obfuscated.org

Memestealing from Pat, Kitty, etc.

The rules, such as they are:

1. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search
2. Using only the first page of results, pick one image.
3. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into Big Huge Lab’s Mosaic Maker to create a mosaic of the picture answers. (Right click the mosaic to copy and save.)

And the questions/answers:

1. What is your first name? Corey
2. What is your favoriate food? sushi
3. What high school did you go to? East
4. What is your favoriate color? blue
5. Who is your celebrity crush? Bob Roll
6. What is your favorite drink? Martini
7. What is your dream vacation? Tofino
8. What is your favorite dessert? Scotch
9. What do you want to be when you grow up? retired
10. What do you you love most in life? Stephanie and Fletcher
11. What is one word that describes you? caffinated
12. What is your flickr name? cap

All,

There is a new best website ever. Enjoy!

Dear Gentle Reader,

Many of the following pages have graphic and clear images of the masculine mustache in all its forms, both sublime and grotesque. My intent is not to shock or titillate, but merely to inform on the subject. The Nineteenth Century gave us many things, but above all it was a hotbed of facial hair experimentation and this is but a poor sampling of those many lost forms.

Lifehacker is currently running a beginner’s guide to Quicksilver. Quicksilver is an amazing utility. It completely changes the way you use your computer, replacing tons of mousing with a few keystrokes. If you depend upon your wrists for your livelihood, I can’t recommend getting to know Quicksilver quite enough.

SvN links to and discusses a study regarding the environmental cost of different cars. The original article discusses the energy cost per mile to build different cars and concludes, amongst other things, that the Hummer H3 takes less of an environmental toll than a Honda Civic Hybrid.

And while many consumers and environmentalists have targeted sport-utility vehicles because of their lower fuel economy and/or perceived inefficiency as a means of transportation, the energy cost per mile shows at least some of that disdain is misplaced.

For example, while the industry average of all vehicles sold in the U.S. in 2005 was $2.28 cents per mile, the Hummer H3 (among most SUVs) was only $1.949 cents per mile. That figure is also lower than all currently offered hybrids and Honda Civics at $2.42 per mile.

Which makes sense. Pickup trucks — which are all the more H3’s really are — have been around for 1,000,000 years, are very well understood, and are relatively inexpensive to maintain. Hybrids, on the other hand, are newer, less well understood, and more costly to replace parts for.

Of course there are many other things to consider — safety, which pickups lack relative to modern passenger cars, future savings from developing technologies used in hybrids, or other harder to objectively measure costs of dependence on fossil fuels. Still, it’s interesting to see environmental costs put in to perspective in this particular way.

SvN’s conclusion rings particularly true.

There’s nothing wrong with buying a hybrid to save on fuel costs, but maybe it’s time to put down the “I’m doing it for the environment” flag and put up the “I’m doing it to save money on gas” one. And there’s nothing wrong with that, of course.

Arms Control Wonk has some analysis of the recent nuclear test in North Korea.

Estimating the yield is tricky business, because it depends on the geology of the test site. The South Koreans called the yield half a kiloton (550 tons), which is more or less—a factor of two—consistent with the relationship for tests in that yield range at the Soviet Shagan test site:

Mb = 4.262 + .973LogW

Where Mb is the magnitude of the body wave, and W is the yield.

3.58-3.7 gives you a couple hundred tons (not kilotons), which is pretty close in this business unless you’re really math positive. The same equation, given the US estimate of 4.2, yields (pun intended) around a kiloton.

A plutonium device should produce a yield in the range of the 20 kilotons, like the one we dropped on Nagasaki. No one has ever dudded their first test of a simple fission device. North Korean nuclear scientists are now officially the worst ever.

I don’t know if this is correct or not, but there’s a funny picture of Kim the Illest from Team America: World Police (which was hillarious) in this post. Which is worth the price of admission.

Recently a good friend commented in her del.icio.us feed and made the following bold statement regarding an article about breastfeeding:

Man, you can’t trust ANY study you read nowadays! Eggs are bad, eggs are good, wine is bad, wine is good. I just don’t know anymore.

I think it’s important for the public to know the truth about these shocking claims. We’ve got science to back us up here; everybody who follows the field and knows anything about anything agrees: Wine is good.

This comes on good authority from any number of people. There is more supporting evidence for this than there is for any other proposition in the history of man. Using rigorously sound mathematical, logical and entomological methods, I will prove it to you.

First, it is delicious. What else needs be said? Each different variety is more yummy than the next¹. If you disagree, you are wrong. It’s as simple as that. You can demonstrate this to yourself using the scientific method. Hypothesis: wine is yummy. Your test: drink a bottle of wine. After the test, you will find the hypothesis verified. If you did not enjoy the wine, your testing methods were incorrect. Try again.

Next, there are many different kinds of wine. As the point most open to debate, this is often called out by wrongheaded wine detractors. There are, they say, very few varieties of wine, sometimes boiling it down to just “red” and “white.” I’m here to tell you that there is also pink and deeper shades of burgundy that the simple moniker “red” fail to properly capture.

Third, it is medically beneficial. Any ailment can be made to seem unimportant with the proper application of wine. As perception is reality, this is proof positive. Above and beyond this logical slam dunk there is more supporting anecdotal evidence — which is the best kind of evidence — than any one proposition needs. I’ve heard at least five stories in which doctors recommended a glass of wine with dinner, and probably seven where a sommelier did the same. That’s twelve members of highly respected fields. You can’t argue with that.

Fourth: Etc.

There are people out there who will disagree. Some of these people have been awarded degrees from the nation’s finest medical schools. I am sorry to say that they are all wrong, no matter what their reasoning. Unless they can soundly refute points one through four above — and they can’t — their opinion carries no water. I hope that after all of this mercilessly insightful logic you agree with me, because wine is in fact good. You can take that to the bank.

1. Order depending on taste, of course.

I couldn’t make it because of work, (and I probably would have been too busy had I stayed home anyway), but there was a great car show in Monrovia this has Saturday. LA-area artist Coop covers the event amazingly.

Notable celebrity death + at-home t-shirt production = exceedingly tacky yet funny.

It’s true. Do the math and prove it for yourself.

• Wired News: Bob Dylan: Technology Sucks - Noting the music industry’s complaints that illegal downloading means people are getting their music for free, he said, “Well, why not? It ain’t worth nothing anyway.”
• vi Search: using commands of vi to search - How…. clever? (This was put together by some of the guys at Snap.)
• Osama bin Laden lusts for… : HTTabloid.com - Now we know why “My Perogitive” was playing in Afganastan on 9/11.
• What’s New in Edge Rails: The Ins and Outs of ActiveResource - A good overview of the New World Order in RoR 1.2

• apophenia: Research on Social Network Sites - danah boyd is trying to put together a roundup of social networking papers accepted by refereed journals.
• Autopia - The interesting and unfortunately unsupported tidbit from this piece: One human life = $3,500,000.
• Wired News: This Global Warming Fix Stinks - Wired gets it all wrong. This plan is awesome. How else are we going to create the perma-smoggy sky from all the awesome dystopian future flicks?