The purpose of this note is to illustrate an important principle: things are always better with flash. Consider, for instance, the picture to the right with FLASH.
NewsFLASH
The Wasting Times
Some lovely diversions from my old site. Too much trouble to move it all here, though.
Rusty, The Narcoleptic Dachshund
No website of mine is complete without Rusty. One of my all-time favorites.
Backstroke of the West
An oldie but goodie for my first minipost. StarWars Revenge of the Sith retranslated from Chinese. (To the right: the original subtitle was “they’re all over me.”) Thanks, Inna.
Dangers — Dec 26, 2008
On January 13, 2008, the wonderful webcomic xkcd posted this cartoon.
Within hours, the comic rendered itself spectacularly inaccurate. Recognizing that it’s important that the public properly understand the dangers of this modern world, we provide here some more recent research. Continue reading »
Honda Needs a Tune-Up — Dec 23, 2008
This is the story of how Honda engineers screwed up a big expensive project with a simple arithmetic mistake, tried to fudge their result with sound editing software, and congratulated themselves for being totally awesome.
When I was a kid, my family used to drive up to The Pinery in Ontario, a beautiful park by Lake Huron. Very scenic. My favorite part, though, was a stretch of road a half-hour outside of the park. To discourage reckless Canadians from barreling past the houses and barns, the local government carved five sets of grooves in the road before every stop sign. Drive over them, and the car would vibrate: “vbvbvbvb… vbvbvbvb… vbvbvbvb… vbvbvbvb… vbvbvbvb.” The faster you drive, the higher the pitch.
My Dad is a musicologist, with a particular interest in tuning. So there was no way he was going to pass up the chance to experiment with this instrument. Every time we approached some grooves, he’d start fast over the first set, and try to slow down by the last set, to play a descending scale: G-F-E-D-C. If there was no oncoming traffic after the stop sign, he’d swing over to the other side of the road and play an ascending scale as we sped up. Continue reading »
Hello world! — Dec 21, 2008
I’m often frustrated by not having a canonical place to write things down, but what really pushed me over the edge is the subject of the second post here. It’s nerdy. It’s kind of hilarious. I know people who will definitely appreciate it. So this blog exists for that.
However, I don’t expect to be writing those kinds of posts very often. I’d also like to write some notes on high energy physics subjects that are widely misunderstood (at least among us grad students), or not often spoken about, but actually important. Half my life these days is figuring out such things. I guess this blog could save some people the same trouble. But it’s just as much for me, since my memory isn’t great, and I’d like to be able to look up answers instead of figuring them out all over again.
Visuals
The current theme for this blog is a slightly horrible mash-together of my old website and the default wordpress theme. Web design is one of my hobbies, so expect that I’ll find some time to fix things up around here.
