Do your Jeans hang low
Do they wobble to and fro
can you tie them in a know
can you tie them in a bow
…

Okay, I’ll stop now.

David’s positive review of 300 reminds me of one of my biggest complaints about the movie (and I had a lot).

Q: What do you call a person who goes to war wearing a cape and sandals?
A: dead. (Seriously, even superman wore a shirt).

I don’t care how many sit ups you do, a good piece of metal is still harder than Gerard Butler’s abs. Greek Hoplites in fact were fairly well armored. What’s with the naked warfare?

I got a letter from the Philadelphia men’s mikvah yesterday. They want me to become a member (AKA give them money). Now a charity soliciting for funds is not that unusual, except I can’t figure out for the life of me how they got my name. I did use this mikvah – once – right before I got married. However that was long before I had this address, and I just left a cash donation in the box – I don’t remember giving my name to anyone. (Or there even being anyone there to give my name to). I honestly don’t think they have my name form that one time, but who knows – maybe they do. The other possibility is that the local chabad (to which I did donate money about a year ago) shares their names with the mikvah. That makes sense on a limited basis. I know many chabad men use a mikvah weekly, however most of the people who use this chabad are modern orthodox Jews between the ages of 18 and 30, and I don’t think a single of of them uses the mikvah more often than once a year. (Or perhaps twice if they use it before RH too). I also checked with a few of my friends who also gave money to chabad and none of them got the letter, which ultimately leaves me thoroughly confused.

Since Rebecca was on call this weekend I had a few friends over to play games on Saturday afternoon. I introduced a few more people to Robo Rally, and while discussing the game towards the end of the afternoon, was struck by a potentially brilliant house rule: put the flag on a conveyor belt and let the flag move on the conveyor belt!

At this point my mind was racing with ideas. The most obvious and simple thing to do would be to play a board like Chess which has a conveyor belt circling the outside of the board. Place one flag at the far end of the board, and the second on the belt. Once people get the first flag, watch as they try to figure out which direction to head to intercept the rapidly moving flag. Get the timing off a little, and you could find the flag zipping past you at breakneck speeds. I also think the idea of chasing a flag while both you and the flag ride around on the conveyor belt reminds me of the fight scene from the second Pirates movie where the three protagonists fight on a large rotating water wheel.

However, in a continued stroke of either brilliance or madness, I thought of the board entitled Maelstrom. (I could only find a picture of the old board layout, so the filled in arrows are a fast conveyor belt, and the not filled in ones are a slow conveyor belt). In this board, if the flag is placed on one of the conveyor belts, it will eventually fall into the bottomless pit and be lost forever. This of course, is only the beginning. Using the Maelstrom, cross, chop shop, and vault boards arranged in a square, I’ve managed to make a board where a flag can start on the chop shop board and be moved into the vault, cross, and maelstrom boards in that order. After the first register of the 15th turn, the flag will drop into the bottomless pit. (If I could find images of all the boards online I would post an image, but alas I can find none). Should this happen, then the first person to touch the flag prior to the mobile flag is the winner. (The mobile flag should be the final flag). If one or more people have already touched the penultimate flag, then the first one of them to do so is declared the winner.

If the board is set up properly, and the early flags can be easily gotten before turn 15, then this sets up a situation where the first person to get to the penultimate flag has an option – do they try to get the final mobile flag before it falls, or do they try to simply mess with other people so no one else can get it, winning when the flag falls. (Given the dangers the maelstrom board presents, pursuit may prove to be fatal). I think the keys are keeping the early flag easy to get and making sure there are lots of opportunities to get option cards (which can only make the final pursuit or flag defense that much more fun).

Science fiction writers have been theorizing for ages that the entire universe only exists as a computer simulation (or something similar). Apparently John Tierney at the NY Times actually fell for it. He forgot something that Asimov pointed out decades ago – in any such simulation, it is inevitable that the creator of the simulation would put in a safety controls to prevent the subjects from ever suspecting it was a simulation. (Otherwise of course, the simulation would be ruined). Therefore, the fact that we may suspect we live in a computer simulation is proof enough that we don’t.

update: Somehow I also missed the biggest assumptions this theory makes – that a computer can have (or impart) consciousness. (Or whatever it is about us that makes us think we have consciousness). This is of course a long debate that I’ve gotten bored of myself, but it’s no small assumption.

I hope Johnson & Johnson crashes and burns with respect to this most recent lawsuit. I mean seriously – suing the red cross for trademark infringement? The only way they could get worse PR would be to steal puppies from small children and drown them while teaching the small children to smoke crack and use firearms.

We all knew it was only a matter of time before Barry Bonds hit homerun number 756, but when it happened, it still left me a little bit awestruck. As a child I remember watching a VHS tape of Hank Aaron’s record breaking shot and thinking how cool it is. I suppose some day I’ll show my children a youtube clip. Some random points and thoughts:

Does anyone know of a good vendor neutral Linux certification? (Please note that I used the word “good”, which would preclude anything from CompTIA).

For the first time since I started at my current job (over a year now), my inbox is completely empty.

it looks strange.