This has turned out to be one chaotic morning, but I wanted to quickly note the latest news on the “Spider-Man” front:
“Away with her.”
March 10th, 2011Heretic!
March 9th, 2011My “Applications in Business Programming” class had our first meeting last night.
This
Note that it is:
- Readily available from sources other than the university bookstore.
- Recently published.
- Reasonably priced. ($34 is about average for a programming book these days.)
Given that I paid $180 for the textbook for my previous class with this professor, I think this is worthy of praise. Well done, sir!
Bang theory.
March 9th, 2011I haven’t done any explosives blogging in a while, and a conversation over the weekend reminded me that I had two links pending:
Derek Lowe’s latest “Things I Won’t Work With”: chlorine azide.
A while back, Joe Huffman (of Boomershoot fame) exchanged emails with a gentleman named Lawrence Johnston. Dr. Johnston worked at Los Alamos during the war: specifically, he worked on designing the detonation mechanism for the implosion bombs. Mr. Huffman has a link to a presentation Dr. Johnston gave in 2006, on his experiences at Los Alamos.
In particular, the material about designing the detonators is fascinating stuff. The problem with the implosion device is that, in order to get it to work, they had to set off 32 separate explosions (in explosive lenses arranged around the core of the bomb) and all of those explosions had to take place within 1/10th of a microsecond. Using conventional detonation mechanisms gives you a timing of several tens of microseconds, which won’t work when you’re trying to get a bunch of explosive fronts to converge into one spherical wave. So how do you solve this problem? Dr. Johnston developed the exploding bridgewire detonator for this purpose, and there’s some great stuff in his presentation about things like the D’autriche test for detonator timing, determining the blast yield of the early bombs, and what daily life at Los Alamos at the time was like. I commend Dr. Johnston’s presentation to your attention, and regret not blogging it sooner.
My heroes have always been lawyers and ambulance drivers.
March 9th, 2011I thought about including this in the previous round of random notes, but on second thought it deserves a post by itself. Here are two epic tales from bloggers that I admire (though I have not met either of them):
Ambulance Driver and his buddy, Too Old to Work, Too Young to Retire, bring a woman back from the dead while on vacation.
Ken over at Popehat talks about a day in the glamorous life of a defense lawyer.
A roundup of miscellaneous crap for March 9, 2011.
March 9th, 2011Some things worth noting in the NYT on this fine day:
Michael Ruhlman reviews Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking
Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider
Never mind.
You may ask yourself, “Why would someone pay $20,000 for a replica of an Eric Clapton Stratocaster, ‘complete with every single nick and scratch, including the wear pattern from Mr. Clapton’s belt buckle and the burn mark from his cigarettes’?” You would probably answer that question, “Because they’re a moron.” The NYT would like for you to know that evolutionary psychology suggests you’re wrong:
Yesterday was election day in Bell, California. How did things go?
Noted: Austin now has a Peruvian restaurant. (Okay, technically, Pflugerville.) Yes, I’m thinking Saturday Dining Conspiracy. No, not right away; we generally give places three months after opening before reviewing them.
Guns up!
March 8th, 2011Missed this one until I saw a link on FARK, but FARK’s link was to the USAToday story.
Pat Knight fired as Texas Tech basketball coach.
This does not seem to have been unexpected, with a 13-18 record (5-11 in conference).
(And, once again, someone told a local newspaper that auto-play videos are A-OK.)
Random notes: March 8, 2011.
March 8th, 2011Slow. Slow. Slow. And WordPress ate the first draft of this post. Argh. “Introduction to Literary Studies” is finished, but “Applications in Business Programming” fires up tonight.
So where were we?
Ken Hoffman in the HouChron on more rodeo food. The chocolate covered pickle makes us gag.
The NYT reports that Julie Taymor and the “Spider-Man” producers are “negotiating”. “Negotiating” in this case apparently means either “work with a newly expanded creative team” or “pack your <stuff> and get out”.
Speaking of art, damn it, art!, Lawrence has brought us happy news for those of you who own iPhones and are fans of Guy Debord, Karen Eliot, Monty Cantsin, and the Karen-headed Smile Monty (see also): there’s an app for that.
By way of Tam, we have learned that the Department of Homeland Security, which is apparently not satisfied with not actually catching terrorists, is going around confiscating Nissan Skylines. The Skyline is a car we were previously unfamiliar with, perhaps because it was never officially imported into the United States. One of Tam’s commenters provided this link to an excellent article about the rise and fall of a Skyline importer in California, which we commend to your attention.
Speaking of commenters, “Bob” (thanks, “Bob”) posted in this thread and provided a link with some new information about our good friend, the spamming scumbag Sven Alstrom. That link, in turn, led us to this one, which also has some good stuff about Sven. We were particularly amused by these two comments from LJWorld staff members:
and:
Sven makes friends everywhere he goes, doesn’t he?
Y’all say what?
March 4th, 2011The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo is getting underway again this year.
But there’s been a change: the rodeo is no longer a Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association sanctioned rodeo. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a professional rodeo, or that there’s not money on the table ($1.75 million, according to the HouChron), just that winnings in the Houston rodeo aren’t officially counted by the PRCA, and don’t impact PRCA standings.
If I understand the story correctly, this doesn’t make Houston unique; some of the larger Canadian rodeos aren’t PRCA sanctioned, either, and it sounds like Houston may be trying to start up a competing rodeo circuit:
The goal is to become the top international invitational championship in the world.
It isn’t that I’m a huge rodeo fan (I’m not), but the situation is interesting. Lawrence made a good analogy to the whole CART/Indycar situation, which (as I see it) seriously damaged open wheel racing in the United States.
Truffle trouble.
March 4th, 2011It would fill my heart with delight if someone managed to grow truffles reliably in the United States.
I know there are many people working on the problem (supposedly including one person out near Dripping Springs; this article is from 1984, and I haven’t been able to find anything more recent in Google) but it seems that the growing of truffles is more difficult than you might expect for something that’s basically a fungus.
All of this is by way of introducing today’s NYT article about two truffle growers in North Carolina who’ve been engaged in a lengthy legal battle.
Important safety tip:
Musical beg.
March 3rd, 2011Does anybody have a digital version, or a pointer to one, of “Throw Him Down, McCloskey”?
I can find the lyrics and even the sheet music online, but I’ve been unable to find a recording of someone actually performing the song. I will be happy to pay money for a recording, but I’ve been unable to find one in either the iTunes or Amazon stores.
The lunatics are on the grass.
March 3rd, 2011Two things that made me chuckle, and one that didn’t.
Goodnight Dune, the children’s book.
Goodnight Keith Moon, which is probably not for children.
(Hattip: Robb Allen.)
This is an old story, but I don’t think I’ve linked it before: Margaret Wise Brown left the rights and royalties from her books to her neighbor Albert Clarke. Clarke was nine years old when she died in 1952. So what’s happened since then? (I know this was published in 2000. I haven’t been able to turn up anything more recent on Albert Clarke, except a rather mean article on an obscure website calling him a drug addict and suggesting that nobody should ever buy a new copy of Goodnight Moon.)
Random notes: March 3, 2011.
March 3rd, 2011I went to the fights last night, and a case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy broke out.
Sirhan Sirhan has been turned down for parole for the 13th time. What’s interesting about this article is that it focuses almost as much on Sirhan’s lawyer, William F. Pepper, and Pepper’s previous efforts:
This gives me an excuse to plug Hampton Sides’ excellent (and Edgar-nominated) book Hellhound on His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History
I’m not going to say it deserves the Edgar; I haven’t read any of the other nominated books (I did pick up The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science
This is not a strategy I had considered for driving up page views, but good for the Austin Bulldog.
Edited to add: This is the closest thing I’ve found to a discussion of food items at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo this year. No photos. I’d apologize, but I don’t want a photo of the “Pulled Pork Sundae”, which frankly sounds disgusting.
For you see I’m on the legal beat…
March 2nd, 2011I love a good heist. But it has to be a good one; that is, there has to be an element of panache to it, not just a random smash and grab. Something like this:
From a second LAT article about the heist:
I’ve previously mentioned Where the Money Is: True Tales from the Bank Robbery Capital of the World
Right decision. Westboro is still a bunch of jackasses.
This decision got a lot of press yesterday. I’m kind of hoping one of my legal readers can explain why:
I’m confused because I’ve always understood “dying words” to be an exception to the hearsay rule. (Wikipedia is not a lawyer. Wikipedia is not your lawyer. Neither am I. Contents may settle in shipping.) What exactly does this decision change?
Quote of the day.
March 1st, 2011I think the lessons here are:
- Always make sure you have the proper permits for your iguana meat.
- If you have the proper permits, you don’t need to hide your iguana meat in masa. Or anything else for that matter.
- Small amounts of iguana meat for “personal use” are apparently okay with Customs.
- You can find recipes for iguana online.
- At the moment, I very much wish that I was in Tijuana.
Here. Have some crap.
March 1st, 2011Sorry. I’ve been a little tied up, and there hasn’t been much to write about. Frank Buckles pretty much got covered everywhere in the known universe, and I don’t have terribly much to say about Jane Russell (well, not here anyway).
Part of what’s been tying me up is the “Introduction to Literary Studies” class I’ve been taking. This weekend was crunch time, with revisions to one essay and a second essay due. So for filler purposes, and to let you all laugh at me, I’ve decided to throw up essay two and essay three.
I wanted to post essay two in particular because Andrew “Shut. Down. Everything.” Wimsatt and I were talking about it one recent Sunday afternoon on our way to Momji; I was describing the subject of this essay to Andrew, and he was laughing hysterically as I talked about rotting buffalo and the cry of the whippoorwill. I don’t think the story is all that amusing, but reasonable people can differ…
Here’s essay three. I doubt that Andrew will find it quite as funny as the other one, but you never know.
Orwell’s 1984 and the “Elephant” In the Room.
Both of these have been graded, so do your worst in the comments. And remember, St. Edward’s uses TurnItIn; plagiarists will be caught.
