C-Objectively

Caltech vs. MIT: Pranks

These pranks are hilarious. This is doubly funny since my buddy Nareg recently was admitted to MIT (among other schools). Congratulations Nareg, you’re more genius than ever.

Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.

You’ve seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You’ve heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.

Fools.

The Earth was built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you’ve had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.

This is not a guide for wusses whose aim is merely to wipe out humanity. I (Sam Hughes) can in no way guarantee the complete extinction of the human race via any of these methods, real or imaginary. Humanity is wily and resourceful, and many of the methods outlined below will take many years to even become available, let alone implement, by which time mankind may well have spread to other planets; indeed, other star systems. If total human genocide is your ultimate goal, you are reading the wrong document. There are far more efficient ways of doing this, many which are available and feasible RIGHT NOW. Nor is this a guide for those wanting to annihilate everything from single-celled life upwards, render Earth uninhabitable or simply conquer it. These are trivial goals in comparison.

This is a guide for those who do not want the Earth to be there anymore.

Continue to read this absolutely hilarious but serious treatment on how to destroy the Earth by Sam Hughes.

Update 10/2/06 - Fixed dead link to the full article.

So I’m sitting in the “commuter” terminal for United here at SFO writing this post. I missed my 9:25am flight to Burbank this morning. I don’t know why they call this airport the San Francisco Int’l. Airport. It’s hardly anywhere near San Francisco; it took almost an hour to get here on the BART. It is however a very big, clean, and generally nice looking airport. With the exception of the “commuter” terminal that I’m waiting in. This thing makes Burbank Airport look like LAX. I think they’re making us fly prop planes into Burbank. I’m really starting to miss my reliable Southwest flights out of Oakland right now.

So recently I’ve been lauding the public transportation I take to work every day as great. But I think that’s mostly been a form of optimism for myself. A recent spate of super-smelly people, including one dude who thought it would be cool to bring several bags of rotting TRASH onto the bus with him, have changed my view on public transport rather quickly. Sitting in traffic may suck but at least I don’t have to hold my breath while doing it.

Speaking of public transport, I saw a funny (weird?) thing the other day on the Muni train to work in SF. One of the seats near mine was wet. These seats are bowl shaped to accommodate our wonderfully bowl-shaped rear ends and in this particular bowl-seat there was a small pool of water. At the next stop, a portly fellow who must have been about 40 boarded the train and placed his rear end right on the seat that had a pool of water in it. I watched this happen, but I only caught the last split-second of him sitting; It was too late to warn him. So the train continued on its way and this guy didn’t move. He didn’t even make a funny face. Now, I KNOW he was sitting in a nice pool of water but the guy didn’t budge. I wonder if he even knew…he must have.

Well, the flight to B-town left at 11 and only one standby got on. Since I am still typing this you can figure out who did not get on the flight. Next one’s at 12:50pm and I think I’ll watch a Euro 2004 soccer match I’ve got until then.

Haha this one’s kinda funny…

If you had purchased $1000.00 of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be worth $49.00.

With Enron, you would have $16.50 left of the original $1,000.00.

With WorldCom, you would have less than $5.00 left.

But, if you had purchased $1,000.00 worth of Beer one year ago, drank all the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling price, you would have $214.00.

Based on the above, current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle.

It’s called the 401-Keg Plan

All right where to begin. I’ll make no excuses for not posting for such a long time besides I was busy living my life. That said, let’s share some interesting parts of it from the past two months (and these will come in no particular order)…

While I was at Safeway shopping up here in Berkeley, at the cashier the guy who was bagging my groceries was named Torn. Yeah you heard me, Torn. Is this because his parents couldn’t make up their mind on a name so they were torn and then decided to have the kid suffer? I don’t know, quite possibly. But really people, Torn? I thought I had seen some weird names but this was a new level for me. Maybe I should name my kids Shredded and Ripped. Maybe the latter will end up being real buff, who knows. Anyway…

The weekend before Thanksgiving I flew down to LA for no other reason than to see my friend Mel who was visiting the area with her family all the way from New York. I hadn’t seen Mel for a couple years and I gotta say we had a lot of fun. We had the obligatory trip to Disneyland (is it really the happiest place on Earth?) and we also explored some parts of LA that I hadn’t even seen so far. Have you heard of The Grove in LA? The big fancy shopping center? Yeah? Great, I don’t care about it. BUT, right next to it is the Farmer’s Market which has been there for decades but was new to me. Now that’s the kind of place I enjoy; all kinds of small and family-owned businesses and places to eat. Each one has a personality or some individuality; there was even an Armenian kabob place there. We spent some time there, Mel, Gayaneh her sister, their cousin who’s name has escaped me right now but was a very cool guy, and myself. I really can’t stand shopping malls and places like The Grove; they’re all so cookie-cutter, all the same. Same stores, same items or food, and same type of people shopping there. Needless to say, I had a great time that weekend.

Well that’s all I have time for today but keep coming back, there will be more soon.

The Iraqometer

Keep track of all the vital stats on the war in Iraq including, cost per taxpayer which stands at $1300 now.

I’ll have a cool update soon I promise. But for now check out one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a VERY VERY long time.

The Real Hussein

I got such a great laugh out of that, it was awesome.

I thought this was funny: do a search on “info on the hammer home gym” at msn.com and my site is in the top 3 results, hahaha.

Oh and this is cool too.

I hold the following to be the “equation of life”:

W=UH

Where W=wrongness, U=ugliness, and H=hardness. In English this equation means:

“if something is ugly or hard, it is wrong”

I first formulated this philosophy in regards to programming computers, where it is undoubtedly true, but gradually realized it had applicability to life in general.

It’s been a while huh? Let’s start by continuing our interesting devices that hook up to USB ports series. We’ve got USB coffee mug warmers here. Then you have USB heated blankets here. Crazy crazy, more to come later tonight.