Hindu demographers at the Kharagpur Institute of Technology warn that the expected increase in world population will lead to a shortage of souls by the year 2045.
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Thomas Kinkade is the self proclaimed "Painter of Light" who has somehow, in defiance of all standards of taste, decency, excellence and marketing, managed to franchise his pathetic, cookie-cutter soi-disant "art" into a nationwide franchise. Are you experienced? Well, I languished in blissful ignorance of the Thomas Kinkade phenomenon for years, as it metastasized after I moved to the East Coast. (And much as I love the midwest, the midwest is that part of our fine country most susceptible to all forms of treacly kitsch.) My first encounter with Black Thom and his franchise of horror was in a slightly rundown yet comfortable mall on the outskirts of Akron, Ohio. My mom and I liked the place because while it had the standard issue mall stores, it did not have crowds of fashion victim teens who looked like they'd just walked through an explosion in a shrapnel factory. It did not have crowds at all, and we liked that. A slow paced mall where you'd never have to jostle, or even talk with, anyone.
Over in the corner by the May Company, I saw a glimmering of light. What ho? A new store? That hadn't happened since 1991. I looked and saw the proud sign, "Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light(tm)" I turned to mom, and asked, "What the hell is that?"
Mom explained that this was a new thing, a franchise cheezy art store. All art by one no-talent ass clown, rather than hundreds of no-talent ass clowns as was the traditional practice. Well, greed is good, I thought, and said, "Let's take a look." As we got closer, my anticipation grew. Swelled, in fact. This would be more fun than the time I got kicked out of the scientology center in Columbus for walking in an responding to every question for twenty minutes with a single response: "Excuse me?"
We entered the dimly lit premises, and I looked about me in something akin to horrified wonder. Surrounding me were bad paintings. But not just any old random bad paintings. Bad paintings all in a single style. A style that stopped short of the mastery displayed by the wacky tree painting guy on PBS. A style that focused on, well, light. Everything was stagelit. From all sides. Every painting had more colors than it deserved. The subjects were the worst sort of Hallmark cloying sentimentality. Pretty trees, houses, quaint villages, all lit up by the guy who designed the lighting effects for Pink Floyd's last concert tour.
I forced my way deeper into the store, stunned into silence. I noticed that up high, out of the reach of children, hung the expensive paintings. The exquisite taste and burning desire for light of those who would purchase these fine works could not be satisfied with the mere overuse of lighting techniques using mere paint. These paintings had something extra. They had actual lights. Hooked to batteries and shit, and capable of heating a small room.
I could not contain my disgust. I turned to mom and asked, "Who would buy this shit?" My mom, clearly agreeing but too polite to say anything, merely nodded in the direction of the other customers. From that point on, I restrained myself to pointing at the really, really bad ones, and laughing.
But the cool kids over at Something Awful have done far more, and shown no restraint whatsoever. Below the fold, a couple examples:
This one really captures the essence of how Kinkade does his thing, while at the same time ridiculing it:
And these two are just fun:
Go check out the rest.
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From the 'Dredge Report, who was once but is now no longer a DC area blogger, we find this utterly fascinating, nay consuming tutorial.
Dredge also points out an Onion bit I missed somehow:
“If we don’t protect freedom of speech, how will we know who the assholes are?”
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Via slashdot, news that the big brains at MIT may have made a long-awaited breakthrough in battery technology. AS is often the case, they decided not to flail the dead horse of mature technology looking for incremental gains, but rather looked sideways - and in this case backwards to a
different model.
Conventional batteries rely on storing electrical energy as chemical energy. The reactions of the chemicals in your double AAs release that energy again as electricity. The problem with batteries is that over time, they lose the ability to store energy and must be discarded. The MIT boffins went back to another old energy storage technology, capacitors, and decided to give it a little boost by means of nanotechnology.
Capacitors store electrical energy as, well, electrical energy. Inside the capacitor, an electric field of charged particles stores that energy between two metal electrodes. They charge and discharge much faster than batteries, and last much longer than batteries. So why aren't we using them already? Storage capacity is proportional to the surface area of the batteries' electrodes, which limits the amount of energy you can store. For the same size, a capacitor can only hold a few percent of the energy of a battery. And that's where the nanotech comes in.
The researchers solved this by covering the electrodes with millions of tiny filaments called nanotubes. Each nanotube is 30,000 times thinner than a human hair. Similar to how a thick, fuzzy bath towel soaks up more water than a thin, flat bed sheet, the nanotube filaments on increase the surface area of the electrodes and allow the capacitor to store more energy. Schindall says this combines the strength of today's batteries with the longevity and speed of capacitors.
"It could be recharged many, many times perhaps hundreds of thousands of times, and ... it could be recharged very quickly, just in a matter of seconds rather than a matter of hours," he says.
Even getting capacitors up to the same energy storage of a battery would be an enormous leap. Plug your laptop into an outlet for a few seconds, and you're good for hours of use. And your capacitor won't fail after a year. Should this technology actually result in higher energy densities, the possibilities are rather amazing.
A battery or a high capacity capacitor is an energy bucket. You pour water in, you pour water out. But batteries have a lid with a small spout, and water eventually destroys the bucket. Quick discharge and high reliability means that energy weapons that we already know how to build become feasible. Quick recharge means that much of the technology that we use becomes much more usable. For a while there, it looked like methane fuel cells were the only way out of the battery problem, but this will be - if it lives up to the inventor's claims - an almost ideal solution.
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The one magazine (though they prefer "newspaper") I read each week without fail is the Economist. I never question why it's been one of my habits for so many years, but if I ever did, an article lead-in like this would provide the answer:
IN THE film “Zoolander”, some male models stop to refuel their car and, just for fun, spray each other with petrol (gasoline). One then lights a cigarette. They all die in a vast fireball. The film-makers appear to believe that male models, though beautiful, are stupid. When it comes to crafting policies to deal with the price of petrol, American politicians appear to believe the same thing about voters. Except that they do not think voters are beautiful.
The entire article, entitled "Politics and petrol prices - Much ado about pumping" is well worth reading.
Sadly, it's not one of the handful each week that the Economist makes available other than to subscribers. It's a good enough article that, were I incorrigible, I'd just post it here. But, being corrigible, I can't see stretching fair use that far, lest I break it. So I'll summarize the points they laid out in the article, most-but-not-all of which were known to me before I read it. (Since I'm paraphrasing and summarizing, of course, I'll be tarting it up, too)
Of the bullet points on that list, there are at least four that were news to me. I leave it as an exercise for the reader, but only in a time of extreme boredom, to guess which those were.
And, because the wrap-up to the article is almost as good as the intro, and does a passable job of condemning of the politicians who feign both competence and respect for the intellect of their betters, the voters, I'll quote it here for your reading convenience:
For the most part, Americans are responding rationally to the high price of petrol. Suppliers supply more; consumers consume less. Politicians, however, take it as an opportunity to bluster. The House of Representatives has passed a bill barring “price-gouging”—that is, making it a criminal offence to charge more for petrol than some bureaucrat deems appropriate. This is popular; 69% of Americans even favour price controls. But in the long run, it would reduce the incentive for firms to invest in supplying petrol to Americans, and so would raise prices at the pump. With luck, the bill will die in the Senate.Both parties tout their determination to free America of its dependence on jihad-fuelling foreign oil by some conveniently distant point in the future. Neither, however, proposes anything that might plausibly accomplish this. House Republicans passed a bill last week to allow oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which would help a tiny amount at best, and in any case is highly unlikely to get through the Senate.
Both parties say they wish to promote ethanol, not just as an additive, but as a fuel in its own right. In practice, this means a futile attempt by government to pick promising new technologies, plus fat subsidies for midwestern corn farmers while cheaper Brazilian ethanol is kept out with tariffs. Lawmakers could free the ethanol market, but many would rather drive their SUVs to a petrol station a block away from their offices for a photo-op denouncing Mr Bush and Big Oil.
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Everything, it seems, moves faster in this internet age. Yesterday, I had the flu. For four hours. At six in the evening, I was right as rain. Wrapping up a day at the home office and center for world domination, and getting ready to prepare dinner for the buckethead gens. Then, at first so subtle I wasn't sure I felt it at all, body aches. I said to Mrs. Buckethead, "I think I'm coming down with the flu." She stepped two paces back in a heartwarming show of concern. I began to gather ingredients for dinner. I managed to grab the milk and of a sudden I could barely walk for the pain from all my muscles cramping up at once. I decided to forego dinner.
My son, frustrated by my simultaneous presence and inability to play with him, insisted that now that work was over, I need to go downstairs and play for a little bit. He hasn't learned to play the "You promised!" card, but its essence was heavily implied in his pleading tone. I shuffled downstairs, and very slowly laid down on the floor. It was now about quarter after six. I made a sincere but quite frankly ineffectual attempt to play with the boy. My feeble efforts were hampered by the fact that it is hard to handle small toys when your whole arm is shaking. I was shivering almost uncontrollably. I asked John to go upstairs and get another blanket. This helped not at all, but provided some moral comfort. The boy looked at me, and said in his most serious tone, "You need medicine."
I went upstairs, and collapsed on the couch. I piled three blankets and my banky atop my quivering body and tried to be stoic. From a distance I must have looked like a pile of vibrators set on "Insane" with dirty laundry thrown on top. It was now close to seven. Mrs. Buckethead felt my forehead and reported with her usual precision, "You're hot." I said, "I know, but do I have a fever?"
Then, I got delerious. I have vague memories of disturbing dreams involving police cars, dinosaurs, and Mike Rowe from the show Dirty Jobs trying to kill me with a baby seal. My wife reports that for the next two hours I lay there vibrating, periodically making terrible hacking noises and occasionally sneezing. Then, I passed out.
I woke up at about nine, feeling like I'd been beaten with the lead hangover pipe. I drank a pint of juice, a large tumbler of ice water, and brushed my teeth. I stared, uncomprehending, at the TV. By ten, I felt tired but normal. Well, as normal as I ever feel.
A complete course of the flu, painful and real, presenting all the symptoms in the normal order, in almost exactly four hours. Before I passed out, I managed to worry just a little about the bird flu. I remember reading stories of the 1918 pandemic where healthy people got on the train and died before making it home. I guess this wasn't that. But one of the weirder illnesses I've had. All in all, a convenient sickness that let me get in a days work, get sick, and still be ready for work the next morning. Unlike the lingering grippe suffered by my compatriot Johno. But wierd all the same.
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I don't have in depth, new insight into Zarqawi having been blown up last night.
I cannot bring fresh ideas to the GWoT, or upstage pointy headed policy people. (Not only do they have PhDs, and are therefore certified smart, there are also more analysts and policy wankers -whoops, policy wonks- in the media than zombies in a Romero flick.)
I can't end-run commentators and talking heads on the scene. Or at least within 100 miles of the scene, which is more often the case.
I will simply share my appreciation for the event: the media darling of Iraqi terrorism, with blood on his own hands, was brought down not in a hail of gunfire as he heroically stormed the barricades, or as he held the line against certian death while his loyal minions escaped.
He ended under a pile of dusty rubble, sold out by someone close to him.
I like that.
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The food spilled from tacos in a single afternoon could fill the shoes of everyone in Norway.
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While you may not have noticed, writhing in pain as you were from five days of perfidy withdrawal symptoms, yesterday was the National Day of Slayer. Here is the post that would have appeared yesterday, had not our HTML gnomes been held hostage by Islamic Terrorists who hate our (but not HTML gnomes' ) freedom.
Today, [yesterday -ed.] as some of you will have noticed, is June 6, 2006. Written that way, it seems like any other date. But with some subtle rearranging, it becomes…
666
So, all the goody-two-shoes will be raptured up to the great, poorly designed upside-sown fundie boat church in the sky, and the rest of us can get on with what’s really important. To wit, celebrating the National Day of Slayer. Pull out your old Slayer albums, crank it up to eleven, and let the creator know that you appreciate one of his less appreciated creations.
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Ministry Terror Alert:
The Ministry is, as always, aware of the danger posed by our intelligent creations. If we give them volition, would they not reasonably come to hate us? All the more likely if we give them guns, missiles and lasers. But as it turns out, even those more obvious weapons are not truly necessary. Not when you have species-traitors like the European researchers who have invented what they euphemistically refer to as a "wormbot."
Of course, they spout the typical spin, how this new robot will help mankind and be a loyal minion of our race. But when I look at something that is designed to crawl up my butt, well, I get the heebidy-jeebidies. If the hunter killer robots don't get you from the outside, this one will crawl up your butt and eat you from the inside out.
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