Tuesday, August 15, 2006

- I am tired of people comparing the war in Iraq to Vietnam. The two are completely different. The war in Iraq is going much better than the war in Vietnam ever did. The next time some crazy left-wing nut (also known as a moonbat) gets in your face and tells you Iraq is another Vietnam, quote him or her the statistics from the following website:
http://www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/bg1954.cfm

- Imagine this...your nine year-old son or daugther is in the championship baseball game for his or her local town little league. Your team is guaranteed a win if you walk the other team's best player, then pitch to the worst player on the other team, but there is a problem...the worst player on the other team has cancer! What do you do? It's a tough moral question. This exact situation came up in a little league game in Utah last summer. Read the following article, and then comment on what you would do. What would I do? I would have walked the best player on the opposing team, and pitched to the cancer kid. After all, I have to think about the 20 players on my team who worked their tails off during the regular season to win the championship. The needs of the many outweight the needs of the few:
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2006/writers/rick_reilly/08/07/reilly0814/index.html

- The 10 creepiest television commercial icons of all-time. I absolutely agree with #5:
http://www.yesbutnobutyes.com/archives/2006/08/ten_creepiest_i_1.html

- Sunday, August 13th was left-handers day. How do you determine if someone is left-handed? There is no hard-core rule. I use the simple rule of which hand do you write with. If you write with your left-hand, you are left-handed. Here is just a small list of famous left-handed people, and two websites devoted to celebrating left-handers day:

Thomas Jefferson (the declaration of independence was written with a left-hand!)
Benjamin Franklin
George Herbert Walker Bush
Bill Clinton
Ross Perot (that's right. All three presidential candidates from 1992 were left-handed.)
Clint Eastwood (at the end of Dirty Harry, which hand does he use to throw his badge into the pond?)
Robert Redford
Bruce Willis (watch Die Hard again. Which hand does he use to hold his gun?)
Tom Cruise
Angelina Jolie
Jerry Seinfeld (remember the check-signing from the Super-terrific happy hour?)
Mark Hamill (Which hand does he use to throw the rock which brings down the gate on the Rancor?)
Will Ferrell
Oprah Winfrey
Nicole Kidman

I write left-handed, but I use my right-hand for various tasks:
I throw right-handed.
I bowl right-handed.
I golf right-handed.
I play tennis and ping-pong left-handed.
I throw darts left-handed.
I drive right-handed.
I smoke left-handed (I would burn myself if I even tried to smoke right-handed.)
I eat left-handed.
I tie my shoes left-handed (people get creeped-out when they watch me tie my shoes.)
I drink left-handed.
I use scissors left-handed.
I kick with my left-foot.
I talk on the phone left-handed.
I play NTN trivia with my right-hand.
I use my mouse with either hand.

http://buzz.yahoo.com/buzzlog/28075/a-hand-for-the-lefties
http://www.lefthandersday.com/

- 20 reasons why college football is better than pro-football. I love both, but I really do prefer college football. I love his comment of "history demands that Michigan must win." You cant fight history!
College Football versus pro-football

- More Iron Man real-world technology. A mechanical exoskeleton that can increase your strength ten-fold!
http://ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?&aid=61474

- Over 50 years ago Alan Turing devised a test for checking if a computer is truly artificially intelligent. It's appropriately named The Turing Test. No one has yet to create a machine which has actually passed this test. Computer scientists debate whether any machine will ever pass this test. I think someday a computer will pass this test, but such a computer still will not be artificially intelligent. Instead, it will simply have so many possible responses stored in its memory that it gives a human-like answer no matter what you ask it. Read more about the Turing test here:
http://tt-blogs.com/comment.php?id=47

- Have you ever noticed that the floppy-drive inside your computer is labeled the "A drive" and the hard-drive in your computer is labeled the "C Drive." What happened to the B drive? Why skip the letter B? Here's why:
http://ask.yahoo.com/20050304.html

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

- Summer of 2005 was a big season of movies (at least it was for me.) We got a new Batman movie, and a new Star Wars movie. Sounds like summer 2008 will also be a big season of movies. We finally get an Iron Man movie, and now Time-Warner has annnounced The new Batman movie. It will be titled "The Dark Knight." The word "Batman" does not appear anywhere in the title. I like it, but it's not all good news. Heath Ledger will play the Joker. Ugh. Yes, the Heath Ledger from Brokeback. I think this is horrible casting, but it's not quite enough to completely ruin my enthusiasm. I am hearing that the new Batman movie will be darker than Batman Begins, and the Joker is going to be really nasty. Personally, I thought Jack Nicholson was the quinessential Joker; a twisted monster with no regard for human life. Others thought Nicholson's Joker was too soft and fuzzy. Here is the official press release for the new movie:
http://www.darkhorizons.com/news06/060731n.php


- Famous sports traditions:
Famous Sports Traditions


- Strange, little test I found on the net. How quickly can you click a series of boxes using your mouse? Look on the right-hand side of the following website to test yourself. The best I could do is 30 clicks in the time given:
http://www.lookuptables.com/

- I love stories about home-made jetpacks. Especially the ones where the inventor operates it for the first time, and runs into a high-voltage power-line. The following inventor didnt make that mistake, but he did give the jetpack a rather familiar, and cliche'd name:
http://www.mobilewhack.com/reviews/skywalker_jet_packs_it_works.html

- Supposedly this is one of the hardest, yet most rewarding puzzles on the internet. There are 137 parts to it. Definitely need to think "outside the box" to solve these puzzles. One afternoon I worked up to page 8 before I stopped. I might give it another crack:
http://www.deathball.net/notpron/levelone.htm

- The top 100 name brands, according to Business week:
http://bwnt.businessweek.com/brand/2006/

- FilmCritic.com picks the top 50 film endings:
Top 50 Film Endings