Christmas Baby Talk

The high pressure shock front of my last couple of finals and the cold, low-pressure negative phase that followed (concepts which I have promised to discuss), have resulted in no posts for nearly two weeks, leading to one seriously unfortunate consequence: any regular readers have been greeted with Jared Fogel's bright and saggy face for the entire period. Lesson: Negative reinforcement is not a winning strategy when you're trying to build a following.

However, I'm not sure you would have been much better off if I had posted. See, I usually spend Christmas in Arizona with my brother's family, which includes five adorable little girls ranging in age from 3 to 10. Consequently, I spend a great deal of time pretending to be an evil snow monster, alerting unsuspecting victims that according to my watch it is now "tickle time," and generally living life under a pile of over-excited little girls. Generally, after a few days of this, my ability to carry on a normal conversation with adults starts to suffer. For example, two years ago, during my first week back to work after a week in Arizona, I was walking with a colleague and pointed out to him that the color of the folder I was carrying was red. He asked me what the hell I was talking about, and I had to tactfully explain to him that I had temporarily mistaken him for a three-year-old.

Unfortunately, things may only get worse in the future. My sister gave birth to twin daughters six weeks ago, bringing the total number of adorable little girls in the family to eight. (Picture of her growing gang, inset.)

There are upsides, though. They are all getting older, so the conversations/activities are becoming more cerebral and interesting. Last year we started playing Clue, which, it turns out, I absolutely love. In addition, my sister-in-law has decided to form a girls basketball team with her daughters. So, I got to spend some time with niece J. shooting baskets on then new basketball hoop (which I assembled) and showing her how to shoot lay-ups (a necessity for any budding point guard). Great fun!

Anyway, I hope you had a Merry Christmas and a wonderful holiday season. I did!

Meet the New Jared Fogle

Has anyone noticed that Subway's poster boy has gone from this:

to this?

Peter Griffin from Family Guy is featured in Subway's new "Feast Your Face" ad campaign. Though, Jared fans, don't fret - you can still see his smiling face on the healthy choices menu in the restaurants.

Anyway, this turn of events, along with Wendy's introduction of the new Baconator(tm), leads me to believe that this whole healthy-fast-food craze is over. It wasn't so long ago that fast food companies were worried about being the next industry, after tobacco, to get sued for generally contributing to the failure of our national health. Perhaps now that they all have introduced healthy options, like apples and milk in place of fries and pop, they feel they are better insulated from suit.

Of course, there are other possible explanations. Maybe Subway agrees with Sarah Silverman that Jared has become "too preachy." Or maybe there are going to be some changes in upcoming episodes of Family Guy...

Shocking! (In a cool way.)

Via BABlog, here's a great set of photos from the SF Fleet Week airshow. My favorite (below), shows an F-18 flying LOW and FAAAAASTTT..... but how fast?



If you look underneath, you'll see a white V in the water under the plane. If you thought this was from the jet exhaust, you're a little off - it actually starts ahead of the tail. Instead, it the result of the shock wave caused by the plane as it passes through the air, perhaps at supersonic speed. Here's a closer look:

Notice the blurring in the air extending from the plane at an angle above and below. That's the shock front. It is actually a three dimensional cone extending in all directions that moves with the plane. When you hear a sonic boom, it is the effect of that wave crossing over your ears.

The author of the photo says that the plane isn't yet supersonic, but as an amateur appreciator of shock waves, I'm a bit skeptical. I'm baffled at the idea that anything would be able to create a V shaped shock front without being super sonic. Given certain assumptions and the angle of the cone, one (perhaps smarter than I) should be able to calculate just how fast this plane is going.

After I take my Patent Law exam tomorrow and my Business Associations exam Monday, I swear, the first thing I'm going to do (after maybe having a drink and a nap) is look into this thing further and report back here.

Even if I forget, which I might, trust me that it is a damn fascinating effect once you realize exactly what is happening in the air around this plane. But, like I said, for now, you'll just have to trust me (or look it up yourself).

Nerd Sniping

I'm loving xkcd.

Thank God I don't even know how to begin solving that problem.

...better to be silent than remove all doubt.

I'm in the middle of finals so my posts will continue to be short and mindless - but not as mindless as this. This weekend Dana Perino, White House Press Secretary, appeared on NPR's "Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me" and admitted that last October a reporter referenced the Cuban Missile Crisis in a question and..... she didn't know what the Cuban Missile Crisis was! C'mon! Really?!?!

I mean, I've always rooted for her. She seems like a genuinely nice person stuck in the worst job in the world. She's cute too, but I'm just going to pretend that doesn't factor in. But seriously, how does this happen?

I guess stuff like this shouldn't surprise me so much. I've been baffled a lot recently. I keep saying things like, "Don't they remember Watergate?" "Have they forgotten about Vietnam?" etc. Cheney and Bush were alive back then, after all. But then again, maybe they prefer to just forget and surround themselves with people who never knew.

At any rate, a quick shout-out to Marty, who for some misguided reason thinks girls with "long hair = good / short hair = not as good as long hair." I think this is a shallow oversimplification of the wonderfully nuanced subject of female beauty. Some women look better (great even!) with short hair. Take a look at this old picture of Dana Perino for an example.

Chip Reese dead at 56

The poker world lost a legend this week. David "Chip" Reese was perhaps the greatest cash game player of all time. In 1974 Chip visited Vegas on his way to begin law school at Stanford, but he quickly found that the old pros were playing 7 card stud all wrong. The $400 he brought with him ballooned to $66,000, and he decided he couldn't afford not to stay.

Because Reese played in relatively few tournaments, he was rarely seen on television even during the recent poker-boom. Instead, he played the biggest cash games in Vegas with minimum stakes exceeding $100,000.

Poker draws a lot of wild personalities, but by all accounts Chip was a mild-mannered, generous, and considerate person who knew the "object of the game." An excellent, if reluctant, ambassador for professional poker.

Science. It works, Bitches.

From xkcd.

Best Sequel Ever!

Here is the new trailer for Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay staring Harold, Kumar, and, of course, Neil Patrick Harris as Neil Patrick Harris. Enjoy!

Due to adult language and content this video is Not Safe For Work (or Mom).

So This Is What Philosophers Do...

Mary Midgley writes a great article strattling the devide in the ongoing debate over Intelligent Design and Evolution entitled: A Plague On Both Their Houses. Here's an excerpt:

Any apparent clashes between [religion and science] must... arise either from faulty religion or faulty science, or both....

It should surely be obvious that there is nothing scientific about atheism. God’s existence is not a question for the tests of physical science; it belongs to metaphysics. What is wrong with fundamentalism is not its theism – theists do not need to take this line – but its sheer irrelevance. Fundamentalism is a perverse attempt to use a particular, bronze-age Hebrew vision of God to resolve factual questions in science and history. Opponents who answer fundamentalism on its own terms by arguing against this mixed project as a package-deal merely perpetuate its characteristic confusion between the realms of fact and meaning.

She nails it. Big tip of the hat to Uncommon Descent, a shameless disingenuous ID rag. :)

I Wish I Was the Walrus

"You can break 6 of the 10 commandments in America, but please, Thou Shalt not Violate the Brand." - David Brooks, No Sex Magazines Please, We're Wal-Mart Shoppers

Consider a man, we'll call him Bob. We don't need to know anything about Bob except that he has been charged with a crime. Bob spent Monday night in jail. Now it is Tuesday morning and Bob is sitting on a bench in the courthouse, wearing handcuffs and shrouded in the presumption of innocence, awaiting his hearing before a judge.

He will have to wait a little longer. Two teams of sharp-dressed lawyers have swept past him into the courtroom, jumping him in the queue. It so happens that late Sunday a phone company started running ads in prime time television that portray a talking walrus in a negative light. Unfortunately, this talking walrus looks alarmingly similar to the talking walrus another company uses to sell mops. The mop company filed for a preliminary injunction on Monday to protect the integrity of their own fictional talking walrus. To prevent any further harm to the fictional talking walrus, the court has granted the companies an immediate hearing.

Meanwhile Bob waits on the bench, in handcuffs and shrouded in the presumption in innocence. Maybe he attempts to figure out how much harm accrues to his own reputation every hour he remains charged with this crime and whether it is more or less important than the reputation of a fictional talking walrus.