drastic measures

via this week's harper's review:

An eighty-year-old Australian doctor had “DO NOT RESUSCITATE” tattooed across his chest

hard core.


table at crimson moon cafe

Technorati Tags: australia, medicine, euthanasia, rights, death

Indecency

The Parents Television Council: "...the e-mail factory that Mediaweek magazine credits with as much as 99.9 percent of all indecency complaints to the F.C.C. in 2004. It is also quite a little fount of salacious entertainment in its own right. On its Web site, the organization's tireless "entertainment analysts" compile a list of every naughty word used on television and invite visitors to "Watch the Worst TV Clip of the Week." An archive of past clips - helpfully labeled individually by sin ("gratuitous teen sex," "necrophilia") - is there for your pleasure, with no requirement for the credit card number or membership fee that porn Internet sites use as a roadblock for children." (according to this [NYTimes Article].)

I'll save you the trouble of going to find the clips. [Worst TV Clip of the Week Archives].

Anyway, my favorite clip is the South Park whoreoff. Gotta love South Park.

google maps, telcontar drill down server

dali at the mall
Originally uploaded by jhc.

via jon udell, some interesting information on the google maps backend, telcontar's drill down server:

Why is the Drill Down Server so fast? "At the heart of Telcontar we have a new spatial data access method that's fundamentally different than how everyone else has tried to organize spatial data,"€ Fennell noted. "€œWe reorganize data from all sources into our format called Rich Map Format (RMF). We have ten patents granted and another 21 filed in this area. A subtle difference - we built our engine and our access method was designed to do high performance route calculations. Traditional GIS systems do geometry and attributes well so you can print a map, and make beautiful maps very efficiently. If you try to use that geometry information to calculate a route you discover you need to have all the topology and term restrictions embedded in the database and it becomes a more difficult engine to solve. So we built an engine to do routing, not necessarily thematic maps, although we have the ability to manage that map layer underneath very well and can put points of interest on top of a map. We do routing well, and do it in an architecture that is stateless, so any user can go to any server and have that query processed."

Technorati Tags: google, maps, telcontar, geospatial, location, cartography, math

wonderlic scores

statue at city hall, against the masonic temple
Originally uploaded by jhc.

via ben maller, this year's wonderlic trends, as provided by the charlotte observer:

The Wonderlic, a 50-question test with a 12-minute time limit given to players invited to the combine, was taken by each of the 336 who attended last year.The kickers did the best job with it, with five players producing an average score of 29, according to the College Scouting Bureau. Centers were second (10 players, 27.6), followed by quarterbacks (21 players, 25.5).

Then came guards (21, 24.4), offensive tackles (20, 23.9), inside linebackers (nine, 23.4), tight ends (19, 22.2), fullbacks (seven, 21.9), punters (six, 21.3), running backs (23, 20.9), outside linebackers (29, 19.9), defensive ends (30, 19.7), defensive tackles (31, 19.5), receivers (50, 19.4), safeties (25, 18.1) and cornerbacks (30, 17.7).

we proud

scarface blazer
Originally uploaded by jhc.

via the conscerned big brother, md:

Indian Village Boy's NASA Claim Crashes to Earth:

LUCKNOW, India (Reuters) - An Indian teenager from one of the country's most backward states appears to have fooled governments, the media and even the president into believing he had topped the world in a NASA (news - web sites) science exam.
[...]
The Uttar Pradesh state government rewarded him with a 500,000 rupee ($11,500) prize and more than 100 members of the state's upper house each donated a day's salary to him.
[...]
An Indian news portal, rediff.com, contacted NASA, which denied any knowledge of the exam.

"Right now, no one knows where this examination comes from," Rediff quoted NASA education official Dwayne Brown saying.
[...]
The certificate, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters, declared "You are the member of NASA" (sic) and is signed by Singh and "Chief of NASA, Cin K. Kif" -- NASA's former administrator was Sean O'Keefe. It also lists the name of Singh's father, common practice in Indian documents.

Singh says he flew to London on Indian Airlines -- which does not fly to the city -- and took a taxi to Oxford University and back every day for the exam from January 4-8, a round trip of about 230 km (140 miles).

Singh told Reuters he stayed in a hotel, but told a Hindi language newspaper he stayed at Buckingham Palace.

this kid is a fucking genius on levels heretofore unbeknownst to the world.

duchamp

tank on the sidewalk
Originally uploaded by jhc.

via interconnected minilinks:

Marcel Duchamp (Wikipedia):
"Recent research by art historian Rhonda Roland Shearer indicates that Duchamp's supposedly 'found' objects may actually have been created by Duchamp. Exhaustive research of items like snow shovels and bottle racks in use at the time has failed to turn up any identical matches. The urinal, upon close inspection, is non-functional. The artwork 'L.H.O.O.Q.' which is supposedly a poster-copy of the Mona Lisa with a mustache drawn on it, turns out to be not the true Mona Lisa, but Duchamp's own slightly-different version that he modelled partly after himself. If Shearer's findings are correct then Duchamp was creating an even larger joke than he admitted."

Technorati Tags: art, marcel, duchamp

Warrenellis.com -> Stem Cell Boob Jobs

SCIENCE!

Warrenellis.com -> Stem Cell Boob Jobs

Jeremy Mao of the University of Illinois, in Chicago, US, took human stem cells and used these to grow fat tissue using a biologically compatible scaffolding. He then successfully implanted the tissue into mice with an immune deficiency to prevent them from rejecting the implants. The implants had maintained their size and shape after four weeks.

Implants grown from stem cells could provide a safer alternative to silicon or saline implants, which can rupture and also interfere with breast cancer detection. They could also be aesthetically superior, keeping their shape and size for longer than artificial inserts, which typically shrink by 40% to 60% over many years, through spreading…

life changing experiences

cira building from drexel's main campus.
Originally uploaded by jhc.

collection of life changing experiences, via ask metafilter

Cart Food

Here is an interesting observation I made the other day.

I was getting lunch from one of the lunch trucks outside where I work. To my left was a cart that served cheesesteaks, hamburgers, and other such fare. To my right was another cart that served the same type of food. I was in the middle at the chinese truck. As I was waiting for my chicken and eggplant, white rice, no spicy, the guy working in the cart to my left came out, walked to the cart to my right, and ordered food.

Now, maybe I missed something, but it seems to me to be a bad sign when the guy won't eat from his own cart. I could understand if the cart he went to served different food. But it didn't. It was the same type of food. Needless to say, I will never eat from that cart to my left.

horniness is the mother of invention. - plato

pics
Originally uploaded by jhc.

via the beeb:

A US strip club has managed to sidestep laws banning total nudity in public by offering customers the chance to make drawings depicting its dancers.

The club in Boise, Idaho, charges $15 (£8) for a sketch pad, pencil and dance performance, in what is billed as an "Art Club Night", Reuters agency says.

A city law passed in 2001 forbids complete nudity in public unless the display has "serious artistic merit".

genius.

and if andres serrano shows up to the club, it would be perfectly legal for the strippers to piss on him.

Math and Language

I've always believed that there is a strong similarity between mathematics and language. It seems that there's a recent study which flies directly in the face of this idea. Here's the abstract:

"A central question in cognitive neuroscience concerns the extent to which language enables other higher cognitive functions. In the case of mathematics, the resources of the language faculty, both lexical and syntactic, have been claimed to be important for exact calculation, and some functional brain imaging studies have shown that calculation is associated with activation of a network of left-hemisphere language regions, such as the angular gyrus and the banks of the intraparietal sulcus. We investigate the integrity of mathematical calculations in three men with large left-hemisphere perisylvian lesions. Despite severe grammatical impairment and some difficulty in processing phonological and orthographic number words, all basic computational procedures were intact across patients. All three patients solved mathematical problems involving recursiveness and structure-dependent operations (for example, in generating solutions to bracket equations). To our knowledge, these results demonstrate for the first time the remarkable independence of mathematical calculations from language grammar in the mature cognitive system."

Here's a link to the original journal article.

Here's a link to a review in Nature.

Anyway, in an effort to hold my beliefs in light of prevailing wisdom, I argue that the capacity for arithmetic is not the kind of "grammar" that prevails in mathematics.

Online Gaming

Is online gaming taking over your life? Here are some testimonials:

"Such open-endedness brings with it a desire to keep playing; not for no reason is EverQuest (EQ) nicknamed EverCrack."

"You lie; you don't go into work because you "had stuff to do at home"; you cancel or refuse invitations to dinner, you spend much less time watching TV (a good thing, presumably)," he wrote, explaining how EverQuest took over his time.

See the article.

There's even a blog discussing the lives of those who are affected by these addictions: Everquest Daily Grind. Wasting our lives away with computers...

Blogging may be hazardous to your 401(k)

Here's a warning to all you fucking blogging nerds out there. Even when you get a real job, you can't hold onto it. Might want to spend less time analyzing the homoerotic undertones between Han and Chewie and pay more attention to your TPS reports. Or else you might become Jeff Albertson, aka Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. And yes, that's his name. They revealed his real name in the episode that aired after the Super Bowl, which the Steelers won by the way.

I think this famliy is who the Walton's were based on.

How's this for a blast from the past? Remember that school teacher who had sex and, subsequently, had two children with her 12-year old student. Well, he's all grown up now and they are making plans to wed. Their daughters are 6 and 7 years old; he's only 22; she's 43, with two children of her own from her last marriage. I heard that they registered at Toys 'R Us. He really wants that new PS2.

head-on

old septa station near queen lane
Originally uploaded by jhc.

saw a great german-turkish movie the other week called head-on (gegen die wand if you 'sprechen sie dick' as they say). plot basically boils down to disaffected man meets disafected woman.

fucking ensues.

also, they utilize the german criteria for disaffection, so it's basically like an order of magnitude more fucked than even torless's life.

birol ünel and sibel kekilli both give inspired and very kinski-esque performances.

lastly: kekilli has a great ass. and hair. and nose.

Technorati Tags: cinema, movies, foreign, film, head-on, german, turkish

metropolis mag: is china ready to embrace sustainability?

interesting article in metropolis:

Over the next two decades, China’s urban population is projected to increase by 250 million people; these city dwellers use up to 3.5 times more energy than rural denizens.
[...]
Some of the plan’s objectives are outright astonishing. For example, Qiu Baoxing, vice minister of the Ministry of Construction, People’s Republic of China, told the conference’s 6000 attendees that by the end of 2010, all Chinese cities will be expected to reduce their buildings’ energy use by 50 percent; by 2020, that figure will be 65 percent. Furthermore, by 2010, 25 percent of existing residential and public buildings in the country’s large cities will be retrofitted to be greener; that number will be 15 percent in medium-sized cities and 10 percent in small cities. Over 80 million square meters of building space will be powered using solar and other renewable energies.

Technorati Tags: environment, environmentalism, green, smart, design, sustainable, architecture, china, developing, nations, urbanization

multiple photo moblog test

trying out sending multiple photos to flickr. pics are from dinner w/ in the crease, before and after.

multiple photo moblog test

trying out sending multiple photos to flickr. pics are from dinner w/ in the crease, before and after.

pats must lose

philly's cityhall is lit up green in preparation for the superbowl. i can barely bring myself to watch, but i pray that the eagles win and they dedicate the victory to hines ward (the greatest of all time).

Ladybug love

Lost the cell phone that i had since 98. Just got a new one and i'm trying out the photo moblogging capabilities...
The photo is graffiti on sansom btwn 17 & 18 in philly.