Category: goo brain

Great Sunflower

The Great Sunflower Project is a pretty simple idea. They’ll send you some sunflower seeds if you’ll spend fifteen minutes, twice a month, watching your blooms and recording how many bees come and go.

They crunch the numbers at their site and you get some nifty flowers – sounds fair to me, and anything that helps stop colony collapse disorder seems like a good idea.

Between The Great Sunflower Project and that recent DARPA balloon spotting competition it sounds like distributed data collection is really starting to catch on, which has me thinking: there have to be some heuristics that can be applied to already existing webcams (traffic cams, monument cams, etc) to determine if that area is suffering a disaster – sort of an early warning zombie detection system.

The Venerable Visible V8

The Visible V8

I was digging through picasa the other day and came across this image I shot in the wood paneled basement of an extended family member.

Sweetest Kit Ever.

As a kid I would have gotten about half way through assembly and lost interest, but now that I’m an old man I know how to covet a toy properly.

(By assembling it once, then leaving it somewhere to safely gather dust.)

Maybe for my next ebay-birthday.

Titles

The ColonelI’m under the weather and over-medicated, so please pardon me if I take a ramble:

Back in the late ’90s the internet was a bit of a wild frontier. People hadn’t really figured out what they were and weren’t allowed to get up to, and nothing that happened online seemed quite real in the classic sense.

At the time I was an impressionable youth who felt he needed more respect, so I joined the clergy. It wasn’t an easy thing to do back then, it involved some emailing back and forth as I recall, but I’m glad to see these days the process is more automated.

I’ve never performed a marriage, but I rest better knowing that I legally could. (In case of emergency.)

The discovery that the system had been simplified got me thinking about expanding my proper title. If I can scrape a few hundred dollars together I should be able to get my doctorate, making me The Reverend Doctor Skinner.

If I can then rescue a Southern Belle and get myself a Kentucky Colonelcy – Reverend Colonel Doctor Skinner –  it should be a short leap to British Knighthood – Sir Reverend Colonel Doctor Skinner*.

(As a side note: I was unaware until recently that esquire was a title bestowed on people who weren’t quite Knights, but who were also better than your average Gentleman. So says wikipedia.)

*or maybe The Reverend Doctor Colonel, Sir Skinner? Hmm.

Ke$ha on Conan

I was introduced to Ke$ha by last night’s Conan O’Brien. In case you missed it:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbMWaNKWrN4]

Of course I was outraged, it’s obvious that the entire setup is a rip off of a famous act from the late 1980s.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMKT0gGEBJQ]

People Of The Future

It seems to me, given the abundance of high caloric menu items these days, that the people most fit to survive are the people who take in the least number of those calories, and expel as much of the junk as possible*.

Is the person of tomorrow a lean,  mean, pooping machine?

(*Although this may seem like a very Western-biased mindset, it is my pretty depressing belief that even the most starving nation will one day find itself awash in twinkies and pizza pockets.)

Rhinestone Shades or Cheap Sunglasses


Anyone watching the ball drop in Times Square yesterday probably saw some version of these glasses – a variation on a long standing tradition. The 200Xs were a boom time for novelty new year’s glasses, a boom we’ll not see again for a long time, at least not unless they can work some Kanye styled magic for 2011.

In fact, the teens may be the roughest patch the industry has seen since the mid-1970s*.

My suggestion? Invest in novelty hats.

* This is actually a lie, the industry wasn’t even around until the early ’90s. You can read more about it here, or at your local library.