Category: Useless knowledge

Information you have no need for. Ever. Usually about me, but possibly about other trivial crap in the world.

Domino homebrew

I can’t recall having seen any moderate or large scale domino setups lately, but recall them being quite the fashion when I was much younger.  Below is a video done by some kinetic artists for a museum.  The real action starts at around 3:30 mark, with leadup showing the already set up domino string, a bit of interview time with the artists, and a few stills of final domino break inserts (when setting up long domino strings, it is typical that one leaves some large holes in case of an accident along the chain and then fills them in when everything else is finished).

The whole action section gets started by the young attendee who guessed closest to the actual number of dominoes used in the display.  (via boingboing)

[tags]dominoes, museum, kinetic artist[/tags]

Lifting squirrels

From the xkcd blag (I’m a Blahgger, he’s a blagger – we just don’t want to fit in with those filthy bloggers, I guess) comes this fascinating look at using lasers to lift squirrels in to space.photon_squirrel.png Amazingly enough, without taking advantage of reflection, the method described uses the Doc Brown approved 1.21 gigawatts of energy to lift a squirrel. Using a sufficiently focused beam of light along with properly placed lasters, that power requirement can be cut a few orders of magnitude, down around 1 megawatt. dyson_sphere_diagram.jpgThis is a far less interesting number, but much more economically feasible. Understand I’m all for using gross amounts of power to lift squirrels in to outerspace, but I realize the country might not share my willingness to drain from the entire power grid for such a useful pursuit.

Nicely, the blag post transcends merely levitating squirrels, advancing to such necessary topics as generating lasers from the sun, tying them together via Dyson sphere manipulation to create a death ray, and sending a message to our celestial neighbors.

Why settle for interstellar communication when you can have interstellar war? And we could modulate the beam to carry a message — in this case, “FUCK YOU GUYS!”

And ultimately, isn’t that the real purpose of advancing laser studies? Inter-stellar war and Parisian-level offense directed at other galactic entities? Well, that and frikkin’ shark/laser hybrids.

[tags]xkcd, blag, lasers, 1.21 gigawatts, squirrels, frikkin’ shark, Dyson sphere, death[/tags]

On killers named Wayne

I frequently find fodder for my other, briefer blog from my regular News of the Weird emails, but rarely use the weird news on the Blahg. A recurring theme in those emails is the improbably high number of killers whose middle name is Wayne. Being a middle-name-is-Wayne kind of guy, I just like to know to whom I am being compared on the oddities scale. With that information, you can probably understand why I’d want to post a News of the Weird image of 3 guys who killed a store owner in a shooting:

which_is_wayne.jpg

{democracy:6}

Can you guess which one has the middle name of Wayne just from the picture? Read the full article to check your answer.

[tags]News of the Weird, Middle name is Wayne, Guess the Wayne[/tags]

My littlest singing

Here’s a pic of my littlest one pretending to be grown up and singing in church a couple weeks ago.

daniel_in_church01.jpg

I should point out that he just turned 5 at the start of the month, and can’t actually read yet.  So cute as this is, it’s just him imitating his mother.

[tags]My children, Church, singing[/tags]

Staten Island Ninja!!!

You know, there are only 3 facts you need to know about Ninja:

  1. Ninjas are mammals.
  2. Ninjas fight ALL the time.
  3. The purpose of the ninja is to flip out and kill people.

So when one shows up on Staten Island robbing houses, you know eventually someone is going to end up dead. It hasn’t happened yet, but someday…

[liveleak 8c3_1191087140]

Phear the Ninja, people.

[tags]Ninja, Real Ultimate Power, Staten Island, LiveLeak, Video[/tags]

Dear Microsoft:

Please give me a way to save my default station and frikkin’ volume level on my Zune.  The damn thing has a hard drive.   Surely there’s a few bits of space on it to save that information.  And I don’t give a rat’s ass about the solid-state Zune owners – satisfy my desires to make this ultimate in poor design media player a little less phail.  Given how incredibly quickly the battery drains unless I fully shut the device down and lock the controls, I have to suffer a reboot and ear-drum breaking volume setting on a static filled non-station every time I want to listen to the radio or my stored music.

I won’t even go in to other problems I’ve found since I first complained about how bad this device is, but know that I keep finding things to dislike about the implementation.  Yes, I keep using it.  But I recommend buying a different player to people who ask me about it, and I’m kinda invested for $100 that I hate to just toss, because it does function as a radio just fine once I set my station (although there are bad choices in the radio interface, but that should be no surprise given how many bad choices were made with this device).

World’s biggest ferris wheels

ferris-wheel-800_clip2.jpg

Honestly, sometimes I even surprise myself with the subjects that I find interesting.  Quite randomly, I recently found this very short, but very cool article on work around the world (well, at least a couple of locations) to build the world’s largest ferris wheel.  A ride that had fallen out of favor some years ago, the ferris wheel seems to be suffering, you might say, a resurgence in interest since the London Eye opened a few years ago.

The larger these monstrous rides become, the greater their capacity and potential profit—and the more seriously builders take them. To start, they don’t call them Ferris wheels. “We categorize them as ‘observational wheels’ because of the capsules,” says Alexander Pieper, spokesman for the Great Wheel Corporation, which developed the Singapore, Dubai and Beijing wheels.

My bad.  The world’s largest observational wheel.  It’s hardly an article, being no more than sidebar length for any magazine publication, but I found the accompanying illustration (captured in part above) to be chock full of useless cool knowledge. For instance, the original ferris wheel, the Eagle 16 noted in the illustration, made a revolution in a mere 12 seconds.  Now, it’s around half an hour start to finish on the giants.  To borrow a phrase from Keanu Reeves – Whoa.

[tags]Ferris Wheel, Observational wheels, Singapore Flyer, London Eye, Beijing Great Wheel, Extreme Engineering[/tags]

Happy Valentine’s day

Celebrate the oddity of love’s expression that is Valentine’s Day with Yahoo! Movie’s look at the 10 most mismatched movie couples.

Dan Aykroyd & Rosie O’Donnell
Exit to Eden – 1994
“Exit to Eden” was a dark, romantic novel by “Interview With a Vampire” author Anne Rice about bondage and S&M. Who better, then, to turn it into a movie than the creator of “Mork and Mindy?” An even better question: what movie executive thought that the formula for box office gold was putting Dan Aykroyd and Rosie O’Donnell in skimpy studded leather outfits? As the comic relief they are painfully unfunny, and not even the kind of painful that a dominatrix would enjoy.

Also making the list are painful pairs like Hayden Christiansen and Natalie Portman (I adore her, but he is Gore-like in his woodenness), and the laughably bad Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck coupling in Gigli.  A couple of the movie couples feel almost like “We can’t come up with couple 9 and 10 – throw some forgettable pair in.”  Otherwise, it’s dirty-laundry comforting to see where others agree with your feelings.

[tags]Yahoo!, Movies, Mismatched couples, Valentine’s day[/tags]

What dancing is all about

This is all the reason I need to suggest more people buy poles to put up in their garage.  Probably NSFW.

Her comments from the YouTube page:

sorry i’m tired of answering the same questions over n over.
took me 3 months to get to this level of dancing 6-8 hours a day for 3 months. i do not do this amout of hours now though.
i do not have any dance background, no ballet, gymnastics ect
song: fergalisous – fergie
i am using a 50mm chrome x-pole from xpole.co.uk
and for those who wanna leave nasty comments… dont bother cause i now aprove them, you gain nothing

Seems more pervs on the intarw3bbs like me have seen the video and tried to leave naughty comments. Shame on you pervs. Be more like me and look but don’t let them know you are looking.

[tags]Pole, Pole dancing, Fergie, Fergaliscous, Mmmmm, Pervs, YouTube, video[/tags]