jason thurber's blog

Obligatory (crap) Fourth of July firework picture… It really is harder to take these than it looks:

Just rememember, dry ice and water should not be enclosed in a small, sealed container… unless you want the container to explode… in which case remember the DIY Explosive Makers motto “too much is never enough” (if that’s too hard to remember, you can substitute the “use it all” formula is most cases).

An interesting article (in The Guardian) detailing a Pentagon project from the 60’s in which two Graduate Physics students designed a working nuclear bomb:

You could have taken any number of classes at Beloit with Professor Dobson, until his recent retirement, without having any reason to know that in his mid-20s, working entirely as an amateur and equipped with little more than a notebook and a library card, he designed a nuclear bomb.

Found this here.

I heard about this on NPR yesterday. Apparently there’s also a book of Rumsfel poetry being published. Enjoy.

Some timely humor over at Penny Arcade. I can only excuse my behavior by saying “I didn’t actually buy the book” (which is hardly mitigating).

Everyone else was doing it, so in the spirit of unity I have put a main page on my website. It’s a bit plain, but it does have my trademark about:blank link.

I read the new Harry Potter book (Order of the Phoenix) this weekend. These certainly aren’t the best books I’ve read (by a fairly significant margin), but there is something frusturating while also engaging about the story, and Harry’s character, that keeps me coming back. I’m a sucker for series with a bunch of long books in them and will tend to read the newest book in the series, even if the last one wasn’t particularly good (case in point: Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series which I read 9 books of, at about 1000 pages per book, before the repetitive nature of the narration and the HORRIBLE story-line got the better of me and I gave up). Anyway, this is probably the best of the Potter books yet. There are a few moments of reasonably good writing from Rowlings (such as “the newly minted look of the sunlight” that let’s Harry know it’s early morning), but she’s not straying far from the formula. Can’t say I blame her. She’s probably the Tolkein of our generation… we’re doomed.

More good stuff from around the blogging world:

I always knew this was going to happen. I always knew that skepticism and science were mere psychological decorations and vanities. Deep in our alligator brains we all know that the world is just chock full of evil and monsters and sinister forces aligned against us, and it is only a matter of time until they show up. Evolution know this, too. It knows what to do when the silent terror comes at you from out of the dark.

When 50 million years worth of evolutionary survival instinct hits you all at once flat in the gut at 200 mph it is not a pleasant sensation.

Without volition I screamed my battle cry (which is indistinguishable to the sound a little girl makes when you drop a spider down her dress (not that I’d know what that sounds like,) and lept out of bed in my underwear.

I ordered my first photos from Pictopia on Friday of last week. Easy to use site, reasonable prices, photoshop profiles provided and a two day turnaround. This morning the pictures were in my hand. I was a bit worried about color balance but they turned out great. I’m pretty impressed with the shipping packaging; simple, but strong enough to protect the package during reasonable (even by FedEx standards) handling (reminds me of NetFlix packaging). Here are some (crappy) pics of the packaging, etc. (looks like Ansel took these, eh?):

Cool article about behaviors that dogs have developed from living in close proximity to humans for thousands of years.

Dr Miklosi said: “Looking at the gaze or engaging in eye contact is a typical human signal, so dogs could be said to be using a behaviour that is analogous to ours.”

They should have compared the ability of dogs, wolves and academic programmers to react to facial queues. I think the dogs still would have won!

Which reminds me of the joke:
“How can you identify an extroverted engineer?”
“He looks at your shoes when he’s talking to you…”

BTW – Found this article over on bitweever.

Good stuff

DENNIS MILLER (1988): We were all scared when those planes swan-dived into the towers, OK? But what separates real Americans from the faux variety is that real Americans don’t turn in their spines to the hatcheck lady in times of stress. People in this country today hear the word terrorist and immediately snap into action — which means locking themselves in the loo, defecating on the Constitution and using the Bill of Rights to wipe their ass. We’re made of better stuff than that, and all the shrieking Rush Limbaughs in the world are not worth one brave man who will stand up and say, “hey, the emperor is starkers, and besides that, he wants all of Yemen’s oil.” I wasn’t around, but I’m pretty sure the guys at Valley Forge weren’t eating sautéed rat three times a day so that a future president could attempt a three-point landing on an aircraft carrier moored three miles off the coast of Catalina Island. We have to respond to terrorism, but the problem is that we’re running around like the lynch mob in The Ox-Bow Incident, and when Hank Fonda stands up and says we got the wrong guy, Jane Darwell whacks him on the head with a gun butt and the next thing you know you wake up behind barbed wire at Guantanamo. All I’m saying is that it’s time to scrap the Merle Haggard diplomacy, OK? Oh, and the reason we haven’t found any weapons of mass destruction is that they’re all in a warehouse in Topeka waiting for the next right-wing militia asshat to work his hatred of the federal government to a sufficient boiling point due to the fact that the local TV station has once again cancelled Dukes of Hazzard. While we’re running around the world like Barney Fife at a jaywalkers convention, it’s good to know that our schools are shit, our economy is floundering, and they’ll have universal health care in Kabul before we have it here…

This is a great interview with Howard Dean (Democrat candidate for Prez.). He’s also got an official weblog here. Hopefully this guy bears watching.

Well, that was about 15min of work. Sweet web app’y goodness…

I thought this was cool. Real Mini’s!

Alex is calling my aesthetic judgement into question over on his blog. This sort of unfounded personal attack is the reason that children shouldn’t be allowed to roam the web unsupervised (’cause they might side with Alex, while adults, with their more developed comparitive faculties, would side with me). Actually, I think he’s just mad about the whole Accord vs. Civic argument… 😉

In any case, you should consider yourself morally obliged to comment on Alex’s blog (unless you’re siding with him, in which case, piss off).

Not sure what’s wrong with me, but I thought this (ISO 9000) was really funny.

No, what our tribe needs is a clear mandate lest we be dragged into the sediments of Floridian illegitimacy and the concomitant self-induced terror attacks needed to superglue the crown to the pate de coup d’etat. We must drudge up from the toxic sludge of history the ancient traditions that echo dimly in the hollow skulls of our ancestors and resonate along the beer-soaked corridors of our medulla oblongadadavida.

(NOTE: You should really sound out that last word.) Reminds me of a bit of HST.

ExplodingDog.com

Found here

Thanks Alex, this (it’s flash animation) kicks ass! You really need to watch the whole thing to absorb the sheer quality of stupid goodness…

After an interminable wait (a year? more?) Old Man Murray is back online! An interesting side-note is that Slashdot’s link to the site has never been removed or modified… very up to the minute, that Slashdot.

Anyway, the first three paragraphs of this are probably the thing most worth reading on the site (it’s fairly offensive, if you don’t like it you’ll hate the rest of the site).