small flightless bird

comic strip

2007-12-12T15:37:00.000-05:00

Hello. If you're looking at this ol' blog, why not check out my new comic strip. It is called Back to School, and it is a laugh.

not this again...

2006-04-18T18:22:00.000-04:00

OK, I don't want to dredge up this old argument again... really, I don't.

But in honor of its one-year anniversary, I'd just like to say that Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, agrees with me.

That is all.

this just in...

2006-04-03T18:06:00.000-04:00

The US isn't happy with its record-breaking level of deficit spending. Apparently, waging one vaguely defined and largely unwinnable war simply isn't destroying the country's economy fast enough. Not to worry: the Pentagon has come up with another one! Beginning in 2006, Congress has earmarked additional spending to wage war on the internet.

Among their stated goals (and I'm not exaggerating) is to be able to completely control what information gets to both foreign countries and their own citizens, and the ability to "completely dominate the earth's electromagnetic spectrum". So, the US is actively developing ways to quash free speech and journalism, and as a backup plan they're figuring out how to just turn off all of those annoying "people" telling "the truth".

Am I surprised? Nope. Seems about par for the course.

discuss...

2006-04-01T13:13:00.000-05:00

I have been informed that my use of the term " 'net " is incorrect and annoying. The apostrophe, I am told, is unnecessary since "net" is a word on its own.

My position is that a "net" is something to catch fish, while the " 'net" is where this webpage lives. We don't like to say three-syllable words when one will do, so we say "the 'net". And like any speech contraction, an apostrophe should be added to denote the abbreviation.

Am I crazy? Or just plain wrong? It's a given that I'm anal.

Discuss...

the internet is the new tv

2006-04-01T12:47:00.000-05:00

I stumbled across this series of articles about the future of television programming and the adoption of the internet as a distribution medium.

The potential of the 'net is to cut out the middlemen. By virtually eliminating distribution costs, the internet replaces conventional broadcast networks, allowing content producers to provide their programming directly to consumers. The problem is that people don't expect to pay for television programming - sure, we pay $29.95 a month for our deluxe cable package, but that's just for access. The lion's share of programming costs are covered by advertisers. So how do the people making the content get paid? This article is one of the first I've seen that doesn't include the "1. do stuff, 2. use the internet, 3. ???, 4. profit" business model, but actually proposes something valid.

I agree that the 'net is a better distribution method than TV. I get what I want to see, when I want to see it, without needing to worry about forgetting to record a show. But perhaps it's a case of preaching to the choir. I am the guy who has cable TV included in his rent, and the first thing I did on moving in was get cable internet, disconnect the TV and shove it into a corner facing the wall, and set up my computer desk where it used to be.

Go figure.

it's not so

2006-03-23T19:24:00.000-05:00

I'm coming out of my own unannounced, perpetual semi-retirement to mention the funniest short I've seen. It's inane. It's juvenile. The main character's only features are his age and his accent. It will not teach you anything useful, and has been decried by several of my friends as a waste of 7 minutes of your life. And I think it's hilarious. So go watch it.

retirement

2006-03-23T00:11:00.000-05:00

Hello the Internet,

I am officially retiring for a while; actually, I retired a few weeks back, I just didn't tell anyone. I will come back if:

(a) the Internet stops being boring and geeky all the time;

(b) the word "blog" ceases to exist, or they stop giving awards to blogs and calling them "the bloggies";

or (c) everyone stops using the word "zen" to refer to something other than zen buddhism.

These are my demands. If they are not met, be prepared to face the consequences: me not writing on this website anymore. You've been warned.

With a love that will echo through the ages,
Chris

chris bliss diss

2006-03-14T11:33:00.000-05:00

So the other day Chris posted a video that has been going around the net of Chris Bliss doing some three ball juggling. Well, I wasn't too impressed, and it turns out other jugglers weren't either. So Jason Garfield decided that to explain why he thought the video wasn't very good, he would replicate it exactly, but with five balls instead of a measly three.

PS. This video was posted to YouTube by Steve Brown, who some of you nerds might know as a yo-yo prodigy and head of marketing and promotions for Duncan Toys. He writes "Watch the video, and understand: THIS is great juggling. That Bliss guy may put on a good act, but he is not a good juggler. There is a huge difference."

it came from outer space

2006-03-11T12:13:00.000-05:00

NASA has been a busy bee lately. The Cassini probe has found liquid water on Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons. That's pretty huge, since where there's water there tends to be, well, life.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has successfully entered martian orbit! The satellite carries the most powerful science payload ever sent to another planet, and is capable of taking surface photographs with 1m resolution and using radar to probe for water up to a kilometer deep. Let's hope the little green men aren't 0.9m tall and living in caves two kilometers deep.

A couple weeks ago, NASA announced its budget for '07. It includes additional funding to cover cost overruns on the space shuttle and international space station - money that comes at the expense of science programs like the Hubble servicing mission and probes to further explore the solar system. It's not possible for NASA to do all of these things at once because Congress has frozen its budget to a measly 3% increase over last year's $16.4 billion - not enough to keep pace with inflation. Sure, $16B sounds like a lot of scratch. Until you remember that Bush is currently requesting another $65 billion to fund the war in Iraq, which will bring the total well over $400 billion. Oh, did I mention that the two missions mentioned above were approved and funded long before the war began? Enough said.

bouncing balls

2006-03-09T00:47:00.000-05:00

Friend and fellow would-be physicist Liz points us at this Bravia commercial which you may very well have already seen: balls bouncing down a San Francisco street. It's even more fun to watch knowing that it's all completely real - not done on computers. Just sit back and feel your mind comfortably melting.

fake tilt-shift photography

2006-03-04T18:44:00.000-05:00

Have you heard about tilt-shift photography?

A tilt-shift lens lets you take pictures from the air that make cities look like tiny models.

The internets is full of wonderful things, and one of those things is a tutorial that lets you use photoshop to create a tilt-shift effect on normal photographs. To the right is one I did of a picture I took of Iqaluit from a helicopter (click for a larger version so you can see the effect).

Here is a large gallery of fake tilt-shift photographs. Some of them are mediocre, but there are some incredible ones. Here is a gallery of actual tilt-shift photogrpahy. Often less impressive actually...

dan kennedy solves your problems with paper, and other pieces

2006-03-03T13:39:00.000-05:00

Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency is sometimes very funny, but that's usually when Dan Kennedy has written something. Rather than searching through their archives for his name, here's an index of everything he's ever written for the site. Or, if you only have a few seconds, read some of their lists.

juggling vs the beatles

2006-03-03T13:37:00.000-05:00

Yesterday Jared posted a video about curling. Today I'm posting one about juggling. Maybe we should change our name from "Small Flightless Bird" to "YouTube Videos of Nerdy Non-Sports". Anyway, enjoy!

holy curling batman

2006-03-02T20:40:00.000-05:00

You may have to watch this one a couple of times before the enormity sinks in. Aparently this is par for the course too.

warbears

2006-03-02T11:43:00.000-05:00

Here's a fun new flash game for you to play: Warbears. It's along the lines of the previously-mentioned Samorost and Hapland games, where you have to find the right sequence of clicks. This one's the best so far, though, with mini-games and unlockable bonuses. And no, I don't know how to get the friendship bonus, so please don't email me. (Check the creater's forum for a good walkthrough.)

don't mess with boing boing

2006-02-27T16:12:00.000-05:00

We here at SFB link to (or steal links from) Boing Boing often, and for good reason. It's probably the most well-read blog out there, and it tends to act as a pretty entertaining filter for all the ways to waste your time on the internet - an accomplishment I've tried in my own small way to mimic with this site. Its power is tremendous - if they post a link to something, that link will probably show up on a few thousand other blogs within hours. And getting Boing Boing to link to your site (an event significant enough to warrant the creation of term "boingboinged"), is often enough to crash servers.

But the contributors tend not to put their awesome powers to direct use - at most, they'll just direct your attention to whatever they think deserves it, or post an editorial on some subject or another. That's why the actions they're taking against an American company that provides internet content-filtering software to other countries might be fun to watch: all four contributors are ganging together with the stated goal of putting the company out of business.

The reason? Thanks to Secure Computing's SmartFilter software, internet users in various parts of the world (including the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and some parts of Africa) can't access Boing Boing due to bogus "nudity" false-positives.

Whether or not you're a regular reader, this fight should be fun to watch. Link.

sex pistols versus the rock n roll hall o fame

2006-02-26T13:20:00.000-05:00

apologia

2006-02-23T00:17:00.000-05:00

Through a series of hilarious yet unsettling events, the post below is only now visible by you, the reader. You had no idea SFB was on holidays. You dutifully visited each day as we tooled around Southeastern Ontario. We are dreadfully sorry and we promise that it will probably happen again.

hi-freakin-atus

2006-02-20T09:40:00.000-05:00

SFB (or at least its principle contributor) is going on a road trip. Please join us again Thursday for the first episode of our four-part expose on the breakfast cereal industry, entitled "Corruption, Greed, and Ruthlessness: Peddling Sugar Highs".

i woke up and my pillow was missing and stephen harper was still prime minister

2006-02-18T11:45:00.000-05:00

In Canadian government news:

Stockwell Day proposes national ID card - This is a pretty horrible idea. He even references the UK's national ID cards, which have been very unpopular (see Boing Boing's coverage for details), as his inspiration.
Harper chooses Iraq war fan as US ambassador - Michael Wilson said in 2003 that Canada should have sent ships and aircraft to help with the invasion.

I'm sorry I don't have more to say about either of these, but it's Saturday. And my sense of humour about a Conservative government apparently only runs as far as a post title. (ID card story via Optimus.)

little people on food

2006-02-18T11:03:00.000-05:00

These images are proving to be pretty popular, but I couldn't resist posting them anyway. Check out photosets one and two. Via this Boing Boing post.

daily show on cheney rampage

2006-02-14T14:29:00.000-05:00

The Daily Show went nuts with the Cheney-hunting-accident story last night, and it was pretty hilarious. You can watch most of the show on the Comedy Central website in short streaming segments (1, 2, 3), or search around for torrents.

four riddles - now with answers!

2006-02-09T12:22:00.000-05:00

Update: Click here for answers! Also, check out the comments for another good riddle from Ed.

You've probably heard at least some of these before, but I felt like posting them anyway, and we all need a break from the usual politics and videos. These are four of my favourite riddles, mostly because none of them are trick questions. Feel free to email us for hints or answers, and why not leave your favourite riddle(s) in the comments?

1. You have eight blocks; they are completely indistinguishable from each other, but one is slightly heavier than the others. You are also given a balance. How do you find the heavy block using the balance only twice?

2. A castle is surrounded by a moat, as shown in the image. You are given two thick boards, four meters long and about a foot wide. How do you get across to the treasure in the castle? (You can't just float on the boards because the moat is filled with huge sharks, like bigger than the one in Jaws.)

3. You come to a fork in the road. One way leads to certain death, the other leads to the next village. Two twins are standing nearby. You've been told that everything one says is a lie, and everything the other says is the truth. You can ask only one question; both twins will answer. What do you ask them to figure out which path to take?

4. You are alone on the ground floor of a house. Upstairs there are three lightbulbs, but you can't see them (or their light) from where you are. The switches for the bulbs are downstairs and unlabelled. If you can only go upstairs once, how can you figure out which switch turns on which bulb?

Click here for answers.

um?

2006-02-08T08:50:00.000-05:00

Go and watch the trailer for the new movie by the director of Napoleon Dynamite. It's called Nacho Libre, and stars Jack Black as, um, a Mexican wrestler. I'm pretty sure this is not a joke.

lol! it's a funeral!

2006-02-07T18:11:00.000-05:00

This photo from the coverage of Coretta Scott King's funeral is pretty bizarre. Those crazy American presidential families. I mean, it's a funeral, not a political conference. Apparently a bunch of the speakers took jabs at Dubya, too. Which I applaud in theory, but I have to question the timing. Then again, maybe it's what she would have wanted?

bush to spend $120 billion on wars, can't afford medicare

2006-02-06T12:57:00.000-05:00

In an effort to meet his deficit-reducing goals, George W Bush wants to spend another $120 billion on the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing the total amount spent on these wars past $400 billion. Meanwhile, he's having to make cuts to 141 government programs. Says AP: "Almost one-third of the targeted programs are in education including ones that provide money to support the arts, vocational education, parent resource centers and drug-free schools."

He also asked for $18 billion for hurricane relief, which I guess means that this year, fighting an unending war is about six times as important as rebuilding the shattered lives of those affected by Katrina.

wait, you're telling me you can turn the volume down?

2006-02-03T08:44:00.000-05:00

File this one next to the woman who [successfully] sued McDonalds because the coffee she spilled on her lap was too hot: A guy in the States is suing Apple because it is possible to listen to their iPods at a volume that will cause hearing damage.

That's right, even though every iPod comes with a warning sticker that says "permanent hearing loss may occur if earphones or headphones are used at high volume", that's not enough for this guy. The lawsuit claims iPods are "inherently defective in design and are not sufficiently adorned with adequate warnings".

The weirdest part? "Mr Patterson's lawyer, Steve W Berman, told Associated Press news agency that his client did not know if he had suffered hearing loss but that that was not the issue." [Read the full article]

People like this are the reason for labels like these.

brokeback to the future (click to play movie)

2006-02-02T11:37:00.000-05:00

blackberry safe at last?

2006-02-02T11:07:00.000-05:00

I'm sure our friend Optimus will be happy to learn that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued a "non-final" rejection of the last of NTPs patents. This thing has been in court since 2003 and is starting to get a little ridiculous.

did the conservatives win or lose?

2006-01-30T15:44:00.000-05:00

Specifically in response to the Washington Post article about the Canadian election titled A Defeat for Anti-Americanism, but also because these misconceptions seem pretty popular, I'd like to say something and hope that it at least generates some angry comments.

Stephen Harper and the Conservatives won the election, in the technical sense: they have more seats in the House of Commons than any other party. But could anyone seriously call it a victory? Let's look at a few facts:

The Liberal Party has been in power for more than twelve years, which is enough time to make a lot of mistakes.
The Gomery Report put it in writing that major Liberal figures are guilty of corruption.
Out of the top five political parties in Canada, only one is officially conservative: the BQ are often more progressive than the NDP or the Green Party; Paul Martin is pretty conservative but the Liberals are generally centrist.
Many (if not most) Canadians have long considered it a waste to vote for any party other than the Liberals or the Conservatives.
Only 36% of voters cast their ballots in favour of Stephen Harper's Conservatives.
30% of voters voted for the Liberals.
Combined, the Liberals, the NDP and the Bloq got 58% of the popular vote.

When you add up all these facts, the result is pretty clear. Canada has not "gone conservative", and Stephen Harper didn't really "win" the election. He was up against an unpopular party with a leader nobody trusted, yet he still managed to win by only a small minority. And since most people were voting against the Liberals rather than for the Conservatives, I think it won't be long before Canadians get a taste of who, exactly, they've elected. And it won't be pretty.

"fed hungry puppies, saved orphans from fire..."

2006-01-29T17:46:00.000-05:00

On the wire today: the White House has been altering Wikipedia entries, which is really creepy. This article is about the specific actions of U.S. Rep Marty Meehan, who edited his own biography. The original text:

"Meehan first ran for Congress in 1992 on a platform of reform. As part of that platform Meehan made a pledge to not serve more than four terms, a central part of his campaign. This breaking of the pledge has been a controversial issue in the 5th Congressional District of Massachusetts."

The entry after Meehan edited it:

"Meehan was elected to Congress in 1992 on a plan to eliminate the deficit. His fiscally responsible voting record since then has earned him praise from citizen watchdog groups. He was re-elected by a large margin in 2004."

There's also this list of changes to entries coming from an IP address originating from the House of Representatives.

why we fight

2006-01-29T15:24:00.000-05:00

For some reason I seem to be really into depressing "the world is so screwed" documentaries lately. Today, I watched "Why We Fight" (torrent), a piece on the American Military-Industrial Complex written and directed by Eugene Jarecki. I heard about it because Jon Stewart interviewed Mr. Jarecki on this episode of The Daily Show.

I have to say, there probably isn't a lot in the flick that SFB readers don't already know: Corporate weaponsmakers like Lockheed-Martin and Halliburton are deeply interwoven with both the Bush administration and Congress. In fact, most US foreign policy is decided by corporate-sponsored "think tanks" with 0 voter accountability and a stated agenda of coming up with reasons and rationalizations for the next war. And of course there has to be a next war, because that's their trillion-dollar business. These annoying questions of "why", "where", and "how to get the public to agree with us"... well, that's why they have think tanks!

In the spirit of preaching to the choir, among my other favorite documentaries on what's wrong with the world's only superpower are The End of Suburbia and The Corporation, as well as a very compelling three part miniseries called "The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear". The miniseries is a cut above the other two because I find it uses less emotional string-pulling and more essay-style presentation of facts to make its point.

nettwerk to RIAA: "take off, ya hosers."

2006-01-28T22:39:00.000-05:00

Canadian music label Nettwerk, who represent such notable artists as Sarah McLachlin, Barenaked Ladies and Brand New, has decided to help out the Greubel family, who are being sued by the RIAA for downloading music. The list of downloaded songs includes several by Nettwerk artists. They have agreed to pay the family's legal expenses, which is the main reason people tend to just settle these lawsuits rather than take them to court - it's actually cheaper.

This is a lot bigger than just one family's court case. Winning even one court case sets precedent, which is a big deal for all future cases. And, more importantly, this is a record label (who the RIAA claims to represent) and a whole collection of artists (who the RIAA says it's protecting from the evils piracy) saying "We don't agree with what you're doing. Stop suing our fans. Take off."

I agree, and with my next paycheque I plan to buy at least one Brand New album. I encourage you to look through the Nettwerk artists, find one you like, and do the same. If I download music more than I buy albums, it's because I think they're overpriced and the extra money ends up lining the pockets of middlemen like the labels, rather than the artists. But if I see that "wasted" money being put to good use like this, I'll pony up.

harper already prime minister, apparently

2006-01-28T20:15:00.000-05:00

Adding a new twist to the ongoing story of Canada's attempt to keep/take control of big empty areas of frozen ocean, Stephen Harper got into a verbal scuffle with the American ambassador mere days after the election. This despite Harper's constant criticism of Martin for fightin' with the Yanks during the campaign. Oh well.

U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins criticised Harper's proposal to build "three new armed heavy ice-breaking ships" and send 'em up north to defend the area against nobody. Harper also wants to set up "an underground network of listening posts", because he likes the sounds whales make.

Harper's response: "The United States defends its sovereignty, the Canadian government will defend our sovereignty. It is the Canadian people we get our mandate from, not the ambassador of the United States."

Harper added, "This outburst has nothing to do with trying to distract attention from Dubya's congratulatory phone call, which could reignite the whole Harper-loves-America thing."

heureusement, ici, c'est le hamas

2006-01-26T22:10:00.000-05:00

The militant Hamas party has won the Palestinian election with a big majority (AFP, Reuters). The problem with this is that the party's platform is not so much concerned with taxes or social programs - it's more focused on the violent destruction of Israel. Needless to say, a lot of people are slightly concerned about what this will mean for peace in the region.

a million little pieces

2006-01-26T16:49:00.000-05:00

My roommate has Oprah on. She's interviewing James Frey, the author of A Million Little Pieces. It has recently been revealed that much of the material in the book - a memoir of Frey's recovery from addiction - was embellished or made up. It originally made Oprah's Book Club; Oprah publicly defended Frey on Larry King, but now she seems to have decided to take it personally. Here's a paraphrased part of a conversation between her and the book's publisher, Nan Talese:

Oprah: When did you realize he was lying?

Talese: When I first read the manuscript I thought it was sensational. But as a publisher, do you ask the author, "Are you really as bad as you say you are?"

Oprah [interrupting]: Yes!

[Audience claps, cheers, etc.]

Yes Oprah, you do ask. For example, each of Hunter S Thompson's books were carefully fact-checked before they were printed. His publisher personally examined the contents of Thompson's trunk to make sure that he did, in fact, bring "two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls" on his trip through the desert. After all, the reader will believe everything the author says if the word "memoir" is on the cover, and the reader has a right not to be deceived.

prime minister stephen harper

2006-01-25T08:15:00.000-05:00

I'm moving to the friggin' States.

this one's for you

2006-01-18T20:18:00.000-05:00

Man, SFB has really been into videos lately. I'm pretty sure it's just a coincidence. I know I should be saying something about the [Canadian] election, but OC has that one about covered, so why don't we just move on to the actual post? It concerns two more videos for you to watch:

William Shatner's interpretation of Elton John's "Rocketman" - if you've seen Family Guy this will seem somewhat familiar to you. Don't watch it until you've heard the original version of the song, though, or it'll make even less sense. [via Stereogum]
A recent commercial for a new computer by Apple is very similar to the Postal Service video for "Such Great Heights". The link brings you to a video which plays the two side-by-side, à la that Nickelback thing from ten years ago. [via Boing Boing]

Maybe tomorrow I'll post some actual content. I'm a little surprised Neil hasn't told us about the Pluto probe...

for those who've always wanted to shoot jello, but haven't the nerve

2006-01-17T11:37:00.000-05:00

The Timing Is Everything gallery collects a bunch of high-speed photography that has been floating around for a while, and it would be a good idea to take a look if you haven't yet seen them. Also included are a couple of balloon-popping images from this Flickr photoset.

best of google video

2006-01-16T20:26:00.000-05:00

Google Video is pretty great. Some guy compiling a best-of list for the service is even better. I guarantee you will waste at least forty-five minutes watching these.

look! up in the sky! it's ... physically impossible!

2006-01-14T11:52:00.000-05:00

Here's something to bring you down a little on this rainy, climate-change-warm Montreal day: an article by Lois ~~Lane~~ Gresh and Robert Weinberg about why physics tells us that Superman couldn't have existed.

I say, nuts to physics! Down with science! Re-elect George Bush!

frank zappa on crossfire

2006-01-10T20:57:00.000-05:00

No, he's not back from the dead - this is a crossfire episode from 1986. It's twenty one minutes long and it might as well have been filmed yesterday, for all the issues it addresses. You can direct download it here or use this torrent.

via crooks and liars.

why didn't the globe call me?

2006-01-09T22:42:00.000-05:00

I missed the debate, but I have it on good authority that it will be giving at least one voter nightmares. (You have a third choice... There is a third choice in this election... Let me tell you about your other choice...)

After reading the nerve-racking poll results showing the Tories ahead by eight points, and then watching a strange argument between Martin and Duceppe about the word "nation", why not go read Rick Mercer's rundown of the upcoming Conversative Cabinet members? From the post:

Rob Anders – Minister of State (Multiculturalism)

Rob Anders is the guy to reach out to Canada’s diverse multicultural communities.

“Nelson Mandela is a terrorist.”
- Rob Anders

“Rob is a true reformer and a true conservative. He has been a faithful supporter of mine and I am grateful for his work.”
- Stephen Harper endorsing Calgary West Conservative MP Rob Anders

Go on over and read the whole thing.

the high cost of low price

2006-01-08T22:35:00.000-05:00

I watched a documentary tonight that had been skipped over in favor of final exams. It's called "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price", and it's directed by Robert Greenwald. Although it is entirely geared to Americans and plays a bit too strongly on both nationalism and christianity for my liking, it raises some valid points about the business practices of the world's largest corporation and dominant retail giant. In short: they ain't good. Of course, the documentary tells only one side of the story.

According to the film: full-time Wal-Mart associates make less than living wage, benefits packages are inadequate and the company actively encourages employees to seek state aid in lieu of corporate insurance, there is systematic exploitation and discrimination from the top levels of the corporation, their environmental policies are either abysmal or simply don't exist, and the company actively and aggressively quashes any inkling of a union at the first sign of its inception.

According to Wal-Mart: associates make higher-than-average wages for the industry, their benefits packages are generous by industry standards, Wal-Mart is an award-winning employer in terms of diversity and worker treatment, they care deeply about the environment, and unions are only out to bilk workers for dues anyway.

The truth is undoubtedly somewhere in the middle. But even Wal-Mart can't deny that the (many, many) people in the documentary are in fact ex-employees, did in fact experience the things they're talking about, and the company is in fact fighting off more tax evasion, fraud, and wage-related lawsuits than you can shake a stick at.

You should check it out. Buy it here, or get the torrent here. I don't shop at Wal-Mart often, but I think that frequency just got reduced to absolutely 0.

why howard dean should've been president

2006-01-08T15:26:00.000-05:00

Howard Dean really gave it to Wolf Blitzer over the Republican-Abramoff-Indian Tribe thing. I'll admit that I'm not really clear on what happened exactly, but I do know that there are NO DEMOCRATS INVOLVED WHATSOEVER. Nicely done Howard.

wolf parade on late late show video

2006-01-07T12:19:00.000-05:00

You can see Wolf Parade play on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson over at Prefix. Do you like this band? Leave a comment.

jon stewart hosting the oscars?

2006-01-07T11:01:00.000-05:00

You'd better believe it - he even mentioned it on his show. Maybe this year I'll actually watch.

The Boston Herald, for one, thinks Jon will lose his "street cred" (I'm serious, they used that term) by accepting the offer. I'm not sure such a ridiculously stated position even deserves a counterargument, but here goes anyway: Street cred?! Does the guy whose filmography includes an unnamed character in Half Baked, a couple of romantic comedies, and some deleted scenes from First Wives Club really have "street cred" to lose?

Anyway, I'm sure his show will be the best thing on television whether or not he hosts the stupid Oscars.

ariel sharon suffers massive stroke

2006-01-05T11:40:00.000-05:00

Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister of Israel, has suffered a massive stroke and is not expected to recover. Many are worried about what this will mean for peace in the middle east, but no-one knows for sure. Sharon was for many years an aggressive general and has been accused of war crimes; in the last few years he has seemed to change his stance, earning praise for such initiatives as the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza strip. The two people most likely to replace him are former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (which would be bad) and Amir Peretz (which might be good).

for everything, turn turn (etc)

2006-01-04T23:51:00.000-05:00

This blogger has put together a bunch of photographs out of a window in Norway into a time-lapse video showing the passage of seasons over an entire year.

Try not to let it phase you.

that sand just keeps falling

2006-01-04T23:48:00.000-05:00

Here is a game, of sorts, to play, sort of. A good hint is that there is no actual objective: just play around with what you can do. Notice also the controls at the bottom. It's called Falling Sand.

stephen harper is afraid of king kong

2005-12-27T20:30:00.000-05:00

Stephen Harper, the leader of the Conservative Party, has a new proposal to help cities deal with giant escaped primates: army units for Canadian cities. These "territorial defence units", ready for an urban emergency such as a huge ape rampaging through downtown Winnipeg, would also be available for foreign operations.

The idea came to the charismatic right-winger after he brought his children to see King Kong, the new blockbuster hit from director Peter Jackson. The movie, which features an enormous gorilla wreaking havoc on New York City, scared Harper into a realization:

"It could happen to us," he told reporters outside the theatre. "Any one of Canada's enterprising young movie directors could travel to an island inhabited by monsters, find a big, dangerous monkey, and bring him back here. I don't want my son held in the leathery grip of an overgrown chimp as he scales the 12-story Provincial Legislature building in Regina."

Harper also promised that, if he were elected, he would act immediately to push anti-gay-cowboy legislation through the House of Commons.

image ads coming to google

2005-12-21T00:14:00.000-05:00

I have a rule with web advertising: If it flashes, moves, pops-up, pops-under, makes noise or even clashes with a site's color scheme, it finds itself AdBlocked. That means that pretty much the only ads that get through to my browser are Google's text-based, context-sensitive ads. They're also the only ads I've ever clicked - sometimes, if I'm looking for product info, the ads are more informative than the search results.

Sadly, it looks like this may change. This looks like a bad move to me. The reason I use Google is because it's simple, it's slick, and it's fast. If it starts beeping and flashing and taking 2 minutes to load, I'm blocking the ads or finding another search engine. Maybe MSN Search. I gotta hand it to Microsoft on this one: they don't get many things right, but these search results prove their engine is working flawlessly.

Update: Google responds to the controversy (link).

and i'm... back in the game

2005-12-20T23:23:00.000-05:00

Whew.... That was a long, hellish exam period. Let this be a lesson to you, kids: don't try to take six technical courses and direct a play in the same term. Can you spell "brain aneurism?" Good try. Now cross your fingers for passing...

On a related note, I now hate VIA with a blinding, flaming passion. Oh, and U-haul can come too. Yesterday, I was moving from Waterloo to Bolton and then coming home to Ottawa. Here was the plan:

10:00: Rent U-haul, pack my stuff, drive to Bolton.

1:00: Arrive in Bolton, unpack, drive to Toronto.

3:00 - 4:30ish: Arrive in Toronto, return U-haul, take train to Kingston.

6:00 - 7:30ish: Arrive in Kingston to meet my sister after her exam in order to drink forties of St Ide's (we're a classy pair) and catch a ride back with her to Ottawa the following day.

Here's what actually happened:

11:30: Get the U-haul rented after a late city bus and spending over 45 minutes talking to "the new guy", trying to make it clear that I wanted a small, one-way rental. End up with 14' moving truck.

1:30: Finally depart from Waterloo.

3:00: Arrive in Bolton after stressful, granny-like driving with no rearview mirror and big honking blind spots. Will I crush a civic when I change lanes? I don't know! I guess I'll just have to signal, wait 10 seconds and find out!

4:00: Landlady makes it clear that under no circumstances may I have mail sent to "her house", which just happens to house me in a basement bachelor suite. For an exorbitant rent. This necessitates stopping at the post office to set up a PO box.

4:30: Depart Bolton, head into stressful, granny-like driving through Toronto rush-hour traffic.

6:30: Pull into U-haul depot, after missing it twice due to it being completely hidden from view behind an overpass, and spending 15 minutes jockeying a 14' truck at a gas station.

6:45: Pull into U-haul depot for the second time, after a faulty gas gauge results in the tank still not reading "full" even though I caused it to overflow during the second gas station-jockeying escapade.

7:30: Arrive at union station to find that there is no train to Kingston until 10PM. Begin reading The Life of Pi.

11:20: Train begins to move after the "problems with the electrical system" have been worked out. VIA extends heartfelt apology in a bored voice over the static-filled intercom.

1:00: Train stops again, this time in Oshawa, this time due to a freight train using the tracks. Can only laugh hysterically as another heartfelt apology and an offer to credit 50% of the ticket price towards our next trip with VIA is issued by the same bored, static-filled voice.

2:20: Finally arrive in Kingston. Almost finished the novel I started over 6 hours ago. Have irrational urge to torture small animals.

On the upside, The Life of Pi is an excellent read.

iran's new president

2005-12-20T00:32:00.000-05:00

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected President of Iran in June of this year. Since then, his many accomplishments include:

Saying that Israel was a "tumor" that should be "wiped off the map" (link)
Denying the holocaust (link)
Banning "Western music" from state-run TV and radio stations (link)

The BBC has an interesting profile of Mahmoud here. Aside from making a few headlines, though, it turns out Mahmoud might not be all that much of a problem - at least according to this article from the Guardian. Reports of a planned attack by Israel on Iran have surfaced; others have said such a thing is unlikely to happen.

on eavesdropping

2005-12-19T10:21:00.000-05:00

There has been a mess of stories coming out of the States these past few days about Bush and his supposed authorization of the NSA to illegally spy on people. The basic idea is that he authorized wiretaps and other eavesdropping methods on people in America, which would normally require court approval in the form of a warrant. Democrats and Republicans alike are calling for a probe, which is supposed to happen early next year.

Almost on the same day we get this story about a kid from the University of Massachussets getting visited by federal agents, at his parents' house, because he borrowed a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's "Little Red Book". He used it to write a paper on Communism. It's these kinds of stories, I suppose, that made the senate block an extension of the Patriot Act.

(Edit: Or maybe that didn't happen, says Boing Boing.)

Up here in Canada, we don't have a Patriot Act. But some are arguing that our anti-terrorism legislation could allow the Canadian Security Establishment to perform the same types of (formerly?) illegal activities.

the chronic-what?-cles of narnia

2005-12-19T10:14:00.000-05:00

Head on over and watch this video from SNL. It's funny.

Via Waxy Links.

he was wrong, but he'd do it again in a second

2005-12-15T12:55:00.000-05:00

I love this story about Bush "taking responsibility" for his decision to invade Iraq. The gist? The intelligence was wrong, but it was still a great idea, and he'd gladly do the whole preemptive thing again.

Whew! For a second there I thought he was actually going to admit some kind of mistake or something. My favourite quote:

"In an age of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, if we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long."

Maybe this one could use a few helpful edits:

"In an age of terrorism [with no links to the countries we want to invade] and weapons of mass destruction [which didn't exist in the first place], if we wait for threats to fully materialize [which might never happen], we will have waited too long [because we won't have any excuse to invade them]."

That's better. Here's the article.

internet to the rescue

2005-12-15T11:07:00.000-05:00

Have you ever read Optimus Crime? Even once? If so, you may have some valuable files sitting in your browser's cache. Poor old OC lost a bunch of images when their hosting company started sucking. Go on over and help 'em out, if you can.

globe and mail has rss feeds, digs firefox

2005-12-14T21:26:00.000-05:00

The Globe and Mail gets two gold stars today. I somehow only just now realized they have RSS feeds in eight different headings, as well as one for each of their columnists! (I'm sure Optimus already subscribes to the Leah MacLaren feed.) The second gold star comes from their glowing review of Firefox:

"Free, full-featured browser (Windows, Macintosh and Linux) with a built-in news reader. More secure, flexible, easier to use than Internet Explorer. Highly recommended by many independent experts." [their italics, not mine]

I'm going to have to rip one of their stars in half, though, for the ridiculous "Terms and Conditions" you're supposedly agreeing to just by downloading a feed. Oh well.

the war on christmas

2005-12-14T16:36:00.000-05:00

Noted jackass Bill O'Reilly and his friends at Fox have been stirring things up by reporting on "The War On Christmas", as mentioned a few times on recent Daily Show episodes (1, 2, 3). Turns out most of their claims are utter garbage. Not surprising, but this swearword-laden rant is still hilarious and pretty accurate. An excerpt:

"...Pat Buchanan has joined the hype-a-thon of the supposed Attack on Christmas, too. Or, as he put it, 'What we’re witnessing here are hate crimes against Christianity.' Sorry? We’re not so hot on paying for an inflatable camel for your goddamn nativity scene and suddenly we’re Slobodan fucking Milosevic? F*** you. Get some goddamn perspective, you little pr***. When they start hunting Christians in the streets, it’ll be time to start yelling 'Hate crime.' And no, it won’t count when they start chasing you with the torches. That’ll be called 'The Most Wonderful Time of the Year.' "

I've edited out the swearwords, because they tend to make Jared cry.

a.k.a. my christmas list

2005-12-14T14:57:00.000-05:00

A trio of Canadian music bloggers (Greg of Are You Familiar?, Jay Watts of Goldkicks, and Stuart Berman of Eye Magazine) have put together this list of The Alternative List of Canadian Bands By A Few of The Other Canadian Bloggers. I confess I don't know what the list is an alternative to, but it's still excellent. Certainly a lot more hopeful than those lists of the best bands in America.

and by cool, i mean totally sweet

2005-12-12T15:50:00.000-05:00

This game is pretty fun: The Way of the Ninja. I found it on Good Experience's list of fun flash games.

Don't forget to also go check out the wonderful new game Samorost 2, sequel to the almost-as-good Samorost.

torrents vs television

2005-12-12T15:46:00.000-05:00

BTSeasonPass is a site where you can easily create an account to track all the latest torrents from your favourite tv shows. I only use it for Family Guy episodes, but it seems to have a lot of good stuff. There are already more than ten torrents for last week's show.

To download torrents, of course, all you need is the very simple and free BitTorrent downloader.

sideshow beast

2005-12-10T13:27:00.000-05:00

Apparently Kelsey Grammer (aka Frasier, aka Sideshow Bob) is playing The Beast in the new X-Men movie. Sure, Beast is supposed to be all intellectual and everything, but he's also supposed to be something of a beast. Penny Arcade had something to say about how easy it'll be for people not to think of Frasier in blue make-up. You can watch the trailer here.

how many people have ever lived?

2005-12-09T16:05:00.000-05:00

That is exactly the question that occurred to me the other day, for reasons which will remain unexplained. Turns out the internet has a few answers. At least one of them uses the same methodology a friend of mine had come up with (with some more accurate numbers). By both official-looking estimates I saw, there have been about 100 billion human births in the past five hundred to one million years (yes, the number does not change a lot if you double the time span). That puts the current world population at about 6% of the total.

Here's a link to a pretty official-looking article, which uses UN numbers. For the more mathematically inclined, here is a page about how a guy named Keyfitz went about calculating the number.

local boys make it big

2005-12-08T11:14:00.000-05:00

Following closely on the heels of Montreal's recent success at the International Scrabble Festival (see previous post), a relatively unknown up-and-coming local band is once again giving our fair city something to be proud of: The Arcade Fire are nominated for two Grammys this year. They're up against Beck, Death Cab, Franz Ferdinand and the White Stripes in the "Best Alternative Album" category, and that song they did for Six Feet Under is nominated for "Best Song Written For Motion Picture, Television Or Other Visual Media".

In case you missed it here a while back, here's the song in question.

Arcade Fire - Cold Wind [2.9 MB mp3]

To be fair, you can also buy the soundtrack or the 7" (with a cover of "Brazil").

mars rovers turn 1

2005-12-05T12:59:00.000-05:00

Today is either the first or almost-second anniversary of NASA's Opportunity rover's arrival on mars - depending on which planet you base your calendar on. The rover has been on the Red Planet for 687 earth days, or one martian year. The second rover, Spirit, hit the same landmark 3 weeks ago. Their original missions were each scheduled for 90 days.

The rovers represent a giant leap forward in data gathering for planetary science. Among their discoveries include soil and atmospheric composition data, establishing a geological history for Mars, and most importantly finding numerous indicators that liquid water once flowed there - lots of it.

almost demolished

2005-12-04T17:07:00.000-05:00

This video of an unsuccessful building demolition is great.

Via Boing Boing.

keeping madness at bay by mercilessly learning everything in sight

2005-12-01T13:03:00.000-05:00

Dear readers, you are witnessing a result of what is known on campuses (campi?) around the world as "Hell". Official title: Final Exam Period. Studious students all, us SFB contributors will not be posting very often for the next two or three weeks.

What better time to point out once again the wonder of RSS feeds? Using something like Google Reader, or Firefox's built-in RSS reader, or (my personal favourite) Feedreader, you can easily subscribe to Small Flightless Bird's RSS Feed. Instead of checking this site compulsively, let one of these totally free programs tell you when there's a new post. It's that easy!

my governor is a jewish cowboy

2005-11-28T22:46:00.000-05:00

Good lord I hope Kinky Friedman wins the gubernatorial race in Texas! I can't think of a better way to kick off 2006 than installing a Texas Jewboy in the governor's mansion. Of course, he'll need to get on the ballot first, which in Texas can be a difficult proposition. More on this as it develops.

this election's hot-button topic

2005-11-28T17:09:00.000-05:00

Paul Hellyer, former Canadian Minister of Defence and Deputy Prime Minister under Pierre Trudeau wants you to start thinking seriously about aliens. The following comments come from a speech given at the University of Toronto last month:

"UFOs, are as real as the airplanes that fly over your head. ...I'm so concerned about what the consequences might be of starting an intergalactic war, that I just think I had to say something ...The secrecy involved in all matters pertaining to the Roswell incident was unparalled. The classification was, from the outset, above top secret, so the vast majority of U.S. officials and politicians, let alone a mere allied minister of defence, were never in-the-loop.

The United States military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens, and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning. The Bush administration has finally agreed to let the military build a forward base on the moon, which will put them in a better position to keep track of the goings and comings of the visitors from space, and to shoot at them, if they so decide. ...The time has come to lift the veil of secrecy, and let the truth emerge, so there can be a real and informed debate, about one of the most important problems facing our planet today."

There's more to the story, of course, but I'm still not sure exactly why Mr Hellyer seems so convinced of the existence of aliens. Maybe the US gave him access to those top-secret Roswell files after he was Minister of Defence.

Anyway, a few organizations are now lobbying the government to hold hearings into the matter. Will this stuff overshadow the Gomery inquiry, climate change, native rights, health care, education, and potholes in the hearts and minds of voters? Only time will tell.

Read the full article here. (Glibness aside, we here at SFB are still very much opposed to the weaponization of space.)

yes, it is our fault

2005-11-26T13:16:00.000-05:00

A couple weeks ago I was speaking to a friend of mine, and the topic of global warming came up. I was astonished to hear that while all evidence points to rapidly increasing global temperatures and sea levels, she believed that this was likely due to natural processes, not humanity. It was rather frightening to hear, because this friend is in Environmental Engineering and plans on becoming a lawyer - in all likelihood, she will be one of the people creating legislation to control greenhouse emissions 20 years down the road.

I decided that perhaps I was misinformed, and resolved to do some research as soon as I had a chance. Well, before I even had the chance, research landed on my lap care of Slashdot: According to a European study of a 3km-long antarctic ice core sample that dates back 650,000 years, "carbon dioxide levels today are 27% higher than they have been in the last 650,000 years and levels of methane, an even more powerful greenhouse gas, are 130% higher".

Another recent study from Rutgers University in New Jersey has found that sea levels have been rising steadily at about 1mm/year since the last ice age. Except for the past 150 years, when humans started burning fossil fuels - since then, the rate has doubled to 2mm/year.

This article provides a decent summary of both studies. They all say basically the same thing: It's real, not fake; it's getting worse, not better; it's our fault, not natural.

I'm not a fan of doomsday scenarios, and there sure are a lot of tree-hugging wackos out there presenting a lot of bad science. But it bugs me when certain people consider peer-reviewed scientific papers extremist, and filter news to keep the public uninformed. The message: Wake Up.

no joke

2005-11-24T22:42:00.000-05:00

Over at the Bicycle Forest they've got a lot of crazy bikes... There's a bike that you row down the street, there's a couch bike, and strangest of all, there's the treadmill bike. Go check out the weirdness for yourself, but don't miss this video of somebody taking the treadmill bike over a 'sweet jump'.

"When the weather's nice, the last place you want to be is cooped up in some stuffy gym. Imagine running through evergreen forests or strolling down country roads. All of this is possible thanks to the rugged design and all terrain tires on the revolutionary Treadmill Bike."

parkour

2005-11-23T14:01:00.000-05:00

I'm mostly posting this right now so that I might spare some of you from having to see that picture of the world's ugliest dog that Jared put up just below this post.

Parkour is about treating the landscape around you as a bunch of physical obstacles. Described by founder Sébastien Foucan as a "philosophy", "way of life", and "state of mind", it tends to look more like a bunch of guys just jumping around like crazy. But they make cool videos! Here's one starring Parkour hotshot David Belle. His site seems to be down right now, but at one point it also had links to some more good videos to watch.

Via this particularly bizarre episode of Achewood, to be fair.

hideous monster finally dies

2005-11-22T16:55:00.000-05:00

The three time winner of the "worlds ugliest dog" contest has been put down, after the owner was informed that his heart was failing. To see him in action, watch this video of a CNN segment about "Sam", a pure breed Chinese Hairless. Let this be a lesson to all you pure-breeders out there. From the video segment

"I think one of his most attractive features is his hernia lump"

Sam was also blind. You can read more about him at his own website if you dare.

montreal (ten points, plus fifty for using all seven letters)

2005-11-21T13:40:00.000-05:00

(Oh wait, proper nouns aren't allowed.) Finally, something to really put Montreal on the map: local boy Adam Logan has won the 2005 World Scrabble Championships in London, England. The thirty-year-old cruised to the finish with the words "qanat" (52 points) and "twistier" (140 points).

Congratulations, Adam! We here at SFB will be rooting for you at the 2006 Winter Olympics!

full disclosure

2005-11-16T16:55:00.000-05:00

Small Flightless Bird is now using Google Analytics to keep track of how many people visit the site and where they come from and such. There has been some discussion about whether this should be worrying and how to make sure you're not tracked, which you may feel compelled to read.

two things to watch

2005-11-15T16:27:00.000-05:00

1. Via the irrepressible Boing Boing, why not head over and watch this flash animation of a person being sketched? It is much more interesting than it sounds. If I knew anything about it I would tell you, but that would require me being able to read Russian.

2. Via the irascible Internets, you can go see this distracting video called Shingo. Once again, I don't know nothing about it except that it was great.

canuckian election

2005-11-14T13:00:00.000-05:00

Hey Canadians! Did you know we might have to go vote in a federal election on December 20th? Yes, I agree, that would suck.

The good ol' CBC has the rundown of the events leading up to this current situation right over here. As it stands, if Paul Martin doesn't call an election soon, the opposition parties might bring down his government sometime this week. Jack Layton finally joined forces with the Bloc and the Conversatives when Paul Martin's health care offer was deemed not strong enough to stop the privatization of health care services.

The upshot: either (a) an election before Christmas, which is unlikely; (b) an election in February, right after the release of the second report into the sponsorship scandal, with official campaigning starting a week into the new year; or (c) Martin's initial promise of an election two months after the second report.

bush vs revisionism

2005-11-14T12:44:00.000-05:00

Now Bush is all angry at people who claim he said things about "weapons of mass destruction", or something, before the Iraq war began. According to him, these opponents of his are trying to "rewrite history".

I was thinking of taking a bunch of time to find all kinds of quotes where Bush says one thing and then contradicts it years or minutes later, but I think we've all seen enough of that. Instead, I will comment on the headline of the article I just linked to: "Bush slams Iraq war 'revisionism'". It's fairly common to use the word "slam" like that in a headline, but come on: did Bush really just "slam" revisionism? Did he pick up revisionism, turn it upside-down, and hurl it to the mat?

We report, you decide. Leave us a comment.

Update: David Corn successfully picks apart the speech so that I don't have to: Bush Rewrites History To Criticize His Antiwar Critics

yo yo yo, give us our dough?

2005-11-13T15:43:00.000-05:00

Two young guys in BC are trying to set up a boycott of McDonalds on December 3rd to put pressure on Washington to return $5 billion in tariffs collected illegally on softwood lumber. McDonalds responded by pointing out that most McDonalds in Canada are owned by Canadians and employ Canadians.

The company also emphasized that it sells hamburgers, not lumber.

more time wasting

2005-11-13T14:19:00.000-05:00

God do I ever love weekends. I just spent half an hour reading Tricks of the Trade, a collection of little tricks submitted by various professionals or simply interested parties. For example, a window washer writes

Wash each side of a window in a different direction, e.g. left-right in the inside, up-down on the outside. Afterwards, if you see any streaks, you'll immediately know what side of the glass they are on.

And an emergency room nurse wrote

Sometimes when a patient is in pain, the doctor will order a weak medication or a very small dosage, mix it with a lot of saline, put it into a huge syringe, and make a big show of injecting it slowly into the IV. The mind is an incredible thing: most patients say their pain is alleviated immediately.

Most of these techniques are completely outside the range of anything I would ever do, but they're endlessly fascinating to read. Then again, some of them are things I wish I'd known say, yesterday when I was putting finishing nails into a Backgammon board I made.

Use a small tooth comb to hold small nails in place when hammering. This will keep your thumb and other fingers out of harm's way.

the conditional jew

2005-11-12T17:40:00.000-05:00

This essay over at Killing the Buddha (which I could have sworn I'd blogged about before, but I gues not) really struck a chord with me, especially the line:

Adult Children of Hippies, I call my caste, and, more specifically, those who think Jewish jokes are funny, whose families were once really Jewish, long, long ago.

It's an interesting distinction - is "Jewish" a description of your religion, or your race? Is it how you pray or the size of your nose? From the article: "I'm not really a Jew," said my grandma when I asked her the question, "I'm Jew-ish."

Either way KtB always delivers with the essays. If you're Jewish, Catholic, Buddhist, Athiest, Agnostic, Mormon, Muslim, Pentacostal, Hindu (or what have you) you should stop by and browse their archives if you're trying to kill time at work.

this fusion ain't cold

2005-11-10T02:12:00.000-05:00

The Open Source Energy Network has an interesting article about focus fusion - a new type of fusion reactor in development that sounds very promising.

For the past 25 years, fusion research has focused almost exclusively on the tokamak reactor - a giant donut that holds 200-million-degree deuterium-tritium plasma suspended in a magnetic field and uses it to produce heat and drive a turbine. This process uses the same heat-engine based approach to power generation as coal - it just replaces a coal furnace with a fusion plant. The deuterium-tritium reaction also produces high-energy neutrons, which leave the plant radioactive. Not to mention that the fuel, tritium, is the same stuff used in H-bombs.

The focus fusion reactor uses a very different approach. The details are on the website, and they explain it much more fully than I can here. But the gist of it is that they fuse Boron-11 and a hydrogen atom using a device called a plasma focus, leaving 3 helium atoms and no radioactive by-products. Rather than letting these atoms collide with a tank of water to produce steam, they are directed in a beam to a sort of reverse particle accelerator that converts the fusion energy directly to electricity. If you've taken any thermodynamics, you know that heat engines are inefficient by nature. Bypassing the steam-turbine cycle not only reduces cost, it makes for a much more efficient process.

Perhaps the best thing about the idea is that power plants based on the plasma focus would be small and cheap - $500,000 and the size of a two-car garage. These small plants could be built in a much more distributed way than current power stations, helping to avoid things like the blackout of two years ago. It would also enable developing countries to generate significant amounts of power relatively cheaply. The project is still in the R&D phase and has yet to produce a break-even prototype. But their proof-of-concept is quite impressive. Take a look.

how much serotonin do you need to be happy?

2005-11-09T16:49:00.000-05:00

I've been interested in brain chemistry since I first read a psychology textbook, but in the last five or six years my interests have shifted from changing my own brain chemistry to the ways in which corporations change the brain chemistry of millions of people every year. I recently stumbled upon one of the best summaries of antidepressants effectiveness I've ever read.

The story starts in the sixties, when a deficiency of serotonin was hypothesized to be the cause of depression and anxiety. But as it turns out, "contemporary neuroscience research has failed to confirm any serotonergic lesion in any mental disorder, and has in fact provided significant counterevidence to the explanation of a simple neurotransmitter deficiency." The brain is incredibly complex, and it is not yet understood exactly what function serotonin has in the brain, and a proper "chemical balance" has never been identified.

Why then does this theory still seem to hold water? Because drugs that increase the levels of serotonin in the brain appear to reduce depression. Don't they? Well, it appears that the evidence that antidepressants cure depression at all may have been seriously inflated by drug companies making billions from marketing drugs directly to consumers.

"Irving Kirsch and colleagues, using the Freedom of Information Act, gained access to all clinical trials of antidepressants submitted to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by the pharmaceutical companies for medication approval. When the published and unpublished trials were pooled, the placebo duplicated about 80% of the antidepressant response; 57% of these pharmaceutical company-funded trials failed to show a statistically significant difference between antidepressant and inert placebo."

I can't really do justice to the article here, but it is a peer reviewed paper and well sourced. Its not long, and well worth the read.

curse of the iceman

2005-11-07T21:04:00.001-05:00

I read a book once about the discovery of Oetzi the "iceman", but I'd never heard about the curse until today. Apparently "the amateur climber who found Oetzi in 1991, Helmut Simon, was killed during an unexpected blizzard in the Alps last year, not far from the original find." Which is not really all that strange, except that:

"Four other people associated with Oetzi have died, prompting rumours of a 'mummy's curse':

Rainer Henn, 64, a forensic pathologist who handled the body. He was killed in a car crash the following year.

Kurt Fritz, the mountaineer who led Dr Henn to the body. He was killed in an avalanche shortly after Dr Henn died.

Rainer Holz, 47, a filmmaker who made a documentary about removing the body from its block of ice. He died of a brain tumour soon afterwards.

Konrad Spindler, 66, an archaeologist who was a leading expert on the body. He died of complications related to multiple sclerosis."

And now Tom Loy, 63, a doctor who had analysed the mummy's DNA has somewhat mysteriously died in Australia.

causal friday

2005-11-07T09:51:00.000-05:00

This is a comic called Savage Chickens; it consists of chicken doodles on post-it notes. You should go read it sometimes.

a practical alternative to quantum theory?

2005-11-06T01:21:00.000-05:00

When the editors of SFB get together, one of the topics we spend a lot of time arguing about tends to be quantum physics. And yes, it's because we're nerds. Now, you might know about string theory, and if you're really a nerd, you might even have heard about loop quantum gravity. Now there's a new contender in the field of unified theories of everything, but this one has a twist - it might actually be good for something!

Randell Mills, a Harvard trained medical doctor with a degree in electrical engineering, believes that he can use his "Black Light" process to knock the single electron orbiting a hydrogen atom down below the "ground" or most stable energy level. Now, according to quantum physics, this is total nonsense - the ground state is called that because it is the lowest energy state available. The strange thing is, unlike most pseudo scientists, Mills publishes in peer reviewed journals and works out of a reconditioned 53,000 square foot satellite manufacturing plant.

Now, we all know that accurate predictions are the only way to gain acceptance for a theory, but as this space.com article reveals,

"Black-light" emissions Mills' theory predicted for transitions to lower hydrino states "perfectly matched" five spectral lines detected in the dark areas between stars.

Making a strong case for "hydrinos" being the confusing substance known as "dark matter". If hydrogen makes up 95% of the matter we know about, "hydrinos" could make up the other 90% of matter we can't seem to identify. Here's another article about Mills' theories for your edification. If this technology is real, it shouldn't take long to find out, and believe me, I'll be watching this carefully.

chemical weapons arriving on american shores

2005-11-05T13:35:00.000-05:00

Apparently the US Army "secretly dumped 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard agents into the sea, along with 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, land mines and rockets and more than 500 tons of radioactive waste" into the oceans on both coasts between 1944 and 1970. This long, informative and somewhat frightening article tells the tale.

riots spreading in france

2005-11-05T12:24:00.000-05:00

The violence in France appears to be spreading outwards from Paris. It appears that thirty years of racial tension, coupled with new discriminatory policing policies issued by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy reached a head in the immigrant neighbourhoods surrounding Paris last week, and now the violence is being picked up by youths elsewhere in the country.

For some dramatic insight into the motivations for these riots, I suggest you watch Mathieu Kassovitz's prescient 1995 film "La Haine".

Update: The violence is entering its tenth night.

death to idioms

2005-11-03T19:09:00.000-05:00

This was on Livejournal Images (caution: link sometimes contains grainy pictures of nude livejournallers), and comes from lj user withoutcanseco. Image reprinted without permission.

the gomery report

2005-11-01T16:10:00.000-05:00

I'd completely forgotten about the Gomery inquiry, but apparently the report was released today. The result? Frankly, about as exciting as most of Canadian politics. But here are the key points, as I see them:

Jean Chrétien himself didn't really do anything bad, except hire a crooked dude as his chief of staff, a guy named Jean Pelletier.
Paul Martin didn't do anything bad at all.
Pelletier operated the Sponsorship Program with Alfonso Gagliano, who was minister of public works at the time. (Gagliano has since been fired.)
A former bureaucrat named Chuck Guité was the one who actually awarded the contracts, and he favoured friends and Liberal-friendly ad firms.
Jacques Corriveau, a friend of Chrétien's who owned a graphic design company, orchestrated "an elaborate kickback scheme by which he enriched himself personally and provided funds and benefits to the [Quebec wing of the Liberal Party of Canada]."

So, there you go. The system sucked, a bunch of Liberals were corrupt, an unknown amount of money went to the Liberals that was supposed to help fight seperatism. Now the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois are clamoring for an election, and Jack Layton says he needs a few days to think it over.

There will be an election, either in a couple weeks' time or else next spring. I doubt the Gomery report will prove explosive enough to reinvigorate the anti-Liberal sentiment that affected the last election, especially since Paul Martin has been exonerated from any blame. And Stephen Harper seems pretty unpopular, even among Conservative voters. That leaves the NDP and the Bloc: the former might gain some seats thanks to Layton's energetic exploitation of the minority government situation, and the Bloc will probably gain some seats now that the report is out.

Anyway, the CBC has excellent coverage of the Gomery inquiry and report; and a bunch of blogs will probably start commenting on it soon - try this Blogger search.

nba to players: 'don't be black'

2005-10-31T17:28:00.000-05:00

The NBA (or "National Thug Association", to quote Rush Limbaugh) has instituted a new off-court dress policy, which outlaws "headphones, chains, shorts, sleeveless shirts, indoor sunglasses, T-shirts and jerseys and headwear such as baseball caps", according to this BBC article. Some players are arguing that the code specifically targets hip-hop attire.

Said Allen Iverson:

"Guys wearing those clothes don't want to be wearing those clothes. You've got all these guys with different personalities. Everybody has their own style, and it's just unfair when you take that away from people. They're targeting guys who dress like me, guys who dress hip-hop. Put a murderer in a suit and he's still a murderer. It sends a bad message to kids."

Link to full article. I wonder what happens when you put Allen Iverson in a suit?

oh my

2005-10-30T17:49:00.000-05:00

Hanging Mistaken for Halloween Decoration (Associated Press)

look up. look waaaaaaay up

2005-10-29T20:04:00.000-04:00

I like Mars. I like it a lot. One day, I'd like to live there. And this week, I'm the closest I'm going to get for a long, long time (give or take a few thousand kilometers). Mars' orbit has taken it unusually close to Earth - not as close as 2 summers ago, which was a several-hundred year record, but close enough to make for prime viewing. There's even a beautifully timed dust storm to feast your eyes on, if you happen to own a telescope. Myself, I'm just going to be peering at the little disc using my 10x binoculars. It might not show me details, but it makes me feel all warm and longing inside.

indictments ahoy

2005-10-28T23:29:00.000-04:00

It looks like Mister I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby has been indicted, possibly for having the same name as a Muppet. He has also resigned. Karl Rove is still under suspicion. For coverage, try Reuters or AP; for thoughtful commentary, try Fafblog. On Friday nights all you get from me is short, terse sentences. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, geez, pay attention already.)

site redesign and reader survey

2005-10-25T18:04:00.000-04:00

Oh hey, Small Flightless Bird looks different. Maybe it was hackers.

In honour of SFB's one-year anniversary, which was about a month and a half ago, we would like to know what you think about the site. Everyone who leaves us a comment answering any or all of the following questions will receive a free, personalized e-card from one of SFB's contributors, and a hearty yet virtual slap on the back.

Do you like this website?
Are there too many political posts?
Are there not enough political posts?
Do you like how the website looks?
Does Chris use too many commas?
What kinds of posts on SFB do you like best?
How often do you read it?

Note: Our inspiring new header image was photographed by livejournal user atook, who is very generous. It is about energy, just like SFB. See the full image here.

plame cia leak scandal in a nutshell

2005-10-25T00:14:00.000-04:00

SFB has posted once or twice about the CIA leak scandal, but we have yet to try to describe what, exactly, the whole thing is about. Well, if you're curious, this AP article describes all the salient points, and has some good context as well. Plus it's short.

If you're not yet curious, try this for an intro paragraph:

"WASHINGTON - It began with a clumsy forgery, led the president to backtrack on his own State of the Union address, already has sent one person to jail and has ruined another's career as a covert operative."

Covert Operatives! Lies! Jail! Addresses! Forgeries! This scandal has it all, man. Read the full article here.

how to see the world from your desktop

2005-10-21T17:53:00.000-04:00

Taint.org has this awesome selection of nearly-live planetary desktop images. They show the entire earth, the current positions of all the clouds, and which parts of the world are in darkness (with lit-up areas around cities). The image to the right is an example.

This is pretty cool. What's even cooler is that you can easily set up your computer to automatically download the latest image and set it to be your desktop background. Click here to read the rest of this post, where I explain how to do this (for WinXP users).

1. Download and install the Microsoft .NET Framework (it's a kinda big install, but you'll need it eventually anyway).

2. Download WpWebChanger.exe from this page, which was written by Michael Zehrer. He also provides the C# source code, in case you know what to do with it. Note where you saved the file to, but don't open it.

3. Open up the Control Panel, through the Start Menu. Open Scheduled Tasks, and double-click the "Add Scheduled Task" icon. This will open up a wizard.

4. Click "Next", then Browse to the place where you saved WpWebChanger.exe (from step 2). Choose to perform this task daily, every day. Don't worry about the start time - we'll fix that later. Your user name should pop up automatically; enter the password you use to log onto Windows (if you don't use a password, just leave it blank).

5. Once you click "Finish", a new scheduled task will appear in the folder (probably called "Wpwebchanger.exe"). Right-click it and choose Properties. In the "Run:" box, copy-and-paste in the url of the satellite image corresponding to your screen resolution (from this page), after the program path. The box should now say something like this:

C:\WpWebChanger.exe http://taint.org/xplanet/day_clouds_1024x768.png

6. Make sure the "Run only if logged on" box is checked, as well as the "Enabled" box. Under the Schedule tab, choose a start time (e.g. midnight). Click "Advanced". Choose how often you want to update the image (the website only updates the images every hour). If you wanna get fancy, you can now click the "New" button and schedule the task to also run every time you start your computer. Under the Settings tab, you can decide if you only want the task to run after the computer has been idle for a few minutes and other such options.

7. Press Ok. Right-click the task icon and choose Run. If your desktop has not changed after a few minutes and you don't use a password to log on to Windows, make sure the "Run only if logged on" box is checked (see step 6).

tattoo removal

2005-10-21T16:51:00.000-04:00

Tian from Hanzi Smatter has put one of my favourite SNL sketches online. Click to play.