brainwagon

Well, those generous guys at Industrial Light and Magic decided to send us cookies to help us celebrate Pixar’s 20 year anniversary. They were all printed with images of Yoda. Cool! Thanks guys! [tags]Pixar,ILM,Cookies[/tags] Addendum: These guys apparently made the cookies.

Have those little sirens of cookiedom (otherwise known as Girl Scouts) lured your diet onto the rocks with promises of Thin Mint cookies? Me too. Well, I’m probably preying on you when you are already in a state of weakened resolve, but check out the following recipe: 101 Cookbooks – Thin Mint Recipe – homemade […]

Southpark has lampooned, roasted, poked, prodded and generally mocked religion at every turn since its very beginning. It’s mocked Catholics and Jews, Hindus and Muslims. Whether you think it’s justified or not, whether you think its funny or not, one can hardly say that Messiers Stone and Parker had a secret agenda: their assault has […]

Oh dear. Check out Intelligent Design the Future: Percival Lowell, Mars and Intelligent Design Today’s Google icon pays homage to Percival Lowell, the 19th century astronomer who popularized the notion that there were Martian-made canals on the surface of Mars and, therefore, Martians. The larger story surrounding his famous blunder discredits the idea that science […]

I’ve wanted to make one of these for quite some time. [tags]Video,Film,Special Effects[/tags]

Metamerist was musing abut Pigeonholing Algorithms & Self-fulfilling Prophecies this morning, a subject that I’m kind of interested in as well.   We’ve all used these systems which try to evaluate our choices in music or books, and then make suggestions based upon what we say.   They are sometimes useful, but most often useless in trying […]

Carmen noticed that the Google home page had a logo that included a telescope looking at Mars.   A moment’s digging revealed that there is a new version of Google Maps called  Google Mars. Now everyone can view VallesMarineris and Olympus Mons.  Cool stuff. [tags]Mars,Google Maps[/tags]

Courtesy of a Japanese TV show, learn how to peel a potato in one step.  Well, to be fair, it’s not really one step.  You do this by: Cutting the skin all around the middle of the potato. Boiling the potato. Immersing it in cold water to the count of ten. And then, just pull […]

Phil Plait reminds us that in about three hours, around 10:30PST, the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter will fire a 27 minute retro burn and enter a highly elliptical orbit of Mars. Over the next several months, it will dip into the Martian atmosphere, aerobraking to reduce speed and circularize its orbit. Then, serious science and imaging […]

I often listen to sports talk shows while commuting (especially now that I’m on hiatus from my commute time podcasts and baseball season is coming up) and today the AM waves were all atwitter with news of the Sports Illustrated cover story excerpting the upcoming book by Chronicle sportswriters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams presenting […]

I’ve been experimenting with voice-over-IP telephony using the Asterisk open source PBX system, and I’m at the point where I’d like you to help! I’ve setup a phone number with VoicePulse Connect! to route to my Asterisk server, and configured a very simple extension so that you can record comments about my blog. Whatever charges […]

Yesterday I took Carmen to go see the latest film in the genre of “hot chicks with weapons”: Ultraviolet starring Milla Jovovich and directed and written (as it were) by Kurt Wimmer. Ms. Jovovich has done an excellent job in previous fun movies like Resident Evil and The Fifth Element (both high on my “guilty […]

Just some early morning fluff courtesy of YouTube: someone filmed a real life version of the introduction to the simpsons. I’m guessing that it was filmed in Great Britain: can you tell why? YouTube – Real Life Simpsons Intro [tags]YouTube,Video,Simpsons[/tags]

It begins today, with Korea playing Chinese Taipei at 6:30ET on ESPN. I don’t expect much from this particular game, but I must admit that I’m fairly interested in the World Baseball Classic. Teams to watch? Well, the U.S. of course.  As much as I really don’t like Roger Clemens, he’s an amazing athlete and […]

A few minutes ago, I noticed the second minor earthquake of the day. I estimated the strength to be a little lower than a three, but it was enough that my next door neighbor Sam called me and asked me what I thought it was. I was already hitting the USGS website to see what […]