I wish everyone out there a prosperous and happy 2008.
I hope that this upcoming year will be one of positive change both in the United States and the rest of the globe. We are all in this together.
Reminder: you only have 1 more New Year’s Celebration left where you will be able to impulse buy symmetrical yet idiotic looking glasses in the shape of a year (2009).
It is the end of Week 3 for my 6-year-old nephew’s portfolio so let’s see how he is doing.
Hmm. Down 4.1% I think he’s on thin ice here if he wants to continue to be my broker. 
(To be fair, $70 has been spent in trades so far and he has improved slightly against the Dow this week.) Click on the image to go to the portfolio.
He traded off ENER (which was up 7.1%) and replaced it with FMT. Who knows? Maybe trading one stock for another with twice the beta is exactly what his portfolio needs. I can almost hear his consultant (father) giving him advice on this one: Big Money, Big Money, Big Money, No Whammies STOP!
Good luck, little dude!
Chance of Something Cool Happening in Space Grows to 3.9% 
Depending if you a glass-half-full or glass half-empty type of person, you could look at this as a threefold increase in the impact happening, or merely a 1 in 25 chance. (NASA bumped up the probability from 1 in 75, where it has been since its re-discovery.
The asteroid, re-discovered November 20 of this year, has been identified as 2007 WD5 from archive imagery. You can play with an interactive orbit diagram of 2007 WD5 using JPL’s Small Body Database Browser. The link is here.
My wife got me a toy helicopter for Christmas. She was forced to because there is only so much pouting a human being can take before they cave. That’s a good strategy to know, fellas. So now I am the proud owner of a severely damaged 2-Channel Transformers Blackout RC Helicopter. You can get them at Radio Shack.
It is mostly constructed of Styrofoam and light-weight plastic. There are no batteries – it is powered by charging an internal capacitor via 6 AA-powered remote control/charging station. There are no exposed electronics except for an amazingly bright green LED. The RC controller is IR based, so that means this is a line-of-sight device - it is vitally important to remember this easily forgettable fact when it starts to dip below the top of the coffee table or behind a chair.
The instructions clearly state: “For indoor use only. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO FLY OUTSIDE EVEN ON A CALM DAY”. Very good advice, since this thing is very, very sensitive to even the slightest air currents. As a matter of fact, it will get sucked violently into the wake of someone casually strolling by three feet away. Even the stratified air of a room that is quite still will give it some trouble if the temperature difference between the floor and the ceiling is high enough.
It comes with heavy stickers that you attach to the nose to get it to tilt forward a little. This gives it a reason to move forward; otherwise it would just hover until it crashes horribly into the kitchen cupboards 12 seconds after takeoff. Again.
In flight, it sounds like a very large dragonfly and has the flight pattern of a dozen or so angry dragonflies haphazardly taped together.
Every time I lift off, there is a movie scene that plays in my head. No, it’s not the “Ride of the Valkyries” scene in Apocalypse Now. Not even the “Easy! You just don’t lead ‘em so much!” scene from Full Metal Jacket. It’s the scene in Hot Shots where Admiral Benson says “You know, I’ve personally flown over 194 missions and I was shot down on every one. Come to think of it, I’ve never landed a plane in my life”.
The Radio Shack site reads: “Inspired by the Transformers, you can fly as Blackout and pursue your enemies with ruthless efficiency.” I assume that by “pursue” they mean “noisily blunder sidelong into” and by “enemies” they mean “lamps, televisions, and potpourri dishes”. I have crashed this thing so many times that I am delighted to “land” it and have it merely spin around upside-down on the kitchen floor rather than have to untangle the gradually disintegrating rotors from the Christmas tree to the delight and amusement of all.
The box claims that this toy is for “ages 8 and up”. That must have been a fun focus group. I hope those researchers got hazard pay. At least the rotors, which are apparently made from Faberge eggs, are replaceable items. I will play with this toy until the aforementioned rotors break or the wife buys me something less hazardous. Like a new table saw.
My wife and I were looking through the Restoration Hardware catalog and I happened upon this “Survival Kit in a Sardine Can“.
It retails for $14. Well, if anyone would know the ins and outs of how to survive in the woods, desert, or other desperate situation, it would have to be the proprietors of a mid-scale furniture and knick-knack store.
So I asked for - and got - this little item for Christmas. Sweet!
The front of the can (left) lists 23 items that are inside, including things like a fire starter cube (neat!), a compass (cool!), a pencil (ok…), and something called an “energy nugget” (bleh). The front of the can also mentions that the pencil, compass, whistle, and safety pin all come from China, I guess in case you would rather let you and your family perish than use Communist-made items in a crisis (As in: “I’ll be damned if some Godless commie is gonna tell me where magnetic North is”).
The can opens to reveal these items. As you can see, there are 23 of them. 
The instructions that come inside the can claim that “This Survival Kit contains more than 25 items, all of which have primary and secondary uses.” The “energy nugget”, it turns out, is the Tootsie Roll, thank God, although for the life of me I can’t even picture MacGyver coming up with a ”secondary use” for that item. And I am also hard-pressed to come up with “more than 25″ when I count these things, unless the wrappers are counted as individual items. Or the matches and then empty matchbook cover. Or the individual grains of salt or sugar…
The little compass is cool. The thread (fishing line and spool, according to the instructions - hey, the spool might be a separate item!) is surprisingly strong for its thickness. The fire starting cube is water-resistant but, unfortunately, the matches are not. The kit claims that the golf pencil can be used to write rescue notes. The “signal mirror” is actually the can itself, and doubles as a cup. My guess is that its razor sharp edges also lets it triple as a mouth lacerator. Which I guess is what the Band-Aid is for.
By putting a little thought into it, one could come up with countless ways to use the kit in desperate situations. For example:
Although what the can actually contains is “false hope”, I think this kit is well worth the $14. The only suggestion I have is to change the name from “survival kit” to “extremely minor inconvenience kit” (”Oh, no, I’m out of gum, and my breath is not as fresh as it could be. No, wait! The day is saved!”).
If you have other ideas on how to use this stuff in a crisis, just post a comment.
Scumbags “Vote” to Remain Firmly in 13th Century
This morning (EST) a suicide bomber detonated himself in a crowd watching Bhutto’s motorcade pass by in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
This blast killed scores of PPP (Pakistan People’s Party) members , although some are reporting that the blast was a “diversion” and Bhutto was actually shot to death.
It is not clear what details to believe, however, when you have posts (like this screenshot shows) from Bloomberg.com, that have been up for two hours now:
(This just got updated a few minutes ago)
A quote from various sources: Her supporters at the hospital began chanting “Dog, Musharraf, dog,” referring to Pakistan’s president Pervez Musharraf.
I wonder if this means that Musharraf will re-don his military uniform…
[Updated 122807 1438 EST] Reports are now saying that she died of a skull fracture when hitting her head on her car’s sunroof lever - not bullets or bomb shrapnel. Hmm. I think this would be the only possible story that 1) lets it appear like she was successfully protected by her bodyguards and 2) that terrorists, technically, did not succeed in killing her. It would be doubleplusungood crimethink to say otherwise.
Merry Christmas to everyone out there! I will be out of town for a few days so I have bumped up the Prize Pool for the Puzzle for Charity to $20. The link is there on the right.
Remember: if someone gets offended when you wish them a Merry Christmas, just respond with “Oh. I’m sorry. What I meant to say was ‘Go to hell, you big jerk’”.
Keep safe, everybody!
I have added an “About Me” section to this blog. The link is at the top of the page. I will update it with stuff when I feel like it. Enjoy!
1.3% or So Chance of Something Cool Happening in Space
NASA is still gathering data and fine-tuning the calculations to see what, if anything, will happen January 30.
But, if you read articles like this one you get the impression that this is gonna happen:
NASA officials say if the asteroid does hit Mars, it will do so near the location of its Opportunity rover, which has been exploring the Martian surface for three years.
The actual quote on the NASA site is (emphasis mine):
Because of current uncertainties about the asteroid’s exact orbit, there is a 1-in-75 chance of 2007 WD5 impacting Mars. If this unlikely event were to occur, it would be somewhere within a broad swath across the planet north of where the Opportunity rover is located.
This is why I always read multiple sources. Remember: the likelihood of an event occurring is inversely proportional to the coolness of that event occurring.
It has been two weeks now with Hunter’s new stock picks. He started out doing pretty good and then things got bad, fast. As a matter of fact he was down over 10% earlier this week. Luckily ENER bouyed the portfolio some and HOG bounced back a little to pull him out of his nosedive. Here’s how it looks so far.
I skim a lot of news sites looking for interesting (to me, anyway) articles on pretty much anything for the World News section of this site. What I am noticing more and more, and maybe it has always been this way, are cutesy headlines and meaningless science.
I have written on the cutesy headline thing before so I won’t go into that but I have discovered that the headlines at the science sites I surf work with “the Fortune Cookie Game”.
In case you don’t know, the Fortune Cookie Game is where you open a fortune cookie and, no matter what the fortune says, you add “in bed” or “with the waiter/waitress” or any other phrase like that. So you end up with “You will find an unexpected surprise… in bed” or “You will have good luck… with the waiter/waitress”. Mirth and merriment ensue.
In this case, adding the phrases “for some reason” or “yet again” works awesome with a lot of the headlines at Physorg.com. For example, using this morning’s news : Babies Do the Driving in Delaware Lab… for some reason. Physicists Find New Explanation for Superconductivity’s ‘Glue’… yet again.
Although I don’t like reading about what I perceive to be meaningless research I am totally against killing funding for meaningless research. Why? Well, it keeps people employed. And the last thing you want is for misguided geniuses to stop putting their energy toward important work such as “Insect Gut Detects Unhealthy Meal”, become unemployed, and take to the streets.
That’s how supervillains are made, you know.
Hey, it looks like it does get cold here every once in a while. And it also looks like I need to insulate my windows better.
It was very windy here this weekend. So windy, in fact, that it woke me and my wife up at about 3:30 AM or so. Well, “woke up” is kind of strong. I was about 25% awake and the wife was 10%, tops. That’s when I heard her mutter, unsolicited and in the most lackadaisical tone humanly possible, ”It’s probably criminals.”
Now that messed with me, bad. I lay there for about 20 minutes, still pretty much in shutdown mode, wondering if what I heard was true, not true, part of a dream, or what. My self-talk went something like this: Criminals. Criminals? Really? That sounds serious. But you’d think she’d have a more concerned tone of voice. She uses a way more concerned tone of voice saying “I wonder where our waitress got off to?” No, that can’t be right. I mean, why wouldn’t she just say “burglars”? How does she know that the guys ransacking my meager possessions, if the guys even exist that is, have prior conviction records? Damn it, I better get up. I wonder how she can sleep through this. She looks so peaceful, God bless her.
So, like an idiot, I got up, stumbled off to the living room, looked around, and, apparently satisfied, went back to bed. Picture the most comically bad movie security guard you have ever seen. That was me, but without a flashlight. Or anything. What, did I hope that my sheer grumpiness would be enough to scare off two or more evil-doers?
I guess the moral of this story is that if you are gonna come over and rob the joint, be slightly quieter than a vicious windstorm and you will do just fine. Or don’t. Either way, you should be OK.
The final installment of the Garden Project has finally been posted. Click on the picture below to check it out.
Here's the current puzzle.
Good Luck!
(Hints so far : 3)
Should I post another hint for the Puzzle for Charity?
Total Votes: 1
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There have been 44 OFNOG sightings since 062307.
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