Free comic book day coming this week-end

Don’t forget to get up early so you don’t miss out on free comic book day offerings at your local comic shop this Saturday. I missed it last year because the site was broken on free comic book day, and I hadn’t checked on participating comic shops before the event. So head over there now, look up your local shops, and make sure to drop in to get your free comics.

[tags]Free comic book day, comics, free, FCBD[/tags]

Optimus keyboard

optimus_maximus.jpgYou can finally order your Optimus keyboard from ThinkGeek for a mere $1600. Well – you can kinda… While checking this to make a post, I noticed it is currently out of stock. But this is a bit of forward movement from the last 2 years of story-without-substance.

Just some of the highlights/features of this keyboard:

  • Revolutionary Keyboard Features a tiny OLED screen on each key. 113 screens total.
  • Play a GIF animation or Quicktime movie on a Key
  • Key sets can be linked to an application, so whenever you open that app the appropriate keys come up
  • Built in USB hub

More features listed on the product page at ThinkGeek. One suggestion I’ve heard is encoding your favorite pr0n and setting it to play across all keys, but honestly that sounds rather infeasible. I *would* like to have one and set it up with animations and key images for the kids when they are playing their games. But I’m going to have to wait until one of these comes out for under $100 before trying anything like that. Probably in 2-3 years, we’ll have that reality, though, right?

[tags]Optimus, Keyboard, OLED, ThinkGeek, YouTube, video, Stuff I want, $1600 keyboard[/tags]

Dead Like Me – the movie

While trying to find out who one of the actresses is on an episode of the television show Dead Like Me that the wifey-person and I watched tonight, I stumbled on the IMDb listing for the Dead Like Me movie. According to the IMDb listing:

After the departure of Rube Sofer, a new head reaper named Cameron Kane takes over. He’s a slick businessman who couldn’t care less about helping the newly dead. Chaos ensues and brings out the worst in Daisy and Mason who begin drinking anew. George and Reggie re-connect for the first time when George reaps a new friend of Reggie’s.

Sadly, it looks like Mandy Patinkin will not be in the movie. I really like him. I have heard from others that he is difficult to work with, and that’s why he doesn’t stay on shows for very long, but I don’t know that to be anything other than rumor.

No word on the actually release date other than this year. Now I have to make sure to see the movie in theaters when it hits.

edit: See the comments for additional information, including reference to the movie delay, a straight to DVD release, and link to an Ellen Muth fansite you should visit.

[tags]Dead Like Me, Ellen Muth, Rube, Reapers[/tags]

Blogging sweatshops

Fear not, fair reader – this isn’t going to happen to me.

Seems I can barely muster a few minutes a day to blog here lately.  Maybe I do need to move to New York and join one of these sweatshops.  Think of the useless knowledge I could serve up with 18+ hours a day at this! (via boingboing)

[tags]Humor, YouTube, Blogging, Sweatshops[/tags]

Butterflies to rest their wings today

In honor of the passing of Dr. Edward Lorenz yesterday, I heard a butterfly say the entire species will recognize the man by not flapping their wings for a one minute observation today.

Dr. Lorenz is best known for the notion of the “butterfly effect,” the idea that a small disturbance like the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can induce enormous consequences.

As recounted in the book “Chaos” by James Gleick, Dr. Lorenz’s accidental discovery of chaos came in the winter of 1961. Dr. Lorenz was running simulations of weather using a simple computer model. One day, he wanted to repeat one of the simulations for a longer time, but instead of repeating the whole simulation, he started the second run in the middle, typing in numbers from the first run for the initial conditions.

The computer program was the same, so the weather patterns of the second run should have exactly followed those of the first. Instead, the two weather trajectories quickly diverged on completely separate paths.

At first, he thought the computer was malfunctioning. Then he realized that he had not entered the initial conditions exactly. The computer stored numbers to an accuracy of six decimal places, like 0.506127, while, to save space, the printout of results shortened the numbers to three decimal places, 0.506. When typing in the new conditions, Dr. Lorenz had entered the rounded-off numbers, and even this small discrepancy, of less than 0.1 percent, completely changed the end result.

When I was in college, one of my math professors taught a chaos theory class.  His term (and I’m sure this is near-universal for chaos theoreticians,  but I’ve only heard him say this) was SDOIC – Situation Dependent on Initial Conditions (we pronounced it stoyk).  In chaotic systems, the results you get are extremely sensitive to changes in initial inputs.  As seen in Dr. Lorenz’s weather simulation, only slightlchanges in the measurements later in the simulation lead to completely different outputs at the end.  Thus the tiniest change in conditions, such as changes to air currents brought about by a butterfly flapping her wings, can lead to massive differences in conditions throughout an entire system.

Clearly, I cannot explain this well enough, but it is a fascinating branch of mathematics, and well worth learning more about if you are interested.  And there is much more to it than what Jeff Goldblum discussed in Jurassic Park.

So remember if the weather is batshit crazy tomorrow, it’s due to the butterflies honoring Dr. Lorenz today.  And that, dear reader, is chaos at work.

[tags]RIP, Dr. Lorenz, Edward Lorenz, Chaos theory, the pirates don’t eat the tourists, Nobody could’ve predicted that[/tags]

Sad news concerning Ms. Monroe

Well folks, seems you’ll not get your chance to see Marilyn Monroe playing up-and-down-on-a-stick any time soon. Her private 15 minute oral sex performance video was purchased by a rich person who intends to file it away somewhere for from the peeping eyes of intarw3b pervs.

The gentleman who bought it said out of respect for Marilyn he’s not going to make a joke of it and put it on the Internet and try to exploit her, said memorabilia collector Keya Morgan. That’s not his intention and I would never get my name involved if that were to happen.

Someone involved in the whole possession of the tape affair suggests that FBI director Hoover was very interested in the tape, and apparently not just to get his jollies watching pr0n:

The FBI agent that I interviewed said J. Edgar Hoover was completely obsessed. A team of nine individuals were analyzing the tape inside a lab. J. Edgar Hoover brought in a few prostitutes who allegedly had been with President Kennedy and they tried to … see if that was really President Kennedy.

As far as I could tell from the article, there is still no information on who the man is, and as he’s only seen from one angle which doesn’t include his face, it’s tough to tell.

[tags]Marilyn Monroe, Pr0n, Hoover, FBI, oral sex, pervs[/tags]

McCain calls it?

Folks, I think we’ve all been wondering lately if we’re in a recession or not. Well, we have official word from John McCain (watch the video for the full commentary by McCain):

…the important factor here is that Americans are hurting. Americans are hurting today.

They are sitting around the kitchen table saying ‘Are we going to be able to make our home or our mortgage payments?’

He makes some good comments.  I think things like this will help him with his standing among some of the uncertain right, but doubt it will make any change with those already convinced to support or denounce him.  Of course, it doesn’t take a political genius to figure that out.

[tags]McCain, Recession, Economy, Americans[/tags]