…but I can’t help feeling nostalgic looking at the nerd dream team of 1927. Wiki any of those names and you’ll find a person physics owes a debt of gratitude.
I can’t be certain which one is Heisenberg and which one is Schroedinger, but at least Pauli is making sure they aren’t taking up the same space.
[found via Reddit – tremendous nerdity ensues in the comments]
Wired has a delightful story about three sons disposing of their dad’s cache of old computers.
My brothers and I didn’t know Dad had a problem. We knew he had an insanely large collection of computers and related paraphernalia. I was living in Washington, DC, and somehow Alex and Andrew, back home in Seattle, had failed to notice that Dad could barely move around his apartment and was navigating from room to room via narrow, oyster-gray corridors formed entirely by PC towers.
In other news, I just inherited six Macintosh SEs from the widow of a hoarder, which I’m looking to place in my 500 sq ft apt. Shit.
Wait, it gets worse: Before they showed up, I had just cleaned my apartment in anticipation of a girl I had been dating coming over. She didn’t, the Macs did. Hey, who’s a cool guy!
This is one of the things I hate about Mac OS X: its tediously unimaginative icon color palette.
How am I supposed to differentiate icons at a glance when they’re all sorta blue-ish, round-ish shiny things? It’s bad enough that blue LEDs abound in consumer electronics. And don’t get me started on the purple & pink fixation of Web 2.0 sites. But Apple needs to mix up their colors, otherwise their icons [get it? ‘iconic’, as in ‘recognizable, identifying symbol?’] won’t be any better than their black-and-white predecessors.
Aw hell, modern life did it better.
“You’re more like a game show host.”
Someone needs to tell parents that Ghostbusters is not a kids’ movie. Otherwise, some impressionable 7-year-old will see Bill Murray hitting on Sigourney Weaver and think wandering around a woman’s apartment and being a smartass is perfectly normal, even charming.
Without a doubt, Reverend Horton Heat‘s “Big Sky” would be the absolutely most fret-burningest, string snappingest, finger shreddingest song were it ever to come to the Guitar Hero franchise.
I get dizzy imagining the hammer-ons, pull-offs and wrist-cramping strumming needed just to keep up with this frenetic, massive Rockabilly tune. If you don’t believe me, give it a listen at the iTunes Store.
Or, just see for yourself. Conquering this on Export Expert mode would be like jumping up and slapping the face of God.
John Linnell once observed that even though They Might Be Giants kept getting older, their audience always stayed the same age. The last time I saw They Might Be Giants, they were performing Here Come the ABCs at Amoeba Records in 2005, but elbowing for room against a bunch of hip parents who brought their toddlers to listen to the same band as me, a person roughly ten times their age, made me realize I’m probably getting too old for these guys.
That wasn’t the case two years before when I saw them perform at UCLA in collaboration with Dave Eggers and his twee writer stable to produce McSweeney’s issue #6. Putting Sarah Vowell’s “It could be worse” mantra to music was the highlight for the show for me, even more than Egger’s story about him shitting his pants.
A caveat: I place TMBG’s performance of It Could Be Worse above Dave’s shit story but at least on par with Zadie Smith’s wry british description of the way a gangly, awkward girl ran “like a naturally uncoordinated animal after it had been shot.”
A selection from It Could Be Worse:
You asked for baked potato
and instead they bring you fries
at least that’s not as bad, now
as the day the music died
I had tried in vain to download a full-length version of the delightfully macabre song I heard that night but only ever found the truncated 1:05 version, which is in and of itself a minor tragedy befitting the song. You can try and download the .ogg version (which won’t play on iTunes!), but you’ll get a 404 error. Oh well, it could be worse.
A bright spot is that in my searching, I found this might be a wiki, the TMBG knowledge base, and got to traipse down memory lane and recall fondly the songs and music videos from my one and only favorite band 1988 through 2001.
I think I’ll dig up my DVD of their videos, and maybe give John Henry another listen. Now that I think about it, I was in high school when that came out — just the right age for a They Might Be Giants fan.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080304/ap_en_ot/obit_gygax
He was slain by an Orc.
It makes you think. 
LEGO Mars Mission? I have a bone to pick with you. While I continue to enjoy your toys recommended for people 1/3 my age, I must take issue with the theme of your Mars Mission sets. From the packaging, the Mars Mission story is: humans take armored assault vehicles to an arid, sandy world to plunder its natural resources, but wind up in a conflict with the natives, who seem very much intent on keeping their natural resources and rebuking the alien invaders.
…does this story sound familiar at all?
Some time ago, I had the brainstorm of making a T-shirt featuring the Puma Man of MST3K fame. I’m proud to say it was received with great enthusiasm! And zero sales. Big surprise. In fact, the only feedback was when a friend posted a link on A Special Thing and got back, “Neat shirt, too bad it’s on CafePress.” Yikes, I guess my one sale’s dog got run over by Baron Von Cafepress when he was a kid. But looking back at the shirts, I did have one legitimate design gripe:
I needed to make the logo bigger.
Enter Printfection. Though it has the look and feel of a beta of Windows Explorer, Printfection handles the nuts and bolts of creating merchandise better than CafePress: lower prices, multiple pricing levels for items, better image management tools, the ability to sell multiple designs for each clothing item. And yes, you can make the logo bigger (up to 4.67″ high)! All Printfection needs to do is fix their clunky and occasionally unclear interface.
But the most important question is: how do the shirts look? I took a chance on Printfection’s $2 t-shirt offer and printed up a quick Puma Man shirt for myself. Printfection doesn’t seem to handle solid, non-web-safe colors especially well,
which resulted in a shade of yellow something like the one here. But switching to the similar #FFCC00 for the color of the text seemed to fix that problem.
The PUMA MAN tee is perfect for wearing to the gym, as if to say to the world, “I’m out of shape and a huge nerd!”
And there’s a shirt depicting the cold-war kid’s drawing Dan Danger, available in special commie red:
Bigger logos, smaller prices. These as well as womens’ styles and other apparel are available all at a reduced price at my Printfection store!