Last week at the Olympics additional evidence was recorded that the President is a bit pervy.

Not that there's anything wrong with a good spanking, but it helps if that's what the recipient is actually expecting rather than a short lesson on volleyball playing.

And everyone should remember what happened in Germany.

Again, there's nothing wrong with massages, but its less wrong when you're not walking to your seat at the G8 summit. On Camera.

The UK, at least, has an internet-based sense of humor about the whole thing. Click through to the Guardian for more LOL bush.

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"Mike Hummer had been a private detective so long he could remember Preparation A, his hair reminded everyone of a rat who'd bitten into an electrical cord, but he could still run faster than greased owl snot when he was on a bad guy's trail, and they said his friskings were a lot like getting a vasectomy at Sears." -- Robert B. Robeson

Yes, it's time again for the annual results of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. An attempt to pay homage through satire of classically bad literature. -- Photo by YardSale

Greg Laden brings an update on the evolution v. creationism debate from a US district court. More at Fox news and the San Francisco Chronicle. As it turns out, all that stuff Christian Colleges are teaching about "intelligent design" doesn't really count as "learning."

If you've got a jones to type xyzzy and teleport to someone's house, the iPhone may be the tool for you. Frotz, available from the iTunes App Store is a z-machine interpreter that allows you to play classic text adventure games on the iPhone and iPod Touch. This is the ultimate marriage of the inconvenience of typing on a phone and the inconvenience of a maze of twisty passages, all alike. -- Touch Archade via Kotaku

In yet another installment of Things That Herald the Coming of Our Robot Overlords, scientists have joined rat brain cells to a robot with the aid of bluetooth. Not only can the disembodied cells control the robot, they can do it at a distance, much like the Reaper program is controled through Skynet. -- too many sources to credit.

And finally, on the topic of green electronics, Samsung is releasing a phone made with bio-plastic. Cellular mulch anyone? Oh, and it's also PVC and BFR free, but hey, bio-plastic. -- via Gizmodo

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Do you remember Winnie Cooper from The Wonder Years? If you're male and about my age, there's a 50% chance you had a crush on her in the 80s. There's also a chance you have kids by now. If you do have a daughter (or a really young girlfriend) and she's old enough to be learning fractions or starting pre-algebra and (this is the tough one for my crowd) likes teen magazines, then Winnie Cooper has a book for you. Make that two.

After The Wonder Years, Danica McKellar took some time off to get a BS in mathematics (suma cum laude even) from UCLA. She's continued with acting in shows like The West Wing and How I Met Your Mother, but she's also done something to help the girls of the world get comfortable with math.

Last year, she released Math Doesn't Suck. This is the first book, to my knowledge, that is targeted directly toward middle-school girls who are having a hard time coming to grips with not only who they are, but what math has to do with them. This year, she released Kiss My Math, aimed at slightly older girls going into pre-algebra. Now I have to admit that I haven't read this book, or Teen Magazine, or Elle Girl, and there's a fair chance I won't but, from what I've heard, she has done an excellent job engaging young girls and even young boys in everyday math.

Her message is pretty simple and is a little beyond the title. Sure, her message starts with "math doesn't suck", but she also covers "you use math every day" and "you don't have to dumb yourself down to make boys feel good about themselves." And honestly, if a young girls role in life is anything, isn't it making boys feel good about themselves?

But seriously, the books are aimed at an age group where kids are just starting to look at the opposite sex as fun rather than icky. Since boys are clueless, girls will often use a tactic of making boys feel good around them to subliminally gain favor with the boys. One common way is to ask question, about math or whatever else, that they already know the answer to in order to make a boy get that "alpha" feeling. Danica's point on this is that, if you're going to ask a boy a question, make it one you don't know the answer to and make that boy work for the answer, that way, he'll feel even better about coming up with an answer and he'll feel even better about you because you didn't ask a stupid question.

More along the lines of math, she asks practical questions like "if that prada purse is $64.00 but it's on sale for 30% off, how much does it cost?" This gets to the root of societal feers about math. We use it every day to make change, make sure we have enough cash in our savings accounts, and make sure the government is getting their fair share. You're already used to using math, how can you be afraid of it?

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This is the final update on my drawing class, since it's over. Though I'll probably upload some more pictures.

I learned many things in that class. One is that 18 to 25 year old girls are inherently attractive. Okay, I kind of knew that already. The most important things I learned were techniques for mark-making. With that, I'm now more able to translate what I want to draw into what I have drawn. I also learned that I can draw reasonably well and that the reason I could never draw people is that I've never had on sit in front of me for long enough. Maybe my drawings aren't as realistic as my photos, but that's okay and I can live with it.

For the last couple projects, I wanted to break with my pattern of trying for photo-realistic drawings. This one was an assignment to create a drawing inspired by song lyrics or a poem we printed out for class. Once I heard the details of the assignment and how they related to content and subject, I thought maybe Soul Coughing wasn't the best choice of bands. At one point, M. Doughty, the lead vocalist, said "Don't listen to our lyrics, they're just there because they sound good."[citation needed] Their lyrics are mostly stream-of-consciousness poetry with meaning mostly imparted by the listener.

The lyrics I brought in were from one of my favorite Soul Coughing tracks, Screenwriter's Blues. Here are some excerpts from the song that were instrumental in creating my drawing.

Exits to freeways
twisted like knots on
the fingers
jewels cleaving
skin between
breasts.

Your Cadillac breathes
four hundred horses
over blue lines
you are going
to Reseda
to make love
to a model
from Ohio
whose real name
you don't
know

...

And the radioman says
it is a beautiful night out there!
And the radioman says
Rock and Roll lives!
And the radioman says
it is a beautiful night out there
in Los Angeles
you live
in Los Angeles
and you are going to
Reseda; we are all
in some way or
another going to
Reseda someday
to die
and the radioman
laughs because
the radioman fucks
a model too

...

as the radioman says
it is 5 am
and the sun has charred
the other side of
the world and come
back to us
and painted the smoke
over our heads
an imperial violet

it is 5 am
and you are listening
to Los Angeles.

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Ever since the first Terminator movie predicted the rise of the machines, some of us have been awaiting our robot overlords. Now that the UK has finished launching Skynet (what were they thinking?) our robotic conquest may not be too far off.

Of course, Skynet is going to need a lot of infrastructure to collect data. It's got sattleites in place and it's got millions of webcams to tap into, but what about areas that aren't always online? Many companies don't have a CCTV network like the UK has. There's also the question of learning about and interpereting the actions of all those pesky humans that escaped the first wave of nukes. Enter more Britts with the Hexapod Emotional Spider Robot.

The programmers have created a system for tracking faces, interpereting emotional content, and reacting to that content. This thing is already advanced enough to be on exhibit at a science museum and it's just a little really quite freaky. Check out this video of it on display at the London Science Museum.

And to think people are giving them weapons too!

-- via io9

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Looks like a video blogwatch today.

Gizmodo has a slow motion lightening video. Wow!

Garage419 has a track test comparing the Dinolicious iPhone app to a commercial accellerometer-based dynomometer.

Greg Laden's Blog has a humorous retort from Paris Hilton regarding John McCain's recent campaign ad.

And Strobist.com has a video from Chase Jarvis giving a 3-minute overview of a commercial photoshoot from contract to delivery.

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The common conception is that women go to the restroom in groups and that the lines are extremely long. Men don't know about that kind of thing so I assume that women don't know what goes on in the men's room. Here's a short public service announcement to help cross-gender understanding.

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Annalee over at io9 linked to an article in New Scientist about an accidental discovery of a screen saver as a test for synesthesia. Since one of the commenters is a color/shape synesthete, we had a unique opportunity to ask some interesting questions.

 5128902158920581920589251298512905
 5892058190285901689508129058901289
 5821595829851920855908519128592085
 8519258920528605189429510289502189
 1020591285202899128951205989028191
 5819108195482901592850621120520895
 5819205890258902125820851925012819
 5812085659402420659600455452810592
 0951228058950198503928190289585208
 8502958102958921029508920195821095

Do you see a random string of numbers? A synesthete may not.

 

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There's a Turkish desert known as "stretchy ice cream" that behaves much like a tank of cornstarch-laden water, only it's frozen and sweet. One of the ingredients is colloquially known as "fox testicles". ScienceFriday.com has video from a meeting of the Experimental Cuisine Collective where they discussed this phenomenon.

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Despite your opinion about whether George W. Bush is a good president or not, you have to admit that he's not a very good speaker. I admire the fact that he improvises a little with his speeches rather than reading everything off cards like we did in High School or like most people do with their PowerPoint presentations, but I think he should spend a little time practicing.

Despite your opinion about whether Steve Jobs is a good manager or not, you have to admit that he's a great speaker. He spends hours during the weeks before an event working on his talk. His keynotes always come across as natural, not forced, and he always gets exactly the reactions he's looking for.

I heard a quote from President Bush this morning on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me that I decided had to be my whiteboard quote of the day:

You're making the choices about whether you want to drive a little extra more or not drive extra more.

This is exactly an example of the little things that make the Liberal Elite feel that they deserve a president that is smarter than they are and that they don't have one. When I went searching on Google to find the quote, I ended up at the Whitehouse.gov press release site where, among other things, they have transcripts of speeches. I know there would be issues with revisionism if these speeches were edited, but there was the statement right in plain text. The other quote I heard was in there too. It's not as much a miss-statement as it is a duh-statement:

The feed stock for gasoline is oil. So when you hear "my gasoline prices are going up," you got to understand the main reason why is because oil prices are going up

I don't know if it makes me an elitist, but I think I deserve better.

 

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