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This was in the Calvin and Hobbes RSS feed yesterday.

I think it applies equally well to Dads and Scoutmasters.

Spinal Tap Engineering.

Today’s XKCD made me laugh out loud. Some problems are marketing and sales problems, not engineering problems.

Spinal Tap Engineering (Click to see original)

Units of measure are sooooo unnecessary.

Uranium ore for sale on Amazon. Stock up for the winter! Now I just need that processing plant.

The funniest part of this is the comments. You really should go read them.

Great Product, Poor Packaging
I purchased this product 4.47 Billion Years ago and when I opened it today, it was half empty.

Great Product but not sold complete
This is a great product but for any serious application, you must also buy this :Oxo Good Grips Salad Spinner
This is so you can centrifuge it and increase its applications.
Good luck!

So glad I don’t have to buy this from Libyans in parking lots at the mall anymore.
I bought this to power a home-made submarine that I use to look for prehistoric-era life forms in land-locked lakes around my home town in Alaska. At first I wasn’t sure if this item would (or could) arrive via mail, but I was glad to see it showed up with no problems. Well, almost no problems.

Unfortuantly my mom opened my mail, because she does not respect people’s privacy. She was pretty upset to see Uranium Ore. After a long argument and me running away from home again, she finaly stopped being such an idiot and I was able to get back to work.

The quality of this Uranium is on par with the stuff I was bying from the Libyans over at the mall parking lot, but at half the price! I just hope the seller does not run out, because I have many projects on my list including a night vision sasquatch radar, an electromagnetic chupakabra cage, a high velocity, aerial, weighted Mothman net and super heated, instant grill cheese sandwhich maker.

If you get bored reading the reviews for the ore, you can check out the Bic pen reviews…

Interesting plot of caffeine vs. calories showed up in my RSS feed. A large mocha frappucino is the same calories as a big mac? Wow. Give me my Americano any day.

How can you tell if you are a real caffeine addict? If all your drinks are found in the lower right corner.

Source

Over at Swans on Tea there was this gem today

The comments on the YouTube video got me thinking:

So if the density of Mercury is 13.5 g/cm³ and we assume Jesus weighed something around 80 kg, then he would be able to walk across a pool of Mercury with less than 6000 cm³ displacement. If his shoes are about the size of the ones I have on, he would sink up to his ankle.

Sometimes it is hard to get your mind around a number. The numbers that have been thrown around in the bailout and stimulus bills are those kinds of numbers. As Richard Feynman said:

There are 10¹¹ stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.

Every one has a hard time when we start working with orders of magnitude or log scales. There is the classic “Powers of Ten” movie that has been around for ages.

So here is a great visual representation of what a trillion dollars looks like. Go ahead and click through, it is mind boggling. That’s $1,000,000,000,000.00, a number that has been reached in not only bailout totals, but also in the stimulus bill totals. So we aren’t even talking about just one trillion. I hope nobody thinks this is real money.

And it isn’t just the current federal administration that is spending like drunken sailors, because here is a graphic that compares the bailout money from Bush’s last months in office to other large spending programs, all in adjusted 2008 dollars, so we are comparing apples to apples. And the numbers come from this.

I know this blog has become a never ending stream of videos and comics lately, but this is too good to share. Maybe it rings true to me these days because I just recently added myself to the ranks of the iPhone users.

I love my phone. I hear that admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery, but if anyone wants to tell me their favorite iPhone app in the comments, I wouldn’t mind!

An anatomy lesson provided by The Brain, of Pinky and the Brain fame.

That ought to keep the little squirts happy.

Thanks,
Pinky

Below is a video where a 9 month old describes entropy to a general audience. This lecture is compressed from 4 hours to 2 minutes.

From Swans on Tea