ATZ OK

Today, I speak in links:
http://finance.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1201907861000&chddm=1955&cmpto=NASDAQ:YHOO&q=NASDAQ:GOOG
http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+irony

My box of worms from Uncle Jim’s Worm Farm showed up today! I can’t remember the last time I was this excited about a sudden invertebrate influx into my home. Thankfully it wasn’t that cold out yesterday, as they sat outside all day and night until I got home at almost 11pm. They seem fine, I opened the box up, moistened their soil, and gave them some green pepper and mushroom bits that were in my soon-to-be-obsolete old compost bin. Tomorrow, I make them new homes!

In the great spirit of last minute Christmas gifts, I’ve decided to build vermicomposters for my family. I already checked with my mom, and she’s down with the worms, but I still need to make sure my brother and father are okay with it. I’ll be using a method like the one described here to make the bins, and just ordered up a batch of the little guys from Uncle Jim’s Worm Farm in Pennsylvania. I’ll be posting up some progress of my own composter construction, as well as a progress report on the worms. I’m going to be exercising my 3 Rs by making them out of some old cat litter buckets I’ve been saving.

When I was little, I loved Alice In Wonderland for its freaky imagery, and mind-bending poetry. When I was a teenager, I still loved it, but for its mushrooms and hookahs and hallucinogenic references. Now I love it as an adult, for its bent logic, and mostly nostalgia for having loved it as a child. Now I hear that Tim Burton is making a new Alice in Wonderland Movie, and I pretty much want to throw up.

Of course, part of me wants to hope that this will be the same Tim Burton who brought us Edward Scissorhands, Beetle Juice, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, and Ed Wood. I love that Tim Burton, but the last of those was almost 15 years ago. In case you still have any hope, the writer who will be adapting our child-loving genius’ book to the big screen is a visionary who brought us such great stories as Homeward Bound, The Lion King, and TV’s Ewoks and The Cartoon Adventures of Teen Wolf.

I think it’s safe to say that this movie will be coming from the bowels of the Tim Burton who brought us Corpse Bride and Planet of the Apes. Personally, I’d hold out greater hopes for the Alice adaptation being worked on by some nerd into self mutilation and having sex with pretend Bettie Page.

That’s right, the United States Military is asking wounded soldiers to return portions of their signing bonuses. I bet they don’t put those “Support Our Troops” ribbons on their government SUVs either! But really, instead of asking for the money back, why don’t they just totally provide inadequate medical care and compensation for the wounded troops? Oh, wait, I guess they already do that too.

Update: Okay, apparently they’re claiming that the letter or letters were sent out inadvertently. It’s nice to know that it’s not official policy, but I can’t help but be reminded of how my bank sometimes charges me strange fees that don’t belong. I call them up and have the fees reversed, but it’s a tremendous hassle, and I’m always suspicious if they know very well that many people won’t bother with the hassle, or even notice the fee in the first place. If it took Jordan Fox’s situation going this far to get them to rescind, how many others got letters that didn’t bother to notify a reporter, and dutifully gave their country what was asked of them a second time?

So despite the horrible, awful reviews it’s been getting, I recently picked up SimCity Societies. It’s actually a very interesting game, with relatively deep gameplay obscured by a horribly shallow exterior. I’ll write up a full review eventually, but for the moment I wanted to show off a couple screenshots of the sort of things you can create with this Sim. I’m also looking into the game’s moddability, in the hopes of creating a more dynamic game experience. See my SimCity Societies game page for more information about what I’m working on.

An old friend emailed me the following quotation, which I found pretty fascinating:
“A vegan driving a Hummer produces less greenhouse gases than an omnivore riding a bicycle.” –Howard Lyman

This is especially interesting to me, because my reasons for being vegan mostly have to do with personal choice, not some sort of political imperative, but I do feel a lot of pressure to conserve fuel whenever possible. It’s interesting to know that the choices I made without even intending to lessen my impact have made a much greater difference than the ones I made with that intent.

Anyways, it got me thinking about the lack off effectiveness behind the EPA’s emissions standards, and fuel-efficient vehicles in general. Yes, I know the Prius is awesome and doing very well, but most people still get worse mileage out of them than they would a Geo Metro 20 years ago. There’s something wrong with that picture.

Considering that raising animals for food is responsible for more greenhouse gases than all of the vehicles in the world combined, it makes me wonder why the EPA isn’t setting standards for meat. Think about it, why not a hybrid burger? A little bit of googling actually reveals that I’m not the first person to have thought of this; a company called Solae has even created such a thing.

It makes a lot of sense, really. Sometimes when I go out to lunch with my coworkers, we go to One World Cafe, a local vegetarian restaurant. Being meat eaters, they usually get the meat substitutes and complain about how much they suck. I can’t help but agree with them, honestly, most of them really do. So what is somebody supposed to do, if they’re not vegetarian, but want to lessen the environmental and health impact of meat? I think hybrid meat products could really make a difference there. Just take your Morningstar Farms and Boca Burger products, and add enough real meat to them to get that flavor and texture you’ll never be able to reproduce anyways. Since most of those products aren’t even vegan to begin with, they wouldn’t even lose many shoppers. After all, is it really any different than putting casein and rennet in soy cheese?

Further reading:
http://www.virtualcentre.org/en/library/key_pub/longshad/A0701E00.htm
http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/06/060413.diet.shtml
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/05/the-warming-globe-and-us/

It’s a little late, I know, but our BM2006 pictures are now up. You might notice a quality degradation in the second half of the pictures. That because these are from Mandi’s disposable film cameras. I think it’s the focus more than anything else that affects the quality, although possibly because of the scanning as well. I tried out getting a Kodak photo CD for these, and it’s okay, but I’ll need to get a good side-by-side comparison versus the actual prints and see what I think. It obviously still beats scanning in the pictures by hand, though.

I still maintain the superiority of A-series Canon digitals, for the perfect intersection of mediocre quality, cheap and easy batteries and storage media, and cheap price. It’s convenient, takes good enough pictures, and won’t break my heart if it gets destroyed by dust and rain.

The fine folks at RoboSavvy have created an example of exactly how amazing the Nokia 770’s potential is by creating a series of robots using a 770 as the brain and to display facial expressions. This is all made possible because of the open source nature of the platform, combined in a lightweight enclosure with useful features such as the high resolution LCD and bluetooth. Also, the puppy dog is super cute.

Thanks, Engadget!

Santarchy DC was another fantastically drunken success! We started out at the Smithsonian, then walked to the Washington monument and then the White House, before ending up at the bars. There were no strip clubs this year, presumably because we’ve either gotten too big, or we’ve been blacklisted all over town, or likely both.

Highlights include a merry-go-round ride (big thanks to Santa for footing the bill), and a run-in with a rival gang, the “Santa Stumble.” We tried to give them a chance and show them how it’s done, but they were pretty much a bunch of douche bags, so we decided to let them date rape each other in peace. Personally, I was hoping for a West Side Story-esque musical gang fight with christmas carols and candy canes on bike chains.

Pictures here.