At the Internet Movie Firearms Database for several years its been:
...a website that allows users to find which guns were featured in certain movies, television series, video games, and anime, as well as contribute to the site in a wiki format.
Of course I’m a sucker for the Featured Quotes on the main page:
Staff Sergeant Matt Eversmann (Josh Hartnett): Conserve your ammo, only shoot at what you can hit.—Black Hawk Down
Back when I was working part-time looking for a full-time job it would be obvious I had too much time on my hands. One of the benefits of that time was listening to an absurd amount of public radio. It just so happens one of the newer shows I gained an affinity for I can still enjoy due to the miracle of the internet. That show is A Way With Words.
A Way with Words is a lively hour-long public radio show about the English language. Co-hosts Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett take calls from listeners about linguistic disputes, grammatical pet peeves, the origins of words and phrases, and curious regional expressions. Martha and Grant also do battle with quiz guys from the National Puzzlers’ League.
What makes this show a bit magical is that each shows theme is made up as people call in describing different origins of words and phrases. Sometimes you didn’t know you’ve been curious about an expression until someone else mentions it.
On June 4th 1989 the chinese government shut down pro-democracy protests being held by students at Tiananmen Square in China. Never forget what a few people tried to do for a bit of change and the lengths their government is doing to make sure everyone forgets about it.
The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 culminating in the Tiananmen Square massacre (referred to in China as the June 4 Incident, to avoid confusion with two other Tiananmen Square protests) were a series of demonstrations in and near Tiananmen Square in Beijing in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) beginning on April 14. Led mainly by students and intellectuals, the protests occurred in a year that saw the collapse of a number of communist governments around the world.
The protests were sparked by the death of pro-market, pro-democracy and anti-corruption official, Hu Yaobang, whom protesters wanted to mourn. By the eve of Hu’s funeral, 1,000,000 people had gathered on the Tiananmen square. The protests lacked a unified cause or leadership; participants included disillusioned Communist Party members and Trotskyists as well as free market reformers, who were generally against the government’s authoritarianism and voiced calls for economic change [1][2] and democratic reform[2] within the structure of the government. The demonstrations centered on Tiananmen Square, in Beijing, but large-scale protests also occurred in cities throughout China, including Shanghai, which remained peaceful throughout the protests.
The movement lasted seven weeks, from Hu’s death on April 15 until tanks cleared Tiananmen Square on June 4. In Beijing, the resulting military response to the protesters by the PRC government left many civilians dead or severely injured. The number of deaths is not known and many different estimates exist.[3][4] There were early reports of Chinese Red Cross sources giving a figure of 2,600 deaths, but the Chinese Red Cross has denied ever doing so.[4] The official Chinese government figure is 241 dead, including soldiers, and 7,000 wounded.[3]
It was 72 years ago today when the Hindenburg disaster occurred resulting in the deaths of 36 individuals of which all but one were on the ship. And to make it even stranger is the fact that 72 years later the conspiracy theorist still crawl out of the woodwork about why and how it happened. Don’t get me wrong. Knowing how it happened is a very important yet illusive fact. Just the fact that they argue the difference between static sparks versus sabotage should be enough to make people turn off their televisions for the entertainment value.
The Wired Blog recently had an entry that was an eye opener about using the musical educational songs of The Animaniacs to teach children. I for one was a high schooler at the time when the show was popular, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying it. Hell I even memorized many facts at the time because of it.
Every now and then I remember how much I miss Yakko, Wakko, and Dot. I was a huge fan of Animaniacs, and, while my favorite segment was “Pinky and the Brain,” there are some segments with the Warner brothers and the Warner sister that I still love. It hadn’t occurred to me until the other day to look for the educational songs they did on the show on YouTube so I could show them to my kids….
When it comes to guilty pleasures fast food definitely is in the top five. Here in Texas unless you have the pleasure of driving through West and picking up kolache, taking 281 and stopping at Storm’s, or it being between 11 and 11 for Whataburger breakfast taquitos your choices are the same dribble the remainder of North America can nickel in less than the same amount of minutes.
Recent conversations with friends made me wonder what our recent transplant to Denmark would nibble on while gliding through her new surrounds. This of course lead to researching European fast food and having fond memories of fries in paper cones. Now I really have to stop by Belgium for some street side waffles.
Fast food in Belgium means frites or French fries. Stands serve them in a paper cone accompanied by mayonnaise, bearnaise or curry sauce. Another popular fast food is the Belgian waffle. Stands in outdoor markets bake them with crunchy bits of pearl sugar in the batter.
Anyone who loves to cook knows you have to constantly clean the workspaces in the kitchen to keep it up. The sister and I are both pretty OCD about keeping the kitchen clean. Overall we can probably put full blame/blessings on our mom for instilling that habit in us, but I digress. Apartment Therapy decided to point out 5 overlooked areas of the kitchen that are rarely cleaned probably just to torture those of us obsessed with all aspects of kitchen living, but I’ll think it’s just to satisfy their own hypochondria. Here is a sample:
3. If you’ve got a dishwasher, clean inside it. Pay special attention to areas where dirt can build up, like the rubber seal around the door and the top edge of the door as well.
Link (via Apartment Therapy)
The Art of Manliness has a list comprising “The Unclassified Laws of Etiquette”. Its quite a long list, but here is a sample:
Never send a present, hoping for one in return.
Never speak much of your own performances.
Never fail to be punctual at the time appointed.
Never make yourself the hero of your own story.
Never pick the teeth or clean the nails in company.
Never fail to give a polite answer to a civil question.
Link (via The Art of Manliness)
Created by Train Horn
Can you hear this sound? Don’t feel bad if you can’t because it is a nerve grating tone that can’t be forgotten. I can’t believe I can still hear anything after all the late night parties I attended in my youth in the first place. Its a fun little test though since it is a sound generally only heard by those under the age of 25. Take good care of yourself.
For a limited time Tor is offering a variety of free ebooks and high resolution cover art. Pick and choose. Cheers.
UPDATE: The offer ends on Sunday! Act quickly.
Are you looking for a new job or, like myself, looking for employment that is more your style? Well take this into account….
With the coming recession, I get a lot of questions about whether it will be increasingly difficult for freelancers to get new clients and, more importantly, projects that pay appropriately.
Over the past eight months, the following industries have proved extremely lucrative for freelancers. I categorize them into Spheres.
The industries in the extreme sphere are those that are currently crashing or booming. Why would a crashing industry be a good industry to find clients in?
If you’re a freelancer, you’re less expensive and easier to handle for a struggling entrepreneur or business than an employee would be. Additionally, if you provide marketing services or can help them secure a presence online, they need you.
A recent global study by McKinsey & Company demonstrated that online marketing drastically out-pulled traditional offline marketing in results. 62% of participants rated online marketing as very or extremely important to their company.
Struggling industries must invest in direct profit-producing services like marketing and online tools to survive.
Then it goes on to list said industries. Check it out.
Jeff Atwood has a very detailed post over at Coding Horror discussing the ideals of practicing skills outside of their everyday usage in order to improve yourself. It definitely applies to more than just coding.
Contrary to what you might believe, merely doing your job every day doesn’t qualify as real practice. Going to meetings isn’t practicing your people skills, and replying to mail isn’t practicing your typing. You have to set aside some time once in a while and do focused practice in order to get better at something.
I know a lot of great engineers—that’s one of the best perks of working at Amazon—and if you watch them closely, you’ll see that they practice constantly. As good as they are, they still practice. They have all sorts of ways of doing it, and this essay will cover a few of them.The great engineers I know are as good as they are because they practice all the time. People in great physical shape only get that way by working out regularly, and they need to keep it up, or they get out of shape. The same goes for programming and engineering.
In this Instructables a person can gain the skills to forecasting the weather by looking at the clouds in the sky. This should really be something everyone should know how to do, but in the age of the lazy and moronic Idiocracy seems to become the law of the land.
Cirrus clouds are white wispy clouds that stretch across the sky. By all accounts, cirrus clouds indicate fair weather in the immediate future. However, they can also be an indication of a change in weather patterns within the next 24 hours (most likely a change of pressure fronts).
By watching their movement and the direction in which the streaks are pointed, you can get a sense of which direction the weather front is moving.
Although I wouldn’t apply this rule to anyone of dating material no matter how tempting it may seem, making your bike physically unappealing is a great way to prevent it’s theft. Make realized this as well publishing an article about it in volume 11 of their magazine. The concept is to make it look tacky with stickers and a bad paint job while at the same time pho-ing unkemptness issues like rust and mud. It might be a bit too much to fake the dirt since that is unavoidable, but if you live in an area with high bike theft this would be something to look into. Cheers.
The Boston Globe has a great diagram up about the proper napping method for people. I’m not big on napping, but I love this.
Nick Hasty is calling his thesis project the EM Brace. Its “a wearable device that lets you experience electromagnetic radiation emitted by devices and gadgets that are around us.” Very neat idea.
Link (with video demonstrating it)
Shouldn’t people be taught good manners? This technology can be abused in such a bad way.
“Ars Technica reports that Microsoft has recently applied for a patent for a technology which would attempt to enforce manners in the use of cell phones, digital cameras, DVRs and other digital devices. According to the article the technology could be used to bring common social conventions such as ‘No flash photography’ and ‘No talking out loud’ to these devices by disabling features or disabling the device entirely. The article also points out that the technology could be implemented in situations involving sensitive equipment, such as in airplanes or hospitals. The patent application itself is also an interesting read, as it describes a number of possible uses for the technology, including ‘in particular zones to limit the speed and/or acceleration of vehicles, to require the use of lights, to verify an indication of insurance coverage and/or current registration, or the like.’ While this technology could certainly be of interest to any number of organizations one has to wonder how the individuals who own devices which obey so-called ‘Digital Manners Policies’ would feel about it.”
Nick Carr, the author of The Big Switch, recently wrote an article for The Atlantic questioning whether the usages of new technology are removing intelligence from humans. To tell the truth I follow Egon from Ghostbusters quote of, “Print is Dead,” for the most part due to loving the transition of magazines and newspapers into an online format. Why does this pertain to the article? Well, its not online yet, but has been published. This led to going down to the bookstore to actually peruse the magazine section.
We really don’t want to think like Google. We don’t want to speak like Twitter. We don’t want to converse like email. And yet we increasingly do, as the Internet reshapes the world in its image. Carr writes:
The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition….The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is recreated in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
In a world where education is paramount UK universities are now available on iTunes U.
Educational content is already available in the United States through the non-charging “iTunes U” section of the music downloading service.
But European universities are now joining, providing video and audio material for students to use on iPods or computers.
The service will include recordings of lectures from leading academics.
“Our students will be able to revisit materials presented to them in lectures, so they can learn anywhere and anytime,” says Professor Peter Mobbs at University College London (UCL)...
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