Tag: Burst of Weirdness

A few oddities and randomments for the lot of you:

:: One night, while we were sitting around at home reading stuff, The Wife came across this, and mentioned it to me. I said, “That can’t be right,” but lo and behold, apparently it was. The thing? Well, you know those incubator things they put premature babies into, so as to keep them nicely warm while they develop after their births? Apparently the guy who invented those had no luck convincing the scientific community of their validity, so he did the next best thing: he set up a sideshow at New York’s Coney Island to display them to the public. Babies and all.

Sometimes human progress happens so strangely.

:: Want to get some kind of notion of the scales of the distances in space? Say, the scales the NASA people were working with in flying New Horizons to Pluto? Check out If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel. Space is big, yo.

:: For the record: the perpetrator of this prank was not me.

That is all.

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I wrote a new post at the Official Site updating everyone on where I stand with certain projects!

Cal needs help picking which caption goes with a photo better!

SamuraiFrog appreciates Maria from Sesame Street!

My favorite “Maria Moment” from Sesame Street, for obvious reasons!

Roger comments on country music albums!

John Scalzi thinks things about gay marriage!

Alton Brown surprises with both his favorite cut of steak AND his preferred method of cooking it (but I’ll try both)!

Lynn Sislo has a new catchphrase!

Finally, what better way to spend July 4 than a Major League Baseball game followed by fireworks? At least, that’s what people thought in 1985 when they went to see the Braves play the Mets. The fireworks took place at 4:00 am, after the game took 19 innings and saw 29 runs scored off 46 hits.

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Some things….

:: I have not yet watched all of the existing Star Wars movies back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back. Maybe someday…but meanwhile, someone has actually overlaid them all on top of one another. Once you get past the opening crawls, which are kind of headache-inducing due to the music not lining up, things get really surreal.

:: Fascinating article on the Soviet space shuttle Buran, which ended up not amounting to anything because the Soviet Union collapsed. Turns out that the Soviets might well have been on the way to designing and building a better shuttle than the United States did, for various reasons.

:: Yeah, Jason had himself a pretty good Saturday a few weeks ago.

Keep reachin’ for the stars, folks!

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Oddities and amusements for your Sunday pleasure….

:: Hmmmmm:

The man behind me in the queue was trying to be helpful: “It’s true, though, right? They are used as weapons in Asia. I go there a lot and I’ve seen them do it—they’re lethal.” He made a sudden gesture, like Spiderman throwing a web.

I was torn between asking this stranger to unpack his astonishing assertion and trying to prevent the airport security guard from unpacking my luggage. I resolved the impasse by laughing nervously, which had precisely the wrong effect. The security guard studied me suspiciously. “You’ll have to come with me, sir.”

What weapon did this guy try bringing on a plane? Would you believe…a yo-yo?

:: Why Sherman was right to burn Atlanta.

:: New research methods have resulted in Shakespeare’s output going up. Wow. Of course, I’m afraid that if they ever study my stuff, the conclusion will be, “Wow, this dude stole from everything!” Because I did, and do. Im shameless.

More next week!

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Interesting, pretty, and/or odd stuff.

:: Pretty: The Big Dipper, enhanced. More here.

:: Also pretty: The clouds of Orion the Hunter. More here.

::  Odd: Dude named Zayn leaves mega-boy band One Direction. Actor Billy Zane is slightly baffled by the outpouring of grief.

:: And then there’s this. Welcome back, Mr. Bond!

More next week!

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Strange things are afoot, Watson!

:: Dude is getting married, and creates e-mail list to keep his buddies apprised of wedding plans. A typo results in a complete stranger being on the list. The stranger comes clean. The stranger ends up getting invited anyway.

:: I may have linked this before and forgotten to delete the link from my bookmarks, but it’s still an interesting article: you know that pint glass that is the dominant piece of glassware for beer drinking these days? Apparently it’s awful. Or so I’m told. I still like them, but other glasses are cool, too.

:: I haven’t dug too deep to see if Stardancer turns up on Kindle Cover Disasters. Lord, I hope not…I’d hate to be in the same company as this:

Wow.

(Note to self: Remove all references in current manuscript to the spaceship Intrepid Monkey.)

(Note to self: Buy the book about the adventures of the Intrepid Monkey.)

More next week!

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And now for something completely (meaning, non-pi or pie related) different!

:: Via John Hodgman, here’s Vampire Kermit attacking Vincent Price.

:: Toronto is often used by filmmakers as a stand-in for other cities. They’re usually pretty good at keeping the very obvious Toronto landmarks offscreen, but sometimes they miss a few. I’ve seen most of these movies, so I’m left baffled as to how I missed these.

::  It’s funny how the Internet can sometimes remind you of weird stuff you’d long-since forgotten. Years ago, there was an ongoing thing in PARADE Magazine (for those who don’t get it, PARADE is a supplement that’s in a lot of Sunday newspapers) when one of their regular columnists, a woman named Marilyn vos Savant who is billed as “the world’s smartest woman” wrote an entry on what’s come to be called “the Monty Hall Problem”. This resulted in quite the kerfuffle, because her answer to the problem is apparently (a) incredibly counter-intuitive, and (b) actually correct. I remember this unfolding over the course of several weeks in the paper, with some ancillary discussion at home (unavoidable with a math professor living in the house). I’d forgotten about it until reading this article.

That’s all for now!

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Weird and wonderful things abide….

:: I recently discovered an amazing photography artist, Michael Shainblum, whose work really evokes an amazing sense of wonder. This particular photo, from his Instagram, seems like it might have been cover art for an incarnation of my book!

:: This has been all over the place this week, but deservedly so. I love it when someone alerts the world to a rare natural occurrence, if only just to show that our world has so very many ways of surprising us. What happens here is that the super-cold temperatures in the Northeast have had the effect of giving the water in the ocean shallows a Slurpee-like quality. As the waves break, they look like something otherworldly.

More photos here.

:: If the music in Mary Poppins had been recorded not by a wonderful Disney orchestra and the practically-perfect voice of Julie Andrews, but rather by a death-metal rock band, it might have sounded like this:

:: Finally, as a final farewell to Leonard Nimoy, here is his wonderful intro to the X-Files crossover episode on The Simpsons.

More next week!

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Weird and nifty things!

:: The Day the Clowns Picked the Wrong Brothel.

:: Everybody’s linked this, but there’s a reason for that. So if by some chance you haven’t seen it, check out Dr. Phil with all the dialog removed and just the reaction shots remaining.

:: Finally: A man, a woman, and an observatory. Given the subject matter of The Song of Forgotten Stars, this article has some resonance for me.

More next week!

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Your weekly dose of small amounts of linkage to carry you on….

:: I confess to being weary of Hollywood’s incessant need to “reboot” things, but I must also confess to being mildly intrigued at the notion of rebooting Columbo, that wonderful working-class detective in the crappy coat who covered up his brilliance with an “Aw shucks” style. It would depend on the casting, of course, but I’d be interested.

:: Twelve-year-old humor alert on this next one! A lot of companies auto-generate their e-mail addresses for employees by taking some specific combination of letters from the first and last names. This occasionally has some unfortunate results. (I just love when the IT guys respond “Uh, we can’t change it.” I’m always amused when IT people say that they simply “can’t” make the computers do what they want. Nobody can just go in and delete on e-mail address and manually add another one? There are no provisions for this?)

:: Want to see pictures of kitties captioned with quotes from HP Lovecraft? Sure you do.

More next week!

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