Friday, October 30, 2009

fruits of mah labors.



One orange, one retarded. It's the standard I expect of my peppers and, someday, my children.

Trivia Question: What was the first song ever recorded in the MP3 format?

Answer:



See also:

those poor cats

this doesn't seem as funny as it did a long time ago. Still.

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Buttered


I laughed. From The Auburner.

Hamburger



He does some mediocre stand up, but he says hamburger over and over and people love it. It's befuddling.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

IGN's top 100 NES games

Any such list that has the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game on it is automatically invalid.

still no words

can has new album today.

Monday, October 26, 2009

football announcers



Happy Birthday, Big Fella.

Finally, we have a way to remember The Juicebot's birthday. It's the day after the Blog's birthday!

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Friday, October 23, 2009

Ice-skating bear kills circus director

Not much to add to that headline.

Sci Fi idea

Faster-than-light travel, wormholes, transporters, putting people in stasis so a trip only feels like a few days or hours: all that stuff doesn't work to get people moving long distances across space. The fastest we can actually get people going with rockets and ship-bound propulsion is not very fast, only a small fraction of light speed. Instead, the only way to get ships going fast (that is, close to light speed, which at an interplanetary scale is still pretty slow) is to create massive rings around stars that use photosynthetic energy to rapidly accelerate a ship, then release it to wherever it is supposed to go; gravity will be the brake at wherever it is going. Because people are going to be on these things for years, they've got to be big, which means the accelerators have to be big and thus difficult and time-consuming to build.

It takes months or years to get from one habitable planet to one of these star-bound accelerators, and then years from one solar system to another. So communication is slow, and actual contact is even slower. Wars revolve around controlling these accelerators, because that's what lets you get to other solar systems, but it takes months to make any kind of move even on these relatively nearby targets. So wars are long, Hundred Years War long, and people are in the midst of wars whose origins are older than anyone alive, which nobody can really remember.

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Best Vita and Acknowledgements Ever.

Fulltext.

Vita
Sean Andrew O'Neill was born. After being born, he grew and grew and grew, until one day, he stopped growing. Along the way, he befriended a green iguana. He has a mother, a father, a brother and a girlfriend.

Acknowledgments
Many are those whom I would like to acknowledge in this section. In fact, it would be more prudent to try to list those which I would not like to acknowledge. However, I am a traditionalist and as such will adhere to the custom of naming those to be recognized.

To start, my family must be thanked. My mother and father, Mary DeStefano and Timothy O'Neill, and my brother, Padraic O'Neill, for all of their love, support, and time wasted putting up with and entertaining me. I would also like to thank all of my extended family, Aunts, Uncles, Cousins. I would especially like to thank my Uncle Larkin for convincing me that the empty set is indeed in the power set of any set.

Many of the professors at Ohio University are deserving of a hearty thanks. Some of those are Dr. Todd Eisworth, Dr. Kaufman, and Dr. Arhangel'skii. I would also like the thank the faculty and sta in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics here at Auburn. Especially my comittee members and my advisor, Dr. Smith, for any ideas they have contributed to this thesis and all their other e fforts in helping me achieve my degree. Further, any students of mine here at Auburn should also consider themselves thanked.

The employees of Little Italy Pizzeria.

301D

My friends, past, present, and future, must all must be thanked for participating in and/or putting up with my antics.

Finally, Christi Morrow is very deserving of acknowledgment. Thank you for putting up with the distance and being loving and understanding these recent years. Please note that this is only a partial list. Add yourself if you feel that you are deserving.

I have left you space:

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

three straight football posts

This is good. Excerpt:
As I continue to watch Michigan’s quarterback run the read option against the Gophers, I now find myself wondering if this play is authentically simple or quietly complex. The read option is a combination of three rudimentary elements of football: spreading the field, running a back off tackle, and the quarterback keeper. It would be an easy play to teach and a safe play to run, even for junior high kids. But it’s still new. It didn’t really exist in the 1970s and ’80s, and when I first saw it employed in the late ’90s, it seemed like an idiotic innovation. It seemed like a way to get your quarterback killed without taking advantage of your tailback. I had always believed teams could not succeed by running the ball out of the shotgun formation. I thought it would never happen. But I was wrong. And I suspect the reason I was wrong was not because I didn’t understand what was happening on this specific play; I suspect it was because I felt like I already understood football. I had played football and written about football and watched it exhaustively for twenty years, so I thought I knew certain inalienable truths about the game. And I was wrong. What I knew were the assumed truths, which are not the same thing. I had brainwashed myself. I was unwilling to admit that my traditional, conservative football values were imaginary and symbolic. They belonged to a game I wasn’t actually watching but was still trying to see.

Officiating

I'm not surprised that Steward Mandel sounds like an obnoxious tool in the latest College Football Mailbag at SI. But:
I've watched the videos, and they were obviously bad calls. You know what else they were? The type of bad calls that take place in almost every single football game.

[...]

I hate to break it to you, people, but bad calls are like airline delays -- they're going to happen.
You know what else is going to happen? Car accidents. Adultery. Irritating, under-qualified sports writers. But that doesn't mean that they're acceptable, or people should just ignore them, or act like they don't matter. Bad calls, especially in close games, devalue the sport and the efforts of those involved. They should be fixed, not brushed off by chubby idiots.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Monday, October 19, 2009

Exactly as awesome as it sounds

Bullets at one million frames per second



My favorite part is the ice.

If the Mountain West were a literary genre, it would be the one that everybody predicted before the season






Yep, that's about what it should look like. No funny business here. If the ACC ends like Newhart, the Mountain West ends however Two and a Half Men will end.

If the ACC were a literary genre, it would be Mexican magical realism

Played today, the ACC title game would be Boston College (who has been overall outscored by ten points in the league for the year) and Virginia (who has a better record against the Atlantic Coast Conference than against the Colonial Athletic Conference). This will change next week, when a zebra blocks a field goal to lift Georgia Tech over Virginia, and BC has to forfeit their last forty wins due to improperly labeled import beer. In week twelve, Ralph Friedgen wakes up next to Suzanne Pleshette, and the whole season will turn out to have been a dream.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

3E Presents: A Top 21 Things on the Internet: #10 Peanut Butter Jelly Time



We took a little break because I forgot. Anyway, back to 3E's list of things on the internet. Not a lot to say about this entry. It's iconic as all get-out.



Then you get internet media references to regular media references to internet media.



It's peanut butter jelly time all the way down.

This video also gets bonus points because, come on, it's always peanut butter jelly time.

Friday, October 16, 2009

Antibacterial soap

For starters, there is little proof that the antibacterial soap you buy at the drug store actually kills the most-dreaded microbes: S. aureus (staph) and E. coli. Plus, living in a disinfected bubble can actually be bad for your health and the environment. Many experts believe that too much sanitization weakens the immune system and may create lethal superbugs that are antibiotic resistant. If that's not enough, the bacteria-killing chemicals go down the drain and into our waterways, harming wildlife and potentially ending up back in our bodies where they can present health risks.

Although you have likely heard at least some of this before, you probably still reach for the antibacterial soap to clean your bathroom and wash your hands. The psychological draw is undeniable. In fact, scientists' warnings have not dampened the burgeoning market. Antibacterial products are a one billion dollar industry and make up nearly 80 percent of all liquid soaps. In 2003, there were fewer than 200 antibacterial products on the market; currently there are over 3,000.

The biggest--and most publicized--concern is whether antibacterial products, like the overuse of antibiotics, will eventually create more of the untreatable bacteria we fear. By creating a hostile environment, antibacterial agents promote strains of bacteria with certain mutations that allow them to survive. These superbugs are also more likely to be immune to antibiotics. The most commonly used antimicrobial in soaps--triclosa--has already shown resistance to S. aureous.
Antibacterial soaps: Unnecessary risks, no benefits

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Friday, October 09, 2009

Thursday, October 08, 2009

3E presents: Snatchphrase Friday

You want to be the coolest cat on the block? You've got to have a snatchphrase! With the weekend coming up, 3E is here to help.The next time anyone answers a question, you get right up in their stupid, mouthbreathing face and hit them with:

"Is that your... FINAL ANSWER?"

Classic!*

Be the lamest coolest guy around this Friday, 'cause it's Snatchphrase Friday.








*not.

an exhibition, sheer precision

Google maps is the best (true that)

Google owns a lot of stuff, and it looks like a subway map.

Learn stuff here.

Wednesday, October 07, 2009

ahhhhhhh


scary animals (Cracked)

Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Idea for operating the BCS poll

1. Nominate 200 sportswriters/media members and 200 former players/coaches to be voters. 40 of each will be selected, for a total voting body of 80. To narrow down to 40 of each, there will be an auction system, with each nominee bidding for a spot. Voters may be paid an amount per week for their ballots that will encourage careful consideration -- say, $1000 -- and may bid up to the amount equal to the number of ballots for the season multiplied by the weekly pay rate. If the number of nominees bidding the maximum amount exceeds the number of voter slots available, then voters will be chosen from among the highest bidders by random. Voters may not serve more than one out of every five years.

2. By noon the Monday before the season begins and every Tuesday after games are played, each voter will turn in a ballot of 40 teams ranked in order. For the purposes of determining payment, each team after #40 in the overall rankings will be considered unranked.

3. If two teams ranked by a voter play, and a lower ranked team wins, or if an unranked team beats a ranked team, then that voter forfeits payment for the week in which the ballot was submitted. The voters who ranked the winning teams higher will collect the payments lost by the voters who ranked incorrectly.

If multiple ranked teams play each other, voters will receive proportional payments based on how they did compared to each other. For example, if hypothetically there were ten games in a particular week, and each voter was paid $1000 per week, then each game would be worth $100; if only one voter ranked correctly for a particular game, then that voter would collect one-tenth of the weekly payments from every other voter -- $1000 dollars, in addition to any other correctly chosen games.

4. The final rankings before bowl selections are worth triple the usually weekly payments.

Take that, Premier League!

“Anyone who spends any time inside football soon discovers that just as oil is part of the oil business, stupidity is part of the football business.” Well, football may not spend billions of pounds actively seeking out stupidity, piping, refining and selling it, but as Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski demonstrate over and over again in Why England Lose, it is certainly swimming in the stuff.
The profound stupidity of football soccer

Monday, October 05, 2009

Saturday, October 03, 2009

It better start rocking or I'll really give 'em something to cry about

Something for all of 3E.



I miss Beavis & Butthead

Friday, October 02, 2009

actual student work

Oh awesome. Every other sports intro in America sucks.



Found here.

Little Wheel

It's about robots.

Thursday, October 01, 2009