Good Afternoon Ladies & Gentlemen,
Last night, I went to Gallivan Plaza to see a free concert (along with a few thousand of my closest acquaintances) and here are some pictures. I honestly couldn't tell you how the music was really because I was sweating and not feeling to well after giving blood an hour earlier and being surrounded by stimulation...but yeah, check out all these souls that I have now thanks to my camera...
I hung out with my dad Wednesday night and we watched "Push" starring Chris Evans, Dakota Fanning and Djimon Hounsou. The story is about people with special abilities (allegedly not mutants) like telepathy, telekinesis, telephonics, telefriend, screaming really loud, being able to sniff out the past or something...yeah, just really odd powers...but of course, the government wants to form an army of these people...and they'll kill anybody who doesn't side with them...because. It follows the trail of a Mover (Evans) who has telekinetic powers but doesn't know how to use them well because he's been trying to hide so this agency doesn't get him. He meets up with a 13-year old (Fanning) who can see the future...and of course, it doesn't look good. Her mom is locked up by this agency...and they want to break her out. Yet they also have the agency (Hounsou) after them...and some Chinese superhero mafia...and basically there's just a lot of loopholes and unnecessary blah blah blah...and I didn't particularly like it. It was okay...but there's really no point to it. Oh and I forgot to mention that the whole Push thing...is using hypnosis to control other people with your eyes (ladies know this all too well). Anyway, that's about all I have to say about that...and it was just really irritating...because the protagonist was kind of a wuss & didn't know how to fight. I don't know. It wasn't horrible but it wasn't good. It's basically like "Wanted" was last year. Some action, a lot of violence, not a whole lot of sense...but one major drawback of this movie, they tried to use Camilla Belle as the eye candy instead of Angelina. Didn't work for me. Did like the backdrop of Hong Kong though. I'd like to visit there one day (along with Amsterdam, Okinawa and the Moon...but what're ya gonna do?). I'd pass on this movie.
Last night, I was still a little dizzy after the concert and drinking an incredible amount of water and thought, "Oh yeah, I did just get that new Nicolas Cage movie. Maybe I should watch that." So I threw in "Knowing" starring the aforementioned Nicolas Cage and...well, basically this movie would have NEVER been made if not for Nicolas Cage signing on. Basically, they unearth a time capsule at an elementary school where fifty years earlier, the children were asked to draw pictures of what they thought the future would look like...and one of the girls wrote down a bunch of numbers instead. Basically it chronicled major disasters in human history over the past 50 years (and let's just skip the whole nonsensical sequence of how this was figured out...involving a drunk Nic Cage). So anyway, a professor at MIT (Cage) finds that there are still a few more in the coming week...and tries to stop them from happening...but does so by acting like a f**king nut bar so nobody believes him. What's he going to do? How can he stop this? How was this girl able to predict the future? Why do women find Nicolas Cage attractive? Why are the effects in this movie so cheesy, horrible & defy the laws of physics? Yeah, I didn't like the movie at all...but hey, check it out if you want. Just don't be surprised if you end up screaming at the screen "IT'S COORDINATES!!!" or "EXPLAIN IT LIKE A RATIONAL PERSON AND THEY'LL BELIEVE YOU...OR AT LEAST LOOK INTO IT!!!" Not my favorite Nic Cage movie at all...and the ending was...well, it was. I ended up fast forwarding through the last ten minutes. No point to this movie. Speaking of no point, here's the news...
This Week in Sperm - It has been an incredible week in the realm of scientific sperm. It started earlier this week when scientists were finally able to create sperm...and not the old fashioned way involving testicles...but rather from embryonic stem cells (is there anything they can't do?). The technique could in 10 years allow researchers to use the basic knowledge of how sperm develop to design treatments to enable infertile men the chance to have biological children, said lead researcher Karim Nayernia, of Newcastle University, whose team earlier produced baby mice from sperm derived in a similar way. The research, published in the journal Stem Cells and Development, was conducted by scientists at Newcastle and the NorthEast England Stem Cell Institute. Stem cells can become any cell in the body, and scientists have previously turned them into a variety of new entities, including cells from the brain, pancreas, heart and blood vessels. Some experts challenged the research, saying they weren't convinced Nayernia and his colleagues had actually produced sperm cells ("Prove it!!!"). Several critics also said the sperm cells they created were clearly abnormal. "I am unconvinced from the data presented in this paper that the cells produced by Professor Nayernia's group from embryonic stem cells can be accurately called 'spermatazoa," said Allan Pacey, a senior lecturer in andrology at the University of Sheffield. Pacey said in a statement that the sperm created by Nayernia did not have the specific shape, movement and function of real sperm. So apparently we're still a long way from artificial swimmers...but serious progress is being made...and I always enjoy good sh*t-talking between nerds. It may not be vulgar...but I always like to hear arguments in scientific terms. "Why yes, I could have been your biological father...but I regret to inform you that my financial situation found me a few coins short and I was given inaccurate directions by her proprietor, one by the name of Pepper Jack." You know, that kind of stuff. But wait, there's more...scientists have also found that sperm prefer attractive females. Yeah, not making this up. Feel free to read the article...but this is your grant money at work, ladies & gentlemen. Anyway, big week for baby batter.
Further Nerddom - Imagine a carbon sheet that's only one atom thick but is stronger than diamond and conducts electricity 100 times faster than the silicon in computer chips. That's graphene, the latest wonder material coming out of science laboratories around the world. It's creating tremendous buzz among physicists, chemists and electronic engineers. (NEEERDS!!!) "It is the thinnest known material in the universe, and the strongest ever measured," Andre Geim , a physicist at the University of Manchester, England , wrote in the June 19 issue of the journal Science. "A few grams could cover a football field," said Rod Ruoff , a graphene researcher at the University of Texas, Austin , in an e-mail. A gram is about 1/30th of an ounce. Like diamond, graphene is pure carbon. It forms a six-sided mesh of atoms that, through an electron microscope, looks like a honeycomb or piece of chicken wire. Despite its strength, it's as flexible as plastic wrap and can be bent, folded or rolled up like a scroll. Graphite, the lead in a pencil, is made of stacks of graphene layers. Although each individual layer is tough, the bonds between them are weak, so they slip off easily and leave a dark mark when you write. Potential graphene applications include touch screens, solar cells, energy storage devices, cell phones and, eventually, high-speed computer chips. Replacing silicon, the basic electronic material in computer chips, however, "is a long way off...far beyond the horizon," said Geim, who first discovered how to produce graphene five years ago. "In the near and medium term, it's going to be extremely difficult for graphene to displace silicon as the main material in computer electronics," said Tomas Palacios , a graphene researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . "Silicon is a multi-billion dollar industry that has been perfecting silicon processing for 40 years." Government and university laboratories, long-established companies such as IBM , and small start-ups are working to solve difficult problems in making graphene and turning it into useful products. Ruoff founded a company in Austin called Graphene Energy, which is seeking ways to store renewable energy from solar cells or the energy captured from braking in autos. The Pentagon is also interested in this new high-tech material. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is spending $22 million on research to make computer chips and transistors out of graphene. Graphene was the leading topic at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, a leading organization of physicists, in Pittsburgh in April. Researchers packed 23 panel sessions on the topic. About 1,500 scientific papers on graphene were published in 2008 alone. Until last year, the only way to make graphene was to mount flakes of graphite on sticky tape and separate a single layer by carefully peeling away the tape. They called it the "Scotch Tape technique" (This is not a joke. This is science.) Recently, however, scientists have discovered a more efficient way to produce graphene on an underlying base of copper, nickel or silicon, which subsequently is etched away. "There has been spectacular progress in the last two or three months," Geim reported in the journal Science. "Challenges that looked so daunting just two years ago have suddenly shrunk, if not evaporated. I'm confident there will be many commercial applications. We will begin to see hybrid devices — mostly made from silicon, but with a critical part of the device being graphene — in niche applications." So there you go, this stuff could be awesome when mastered and...dare I say it...make space travel possible and affordable...so that all those futuristic sci-fi movies could come true. Awesome, right?
Now THAT'S a Prank - Okay, enough nerddom for a second, let's switch over to prank calls. A few days ago, I reported about some r-tard who made threatening phone calls to her grandma because...well she's an idiot and thought it would be funny. However, this one is much better. Authorities say a prankster persuaded a married couple to smash their Florida hotel window after falsely telling them the room had a gas leak. Police say a person claiming to be a front-desk clerk at an Orlando hotel convinced the couple to break a wall mirror and use a lamp to punch a hole through the wall. The couple also threw a mattress out the window, but a hotel manager came to the room before they could jump. The manager told the couple there was no gas leak. The manager also said employees had received a memo from the hotel's corporate office warning that dangerous pranks were being pulled at hotels in other states. The prank cost about $5,000 in damages. Police say the couple were not arrested Monday because they thought it was an emergency. The hotel has not asked them to pay. WOW!!! That is messed up...yet it still appeals to me a basic instinctual level. Sure, I think it sucks that those people were really fearing for their lives but...I just imagine being a fly on the wall and watching this whole thing go down. The person on the phone must've been very convincing. "No, don't open the door to the hallway. That's where the gas is. Now, I want you to tear a hole in the wall because its hotel policy to stash the gas mask in the wall behind the television set. Don't worry, go ahead and throw the whole entertainment center out of the way." Yeah, it's twisted...yet pretty damn funny at the same time. I have a unique sense of humor and perception. What can I say?
That'll do it for today. I hope that you all have a wonderful weekend filled with fun plans. If not, gimme a call & we'll see what we can do. I plan on working tomorrow morning and then...who knows? Have a great weekend everybody!!!
Last night, I went to Gallivan Plaza to see a free concert (along with a few thousand of my closest acquaintances) and here are some pictures. I honestly couldn't tell you how the music was really because I was sweating and not feeling to well after giving blood an hour earlier and being surrounded by stimulation...but yeah, check out all these souls that I have now thanks to my camera...
I hung out with my dad Wednesday night and we watched "Push" starring Chris Evans, Dakota Fanning and Djimon Hounsou. The story is about people with special abilities (allegedly not mutants) like telepathy, telekinesis, telephonics, telefriend, screaming really loud, being able to sniff out the past or something...yeah, just really odd powers...but of course, the government wants to form an army of these people...and they'll kill anybody who doesn't side with them...because. It follows the trail of a Mover (Evans) who has telekinetic powers but doesn't know how to use them well because he's been trying to hide so this agency doesn't get him. He meets up with a 13-year old (Fanning) who can see the future...and of course, it doesn't look good. Her mom is locked up by this agency...and they want to break her out. Yet they also have the agency (Hounsou) after them...and some Chinese superhero mafia...and basically there's just a lot of loopholes and unnecessary blah blah blah...and I didn't particularly like it. It was okay...but there's really no point to it. Oh and I forgot to mention that the whole Push thing...is using hypnosis to control other people with your eyes (ladies know this all too well). Anyway, that's about all I have to say about that...and it was just really irritating...because the protagonist was kind of a wuss & didn't know how to fight. I don't know. It wasn't horrible but it wasn't good. It's basically like "Wanted" was last year. Some action, a lot of violence, not a whole lot of sense...but one major drawback of this movie, they tried to use Camilla Belle as the eye candy instead of Angelina. Didn't work for me. Did like the backdrop of Hong Kong though. I'd like to visit there one day (along with Amsterdam, Okinawa and the Moon...but what're ya gonna do?). I'd pass on this movie.
Last night, I was still a little dizzy after the concert and drinking an incredible amount of water and thought, "Oh yeah, I did just get that new Nicolas Cage movie. Maybe I should watch that." So I threw in "Knowing" starring the aforementioned Nicolas Cage and...well, basically this movie would have NEVER been made if not for Nicolas Cage signing on. Basically, they unearth a time capsule at an elementary school where fifty years earlier, the children were asked to draw pictures of what they thought the future would look like...and one of the girls wrote down a bunch of numbers instead. Basically it chronicled major disasters in human history over the past 50 years (and let's just skip the whole nonsensical sequence of how this was figured out...involving a drunk Nic Cage). So anyway, a professor at MIT (Cage) finds that there are still a few more in the coming week...and tries to stop them from happening...but does so by acting like a f**king nut bar so nobody believes him. What's he going to do? How can he stop this? How was this girl able to predict the future? Why do women find Nicolas Cage attractive? Why are the effects in this movie so cheesy, horrible & defy the laws of physics? Yeah, I didn't like the movie at all...but hey, check it out if you want. Just don't be surprised if you end up screaming at the screen "IT'S COORDINATES!!!" or "EXPLAIN IT LIKE A RATIONAL PERSON AND THEY'LL BELIEVE YOU...OR AT LEAST LOOK INTO IT!!!" Not my favorite Nic Cage movie at all...and the ending was...well, it was. I ended up fast forwarding through the last ten minutes. No point to this movie. Speaking of no point, here's the news...
This Week in Sperm - It has been an incredible week in the realm of scientific sperm. It started earlier this week when scientists were finally able to create sperm...and not the old fashioned way involving testicles...but rather from embryonic stem cells (is there anything they can't do?). The technique could in 10 years allow researchers to use the basic knowledge of how sperm develop to design treatments to enable infertile men the chance to have biological children, said lead researcher Karim Nayernia, of Newcastle University, whose team earlier produced baby mice from sperm derived in a similar way. The research, published in the journal Stem Cells and Development, was conducted by scientists at Newcastle and the NorthEast England Stem Cell Institute. Stem cells can become any cell in the body, and scientists have previously turned them into a variety of new entities, including cells from the brain, pancreas, heart and blood vessels. Some experts challenged the research, saying they weren't convinced Nayernia and his colleagues had actually produced sperm cells ("Prove it!!!"). Several critics also said the sperm cells they created were clearly abnormal. "I am unconvinced from the data presented in this paper that the cells produced by Professor Nayernia's group from embryonic stem cells can be accurately called 'spermatazoa," said Allan Pacey, a senior lecturer in andrology at the University of Sheffield. Pacey said in a statement that the sperm created by Nayernia did not have the specific shape, movement and function of real sperm. So apparently we're still a long way from artificial swimmers...but serious progress is being made...and I always enjoy good sh*t-talking between nerds. It may not be vulgar...but I always like to hear arguments in scientific terms. "Why yes, I could have been your biological father...but I regret to inform you that my financial situation found me a few coins short and I was given inaccurate directions by her proprietor, one by the name of Pepper Jack." You know, that kind of stuff. But wait, there's more...scientists have also found that sperm prefer attractive females. Yeah, not making this up. Feel free to read the article...but this is your grant money at work, ladies & gentlemen. Anyway, big week for baby batter.
Further Nerddom - Imagine a carbon sheet that's only one atom thick but is stronger than diamond and conducts electricity 100 times faster than the silicon in computer chips. That's graphene, the latest wonder material coming out of science laboratories around the world. It's creating tremendous buzz among physicists, chemists and electronic engineers. (NEEERDS!!!) "It is the thinnest known material in the universe, and the strongest ever measured," Andre Geim , a physicist at the University of Manchester, England , wrote in the June 19 issue of the journal Science. "A few grams could cover a football field," said Rod Ruoff , a graphene researcher at the University of Texas, Austin , in an e-mail. A gram is about 1/30th of an ounce. Like diamond, graphene is pure carbon. It forms a six-sided mesh of atoms that, through an electron microscope, looks like a honeycomb or piece of chicken wire. Despite its strength, it's as flexible as plastic wrap and can be bent, folded or rolled up like a scroll. Graphite, the lead in a pencil, is made of stacks of graphene layers. Although each individual layer is tough, the bonds between them are weak, so they slip off easily and leave a dark mark when you write. Potential graphene applications include touch screens, solar cells, energy storage devices, cell phones and, eventually, high-speed computer chips. Replacing silicon, the basic electronic material in computer chips, however, "is a long way off...far beyond the horizon," said Geim, who first discovered how to produce graphene five years ago. "In the near and medium term, it's going to be extremely difficult for graphene to displace silicon as the main material in computer electronics," said Tomas Palacios , a graphene researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . "Silicon is a multi-billion dollar industry that has been perfecting silicon processing for 40 years." Government and university laboratories, long-established companies such as IBM , and small start-ups are working to solve difficult problems in making graphene and turning it into useful products. Ruoff founded a company in Austin called Graphene Energy, which is seeking ways to store renewable energy from solar cells or the energy captured from braking in autos. The Pentagon is also interested in this new high-tech material. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is spending $22 million on research to make computer chips and transistors out of graphene. Graphene was the leading topic at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, a leading organization of physicists, in Pittsburgh in April. Researchers packed 23 panel sessions on the topic. About 1,500 scientific papers on graphene were published in 2008 alone. Until last year, the only way to make graphene was to mount flakes of graphite on sticky tape and separate a single layer by carefully peeling away the tape. They called it the "Scotch Tape technique" (This is not a joke. This is science.) Recently, however, scientists have discovered a more efficient way to produce graphene on an underlying base of copper, nickel or silicon, which subsequently is etched away. "There has been spectacular progress in the last two or three months," Geim reported in the journal Science. "Challenges that looked so daunting just two years ago have suddenly shrunk, if not evaporated. I'm confident there will be many commercial applications. We will begin to see hybrid devices — mostly made from silicon, but with a critical part of the device being graphene — in niche applications." So there you go, this stuff could be awesome when mastered and...dare I say it...make space travel possible and affordable...so that all those futuristic sci-fi movies could come true. Awesome, right?Now THAT'S a Prank - Okay, enough nerddom for a second, let's switch over to prank calls. A few days ago, I reported about some r-tard who made threatening phone calls to her grandma because...well she's an idiot and thought it would be funny. However, this one is much better. Authorities say a prankster persuaded a married couple to smash their Florida hotel window after falsely telling them the room had a gas leak. Police say a person claiming to be a front-desk clerk at an Orlando hotel convinced the couple to break a wall mirror and use a lamp to punch a hole through the wall. The couple also threw a mattress out the window, but a hotel manager came to the room before they could jump. The manager told the couple there was no gas leak. The manager also said employees had received a memo from the hotel's corporate office warning that dangerous pranks were being pulled at hotels in other states. The prank cost about $5,000 in damages. Police say the couple were not arrested Monday because they thought it was an emergency. The hotel has not asked them to pay. WOW!!! That is messed up...yet it still appeals to me a basic instinctual level. Sure, I think it sucks that those people were really fearing for their lives but...I just imagine being a fly on the wall and watching this whole thing go down. The person on the phone must've been very convincing. "No, don't open the door to the hallway. That's where the gas is. Now, I want you to tear a hole in the wall because its hotel policy to stash the gas mask in the wall behind the television set. Don't worry, go ahead and throw the whole entertainment center out of the way." Yeah, it's twisted...yet pretty damn funny at the same time. I have a unique sense of humor and perception. What can I say?
That'll do it for today. I hope that you all have a wonderful weekend filled with fun plans. If not, gimme a call & we'll see what we can do. I plan on working tomorrow morning and then...who knows? Have a great weekend everybody!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment