Friday, December 24, 2010

Interesting emotion

This is a late 1930's photo of hitler I think pre WWII?  I am not sure why I find it interesting.   May be it is because it is a pic of such an incredibly destructive person looking so much like a teenage outcast who can't believe he has made an attractive woman laugh.  
Dinner Party In Obersalzburg

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Fat bike film

This pic is unrelated to the film links below I just like pic's on blogs.   The pic is what happens if you stray from the center of some fat bike trails.  It is often like ridding on top of a skinny table of packed snow.   It is even harder when you auger in after falling on the side of your body.  


Fat bikers like tscheesy and endorondo among others like coast kid are really making some nice videos and posting them on the MTBR fatbike forum.  Here is one from a few days ago: Link 1  for endorondo's film of how some of this was done go here.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Then is now

 Daniel Polevoy made these. 


Why is it that combining Lincoln and Ronald I see my cousin Chip?

The real Kiss


Monday, December 06, 2010

I fixed my phone and so can you

About a month ago I dropped my HTC incredible and cracked the glass digitizer.  $600 to replace straight up without a new contract.  $200 if I wait a year and a half to get a new contract.  $150 and an unknown amount of time to send it away to a place that will fix it.  Or around $60 to order a new digitizer from Repairs Universe.   The repair took a couple of weeks of psyching my self up and about 4 days with it apart to psych myself up of about each next step.  If I had to do it again today the repair  would take about 20 minutes.  The biggest challenges were figuring out how to get all the broken and glued glass off the black part.  Solution was a hair dryer.  Next was figuring out how to work the four ribbon cables.  The digitizer one is plenty big but two of them are so small you just had to use the force to guess if you put them in right and got the tiny clamp on right.  No real direction on how to reattach the new digitizer other than the tech guy saying they have some adhesive strips they didn't sell me on my first purchase.  Solution, clear liquid nails glue.  I only had to take it apart one time after the first attempt because the optical mouse (white thing on the black case on the left of the pic) didn't work.  Likely I did not get the ribbon cable in right.  I added a 16 GB micro SD card to the mix and the phone works like new.

Friday, December 03, 2010

A living fossil of life.

OK the new life finding wasn't exactly like my last post and pic predicted.  NASA did however announced that they have found a life form (bacteria in this case) on earth that is based on different building blocks from every other living thing ever found.  I will not pretend like I even know what I am talking about but I did skim a lot of headlines.  I use a new kind of in depth twitter style research.  I can use more than twitter for information but if I have read more the 140 characters of a news story or research paper I have read too much.  So after doing an exhaustive twitter style research for a few minutes I understand that basically all life  every found has (its DNA?) built up using phosphorous.   The cute little guys in the pic use arsenic.   Yea poison.  This has to be the most bad ass life ever.  Being based on arsenic has a lot of implications about life that I am unaware of and not smart enough to speculate about.  What I am aware of however is that it means life can form in more than the single way we have only every found.   This opens up the where and how life can start dramatically.   It also opens up where we can plausibly look for life on earth and on other planets.   Finally this news makes me speculate (without a shred of concern that I don't know anything about what I am saying) that life or life like structures likely formed in multiple ways on earth in the earlier times of its existence.   Our  phosphorus based life system (and by our I mean every other living thing on earth from bacteria to John Stamos) may be the end of a long line of started only to become extinct life like structures.  As the earths chemical, temperature, and other environment conditions slowly changed into its current state life systems likely began and ended over and over with the phosphorus based system being the fittest for the current state of the earth.  Is the arsenic life structure a living fossil of life itself?

Thursday, December 02, 2010

Are we all aliens?


I don't find it hard to accept that life evolved from something like a single DNA strand or single celled thing all the way into a person.  Way too much evedence to suggest otherwise.  I have however always struggled with how that first DNA strand or single celled thing came into being.   I am sure it did however happen naturally some how and somewhere.   I have often thought it was just about as plausible that it developed elswhere in the universe and ended up here as a cosmic stowaway in commet water or meteor as it was plausible that it happend here on earth since the universe is a lot bigger place with lots of wacky events going on.   Apparently Nasa is going to have a news conference today at 2pm central time to anounce some findings.  I don't think they will be mind blowing but they will likely be relavant to life potentially existing in other parts of the  universe.