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The Big Bang Theory on CBS.com - Home

The Big Bang Theory on CBS.com - Home

Holy smokes! This was an unexpectedly funny show. I kept expecting a train wreck, and even now I'm not sure how many shows I'll get to see before it is taken off the air, but this show is well written, the dialog is timed perfectly, and I'm going to enjoy every show I can!

PS, if you have a TiVo and Amazon Unbox, download the pilot show and pause it at the end when you can find a white page with text on it. A very funny bonus!

Workingamerica.org: BadBoss - My Bad Boss Contest, Tell Your Bad Boss

Workingamerica.org: BadBoss - My Bad Boss Contest, Tell Your Bad Boss

Think your boss is bad?

I've heard some doozies. Watched my sister face her new career going down the tubes because a boss made a pass at her, and watched her find her career went down the tubes because she sued for the right not to be harassed. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

I've had my own horrible bosses, and learned how to get by on four or five hours of sleep simply because I was too stressed to sleep enough.... For three years, I woke up before my alarm clock, which I hated, just because I worked at a place which would fire you if you were late (five minutes or more) three times in a year.

Maybe it'll make you feel better to hear how other people have it worse. Then again, maybe it'll make you puke. Regardless, here's one for the poor saps in the Veal Fattening Pens that are our cubicles. Put some Vaseline under those leg shackles and read the AFL-CIO's MyBadBoss contest.

And if you insist you have it worse, why not submit your story!

Write Your Representative - Contact your Congressperson in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Write Your Representative - Contact your Congressperson in the U.S. House of Representatives.
http://www.house.gov/writerep/

I have, for the first time in my life, actually written my congressperson. I received a "Washington Report" recently (see http://www.house.gov/duncan/August2007WashingtonReport.htm, page 2), and came across a paragraph made up of quotes about Global Warming now being a bad problem.

Now, to be sure, the quotes talk about "alarmism" leading to the cutting off of funding for dissenting views (those that disagree with the position that the Earth ground level temperature is rising and/or that it is our fault), and I am a supporter of the notion that science must have a clear and open forum for research and presentation of data.

However, I know from several of my government research friends that the opposite is actually happening. I have met and heard of more than a few researchers, very a-political people, almost to a fault, finding their research dollars have been slashed, or their published papers being edited, with important findings removed, because they show and present evidence supporting the global warming trends.

Please, please please, write your congressperson and let them know YOUR views. Ideally, their job is to not speak from their own uninformed positions, but from their constituents. Whatever your position on the debate in question, LET THEM KNOW WHAT YOUTHINK! Though I usually hate forwarding these things to friends unless I know for certain they might also be interested, if you are of a mind to, forward it on to your friends, and they to theirs....

If you're interested, here's what I sent. I used http://www.house.gov/writerep/, though I am sure there is one for the senate as well (email me if you come across it before I do).

In your recent "Washington Update" mailing, you write about two quotes criticizing the global warming debate. The general tone of this section seems to suggest that you also agree with these people and that global warming is not an issue that needs to be addressed.

I know scientists researching these problems, good people in good standing, who have little political bias and a great respect for withholding their opinions on matters until they have sufficient evidence and due diligence in study. I have yet to meet one out of the several I know that has expressed any doubt whatsoever that a) there is a problem that is leading to overall rising in global temperatures, b) that these issues will lead to catastrophic problems near-term and long term such as the melting of the world's ice, flooding of coastal areas, changes in climate across the globe, famine and disease due to the effect of animal population sizes and migrations, as well as those of the human populations, and c) that some large part, if not the greater part, of the causes are human in origin.

However, even if you refuse to believe this and prefer to find a minority of experts who tell you it is all a fantasy, as an elected representative of this region in our government, I plead with you to understand that your views DO NOT REPRESENT the views of this constituent, nor of several others that I know.

The price of being wrong in assuming global warming is real is not that large. It will lead to new technologies, new jobs and will place Tennessee, a fine source of natural resources, in the forefront as a progressive state, concerned about business and the environment at the same time. Fear of losing business money and jobs are not as great as has been suggested.

On the other hand, the price of being wrong in assuming there is no global warming problem is very large. War in the Middle East, already hot and already tense, is certain to become worse, leading to tighter resources of oil. Across the world, people will find their resources, access to water, to land, will change. Coastal areas will become flooded. People inland will find themselves without water as their local temperatures rise, people will leave drought stricken areas to other areas already dense in population. World-wide, economies would be made unstable, and we know now that the US economy is not safe from these problems.

Please do not entrench yourself in thinking that global warming as an issue will not be serious enough for you to address.

The problems are serious and must be addressed now.

Grand Central gives me a new phone number

Call me any time by clicking on this button. Or just call 865 686 6181.

V

At Group of 8 Meeting, Bush Rebuffs Germany on Cutting Emissions - New York Times

At Group of 8 Meeting, Bush Rebuffs Germany on Cutting Emissions - New York Times:

This G8 meeting in Germany had, apparently, the usual demonstrations, and the usual police intervention. But this year, they apparently decided to apply some well-considered satire....

"Demonstrators in clown makeup and pink and yellow wigs danced outside a steel fence surrounding the meeting site, clashing with the police, who used tear gas to disperse them."

I have to wonder if they were playing Smokey Robinson.

KnoxNews: Local

Knoxville makes the national news!!!

KnoxNews: Local

This story has been cracking me up. Seems this state cop took up a Knoxville part-time resident, part-time porn actress (Knoxville has one of those?) up on her offer of a blowjob to make a drug charge go away, and now the cop is in trouble because of a little thing of behaving badly in uniform, and using state equipment (his laptop) to visit her porn website. It's gotten coverage on Digg.com (http://www.digg.com/offbeat_news/Lick_it_or_Ticket_Tennessee_Troopers_Launch_New_Initiative, http://www.digg.com/offbeat_news/Trooper_fired_for_getting_blowjob_from_porno_star_during_traffic_stop, http://www.digg.com/offbeat_news/troopers_routine_stop_turns_into_a_porno_lucky_guy, http://www.digg.com/offbeat_news/Porn_Star_Gives_Trooper_an_Oral_Favor_Gets_Out_of_Traffic_Ticket), in papers in Salt Lake City, UT, among others, and even on the national news (seems she was invited to fly out to New York to do the morning news shows).

The cop was about to be fired, but he resigned first to keep his pension, and apparently he now facing felony charges (though the starlet in question has some things to say about that:-) http://www.knoxnews.com/kns/local_news/article/0,1406,KNS_347_5564346,00.html. Apparently, she's quite miffed that she's being put in the position of victim.

She's, meanwhile, been finding her website hit count has gone through the roof. Getting more popular every day! It's become a pay site (WARNING: (duh!) ADULT MATERIAL), but has a blog that talks a lot about the latest goings on: http://barbiecummings.blogspot.com/.

This is the best local news I've come across since I moved here in 1985!

Block Cell Phone Numbers - eMail going around

Submitted as a public service:

I keep getting emails, just like everyone else, that warn people to do this, that, or the other hokus-pokus activity (call this number, visit this link, register for this service!) to avoid that or this disaster.

They're not the usual spam, in that they are more likely to be sent from people you know, and typically will include about three pages of forwarded email addresses showing the power of the internet to play party games like Operator, except you don't have to repeat what you thought you heard, but you get to keep the original text (but, sadly, frequently not the pictures) of the original email, if you are only patient enough to weed through email addresses as anti-virus reports.

Usually, I get these emails from my mother, the mother of a friend or a client-turned-friend from a past job.

They are typically emails with "little-known facts" trivia content, or maybe political rants using half-truths and distorted rumors that purport to show some conspiracy of some sort. But frequently the emails are about scams, computer software gotchas that will leave you with vulnerable security, things like that. Usually, I'll just do a quick search on the Internet and reply to my mother or whoever sent the email (sincerely worried that not spreading the news will leave people vulnerable) that they need not be concerned, here's a link to help you understand more.

Now, when I get these emails, it's usually with a note saying something like "I don't know if this is true or not" or maybe I'll get a forward specifically to me alone asking if it's true and should they send it on to their friends....

I thought I would share this latest one and reconstruct the email history in normal reading order. To those who might now know of these useful tricks, I hope this is helpful to you. To those who know of alternative approaches, please fell free to post your criticism and comments!

---------------------------------
The original email
---------------------------------

REMINDER...12 days from today, all cell phone numbers are being released to telemarketing companies and you will start to receive sales calls.

.....YOU WILL BE CHARGED FOR THESE CALLS

To prevent this, call the following number from your cell phone: 888-382-1222.

It is the National DO NOT CALL list. It will only take a minute of your time.
It blocks your number for five (5) years.
You must call from the cell phone number you want to have blocked.
You cannot call from a different phone number.

HELP OTHERS BY PASSING THIS ON TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS.
It take about 20 seconds.

---------------------------------
The forwarded email I got
---------------------------------
Hi folks,

I assume this is accurate. If anyone know or finds out it isn't, please let me know. Have a nice day!


Mary


---------------------------------
My response
---------------------------------

Matter of fact, I got this email a few weeks ago from my mother. It is a scam, though a fairly bizarre one, in that the end result is to get your number on the do-not-call list, so that's okay.

One way I go about checking the validity of some of these emailed claims is to assume that if it is a con or a myth, probably other people have already come across it. So I will take some distinctive text from the email and search for it on Google, maybe adding "truth" or "scam" or "myth" to the search terms.

Usually one of the top links that pops up will be to a government (.gov) web site, or one of the sites devoted to urban myths (www.snopes.com is one great example, though there are others). If the page is indeed on one of these sites, then I am pretty confident I can rely on that information, and often I will find that the email they display is pretty much identical to the one I received, and I can get the facts on it.

In this case, to do it from scratch, I searched for "all cell phone numbers are being released to telemarketing companies" and found a Yahoo link that said "Yahoo! Answers - Cell phone Do Not Call list (is it for real)?". Now that's not a reliable source, but sometimes people put links to .gov or other sites in their answers. Detective work.

So I looked at the page, and I was right. They guy said it was false, and provided a link to http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/cell411.asp .

And at the bottom of that page, I hit pay-dirt: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2005/04/dnc.shtm.

This is a .gov site, and it talks about this email specifically. In it, they specifically mention the following:

• FCC regulations prohibit telemarketers from using automated dialers to call cell phone numbers. Automated dialers are standard in the industry, so most telemarketers are barred from calling consumers on their cell phones without their consent.
  
  
• The federal government does not maintain a national cell phone registry. Personal cell phone users have always been able to add their numbers to the National Do Not Call Registry — the same Registry consumers use to register their land lines — either online at www.donotcall.gov or by calling toll-free 1-888-382-1222 from the telephone number they wish to register. Registrations become effective within 31 days of signing up and are active for five years. There is no cut-off date or deadline for registrations.
  
  
• Business-to-business calls are not covered under the Registry.

So, feel safe. Go ahead and add your number. But don't worry about any release of numbers.

If this is useful to you, feel free to pass it on.

Vania

Scientific American: Ask the Experts: Chemistry: Occasionally the ice cubes in my freezer's ice trays will develop a stalagmitelike shape without any obvious, unusual interference. Can you please explain what causes this?

Scientific American: Ask the Experts: Chemistry: Occasionally the ice cubes in my freezer's ice trays will develop a stalagmitelike shape without any obvious, unusual interference. Can you please explain what causes this?

See also http://www.physics.utoronto.ca/~smorris/edl/icespikes/icespikes.html

About 8 months ago, our small web development company moved into a historic office building in downtown Knoxville, TN. We got settled in and comfortable and slowly collected our own comfortable space for coding, design, and most importantly, break time.

Our simple refrigerator had plenty of room for ice trays, an ice pack for my knees which flare up from time to time, and several frozen lunches for the employees I work with.

But soon enough, one of my co-workers and I started to notice that our ice-trays had weird things happening. Our ice cubes were growing spikes! Well, after months of trading theory back and forth (and debunking each theory as we saw fit), I finally come across an answer! It appears someone has already been studying this, and as he says on his web site: "you are not alone ...".

Take a look!

The Top Ten Most Practical Superpowers

The Top Ten Most Practical Superpowers

At long last, an in-depth analysis of superpowers and their practical limitations. I love that Superman's XRay vision drops him directly into the puddle of pervie Peeping Tommishness.

Cave Man

Cave Man Erotic Cartoon Poor guy, man. What a lot of work for a thrill!

Lah lah lah, Meme meme meme....

Meme Tree

The concept of a "meme" refers to the most basic unit of a thought or concept that can be communicated to another person. And article in Wired talks about an experiment performed to follow the propagation of memes across the Internet.

This blog is simply a way to get on the graphical representation of that meme network as determined by the existence of the above link. :-)

Computing, 2016: What Won’t Be Possible? - New York Times

Computing, 2016: What Won’t Be Possible? - New York Times: "Social networks, noted Jon Kleinberg, a professor at Cornell, are pre-technological creations that sociologists have been analyzing for decades. A classic example, he noted, was the work of Stanley Milgram of Harvard, who in the 1960’s asked each of several volunteers in the Midwest to get a letter to a stranger in Boston. But the path was not direct: under the rules of the experiment, participants could send a letter only to someone they knew. The median number of intermediaries was six — hence, the term “six degrees of separation.” "

I'd heard of the "Six Degrees of Separation" idea for a long time, but I never knew the origins.

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: DNA Computer Plays Complete Game of Tic-Tac-Toe

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: DNA Computer Plays Complete Game of Tic-Tac-Toe

The human body, hell, even a bacterium, has computing capacity so vast that it makes our current level of computer power seem more like a pocket calculator from the 1980s. Our neurons, cells and even intracellular material have, in computer hardware contexts, tiny footprints and incomparable versatility. However none of this has been accessible to engineers, because while you can get a huge button the size of a finger (like those on your computer keyboard) to connect to a smaller wire, to connect to a smaller circuit (and so on (and so on (and so on))) until you pass the clicking of that button down to the smallest "circuitry" that is the stuff of DNA, no one has figured out a way to create or use collections of DNA in any way comparable to the structures of our current silicon "gates", which make up the foundation of our computer technology.

I have been following articles researching the use of this basic stuff of life for computer purposes for a few years. This article shows what appears to be a milestone in this arena. They have managed to get little puddles of DNA strands to play Tic-Tac-Toe, and win or draw every time.

This should force the vernacular to change the definition of "software". Or maybe they'll call it "squishware", though I haven't ever actually touched a puddle of DNA before.

Discovery Channel :: News - Technology :: 'Cloak of Invisibility' Made Real

Discovery Channel :: News - Technology :: 'Cloak of Invisibility' Made Real

David Copperfield is going to have to find a new trick after this technology matures.

They are only working on microwaves, right now, but this articles speaks to the possibility of using this technology to make things invisible to other ranges of light, including visible light, and (oddly enough, to my mind) other non-light things like acoustic waves to protect from vibrations (!!).

Wired 14.10: Posts

Wired 14.10: Posts

I think people underrate just how integrated we are with computers today. Take a look at this article. Notice that in the scenario the actual attacks were one bomb, and a few well-placed hacks. The hospital's drug computer ended up incorrectly distributing drugs. The city was thrown in chaos. The infrastructure of warning systems and communication systems was clogged.

It strikes me that "cyberterrorism" is not about simply keeping an honest company from making a buck for a day. And it's not about keeping people from viewing their news or their porn or their YouTube video of the day.

One day, on The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson supposedly had a faux news item that there was a national shortage of toilet paper. The next day, so many people went shopping for toilet paper in response that there was... a national shortage of toilet paper. The media of Radio, TV and now the Internet amplifies. Colbert tells people to vote him the the winner of the Hungarian Bridge contest, and he wins. If some media event tells people to flush their toilets at exactly some time, and a fire is lit just a bit before, would there be a massive water shortage?

I'm all for technological innovation. I'm a geek. I want a house that is automated, and I want to start a company that gets bought by Google for billions, just like the next guy.

But I'm not exactly comfortable with some of the vulnerabilities we have.

Selling Soap - New York Times

Selling Soap - New York Times

On doctors and poor hygiene....

Turns out that doctor's don't wash their hands very often. A hospital's efforts to change this are described, including mention of using physicians's hands on a petri dish to grow bacteria. They made the resulting culture into a screen saver.

In regards to the screen saver.... Eww....

A Show That Trumpeted History but Led to Confusion - New York Times

A Show That Trumpeted History but Led to Confusion - New York Times

Well, it looks like this program is/was a waste of time if you were interested in learning the facts of 9/11. I mean, it doesn't look like they post messages in big red letters proclaiming "This segment was modified to make it interesting. Any relationship to real facts is purely coincidental".

Pity.

Wired News: Experimental AI Powers Robot Army

Wired News: Experimental AI Powers Robot Army

I've long been a fan of AI in its many forms both fiction and non-fiction. Here's a story on the state of the art. Interestingly, there's even some mention of what's known as an emergent property, where the AI in individual robots unintentionally or unexpectedly work together with others to bring a cooperative, community behavior.

Photo Periodic Table Posters

Photo Periodic Table Posters

Neato....