Archive for the ‘Wow!’ Category

I find myself reminded of the J. B. S. Haldane quote

Wednesday, April 4th, 2018

“Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose.”

It turns out that some people are their own twins.

Then again, I guess I knew of the possibility, I just hadn’t considered how widely applicable it might be.

We’re starting to see beautiful spring-like weather …

Tuesday, May 9th, 2017

… but there are still some setbacks along the way. We had the snowstorm back at the end of April, then yesterday was a pretty significant hailstorm. There were reports of baseball-sized hail in a few areas, but where I was, this was about the largest (note the quarter for scale).

There was so much hail that it was piling up inches deep in some places, but it wasn’t that deep in most areas. It did cover the ground almost completely by the time the storm ended, though.

My windshield was cracked, and a taillight was broken. The amusing thing was that my roof apparently flexed enough that the dome light cover popped off and the bulb fell out. That, at least, was easily fixed.

My boss, who was parked next to me, also received a cracked windshield, as well as two broken side mirrors – on one side, just the housing was broken, but the mirror was broken on the other side.

The women in the office next to ours had windshields that were much more damaged – one had to call her husband to get home, because there were so many cracks in her windshield that she couldn’t see out it. Across the parking lot, two women had their rear windows completely shattered.

The weather report called for the possibility of more storms this afternoon, but that didn’t happen. A couple of years ago, I lost a hops bine to a snowstorm followed by a hailstorm. I’m not growing hops yet this year, but my oregano and sage seem to have come through the storm well enough. I’m going to have to cut back the oregano, anyway, because it’s trying to take over the garden. Can’t have that – I need room for other things, too.

It seemed absolutely crazy

Tuesday, February 16th, 2016

I found this to be an absolutely fascinating article. I am tremendously impressed with Jill Viles. She is a poster child for taking control of your medical care, which is something I should do more of.

It seemed absolutely crazy. The idea that an Iowa housewife, equipped with the cutting-edge medical tool known as Google Images, would make a medical discovery about a pro athlete who sees doctors and athletic trainers as part of her job?

I believe that my sisters were once contacted about a medical study concerning a condition that may run in our family. Jill, in contrast, found an active study about her condition and got them to include her family. She got care for her father that likely extended his life by eighteen years, and did the same for an Olympic athlete. That’s impressive.

Definitely someone more people should know about.

If I hadn’t already made plans …

Friday, May 15th, 2015

to be at Ukefest, I might have been tempted to attend this, which is taking place in my old neighborhood. As it is, though, Ukefest wins hands-down.

From the “more money than sense” files

Monday, December 15th, 2014

Two stories out of the Daily Mail:

1) A Swiss belt buckle that costs more than half a million dollars. White gold, titanium, 387 diamonds, 167 pieces. Does not include a belt. I wonder if you need a manual to operate it?

2) A Rolls-Royce Phantom coupe (about $470K) with black velvet in lieu of a paint job. I wonder if there’s a business opportunity for a dry-cleaner car wash?

No. Just … no.

Monday, October 6th, 2014

I would not do this, but I can watch it in full-screen.

Via The Feral Irishman (often NSFW)

Anything worth doing is worth overdoing

Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

Or, as the MTV tagline used to have it, “Too much is never enough.”

Via Neatorama.

There are definitely reasons

Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

One website I go to classifies some posts under a category named something like, “Reasons we aren’t nearly afraid enough of the Japanese.” I think this would fall into that category. There is a type of performer in Japan called the idol singer. There have been idols who were “merely” popular performers, idols who were corporate image representatives, and so on. They’re a long-lived enough cultural phenomenon that they’ve been reasonably common in anime, as well, with one character whose singing was sufficient to stop an interstellar war.

Now, they’re not even required to be real people for live performances in the real world.

One has to wonder what the people in the audience actually saw – is the technology advanced enough for them to see what we can see in the video, or was this done in postprocessing? But don’t worry about where they can possibly go from here – they went there about a year ago.

Video found at Snapped Shot.

Virus protection racket

Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

It’s incredible how ingenious con artists can be, and disheartening to realize what kind of wild stories people are gullible enough to believe.

Economics was never my strong suit

Thursday, September 23rd, 2010

That said, it doesn’t take much study to be scared by this graph, or by this one. The discussion related to this graph is also easy to follow, and quite disturbing.

I could be flip and say that there’ll be a quiz on November 2nd, but this is no laughing matter.