For those that don’t know, Phish reunited last weekend with a whopping 10.5 hours of music over three nights.  Here are a couple shots.  You can download all three shows for a limited time at http://phish.com/fromtheroad2009/.  Nice light show, huh?

Here ya go!  I figure this gets rid of the need for the extra “c”.  Enjoy!

(Brian, you win “most epic description of the reason we need a McCrappy icon”,  I can’t even play ball with your previous attempt…    )

This is harder than you might think…

Brian I liked yours, but I think having two “c”s makes it a little crowded.  That’s why I just went for “Mc”.  What do you think?

Courtesy of http://www.hipstersuck.com

The last 10 episodes begin airing tonight on the SciFi channel at 10pm.  Pat Byrnes and I will be having a hot-line discussion not two minutes after the show ends if anyone wants to join in.  We discuss the episode, and all possible implications for future episodes.  Exciting stuff people, exciting stuff.

Yes, yes, I know the human brain tries to find patterns in whatever it experiences, but this is too weird. My friend wanted to go the library yesterday, which I always find enjoyable, so I agreed to accompany her there. She wanted to rent some movies, which apparently you can do now, so we browsed the movie section, and rented “Dr. Strangelove.”

She was finished, so I started wandering around the library. I didn’t pick up any books, just looking at covers and titles. Well, then I wandered off pretty far into a corner of the library where no one was, and some books caught my attention. It was the “How Things Work” series. There were maybe six books next to each other. I picked one at random. Then, I randomly opened the book…

When I opened the book, and I kid you not, there was a full page color picture of Trey Anastasio playing guitar! That library probably has three pictures of Trey in the entire library, and the ONE book I picked up opened randomly to a picture of Trey. How is that possible? Coincidence? How could I literally walk into a library, make one choice as to book and page, and it opens to Trey? Just think about the staggeringly low chance that would happen to ME, someone who loves Trey.

So I have to consider if it was coincidence. It must be, because otherwise some intelligence somehow orchestrated the entire universe so that I would open that book and that page at that time. And in that case, I have to view this as a message from a higher source. Is it a coincidence that Phish is about ten weeks from walking on stage for the first time in years? Was this a message telling me that I am supposed to go to the first Phish shows, because something will happen to me there?

Is this my field of dreams? “If you build it, he will come.” Well, how about, “If you go to Phish, something may happen to you there.”

If this isn’t a message, then what are the possible chances of me finding Trey’s picture in an ENTIRE LIBRARY on my FIRST TRY? Staggeringly low…

One of the better ideas I’ve seen lately (the idea has been around for a while).  Others may have seen this already, but if you have not, check it out.  The Optimus Maximus keyboard uses small OLED (organic LED) displays for each key.  This means that when you enter a different application that the keys can change to reflect that particular application.

In other words, in a first person shooter, the space bar would print the word “Fire Gun” on itself, for example.  Or different languages appear instantly on the keyboard.  Or, the normal letter keys have icons on them instead.  Limitless variations…

Apparently this first version of this technology is CPU intensive (why they would have the CPU process the data rather than something on-board, I do not know) and its also kind of buggy.  One reviewer said his fingers actually got tired within a couple of minutes of typing due to difficulty with actual key-presses.

Total cost?  $1600 or so.

Awesome idea though, which we see kind of implemented on the iPhone.  Maybe a full-keyboard-sized iPhone-type surface?

I’ve never seen anything like this.  You will be impressed.  About a minute long.

Other jokes from the same site.

It’s this Friday, December 5th, 2008.  To the day!

I’d like to take this opportunity to have everyone think for a moment about the current era of drug prohibition we are all living through.  The basic idea of a drug war where drug scarcity is the goal rather than treatment of drug addiction or proper unbiased education of our youths is ludicrous.  The creates a high demand, and thus a high price, and wherever profits are to be made, people (the black market) will step in to take them.  I think our government should step in and get these profits.

You can say, “Well heroine does very bad things to people so as long as its kept off the streets, I am willing to deal with a loss in my civil liberties regarding less harmful drugs.”  This would be a great thing to say if it were true.  The fact is that ANYBODY who wants to find a drug, ANY drug can probably do so very easily.  These drugs ARE on the streets.  Regulation would take them off the streets, and allow for taxation.  Not to mention deaths associated with impure drugs or unknown purities go away.

So we have to accept that a “drug free society”  is an unachievable ideal.  And why call it an “ideal” in the first place?  Why even think a drug-free society is the best one?  Why is that the position we as a society have taken?  After all, alcohol kills hundreds of thousands, along with tobacco, and these are accepted with no thought.  And then we ban drugs that kill NO ONE?  We are not a drug-free society to start with, so the discussion is hypocritical from the get-go.

Anti-drug commercials for teens have been found to INCREASE drug use in teens (federal studies)!  We spend about $7 Billion annually on the war on drugs, that we don’t have to spend.  We could tax and regulate all drugs and get an increase of $6.9 Billion.  Right there is an extra $13.9 Billion!  Not to mention releasing NON-VIOLENT people from jail.  Did you know it costs 4 times as much to keep someone in prison for a year for a non-violent drug offense than it would to send them to state university for a year?  I could go on and on, so if anybody is on the side of defending prohibition, let’s do this thing!

During last week’s comment war regarding money, I noticed some limitations with blogging that I would like to discuss.  Does anybody feel that the current model for commenting on blog posts is limited?  Let me try to spell out what’s in my imagination, and maybe we can see where that gets us.

Ok so I wrote that super long comment, and maybe some people read it (hopefully), but because it was so long, it made it difficult to comment on.  What would be nice would be to have a way to open up discussion on one small point, that could expand and contract at the particular point in the article.  That way, comments on particular points are localized to that point in the article.

Then, it would be nice to expand that kind of functionality in a global sense.  How many times have we said, “This has already been discussed elsewhere on the web.” ?  It would be cool to have a metablogging platform, where each post on all the individual blogs on the internet are tagged for content, and then some kind of software would encompass the totality of blogs out there.  It is important to remember that each individual blog contributes something unique.  So combining these ideas we get some kind of system that organizes blogs by topics (not just a list) and then when particular blogs post about particular topics, they are placed into that topic.  In this way, a blog like McCrappy could review the discussion that already happened “elsewhere on the web,” and then our unique additions to the topic could be placed into that one larger context.

So you could have a topic like “The History of Money”, and then you get a list of all blogs that discussed that topic.  The blog with the most hits on that particular topic would be listed first.  Then you could expand discussions that particular blogs added to that topic.  So, under the “The History of Money,” there would be, say, a plus sign with the word “McCrappy” next to it, and in that way, people could see what McCrappy had to say on this subject, as well as other active blogs.

It would be really cool to have a way to visually explore the blogosphere.  So again you could type in “money” and then see a couple of “hotspots” in a 3D space where recent activity on that topic would be highlighted.  You can then go to the hotspot and see a list of active blogs discussing it, and you can see the posts.  Kind of a way to visually navigate similar discussions all over the web.  As long as each discussion was tagged for content, this would be achievable by searching the tagspace.

Additionally, you could view the branching in the 3D space, so you could see similar discussion topics occurring (i.e., the “financial breakdown” would be close to “history of money” in that space).  Or let’s say comments on a particular post lead to a divergent thought, well at that point you would see a branching away from the main line of thought.  And that divergent line would converge to another topic.  In this way, you could visually navigate discussions from multiple blogs as they converged and diverged, similarly to how wikipedia allows you to surf topic after topic.

I don’t think anybody is doing anything like this…

So I watched the debate last night.  Aside from McCain appearing to be the bumbling fool, he did make one good point which I will bring up now.

Obama and McCain were going back and forth about tax cuts, with Obama calling for tax cuts for people making less than $200,000 per year, and McCain wanting to give big businesses tax cuts.  On the surface, one would wonder why a company like ExxonMobil would need a tax cut ever, with something like $14B made in the last three quarters.  But then McCain made a wonderful point.  He said the US has the “second highest business tax rate in the world” at something like 35%.  He quoted that Ireland’s business tax rate is like 11%!

McCain went on to say that by reducing the bis business tax rate, it will generally allow for more business to stay in the US instead of going overseas to find a cheaper tax rate, and that this will produce more jobs and put more money in people’s pockets.

I have to say, he makes a good point here!  It is striking how different these guy’s plans are… comments?

If you are having a bad day, check out http://globalrichlist.com/.  I, apparently, am among the richest 2.37% in the WORLD…  That means that 97.63% of people are, in a big way, much worse off than me.  However, you can’t relate money and attitude towards life.  Just because I make more money than 97.63% of the world, doesn’t mean I am in the top 2.37% of the happiest people.  Interesting stuff…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URIypadX3n0