Bryan's blog

Why McDonalds doesn't serve breakfast all day

2011-12-07T09:05:00.001-05:00

I am subscribed to an amazing daily newsletter called "Now I Know" which is emailed to me every weekday morning. It's written by a guy named Dan Lewis (you can subscribe to it here if you want; you won't regret it.)

Anyway, the bonus fact in today's newsletter was really interesting. (The article was about Waffle Houses.) This is what it said:

Bonus fact: Waffle Houses serve breakfast all day. McDonalds does not -- they stop serving breakfast foods at about 11 A.M., depending on individual franchises. Why? Because the breakfast foods cook at a lower grill temperature than the regular burgers-and-sandwiches (but not hot dogs) menu; once the grill is turned up, breakfast can no longer be prepared.

I've always wondered this, because I always want an Egg McMuffin whenever I go to McDonalds. Granted, I only go to McDonalds maybe once a year, but whatever.

A drawing made of 3.2 million dots

2011-12-06T21:19:00.001-05:00

This is a really cool process of a kid drawing a picture by using dots. It's pretty neat.

Hero from Miguel Endara on Vimeo.

I think I would be worried about hand cramps.

Push on your eyeballs to lower heart rate

2011-11-15T22:05:00.001-05:00

My professor told me that if you push on your eyeballs, your heart rate drops.

I just tried it and it works.

I'm glad I was sitting down though, because I got dizzy and light headed. My professor said that sometimes when he used a certain instrument that pushes up against someone's eye, that person might faint if they have low blood pressure.

Why does your body do this?

He explained that your body is designed to lower the heart rate when there is pressure on the eyes because there are pressure sensors there. If there is pressure on the eyes, the theory is that your body assumes that you are under water and slows down your heart rate to conserve oxygen. However, this causes a lack of oxygen in your brain, which may cause you to faint.

So if a bad guy is chasing you and you know that bad guy has low blood pressure, you can try two things:

Reach behind and try to press his eyes so that he might faint.
Tell him that he "might be able to run faster if he presses his eyes," so that he'll try to press his own eyes himself.

This plan is flawless!

Personality Test

2011-11-09T22:43:00.001-05:00

We took a personality test in my business class last week. It was pretty interesting to see how true that test was. Basically, our professor said that there are four basic personalities:

Playful/Popular
Powerful
Perfectionist
Peaceful

These four personality types have been called a bunch of different things throughout history, such as the four temperments: sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic.

My professor put up a slide with four columns of adjectives, and we had to choose one adjective in each row that described us. Then we added them up to see which personality we were.

I showed it to Katie and she said it's like those quizzes in Teen Beat magazine that shows was color lip gloss to wear to match your personality. I think this test is pretty much just as accurate as the lip gloss test.

If you want to try it, this test is pretty similar to the one my professor gave us.

I was a Peaceful/Perfect. Katie was a Powerful/Perfect.

I think you could also apply this to the Houses in Hogwarts, where Gryffindor = Playful/Popular, Slytherin = Powerful, Ravenclaw = Perfectionist, and Hufflepuff = Peaceful.

But that would mean I would be in Hufflepuff. Dang it. No one wants to be in Hufflepuff. At least I'm not a Slytherin, like someone else I know (**cough** Katie **cough**).

Art and Medicine with Frank Netter

2011-11-08T21:48:00.000-05:00

I learned about Frank Netter today, but I was aware of his work before today. Frank Netter was born in the early 1900's and grew up wanting to be an artist. During high school he went to a design school, but his family didn't want him to be an artist. He decided to go on the medical school and he became a surgeon. He opened up a practice, but it was not profitable at all. This was in the middle of the Great Depression.

He did some freelance art work for pharmaceutical companies, most notably CIBA, and it tuned out to pay a lot more than his own private practice. He then gave up the practice of medicine and started to make medical illustrations full-time.

Doctors still use and love his illustrations. I have seen them in my current Histology and Physiology classes. There were posters of Netter's illustrations hanging up in the cadaver lab at BYU.

Here's an example of his art:

From University of Waterloo

I guess I think he is really cool because I like drawing and I like the human body. It reminds me of when I drew a bunch of pictures to study for my anatomy class.

Your liver can REGROW!

2011-11-06T18:47:00.000-05:00

I remember hearing from someone in Middle School that if you cut off a piece of your liver then it will grow back. I thought he made it up. I told him that was just a myth perpetrated by the story of Prometheus getting his liver eaten out each day and then it growing back.

But it is true.

You can donate up to 60% of your liver and it will regrow. It may not grow to it's original shape, but it will regain it's function--which is AMAZING!

Also, in other news, I opened up my portrait shop again (but I increased the price and added a few weeks to the delivery time to account for the fact that I'm in school now.)

That is all.

Cuttlefish eyes

2011-11-05T15:36:00.003-04:00

Cuttlefish are related to squids and octopuses and they are really neat creature. But studying eyes has made me really appreciate how cool their eyes are.

From Wikipedia

Here are some amazing things about cuttlefish eyes:

They can't see any color, but they have two focus-point areas (fovea) on their retina: one to look forward and one to look behind.
The "w" shape of their pupil allowed them to see the polarization of light, which enables them to see with greater contrast.
They focus their eyes by reshaping the entire eye, not just the lens.
They have no blind spot because their optic nerve is behind the retina
Scientists have speculated that their eyes are fully developed while they're still in their eggs, and they prefer to eat things they have seen swim by whilst in their eggs.

I have no idea what it would look like to be able to focus on two objects at once, or be able to perceive the polarity of light--all I know is that it would be AWESOME.

Tracy Chapman

2011-11-04T22:38:00.002-04:00

Every time I hear Tracy Chapman sing, I have one thought go through my head:

"Is Tracy Chapman a man or a woman?"

And I have to Google it every time, because I can never remember.

Bonus Post

2011-11-03T22:41:00.000-04:00

Because I forgot to post yesterday, here's a neat secret I learned about Google.

If you Google "do a barrel roll," then Google will do a barrel role.

Try it.

Treating disease is easier than treating patients

2011-11-02T20:46:00.002-04:00

Patients don't always do what you want or expect them to do. My professors have often said that it's easy to know what needs to be done to fight a disease, but it's hard to make sure the patients actually do it.

Here's an example to illustrate the point. This is true story. No joke.

A women brought her teenage son in my professor's office one day because he had a red eye. He looked at it and saw that it was a bacterial infection and wrote him a prescription for some antibiotics. He gave them the paper with the prescription and told the mom to make sure her son took it every day, and then to come in again for a follow-up exam in a week.

A week later, the mom brought her son in again and the infection had gotten worse. He couldn't understand what was wrong, so he asked her if he's been taking the prescription.

"Yes, every day!" she replied.

"Okay, show me how he does it."

The women pulled out the piece of paper with the prescription on it and she proceeded to rip a small piece of it off, rolled it into a ball, and popped it into the boy's mouth. She had been giving her son pieces of the paper instead of filling the prescription.

Moral of the story: don't assume anything. If you are going to expect the patient to do something, make them show you that they know how to do it before you let them out of the office.

Watery eyes

2011-11-01T20:54:00.001-04:00

I hardly get watery eyes anymore. This is a good thing, because I used to get them whenever I thought about something painful or someone with inflammation in the eye. And I don't think anybody would want to visit an optometrist who couldn't look at your eye infection without crying.

This has come gradually over the past seven weeks of school. I think looking at pictures of bloody, pus-filled eyeballs every day has dulled my senses. Also, learning about what is happening to the eye (what is being inflammed, which cells are causing it, what treatments would be necessary, etc.) helps me analyze the eye instead of saying, "Oh man, oh man, there's an actual hole in that eye and something gooey is coming out."

Are you brave? Don't look if you're squeamish! Click here to see some nasty eyes!

Anyway, school is going great. My classes are very hard, but they're super interesting.

Oh, those crazy Japanese

2011-10-06T16:56:00.000-04:00

I just read one of the best blog posts ever. It's about a robot that washes people's hair. When I first read that title, I thought that it was a frivolous expense and worthless invention.

[Source]

But after reading it I realized how blind that point of view is.

From Boing Boing:

"This hair-washing robot, introduced by Panasonic at a public demonstration in Tokyo last week, is actually a pretty practical idea. Washing your hair involves a decent amount of small motor coordination and finger dexterity, things that people often lose when they have a spinal injury or other kinds of nerve damage. A hair-washing robot could offer those people a bit more independence when it comes to their daily routines. That's a good thing.

But the real reason I'm posting this here is to show you how easy it is to take research that is objectively beneficial, and make it sound deeply silly and frivolous. All you have to do is show that picture (which is a little funny looking already, right?) and frame the story from the perspective of privilege—the perspective of people who have no problems controlling the nerves in their hands and forget that not everybody shares that skill."

It's pretty easy to frame any scientific experiment or research in a way that sounds ridiculous and a waste of money. But instead of trying to see how dumb any idea is, I think I'm going to try to see any possible uses from that experiment.

For example: scientists are wasting money trying to make kitties glow in the dark! Except the florescence gene (which isn't glow-in-the-dark, it just shows up under a UV light) is just a biomarker to help identify an immunity in cats against HIV.

Betting on Power Rangers

2011-10-03T22:18:00.000-04:00

I can remember watching two TV shows religiously as a kid: Reading Rainbow and Power Rangers. I remember when I was in the first grade I used to ask my mom if I could watch Reading Rainbow once Chris and Lisa left for school in the morning. It was the highlight of my morning. Levar Burton was awesome.

And in third grade I would watch Power Rangers every Saturday morning. It was fun to watch Power Rangers in third grade because every one else watched them too. I would talk about them with my friends during recess. I once made a bet with a girl on who the Green Ranger would turn out to be. I bet her 50 cents that it wouldn't be Tommy.

It turned out it was Tommy. During the commercial break, she called me to tell me that I lost the bet and I owed her 50 cents.

I didn't have 50 cents, so I decided to earn some money. I grabbed a handful of pretzel sticks and set up a card table on our front lawn. I sold the pretzel sticks for one penny each.

Luckily, I had a customer. Just one. It was a woman who pulled up in her minivan and and handed me a dollar and asked for just a handful of my pretzels. It was pretty sweet.

Dynamic views and school

2011-10-02T18:58:00.000-04:00

I really love the dynamic views that Blogger put up. This is the kind of thing that I was hoping for while I was posting so much last year. Maybe this exciting new format will encourage me to write more often again.

Speaking of which, I am planning on writing again everyday in November. I hope everyone else does to, OK? OK, sounds good.

Optometry school is pretty hard. I'm taking Physiology, Histology, Optics, Genetics, and a Business class. We sit in the same class room the whole day (room 22) and the professors come in a lecture for 2 to 3 hours and then a new professor replaces them when their time is up. Once they come in they start lecturing non-stop and you do everything within your power to keep up with them and write down what they're saying. After about four hours my hand starts cramping up. Luckily we have a ten minute break each hour.

But school is really really interesting. Way more interesting than my construction management classes at BYU. I haven't even been tempted to fall asleep in my classes yet.

The couch

2011-09-27T22:32:00.000-04:00

Our couch is pretty magical. As you can barely see in this picture, it is green. We bought it second hand at the local Goodwill on Katie's birthday when we first moved here. It was the only present she got that day. Poor Katie. Don't worry -- we celebrated her birthday a few weeks later.

The reason I say our couch is magical is because I found a lot of magical things in it. These things belonged to the couch's previous owner, and I think they are pretty telling of that owner's personality. Here is an incomplete list of the things I pulled out of the couch:

A drum stick. Not like a chicken leg, but the wooden stick you hit a drum with.
An English 202 midterm exam. He got a 57%. Sad day for him. I know it's a "him" and not a "her" because his name was on the exam. But I won't tell you his name -- that would be a FERPA violation...I think. I felt kind of bad for him because his answers really were pretty terrible.
3 saltine crackers. Intact. I think the fact that they were intact is what amazed me the most.
14 cents (dime, penny, penny, penny, penny).
3 ballpoint pens. All of them were out of ink.

I know there were some more random things we found in there, but they aren't coming to mind.

Baking powder vs. baking soda

2011-09-26T20:10:00.000-04:00

Katie put up a magazine holder in our bathroom a few weeks ago. We have issues of National Geographic, Popular Science, and Martha Stewart Living sitting in there right now. After reading every article in National Geographic and Popular Science twice, I decided to pick up Martha. I was bored, OK?

Anyway, I found a really interesting article! A reader asked if baking soda and baking powder are interchangeable.

Answer: no!I kind of had a hunch that this is true, but I didn't know why. Both baking soda and powder are leavening agents (meaning they make bubbles to make bread rise), but they use different methods.

Baking soda is used when you are making something that has an acidic ingredient, such as molasses or vinegar or chocolate. The soda (which is a base) reacts with the acid and makes carbon dioxide bubbles.

Baking powder is used for situations in which there are no acidic ingredients. The powder has an acid built right it: cream of tartar. So once baking powder gets wet, it starts making bubbles, as you can see from this, um, really cool video.

Most annoying song on most annoying instrument

2011-09-26T00:07:00.000-04:00

[Video link]

Evolution

2011-09-25T23:42:00.000-04:00

According to this study by Gallup, only 4 in 10 Americans say they believe in evolution, which is, in my opinion, a staggeringly low amount. I think this is because there is a common misconception that a belief in evolution means that you can't believe God.

I personally believe in evolution. And I strongly believe in God. And what's more, I don't think those two ideas contradict one another. You don't have to be an atheist to believe that evolution is real. In fact, I think looking at the intricities and beauties of science has strengthened by faith.

When I was at BYU, I came across many people who didn't believe in evolution. In each biology, chemistry and psychology class I took we discussed evolution and how it the basis for modern science and doesn't contradict true religion. These are the two main points that fellow class members brought up, arguing that evolution isn't necessarily true:

Evolution is just a theory. While this is true, I think it is misunderstood. Theories are the strongest piece of evidence that science has to offer. Relativity is a theory. Plate tectonics is a theory. Germs are a theory. And all of these theories are used as if they are fact because they are the best models we have at the moment to define the world around us.
Evolution proves that God doesn't exist. This is not true. All evolution shows us is that species adapt to their surroundings. This happens because DNA mutates when species have offspring. Sometimes the change in genes makes them better adapted to their surroundings, and sometimes it makes them worse. The mutations that make the species better adapted gets passed on because they live long enough to have more kids. Their offspring carry the adapted gene and the species has evolved to a stronger species. That is all evolution is.

I believe that there isn't a scientific truth and a religious truth. There is only truth. And we will one day everything will be understood completely. In the mean time, I applaud the scientific community for advancing the limit of what we know, while at the same time I cherish the simple truths the come directly from God.

Folding a fitted street

2011-09-11T00:09:00.000-04:00

A few months ago, I was listening to a podcast by the guys at How To Do Everything (I think it was this one) and they had a part of the show that was called "Ask A Rocket Scientist." This is when they would ask a rocket scientists all the questions they didn't have time to answer themselves to get some quick answers.

One of the questions was this: How are you actually supposed to fold a fitted sheet?

The rocket scientist simply responded that she had no idea. And they left it at that! I was like, "What?! You can't do that? I've wanted to know this my whole life, and you totally crushed the hope that you allowed me to have for a split second."

I decided that there had to be a solution. So I googled it and I found this gem from Martha Stewart. I was so excited that I emailed the hosts at How To Do Everything with a link to the site, and they actually responded! I felt super cool. This is was Ian Chillag said back to me:

That's great, Bryan. This only further justifies my plan to replace Mike with Martha Stewart.
Thanks,
Ian

How cool is that? I, too, admire Martha's ingenuity, but I found Martha's instructions to be a little confusing, specifically steps two and three. Here's how I do it:

Turn the sheet inside out and stick your hands in two corners

Bring your hands close together

Flip the corner of your right hand on to the corner of the your left hand

Put your free hand in the doubled-up corner on the bottom and bring it close to the one on the top

Again, flip the corners from your right hand onto the corners on your left hand

Now, all four corners should be piled on top of each other. Fold the sheet so that the elastic is hidden in the middle

Now you have a tidy looking fitted sheet!

Magic squares

2011-09-01T23:25:00.000-04:00

Have you ever heard of magic squares? These are squares with numbers in them, and if you add up the numbers in the columns or rows, they all add up to the same number.

In this example, all of the rows and columns add up to the number 15. There is a pretty simple pattern to use if you want to make one, although this pattern only works for boxes with an odd number of boxes in a row (3x3, 5x5, etc)

Read on to figure out how to make one after the jump.

Here's how you can make one. There are two simple rules:

Place the next number diagonally up and to the right
If that space is filled, go down

I'll show you to explain:

Start with an empty box.

Put a "1" any where you want.

Put the "2" in the spot diagonally up and to the right. Do the same thing with the "3". (You have to imagine that the square kind of wraps around so that if you go off the side up appear on the other side.)

If we kept following the same pattern, we would have to put the "4" in the square where the "1" is. Since it's already occupied, you go down and put the "4" right below the "3".

Then you go up and to the right again to place the "5". Continue following those two rules until you have filled in all the boxes, and there you have it! In a 3x3 square, you see that all the numbers add up to 15. I'm not sure how you do the trick where you can make a square that adds up to any number of your choosing.

Maybe that will be my next project...

I read about this a couple of months ago and I have tried to find the original source, but I can't seem to find it right now. However, I just refreshed myself on the rules by looking at Harvey Mudd College of Math's website.

Coincidentally, Harvey Mudd is the school that the mathemagician Arthur Benjamin teaches at. Katie, Lisa, and I saw him a few years ago at a show at BYU. It was pretty jawsome.

Smart kid builds efficient solar panals

2011-08-20T14:18:00.000-04:00

I read this article at popsci.com about a 13-year-old boy who designed new, super-efficient way to organize solar panels.

Aiden Dwyer was walking in the forest in the winter time and noticed a pattern in the tree branches. After studying them for a while, he realized that they grew in a spirals. He found that they were organized in the Fibonacci sequence (1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,etc.).

This is the picture he drew.

He realized this has probably something to do with photosynthesis and how efficient the tree was, and so he built a model tree and placed little solar panels on the branches in accordance to the pattern he saw in nature. He then compared the output of his tree model to the traditional set up of the solar panels.

Here is his model next to the traditional version

It turns out that his tree model outperformed the traditional model by 50% in the winter solstice days. This design won Aiden the 2011 Young Naturalist Award. He has applied for a patent and is continuing on perfecting his model by studying other tree species.

You can read his essay that he wrote here. Pretty cool for a 13-year-old to figure out!

Amazing picture

2011-08-17T12:50:00.001-04:00

Untitled, a photo by joeribosma on Flickr.

I'm not sure why I like this picture so much. At first I thought it was Photoshopped in some way, but I don't think it is. I love how his wet shirt lines up with the horizon.

Which color is different?

2011-08-12T23:50:00.000-04:00

Can you tell?

There actually is a different one, and most Westerners can't tell which green is slightly off. Even though I know which one is different, I'm having a hard time noticing it. You can click here if you want to see the RBG values to see which one it is.

There is a tribe of of people in northern Namibia that can easily point out which green is different. That is because they have different words for those shades of green. They do have a hard time telling blue and a certain type of green apart because those are the same words. Some researchers believe this is because learning the names of colors and the perceptions of colors are linked.

This is the video that is associated with this image. It's kind of long, but really interesting. I would watch at 2:10 to get the explanation of the Himba color words.

Oh yeah, the green square they point out in the video as the different one is wrong. Or maybe it is a different chart. But just to make sure that the chart above is correct, I uploaded the image in Photoshop and double-checked the RGB values with the eyedropper tool and the linked image is right.

Updated: Sorry, I thought I included a link to the original post that I saw on Boing Boing. Here it is! It's really interesting. Man, I love that blog so much.

World's Largest Gummy Bear

2011-08-10T22:01:00.000-04:00

I found this a while ago and have thought about it every time I see gummy bears.

And it's only $29.95!

The emotional stages of drawing

2011-08-09T23:16:00.000-04:00

I've been drawing a lot more lately. It's a lot of fun but also makes me sweat some bullets too. It started a few weeks ago when I decided that I wanted to try to sell some portraits of people in an Etsy shop. I needed some more pictures to build some sort of portfolio, so I did a few pictures for free. This is basically how my emotional levels progressed throughout the drawing process:

1. Super happy! Someone wants me to draw a picture for them!

2. A little anxious. The shadows and facial expression look kind of hard.

3. UTTERLY DEVASTATED! The picture looks horrible! It looks like a monstrous hybrid between Chucky and an evil clown.

4. Slightly sedated. OK, this might be salvageable. It still looks weird, though.

5. Super happy! Yay, it's not ruined! (Yes, I do grow freckles in step 5.)

The exhausting thing is that I go through those five steps every single time. This last picture I did I almost erased the whole thing once I hit stage three. But I pulled through. I think the trick is to keep sitting at the desk and drawing and drawing until you get it right.

Pica Pic

2011-08-08T23:52:00.000-04:00

You know those old handheld games that we used to play when we were little?

I found a website that has a collection of 26 or 27 different games you can play right on your computer. It's pretty sweet; you should try it!

The website is pica-pic.com.

I like teaching primary

2011-08-07T22:20:00.000-04:00

Katie and I were given the calling of teaching the 5 and 6 year olds in primary, and we absolutely love this calling. Primary is way more fun than Sunday School and Priesthood and Relief Society. Here are reasons why I love primary so much:

We sing at least 5 songs within a 30 minute period
The kids are really excited to tell you things that have happened to them, like that they played a board game with their brother, or that their school teacher had a sunburn.
They have crazy imaginations. For instance, we were teaching a lesson on faith last week, and for an object lesson we hid something under a cloth and asked them how they knew something was underneath it. After that, we had them guess what the object was. One kid thought it was an ostrich with a suitcase--I have no idea why.

Brain freeze

2011-08-06T23:39:00.000-04:00

I was bad today. I sneaked some ice cream while Katie was at work and Olivia was in the living room reading her favorite Busy Town book. It was really yummy. I was eating it really fast because I didn't want Olivia to see me eating it and want some herself. The problem with scarfing it down is that it dramatically increases the likelihood of a brain freeze.

This one was absolutely devastating. It hit really hard and made the whole right side of my face seize up in pain. My eyes were watering and I fell to the ground and crawled over to the rug and laid there for a little bit. Olivia kind of laughed and walked over to me and said "Daddy fall down!" Then she proceeded to use me as a jungle gym.

Once my headache went away (two whole minutes later) I thought I would look up how they work. The ice cream cools and constricts the blood vessels on the roof of the mouth. This change in blood vessel size stimulates the trigeminal nerve that goes over the mouth (you know what I'm talking about, Alison...right?) The nerve sends the signal to the brain, and the brain misinterprets the signal for a pain signal from the forehead, face, etc.

I just found a cure for a brain freeze! The trick is to warm that area of your mouth as fast as you can to make the blood capilaries expand again. You can do this by pressing your tongue against the roof of your mouth or drinking some warm water.

I can tell you that I'm definitely planning on trying that the next time I get another headache.

Slap hat

2011-08-05T16:24:00.000-04:00

I saw this lovely item and thought it was one of the dumbest weapons ever.

It took me a while to figure out how it worked. I thought it was just a normal baseball hat that you can slap people with. It turns out that there is a heavy 2 pound beanbag on the back of the head that is full of "impact material that is 100% the density of lead."

I'm not really sure what it means when it says it is 100% the density of lead. Is it lead then? Or just some cornstarch or something? Maybe it's full of plastic toys. I know it hurt really bad when I was hit on the head by Cookie Monster's plastic eyeballs.

I think everyone has been hit on the head by those eyeballs. He may look cute and innocent, but I'm pretty sure he hides blades in those eyes. [Link]

Understanding big numbers

2011-04-13T23:20:00.000-04:00

This last week there was a lot of news coverage about the budget and government shutdown. Once you get into numbers like million/billion/trillion, it is hard to actually understand what those numbers mean.

I found a blog that uses a simple way to understand these huge numbers: divide everything by 100,000,000.

If you divide everything by 100,000,000 then you get the following:

We have a family that is spending $38,200 per year. The family’s income is $21,700 per year. The family adds $16,500 in credit card debt every year in order to pay its bills. After a long and difficult debate among family members, keeping in mind that it was not going to be possible to borrow $16,500 every year forever, the parents and children agreed that a $380/year premium cable subscription could be terminated. So now the family will have to borrow only $16,120 per year.

Here's the whole post.

Keynes vs. Hayek

2011-04-13T22:27:00.000-04:00

I just finished my last economics class yesterday, and my professor showed us this video as a sort of treat. It's pretty funny. I can't remember ever listening to a rap that was so informative. And the amazing thing is that I could kind of follow what they were saying.

The happiest man in the world

2011-03-15T13:59:00.000-04:00

...is a man named Alvin Wong.

Really.

According to this article in the New York Times, Gallup compiled some statistical data to determine what attributes contribute most to happiness. They found that people are happier when they are:

male
tall
Asian-American
at least 65 years old
married
has children
is a practicing Jew
lives in Hawaii
runs his own business
makes at least $120,000 per year

After a few phone calls to synagogues in Hawaii, Gallup found a tall, Asian-American Jew who fit all the descriptions.

Too bad I only have three of the nine qualities...

Line, dot ...

2011-03-12T18:00:00.000-05:00

Laws of Attraction

2011-03-11T18:49:00.000-05:00

What's a Bobalagooch Handle?

2011-03-11T11:14:00.000-05:00

The bobalagooch handle (pronounced BOB-ah-lah-GOOCH) is something that my brother David made up. We used to play the game as kids where you had to say "safety" if you ... passed gas. If you didn't, someone else could yell "doorknob" and then they could punch you until you touched a doorknob. If there wasn't a doorknob nearby, you could get punched for hours until you found one. We naturally added some more things you could get punched for, such as burping (you had to say "protection" or else someone could say "door handle") and picking your nose (you had to say "shield" or else someone could say "cupboard knob").

Because of this triple threat, David made up the bobalagooch handle, which is a doorknob, door handle, and cupboard knob all rolled into one. If someone yelled something and started punching you, you had to sing the bobalagooch song, which means the tooter/burper/picker had to sing "Bobalagooch! Bobalagooch!" over and over again to the tune of Winnie the Pooh. Once you finished the song, you had to go through the motion of rotating the the imaginary doorknob, turning the imaginary door handle, and pulling the imaginary cupboard knob.

Then you're safe.

So why did I name my blog this? Because I write about a variety of different things, all of which arm you against the pounding blows of ignorance and boredom.

Senioritis

2011-03-10T22:39:00.000-05:00

If...

2011-03-09T23:47:00.000-05:00

Noteslate = want

2011-03-09T09:12:00.000-05:00

I found this the other day and I really, really want one. I'm not sure if it is real or not...

It's called a Noteslate, and it's a $99 eInk writing tablet. You just take your notes on it and then it will save it to a SD Card of USB drive for you. This would be perfect for school. I would just take the Powerpoint slides made by the teachers, convert them to PDFs, upload them onto this, and then I could just take notes right on this without having to carry a bajillion papers around.

I could also scan in images of my text books and then carry around digital copies of those, too. I actually tried this out the other day. I took an old copy of National Geographic (thanks again, Kathy!) and had the binding cut off. Then I took it to the Genealogy and Family History Library in the BYU Library, where they have a book scanner. The machine scanned the whole magazine in a few minutes, and then I had that whole issue on my flash drive. A bonus feature was that the book scanner was able to read words, making the whole issue word-searchable. Imagine how cool it would be to be able to have your handwritten notes word-searchable!

Anyway, the site says that the Noteslate should be available in June. A lot of websites are doubtful, though. I guess we'll see.

Google searches

2011-03-08T15:01:00.000-05:00

I was looking at the "Stats" icon on my Dashboard just now, wondering how many people look at my blog when I don't write. I still get a lot of people looking at it, but it is all from random Google searches.

I guess that comes from writing about tons of random things for a year. Here are some searches that brought of links to my blog.

"sparklines"
"oat sample questions"
"jack nelson logan utah"
"play hnefatafl"
"baby names 2015"

That baby names search has been extremely popular. I'm not sure why.

All my ideas are against the law

2011-02-23T00:50:00.000-05:00

I really like being on the Student Advisement Committee for the BYU Library. Basically, we get paid to come up with ideas for ways to improve the library. Unfortunately, none of my ideas this semester are legal. Idea number one: purchase e-book readers for students to check out and read the library's existing e-books. We have literally tens of thousands of academic e-books. Unfortunately, every e-book reader that I researched is only licensed for individual use (this includes the Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and Sony Reader). Also, the e-books we own all have specific DRM from the publishers so that the files can't be converted to ePub files that can be read on a reader.

Bummer. Maybe copyright laws will change in 5 or 10 years.

Idea number two: make digital copies of our audio books (which are on CD right now) and let students check out MP3 players with the digital recording of the book on that device. I went to the copyright office here on campus and talked to the director about this one. He wasn't sure if it was legal or not, so he emailed me a copy of the copyright law and we both looked at it. After reader through pages of legalese referring to reproduction rights of academic institutions, I found that it is currently legal to make a digital copy of an audio recording, but only if the medium which the book is currently on is obsolete. So we can only do this once manufacturers stop making CDs and CD players, which isn't likely in the next decade or so.

Dang. The frustrating this is that doing these things shouldn't be against the law. We're not trying to sell them to make a profit. We're not letting students copy the material for themselves. It makes me want to figure out who is in charge of writing the copyright law and lobby them for change.

So if anyone else knows any great ideas to implement in the library, let me know! I'm desperate for good ideas.

Ironic

2011-02-15T21:41:00.000-05:00

Guess he didn't see this one coming. Here's the link. Ha!

Norville Rogers

2011-02-12T18:01:00.000-05:00

Do you know who Norville Rogers is? I bet you would recognize him if you saw him...

Dang, the picture I was going to use is copyrighted. Guess I'll have to resort to Paint...

Oh man, never man. That drawing looked too bad.

Well, here's a hint: he has the same popular nickname as Orville Richard Burrell, who wrote "Boomtastic."

Norville Rogers is the name of Shaggy, that really cool guy from Scooby Doo!

...No wonder he goes by Shaggy.

Death and Taxes

2011-02-10T14:32:00.000-05:00

I think you all know that I love infographics. I found one of the most detailed, comprehensive, and amazing infographics out there.

It's created by Jess Bachman and it's called Death and Taxes. It a visual representation of how our tax money is spent each year. She spends a few months each year creating a new poster, so you can track the trends of government spending and, in turn, public opinion. Her site is here.

Be sure to click the "full screen" icon.

Scorpion Venom

2011-02-08T14:52:00.000-05:00

A while ago I wrote a post about expensive liquids. At that time I had found a site that said that scorpion venom was the most expensive liquid, and I wondered what it was used for.

Now I know why it's so expensive.

I was listening to a podcast (which I can't seem to find right now) that explained that scorpion venom is actually used in cancer research. It is very, very, very difficult to find something that will only kill cancer cells and not healthy cells, but apparently scorpion venom tends to attack certain cancer cells first. They made a synthetic, radioactive version of this venom and inject it into people with brain tumors called gliomas, and the hope is that the radioactive venom will target just the gliomas and not the other cells. The radioactivity will kill just those cells.

This is still in the early testing period, but I think it's an awesome idea. I figure that cancer research is a pretty good reason to buy scorpion venom. Maybe I could get a scorpion farm and collect venom and sell it to research institutions...

I wonder how you even collect venom from a scorpion?
... Now I know

Drunk octopus

2011-02-05T23:40:00.000-05:00

I found this image here. I think it's the funniest thing I've ever seen.

Sperm whale oil

2011-02-03T14:02:00.000-05:00

I few weeks ago I learned about waxes and oils in my biochemistry class. My professor told us about sperm whale oil, and it's pretty amazing stuff.

Apparently, there's a huge cavity in the skull of the sperm whale that's full this oil, called spermaceti. It's oderless and tasteless, and is used for making candles and oils for lamps and cosmetics. There's a lot of oil in the skull. When the whalers caught the whale, they would cut a hole in the head and take out the oil in buckets, or they would have a guy jump in the hole and take it out manually.

They oil has special properties that might have helped the buoyancy of the whale. The oil has a melting and hardening point of about 6 degrees Celsius, and the temperature of the oil can be controlled by the opening and constricting of blood vessels in the nasal passages of the whale. If they want to dive, they just constrict the vessels, making the oil colder and harder, which causes the whale to sink. They can actually dive about 2 miles below sea level. And when they want to come up, they open up the blood vessels (I imagine this as flaring your nostrils), which melts the oil, which helps them float.

Awesome.

New Year Goal

2011-02-01T23:19:00.000-05:00

I finally thought of a new year goal for myself. It wasn't an easy process. It had to be something that I normally wouldn't do, that isn't actually required of me, but would make my life better, but it can't take over my entire life. After a few weeks of thinking, I've decided that I would draw something everyday.

Starting today, Feb. 1, 2011 and ending Feb. 1, 2012, I will draw something daily.

I pulled out my old sketchbook and drew some doodles while I waited for my Economics class to start. That's the beauty of this goal: it can be a simple as a doodle and as complex as a painting. I'm pretty excited. A sub-goal of mine is to sell something that I made. That's what would make this official. But it doesn't have to happen.

Speaking of drawing, I saw this video today and it blew my mind. It totally puts my Paint drawings to shame. It's a video of Bob Staake and how he draws. He actually uses a mouse and draws in a primitive version of Adobe Illustrator. It's crazy how good he is.

Split brain

2011-01-29T21:51:00.000-05:00

I saw this YouTube video in my Psychology class a few days ago. We are talking about brain function and the importance of the corpus callosum, which is the bridge between the left and right brain. It's what makes communication between the two halves possible.

This guy in the video, Joe, had severe seizures and to help get rid of them he has the corpus callosum snipped. Now his brain is basically two parts that are independent of each other. His left side and his right side can't communicate. This neuroscientist in the video does some interesting experiments to show how this affects Joe. Check it out:

How to draw the "cool S"

2011-01-27T10:11:00.000-05:00

You all know what I'm talking about. These cool S's were all the craze in the 90's. People called them "Stussies" but I don't think the brand "Stussy" ever used them. You could see them drawn all over a kid's binder, Trapperkeeper, or backpack. In case you missed that awesome phase of your life, I will now share my secret knowledge of how to draw the awesome "s" with 14 straight lines. Follow these simple steps and you will become the King of 3rd Grade.

Step one: draw three lines.

Step two: draw three more lines right below the first.

Step three: this is the hardest part. If you mess this up, your "S" will be backwards. Connect the top left line to the middle bottom line, and then the middle top line to the bottom right line. Got it? Sweeeeeeeeeeeet.

Step four: draw a little short line from the top right to the middle, and then again from the bottom left to the middle.

Step five: connect the top and bottom sides.


Step six: repeat until your entire binder is full of them.

Pretty awesome! Here's what knowyourmeme.com has to say about the "Super S Stussy":

The “Super S” or “Stussy” symbol was drawn by kids worldwide in the 1990’s. Origins of the symbol are generally unknown but some have suggested it is related to the “Stussy” clothing line (although some say they never used this font style). It was a worldwide meme reaching countries all over the world, primarily drawn at school on binders or notebooks. There is a technique in drawing the symbol (which consists of 14 lines) which was regarded as a kind of special knowledge. In some schools it was later banned because it was thought of as being a gang symbol. Multiple S symbols are referred to as “stussies”.

Toilet bowl wind speed

2011-01-25T13:44:00.000-05:00

You learn some funny things by taking a plumbing class at BYU. Did you know that you can estimate the wind speed outside by looking at your toilet? It's true. This is how:

This is what your toilet bowl looks like with no wind outside:

And this is what it looks like when it's really windy outside:

Did you notice the lower water level? When it's really windy outside the water level is lower in your toilet. This is because of Bernoulli's Principle. Fast wind speed lowers the outside pressure, thereby sucking the water out of the bowl. You can visualize it this way:

Pretty neat, huh? You could calibrate it if you found the actual wind speed during a windy day, then mark that point on your toilet. The you could fill in the blanks by dividing out the remaining spots.

...Well, that's assuming that the relationship between wind speed and water level is linear, which is probably isn't given the fact that the toilet is curved. So you would have to know how the bowl curved to actually do it. But still, it's a neat concept.

Jenga gun

2011-01-25T00:09:00.000-05:00

It's been weird and nice not having to write everyday. The problem is that I keep thinking about great ideas to write about, so my topic list keeps getting longer and longer and the only outlet is for me to write more.

We were playing Jenga the other day and I really wished I had one of these guns for the impossible shots. It looks pretty sweet.

Common Misconceptions

2011-01-19T01:04:00.000-05:00

I found this page on Wikipedia today and it's mind-bending. The page in Wikipedia is called "List of Common Misconceptions" and it ranges in topics from history to transportation. Here are some great passages:

Napoleon Bonaparte was not especially short, and did not have a Napoleon complex. After his death in 1821, the French emperor’s height was recorded as 5 feet 2 inches in French feet. This corresponds to 5 feet 6.5 inches in modern international feet, or 1.686 metres. There are competing explanations for why he was nicknamed le Petit Caporal (The Little Corporal), but few modern scholars believe it referred to his physical stature. Another explanation is that Napoleon was often seen with his Imperial Guard, which contributed to the perception of him being short because the Imperial Guards were above average height.
Elephants are not afraid of mice.
Humans have more than five senses. Although definitions vary, the actual number ranges from 9 to more than 20. In addition to sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing, which were the senses identified by Aristotle, humans can sense balance and acceleration (equilibrioception), pain (nociception), body and limb position (proprioception or kinesthetic sense), and relative temperature (thermoception).Other senses sometimes identified are the sense of time, itching, pressure, hunger, thirst, fullness of the stomach, need to urinate, need to defecate, and blood carbon dioxide levels.
Eating less than an hour before swimming doesn't increase the risk of experiencing muscle cramps or drowning. One study shows that a correlation between alcohol consumption and drowning, but there is no evidence cited regarding stomach cramps or the consumption of food.

There are many, many more.

And now I bring you this comic from xkcd:

Sum

2011-01-17T22:04:00.000-05:00

I used the rest of my Christmas book money today! I got a book called Sum by David Eagleman. I've wanted to read this book for months now. I've checked the Provo City Library and the BYU library, but neither had it. I first heard about this book from Radio Lab. They have David Eagleman on their show every once in a while. He's a neuroscientist, I think ... but his book Sum is a work of fiction. It's actually 40 short stories about the afterlife.

Here's one of the short stories. It's called Sum, just like the title of the book. Radio Lab had an actor read it. It's really interesting.

Real Life Super Hero

2011-01-15T13:10:00.000-05:00

A Real Life Super Hero (RLSH) is someone who dresses us in a costume and goes around trying to do good things in their neighborhood. These people really exist. It just reminds me of the beginning of Spiderman where Peter Parker dresses up in a costume ad gets the living tar beat out of him.

Here's one RLSH that calls himself Phoenix Jones:

And here is a RLSH online manual.

ISBN

2011-01-12T09:12:00.000-05:00

After working in the library for almost 2 years, I have written down literally thousands upon thousands of ISBNs for books. After a while I noticed that books from the same country or from the same publisher had similar ISBNs. This made me curious, so I did a little research last year and found out how books are assigned their respective ISBN. It's kind of neat.

Here is how the number is broken out:

It's always 13 numbers long. The first three digits are always 978. I'm not sure why. Sometimes people leave off this prefix to have a 10 digit ISBN, but that practice is being phased out. The next section codes for the language the book is written in. The third section is the publisher, the fourth is the title (assigned by the publisher), and, finally, the last digit is the check digit.

The language number is kind of neat:

Here are the numbers that are assigned in the language section. The only things I've personally ordered with a language code of 4 are some comics for the Sampler section of the library. I guess there's not a lot of demand for other Japanese stuff...

Now let's look at the check digit.

The check digit is just a complicated math formula to make sure you didn't mix up your numbers when you wrote them down. You multiply the numbers by either a 1 or 3, add them all up, divide by 10, subtract the remainder from 10, and there's your digit. If the number is 10, then just write a 0.

If you don't want to do all the math, you can just use this website, which does it all for you. I use this quite often because people don't realize that the check digit changes when you add then "978" prefix to the ISBN.

Why I have Usher stuck in my head

2011-01-11T09:00:00.000-05:00

Ever since Saturday I've been humming Usher's song "OMG" to myself at random times. The weird thing is that I have only heard about a 5 second clip from the song. And I blame public radio. I heard about this on Wait Wait, and then I found a You Tube video.

Basically, Usher ripped off Homer Simpson.

See for yourself:

Rice Krispiehenge

2011-01-10T22:00:00.000-05:00

Cool, no? I found it here.

Cool Tools

2011-01-06T23:58:00.000-05:00

I know, I know. I don't have to write today, but I thought I would to share this cool blog. If you ever read Boing Boing regularly, you know about Cool Tools. Basically, they recommend cheap and awesome tools. They aren't in it for the money or advertising. They are honest and only write about neat things that they like personally. Some tools that stick out to me are:

the "Fantastic" ice scraper. It has a brass tip and it costs $2.
the basic Casio watch. It tells the time, date, has an alarm, and has a stop watch. And it's only $11. Perfect.
a Christmas light fixer. Neat-o.

Here's the link.

Flowchart

2011-01-06T00:44:00.000-05:00

Here's a little flowchart that I made on Paint for you to enjoy. Thanks for reading!

Click to enlarge!

Also, don't worry about me not writing ever again. I'll still write regularly, but I might not write EVERY day. So we'll keep in touch.

Thanks again, my loyal fans.

Boardgame Remix

2011-01-04T15:15:00.000-05:00

I found this the other day and thought it was pretty sweet. Basically, it's a guide for how to make AWESOME games from old games buy mashing them up. All you need is a copy of Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, Scrabble, and Cluedo (or Clue, if you're American) to make some great games like a zombie invasion in a haunted mansion, word battles with Scrabble tiles, and lots of other insanely fun (I presume) games. Here's a link to the sample PDF.

Out of Context Science

2011-01-04T00:55:00.000-05:00

This is a pretty funny blog that plucks a sentence from a peer-reviewed science paper that sounds pretty funny on its own. For example:

--It seems that really active black holes are rare but not antisocial

--[A] noticeable percentage of flies… ended up with bizarre and random abnormalities such as legs growing where eyes should be

--The stimulus material consisted of the ﬁrst 43min of the movie Bridget Jones Diary

Here's the link.

Tiny Art Director

2011-01-02T23:10:00.000-05:00

Katie gave me some money for Christmas for me to use to buy books and I decided to get a book called the Tiny Art Director. I'm super excited to get it. And he has a blog too! It's really funny. You should look at it. Basically, this dad asks his daughter what he should draw and then she critics his work...sometimes very harshly.

New vs. Old Toothbrushes

2011-01-01T14:51:00.000-05:00

When I was in third grade, a kid in my class told me that Michael Jordan was so rich that he used a toothbrush only once and then threw it away. I asked him why he would do that and he said that new toothbrushes are way more effective than ones that have even been used once. I tried looking up "Michael Jordan" and "toothbrush" on Google, but all I came up with was Jordan's new toothbrush mustache, also known as the Hitler mustache.

But I found this paper, along with some others, that did a study to compare the effectiveness of a brand new toothbrush and a 3-month-old toothbrush. Manufacturers recommend that you replace your toothbrush every 3 months, and these people wanted to see if it really made a difference how old the toothbrush was.

Result: there's not much of a difference.

I guess the big issue is how well your technique is when you brush your teeth. The thing that grossed me out the most is that they had the people not brush their teeth for 48 hours and then they measured the amount of plaque that was removed by brushing their teeth. The gross part is that they only removed on average 34% of the plaque on their teeth, regardless of the condition of the toothbrush. I guess that's why it's important to floss, too.

Best of the Year

2010-12-31T22:43:00.000-05:00

For this last post of 2010, I have decided to mention the posts that, in my opinion, were the best of each respective month. Here's what I think:

January
Capital Punishment -- This was my first post that I wrote. I spent a lot of time writing and re-writing this one. And it was also the first time that a random person left a comment on my blog. I felt pretty famous.

February
Abstract Art - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 -- This was a very fun series for me to write. Every time I see a Jackson Pollock, I think about what I wrote here. To write these posts, I first pulled out my old Art History book to find things to write about when I realized that there was enough material there to make it into three posts. It was pretty nice.

March
Malaria -- This post was pretty interesting. I wrote it after a guest speaker came to my microbiology class. I wrote a followup post here about what one could do about the problem.

April
Seeing in 3D -- If you click on the link on the blog those pictures will be placed side by side and you can see the 3D image if you look hard. It's cool.

May
The Uncanny Precision of the Collective Uninformed -- I heard about this concept from an episode of Radio Lab. Basically, it says that if you get a group of uninformed people to guess something in a subject they don't know about, they will be more precise than a professional. Pretty neat, huh?

June
Prosopagnosia -- This is an illness that I've been thinking about a lot. If you suffer from prosopagnosia, or face-blindness, you can't recognize any faces. You can take a free test from a link on that post. I think one of the most amazing things is that 3% of the population suffers from this.

July
Meeting the Cadavers -- This was an interesting time for me. It was the first time that I came across a dead body.

August
Ant Head Stitches -- This is an awesome concept that I learned from a great book that I read. Basically, you use huge monster ants to bite a cut closed then twist off the body so the head keeps the wound closed.

September
Gambling Simulator -- This is a pretty cool simulator. It shows how likely you are to win the lottery. And in case you didn't know, it's not very likely.

October
F-pyrosharpiongun -- This was pretty fun. I kept thinking about what the most dangerous creature would be. It started out as a mix between a shark and a scorpion and then just went on from there.

November
Shearing the Sheep -- I liked the picture that I drew for this post. That's about it. I guess November was a king of slow month...

December
Stone Coin at the Bottom of the Sea -- I really liked this podcast. I think about it when ever I cash or write a check.

Well, there you have it! It's been a long year, and there are only 5 days left for my year long goal.

Password generator

2010-12-31T00:28:00.000-05:00

Ever having a tough time choosing a password? Just use this handy dandy password generator!

It's completely random, so there's no chance of anyone just guessing it. However, there's no way of memorizing the password, so you better have it saved somewhere.

You could also use this to create a throwaway email account, you know, if you want to create an account on some website but don't want to use your real email account. Or you can use it to give to people for keeping in contact with you if you are on vacation and don't want to check your normal email or something.

Class Crossover

2010-12-30T00:18:00.000-05:00

Because my major (Construction Management) and my career path (Optometry) are quite different, there is hardly any crossover between the classes I take for my major and the prerequisites that I had to take to get into optometry school.

However, I can remember as specific time when there was crossover between my two college worlds:

It was between Construction Safety and Human Anatomy. I went to my Human Anatomy lab early one morning and learned about the circulatory system. We discussed and looked at all the veins and arteries in he body. My TA pointed out the femoral artery, which is huge. On the cadaver it was about as thick as my pinkie. He said that if that just punctured or pinched, you could die within an hour.

Later, I had Construction Safety, and we talked about fall harnesses. My professor explained that once you have fallen, the little loops around your legs pinch tightly and pinch your femoral artery closed. He said that you have about 30 minutes to rescue someone who has fallen from a roof or scaffolding before they completely blackout and then 10 more minutes until they die. To show is that this is true, we actually did a fall test. I thought they would do it on a dummy, but they asked for volunteers from the class. Rather than jumping off a roof (which can lead to some nasty leg breaks from the harness) we had a mechanical crane lift the guys up and hold then about 2 feet above the ground. Almost instantly their legs fell asleep and then started aching. By the end of it their legs were shaking and hurting, and they were only in the air for one minute. It was pretty crazy and it was pretty well ingrained in my mind that I really don't want to fall off of a roof.

Happy Third!

2010-12-28T23:52:00.000-05:00

Today's post will be short because I'm tired. But it's mine and Katie's anniversary today! Woo hoo! And I only have to write for 8 more days!

Iotacons!

2010-12-27T21:03:00.000-05:00

I have just discovered Iotacons (that's with an "i" as in "iota") drawn by Andy Rash and it's pretty cool. Here are some samples:

Click here for more!

Monkey on a typewriter

2010-12-26T11:26:00.000-05:00

I got some sweets books for Christmas this year. One of those books is called "50 mathematical ideas you really need to know." It's really neat. Olivia has been sick today, so I stayed home from church with her and read a chapter on probability. It talked about the classic case of the monkey and the typewriter, saying that given enough time, a monkey could produce a work of Shakespeare by randomly hitting keys.

But how much time would he need?

Here's the short answer: a lot.

Here's the longer answer: let's say there are 30 keys on a typewriter (26 letters, a period, a comma, a question mark, and a space). Let's also assume that the monkey won't have to write an entire sonnet, but just the first three words of the famous soliloquy in Hamlet:

TO BE OR

That's eight keys that the monkey will have to hit in the correct order (including the spaces). How do you calculate that probability? Well, the monkey has a 1 in 30 chance of hitting the "T", and an 1 in 30 chance of then hitting the "O", and so on. So you multiply them all together:

30 x 30 x 30 x 30 x 30 x 30 x 30 x 30 = 6.561 x 10^11

Now, if you assume the monkey can hit one key per second, without taking any breaks for eating or sleeping, the monkey will have to type for about 20,000 years for there to be a "reasonable expectation" that it would have typed "TO BE OR." But if that ever happened, I think the monkey would be more famous for living that long.

Christmas present to YOU!

2010-12-25T13:00:00.000-05:00

Merry Christmas!

As a Christmas present to the general blogging world, I decided to post the PDF version of the new book that I published! It's called "The Lewis Family Tragedy and Other Stories"!

Click here to enjoy!

Kiva

2010-12-24T10:00:00.000-05:00

Kiva is a pretty awesome organization. I took a Business Finance class this past semester at BYU and my favorite section was about micro-finance. I think I enjoyed it so much because it was something that I understood and could grasp. Global markets are too big and complex, but small $25 loans is something that I can relate to.

Here's a video that explains the idea behind Kiva:

How Kiva Works from Kiva Microfunds on Vimeo.

Pretty neat, huh? And it's not a hand out! You are actually not losing any money at all. It's a win-win situation.

Population Density

2010-12-23T15:45:00.000-05:00

Click to embiggen

Here's another infographic that I found. It's made my Time Magazine and it shows where people live in the United States. It's crazy to see how the population makes a distinct line through Texas and Oklahoma and then between Minnesota and North and South Dakota.

And then it's basically blank after that. Except for the coast and some token cities out there. And it's also crazy how many people live between Boston and Washington DC. And look at the size of New York! I love maps like this.

Could you be a failure?

2010-12-22T21:44:00.000-05:00

I saw this infographic and thought it was hilarious.

I found it here.

When zombies attack

2010-12-21T17:20:00.000-05:00

I was learning about responses to zombie attacks the other day. It was pretty intense. Basically, some statisticians and pathologists who work for the Center of Disease Control have run some simulations about the spread of the "zombie disease" (if one ever stuck). If there is any sort of hesitation on anyone's part in regards to killing any zombie will result in a massive outbreak of the zombie virus and will take over the world. The only way we would be able to control zombies is to immediately remove the zombie head from the zombie body as fast and in any way possible. If there is any sort of conference on ways to "save" them or a humane way to treat zombies, modern civilization as we know it will collapse.

So just remember that. You should probably mentally prepare yourself to attack when you see someone with zombie-like characteristics.

Knife Hunting

2010-12-20T12:04:00.000-05:00

Knife hunters consider knife hunting the "fairest way to hunt." Knife hunters are pretty intense. They usually hunt wild boar. They go out in the forest with their hunting dogs, and the dogs chase the boars to make them run pretty fast. Then the hunters run after the boar to chase them down and tackle the boar. Once tackled, the hunter proceeds to stab to boar until it is dead. And then he eats it raw.

Just kidding about the hunter eating it raw. I'm sure he cooks it by breathing fire on it first.

Liquid Body Armor

2010-12-19T15:06:00.000-05:00

I was listening to a podcast the other day about body armor. It was pretty sweet. It kind of tied in with what I was learning about in my molecular biology class, namely that scientists are trying to get bacteria to grow genetically engineered spider silk and use that material for armor or rope or whatever you want a super-lightweight and super-strong material for. Spider silk has some pretty amazing mechanical properties. Maybe I'll write about that one day...

Anyway, they were talking about body armor and how there is a problem with it. If it's really strong, you can't move--but if you make it so you can move easily, it's not so safe. And they have a solution. They have suspended silica particles in a type of oil that is really easy to move in, but once it's hit by a fast moving object (like a bullet) it stiffens up and makes a hard shell.

It's pretty much like an enhanced version of oobleck (cornstarch and water). You can roll it up in a ball, but when you set it down, it turns into a liquid again.

My first phone call

2010-12-18T16:17:00.000-05:00

Do you remember the first time the phone rang and it was for you? I sure do. It was a big day. I think it was the first time that I felt like I was part of the world. It was neat.

I was six years old when I got my first phone call. It was my first grade teacher, calling me before school started in the fall and letting me know what her name was and how excited she was to meet me. I know--what a nice teacher, right? Do you know what I did while talking to her? I went to the fridge and got a soda and lounged on the couch with my legs crossed in front of me. I think I thought that was what you where supposed to do when you talk on the phone. Too much TV, I guess.

Provo Tabernacle is gone

2010-12-18T00:37:00.000-05:00

The Provo Tabernacle burned down today. This is what it used to look like:

And this is what it looks like now:

The entire roof caved in. Isn't that crazy? It seems that the fire started early this morning. I don't think anyone knows what caused the fire yet. It just seems so weird to imagine that yesterday the building was fine, but now the building is pretty much gone. I hope they are able to repair it, or at least rebuild it.

Taiwanese Health Care

2010-12-16T22:38:00.000-05:00

I like the health care system they have in Taiwan. It's universal and both doctors and patients like it. It used to be fee-for-service, but then doctors were abusing the system by over-prescribing stuff. To avoid losing all their money, the Taiwanese government switched over to a global budget in 2002.

The think I like most about the Taiwanese health care system is that everyone is given a smart card that has all the medical history on it, and you make payments using the card, too. I'm pretty sure it looks exactly like this one:

The great thing about the smart card (besides not having to transfer medical records from one doctor to another) is that it cuts out all of the middle men and all the paper work. They have the lowest health care administration costs in the world: less than 2 percent of the total health care costs.

And they only spend about 6 percent of their GDP on health care. Compare that to the United State's 16 percent. Sweet.

You can find out more by Googling it. Hahaha. I love using "let me Google that for you."

A huge stone coin at the bottom of the sea

2010-12-15T19:02:00.000-05:00

The idea for this post came from an awesome podcast from Planet Money. I have embedded the podcast at the end of this post. I highly recommend listening to it. Your mind will be blown. Guaranteed.

Money is such a strange concept. It seems as if we all just arbitrarily agree that a dollar is worth something and that we all accept it its worth as a universal truth.

It wasn't always so. And to illustrate this fact, I would like to talk about the island of Yap. People in Yap use huge stone disks as currency. At least they used to, until recently. They actually use the dollar now. The huge stone disks or coins look something like this:

These things are huge--probably 8 to 12 feet tall and weigh thousands of pounds. Why do they use stone money? Well, that's an interesting story. There was an islander many years ago who paddled his canoe many miles away from the island of Yap and found an island that had some awesome limestone. He decided that he would make a huge piece of artwork that looked like the moon.

When he came back with this huge "coin," everyone loved it. And everyone wanted one. So they got some more moon coins and people would have these huge coins in front of their homes. They came to signify wealth and prosperity. The more you had, the more wealthy you were.

There was just one problem: they were too heavy to move. So what ended up happening is that instead of the coin actually switching hands or locations when you bought something, people just knew which coin was theirs. If you bought a new house, to give him your money you would just say "OK, you see that stone to the left over there? That used to be mine, but it's yours now."

This makes sense, right? No need to move the heavy coins, everyone agrees which one belongs to them. But it's crazy, right? I don't know why, but it just seems crazy in my head. But it gets even crazier. There was this one canoe carrying a huge stone coin that sank a few miles off the coast. When the people in the canoe came back and told the villagers what happened, they said "Don't worry about it! We all know it's there and we can still count it!"

And do you know what's crazier?! We do the same thing! We don't actually trade gold bars. We just trade ownership over the gold bars! (Well...not really. But not so long ago we used to.)

I mean, think about writing a check. The physical money doesn't actually move. If I write you a check for $100, the guy at the bank doesn't pull $100 out of my slot and put it in your slot. No, it's just the ownership of that money that transfers.

Why pirates wear eye patches

2010-12-14T16:56:00.000-05:00

Did you know that pirates didn't wear eye patches because they were blind in one eye? I always thought they wore them because they didn't want people to be grossed out by their blind eye. But that isn't true. (Probably) Have you ever heard of a considerate pirate? I didn't think so.

Pirates wore the patches so that they can quickly uncover their eye in a dark place and be able to see. It works--try it out yourself! If you think about it, it makes sense. The pirate would jump on the deck of the ship he was taking over and take care of everyone on the deck. Then he would have to go below deck in almost complete darkness and it could take a minute or to for the pirate's eyes to adjust. He was fighting in the bright Caribbean sunlight, after all. This way the pirate could storm dark rooms with his guns blazing.

This hasn't been supported by any historical data, but that just means the pirates didn't keep a diary. Of course they didn't keep a diary! They're too busy taking over ships to write down why they use an eye patch.

I've actually used this technique myself when I go the bathroom in the middle of the night. When I turn on the light in the bathroom, I keep one eye shut. When I'm done and I'm heading back to bed, I open the other eye that is used to the darkness. That way I don't trip over Olivia's toys or step on anything. It's pretty great.

Slow Motion Video from a Train

2010-12-13T21:25:00.000-05:00

This video was shot by a high speed camera from a train as it approached a stop. The camera took 210 frames per second, so he slowed it down. That's why everyone looks frozen. It's pretty neat.

The reason why people seem to move faster near the end of the video is because the train is slowing down to a stop. Anyway, I think this is pretty mesmerizing.

A Work in Progress

2010-12-13T00:58:00.000-05:00

Two years ago I got a canvas from Chris and Anna for Christmas. It was an awesome present, but rather intimidating. The stuff you draw on a canvas is so permanent and you feel pressured to make it look good. I tried drawing some avocados on the canvas soon after I got it, but it just looked dumb. I set it aside and waiting for inspiration to strike.

Last week, it struck.

Here's how it is coming along:

Does the picture look familiar? I'm pretty happy with the way it has turned out so far. I think I'm going to just paint the background a solid color and keep her black and white.

And I'll probably spend three more hours shading her upper lip...

Also, I saw this art competition that is going to be held by the Church. I think I want to enter. I'll just wait for inspiration to strike again.

Play Hnefatafl

2010-12-12T01:44:00.000-05:00

Remember this post I wrote a few days ago about hnefatafl? I found a site that lets you play against a computer or another person. It's pretty neat. I like that the games usually last only a few minutes, as opposed to chess. I remember one time I played chess against Chris when I was younger and the game took three days. Bleh.

Anyway, HERE is the link. Enjoy.

Surviving Piracy

2010-12-11T00:57:00.000-05:00

I found a great bbro-shure the other day put out by European Union Naval Force. It explains how to survive being taken hostage by Somali pirates. For some reason, I thought that Anna would appreciate this information a lot. Here are some great tips I learned:

Reassure the pirates that you won't be a cause of concern for them.
Develop a physical exercise program to relieve stress.
Negotiate the best possible living conditions on-board for yourself and your crew mates. (I don't know...this seems like a bad idea to me. I figure I will let the guy with the shoulder mounted missile launcher get to pick which bunk he gets to sleep in.)
Accept the fact that you will be a hostage for 6 to 12 weeks.
Perhaps my favorite tidbit of advice: if the pirates offer you a drug called "khat," don't take it. You will get addicted and experience cravings and tension that might cause "undue violence from your captors."

So there you go. Read through the entire bbro-shure HERE.

And practice saying "I'm not afraid of you" in the mirror at least twice a day.

Most Unwanted Song in the World

2010-12-09T14:28:00.000-05:00

There seems to be a general consensus among the population about what defines a terrible song. Scientists did some research and they made a list of things in music that we hate. Here are things that top the list:

Holiday music
Bagpipes
Organs
A children’s chorus
Cowboys
Oompah tubas
Opera
Rap

So these sick, sick people decided to make a song combining all of these pieces together. I got to 2:30 before I had to turn it off. I DARE you to listen to the whole thing.

Most boring day

2010-12-09T00:05:00.000-05:00

Researchers have discovered the most boring day in the 20th century.

That day is April 11, 1954.

Nothing happened on that day. They searched 300 million facts for major news events, births, deaths, and other important things and have discovered that NOTHING happened on that day.

Well, at least nothing important. The highlight of the day was the general election of Belgium.

And I apologize to anyone who was born on that day.

Tutorial: Chess Board

2010-12-07T13:55:00.000-05:00

A few Christmases ago I made some chess boards as presents. I worked at an architectural mill at the time, so I was able to use the scrap materials and equipment for free. It was great. I thought I would write up a little tutorial on how I made the chess boards because I came up with this method all on my own and I think it was pretty clever of me.

First, find a bunch of scrap pieces of two different types of wood. I liked using mahogany and maple. Glue the pieces together to make to big sheets.

Even out the ends if you want, and then cut the sheets into 5 equal width strips.

Then glue them together alternating colors.

After it is glued, turn the board 90° cut it up into 8 equal strips.

Then shift the pieces by one square and glue it up again.

Use saw to cut off the overhanging pieces and a router or joiner to smooth off the edges. Now you can stick some pencil molding or use a router to make the edges all nice.

And there you go! I tried to carve chess pieces too...but those turned out SO BAD. So I would recommend just stealing some pieces from a board you have lying around the house.

Hnefatafl

2010-12-07T00:36:00.000-05:00

Hnefatafl is Viking chess. It's pretty simple, and it looks pretty neat. It is also one of the only games where the two sides are uneven. Here's what the board looks like:

The big middle white piece is the King, and the purpose of the game is for the White Team to get the King to one of the four corner pieces, while the Black Team tries to kill the King.

Every piece moves like a rook and you can't jump over any pieces. You kill pieces by "sandwiching" them. Like this:

I kind of want to try it out. Anyway, it looks pretty cool.

Fake Entries

2010-12-05T18:46:00.000-05:00

I found out yesterday that dictionaries, encyclopedias, and maps sometimes add fake entries. Why? To see if anyone is plagiarizing their work. If some map includes the same fake street as the map you made, you know they just copied you instead of doing the surveying themselves.

One of the more better known fake entries is "Lillian Virginia Mountweazel" from the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia. The New Yorker wrote an article about this fake woman. This is what they said about her:

Turn to page 1,850 of the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia and you’ll find an entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a fountain designer turned photographer who was celebrated for a collection of photographs of rural American mailboxes titled “Flags Up!” Mountweazel, the encyclopedia indicates, was born in Bangs, Ohio, in 1942, only to die “at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.” If Mountweazel is not a household name, even in fountain-designing or mailbox-photography circles, that is because she never existed. “It was an old tradition in encyclopedias to put in a fake entry to protect your copyright,” Richard Steins, who was one of the volume’s editors, said the other day. “If someone copied Lillian, then we’d know they’d stolen from us.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/08/29/050829ta_talk_alford#ixzz17Hdmy7vZ

Pretty interesting, huh? These fictitious entries are quite old and have since been adopted in many reference works, such as zzxjoanw (1905) and some of them are quite recent, such as the word esquivalience (2005). It makes you wonder how many fake entries are in the dictionary nowadays.

Free Classes

2010-12-05T02:50:00.000-05:00

I used to work for BYU Continuing Education many years ago. My job was to register people for classes and to look good as a model. I was poking around on the Independent Study website the other day because I had to sign up for an online class, and I noticed that Independent Study offers free classes! How cool is that?!

Granted, they are kind of lame, but still!

Here's a list of the "recommended free courses":

I signed up for the Citizen's Guide to American Politics and within minutes I was learning about the national budget and stuff like that.

A full list of all the classes available can be found here.

Plastering an Ant Colony

2010-12-03T20:45:00.000-05:00

Have you ever wondered what an ant colony looks like below the earth?

Now you know.

This guy, Walter Tschinkel, poured plaster down an ant colony, excavated all around it, and the pieced the entire thing together again. Super cool, if you ask me. Kind of bummer for the ants, though. Here's the paper that he wrote about it.

I bet I could do this

2010-12-02T09:00:00.000-05:00

This is one of the most amazing landings I have ever seen. Check it out.

The 18th Camel

2010-12-01T18:03:00.000-05:00

This is a story that I listened to this morning from a TED talk given by William Ury.

"There once was an old father who had 3 sons and 17 camels. When the old man died, he left 1/2 of the camels to his oldest son, 1/3 of the camels to the middle son, and 1/9 of the camels to the youngest son. They realized that you can't divide 17 by 1/2, 1/3, or 1/9, so the began arguing and tension started to rise.

They found a wise old woman and asked for her help. She thought and thought and finally said, "Well, that's a difficult situation, but if it helps any, you can have my camel."

So the three brothers took the old woman's camel and now had 18 camels. The first son took 1/2 of the camels (which is 9), the second son took 1/3 of the camels (which is 6), and the third son took 1/9 of the camels (which is 2), which comes to a total of 17 camels.

So they returned the 18th camel back to the woman."

Interesting story, isn't it? He used this story to explain how many problems to our solutions come from sitting back and trying to look at the whole picture.

Bridal Diapers

2010-11-30T13:22:00.000-05:00

Are they real? As disgusting as it may sound, I think they are.

They have been talked about a lot online in recent months (here, here, and here), but I don't think they are catching on. At least I sure hope not. Apparently, some brides are worried about dealing with their dresses on their wedding day. I guess it's way less humiliating in their minds to poop their panties than to ask for help.

...Lisa, please please just ask for help.

Oldest Game

2010-11-30T02:31:00.000-05:00

I was told in 4th grade that the oldest game in the world is Mancala. I don't think this is true anymore because the earliest evidence of the game is from the 6th or 7th century AD, whereas games such as Senet, Pachisi, Go, Backgammon, and Chess were all played before this time [link].

But that doesn't say that people in Africa didn't play Mancala before the 6th or 7th century. We just don't have physical proof that they played it before all the others. For all we know, they could have just dug holes in the ground and played with pebbles they found. And they could have played it that way for centuries before actually making a playing board out of pottery or wood.

Thanksgiving Psalm

2010-11-28T23:06:00.000-05:00

I heard this story from my Molecular Biology professor. He told this story in honor of Thanksgiving last week. When he was 60 years old, B. H. Roberts (who wrote the Comprehensive History of the Church) was a chaplain in World War I right before the treaty was signed, so he never saw combat. He was the only Mormon chaplain in his division and the other chaplains didn't like him too much. They were kind of mean to him. They were having a big celebration meeting to celebrate and give thanks for the end of the war. One of the chaplains who was leading the meeting announced that he would be pleased to hear Brother Roberts recite "the Thanksgiving Psalm" in honor of this celebration.

There was only one problem: Elder Roberts had no idea which psalm was the Thanksgiving Psalm, or even if there was a Thanksgiving Psalm.

So he got up off his chair and slowly walked up to the podium, having no idea what he would say when he got there. He didn't want to make a fool of himself, but even more importantly, he didn't want to make the Church look bad. On his way to the stage, he heard a voice call out, "Psalm 100!" He turned to look who had said it, but he didn't see anyone else looking around and realized that no one else had heard it. So he got up to the podium, turned to Psalm 100 in his Bible and started reading, having no idea what Psalm 100 was even about. This is what he read:

1 Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands.
  2 Serve the Lord with gladness: come before his presence with singing
  3 Know ye that the Lord he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.
  4 Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name.
  5 For the Lord is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endureth to all generations.

Pretty cool, huh? Later that evening he went through the entire book of Psalms and couldn't find any better psalm that mentioned "thanksgiving." Anyway, I just thought it was a cool story about how the Lord comes through for you in the end.

Shearing the Sheep

2010-11-28T01:30:00.000-05:00

I got a haircut yesterday. My hair is really curly when its long. When I'm stressed out, it gets fluffy. You can tell how stressed I am by measuring the diameter of my fro.

But I got my hair cut yesterday. Yay!

Here is a picture showing how different I look with a haircut. I want you all to notice that the only thing I changed is the hair.

Don't I look like two different people? I think I will do this type of transformation if I ever decide to rob a bank. I will grow my hair out long and shaggy, rob a bank, then run and get a haircut. No one would ever recognize me.

Cool watch

2010-11-26T20:29:00.000-05:00

Check out this watch. It looks pretty neat.

It has bellows to make the sound of the watch resonance. It makes sounds for each minute and hour with a repeater. And I want one. You can read more about it here.

Happy Thanksgiving

2010-11-25T12:32:00.000-05:00