After a hectic few months, I finally have some projects that are in the early stages. But since nothing is worth posting about yet, here instead is a list of phrases that (at the time of this posting) turn up no hits on Google: “ate a violin” “driver-side bidet” “unlike normal furries,” “Sarah, plain and …
Yearly Archives: 2008
Debate Drinking Game, New Yorker, Burlington Vermont
I am currently at the tail end of the Debate Drinking Game, wherein you take a drink every time McCain says “my friends” and Obama starts a response with “Look,”. Since both candidates had their verbal tics under control, I just took a drink every time someone said a pronoun. I am not in a …
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Youtube Audio Preview
Wow. It seems someone at YouTUBE took this comic seriously and decided to add an “Audio Preview” feature. Now you can hear your comments read aloud to you. Of course, it’s an optional button using speech synth rather than a mandatory dramatic reading, so it’ll just be used for entertainment by people who haven’t played …
Federal Reserve Skateboard: A Short Story
(Written after sitting in a car for five hours listening to financial news stories.) ——- Damn these subprime lenders, thought Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, barely keeping his balance on the wobbling skateboard. We can’t afford more debt. He snapped a grappling-hook-tipped quarrel into his crossbow as the skateboard slowed. When the country owes trillions and …
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The Goddamn Airplane on the Goddamn Treadmill
Sorry for the forum/blog downtime today. Many things went wrong during davean’s heroic upgrade. (I blame the LHC.) Feynman used to tell a story about a simple lawn-sprinkler physics problem. The nifty thing about the problem was that the answer was immediately obvious, but to some people it was immediately obvious one way and to …
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Pi-Con, Math, Gender, Glaubama
Pi-Con: This weekend I’ll be at Pi-Con, a convention in West Springfield, MA. It’s run by some old friends of mine, and will feature Cory Doctorow. I’ve never actually met Mr. Doctorow in person, so it should be fun. In my mind’s eye, he still wears a red cape and goggles everywhere he goes. I …
Oops (delayed post)
In today’s comic, I have the rain-stick thing happening in Jaynestown, when it actually happens in Our Mrs. Reynolds. I lose three nerd points. When writing the comic, I actually compiled a list of references to wood in Firefly by searching the scripts. They included Badger serving Jayne wood alcohol and Inara likening Mal’s sword …
Trebuchets, Geohashes, and Richmond, VA
A while back, I was home in Virginia for a little while, and my friend James decided it was time to build a trebuchet Pictured: James, Doug I say measure once, cut eighty or ninety times. As you can see by Doug’s hat, trebuchets are very serious business. I had to leave before we could …
Geohashing Followup + change to algorithm for Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia
Geohashing has been great fun so far. There are hundreds of users on the wiki, and I’ve gotten to wander places like this: There’s been a small change to the algorithm to deal with time zones. This change does not affect anyone in North/South America (excluding Greenland), does not affect Saturday meetup times anywhere, and …
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Geohashing
Summer seems to have arrived, at last. As you may have noticed, today’s comic contains an algorithm for converting dates into local coordinates. For a given day, you can calculate what that day’s coordinate is for your region. Dan has put together a tool for calculating a day’s coordinates and show it using Google Maps. …
xkcd 