put up with the Power Balance bracelets and the many other products of similar ilk.

    Read More

  • Mother-in-Law update

    February 17, 2011 / No Comments

    File-Ventricular_assist_device copyWell, I’m back. I drove through the night rather than getting up early to get home at a reasonable hour. The sugary went well. No surprises for the surgeons. We were hoping she wouldn’t need a LVAD put in, but she did. It will be a little adjustment to learn haw the LVAD works, and get use to always having a battery pack strapped to her. Now she just has a long road to recovery. She will be in the hospital for two more weeks, and then she needs to stay near the hospital, in an apartment for a couple more weeks to make sure she can handle the LVAD on her own, and be close for checkups. She is also now on the transplant waiting list. She will need a transplant sometime in a near future. So if you’re not a donor, why the hell not? I have been a donor since I first got my license at 16. If I’m not going to need my parts, might as well give them to someone who does.

    The bad thing is the price of all of this. They are probably lucky that they don’t have any money or health insurance, otherwise this would have probably bankrupted them. Since they have nothing, there are programs out there to help them out, which is great. There will still be a bunch of costs that us, and the rest of the family is probably going to have to chip in to cover.

    The loss of my Mother-in-Law’s income is really putting them in a bind. My Father-in-Law just has some crappy $12 an hour job, while that was still more than my Monther-in-Law brought in, they really miss her paychecks. I couldn’t imagine living on $12 and hour. We probably put more into savings a month, then they make a month. It almost make me feel bad.

    Okay, that’s the update, now time to get back to my RSS feeds. The hospital wifi was down on Wednesday, so I got way behind.

    Read More

  • Surgery day

    February 14, 2011 / No Comments

    Tomorrow is my Mother-in-Law’s surgery day. She is having a quadruple bypass, so it’s a little scary, but doctors nowadays are pretty amazing, so she should be fine. I’m heading out to Minneapolis in the morning and should get down there shortly before she is out. Then it’s a long and boring week in the hospital. I’m not sure how long I will be down there, but I won’t have much internet access. I think the hospital has wifi, but nothing at the relatives’ house that we are staying at. I am already getting the shakes. I wish I had my iPhone already because the wifi hotspot would be nice, but I still have 37 days left of my contract.

    I am hoping that I can sneak out early since most of the family is going to be down there all week. Not that I don’t want to be with my family, it’s just that once she is out and fine, I don’t feel the need for me to be there. I would rather be someplace with internet. Yeah, I might have an internet addiction problem.

    Read More

  • Supporting independent artists

    February 12, 2011 / No Comments

    I love supporting independent artists who release there stuff online as “pay what you want”. I just bought Wil Wheaton’s new short story Hunter, and Molly Lewis’s new song, “An Open Letter To Stephen Fry”. I love them both, and am more than happy to throw a few bucks at them for their hard work.

    I would like to think and hope the “pay what you want” model works. I support it whenever possible, and always throw in a little extra. I would think most fans would chip in, and if they weren’t fans and downloaded it for free—Well, they may become fans and buy future works.

    Wil Wheaton said he would probably get $125 for selling his short story to a magazine. With his fan base, I can almost guarantee he will make much for than that selling it online. It would just take 42 people to pay the $3 that I did. The best part is no DRM. I don’t have to crack the DRM like I do when I buy from Amazon, and it also feels good knowing that 100% of the money—after PayPal takes their cut—goes into his pocket.

    And if you don’t know who Molly Lewis is, you can watch her on YouTube, and buy her music on BandCamp. I honestly listen to her music all the time, and am always looking for new stuff. Here is her video for her latest song that I just bought:

    Read More

  • The amazing universe

    February 9, 2011 / No Comments

    via youtube.com

    I’m currently reading Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. I’m about halfway through it, and it’s a great book about the history of science. It got me thinking of this video. I saw it a while back, and may even blogged about it before. The video is nearly as old as me, but it’s still great and illustrates how amazing massive the universe is, and how insignificant our pale blue dot is. It also shows how amazing small atoms are. It always amazes me to think that you and everything around you, including the air, is mostly empty space.

    Read More