Komojo

Awkward Product Names and Acronyms

2009-09-06T07:15:17Z

I feel like making a list of products that have awkward words in them.

I was at the grocery store the other day and I saw this by the checkout stand:

Yeah, it's Veggie Tales. Before you ask why I'm posting an image of Veggie Tales, all I want to focus on is the main character's name: Minnesota Cuke. Yeah, I get what they're going for...it's Indiana Jones but with a cucumber. But, really, "Cuke?" That's what you're going to name your main character? Could you imagine watching something with a name that awkward, let alone being one of the animators working on it? I'd start to question where I went wrong in life. (Then again, if you're working on Veggie Tales, you have no soul to begin with.)

I love how hilariously ugly the female character is, too. Surely that character will become iconic, like Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny.

Anyway, it got me thinking, besides "cuke," what other products have I seen that just have awkward words in them? I know I've seen movie titles with awkward words or phrases in the title, but I can't think of any off the top of my head.

Here's one I can think of: Star Wars Bombad Racing.

What the hell is a bombad? I still don't know. In the words of Brak, "I don't wanna play bombad racing, I mean what the heck is that?" For that matter, "Revenge of the Sith" is probably confusing to anyone who only watched the original Star Wars trilogy, since they don't use the word "sith" even once.

But I think the worst offender has to go to the ATLAS experiment in the Large Hadron Collider.

You can't tell from this diagram, but that thing is huge.

Don't get me wrong, the experiment itself is an amazing feat of engineering, and to me it's incredibly inspirational to think about what these experiments mean.

But then I saw what ATLAS stands for: A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS. Did you get that? Do you see why that acronym is the worst acronym I've ever seen? It's wrong on so many levels.
First of all, don't use "A" as a word in an acronym, that's retarded.
"Toroidal" is also an awkward word to use, but it does describe the experiment.
"LHC" is an abbreviation used within the acronym, so really it's "A Toroidal Large Hadron Collider ApparatuS" or ATLHCAS.
And "ApparatuS?" You're using the END of the word as a letter in the acronym? God that's dumb.
The name ATLAS breaks every rule of making a good acronym. These people are supposed to be discovering the secrets of the universe, but if this is the best they can come up with I'm starting to wonder if they've got what it takes. I have to believe they chose a purposefully bad name just to be funny.

Random Keyboard Jam

2009-06-21T07:59:20Z

Hello Youtubes

Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter

2009-05-30T03:40:58Z

The game I've been working on has been announced. Drawn to Life 2: The Next Chapter for Nintendo DS. I posted this on Facebook the other day so everybody who's reading this has probably already seen it, but here is an interview with some screenshots and a teaser video!

http://ds.ign.com/articles/986/986981p1.html

Visualizing Special Relativity and the Big Bang

2009-05-18T01:34:18Z

So let me talk about relativity for a second, because relativity is a fucked up subject to think about.

I wouldn't call myself an expert in the idea of relativity other than a few basic equations and concepts, but I love thought experiments and this is one of the craziest things in the universe once you start to understand it.

Here's the central idea: The speed of light is the same everywhere. If light is coming to the solar system from a distant star, it doesn't matter how fast that star is moving toward us or away from us, the speed of light that you measure will be exactly the same. You would expect that incoming stars would emit faster light and that stars moving away would see the light slightly slower, but this was proven not to be the case by experiment. Relative velocity doesn't affect how fast light moves, it is measured the same from anywhere in the universe. This discovery leads to the conclusion that nothing can go faster than the speed of light.

First off: Time dilation and length contraction. If you see somebody moving relative to where you are at close to the speed of light, they will appear to be physically compressed in their direction of motion. Time will also appear to be moving slower for them. Also, events that appear to be happening simultaneously to you will appear to happen at slightly different times relative to the other person, and vice versa.

Why does a constant speed of light lead to time dilation? This is the way it was explained to me, and it makes some sense. Imagine you have a beam of light reflecting between two mirrors. From a stationary point of view, the light takes a certain amount of time to get from one side to the other.

Now suppose this mirror is in motion. The light would appear to move back & forth and bounce between the mirrors, but now it also has sideways motion. The total path is now longer. If it were something moving at normal everyday speeds, the horizontal motion would add to the overall speed and it would appear to take the same amount of time but travel faster than the stationary light. But because the light must travel further while moving at the same speed, it takes longer to traverse the path, and therefore the passage of time in the other frame of reference is actually slower.

Length contraction is a different subject, but I think I found a way to explain why it would have to happen.

Astronaut B is floating in space. He looks to both sides and can see Astronaut A and Astronaut C on opposite sides, speeding toward him at close to the speed of light. They are going to zoom past him without hitting and continue moving at full speed. At the exact moment that they pass him, he takes a flash photo of their journey.

The light from the flash is emitted as a sphere. Astronaut B looks out after he takes the picture and "sees" (or would somehow measure) the light emitted as an expanding sphere. Astronauts A and C are speeding away from him at almost the speed of light, appearing to almost reach the edge of that sphere.

But then look at it from astronaut A's point of view. He sees B speeding away at almost the speed of light, and C moving ahead further than that. Without relativity, you'd conclude that astronaut C is moving twice the speed of light, but remember the flash of light, because that's the critical thing: Because the light is always moving at the same speed, it's the same shape for everybody, so everyone sees it as a sphere with all the astronauts inside of it. The astronaut at the far edge of the sphere still fits inside, and A sees B moving almost the speed of light with C moving slightly faster. C sees the same situation, but in reverse.

This image goes a little bit of the way to explaining why it takes more and more energy to go close to the speed of light. Adding more energy makes it go closer and closer to the speed of light, but there will always be more space between the object and that event horizon in which light is still propagating and space is expanding in the same pattern. We could continue this example with more astronauts going past at even greater speeds, and if you added more and more objects in a row they would appear closer and closer to the edge of the sphere from your perspective, but there would still be more space where you could add another one.

There are some weird things that happen in relativistic conditions. Simultaneity gets messed up. Suppose you have the same situation as the first example with light reflecting off a mirror, only make it perpendicular, so the mirrors are moving in the direction in which they are separated. Imagine you have a flashing thing in the middle, and suppose the mirrors are stationary from the point of view of the center. You emit light from the center, then you "see" the light hit the mirror on both sides at the same time and then reflect back to hit the center point at the same time.

Now imagine you're looking at this from somewhere that is moving sideways relative to the mirrors. One beam will appear to go backwards and immediately run into the mirror behind it. The other beam will move forwards, but because the mirror is receding faster and the light still appears to move at the same local speed, it takes longer to reach the other mirror. Eventually it hits the mirror and is quickly reflected back, just in time to meet up with the other photon which has been traveling forward most of the time.

This is bizarre and counterintuitive, because from one person's vantage point, the order of events completely changes; the light bouncing off the sides of the mirror is no longer simultaneous, but one happens before the other.

It is possible to trace out the path of these particles by visualizing the time as a space axis (i.e. each horizontal row represents a moment in time) in which case the situation looks like this:

Notice how these two transformations show the exact same event, just from two different points of view. There is no absolute time to which all observers in the universe can be synchronized, but whatever vantage point you are looking from there is still one single universe that is consistent with itself. If two particles collide, then they will always collide in that same position in timespace, even if it get projected in different ways depending on relative velocity. It just might not look the same from all angles.

What confuses most people about this is that it's symmetrical. You'd think, if I see time slowed down from their perspective they must be seeing your time sped up with you stretched out. But that's wrong. There is no state of absolute rest, and no vantage point is more valid than any other. So if you see an object coming at you at a certain speed, there's no difference in saying you're standing still and the other person is moving, or you are moving and the other person is standing still. If you're moving close to the speed of light relative to someone else, you see what the other person also sees. So from the vantage point of the other person traveling close to the speed of light, your length is also contracted and your time is also slowed down.

This leads to an apparent paradox, which Wikipedia calls the ladder paradox.

Imagine you have a ladder moving at almost the speed of light. (It could be any object, but somehow people decided it was going to be called the ladder paradox.) You also have a garage with two doors on opposite sides. The ladder is normally too big to fit in the garage, but because it is moving so fast and is length contracted it is small enough. The doors stay open until the ladder is inside, at which point they shut instantly for a brief moment while it fits inside and then open again. (Or I guess another way to look at it would be if it started with only the left door open, then the left door closed and then the right one opened.)

From the ladder's perspective, the garage is now much shorter for it to fit inside. How can both of these situations be consistent?

It works, because the ladder sees a completely different order of events. From the ladder's point of view, it flies in, the door in front closes, then it passes through the garage, and then the door behind it closes. If the doors were to actually touch the ladder it would feel the collisions at different times.

This situation can be diagrammed with a timeline the same way we did the particles bouncing off the mirrors. If you look at the way it's stretched out you see it's stretched diagonally in the same way.

Other crazy shit about relativity: The speed of light is the arbiter of causality. For any two events that appear to happen close enough that you could reach one from the other going less than the speed of light, there is some frame of reference in which both of those events happened in the same place at different points in time. For any two events that happen far enough away that you couldn't possibly reach them going the speed of light, there is some frame of reference in which they happen at the same time in different locations. These are mutually exclusive: No matter where you are, non-correlatable events will be non-correlatable and vice versa.

^--- I took this image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation. It was one of the featured Wikipedia images. I made rest of these animations myself.

Thinking about this you start to realize just why traveling faster than light is impossible, and why if you did it would be equivalent to time travel.

Here's an interesting thought experiment that I haven't specifically seen anywhere else (possibly because it's not entirely correct.) Try to imagine the situation of the reflecting mirrors, but combine the two situations together and see what it looks like from all angles.

Imagine you have a really tiny object that emits light inside of a circle made of reflective material. From the perspective of the center, the circle on the outside is not moving. The light flashes for an instant, and a sphere of light is emitted in all directions. A moment later, it reflects off the edge, and imagine that it's a perfectly smooth mirror so the light all reflects off in exactly the opposite direction.

First thing to realize: Since the speed of light is the same in all reference frames, this sphere will look like a sphere no matter who is observing it. If you're moving relative to the original flash, the location of the object in the middle won't match up with the center of the sphere, but it will still remain the same sphere growing at the speed of light, even in a different frame.

Second thing to realize: Since the reflective sphere is now a moving length-contracted object, the light will not reflect off of all of it at the same time. If you're moving close to the speed of light and looking at it, you'd see the flash go off, and then immediately you'd see the flash hit the wall behind it, since not only is the light moving backwards but the sphere is moving forwards to catch it.

From there the light hitting the edge would spread out to the sides, then reach the other side. Everything would reflect back, and it would meet back up with the original center point.

Now remember, the light is always coming off as a sphere. So when it gets to the halfway point, all the light coming from the light source would still be in a spherical shape from this perspective, centered around where the light flash originally appeared. Since this light reflection is a totally symmetrical event, this means that the light reflecting back is also a perfect circle, and when it reflects back it will all reach the center point at the same time.

You can think of the situation relative to the center point as a way of measuring a simultaneous moment. Everything reflects off the sphere at the exact same time, so you can define that as a single instant where everything happens at once. But because you see the light reflecting at different times from other perspectives, it means the instant of time itself is "moving" from one side to the other from some vantage point. Each plane of existence then represents a slightly different moment, with the past in one direction and the future in another direction. This is what resolves the ladder paradox. The "planes of simultaneity" defining the moment where the light reflects off will always move faster than the speed of light.

Here's something else that trips me out about relativity: Try to imagine what the world would look like from the point of view of a single photon traveling at the speed of light. I don't think that's actually scientifically meaningful, but if you were to put yourself in that vantage point you would see that it doesn't experience any passage of time. This has something to do with the fact that it is massless. From our point of view, a beam of light that travels to Earth from the Andromeda galaxy travels 4 million light years and doesn't seem to experience time passing. From the photon's point of view, it would start and finish its journey in the same moment, and the two galaxies would be length contracted until everything was on the same plane, perpendicular to how the photon was moving. It took no time at all because it was traveling a distance of 0.

When I was kid I heard that nothing could go faster than the speed of light, and I came up with an interesting thought experiment that would seem to contradict that. What if you built a track that went along the entire equator of the earth, and then connected wires along evenly spaced intervals that ran from the track to one of the poles? At the pole, you send out electrical signals that spin around at a rate faster than 8 times per second, and then once they reach the track it activates something like a lightbulb or an electrical motor. At the equator, the wave of incoming signals would appear to be moving faster than the speed of light.

I guess in retrospect it wouldn't need to be this big, but I came up with the idea for a sci-fi story or something.

Anyway, this almost works except for a few things:

1) If you tried to move an object using this method (say, by squeezing it or activating a magnet when the signal reached the track) it would require too much energy to actually move it to the speed of light

2) While you could get two things to activate at different times so that it looked like something was going faster than light, in reality you'd never be able to actually send information from one point to another that fast. If you were witnessing this scene from a fast-moving reference frame, the order of activation would get out of whack, so that parts of the wave on the track would appear to be moving backwards, due to the difference in the amount of time it takes for the signal to get from the pole to the equator. In this situation it's obvious that you can't send any information that fast, because one receiver would get the response before the other sent it.

The philosophical aspects of relativity become mind-boggling after you dwell on them enough. It's heavily connected with the big bang and the origin of the universe (an expanding or contracting universe is actually one of the conclusions of relativity.) The sphere of light that is emitted in a light flash is the thing I can't get my mind off of. It amazes me that everyone sees it as the same spherical shape. If you look into the sky with a powerful enough telescope, you can see objects as they were in the past, because the light takes so long to reach you. The further you look, the further back in the past you see. Eventually you get to a point where you're seeing the first light emitted in the universe, a few hundred thousand years after the big bang. The light from this flash started off with very high energy, and it has been slowly losing energy and increasing in wavelength over time, from gamma rays through all the different colors of visible light to microwaves. This is a red-shifting effect caused by the expansion of space.

If length contraction and time dilation applies to everything, that would seem to mean that at the "edge of the universe," all of the matter that is moving away from you would get more and more compressed the closer you got to light speed, and time would move more and more slowly.

So what's at the edge of the sphere? Could you ever actually reach that event horizon? In real life you can't, but imagine if there were something there, or imagine what happens as you approach that limit. Time moves more and more slowly the faster you go, so the light-sphere of the big bang itself would have to be experiencing no time passage whatsoever. So it's the same now as it was at the moment the univese started.

If it's in the same state now as it was when the universe started, then what determines its scale? The further you look outward, the more matter you can see, so it has to be "big" enough to encompass all that matter. So when the universe is 100 times older than it is now, the outer edge of this event horizon will be 100 times bigger and there will be more space in between, so it exists on that scale, and yet it also exists at the microscopic scale that it was at the beginning of time.

So...if it's in the same state now as it was when it was microscopic, then that state will be just as valid when it is 1000 times bigger and physics would seem to operate on a different scale. I guess everything would be expanded and there would be more space between the galaxies in future scales, but their trajectories would still be consistent with what happens at lower scales when the physical constants of the universe had different effects. I imagine it as an infinite fractal shape with no smallest unit of measurement.

This is the part that seems to take on religious significance, because it would mean that the moment of creation of the universe is frozen in time, the same now as it will be in a trillion years, and yet within the finite space you have an infinite universe with an eternal history playing out.

The "recombination" event, the earliest light we can see in the universe, happened about 300,000 years after the big bang. That would've essentially happened in the same moment everywhere, but just like the light reflecting off the sphere in my thought experiment, that moment is constantly moving away from us. So the further into the future you go, the bigger the sphere would be that determines a specific moment in the universe's history, and the more young galaxies you would be able to see. The older the universe gets, the more information you have about what the beginning was like for a bigger area, and yet reaching back to the very beginning would still be impossible. It may be fundamentally unknowable.

But does this event horizon I'm imagining actually exist? Without being an expert in the math, it seems possible that there could be an infinite amount of matter within a finite shell, as long as it got more and more contracted as you got closer to light speed at the right rate. Light speed would be the limit of the function, and you could get closer & closer but not actually get there.

On the other hand, from what I understand space itself can expand so that two points are moving away from each other faster than light, but the objects within that space still can't travel any faster. In this case, it would be possible for there to be some parts of the universe moving away so fast that there is no way for it to have any effect on us. If this is the case, then there is only a finite amount of matter than can interact with any given point in spacetime, even if "the whole universe" is infinite.

Whooooah, did I just blow your mind?

I could go on, but I'm starting to ramble more and more about stuff that I clearly don't know much about. Stop me before I start sounding like the TimeCube guy. It's fun to think about though.

Shitty Synth Music!

2009-03-31T19:26:19Z

So, after watching a bunch of PC demos online (I'm addicted to this site now), I've decided I want to actually try to make a demo myself. I'm going for a 64k demo, so everything needs to be compressed and procedurally generated, which is a lot harder, but more impressive if you understand the limitations.

For those of you unaware, the idea of demos is to show off programming/art skills, and in Europe they have big LAN parties where they project demos onto a big screen and compete against each other for the best demos. One of these days when I can afford to take a vacation I really want to go to a demoparty, but only if I have an actual demo to release at the party. The main thing that was preventing me from making a real demo is that I don't have much musical talent and making a sound synthesizer is totally beyond my abilities...or at least it was.

A few weeks ago I decided to see if I could get something simple up & running that might fit into a 64k demo, and here are the results.

First, here's what my theoretical competition would be. These are all 64 kilobyte demos. My synthesizer isn't even in the same ballpark:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Fd8lDaTfwk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s1lbk-gH7M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK3jEoBrx5w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IH03IcqBwzo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK3jEoBrx5w

Now here are my crappy synth songs:

Dope by Complex
Original: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R__IrgCireM#t=4m20s
Crappy synth version:

This is the first song I made, it sounds pretty incomplete at the moment. But it demonstrates the different types of instruments I can make.

Second Reality by Purple Motion
Original: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G_aUxbbqWU#t=4m58s
Crappy synth version:

The Product by kb/Farbrausch (this one's arguably the best one):
Original: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkEsP9H2HGM#t=5m00s
Crappy synth version:

The main thing that's horrible is that when new notes are played the old note just cuts off awkwardly, and I have no control over the note length yet. But it's a start!

komojo @ 2008-12-26T15:15:00

2008-12-26T23:17:42Z

2008 has been the year of me fucking up the left side of my body and then not taking any action on it causing the situation to probably become worse than it needed to be.

First, I land on my foot the wrong way when playing beach volleyball barefoot, and the big toe on my left foot gets bent down too hard. At first I thought I may have broken broke it, then I figured it was just sprained, and I never went to a doctor. Now I'm starting to wonder if it was really broken, though. It healed well enough and it's not causing me any pain, but I can't crack my toe like I'm cracking my knuckles anymore on the left side, only the right. I know I used to be able to do that with my left foot, but it doesn't do it anymore.

Then I cut myself on a metal can because I was an idiot. Mistake #1: Using a shitty can opener that was so cheap it was completely non-functional and was not only hard to hold but actually didn't cut anything. Mistake #2: Giving up on the can opener and deciding it would somehow be easier to pry the top open with a butter knife. That evidently sometimes results in accidentally slipping and cutting your hand on the sharp metal edge. Mistake #3: Not having band-aids beforehand for some reason? Mistake #4: Not taking your friend's advice when he says to use superglue and glue the cut back together so it heals better. Want to see what happened?

See that? Notice the horizontal line on the groove of my hand? Notice how it doesn't fucking match up in the same place on the other side? Technically it might've been like that the whole time, but I'm 99% sure I just fucked up my hand and had it grow back in the wrong place.

Those kinds of things are why I can see how people would want to get plastic surgery or a tattoo. On one hand, you're altering your body permanently and irreversibly, but on the other hand, everything does that. Technically, what I ate for breakfast this morning had a small permanent effect on my body, so why not go out and get crazy piercings and tattoos? My body isn't permanent, it's constantly undergoing change and recycling itself slowly. Life is crazy.

World Debut: Scribblenauts

2008-12-06T03:12:30Z

5TH Cell announces "Scribblenauts"

This is...also not the game I'm working on. But it is undeniably awesome.

Weekly team meeting > weakly teeming meat

2008-09-16T04:19:33Z

I feel compelled to share links with people.

Latest cool YouTube videos:

People rocking out to Sonic 2 songs

^-- This guy reminds me of Pat DeBerry. Yeah, I said that 'cause he's black and plays the guitar.

Is it a good idea to microwave this? (Skip past the first minute and a half, the intro is dumb.)

komojo @ 2008-09-12T21:55:00

2008-09-13T04:55:44Z

Iraqi death toll: August 2008

Gary M. Henry
Jonathan D. Menke
Jose E. Ulloa
Kenneth B. Gibson
Michael H. Ferschke Jr.
James M. Hale
Daniel A. C. McGuire
George Stanciel
Steven J. Fitzmorris
Carlo E. Alfonso
David K. Cooper
Michael L. Gonzalez

GET THE TRUTH OUT

2008-09-07T18:30:36Z

THE DEATH STAR ATTACK WAS AN INSIDE JOB!

Hell Youtubes!

2008-08-24T02:08:10Z

This guy is amazing.

komojo @ 2008-08-17T13:15:00

2008-08-17T20:15:50Z

If Darth Chef doesn't kick some super adventure club ass in the South Park premiere I am going to be so disappointed. (What would be even better is if they advertised some really crappy story as the first episode and did a switcheroo like in the April Fools Terrence & Philip episode but in reverse. That's kind of how they did the return of Chef episode.)

Also...

2008-08-08T18:57:00Z

Dead people in Iraq for July 2008:
William L. McMillan III
Steven J. Chevalier
Byron J. Fouty
Alex R. Jiminez
Danny Dupre
Jeremy D. Vrooman
David W. Textor
James A. McHale

Camping Trip

2008-08-08T18:54:24Z

I went camping last weekend. Here's what I did:

Took 10 hours to travel somewhere 3 hours away. Time to get a fucking car.
Bought binoculars and sunglasses.
Got tons of shit at Costco.
Brought my parents' inflatable raft because my friend Mitchell was also bringing a raft. It was the same type of raft, so we only needed my one foot pump.
Hiked a mile into the campsite carrying tons of shit.
Found an amazing camp site by the river that is hidden behind a hill that you have to hike over.
Met my friend Casey, who traversed the mile long path in total darkness using only the light of his cell phone.
Got several mosquito bites.
Played beer pong on the picnic table.
Took the raft across the river to explore a little peninsula.
Tried to find a golf ball among thousands of white circular rocks.
Climbed over fallen logs and hiked around the dense forest with no shoes on.
Played Risk on the picnic table.
Played poker on the picnic table.
Ate tons of hot dogs.
Went seaching for fire wood.
Looked at stars through binoculars and saw lots of stars invisible to the naked eye.
Hiked over 8 miles total.
Drank 90 cans of beer over the weekend between 7 people.

komojo @ 2008-07-28T12:05:00

2008-07-28T19:21:19Z

So I had my house-warming party this weekend. It was pretty cool.

Friday morning I cleaned up most of my apartment and vaccuumed the floor (one of the people I invited said he's allergic to cats.) Some people were coming in my house to inspect my chimney, so I locked the cat in my room and put the litter box in my bathroom and food in my bedroom, then I left the door into the bathroom open. I cleaned up everything else in my apartment and did the dishes at the last second before people showed up.

First, there was the mini-DigiPen-party. I tried to invite people so I would have all my good friends from DigiPen meeting up with my high school friends and mingling, because my friends share a lot of common interests, but that didn't end up happening. One of my friends from Portland was working late and they couldn't get on the road until after 9:30, which meant they'd show up at 2 or 3 in the morning. So only a few people showed up for the first half of the party (next time I'll invite more assuming people won't show up) and I just hung out in my living room drinking beer and gossiping about crazy DigiPen teachers and students. After a few hours, everybody dispersed, and at 1 in the morning I sat down and took a nap on my couch.

Later, at about 3 AM, everybody barged into my living and room and I sat up in my couch, half-asleep and half-drunk, mumbling "Whoa, there are people in my living room." We hung out for a little bit and then went down to a 24-hour Denny's by my house. We came back at 4:30 AM and passed out.

Saturday we all slept in until noon, and then I spent the afternoon with John, Casey, Hunter, Mitchell, and Mitchell's girlfriend wandering around downtown Seattle. We came back to my house afterwards and played Presidents & Assholes on my coffee table. Later, everybody except John and me went to the NIN concert and I just stayed back at my place with John were we played video games and watched DVDs. We originally planned to take the bus to meet them there after the concert to go to a bar somewhere, but we looked at the bus schedule and realized we'd have to walk 15 blocks downtown after midnight while already tired and full of alcohol, so we just waited for everybody else to come back. They got back around 1 in the morning and I just went to sleep.

Sunday afternoon we all went to the Seattle aquarium and got to look at the fishies and otters, plus we got to go into the underwater dome and see scuba divers feeding the fish. We followed that up with delicious sea food, then went back to my apartment to hang out for a while before everybody got back on the road.

All in all, it was a really successful weekend, especially considering the fact that I've never hosted a party before. I went from not inviting anyone over to my place while I was in college to having 5 people from out of town stay the night in my living room. The best part is, my cat wanted to be friends with everyone she saw. :)

Creationists are idiots.

2008-07-25T02:26:11Z

Here's a cool blog post from badastronomy.com:

As a follow up to the post I made about flawed creationist reasoning when it comes to plate tectonics, I missed something obvious that, in retrospect, is (yet another) killer for creationism: heat.

Creationists need the Earth (and the Universe, don’t forget) to be 6000 or so years old, due to a lengthy list of "begattings" in the Bible. The problem is, we see lots of processes going on right now that are very slow — but we see their effect because the Earth is incredibly old. But if the Earth is young, these processes have to have been cooking a lot faster in the past.

Cooking indeed, because these forces expel a lot of heat. And it can be hard to dump that heat: it has to go somewhere (like an oven heating up a room when you open the door), and we just don’t see that happening. Some people — and by "some", I mean every reality-based person in the whole Universe — say it’s impossible to do that in 6000 years and still have a nice, hospitable planet today. And in fact, any Earth-forming process must have taken far less than 6000 years, since according to creationists people have been around nearly all that time. Even being generous, and giving these processes a few hundred years, makes it like impossible squared to happen.

One of these processes is plate tectonics. As mentioned in the previous post, sliding plates around the planet and on top and underneath one another is a problem for creationists. A big one; it takes a long time to move a plate around when it crawls at an inch per year. But creationists, of course, think it all happened quickly, right after Noah’s flood.

However, this is impossible. And I mean impossible. Happily, the National Center for Science Education has a nice explanation of why, which boils down (haha) to the energy release from such rapid motion being enough to vaporize the oceans and melt the Earth’s crust completely.

And it really bugs me when Biblical literalists try to rely on science for some stuff, then just say "It’s a miracle!" for other stuff. Why even turn to science at all then? The paper says this beautifully:

Fourth, we would criticize this concept on theological grounds. In Humphreys’s article in the RATE book, he postulates that God performs lots of miracles in order to explain things. God is supposed to have changed the mass of the pion, changed the parameters of gauge bosons to accelerate beta decay, and changed the effective distance of the strong force to alter alpha decay. With all these miracles, why then does God switch to a naturalistic solution to the heat problem — albeit one that requires a rapid cosmic expansion of unexplained origin? All of this raises two serious theological questions. Why does God dance to Humphreys’s whim, performing a miracle each time Humphreys requires one? Demanding miracles of God raises certain questions of who is the master and who the servant. And why does Humphreys insist on any naturalistic approach at all, given all the miracles he postulates? Why not simply remove the heat miraculously?

That is how you debunk creationism: cut to the quick. And I love their conclusion:

For these reasons, we reject Humphreys’s cooling mechanism: because it is wrong, it is ineffective, it is falsified by observational data, and it is theologically flawed.

Ouch.

Tip o’ the continental shelf to RBH in the comments of my previous blog post for pointing out that awesome article.

Even More Death

2008-07-20T19:45:03Z

Iraq war casualties for June 2008

Justin R. Mixon
Shane P. Duffy
Jonathan D. A. Emard
Cody R. Legg
Irakli Kordzaia
David R. Jurst
Tyler E. Pickett
Thomas F. Duncan III
Steve A. McCoy
Kelly E.C. Watters
John D. Aragon
Jason N. Cox
Du Hai Tran
Bryan M. Thomas
Gregory T. Dalessio
Dwayne M. Kelley
Robert C. Hammett
James M. Yohn
Joel A. Taylor
Alehandro A. Dominguez
Joshua L. Plocica
Max A. Galeai
Philip J. Dykeman

More Death

2008-07-20T19:41:20Z

Iraq war casualties for May 2008

Jeffrey F. Nichols
Glen E. Martinez
James F. Kimple
Miguel A. Guzman
Casey L. Casanova
Corey L. Hicks
Zura Gvenetadze
Giorgi Margiev
Alex D. Gonzalez
Aaron J. Ward
Jessica A. Ellis
Victor M. Cota
John K. Daggett
Branden P. Haunert
Kyle Phillip Norris
Blake W. Evans
Frank J. Gasper

Iraqi Death Toll

2008-07-20T19:36:46Z

War in Iraq death toll for April 2008...I can't keep with all the death.

Travis L. Griffin
Matthew T. Morris
Ulises Burgos-Cruz
Stuart A. Wolfer
Stphen K. Scott
Shane D. Penley
Emanuel Pickett
Jeremiah E. McNeal
Richard A. Vaughn
Jason C. Kazarick
Michael T. Lilly
Timothy M. Smith
Mark E. Rosenberg
Jeffery L. Hartley
Jacob J. Fairbanks
Shaun P. Tousha
Jesse A. Ault
Jeremiah C. Hughes
Anthony L. Capra
Merlin German
William E. Allmon
Dead D. Opicka
Richard J. Nelson
Joseph A. Richard III
Auturo Huerta-Cruz
Jason L. Brown
Lance O. Eakes
Benjamin K. Brosh
Adam J. Kohlhaas
Steven J. Christofferson
Matthew R. Vandegrift
Jonathan T. Yale
Jordan C. Haerter
Ronald C. Blystone
John T. Bishop
Shaun J. Whitehead
Mark A. Stone
Marcus C. Mathes
Adam L. Marion
David P. McCormick
Bryan E. Bolander
Clay A. Craig
Lawrence D. Ezell
Ronald J. Tucker
Andrew R. Pearson
Chad A. Caldwell

Wearing her birthday suit

2008-07-15T16:36:11Z

Yesterday was Roo's birthday. I got her a mini-leash and took her outside onto the deck. :)

Terrorist Watch List

2008-07-15T09:16:02Z

The government's terrorist suspect watch list now has a million names on it.

Well that's good, if not for that we'd be under attack by a million terrorists.

This makes me think of George Carlin.

2008-07-05T06:13:58Z

Is there anything cooler in life than seeing a rocket taking off and then failing catastrophically?

I think the "TH" in "5TH" is supposed to be capitalized.

2008-06-14T03:33:13Z

I'm calling it now: When the game I'm working on comes out, it's going to get review ratings of at least 9 out of 10. It's awesome.

Link Sharing

2008-05-24T02:10:29Z

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6474278760369344626
This was on the first page on Google Video when searching for the word "interview." It's Richard Dawkins discussing God with a religious guy. They are both nice when they are talking to each other, but by the end of it Richard Dawkins is basically running circles around the religious guy's arguments. It's a long video but it's really interesting.