[NSFW!] Problems with the plumbing.

Two vagina-related points today:

1. Humans have apparently long had a fear of vaginas with teeth (vagina dentata). Someone recently decided to take that fear to the next level by making a horror movie entitled Teeth about a girl who regularly uses her vagina-teeth to bite off body parts.
2. The more horrifying story: "My vagina fell out." Apparently female genital prolapse "is characterized by a portion of the vaginal canal protruding from the opening of the vagina." In other words, an innie becomes an outie, as seen below. I would not wish this on anyone.
   

Insider trading.

Carly and I are currently dog-sitting in midtown for my aunt and uncle. They live next door to Raj Rajaratnam, a hedge-fund manager (he founded Galleon Group) and number 236 on Forbes' list of the richest Americans. Raj is also notable for his fantasy football league, which has a $100,000 entry fee and awards a total of $1,000,000 to the top three teams each year.

Early this morning his apartment was raided by the FBI and Raj was hauled in on insider trading charges alleging he earned over $20,000,000 illegally. Apparently the FBI is good at quiet raids, because Carly and I slept through the 6am arrest and apartment search.

**Correction: Raj was arrested Friday morning, not this morning. Carly and I still heard nothing.

Bad parenting.

"Sometimes I do better with lists," a wise man once said. To that end let's start getting some lists together and vote on who makes the best submission (à la Apples to Apples). The topic for this trial run: awful celebrity baby names. My entries (these are just the ridiculously-named children, not all the kids in each family):

• Zakk Wylde: Hendrix Halen Michael Rhoads (named after Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, Mike Piazza, and Randy Rhoads);
• George Foreman: George VI (Joe), George V (Red), George IV (Big Wheel), Freda George George III (Monk), Georgetta, and George Jr. Foreman has said he named all his sons George because, "In this career, you have to prepare for long term brain damage.";
• Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin: Apple (Paltrow discussing the name: "It sounded so sweet and it conjured such a lovely picture for me – you know, apples are so sweet and they're wholesome and it's biblical – and I just thought it sounded so lovely and … clean! And I just thought, 'Perfect!'" Bonus points because Apple's godfather is Simon Pegg.);
• Demi Moore: Rumer Glenn Willis (as in Bruce Willis) and Tallulah Belle Willis;
• Frank Zappa: Dweezil, Ahmet Emuukha Rodan (a member of the Reggie Cleveland All-Stars), Moon Unit, and Diva Thin Muffin Pigeen.

Strangely Badass III

This week: Scott Altman. Altman is a Navy test pilot and a NASA astronaut who was among the four pilots who flew the military jets in the Tom Cruise movie Top Gun. Oh, and he is the mission commander of what the Daily Mail is calling NASA's "most dangerous ever shuttle mission."

The mission, known as STS-125 and scheduled to launch tonight (May 11), is intended to repair the Hubble telescope in order to make it useful for another five years. There are, as there must be with such an introduction, a few catches.

1. No ISS-cape: Unfortunately, "Due to the inclination and other orbit parameters of Hubble, Atlantis would be unable to use the ISS [International Space Station] as a 'safe haven' in the event of structural or mechanical failure" ("STS-125"). NASA's solution? Have a backup shuttle and crew ready to launch in the event that something goes wrong, a step taken for the FIRST TIME EVER.

2. Russian roulette space-walks:"During five highly risky spacewalks, [the astronauts] will clamber aboard Hubble to repair and replace instruments contained inside, upgrading its capabilities and prolonging its life for another five years" (Daily Mail). Five times is a lot of times to risk your life 350 miles above the surface of Earth.

3. The little things: "[The astronauts] will face major hurdles, such as unscrewing dozens of minute screws while wearing gloves five layers thick and removing razor-sharp circuit boards capable of piercing the $10 million spacesuits that keep them alive in the vacuum of space" (Ibid).

4. The good guys: John Grunsfeld, another of the astronauts slated for the mission, seems to be the type of guy you do not want to spend eleven days around in a cramped environment. While others are reserved and saying, "The adrenalin is certainly pumping," or, "This is really going to be tough, the toughest servicing mission we have ever attempted," Grunsfeld has chosen to pump out metaphors of difficulty allowing people to fully understand how awesome he is. So far he has said the mission is like "performing brain surgery in space" and stated that he "[considers] this the climbing Mount Everest of spacewalking missions." (Ibid)

Somehow having a guy from Top Gun save the Hubble makes me think we are getting one step closer to a real-life Armageddon. I hope Altman can complete his job as well as Bruce and Ben completed theirs.

The two worst weddings ever.

For the longest time I though that the Versailles wedding hall disaster (see video above) was probably about the worst way a wedding could end: 23 dead, 380 injured, one building destroyed.

As it turns out I really did not think hard enough about other awful ways a wedding might end. Sure, there are the obvious terrible outcomes like a no show on the part of the bride or groom, or the denouncement of the marriage by family members, or maybe a heart attack death caused by excitement. Then there is the unexpected: the wedding that re-ignites a decades-old blood feud and leads to an assault on the wedding by men armed with grenades and automatic weapons.

Known as the Mardin wedding party attack, this occurred in Turkey three days ago and led to the deaths of 44. "[A] combination of tribalism, love for guns, and tradition gone awfully wrong," the attack left the faces of the victims unrecognizable and killed six children. According to the AP (via Yahoo! News), "Two girls survived after the bodies of slain friends fell on top of them during the onslaught."

I don't know about the rest of you, but I think this was way under-reported, and I have no idea why. I only found it because of Wikipedia's news section.

Anyone know of any weddings that ended in ways worse than this?

Odd Day!

I can't sleep, so why not share trivia with the blog!

Today (05-07-09) is one of only six days this century in which the date (written in the form I used) is made up of three consecutive odd numbers! Odd Day even has its own website!

On a related note, check out square root day over at Wikipedia. We have to wait until April 4, 2016 for the next one of those (both the month and the day are the square roots of the last two digits of the year).

And the final two that I know of: Mole day and Pi day.

"A rags-to-rags story of world domination in information that could only have happened in the Internet age."

Nice piece in the Times on Wikipedia, comparing it to a virtual city:

"Wikipedia can no more be completed than can New York City, which O. Henry predicted would be “a great place if they ever finish it.” In fact, with its millions of visitors and hundreds of thousands of volunteers, its ever-expanding total of articles and languages spoken, Wikipedia may be the closest thing to a metropolis yet seen online."

There's some interesting parallels about things like trust in strangers, safety in numbers, and "professional skeptics," which Wikis and cities have in common.




There are few things that make me happier than a late-night dive into Wikipedia. I unintentionally learned a lot about milk pasteurization standards last night.

Interesting Wiki Page

In doing the complete opposite of what Bart and I are trying to do (namely, reduce our number of posts linking to a small number of articles) here is a Wikipedia page I found particularly interesting. Some of the pages on the list seem really random to me, such as RuneScape in the top 10 (I had to look at the article to learn what it is).

Pages with the most revisions - Wikipedia

Fish and Fishes

I recently found myself in yet another debate over the usage of "fish" vs. "fishes" and other similar issues.

Unless I'm mistaken, I'm rather sure that "fish" just refers to more than one fish whereas "fishes" refers to more than one type of fish.

Anyway, I figure that sort of thing has to have a name but I couldn't find one. Anybody got any ideas? In the process I came across interesting words Ichthyology and Isogloss.

Final thought: does the same rule apply to "persons" and "people"?

Anyone looking for a new hobby?

A few nights ago Carly, Katie, and I had a group Wiki-diving session that ended up using up about forty-five minutes of our time and required three different types of searches (Wikipedia, YouTube, and Google Products). I’ll introduce the topic here the same way in which we learned about it: a video of some guy in a park playing with a clear ball.

The Wiki-diving actually began as an argument about whether the guy in the video was holding a real ball or a digitally created image of a ball that was added at a later time. This led us, naturally, to Wikipedia, where we found out that, “Contact juggling is a form of object manipulation that focuses on the movement of objects such as balls in permanent contact with the body. Having little in common with ‘toss’ juggling, it most typically involves the rolling of one or more completely transparent balls on the hands and arms to create visual illusions, such as that of a ball fixed in space” (Contact juggling). Who knew?

A few related links that we enjoyed:

• Contact juggling balls for sale (it turns out that this is a fairly cheap hobby);
• Michael Moschen, the founder of the activity;
• Michael Moschen’s TED talk;
• ”Contact Juggling: Day 114”.

Since we watched nearly all of Moschen’s very strange TED talk Katie determined that the three of us are TED addicts and may need professional help.

That's a lot of money

Christopher Buckley, or C-Buckz, as I'm tempted to call him (just kidding, although that really makes me wish he'd marry Star Jones so she could be Star-Buckz - sorry, it's been a long week) has an article at the Beast trying to put a handle on how much the $1.2 trillion dollar deficit really is. And while I like what he does, he's taking a macro approach, and before I had read it I was already planning on taking more of a micro approach.

Let's start with Bernie Madoff. One fraud case, 50 billion dollars. That's a lot of money. A whole lot. It averages out to about $170 for every man, woman, and child in America.

Now, you didn't lose $170 in the Madoff fraud case, which you're probably pretty happy about. And that makes you like most Americans - almost all of them in fact. But for every American who didn't get ripped off by Madoff, that means that one of them who did lost an extra 170 bucks. Put another way, if you put all Americans on one side of a giant room with a big line down the middle, then for every single person that got to cross the line to the "didn't invest" side, some investor would have to pay $170. Just think about how long that would take ...

Now think about the stimulus. The tax rebate stimulus in early 2008 was $150 billion. Then TARP was $700 billion. Now Obama proposes another $825 billion. That adds up to $1.675 trillion (Just for fun: $1,675,000,000,000) There are 138 million taxpayers in the United States, so this amounts to $12,140 per taxpayer. That's incredible! Essentially, the federal government is forcing taxpayers to band together and go into (an additional!) $12,140 worth of collective debt each (albeit at a low interest rate, and of course the burden is not evenly distributed).

The entirety of the debt when Clinton left office was under $6 trillion. It's now over $10 trillion with $1 trillion deficits projected indefinitely. And we haven't even gotten to Social Security et al yet.

Many Random Thoughts and Articles

Iowa representative Steve King, who predicted an Obama victory would lead to al-Qaeda "dancing in the streets," now says that he doesn't know why Obama will be using his middle name Hussein in the inauguration, but that his given reason - historical consistency with previous inaugurations - "could not be the reason."

UPS delivered 30 pounds of marijuana to a Texas resident last Tuesday. Two side thoughts: One, I don't know anything about the prices of drugs, but even with my suspicion that marijuana is cheaper than other street drugs out there, I'm surprised at the article's valuation of the delivery at $350/pound. Two, thank goodness that guy didn't have an accidental arrest warrant out.

Last night was Bush's final presidential address. Mostly it's not worth watching, but if you're willing to be overly-nitpicky you can find humor in a couple of spots. At 4:37 he describes, without naming, the two sides of the war on terror. If you pretend the descriptions apply in the opposite way he intended them it's sort of funny. At 6:38 - and again, this is nitpicky - his phrasing leaves me wondering if there were more Supreme Court appointments that I didn't know about. Finally, though his phrasing is technically accurate given his intention, at 9:00 it sounds as if he's using a rather glaring tautology.

The inauguration security force in Washington DC will consist of 42,500 personnel. By comparison, this is roughly nearly 30% of the total number of US troops currently serving in all of Iraq.

Do the results justify the actions? Don't look too much into me mentioning this - I'm in awe of this guy, but it's worth pointing out that yesterday's emergency landing in the Hudson brought a damaged plane within 900 feet of the GW Bridge - for reference, that means it was essentially at the same altitude as the top of the Empire State Building when it passed over the bridge. And that's without considering what would have happened had he missed the river and landed on the island ... On the other hand, I can't really think of any better options, and it's not like the pilot is going to be like "well, there's a chance this may not work out, so I'm just going to crash us in a field for the greater good." Just an observation.

Found this slideshow of "right-leaning celebrities." It's just funny because of how deep they had to dig. And one of their best example, Dennis Hopper, campaigned for Obama anyway.

Finally, a take on Pinky and the Brain that would be funny if it weren't true.

Victimless Crimes

On the radio during lunch today part of the O'Reilly Factor consisted of a discussion of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Long story short (more Wiki surfing) that got me thinking about victimless crimes.

Clearly this is a group that overall would take the position that, in general, if there's no victim there's no crime. So I'll go the other way - is there a case for something with no victim that should still be outlawed?

It's totally possible, by the way, that there may be some really obvious ones; I'm just not thinking of any off the top of my head.

(PS - O'Reilly, for the record, routinely cuts off callers spewing anti-gay talking points and remarks that he doesn't think that the govt has any business regulating the bedroom, which is a little more liberal/libertarian than I would have put my money on; nonetheless, he does oppose "redefining the religious and historical term 'marriage'" and also seemed to oppose repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" on the grounds that the number of heterosexuals alienated by its repeal would be greater than the increase in homosexual enlistment)

More cities I wouldn't have expected

King of Prussia, PA

In other news, I apparently am descended from Prussian royalty. Yeah, that worked out pretty well.

A new grammar debate: the serial comma.

Background information.

I would like a bit more arguing on this site, as we tend to agree on politics, the de facto topic of choice for this blog. To that end, I am curious to hear opinions on use of the serial comma. I am strongly in favor of the serial comma as the standard rather than the exception because it is the least likely form to lead to ambiguity. I will even go one step beyond this and argue that in the cases in which the serial comma would lead to ambiguity the sentence should be rephrased, as it is clearly confusing in its current form.

In case you would like to hear a song about the serial comma, check out "Oxford Comma" by Vampire Weekend. The band sounds like a strange combination of Peter Gabriel, The Police, and Paul Simon. Perfect time to use the serial comma.

Update: As it turns out, this is the 100th post on this site. Way to go, everyone. Chris, thanks for keeping this going when the rest of us slack off. I don't know about everyone else, but I appreciate the updates even when I am not posting regularly.

Gauss is a badass

My manlove for Gauss is well documented. I should devote an entire post to him, and someday I will. But for now, just go to Wikipedia's page on him and check out the "Known for" entry in the infobox. That's how you know you're awesome.