If you happen to live in Kalamazoo, Michigan, some local filmmakers are auditioning for parts in Fanboy, an episodic show about, well, fanboys.
Auditions are March 11, 2006 from 4:00 to 8:00 p.m. at Fanfare Sports and Entertainment, 4415 S. Westnedge.
Jim Roepcke posted a link yesterday to this YouTube video which shows the ridiculous load time for Smackdown vs. Raw 2006 on the PSP.
Whoever did the video put a nice musical loop and some funny text commentary overlayed on top of the load screen.
From startup to actual playing in season mode takes 6 minutes, including a couple of loading areas that seem done to provide superfluous graphics.
Update: The video has been removed from YouTube, but can be found at Google Video.
Interesting — turns out there is actually a Toy and Action Figure Museum in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma. It just opened this past October.
According to its mission statement page,
Our mission is to educate & excite visitors with a comprehensive collection of classic “pop culture” toys, with an emphasis on the social & historic evolution of the action figure & to serve as a catalyst for the economic revitalization of historic downtown Pauls Valley.
It is the goal of the museum to pay tribute to the designers, sculptors, and toy companies that have turned action figures from a child’s plaything to a work of art.
Nice idea for a museum. Lousy idea for a downtown revitalization project.
Not sure why, but Glenn Reynolds links to this ignoramus about the it’s ricin/it’s not ricin series of events at the University of Texas.
Short version — a student there found a white powdery substance in a roll of coins. Initial state tests suggested it was ricin, but further tests by the FBI confirmed that it was not ricin. This seems to be a fairly common pattern with ricin tests, which makes you wonder why they even bother with the preliminary tests if it is so unreliable.
Anyway, this Associated Press article notes,
“There were no proteins in there to indicate it was in fact ricin,” Salinas said. He said was unlikely further testing would be done.
Texas health officials did “just a quick test and they don’t check for the proteins in ricin,” Salinas said.
This seems pretty straightforward, but not to the ignoramus blog who writes,
If they didn’t check for ricin in the first place, why are we having this discussion? Obviously, someone checked for ricin proteins… and allegedly found them.
The AP story that the ignoramus links to is poorly written and annoying, but nowhere does it claim that a) officials tested for ricin proteins, b) much less found them. That is something that the ignoramus is simply inventing out of whole cloth.
Hint: there might be a quick test for possible ricin contamination that looks for some sort of marker common in ricin but avoids actually testing for the specific protein. Perhaps this is why that AP story notes that, (emphasis added),
Preliminary tests for ricin came back positive Friday.
I was curious what sort of field tests for Ricin might exist. It turns out that the test that was likely used is something Osborn-Scientific’s ricin test. Rather than attempt to detect the ricin protein directly, which can take days, the test involves taking a sample of possibly infected material, exposing it to a culture, and then testing for the presence of anti-ricin antibodies which should emerge if ricin is really in the sample. But the test results in a pregnancy test-style readout that gives only very broad information about the possible presence of ricin.
As the detailed insert sheet for the test notes, however, there are any number of conditions, including contamination from non-ricin materials, that can cause the test to be inaccurate. In fact, as the insert notes,
1. There is a possibility that factors such as technical or procedural errors,
as well as other substances in the samples may interfere with the test and
cause erroneous results.. . .
A positive result indicates the sample probably contains
Ricin toxin above the cut-off concentration.
A number of other companies manufacture similar fast tests for ricin that use similar methods. They are useful for quick evaluations — if it tests positive, as it did here, then the people exposed need to take medical precautions — but the test is not good enough to guarantee that the sample does indeed contain ricin and it does not measure directly the presence of ricin proteins.
So how do they test for ricin once the sample is sent to a laboratory? According to the CDC,
What tests can be done for ricin in environmental samples
When a reference laboratory receives an environmental sample suspected of containing ricin, the laboratory performs specific tests to detect the presence of the agent. Tests performed on ricin-suspicious samples include the following:
- Time-resolved fluorescence immunoassay: In this test, the laboratory technicians use an antibody that binds to ricin to enable them to detect it in environmental samples.
- Polymerase chain reaction (PCR): PCR is a test used to locate and make copies of parts of the DNA contained in the castor bean plant. The search can specifically look for the DNA of the gene that produces the ricin protein.
Based on all of this, the logical conclusions is that the initial tests performed by the local officials were looking for ricin antibodies, whereas the FBI did a full PCR test which would directly measure the presence (or lack thereof) of ricin protein.
Perhaps some folks might want to rename their sites the “Why Keep On Blogging If I’m Not Going to Use My Brain or Google” Generation.
According to this Associated Press story, some Christian evangelicals have reached the conclusion that Pat Robertson’s regular outbursts may actually be damaging their movement. No, really?
You mean that saying federal judges are more dangerous than Al Qaeda might turn people off? Saying that Ariel Sharon’s death was God’s punishment might be a bit off-the-wall? Or that the U.S. deserved the 9/11 attacks might alienate people?
The Associated Press quotes Brin Britt of the Religious Studies Program at Virginia Tech who offers a functional explanation for why Robertson says nutty things like that,
On the other hand, Brian Britt, director of the Religious Studies Program at Virginia Tech, said Robertson’s remarks aren’t just “off-the-wall, crazy uncle stuff” but part of a strategy that earns him headlines.
When people attack Robertson, he wins sympathy for appearing to be an underdog, Britt said.
“It reinforces an image of Christianity as a persecuted religion, a religion that is being hounded by the secularists out of the public square, rather than a dominant and hegemonic force,” Britt said.
But Robertson’s statements probably do both. On the one hand, even at his nuttiest Robertson never appears anything but extremely sincere. On the other hand, such extreme remarks do create the sympathetic feelings from hardcore followers which then reinforce Robertson’s willingness to say such things in the future (whereas, if his followers were reacting negatively then he might think before sharing his more extreme views) as well as radicalizes the base making them more likely to accept such pronouncements.
This is a common dynamic that you see, for example, with extremist animal rights organizations. Groups like PETA genuinely believe the more extreme statements, but the reason they continue to make extreme statements over time is because of the positive feedback they receive from their followers. At the same time, this also gradually pushes the range of statements that followers are willing to accept.
Source:
Pat Robertson Accused of Damaging Movement. Sonja Barisic, Associated Press, February 18, 2006.
Merlin Mann has several interesting tips for running more productive meetings.
The only suggestion I had real issues with was #4,
No electronic grazing. Period. – Laptops closed. Phones off. Blackberries left back in the cube. YouÂ’re either at the meeting or youÂ’re not at the meeting, and few things are more distracting or disruptive than the guy who has to check his damned email every five minutes.
If I’m at a meeting and I’m using a laptop it is because I’m taking extensive notes on what is being said and what was agreed to (it never fails to amaze me how a week later a meeting with four people can result in four very divergent views of what was agreed upon — its like a three times a week showing of Rashomon).
I do occasionally see people “grazing” rather than focusing on the meeting, but typically it is because the meeting planners don’t use the other rules that Mann outlines.
Finally, Mann’s end-of-post aside is hilarious for anyone whose ever found themself in this particular situation,
Aside: Understand — this is coming from a man who often was compelled to spend the better part of one day a week on a bi-coastal video conference call with two dozen people. Staring. Wishing death. Listening to the CTO opine at length about how exciting it would be to build and sell a national yellow pages app from scratch. If there had been cyanide capsules on the table instead of M&Ms, I don’t think I would have hesitated to indulge. “Boil the ocean” business models and long meetings are the cocktail for making Merlin wish harm upon himself.
This page has photographs and information about a full-sized pinball machine made entirely out of Legos:
The control system uses RCX units from Lego Mindstorms. Amazing.
Writer Andrew Hearst profiles Richard Dawkins’ latest rantings against religion and concludes (emphasis added),
Tipped off by a thread on Echo, I bittorrented both episodes a few days ago. From the vantage point of the United States, the program is remarkable: You simply would never encounter such a brazen denunciation of religious faith on this country’s airwaves, because the outcry from the religious right would be deafening. Dawkins’s narration drips with contempt; as he goes about his rounds, it’s as if he can hardly restrain himself from shouting, “I’m surrounded by IDIOTS!” The smoke coming out of his ears leaves a trail behind him wherever he goes.
Right. That’s why you never saw someone like Madalyn Murray O’Hair on the Donahue Show during the 1960s and 1970s. That’s why Penn and Teller’s Showtime series Bullshit never features episodes that makes Dawkins’ look like positively moderate (certainly Dawkins does not deploy the F-word to anywhere near the effectiveness that Penn and Teller do).
Meanwhile, much television is blatantly offensive to one religious faith or another because it mocks or rejects their values. But, overall, most television seems to avoid explicit religious or anti-religious overtones for base commercial reasons. Personally, this is not such a bad thing.
Now maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it would be better to have a segment in the middle of What Not to Wear where atheists and Buddhists squared off. Maybe we need to send more pretentious intellectuals to religious services and then make fun of them in prime time.
Frankly, that just doesn’t sound like Must See TV to me.
There’s an EB Games store near where I work. I usually don’t shop there because I can’t stand the layout of this particular store. But I was in a hurry yesterday, so in between a bunch of other errands after work I stopped into pick up a copy of The Sims 2: Nightlife expansion.
I wasn’t surprised when the guy behind the counter told me that they don’t do returns on opened PC software due to piracy. It is a stupid policy, IMO, but whatever.
I became rather pissed off, however, when I realized that this applied to defective media as well. But there’s an out for those of us (like me) concerned about defective media — for an additional $3, they’ll “guarantee” the media against defects and allow such returns.
At which point a two word phrase came to mind which starts with “f” and ends with “off.”
Even Best Buy’s terms aren’t that stupid.
TimeSnapper is like Fraps for day-to-day productivity apps. Fire it up and it sits in the background and takes a screenshot every X seconds and writes that to a directory naming the files sequentially.
The developer bills it as a method for tracking project-related work time,
With TimeSnapper you can play back your week just like a movie. You can play it at any speed you like, and jump in at any time you like.
When it’s time to fill out that dreaded timesheet, TimeSnapper is a savior. No need to tear your hair out trying to remember where all the time went.
Personally, I’m just obsessively drawn to these types of apps.
Anyway, its freeware and on my laptop only uses about 4-5 megabytes of RAM.
