Cuz We Said So

Triumph Spitfire in the Wild

2009-11-08T23:26:05-06:00

No, I’m not turning this into a car blog, honest. But can you blame if I spotted some interesting cars during my recent time in New Hampshire?

No. Of course you can’t.

Anyway, this specimen I spotted it on the way to lunch one day. It is, if my eyes do not deceive me, a Triumph Spitfire. You don’t see too many of these on the road these days; the last one rolled off the assembly line in 1980, making this piece of rolling automotive history close to thirty at minimum. (The chrome bumper might suggest the car was older still—no later than a ‘78—but of course, there’s no way to know if it’s the original bumper.)

If youre wondering if your cat can get swine flu

2009-11-05T00:37:23-06:00

…it appears the answer is yes.

Thought for the Day

2009-11-04T14:50:45-06:00

“Your inability to see your own bad argument does not mean there are flaws in my logic when I point them out to you.” —John Scalzi via Twitter

David Regards Ferrari 458 Italia, Approves

2009-11-03T20:46:47-06:00

It is irrelevant in nearly every way how much I like or dislike the design of the latest Ferrari. But I’ll still toss out there that I think the 458 Italia (seen here in the wild back in August via Autoblog) looks pretty hot, particularly compared to the F430 it replaces, which never really did much for me.

Side note: I enjoy that Ferrari’s promo site for the Italia lets you play sounds clips of the car starting, accelerating, passing at the track etc. Ferrari clearly understands their target demographic, which essentially = me + a whole boat load of money. And yes, the car sounds fantastic.

How to Understand Flow Charts

2009-10-28T08:26:00-05:00

A guide in flow chart form. Funny

Lloyd Weber To Make A New Phantom

2009-10-08T06:17:47-05:00

Sequels, especially to classics, are tricky things. Hopefully this won’t be a terrible, horrible mistake:

Andrew Lloyd Weber has announced a sequel to his massively successful "Phantom of the Opera" that will be set at Coney Island.

Weber's new production, "Love Never Dies," is due to open in London in March of next year.

Seven-year-old Blind Boy Uses Echoes to See

2009-10-05T22:30:09-05:00

An article in the Telegraph this morning about a boy in England taught to echolocate by my friend Dan.

Zombieland

2009-10-05T18:48:41-05:00

I'm a fan of zombie films, and zombie comedies are even better! (Okay, I liked "Shaun of the Dead". That's the only one I can think of at the moment.)

This very tongue-in-cheek riff on the well-worn tropes of zombies is one of the least socially resonant I can remember seeing. Yes, once again, zombies illustrate a social force in our society. But this time around, they're a stand-in for our technology-based alienation from each other. And it takes the the destruction of our civilization for our heroes to realize they really do need each other. (Yawn.)

The jokes, on the other hand, are pretty good. Jesse Eisenberg ("Adventureland") is our narrator, giving us his backstory along with several Max-Brooks-ish rules for surviving in the post-apocalyptic Zombieland, such as "Check the back seat" and "Don't be a hero". His mentor in zombie killing is a suprisingly likeable Woody Harrelson. (I say "surprisingly", because I haven't liked the guy in anything since Cheers.) Joining these two are a pair of sisters played by Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin.

There are a few too many reversals which seem to have irretrievably broken our little foursome up... but since you're a movie viewer, you know they won't be broken up for long. An extended celebrity cameo is a great deal of fun. And the finale surprised me a little.

All in all, it was enjoyable, but nothing very earth-shatteringly original.

The New Rules of News

2009-10-03T22:30:17-05:00

Dan Gillmor has 22 ideas for changing how news is produced. It may not be a perfect list, but the product he describes sounds a lot more compelling than most of what comes out of today's newsrooms.

Universe Closer to Death

2009-10-03T07:40:56-05:00

Yes, it’s more bad economic news on President Obama’s watch: it appears the universe may be closer to its eventual end than previously thought:

An analysis by Chas Egan of the Australian National University in Canberra and Charles Lineweaver of the University of New South Wales in Sydney indicates that the collective entropy of all the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies is about 100 times higher than previously calculated.

Entropy quantifies the number of different microscopic states that a physical system can have while looking the same on a large scale. For instance, an omelet has higher entropy than an egg because there are more ways for the molecules of an omelet to rearrange themselves and still remain an omelet than for an egg

Egan and Lineweaver’s new value for the entropy of the universe is still a billionth of a billionth the maximum possible entropy that researchers have estimated…

Please plan your vacation time accordingly