Author: matthew

You rise from the ruins of your grand tower, your body torn and shattered, your greatest source of power removed and in unknown hands, and only a handful of goblin minions at your beck and call to restore your grand and dark dominion to the ends of the earth.

It’s time to be an Overlord. The game concept reminds me of “Dungeon Keeper” from some years back. I’m absolutely picking this game up as soon as it’s available for PC. Why? Because hordes of goblin minions doing your bidding and cackling gleefully while they do so appeals to my inner megalomaniac, that’s why!

Tonight my girl and I will be curling up in front of “A Good Year” on our beanbags in the basement. We try to go out on a date every week, though this week we are staying in. It’s funny… when I get together with some of my club-mates and tell them I have a date, they look shocked and ask “does your wife know?”.

Things we’ve done together that I can recall off-hand:

• Climbed the rock wall at the local entertainment center.
• Played air hockey.
• Gone bowling.
• Dinner & a movie… time-honored favorite.
• Had ‘game night’ at the home of another couple.
• Went to the Desert Star Cabaret Theater and watched a live performance by some hilarious actors with good friends.
• Gone to the drive-in. If you take your kids, does it really count as a date?
• Gone for long walks. Haven’t done this in a while.
• Went to a resort.

Most of our dates are things we can do in 3 hours or less. With a busy family, shuttling kids around, and arranging sitting, it takes a lot of planning to do much more than that. What are your favorite things to do on date night with your significant other these days?

Apparently, scientists are very near to sequencing mammoth DNA. Cloners have shown an active interest in this research, with several attempting to synthesize mammoth DNA using parts from elephant DNA to “fill in the blanks”. Creation of a woolly mammoth could one day be as easy as removing the DNA from a fertilized elephant egg and inserting the mammoth DNA, allowing the mother elephant to carry the baby to term, and voila! Instant exterminated species returns!

In 2005, scientists did this successfully with a virus, resurrecting the exact strain of Spanish Flu which killed off between 2.5% and 5% of the entire human population in 1918, and affected over 20%. That’s between 1 in 20 and 1 in 40 of the entire planet who died in just 18 months, with a much heavier ratio in America and Europe than elsewhere.

That deadly killer is locked in a lab right now, because most humans today still don’t have any immunity to it. Pandemic, anyone?

What are your thoughts on this kind of application of cloning technologies? When do you think it would benefit humanity, and when should we desist? Scientists are all over the map on this question, with many saying “it can’t be done” for DNA fragments beyond a certain antiquity, while others think it can — and should — be done wherever possible to increase our knowledge.

You have always wondered. It has gnawed on the back of your conscience for a couple of decades. You’ve often thought it would be useful to know, but have never taken the time to look it up.

The air speed of a fairly typical unladen European swallow is estimated to be roughly 24 miles per hour.

You are welcome.

(If you don’t get it… please go watch and come back.)

Thought for the day:

If electricity comes from electrons, does morality come from morons?

Sorry, folks, Placebo’s Sleep Tracks were consuming a terabyte of bandwidth per day. I can’t afford to pay $4/GB to allow more downloads. I apologize to anyone who came here looking for them.

Please try:

http://barnson.org.nyud.net:8080/sleep/

I thought the news article I stumbled across couldn’t possibly be right, but it nailed it: For the first time in history, the LDS church in its official church magazine the “Ensign”, has chosen to address the events surrounding the Mountain Meadows Massacre. After 150 years of secrecy and cover-ups, I am stunned at this release, and have few words left but to suggest you read the article.

Although some aspects of the incident as described are debatable, and some damning evidence is glossed over, it is a far more fair treatment than I ever expected to read in the covers of a Church-sponsored magazine. It freely admits the complicity of local leaders and alludes to Brigham Young’s involvement in stirring up local sentiment against U.S. settlers, and places the blame squarely on the shoulders of those to whom it belongs, rather than on the shoulders of the Paiute Indians who were wrongfully attributed to having committed the crime for more than a hundred years.

As the September 11 anniversary of this event draws closer, it’s a welcome change from the posturing of years past, and can hopefully set the matter to rest.

Out of the many strange/weird/bizarre things I do, one is to take 20-minute power naps. I find if I do this, I can get by on far less sleep per night. To help me be able to fall asleep in unusual locations and with different degrees of ambient noise, I rely on Placebo’s Polyphasic Sleep Soundtrack. Greg (a.k.a. Placebo) shared thse MP3s with the polyphasic-sleeping community some time ago, and they’ve been a well-kept secret.

Until now.

Today, they got linked from Lifehack. While cool, on the one hand, to bring exposure to the many people who sleep polyphasically (monophasic == one sleep per day, biphasic == two sleeps per day like Siestas, polyphasic == three or more sleeps per day), on the other hand it hammered his bandwidth and his ISP shut him down. Lots of people want to download these MP3s now that Lifehack has linked ’em.

I pay $90 a month for this server. By gum, I’m going to get my money’s worth, and I’m only using 10% of my bandwidth transfer per month right now.

So anyway, if you mouse-over the links on Greg’s site for the sleep-track MP3s, you may notice a familiar name hosting them. And in the bargain, I just found the Lifehack site, which has lots of cool tips for getting the most out of your time. Nifty.

Yeah, I know it’s old, but it’s a good one…

HOW TO WRITE GOOD. ——————————————————

This is an English recap. Now for today’s lesson.

1. Verbs has to agree with their subjects.

2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.

3. And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction.

4. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.

5. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They’re old hat).

6. Always avoid annoying alliteration.

7. Be more or less specific.

8. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.

9. Also, too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies.

10. No sentence fragments. No comma splices, run-ons are bad too.

11. Contractions aren’t helpful and shouldn’t be used.

12. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.

13. Do not be redundant; do not use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.

14. One should never generalize.

15. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.

16. Don’t use no double negatives.

17. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.

18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.

19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.

20. The passive voice is to be ignored.

21. Eliminate commas, that are, not necessary. Parenthetical words however should be enclosed in commas.

22. Never use a big word when a diminutive one would suffice.

23. Kill all exclamation points!!!!

24. Use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them.

25. Understatement is probably not the best way to propose earth shattering ideas.

26. Use the apostrophe in it’s proper place and omit it when its not needed.

27. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”

28. If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times: resist hyperbole; not one writer in a million can use it correctly.

29. Puns are for children, not groan readers.

30. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.

31. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.

32. Who needs rhetorical questions?

33. Exaggeration is a million times worse than understatement.

34. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.

So just in case you are wondering, today I present for you the reason why, after eating asparagus, your pee smells funny. Apparently only 40% of us produce the distinctive, foul odor, and only about 40% can smell it.

Unfortunately, there is no correlation between the two. I’m one who can smell it, but doesn’t make it… I wish the fellow who used the restroom right before me were in the same camp!

I will admit to being guilty of coffee-whizz if I drink more than one cup, though…