Easy Rider

Sorry for the long gap in posting, I've been busy. Last weekend Chris and I took a motorcycle safety certification course. We both passed and now I have an official "class M" license to drive motorcycles. Unfortunately, the weather over the weekend was really shitty in Columbia, causing delays in the training exercises we had to do on both days (because frankly, riding in the rain on freshly surfaced asphalt is really slippery). I actually almost bought it on on turn I made a little too quickly. My rear tire slid out from under the bike but I managed to get back in control in an instant. Even still, it was quite a thrill. I had promised a friend I'd help him move a couch after class on Saturday, and another friend that I'd attend his house party in the evening. After the rain delays in class, I was late for helping the couch moving, which itself also took longer than I expected, leaving me little choice but to bail on the house party (since I still had another day of class on Sunday which required attendance at 7:30 Am sharp). Sorry Spike!

Anyway, the Monday before this passed weekend was spent in San Fransisco on business, so for any of my friends out there who might be reading, apologies for not getting in touch. I only arrived in town late Sunday and flew back home Monday afternoon. I will say that if you are in the mood for seafood in the bay area, go to Kincaid's in Burlingame. The snapper stuffed with King crab was awesome, as was the sushi sampler.

caturday lolcat!

Some explanation may be required if you aren't quite the internet junkie that I am. In the beginning, there was FARK which hosts many "photoshop contests" from which many of the most famous internet memes have been spawned. Then there was the "lolcats" website which began to archive most of the lolcats photoshop contest pics from FARK, a signal that meme had matured. All this now leads us to today, which has seen not just one but two "caturday" threads on FARK. So I finally decided to break down and make my own contribution (above, and submitted to the second thread, along with another). It seems that lolcats is about to go mainstream (if it hasn't already). I don't even like cats generally.

Now if you are like me and can't get enough of this shit, then you should also check out a recent derivative thread called "lolpresidents" which has also taken on a life of its own and had me laughing off my stool for hours.

Friday Action Figure: Megatron

I saw the new "Transformers" movie at a matinee on July 4. I really liked it. It was the very first summer "blockbuster" for which I can honestly recommend that you go see it. All they had to do to win me over was to not screw it up. Of course, they may have had a lower bar to jump in re-making what was originally a Saturday morning cartoon rather than the rich and well-developed story line of a long-running comic book series, but still, they did a good job. I would even go so far as to say they fixed a thing or two. First they made BumbleBee a Camaro (first very old and then very new) instead of a Volkswagon Beetle which, I have to say was an improvement. Although I think it would have been much cooler if they had introduced Bumblebee as a '71 Dodge Charger Super Bee and then later as the modern Charger. A nicer fit that would have been. The best do-over though goes to Megatron who I always thought was a bizarre transformer in the cartoon. How exactly does the largest of the bad-guy tranformers convert into a pistol that can be held in the palm of any other transformer? I always thought that was stupid. Well they fixed it in the movie and had Megatron transform into a cannon of vaguely pistol shape, but giant, non-hand-holdable size. The movie also did a really great job of explaining how the transformers chose their familiar "incognito" forms of Earth-machines, which the cartoon never did as far as I know. This explanation opened the door for transformers to adopt multiple on-the-fly incognito shapes if the need arose, but they would do this infrequently enough, and under such desperate circumstances that it was easy to interpret this act as one requiring great amounts of precious "Transformer energy". That is, transforming between humanoid robot form and chosen incognito form was a snap, but adopting a new incognito form seemed a pain in the ass.

Biology Rules

There this field of study out there dubbed "evolutionary psychology". It is unfortunately what I would call "soft science" in that there are no real experiments. So they have to do what the modern physicists do which is essentially to make up hypotheses and then go looking for real world support for these hypotheses via direct observation. This isn't much better than what sociologists do so I'd say the veracity of either group's conclusions are about equally untrustworthy. In many cases, both groups start from the same set of observations, but propose wildly different root causes for the observed behavior. In most cases, I think both explanations are true, but most of the time I would have to go with the evolutionary psychologist's conclusions as "feeling" more at the root of things.

Here's a great evolutionary psychology article detailing "Ten politically incorrect truths about human nature". Spike and Jackie, this is for you.

Pop Quiz

1) The Sun revolves around the Earth - True or False?

2) What is a molecule?
A) A very small living thing
B) Two or more atoms bonded together
C) A wave
D) Silicon
E) All of the above

3) Which of these is a form of radiation?
A) Radio waves
B) Micro waves
C) Light waves
D) Gamma waves
E) All of the Above

4) Which of the following molecules stores hereditary information?
A) Silicon
B) Water
C) DNA
D) Sperm
E) All of the Above

5) What is a stem cell?
A) A cell which can grow into many different cell types
B) A cell from a cloned mammal
C) A cell which grows into a stem shape
D) A cell from an aborted fetus
E) All of the Above

Not to be all professorial, but I just read this article and it freaked me out. So I want to be sure all of my readers are up to snuff. Write your answers down before clicking the comments link to see which were right. No cheating.