Mmmm…nuts…

You know what I just discovered is really good?

Dry roasted peanuts covered in dark corn syrup.

Mmmm…

Post-Easterism

Now that Easter’s over, we can look forward to the most important thing:

Lots of mark-down easter candy at the grocery store! Yay!

The Presently-Past Future

Since one of my hobbies is predicting the future, it is often useful to look at what other predictions people have made, especially those that were made long ago, and can now be checked. Some seem silly and ridiculous, but some actually get something right.

Case in point: this video, made in 1967, about 1999 life.

The styles of the machines and clothing seen here may seem absurd to us in the early 21st century, but what this video is really about is what the machines do. This video is essentially correct.

Let’s see there’s online shopping, online banking, email/faxing. Home and store computers linked up…the internet? In fact the only thing that’s really not happened is the home video surveillance that the mother does of the kids, and I think that’s becuase most people just don’t have a need for it.

Of course, they also fail spectacularly at anticipating changing roles of the father and mother. Fortunately, that’s something we can all laugh at.

Success! Well for Steven Colbert Anyway…

Apparently the next International Space Station module is going to be named after Steven Colbert. He won the write-in contest by an enormous margin.

Of course, the final decision is NASA’s, and I highly doubt that they’ll name it after him. But I think they should serious consider it: NASA relies on government funding which is reliant on public opinion. If people don’t want NASA around, they’ll vote people into office which will take away their funding and NASA will disappear. This, to put it mildly, would suck.

Unfortunately NASA as a probably-deserved reputation for being old and stodgy and if they do name it something else, it will probably just fan the flames of anti-NASA sentiment.

Well, however it ends up, it’s still pretty funny, much like Colbert himself.

Mmmm…pi…

Today is March 14th, and you know what that means: it’s Pi Day! You see because pi is (approximately) 3.14. And today’s date is 3/14. And…well that’s it, really. I’m looking forward to 2015, when we will be able to write the date 3/14/15, which is the first four digits of pi. And on that day, at 9:26:53 it will be super-duper Pi Second, because pi is 3.141592653… Although rounding purists will probably prefer 9:26:54 because the next digit after the last 3 is a 5. Heh, what nerds <snort>!

Anyway, today is double special for me. Why? It’s my birthday! Well, ok, it’s not my birthday, but it is the birthday of my character in my semi-autobiographical novel Alien Life. It’s about an extraterrestrial who’s come to Earth to study human culture and technology. A sort of intergalactic anthropologist. He, that is to say I, or Alien!Arik Rice, was born on this day, at least on the human calendar.

So, how old is the little tyke? Well it starts with a 1. And ends with a 2. And it’s not 12.

He’s 16,102 years old, born in the year 14,094 B.C.E. Yes, I’m he’s older than human civilization itself! All because of mind upload and taking care to avoid unnecessary risks, although uploaded people in his civilization are practically indestructible, so even relatively large risks are not hazardous. That’s what you get when your civilization is over a billion years old.

Doktor Wer

What’s better than Daleks shouting?

Daleks shouting in German.

Oh yes.

Season Reason

So it’s Christmas time. As you unwrap your presents, eat your Christmas ham, and revel in the good tidings and fun of the holidays, make sure to take time out to remember where it all comes from:

Sometimes Being So Smart is a Drag

I’ve been busy playing this online game called EVE Online. It’s basically a massive online space simulation game in which you can do a number of things.  You can mine resources, refine them, make items to sell in-game or use yourself, fight NPCs or PCs (that is, computer controlled characters and other real human players), any and all at the same time.

But being the smart guy that I am I like to ask questions and figure things out. For example: what is the best way to make in-game money? The economy is almost exclusively player-driven. When you sell an item, it is because some other player somewhere in the world has put out a buy order. When you purchase an item, it is because someone else has put it on the market. It takes a bit of mathmatics but I figured out that the best way to make the most money was to go out, mine a certain type of ore (called Dense Veldspar, which is entirely common throughout the game’s universe) and sell it.

Then do it again. And again. And again. You might use the money you get to purchase better ships and mining equipment so you can mine larger quantities exponential growth. But in the end it’s just going out, mining asteroids, and selling the results.

The game now seems incredibly boring. I can go out and keep mining sure, but to what end? It’s not like the money I earn in-game can be transferred to the real world. There are other things I can do, like combat, but that appeals less to me than mining and manufacturing. My own sheer brilliance has reduced a complex game to a simple equation: mining = wealth. Wealth that is ultimately worthless.

Oh well.

Xtreme Koolz Comix Distributron

I love the web comic XKCD (which actually doesn’t stand for the title of this post or anything for that matter). It sometimes deals with computer stuff, which I’m generally clueless about, but also brilliantly combining bizarre and arcane mathematical and physical theory (all of which is accurate) with everyday life. For example, check out today’s comic. This site is where I got a couple of comic images that was on The Other Blog.

Bunnius Explodus

Searching randomly around I just ran into a species that probably has the best name ever: the Volcano Rabbit!

And look, it’s so cute!

Awwww…