Steve Fischer's Random Blog

Author: fish1964

  • Crop Circle follow-up

    OK, this is just funny, as is the headline…

  • I don’t even know what to say…

    Should I comment on our litigious society? Say something like “even naked cowboys have rights”? Am I amused? Offended?

    I’m going with amused…

  • Hilarious

    This is a do it yourself resignation letter from Yahoo! using drop down lists. My favorite potential phrase is:

    I have come to realize that management does not seem to fully understand to run a fucking taco truck, much less an actual, you know, $30 billion business.

    Although equally funny is:

    My last day here will be the best day of my life you fucking incompetent nincompoops, after which time I shall be taking a position with that doesn’t require me to bend over and lube up.

    If you aren’t offended by the f-word (sorry, I should have warned you before the above quotes), the last item in each list is funniest…

  • Only in The Onion

    In reference to the Belgian company ImBev trying to buy Anheuser-Busch:

    “Those greedy Belgians. First they annex the German districts of Eupen-Malmedy in 1919, and now this.”

    As a well-known beer snob, what do I think about this possible takeover? Would it be a horrible thing for the last really crappy huge brewery in America to become foreign owned? (Miller is owned by a South African company and Coors is owned by Molson in Canada).

    Truly, I don’t care about this one. There is a thriving micro-brewery economy in the US and that’s where the best beers are coming from.

  • Guatemalan Adoption today

    I can’t read articles like this one without feeling incredibly lucky. Our adoption went through about six months before the change.

    It was always clear to me that the old process had so much money flying around in a poor country that the potential for abuse was huge. We went with a large, reputable adoption agency for just that reason. We felt that a large organization working in many countries couldn’t afford the reputation damage of a baby for money scam.

    For our process they did take steps to prevent abuse. The birth mother had to be photographed with the baby when she put her up for adoption as proof that she did so voluntarily. They ran a DNA test to verify that it was really her baby.

    Not that all of that couldn’t be forged in a third world country. So you really never know.

    But as the article states, the one good thing about the old process was that it was quick. As hard as it must be to give up your baby, at least you know he/she will have the opportunity for a good life in America, not in an orphanage. I agree that you need a process to make sure people aren’t buying/selling babies or pressuring birth mothers to give up babies, but you have to balance that against the understanding that a quick adoption helps the baby.

  • Crop Circle are real – Fox News says so

    OK, that’s a misleading headline. Crop circles are definitely real, there are tons of examples. And FoxNews.com reports on one, generally promoting the myth that these things were created by aliens.

    I recall reading about crop circles when I was a kid. At first it sounds so eerie. Geometric shapes made from flattened crops where the shape is only revealed from the sky. To a ten year old, clearly that could only be made by aliens. OK, maybe I wasn’t that smart when I was ten.

    Hmm. Making a circle from flattened corn. That would require the amazing technology of a rope and something heavy enough to flatten corn. What about more complex shapes? Well, think about it. What would you do if you needed to create something more complex? A few sheets of graph paper to diagram it, some different lengths of rope, c’mon how hard is this really?

    What I as a ten year old never considered was that someone might do this just as a prank.

    One good quote in a discussion of crop circles is this:

    Before you start stockpiling shotgun shells and tin-foil helmets, you should know that the vast majority of crop circles appear in English wheat fields. This is significant because, apparently, British people have a lot of free time. Doug Bower and David Chorley admitted in 1991 that they had made over 250 crop circles by hand over the course of a number of years.

    Of course, those who truly believe that aliens made all the crop circles are convince that the confessions were coerced. And you see some of the more complex crop circles and wonder. But then you read about this:

    For Hello Kitty’s 30th anniversary, Sanrio (the company that owns the “cute” little kittens’ likeness) commissioned an enormous crop circle shaped like the cat’s head

    image

    OK, if you can do Hello Kitty with flattened corn, you can probably do anything. It turns out that crop circling is somewhat of a competitive thing. Not unlike hacking. People try to outdo one another. It is apparently most popular in England. There are lots of comments about the Brits having too much free time on their hands:

    Apparently, England has a surplus of rope and young men with too great a knowledge of geometry, too little with which to keep themselves occupied, and a powerful lust for laying intricate plans.

    I’m surprised there was no comment about the large number of pubs…

    And now it’s mainstream. This one was created to promote a Danish Newspaper (apparently that’s Danish for “Big words”). I’m sure someone still thinks it was created by aliens.

    image

    There is a web site devoted to the creation of crop circles. I love the page that highlights top crop circles of the 2007 season. I wasn’t aware there was a season. I have to admit they are very cool designs. But what do the top crop circlers do during the off-season? Try out new designs in Australia?

    My other favorite part of this site is the beginner’s advice:

    After ensuring that you haven’t been followed from the pub, drive to the field and unload the roller and stalk-stomper (the measuring tape can be carried in a pocket or rucksack).

    Really, I’m just amused by the opening phrase, “After ensuring that you haven’t been followed from the pub…”. That really sums it up, doesn’t it?

    I find the whole thing amusing, but can we get over the whole aliens thing? I’m not saying that it’s impossible that aliens have ever come to this planet. I’m just saying they’d probably have better things to do than flatten corn…

  • McCain needs to figure out this RSS thing

    OK, lots of people haven’t figured out RSS. I don’t need a president to understand RSS (though I’d prefer it), but at least the campaign ought to get it.

    I was checking out McCain’s and Obama’s web sites. Both are similar. Ask for money, get people to join the team, promote the big themes, have a blog (that someone else writes). The color scheme is exclusively red, white and blue. They are both, interestingly enough, trying to recruit Hillary supporters right on the home page.

    But all I was looking for was an RSS feed to see what kind of stuff they push out. I thought McCain was actually more advanced because he lists five different RSS feeds, by category. Iraq, Health, Economy, Spending and Campaign. Obama just has one feed.

    But the Obama campaign appears to actually use RSS. I subscribed to the McCain Campaign feed and Obama’s feed. A week later I have one thing from McCain and about 80 from Obama.

    Most folks know my politics. This post wasn’t about politics. I just want leaders to get technology.

    There’s another RSS feed from the “McCain Report” page (though not listed on the RSS feed page). That actually seems more like the real blog. I’ll try that and see if it’s any better. I’ll report back in a week…

  • Webby Awards

    You have to love an awards program that limits winners to acceptance speeches of only five words. Stephen Colbert’s speech was true to form:

    Me, me, me, me, me.

    For Flock The Social Web Browser (social networking award):

    No shit! We beat Facebook?

    For Best Copy/Writing, the winner was HowStuffWorks who said:

    This award smells like butt

    Best Visual Design – Aesthetic, the winner was Orange Unlimited who said:

    Mine is longer than yours

    Retail, the winner was IKEA mattress:

    We enjoy sleeping with you

    You can check them all out here.

  • Warren Buffett advice

    From the blog of Tim Ferris (author of The Four Hour Work Week). He asked the following question of Warren  Buffett at the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting:

    “If you were 30 years old and had no dependents but a full-time job that precluded full-time investing, how would you invest your first million dollars, assuming that you can cover 18 months of expenses with other savings? Thank you in advance for being as specific as possible with asset classes and allocation percentage.”

    Buffett let out a small laugh and began. “I’d put it all in a low-cost index fund that tracks the S&P 500 and get back to work…”

  • Evolution in a lab

    If you don’t believe in evolution, don’t read the rest of this blog.

    Otherwise, check out this article. It discusses how an experiment was conducted on the evolution of E. coli bacteria in a tightly controlled lab environment. It helps having a species that reproduces very rapidly, but the experiment has been going on for 20 years (over 30,000 generations for E. coli). Ultimately some of the isolated bacteria evolved into something that can eat a chemical that normal E. coli cannot giving them a huge evolutional advantage.

    Fascinating stuff…