Thursday, February 21, 2008

Frozen cans of cell phones

Cell phones allow people to call people. They do! There's no waiting for pay phones to become available or saying stuff like: "Oh, hey Roberto. I don't have a cell phone. Nope, don't got one." Cell phones make that kind of conversation a thing o' the past!

But cell phones are also the dumbest dumb thing in the universe, dumber than piano benches, a sack of diapers, and an anvil.

Things that are dumb:
1. Cell phones
2. piano benches
3. a sack of diapers
4. anvils

I say so because of cell phone PROVIDERS. Sprint is stupid. In fact, cell phones are not all that unintelligent, the folks at Sprint are.

Revised list of dumb things:
1. Sprint
2. piano benches
3. a sack of diapers
4. American Idol
5. anvils

A post about post-its

I blogged once about index cards. A comment surfaced about post-it note index cards. Post-it notes have so many other uses, though, besides note-taking. But only one is of any real worth.

Things post-it notes are good for
1. Note taking
2. Post it note art!!!









Friday, February 15, 2008

Obligatory Post-Valentine's Day Post

Almost everyone I know posted on Valentine's Day, and I didn't, so I better get crankin'.

I went to every blog that I know about, and I made note of those with a February 14th post. Then I included the ones with a February 15th post, as long as it had something to do with V-day. Here are the blogs:

http://councilbluffs.blogspot.com/
http://caitlinpcarroll.blogspot.com/
http://theschmec.blogspot.com/
http://eanaj.blogspot.com/
http://thefruitrollup.blogspot.com/
http://sparklepony.blogspot.com/
http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com/
http://www.apostropheabuse.com/
http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com/

(Those last 2 really are blogspot blogs. Or at least they started that way.)

And here are my reactions to each of the above blogs, in no particular order(of course):

1. What's with the crappy Flying V clip art?
2. Can't stop thinking about NFL.
3. I'm not! I'm totally not!
4. That's not even that good!
5. Great crap. That sounds REALLY good.
6. Cuties, they are. Cuties.
7. Well, mediocre people do exceptional things all the time.
8. I was also single, but I'm a guy, so Valentine's Day doesn't faze me.
9. Hah! Yellow?

Thursday, February 7, 2008

The worth of the human genome

This is what happens when Kyle and I start talking about crap.

The human genome contains about 3.2 billion base pairs, each of which can be represented by a C, A, T, or G. Thus, they can all be represented using 2 bits, i.e., 00, 01, 10, and 11.

We can store 4 at a time in a byte, which is made up of 4 bits; for example, GTTA would be represented as 11101001.

Here's a helpful conversion table:

1 byte = 8 bits
1 Kilobyte = 1024 bytes*
1 Megabyte = 1024 Kilobytes*
1 Gigabyte = 1024 Megabytes*

*It's not 1000. It's 2 to the 10th power.

So if 4 of the 3,200,000,000 base pairs can be stored in a byte, it would take 800,000,000 bytes to store them all.

Store them all!

That means it would take 781250 Kb.

And 763 Mb.

I know what you're all thinking. "763 megabytes really isn't all that much!" And you're right. But as Council Bluffs pointed out, we're constantly shedding skin cells at an alarming rate. Now we're talking about some new conversions:

1 Gigabyte = 1024 Megabytes
1 Terabyte = 1024 Gigabytes
1 Petabyte = 1024 Terabytes
1 Exabyte = 1024 Petabytes

Now this is some serious data storage. The human body casts aside a LOT of dna strands. Yet people pay hundreds of bucks for computers that store a few hundred Gigabytes of data.

Weak.

Friday, February 1, 2008

2 Solutions and Who Should Be President

Solution #1:
The answer to the matching problem is as follows:

Stuff 1-7 corresponds to reason #5.

Thanks for playing!


Solution #2:
If every house or apartment had to elect a president, there wouldn't be months and months of debate and backstabbing. It would be relatively easy for most houses. In my apartment, Council Bluffs would be the president, and I think we would all agree on that. When you go from small groups of similar people to one big group of extremely different people, you can't pick just one person to govern them all. Heh, govern them all.

That's why I think we should split the U.S. into a thousand states, and put people that are similar to each other in the same state. We could narrow all the different kinds of people down to 1,000 groups. Sure. So we let them govern themselves, each group with its own president, economy, and one of those war-planning boards with the little armies and rakes.

The states that fail? Make them admit that they are all too stupid to have a say in who should be president of the whole country. The states that do well? They decide who should be president.

Who Should be President
Council Bluffs.