I’m breaking my temporary and busyness-induced blog hiatus for the sole purpose of ensuring my eternal Internet fame and glory.
I’m doing it by introducing an Internet meme that is so true and right it has no choice but to become viral: Maslow, used as a verb:
Maslow, verb; To substitute a planned activity for one more basic on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I Maslowed my homework last night to take a nap.
Following is a presentation I created for a science-trained audience on the physics of helicopter flight.
This is a presentation I created on how helicopters work, for a “Physics for Non-Physics Majors” audience.
Today’s xkcd.
If it means I get to be chased by a levitating, marauding, balloon-mounted shark of my own devising, then I want to be a scientist too.
I think a part of each of us will always be ten years old. When I was ten, I’d look up at HealthNet’s BK-117 as it flew over Morgantown and say, “I’ve gotta do that.”
Last week, I landed on the roof of Ruby Memorial, Morgantown’s main hospital, as a HealthNet pilot.
My personal 10 year old is pretty darned thrilled right now. :)
While I was waiting to pull into my parking space tonight, a woman who looked familiar but who I couldn’t quite place walked up to the car and (re)introduced herself to me. It turns out she was the mother of student I recently tutored. By way of jogging my memory, she said: “You saved my son’s life in trigonometry last year.” I don’t think I can even claim that from a year and a half of being an EMS helicopter pilot.
It’s a good day to be a Jonathan Mack.
The legacy of the George W. Bush administration is one of fiscal irresponsibility, reckless foreign policy, rejection of reason, and violation of human rights. Bush was either too incompetent to stop his underlings, or too unbalanced to think anything was wrong with what he was doing. Either way, he was completely unsuitable for the job of President, and no amount of jokey last-minute interviews will change that.
I submit to you that AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” is one of the rockingest music videos in the history of the world. From the Drumstick-Cam that starts it off, to Angus Young’s exhausting song-long riff to the literal wall of fist-pumping “Thun-der!”-shouting fans that surround the stage, this is a video that grabs you off the street, beats you up in a back alley, and leaves you, dazed and bleeding, wondering the last time such a smackdown was that awesome.
It appears that our economy was based on people making poor economic decisions (buying on credit, getting loans they couldn’t afford). We appear to be stuck; either people make bad decisions and screw up their personal financial situation, or they make good decisions and all the industries that benefit from bad decisions (which appears to be most of the economy) are wrecked.
It’s a sobering thought to consider that my relative frugality, if applied to everyone, would almost surely cause national economic meltdown. I wonder if someday the President will implore people to spend beyond their means, to please max out their credit cards as part of their patriotic duty…
There’s a new Star Wars movie coming out in August, as you almost undoubtedly know. I almost undoubtedly know that, like almost every other Start Wars movie before it, the plot will be haphazard at best, the dialogue will be cringingly cheesy, and that these make me gag in almost any other movie. I also know that I’m going to see it, maybe even in the theatre, so I can get an even greater effect from it.
What I’m wondering is, why? And this is actually something I’ve been trying to figure out; on a purely cinematographic level, most Star Wars movies just aren’t very good. (Empire is excepted, of course.) And I hate watching bad movies. So why do I (we) keep going to them? The special effects, of course, tend to be great, but there’s something deeper. The best I can come up with is this: Star Wars taps into very fundamental desires/wishes that many, many people have, especially guys, and even more especially guy nerds. Here’s my best guess as to what they are they are:
All wonderful fantasies, of course, but they don’t help me when I’m standing in line to get in to the theatre, wondering why I’m giving George Lucas yet more money to wreck a story.
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