Stephen Mizell feed

Mobile Treadmill

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 23:55:01 -0500

A coworker sent me this video about a mobile treadmill, and it left me very confused. I've always thought the benefit of a treadmill was so you could run and exercise inside, away from the elements. I also thought it was a bonus for the treadmill to be stationary so you could do it all in the comfort of your home or gym. In the occasion you didn't need those two benefits, you could go outside and go for a jog around the block or on a trail. So I guess my thought is if you can go outside and run, and you actually want to go outside and run, why not just run on the ground instead of run on a treadmill?

Note: I used Kottke's trick for higher quality Youtube videos, so you can watch the video in all its glory.

Taxidermy at its Finest

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 23:59:00 -0500

I really think this taxidermy project is going a little too far with the hobby.

Chicken Flavor

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 23:55:20 -0500

The Chicken Flavor Ramen Noodle meal really gets me. Don't get me wrong, I love chicken and I eat it quite often, especially in Mexican food where they just smother it with cheese. But what is this chicken flavor deal? How do you get the flavor of chicken without the chicken? What concoction of random chemicals and spices creates the same taste as a real, cooked chicken? Some Ingredient Engineer really had his thinking cap on when he thought up the money-making scheme of cutting costs by using fake chicken flavor to make it taste like you're eating real chicken. "Just make it taste like chicken," he says, "they'll never know."

The craziest part of this all is that they try to trick you into believing the fake-chicken taste you are buying is actually real chicken by manipulating the wording on the package. Check out this picture of a package of chicken ramen noodles where they put the word "flavor" in tiny print under the huge "Chicken" text. I like how they even put a slab of real chicken on top of the noodles to fool the customer even more. I'm sure somewhere on the package it says, "Chicken not included, only its flavor, which is not even from a real chicken." Who are they fooling with this little scam? Did they do some type of usability testing on the packaging and find they could actually trick people into thinking the noodles they were looking at had real chicken in it, when, in fact, it was just flavored like chicken? How can the makers of these noodles sleep at night knowing they've tricked someone into buying their product?

This just sickens me, both the marketing scheme and the thought of tasting fake chicken.

Mr. Boldin

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 22:38:14 -0500

As I sit here and watch Monday Night Football between the Arizona Cardinals and San Francisco 49ers, I am a little taken back by the story of the Cardinal's wide receiver Anquan Boldin. On September 28th of this year, he was hit with a pretty nasty helmet-to-helmet hit that left him unconscious with two facial fractures. You read that correctly, he fractured his face in two places. They took him to surgery and put eight plates and 40 screws in his skull. He even came out of surgery and refused pain medication just to prove he is tougher than you.

Now after hearing that, you'd think he'd be out for a very long time taking care of those nasty injuries. The injuries were so crazy that his quarterback, Kurt Warner, almost retired because he realized the damage football can cause. If it were me, I would have worn a helmet everywhere I went and never played football again. Not Mr. Boldin, he's a man, and he just scored a touchdown a few minutes ago, which is less than two months after his nasty collision.

One is the Loneliest Number

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 23:59:00 -0500

This is something I've spent several hours thinking about, and I just can't seem to figure it out. I'm going to show you that the word "plural" isn't quite what you think it is when we think of it grammatically.

In your head, think of how you would define what the word "plural" means in the grammar world. If I were a betting man (and I'm not), I'd say you thought of something along the lines of a "grammatical number category referring to two or more items or units," with the key phrase there being "two or more." Let's use an example, say we are talking about meters, and we have two of them. Since we have more than one, we pluralize the word "meter" by adding an "s," making it "meters." If we only had one, we would not add the "s," since the word is singular. Everything makes sense, right?

Here is where things get out of hand. What happens when you have less than one meter, like 0.5? You wouldn't say, "I ran 0.5 meter," but rather, "I ran 0.5 meters." Aside from the fact that you have poor stamina, why would we pluralize "meter" there? It's definitely not more than two, so why is it plural? Look at the number zero. "I have zero chairs," or even, "I have no chairs." Again, we pluralize a word that is not two or more. What about negative numbers? That just throws a huge wrench in our system, because every negative number is less than two.

Does this mean one is the only number that is not plural in grammar?

Update: Here is a good discussion on the topic (h/t Bofe)

Tabula Rasa

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 12:46:36 -0500

I have been challenged to participate in the National Blog Posting Month, and I never back down from a challenge. I do understand I haven't updated this site in over year, and I also understand I have only posted about 10 times in the short time this website has been online, but you can't progress forward if you never take that first step, right?