Musings of the Great Eric

See what happens when a fireworks factory explodes:

Technorati Tags: Awesome, Cool, Funny, Videos, Fireworks

The Big Ten (Nice diagram)
What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Thus what we have today is not a problem wholly new in kind but rather the disastrous upshot of an evolutionary process whereby that old problem has become considerably larger–and that great quantitative change, with just a few huge players now co-directing all the nation’s media, has […]

Engineering Gems of the U.S. Highway System

The U.S. interstate highway system is celebrating its 50th anniversary. Fifty years ago, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a bill to pay for the wide ribbons of highways that connect America’s cities and towns.
The system of highways profoundly changed American society: where we live, how we live and how […]

Yesterday, the Supreme court handed Bush a major defeat, basically saying “Yeah… that rule of law thing… you’re still bound by it”.
Go Democracy!
Justices, 5-3, Broadly Reject Bush Plan to Try Detainees

The Supreme Court on Thursday repudiated the Bush administration’s plan to put Guantánamo detainees on trial before military commissions, ruling broadly that the commissions were […]

There’s nothing I can possibly say that could either add or detract from that headline.
But wait, it gets better on its own:

Mohammad, who is serving a four-year sentence for making liquor, prohibited for Muslims, said he was shocked when he was first told the cause of his discomfort. He swears he didn’t know the bulb […]

Pirates pursued democracy, helped American colonies survive

Pirates practiced the same egalitarian principles as the Founding Fathers and displayed pioneering spirit in exploring new territory and meeting the native peoples, said Jason Acosta, who did the research for his thesis in history at the University of Florida.

Like the American revolutionaries, pirates developed three branches of government […]

So I’m not going to be sleeping tonight….

Technorati Tags: Nature, Centipede, Bat, Cool, Video, Scary

Reuters:
Billionaire Warren Buffett on Monday called for U.S. lawmakers to retain the estate tax, after announcing plans to leave more than $37 billion of his own fortune to charity, not his children.
Buffett spoke after agreeing to sign over roughly $30.7 billion of his $44 billion fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, run by […]

Simply Brilliant.

Technorati Tags: Star Wars, Monty Python, Videos, funny

There’s an awesome point-by-point debunking on IPac of a debate featured in the WSJ about DRM schemes. It’s sad that these arguments actually fly with some people (especially Congress), given how easily they’re shown to be pure BS. What’s even more depressing is that the original arguments were featured in the Wall Street Journal, and […]

He’s been locked up for 75 Million years. Hasn’t he repaid his debt to society?
Technorati Tags: Scientology, Religion, Funny, Stupid

Jon Stewart does what he does best, point out what jackasses they are. And it’s so well deserved.

Technorati Tags: Jon Stewart, The Daily Show, Videos, Funny, Video Games

Nation’s Elite AWOL From Military

As recently as 1956, 400 members of Princeton’s graduating class went on to serve in the military. In 2004, nine graduates did so. Harvard, Yale, Brown and other elite universities don’t even allow Reserve Officer Training Courses on their campuses.
In the years after World War II, virtually every member of Congress […]

You can’t make this stuff up. Simply awesome:
Rush Limbaugh was detained for about three-and-a-half hours Monday at Palm Beach International Airport after authorities said they found a bottle of Viagra in his possession without a prescription.
“The problem was that on the bottle itself was not his name, but the name of two Florida doctors,’’ Miller […]

Fletcher’s Commute
When Kentucky Gov. Ernie Fletcher (R) finishes a day at the office “instead of walking through the idyllic scene across the street to the Governor’s Mansion, he gets into a Lincoln Town Car to be chauffeured to his door,” the Lexington Herald Leader reports. The entire distance is a few hundred feet.

Arrogant prick.
Technorati Tags: […]

Blunt weighs in on movie’s PG rating
Filmmakers regularly gripe that the movie-ratings system is arbitrary and unfair, but it’s uncommon for a lawmaker to entangle himself in the process.
House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) did that, however, just last week that by weighing in on the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) decision to rate […]

This is a terrific episode of PBS Frontline from a few years back; it’s one of those documentaries that everyone should watch. The level of marketing today is nothing short of breathtaking; and the depth of deception and manipulation marketers use is nothing short of disgusting.
Technorati Tags: Cool, Teenagers, Marketing, Sociology, PBS, Documentaries

Google Blogoscoped compiled the list, but I’d just like to briefly rant on number one: “We Need Separate Print Pages”
We’ve all seen this – a separate print page, linked to from a crowded, table-layoutish HTML page, aiming to serve no other need than being printed out (it fails, because bloggers link to print pages – […]

UFO’s aren’t visiting as much, either.
Earth used to be, like, the hottest place for aliens to visit. They would fly billions of light years across the galaxy in their flying saucers just to see how our civilisation was going and if we’d yet figured out whether there was really any difference between cellulite and plain […]

A good list detailing all the ways that the studios have already fucked this up and the technology is doomed from the start. The only thing I’d add is the draconian DRM schemes, especially in the case of Blu-ray. Consumers aren’t going to switch to media that actually does less than the media they have […]