Archive for the ‘General Nerdery’ Category
Ol’ Ephraim comes across a wildlife photographer’s Go Pro and auditions it for the role of “lunch”. Come for the spine-chilling views of the inside of a Grizzly Bear’s mouth, stay for the footage of what is essentially a minivan with teeth splashing around in a river to chase down salmon.
“They charge by the coil, so I just had them do one coil per word.”
“It’ll still be legible, right?”
“Yeah, I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
French magician Yann Frisch and his incredible sleights of hand:
I love that, without saying a word, he can clearly portray himself as being tortured by a bunch of little red balls and the seemingly random peregrinations of his cup. Absolute brilliance.
…next Christmas, I’m headed to Burning Goat:
…[the Goat] tends to get burnt down every other year and I have to admit that some of the attraction is to see if it actually lasts the Christmas season or gets torched. Over the years, it has been set alight using a flaming arrow and in 2009, the webcams were knocked out by a DoS attack so the arsonists could burn it without being filmed. There are some pretty dedicated and resourceful goat-burners out there…
File this in the “Weird Scandinavian Holidays” section alongside the Dutch St. Nick and his “Six to Eight Black Men“.
One of the things I love about working at Amazon is the sheer density of brilliant, obsessive nerds with diverse skills and passions. This translates not only into an awesome work environment and Amazon’s ability to ship some seriously cool products, but also in some incredible products bashed out on the side.
Three examples:
1.) St. Optimus of Prime.
2.) Custom robotic target holder with randomized target presentation:
3.) No link for this one, but I was talking to one of my fellow Amazonians over beer the other day, and apparently his team just got finished building out metrics, monitoring, and alarming for their kegerator. Yes, in the true “metrics or GTFO” engineering attitude, they added scales to check beer weight left in the kegs and wired it up via an Arduino processor to send an email when the beer is low. Apparently the next step is to set up a real-time metrics dashboard to track beer consumption over time and to add a way for the metrics to be content-aware so they can alert people which beers are on tap and which are running low.
Context: A study of some of the most decorated bomb-disposal experts in the US discovered that, when they get to work on an explosive device, their heart-rate doesn’t just stay flat, it actually goes down.
“To throw another methodological monkey wrench in the works, it turns out that bomb-disposal operatives aren’t the only ones who experience a drop in heart rate when they get down to business. Relationship experts Neil Jacobson and John Gottman, authors of the popular book When Men Batter Women, have observed identical cardiovascular profiles in certain types of abusers, who, research has shown, actually become more relaxed when beating up their partners than when they’re lounging in an armchair with their eyes closed.” – Kevin Dutton, The Wisdom of Psycopaths
Your election results page is downright enraging. We here in Washington State have been mailing our votes in for weeks. Your site claims to be real time-ish, reporting results from districts as they are available.
Which makes it maddening for a data junky like myself that, as of 19:57 local time on Election Day, you still report 0% returns for every single item on every ballot.
Please get your shit together.
Naught but frustrated derision,
AMB
It’s a day late, but this video sums up my feelings re: Halloween better than I ever could.
Scene: The author, William A. Dutt, is resting at the edge of a wheat field in rural Norfolk. He’s been speaking to the son of one of the farmhands, when the farmhand comes over to say hello. Emphasis and peculiar spellings in the original.
“He has been at work, he tells me, since half past five this morning; but was abroad an hour earlier, for his home is three miles away, and he has to walk to and from the meadow every day. Such a walk, however, is ‘nowt to speak on’: as a lad he worked on a farm five miles from his father’s cottage, and except when lucky enough to get a ‘lift’ in a waggon or tumbril had to make the daily journey backwards and forwards on foot. … Boys nowadays, he goes on, with an impressive glance at his own offspring, …, don’t know what work is; if they have to get up before daylight they think they are ‘hard put upon.’ They are taught at the schools all sorts of things that he never learnt, but not how to work as their fathers did when they where lads. All the ‘young ‘uns thowt on now’ was to get away from the land and into the towns. I suggest that a better remuneration for labour in the towns has something to do with this; but he only shakes his head and says that living costs a ‘sight’ more in towns than in the country. He is not, however, against ‘a chap’s goin’ to sea, for there his livin’ costs him nowt.” W. A. Dutt, Highways and Byways in East Anglia, 1901
