Who listens to this shit?

So yesterday morning when I entered the lab I was subjected to one of the worst forms of cruelty imaginable thanks to someone's poor choice in radio programs. Thankfully it wasn't some conservative talk-show, though at least then the stupidity would have been humourous. And it wasn't one of the MANY religious radio stations that are so prolific in this country. It's really kind of scary how many of those you can find on a road trip through the Midwest. Alas, the source of my torment was possibly even more mindless than those programs, I was subjected to "sports radio"...I still feel unclean to tell you the truth.

Thankfully the whole process only lasted a few minutes, but even then it made an impression on me that won't easily be repressed. Seriously, who listens to this shit anyway? This is what I heard in those few minutes:

• Some crappy advertising - ok, you get that on almost all radio stations, sadly though it was the highlight of my experience with "sports radio."
• Next up was some "music" - this seemed to consist of a remix "The night Chicago died" and sports sounds (i.e. crowd noise, whistles, buzzers and maybe a body check). I didn't know it was possible, but it seems a new circle of hell has been created.
• Then a phone interview - I'm not sure who they were talking to, possibly the bat boy, but the fucker seemed pretty sleepy/hungover while they were discussing the merits of putting in a left hander against a guy who wears socks that are 0.05 mm shorter than most...or some similarly inane line of questioning.

To those of you out there who listen to this crap, for the sake of what little is left of your brains, please stop! You don't need to listen to two washed-up (or never were) jocks who sit on their asses all day discussing the intricacies of the decision made in the 4 inning of game 26 in a season that consists of 162 boring games. Maybe if you spent a little more time listening to something that mattered, like the actual news, this country wouldn't be stuck with a dimwitted president for the second time in a row.

That's it, I quit!

I've had enough! For far too many years now I've been helping people move and I'm now fed up with it.

Sure, it was fun the first few times. It was new and exciting. I never really knew what I was getting into; was there going to be a big leather couch to carry up three flights of stairs, or maybe a fridge?. But there was usually free food and beer after it was all done, except for the one fool who forgot to buy that stuff first and we finished moving after the stores stopped selling beer. Incidentally he's also the one who had the big fucking leather couch; he supervised us moving it upstairs. But aside from that at least I was storing up a lot of favours with friends, surely they would be willing to help me move when the time came

Of course all those favours were shot out the window when I moved away for grad school. So I started all over again. Moving more and more people, learning all the while that I was far better at doing it than they were. After all at one point I realized that I had taken part in a dozen separate moves in the space of eight months. So I tended to take charge when people seemed to be at a loss for how to put things in the truck, or what to move first, or how to get a couch through a narrow hallway. And other than that one wall that we had to bust down, and the couch that had to be subsequently repaired (both related) things went smoothly. I was feeling like a pro and building up a lot more favours. But then I left, again, with virtually no help at all in my moving.

So now after several moves here in the states I'm done. I don't want to have to move your box of broken shit that should have been thrown out ages ago. I'm not going to try and carry yet another large box full of books that weighs more than I do. No more couches to maneuver around corners. No dirty boxes covered in dust from the back of your closets. No more overstuffed, tearing, garbage bags full of clothes. You want to move find some other chump. Because I know that you aren't going to be there to help me move (my job is paying for my next move) and frankly, I'm just frustrated at doing this shit for you for a few slices of pizza!

Fuel efficiency is bad...and dangerous for America

Wow. I always new that the people that ran car companies were fucking assholes, but they are stating to seem more and more like they're Big Oil's bitches.

You can follow this link to a statement put out by the Union of Concerned Scientists about a classy ad campaign that the auto industry has started. It seems that they want to prevent the government from increasing fuel efficiency standards. And how do they do it? Well there are a couple of audio ads that typify the methods.

Ad #1: Use fear of losing our freedom and paint politicians as "others" who don't know what's good for us and want to take away our trucks. I'm surprised they didn't somehow tie it to taking away gun racks and guns.

Ad #2: Use fear again, only this time it's about our safety. They will take away your big safe car and put you at risk. And somehow changing the fuel we use will keep America safer...is that a veiled reference to terrorism? If so wouldn't needing to use less gas keep America equally safe, and sooner than waiting for a magically efficient fuel cell?

It's good to see that the social manipulation lessons that the Republicans have taught us are being put to good use...

They're almost as big as it's head!

So being a research scientist I'm always interested in learning new things and I'm lucky enough to have a job that constantly exposes me to new things. Some of these things are neat, like the process to make nylon, you just simply pull a membrane that forms between two immissible solutions. Other things are just kind of boring, like most chemical syntheses, which result in a clear liquid or a white solid...oooh, how exciting!

Other things however are just fucking odd. Like seeing how big a rat's testicles are!

Now, you're probably wondering why I've been looking at rat testicles, well it's nothing as perverted as you might think. One of the research projects in our group involves studying neurotransmitters in live rat brains. To do this a rat is sedated and laid down with a probe in it's head and it's testicles poking out like leg fat leg stumps next to the tail. And let me tell you, those things are huge, frankly they are about the size of it's head. Now imagine what your life would be like with testicles the size of your head! Just one more reason I'm glad I'm not a rat.

Oh and if you're interested in why rat's have such large testicles there's a web page dedicated to the topic. I haven't read it, though I'm pretty sure it has to do with the need/opportunity to breed a lot; unlike gorillas who have tiny testicles...ok, I know way too much about testicles, I'm going to stop now.

My own stupidity

Yes, I know I should probably be heading to bed right now, not writing a blog for the 7 or 8 of you even bother to read it. But this is a post about my own stupidity, so it only makes sense that I deprive myself of sleep. Anyway, I can sleep on the plane...oh yeah, I'm flying out to Pittsburgh again, but this time it's to bring Deirdre back here for good! Well, at least until we both move to SoCal. Yeah, I know, you're jealous, and you should be ;-)

Actually, after I tell you my little tale of stupidity you probably won't be all the jealous of me and you may even feel some pity for Deirdre and her being stuck with me. But forget that, let's get onto the point.

How many of you know about in-ear headphones? I'm not talking about the horribly uncomfortable, hard plastic, cheap-ass ear-buds that come with most music players. I'm talking about the ones that are specifically designed to actually fit into your ear canal and sit tightly in there; they come with various sizes of soft plastic cap to fit comfortably. Well, if you haven't they are really nice little sound systems. By sitting so close to your eardrum they don't need to put out a lot of sound to seem loud. But better still, you don't need to crank them up because they act as earplugs. By blocking out the outside noise you don't have to play music ridiculously loud to hear it in noisy environments.

Anyway, these earphones fit very snuggly into your ear and they feel pretty comfortable. Well sometimes I'm prone to fiddle with thing, absentmindedly and without regard to any risk. So this afternoon I was sitting at my desk, listening to music and playing with the earphones. The next thing I realized the sound went dead in my left ear, but it felt that the earphone was still in place? Nope, it wasn't in place, I had actually managed to pull the sound system out...leaving behind the soft plastic cap...lodged in my ear.

So of course I don't want to panic, because that will never make things better. I just need to get the cap out, but I can't grab onto any part of it.

Ah! I have a pair of tweezers on my mini-leatherman, that should work. Nope, after trying to get a grip without pushing it further in I learned that the plastic is designed not to stick at all to metal, but will stick to flesh like super glue.

I could ask someone to get it out for me...but that's just kind of lame. And which of the people do I ask to get it out? Some would surely insult and harass me about it for ages to come, others I'm not sure I want to try and trust them with getting something out of my ear.

Fortunately I found that I was able to deform it enough and rotate it sideways so that I could pry the damn thing out. What can I say, I''m just a danger to myself at times.

Dance Monkeys

So here's a video I picked up from Richard Dawkin's web page, originally from YouTube. Either way, it's really funny and quite accurate, so I hope you enjoy it:

My password was censored?

I'm not sure how many of you use online banking at this point, I do and I like it. Of course there is the whole security issue to it, which may or may not be effective. I recall a story from a few months back that the latest practice, having a set image and phrase/word that you select appear to prove that the site is valid, can be pretty easily circumvented...though that was mostly due to individual laziness at not paying attention to the phrase and/or image they were shown.

Well, I'm pretty sure I mentioned this before, but the US banking system is just kind of odd, and frankly it seems a bit antiquated. Hell, I still see people paying for groceries with a cheque, why do this? It takes so much longer and you obviously have an account and the debit reader is right there...but I won't go into the idiocy of tradition in this country. Anyway, I don't know if there are any fully national banks in this country, there are plenty of regional ones, which in my opinion reduces the quality; they don't have the resources and/or expertise to implement effective complex practices.

One example of this is my TCF account; they have taken ages in improving the security measures for the online banking, now I think I found out why it took so long. What I found when I signed in today was an updated security system, requiring you to create a phrase and answers to three questions and you are given a set image (it would have been nicer to chose my own from a list like I did with ING). So this was all good and it looked promising. I made my phrase, selected my questions (laughing at the stupidity of the questions and even suggestions that go with them) and wrote in answers. Then the system had to verify that the answers fit the guidelines, suck as number of characters and no symbols (apparently ! and ' are symbols and not punctuation, so that's good to know), and this is where I learned what took them so long to install the security system. It turns out that it has a LANGUAGE filter! That's right, I cannot chose certain words because they are "inappropriate"!


Who asked the bank so censor my language anyway? After all, I should be the ONLY person to see the words that are used in accessing my account, it's not like anyone should be offended by my password. So what's the big deal if I want to use the word "Bitch" as the phrase with the picture, it was a picture of fucking dog anyway! First it was my phone, now my bank account passwords, what will be censored next...probably this blog, I swear too fucking much, but tough shit, if you don't like it don't read it!