The BlakeBlog

It's nice to see so many in one place.

Flash Helicopter game that's fun, but fortunately not too addictive.

Thanks, Ron.

According to TiVo, the Super Bowl halftime half-exposure of Janet Jackson's breasts was the most-watched moment to date on its device.  No surprise there:  recently the Super Bowl has been the most watched show every year.  TiVo also said users had watched the few seconds nearly three times more than any other moment during the Super Bowl broadcast.  No surprise there either:  that's what rewind is for.

The only surprise for me was that they knew not only what you watched while it downloaded, but also what was played back.  Down to the second.

Courtesy of Terry:  If you missed the most over discussed moment in recent TV history, here is a still of the moment, and here is where to buy the jewelry.

... may not just be hot air

But why does your phone say you're at the beach?

By December 31, 2005, your cell phone company will always know exactly where you are.  And maybe your friends, enemies and boss will too.

Oops:  The February Trail magazine contained a route that would lead climbers off the edge of a cliff on Britain's tallest peak.

Today, January 29 is National Corn chip Day, and I almost missed it. It's also National Whatever Days for a bunch of other things, just like every other day is.

Check out link1 and link2 for all sorts of other holidays and "nation fill in the blank day".

It's a start.

Not all of you, but your name can go.  NASA will put it on a CD that will go to Comet Tempel 1.  You can even print out a geeky certificate to prove you did it.

They quit taking names on Jan. 31.

This site lists items (like a USB Portable Flash Drive) that you can get for free after rebate.  Their motto is:  The best things in life are free (after six to eight weeks).

Russian soldiers were sent in to save the beer.

"The question is, where were you, Governor Bush? What would you do as commander-in-chief if someone in the National Guard did the same thing? At the least, I would have been court-martialed. At the least, I would have been placed in prison," said Senator Daniel Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii.

He was referring, of course, to the 12 month period where our Fearless Leader was nowhere to be found during his stay with the National Guard.

Michael Moore provides a number of links to news articles about the absence, and to Peter Jennings' interview with Wesley Clark where he asked about Moore's support.  Since the link is Moore's entry page, the information will probably be gone soon unless you look for it within the site, probably in the Must Read section.

Shrubya will give his version tonight.  Here's a sampling of numbers he won't be talking about:

$113 million: Total sum raised by the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign, setting a record in American electoral history

$130 million: Amount raised for Bush's re-election campaign so far

130: Number of countries (out of total of 191 recognized by the United Nations) with an American military presence

58 million: Number of acres of public lands Bush has opened to road building, logging and drilling

And the last disturbing one is
53%: Percentage of American citizens who approved of the way Bush was handling his job as president when asked on 16 January, 2004

According to Advertising Age Research, last year's Super Bowl had 88,637,000 viewers (138.9 million according to the NFL) at 43,433,000 homes watching commercials that cost $2,100,000 for 30 seconds of air time. That's $23.69 per viewer over the course of the game, but less than 25¢ per 30 seconds. The first Super Bowl ads cost $42,000 ($239,167 inflation adjusted) for 30 seconds. This year, the price is up to $2.25 million. What will be eaten during this year's 62 half-minute events?  Pizza. Super Bowl Sunday has evolved into a national party day:  The average number of people at a Super Bowl party is 17. More pizza will be sold Feb. 1 than any other day of 2004:

• Domino's will deliver about 1.2 million pizzas, 42% more than on a regular Sunday, and its drivers will cover 4 million miles.
• Papa John's expects its business will jump 70% in some areas.
• Grocery store sales of Kraft's DiGiorno and Tombstone frozen pizzas typically jump 20% during Super Bowl week.

Pizza Hut, the world's most powerful and influential pizza seller, will unveil what it considers its biggest product idea in years: four square, topped-to-order pizzas in one large pizza box, which, at $11.99, costs about the same as a regular large pizza. It will spend $50 million to launch the product, and fill the national airwaves with as many as 75 commercials throughout game day.

Personally, while pizza is probably my favorite food, I hate Pizza Hut pizza. And although their franchises originally didn't want the new pizza, in part because they had to get new equipment to make it and it may reduce the number of two pizza orders, it should be good for them. Now it's not only the edges of the pizza that won't have topping, the lines separating the four parts will also be empty. What a great way to sell bread at a premium.

The musical history of the Electro-Theremin is at The Paul Tanner Electro-Theremin Page.  It was used on the Beach Boys' Good Vibrations and the TV show My Favorite Martian.

As many of us thought, it turns out there isn't any simple answer because it depends on the rain speed and direction, your running speed and size, wind, etc.

Here's a Running in the Rain Calculator.

Thanks again, Terry.

This is a cool graphical representation of zip codes.  Click on the map and type in a code.  As each number is typed, the map shows the limits for that part of the zip.

You need to be running the Java VM, which is no longer included with Windows, for this applet to work. 

Thanks, Terry.

By now most people have seen the Carl's Jr. ad for their low-carb burger.  It uses lettuce to hold things together instead of a bun.  It turns out that In-N-Out has had this for a while on their "Secret Menu";  it's called "Protein Style".

They don't have a name for what I eat at home:  everything sitting on top of half a bun.  I guess I could get a Double Double "Flying Dutchman" style and a mix it with a dry "2x4".  And then be really, really full.

MoveOn.org is having a contest to come up with a 30 second campaign ad showing Bush's accomplishments.  The initial 1000+ entries were voted for on the web, getting it down to fifteen finalists.

Take a look at the final fifteen at www.BushIn30Seconds.org

Almost no news has been reported about the government's new powers to look at your finances.  That's because it was signed on a Saturday at the same time that Hussein's capture was announced.  The only reporting seems to be from the San Antonio Current article With a Whisper, Not A Bang:

By signing the bill on the day of Hussein's capture, Bush effectively consigned a dramatic expansion of the USA Patriot Act to a mere footnote. Consequently, while most Americans watched as Hussein was probed for head lice, few were aware that the FBI had just obtained the power to probe their financial records, even if the feds don't suspect their involvement in crime or terrorism.

The Bush Administration and its Congressional allies tucked away these new executive powers in the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004, a legislative behemoth that funds all the intelligence activities of the federal government. The Act included a simple, yet insidious, redefinition of "financial institution," which previously referred to banks, but now includes stockbrokers, car dealerships, casinos, credit card companies, insurance agencies, jewelers, airlines, the U.S. Post Office, and any other business "whose cash transactions have a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax, or regulatory matters."

The fact that I couldn't find this on any of the news services made me do a little more research than usual.  I found the text of the bill, H.R. 2417, and an announcement that it was signed.  But even that doesn't make clear what happened because the text of the bill refers to the United States Code.  The new meaning of financial institution is finally made clear there.

On and on...  it seems the article is correct, but perhaps not as sweeping as it sounds.  That's because only the smaller institutions were added; the big ones were already there.  At least from what I can tell from that legal morass.

The FBI is warning police nationwide to be alert for people carrying almanacs.  In a bulletin sent Christmas Eve to about 18,000 police organizations, the FBI urged officers to watch during searches, traffic stops and other investigations for anyone carrying almanacs, especially if the books are annotated.

Why Part 1 in the title?  With things going this way, there's no doubt that a part 2 will show up soon.  Maybe people carrying maps.

What A Crappy Present.  Ho, ho, ho!

Depending upon what you read, either "US Internet Growth and Broadband Adoption Slow" or "US Broadband Up 18% in H1".  But they're both using the same reports.

According to a Dec. 22 Pew Internet report:

• The size of the online U.S. adult population is 63% of all those 18 and over; online population was 126 million in August 2003.
• The size of the online population on a typical day was 66 million in August 2003
• 31% of Internet users who go online from home have broadband as of August 2003.

It's the last number that caught my interest.  I can't imagine using a dial-up connection any more and wondered how many others had made the move.  I have friends that won't look at anything on the internet unless they really, really need to because it takes too long to load. 

Those numbers mean that only about 20% of the U.S. population (at those using home access) are surfing at high speed.  I guess I better make my blog and website smaller.

Just got this neat tip in the mail for Internet Explorer:

Type the main part of a URL but instead of hitting Enter use CTRL+Enter and IE will add the http:// and .com to what you typed.

LOTR's third installment, ROTK, has introduced a character that fans are not happy about.  (You can never have too many TLAs or ETLAs.)

If you've got some time to kill, check out this collection of strange album covers.

Then top it off with the Worst Album Covers Ever.

Last Thursday Gaven Stubberfield, number 8 on Spamhaus' Top 10 Spamers list, was arrested and charged with four felony counts of using fraudulent means to transmit unsolicited bulk e-mail, the first felony prosecution in the nation specifically using an antispam law.

My incoming spam dropped by more than 90% over the weekend.  There was only one this morning instead of the usual 40 to 60.  Was it due to the federal antispam bill?  No, that hasn't been signed yet; and Spamhaus says it shouldn't be.  Whatever the reason, it's good to see spam slowing.

State of Hyphened Awareness

Who decides if anti-spam gets a hyphen?  It seems to be running about 50-50 now.

The Theban Mapping Project has been working to prepare a comprehensive, detailed map and database of every archaeological, geological, and ethnographic feature in Thebes.  Fly over and zoom into the temples, tombs and palaces of Luxor's West Bank with the Atlas of the Theban Necropolis.

December 14th, 2003 marks the 500th anniversary of the birth of Michel de Nostredame (whose Latinized name was Nostradamus).

The Cult of the Goat contains more bock beer label bock* pictures than we actually care to see, along with a history of why goats are associated with evil.

But that's just one time eater at NoRelevance.com, "an obsession with the obsolete, discarded, forgotten and otherwise passed-over".

* "bock" is actually the German word for "billy goat"

Astronomers say the colors in Edvard Munch's famous painting, The Scream, was not from his own imagination, but was inspired by the volcanic eruption of Krakatoa.  Its ash cloud affected sunsets for more than a year and Oslo's local newspaper reported that the phenomenon was widely seen.  The astronomers found the location where the painting was conceived, and determined that Munch was looking in the direction west of Java.

I don't suspect art critics will change their stance that the painting "depicts not so much an incident or a landscape as a state of mind."

It's G.I. Joke!  Weapons of mass destruction are, of course, not included.

Thanks, Rick

James Watson was only 24 when he discovered the helical structure of DNA.  But why should today's kids wait to get started?  Discovery.com is selling an $80 toy called DNA Explorer that allows children to extract and sequence the DNA from a variety of foodstuffs.

Or they can try Discovery's Forensics Lab

And to think that I used to be happy playing with chemicals that would only change colors, foam, and crack the sink.

The view from Everest is literally breathtaking, but carrying oxygen isn't a requirement to see the picture.  Bring some time and bandwidth to see the rest of the images at the Astronomy Picture of the Day archive, or just take a quick look at today's picture.

Ah, but that's the question:  more or less? There were two articles this morning about the labor market.

One headline states that Jobless Claims Rise to 365,000.  The four-week moving average of new claims, a less volatile indicator, rose to 362,500 last week.  (NY Times)

Another says that Businesses Add 57,000 New Jobs in Nov., although that was lower than the 150,000 that had been predicted.  (ABC News)

Does that mean a net loss of 308,000 jobs?  Or does it mean that although there were 365k new people unemployed, that 422k unemployed people got jobs, giving a net gain of 57k jobs?  I had been thinking it was the former, but because the unemployment rate went down it looks more like the later.

Is this good news?  Are there more jobs or fewer?  And finally, why aren't these numbers ever in the same article?

e-voting on Nov. 11 with background info.)

Here are a couple of other important updates:

November 22, 2003: California is requiring that all electronic voting machines produce a voter-verifiable paper receipt by 2006.  While this is a move toward sensible e-voting safeguards, the action isn't quick enough to stop the stealing of the 2004 presidential election.

December 3, 2003: The Ohio Secretary of State has announced the results of a study his office commissioned, which examined four e-voting systems.  Each system had at least one "high risk" problem.  The review turned up so many potential security flaws in the systems that the state's top elections official has called off deploying them in March.

Oh those funny Googlers.   First it was searching for “weapons of mass destruction” giving this not found website when you hit “I'm feeling lucky”.

The new one is doing a Lucky search for miserable failure (no quotes). Or do a regular search and check out the first item of the search results.

Hint: this is his first presidentiary.

The turkey looked perfect, but don't try to eat it.  In the Iraq Thanksgiving picture seen so frequently, Bush is holding the centerpiece.

It's like he's a Truth Compass.  Just look at Bush and truth is the other way.

The military is looking to something old as a new weapon in the war on terrorism:  blimps.  They can travel up to 60 mph and fly at an altitude of about 2,000-3,000 feet.  Wow.

This just in:  A Goodyear blimp crashed Wednesday night...

Next up:  catapults making a comeback.  Secret military plans have been leaked.

A what?  It contains no electronics.  Light travels through the fibers to illuminate the segments of the display to form a readable number in the tens-of-minutes portion of the display.

Hines Labs sells blueprints and grants rights to build one.  But to make it easier, Digital Sundials International sells them.

They say, “Time flies!”, but how can you when they go so fast?

Yesterday marked the one year anniversary of this blog.  I'm guessing there are about 250 posts.  To commemorate, here are some pointless destinations:

 

Okay, I don't really know why you would want to do that last one unless you're French.

Probably only of interest to guitarists is the history of the Electro-Harmonix Company (which made the Big Muff Pi) and its relation to Sovtek, which makes vacuum tubes in Russia for those few of us that still need them.

Three somewhat related subtopics here:  Food, Wal-Mart, and Food

   

A Daily Show With Jon Stewart reran with this opening:

"We begin tonight with national security � an issue President Bush has emphasized here at home and is utterly disrupting across the Atlantic.  Tomorrow the president flies to England for a three-day state visit with coalition partner Tony Blair.  In preparation, British officials are stepping up security measures and putting more police on the streets than at any time since the end of World War II in anticipation of possible violence.  Remember, this is England... our ally [very long pause] � I guess all the cops and troops are there to make sure things don't get too friendly.  ... British Intelligence services have even taken the step of raising England's terror alert level to 'severe general', which is � I hate the metric system � I think it is orange." �Jon Stewart

Here are a couple of other good comments on the subject, all from Working For Change - Quote of the Day:

"President Bush and Queen Elizabeth have a lot in common -- they both came into power without being elected." �David Letterman

"President Bush says his visit to England is going so well, if time permits, he wants to visit the United Kingdom and Great Britain as well." �Jay Leno

A surgeon who has patented a device that triggers an orgasm has begun a clinical trial and is looking for female volunteers.

The Good News:  Opus, by Berkeley Breathed (Bloom County, Outland), is back in black.  Black and white, like a penguin should be.  It's in the LA Times, so I'll get to see it on Sundays.
The Bad News:  There's no digital edition; it's going to be in the newspapers only.

The ‘no digital’ news comes from a Washington Post interview.

"Today was Veteran's Day, a day to honor those brave Americans who have fought to defend our country � or in our president's case, a day to freak them out.  President Bush commemorated Veteran's Day by attending a ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery, then signing the National Cemetery Expansion Act, which basically establishes new burial grounds for veterans.  So happy Veteran's Day � we wanted to give you health insurance but ..." �Jon Stewart

To summarize:
Nov. 11 - Bush signs bill that creates new cemetery space for vets.
Nov. 15 - Monthly Iraq fatalities are climbing back to the pre-end-of-the-war rate.
Nov. 22 - The U.S. military will have 100,000 troops in Iraq until 2006.

Coincidence?

Powell described his killer schedule in an interview Thursday with Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed, a reporter for a London-based Saudi newspaper. "So do you use sleeping tablets to organize yourself?" Al-Rashed asked.

"Yes. Well, I wouldn't call them that," Powell said. "They're a wonderful medication -- not medication. How would you call it? They're called Ambien, which is very good. You don't use Ambien? Everybody here uses Ambien."

Just what does 'Everyone Here' mean? Everyone in the US? Or in the White House?

From the Washington Post.  The U.S. Embassy transcript shows the same thing.  What a Rush.  (Couldn't resist that one.)

Biotech entrepreneurs plan to market the nation's first genetically engineered pet:  a tropical zebra fish infused with the gene of a sea anemone that makes it glow fluorescent red.

They Rule, has interactive maps that show how companies are connected through their board members.  Go to: Load map, ‘then eye of the rich’ for a nice overview of corporate ties.  Another good one is ‘!7 most powerful!’ which is self-described as:

These are the seven most connected people in the Fortune 100.  Together the 6 men and 1 woman are on the boards of 26 companies!

When you're done with that, OpenSecrets.org - (“Your guide to the money in U.S. elections”) shows who gave and who got contributions.  So far the largest contributor to Pres. Bush is Merrill Lynch at $364,000, although other financial institutions are close behind.  Merrill has contributed $652,760 to this election cycle, 87% to Republicans

For the 2002 elections, over $964 million was raised for House and Senate races.  I guess that's one way to keep the economy going.