Lackhead.org

A blog that I have recently tuned into is John Cole’s Ballon Juice. In particular, he had a rather terse post concerning the fact that a number of right-wing bloggers were expressing outrage that the “liberal blogosphere” was drudging up a storm about the use of torture by the United States, but wasn’t as rigorous in complaing about the use of torture by Al-Qaida. John’s repsonse was:

It isn’t news because they are terrorists, you fucking simpletons. Yesterday, my cat scratched himself then shit in a box. The media didn’t report that, either.

Anyway, what I found totally and utterly fascinating was this post, and in particular, the YouTube links found within. I mean, the first link, Apache is totally in itself absolutely blogworthy, but the Hasselhoff-er-ific follow up as almost as mind blowing. And some people take drugs to alter their state of consciousness. Man, they could save a lot of time by just looking for stuff on YouTube.

So, for those of you with a curious and masochistic streak, I’ll save you some time and link to the videos strait up and stuff. First, everybody do the Apache:

Now, everybody sit back and try not to lose their lunch over this cover of “Hooked On A Feeling”:

Man, and you thought Pour Casses Avec Toi left an indelible mark on your brain. You may now go back to worrying about the fate of the United States economy, and try to pretend like the last 8 minutes of your life didn’t happen.

-c

Tomorrow, the 25th of May, is Towel Day, the day on which the life and work of Douglas Adams is celebrated (wikipedia entry here). While most people might carry around a towel, throw themselves to the ground and miss, or other such silly things, while I myself will spend my day having a long conversation with a sentient puddle. Hey, we each have our own way.

So, in the spirit of things, I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Douglas Adams:

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

Enjoy the gardens out there everybody.

-c

Ethan recently brought home a printout that his teacher gave him at school, which read thusly:

fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too.

Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The
phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the lny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot
slpeling was ipmorantt!

Pretty neat demonstration of how well our brains work when reading, and how large of a role context really does play in our cognitive parsing. I tried looking up stuff on the net concerning this, and as far as I can tell the “research at Cambridge University” is misleading, or at least that research isn’t represented too well on the ‘ol ‘net (sounds like the “55 out of 100″ statistic is off too). I found a couple of interesting viewpoints though, including that from a professional speller and some guy who compares it to nucleotide polymorphism. But honestly, most references to this on the net are just people doinking around, and I guess with this posting the number of doinkers just went up by 1.

Hmmm, I wonder if it works with numbers too…let’s try it! What do you see here: 8.474132? Do you really read that as 8.314472, the universal gas constant from the Nernst equation?

-c

This is the South Park character that I just created using South Park Studio, and online flash tool that, well, allows you to create your own South Park dudes. I call him “Monsieur Malheureaux” and he’s hiding out in Osama Bin-Laden’s cave. Kids love him!

I came across this via a movie on YouTube that used this to create a neat spoof of the venerable Mac vs. PC ads (the “where’st he beef?” of today’s generation, I guess). Check it out for yourself:

-c

Aww, aint this lil’ guy just the cutest?!! This my friends, is a cuttlefish, a cousin of squids, octopuses, and other Cephalopods.

And what makes these little buggers so awesome? Well, besides having w-shaped pupils, eyes that work on polarization more than color, likely being the most intelligent invertebrate species, having blue-green blood that uses Hemocyanin instead of hemoglobin, producing ink called sepia that was the original sepia ink used in writing, and just being all-around the coolest creature ever, they are also the most amazing quick-changing artists ever.

The skin of these beasties contain tiny colored sacs that can be reshaped via muscle control. These colors can blend, even more so than the pixels on a TV/computer screen to form amazing colors and patterns, all very quickly. In addition, underneath all this is a layer that reflects blues and greens which can also add a metallic tint. And to top it all off, these guys can also change the polarization of the light reflecting off their skin, to add yet another dimension of variability to their appearance. This all happens in the blink of an eye, and is all housed in an invertebrate’s body, so shape changes too.

Nova recently did a special on them called Kings of Camouflage and they have some cool short videos online, and if you have some spare time, you can also watch the whole thing on Google Video.

There are more things in heaven and earth, my dear reader, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

-c