Rusty's Blog

@Zuni

The warrior charged ahead. Weaker men would have lost their minds in the madness: telephone cords plugged into Ethernet jacks, AC adapters plugged into phone jacks, a lone VGA cable wrapped in a firm knot around an Ethernet cord. But the warrior bested the thicket, ripping away the vestigial cords and swiftly untangling the deadly trap.

And at last the warrior arrived at the Router.

"You're good with computers, right? Well, you see, when I Google 'Microsoft Word' it won't let me launch it! It used to work, I promise. Can you help???"

The scientists trained a large group of golden shiners, a small freshwater fish used as bait, to associate the arrival of food with a blue target. They then trained a smaller group to associate food with a yellow target, a color naturally preferred by the fish. Not surprisingly, when all the trained golden shiners were put in one aquarium, most of them swam toward the yellow dot; the stronger desires of the minority, fueled by the shiners' natural preference, persuaded the majority to follow along.

But when scientists introduced a group of fish without any color training, yellow suddenly lost its appeal. All of a sudden, the fish began following the preferences of the majority, swimming toward the blue target. "A strongly opinionated minority can dictate group choice," the scientists concluded. "But the presence of uninformed individuals spontaneously inhibits this process, returning control to the numerical majority."

This article is kind of bullshit – Lehrer brings in Hitler and the Nazis as an example of what happens if opinionated minorities control a political process. Godwin's Law applies everywhere on the internet, the Wall Street Journal included. More interesting than the somewhat feeble analysis is the referenced study.

Listen up. I know the shit you’ve been saying behind my back. You think I’m stupid. You think I’m immature. You think I’m a malformed, pathetic excuse for a font. Well think again, nerdhole, because I’m Comic Sans, and I’m the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg.

Helvetica is to Hipster as Comic Sans is to ???

Mulleted drunk at the bar?

In examining the grade-point averages of the Oregon student body and the performance of the Ducks’ football team, the researchers found a relationship between declining grades and success on the field.

“Our results support the concern that big-time sports are a threat to American higher education,” the paper’s authors — Jason M. Lindo, Isaac D. Swensen and Glen R. Waddell — wrote.

I'd say anecdotal evidence confirms this study's findings.

The Numi has what is referred to in the industry as “bidet features”: it can wash and dry its user (there are modes for women and men). Both functions are accomplished via a wand that extends from under the seat that can spray water or blow air. Pressure and temperature are adjustable, as is the spray pattern, which can go from a steady blast to an oscillating pattern that can only be described as invigorating.

I wonder a) what operating system the toilet runs (NetBSD?) and b) what kind of reporting and analytics features it incorporates. For instance, I'm interested in the correlation coefficients between time-of-day, temperature and shit duration.

[There] aren't too many athletes out there who can do what Rogelio Juarez does.

Mustafah Abdulaziz for The Wall Street Journal

Juarez, 49, is a rising New York star in the tiny but transfixing sport of Masskrugstemmen, an endurance competition in which athletes—and they are athletes—try to hold onto an enormous beer for as long as they can.

I'd guess my over/under at 4.5 minutes.

Thinking of growing a full mountain man beard just to recreate this.

This map is crazy cool. Contrast Detroit with Seattle. Red lines represent outward migration; black, inward.