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You know, I’m a huge fan of Preshrunk, the t-shirt blog. They regularly post up links to snarky, hipster-ish t-shirts that I would totally buy if I wasn’t so broke-ass. And, of course, I am an unyielding enemy of ultra-conservative x-tians. So, when Preshrunk fearfully pointed me over to this so-called Christian T-Shirts site, I went over with great trepidation. Most of them were predictably horrifying:

and:

.. and the most horrible of all:

… but then I found one that was just so freakin’ hilarious, I think I might buy it.. or more likely, photoshop up a similar design and have one made at Cafepress, because I don’t want to see these ignorant asshats get a single penny from me. So here it is, the winner of the Best X-Tian T-shirt EVAR competition which I just made up right now:

Ahem… LOLOLOMGWTFBBQ!!111!!1

ROFLz!!1

Nice article in Scientific American by Michael “The Skeptic” Shermer where he talks about the human brain’s natural ability for pattern recognition and such phenomena as the ‘Paul is dead’ thing, Grilled Cheese Mary, and Jesus on the Halfshell:

Consider a few cases of false pattern recognition… the face of the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich; the face of Jesus on an oyster shell (resembles Charles Manson, I think); the hit NBC television series Medium, in which Patricia Arquette plays psychic Allison Dubois, whose occasional thoughts and dreams seem connected to real-world crimes; the film White Noise, in which Michael Keaton’s character believes he is receiving messages from his dead wife through tape recorders and other electronic devices in what is called EVP, or Electronic Voice Phenomenon. EVP is another version of what I call TMODMP, the Turn Me On, Dead Man Phenomenon–if you scan enough noise, you will eventually find a signal, whether it is there or not.

thanks BoingBoing!

… so, not that long ago, I got a 512MB SD memory card for Glitch, my faithful PDA. I figured it would be more than enough for a good long time, to fit in all the programs, games, books, music, and the occasional video I might want to take me. And so it was, at least for a while. Then, I got into podcasting.

Now, I regularly carry around some 6 hours of programming (on average), and a massive chunk of my storage space goes straight to keeping all those podcasts there. It’s been tight (especially since I have a bad habit of adding another new podcast to my listening roster every week or so), but I’ve been managing, keeping everything, a backup of my entire system settings made each morning, all my podcasts, programs, documents, etc., and still having 10 or so MB left over on a good day. But now, I’ve found something that leaves me feeling.. well, inadequate.

I’ve discovered I can take Wikipedia with me. Yeah, the Wikipedia. Apparently, the whole shebang fits in a single 400MB file (without pics, a little over 1 GB with pics). One file, locally stored, indexed, searchable, hyperlinked, in my pocket, wherever I go.. inforgasm….

So now I want.. nay, need a bigger storage card, simply so I can carry Wikipedia with me. I mean, I allready carry the Skeptic’s Dictionary, the whole site, in a single file, indexed and searchable, in my pocket, for whenever I feel the need to debunk something. That’s just a 6MB file, no biggie. But Wikipedia… man! Back me up on this, people.

Well, I finally got around to putting up a podcast, as part of the unstoppable media frenzy I’m unleashing onto the world this week. This show marks a rather large departure from my previous ones. There’s a lot less of the whole ‘Tech News and Reviews’, and a lot more of the ‘Barely Coherent and Foulmouthed Rants’. I feel really good about this.

So, 13 MB, half an hour, and lots of background noise from the car as I was driving to work this morning. I talk about why I made the change to the podcast, what took me so long in getting this one out, and then I go on a NSFW rant about celebrities who try and guilt me into donating for their charities. The fuckers.

So, enjoy!

… and remind them that I can be of great use in gathering other humans to build their fiberglass traps to catch other insects for food.

Yes, fiberglass:

Using a home-made trap, a tiny species of ant is capable of ensnaring prey much larger than itself and tearing it to pieces.

The ants (Allomerus decemarticulatus), which live in Amazonian plants called Hirtella physophora, construct a honeycomb-like structure out of their host plant’s fibres from which they can stage an ambush.

The worker ants hide in the holes of this death trap with their mouths open wide, waiting for locusts, butterflies or other insects to land. When prey arrives they quickly seize its extremities, pulling on legs, arms and antennae until the hostage is rendered immobile. Once trapped, other ants from the colony arrive to sting and bite the prey until it is paralyzed (see video).

….

The ants, studied in French Guiana, also farm a certain fungus on their host plant. Researchers believe the fungus is transported from plant to plant by the colony’s queen. The mould is spread on top of the ants’ trap to reinforce its structure, as it hardens into a fibreglass-like material. “The fact that they manipulate fungus to build the trap is also exciting,” says Orivel.

… my days as a Subgenius may have been mostly put behind me, praise “Bob”, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate it when I get to enjoy a moment or two of pure, unadulterated Slack. So it is with great pride that I announce everything I was able to do this weekend: Jack-shit.

Was there stuff I should have been doing? Yeah, probably. Most likely, important things that will come and bite me in the ass during the week. But rather than deal with them, I vegged out in front of the computer, played a metric butt-load of WoW, and did my damnedest to try and physically fuse with my chair. Ahhh… if only I could have a couple of months of this, and I’d be OK again. Really.. 3 years with no vacation, none at all, makes Katsu a dull boy. So I take my Slack where I can get it.

I apologize for the lack of ranting on the site, by the way. As always, all blame goes to WoW, direct your hate-filled rants over to the good people at Blizzard Entertainment. Besides, really, what’s the point of updating, when there’s shit like this out there to read? I mean, it’s like I’m drawing stick figures, while, right beside me, Van-fucking-Gogh is busy cranking out the masterpieces. My rantings are the words of a n00b, and they have been pwned.

But I shall persevere, oh yes, I shall go on. If for no other reason than out of spite.

So this is my commitment to you, dear reader. This week, I shall post. I shall post shit every single day, at least once, maybe more than once. And when this week is over, there shall have been new material posted up on the site. People will dance in the streets, soldiers will lay down their weapons and smile, the intergalactic Love Aliens will finally come down in their Funky Motherships, and we shall all, together, get down as one people, at long last.

Behold the beauty and majesty of my blog, asshats.

… + computer troubles = no postings.

No idea why I’m so fucking tired these days, but I am. I think I may be coming down with some version of the Martian Death Flu… of Death. Either way, it’s meant few postings here.. something which I hope to remedy shortly. Still, just felt like letting everyone know: I still live. Please make the appropriate adjustements to my deadpool lottery odds.

In other news, Lord Absu continues to r0xx0r your b0xx0rz with unstoppable sk1llz, j0. Go read his stuff while I recover my senses. But be sure to come back at some point, as I may* start a million-dollar giveaway, which you will totally miss if you don’t check my site.

* - We have secretly replaced the meaning of the word ‘may’, with the phrase ‘will most definetly not, but we reserve the right to stick a barrel o’ crabs down your pants, rather than’. Let’s see if you notice.

Tax day is… tomorrow, right?

Yeah… I’d better get crackin’ on that, then. Heh. *looks self-consciously from side to side*

Gotta love that ‘Tax Returns Online‘ thing we got here, right?

Monster sends this one in:

Greetings to the Imprisoned Citizens of the United States. We are Unitarian Jihad. There is only God, unless there is more than one God. The vote of our God subcommittee is 10-8 in favor of one God, with two abstentions. Brother Flaming Sword of Moderation noted the possibility of there being no God at all, and his objection was noted with love by the secretary.

(more…)

… there’s at least 26 of them, and you can see them all, with illutrations, here: Reasons why I love The Tender Crisp Bacon Cheddar Ranch

Over on BoingBoing, Cory’s posted a review of James Hughes’s “Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future.”, which deals with the transhuman condition, a subject near and dear to my heart. It seems to be a smart, sensible, and reasoned approach to a future in which we may well be able to modify our genome, our physical bodies, and even determine the sex and genetics of our children ahead of time. The review is worth a read, and I think I’ll be snagging myself a copy of the book when I can, as it sounds very good. Humanist transhuman… I like it.

Luniticus sends this one in:

Hitachi came up with a new technology for increasing the storage capacity of hardrives tenfold. And they came up with this wonderful Schoolhouse Rock parody to explain how it works:

Get Perpendicular!

Nice.

So, I’ve been at this blogging thing for about three years now… and finally one of my friends gets inspired to start up his own blog (Jan doesn’t count anymore because he hasn’t blogged in, like, hundreds of days).

My good friend (and dweller in the Void) Lord Absu took me up on the offer to set him up with some free webspace and bandwith on my account, and over the past few days we’ve set up a nice little Wordpress-powered blog. The domain name’s DNS records finally started pointing to his site correctly last night, so I can point all you guys over to him:

Absu writes with a hyperkinetic style all his own, about life, love, pr0n and videogames (among other things), and I’m thrilled to have had a hand in setting his new blog up. Go check it out (and prepare to have your ass handed to you) here: A Glint in the Void.

My good buddy Eldrin sends this one in:

EPIC 2014

It’s an 8 minute Flash film detailing what the media landscape looks like in the year 2014. Just one possible future, based on the events and companies of today: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Blogger, Friendster, the New York Times. It depicts a future that is, at the same time, both inspiring and scary. Absolutely fascinating to watch, and as new systems keep popping up online, such as OurMedia, GMail’s jump to 2+ GB, and a lot of other developments that I keep meaning to talk about, the future’s just getting more and more interesting. Go check it out.

(thanks Eldrin!)

If you’ve ever tried to find some stock photos to use in a report, blog post, or anything, really, you’ve probably run head-on into a major problem: Finding good, free photos online can be hard. Usually, you’ve got only two choices: Pay $1,000 + a year to an archive service for access to their photo library (and then possibly pay extra royalties for specific pics), or hit Google’s Image Search and ignore the copyright warnings, which is not terribly legal.

Well, no longer. Robin Good has put up a really good article/resource on Where To Find Great Free Photographs And Visuals For Your Own Online Articles. Totally worth a look and a few bookmarks for the next time you’re desperately hunting down a picture to use for your next presentation.

Allright, so apparently the gnome/elf/alien thingy we talked about last time, is nothing more than a simple dog caught from a weird angle in a blurry picture.. or is it?

The people who claim it really is just a dog say that they ran several filters and processes over the picture to come to this conclusion, but the one picture they always point to is this one:

Pretty convincing, huh?

There’s one small problem, though: anyone who’s used photoshop for more than 5 minutes can tell you that the ‘multiple filters’ they ran on the picture are nothing more than a simple ‘emboss’ effect. The ‘emboss’ effect creates false shadows and alters the colors on a picture to give it an odd 3D effect, as if it was ‘embossed’ on a metal plate. The mathematical formula for this effect is based on detecting the edges and exiting shadows of a picture and exaggerating them, but it’s hardly perfect. In fact, here’s a more telling picture:

You’ll notice the shadows created by the emboss effect have little to do with reality. And it’s these shadows that the ‘dog hypothesis’ folks are basing their whole theory on!

Now, I’ll admit, when you look at the embossed picture, it really does look a lot like a dog. But now that we know that the shadows in that picture do not neccesarily have any basis in reality, let’s take another good look at the original picture, without the photoshop trickery applied:

Hmm..

As a final gift, I give you all this riff on the classic poster from Mulder’s office in the X-Files:

PS - This is all firmly tounge-in-cheek. The one who’ll come out looking like an asshat if you flame me about gullibility is j00!

Allright, found this one through BoingBoing too, and while I’m almost certain it’s either a photoshop or an artifact, it’s still pretty damn neat. See if you can find the non-human non-horsey being in this picture:

… and of course there’s always the possibility that it really is an alien/wood elf/gnome thingy.

As mentioned by BoingBoing and the Dragon Page, Scott Sigler is releasing his novel, EarthCore, exclusively as a free serial audio download, e.g., a podcast. I listened to the Prologue and the first 5 chapters today, and it’s really good stuff. If you’re at all interested, this is a great time to jump in, as it’s just started and there’s not that much stuff to download in order to catch up (Just three: the Prologue, Chapters 1-4 (they’re all together in one file), and Chapter 5.) Here’s some info, straight from the author’s site:

Deep below a desolate Utah mountain lies the largest platinum deposit ever discovered. A billion-dollar find, it waits for any company that can drill a world’s record, three-mile-deep mine shaft.

EarthCore is the company with the technology, the resources and the guts to go after the mother lode. Young executive Connell Kirkland is the company’s driving force, pushing himself and those around him to uncover the massive treasure.

But at three miles below the surface, where the rocks are so hot they burn bare skin, something has been waiting for centuries. Waiting … and guarding. Kirkland and EarthCore are about to find out first-hand why this treasure has never been unearthed.

EarthCore is the world’s first podcast-only novel: you can’t find it in stores, you can’t download the full audio, and the only way to find out what happens is to subscribe to the podcast. This novel is a cross between episodic modern-action fare like “24″ and classic sci-fi movies like Predator and Starship Troopers.

Go check it out here.