Robot Monkeys

First up, we have defending hot dog eating champ Joey Chestnut defeating ex-champ Takeru “Arthritic Jaw” Kobayashi. w00t!

Secondly, we have Sen. Jesse Helms taking MC Hawking’s advice at 86.

USA! USA! USA!

Whenever I think that nothing Fox will do will surprise me, they manage to dig a ditch an get just that much lower.

The great thing about Fox & Friends is just how unabashedly “fair and balanced” it is. The hosts are such horrible hacks, but even then I didn’t think Roger Alles would let them stupid to essentially juvenile graffiti. Photoshopping photos of people you don’t like.

Wow. Just wow.

I have this fascination with Scott Banister. “Fascination” is too strong of a word for it, so I guess I should say “reoccurring curiosity” about Scott Banister.

I knew Scott Banister. Ryan introduced me to him early freshman year of college. He’s smart. He was big in the ACM, and founded the WebMonkeys sig there. Sophomore year he apparently quit bathing, but that’s something else.

Freshman or sophomore year he created Submit-It, a perl script and really crappy web form that submitted a url to every search engine known at the time. Pretty much Yahoo, Excite, and Altavista. (This was back in 1994 or 1995.)

Either the middle or the end of his sophomore year he dropped out and moved to The Valley.

He sold Submit-It to Link Exchange. Probably made a ton of cash.

He then went on to create Iron Port, take up bathing, but not shaving or cutting his hair. (I’m a hypocrite I know.)

He sold that to Cisco for $830 million in 2007.

I guess in a sense I compare myself to him. I don’t know why. Our lives are incredibly different, but I guess since I met him at 18, and he disappeared from my daily life at 19, it’s a bit odd, but it is what it is. Now in my defense, I don’t go google stalking him, it’s just that his name shows up in news articles I read. *sigh*

So what’s Scott Banister up to now?

Well he’s married to a girl named “Cyan,” but that’s not very interesting. So I’ll just say, in a word: Porn.

For years, nay decades, I’ve been wondering which was more environmentally friendly, paper towels or hand driers. I believe I first became aware of the modern day moral conundrum when I was in a bathroom that had both, and both had signs indicating that they were the obvious alternative.

Slate’s Lantern has the answer. Blow Dryers… maybe.

Apparently Salon did this a while back, as did Excel, makers of the very effective, but insanely loud Xcelerator (”Feel the Power”). (I thought I had a post for years ago describing my first experience with one in the SIU Student Center, and how I could watch my skin billow under its jets exhaust, but alas, I can’t find it.)

Calculating the environmental impact is difficult given the variance in the number of towels used and the duration of the blowing, the efficiency of the blower, and the along with the source of the electricity. The environmental impact of the towels comes from transporting and manufacturing them, since none get recycled, and deforestation is a nonissue due to them coming from industrial tree farms. Basically, using two paper towels is about the same as one blast from an old dryer. If a new dryer is used, then the dryer wins hands down (just hopefully not your pants).

U.S. Major Gen. Antonio Taguba (Ret.):

There is no longer any doubt that the current administration committed war crimes. The only question is whether those who ordered torture will be held to account.

Sorry Tony. There’s no question of that either. They won’t be.

What should happen is that the International Criminal Court should issue an arrest warrant, and then the principles: George W, Cheney, Rummy, John Yoo, Scooter Libby, and the whole lot, should be arrested as soon as they step off the plane in a foreign country. Hell, Interpol should take a page out of their playbook and perform an “extraordinary rendition” and arrest them here.

Hell! Why the hell isn’t the Berkley city council ordering the Berkeley PD to arrest John Yoo at his office at 890 Simon Hall? I’ll tell you why. Because unlike the fucking Berkeley Nuclear Free Zone, this would actually achieve something, and hippies aren’t about achieving real change. They’re all about “sending messages” and forming drum circles and raging against the war machine and what not. Just not achieving real change.

If there’s one thing those crazy libertarians at “Reason” get right, it’s the war on pot. Reason obliterates ONDCP’s latest attempt to scare old pot smokers into thinking that pot is not only bad, but way worse than ever before. Fun facts include:

• Drug Czar Walters cites a level of THC in old pot that would make it impossible for anyone to have gotten high in the 1970s
• Drug Czar Walters creates a “scary” increase in THC levels by comparing the lowest outlier to the highest outlier.
• Standard correlation versus causation propaganda

and of course the real kicker:

• More people are in drug treatment today because of pot, therefore pot is worse. We know more people are in drug treatment today because of pot, because part of our crackdown on pot, we compel arrestees to attend drug treatment programs.

Nice and circular. They way God intended.

Troy Patterson’s review about Discovery’s new “Planet Green” is divine in it’s contempt for the network. The money quote:

I for one want to go out and kill a dolphin.

E.Coli can now metabolize citrate. Actually, one specific colony at Michigan State can.

For the past 20 years, Richard Lenski has been keeping 12 separate colonies of E.Coli alive in a petri dish. Every 500 generations, he freezes a sample, in order to stop their growth. Recently, one of the colonies has developed the ability to metabolize citrate, one of two nutrients in their substrate. This is important, because until now, E.Coli can not metabolize citrate. In fact, this is one of the distinguishing characteristics of E.Coli. Now after 31,500 generations, it can. This ability developed after many simple natural random changes to the E.Coli genome. Examining the
saved cultures, it was determined that the critical change occurred somewhere around the 20,000th generation.

The take away: Someone has watched evolution occur.

Take that Mike Seaver.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD):

Absolutely. Absolutely. I think I would be great. First of all, I know how to behave at weddings and funerals. And I know how to be commander in chief. I’d bring a lot of fun to the job. We would rock the Naval Observatory.

Reward for al Qaeda in Iraq leader, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, now $5,000,000 $1,000,000 $100,000.

I find this incredibly bizarre. It’s as if he’s a stock, and his price fluctuates. If he plans some more car bombs, does the price go back up? Probably not. Part of me suspects that this is part of a move by the administration to whitewash Iraq. “We’re making progress! The reward for Abu Ayyub al-Masri went down! He’s not as valuable! Of course this is simply an arbitrary value assigned by fiat, but don’t worry your pretty little head about that. It’s not like we’d ever manufacture a story, and then cite it in order to deceive anyone! We’re making progress; that’s all you need to know.”