So yeah, this is a law school buddy of my friend Dave in Texas.  He’s already won the bet, but figured I’d post up the link anyway.

http://www.helpwinthisbet.com/404/

From wake@WPI.EDU Thu Sep 12 00:03:00 2002
Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2002 00:02:57 -0400 (EDT)
From: Josh Wakefield
To: Phi Sigma Kappa Fraternity
Subject: respect for my decision…

Guys, I want you all to know that since Jeff’s recent email, I to have been inspired to come out of the closet, as they say. Please respect my decision, I know it may be awkward for a few of you but there’s really nothing all that weird about it. I should be able to make out with other men if I want to. If you see Jeff and I making out at some point please don’t give us too much shit. We don’t hassle you guys for making out with women. If you feel like talking or maybe some cuddling or pillow talk feel free to stop by my place.

josh

I’ve been subscribed to the DDoI feed for a while now, and it’s really sweet – the guy is not only a great photographer, but he uses a lot of effects (during the shot and digitally afterwards) to make for some cool photos. Some good ones from the last few months:

one
two
three
four
five
six

I was just thinking about Rasta, and what is was like to live at the house and hang out like we always did. It was just an awesome point in my life, and I’m sure for you too. Obviously things have changed for everyone, and people are semi-drifting, and it’ll continue like that. But wouldn’t it be nice to have something where we could all hang for longer than an afternoon and a night? It never feels long enough when I compare it to living at the House.

I was thinking, and I realize how hard it is to coordinate time off when everyone already has their own plans and full-time jobs, etc, but I was thinking, Would anyone be interested in maybe renting a place on a lake somewhere for a week? Those places are usually about $1000-$1200 per week, but rates go down a little after the middle of the summer. If we chose a week, and plan now, it will be much easier to coordinate the time-off part.

I don’t even know where, it wouldn’t really matter. But if we planned it for August, then maybe we could get like 10 people in on some place, and all hang out for a week, fishing, swimming, bbq, fires everynight, and then throw a huge Friday/Saturday bash to end the summer?

Any interest?

I hope I’m not the only one who remembers the days of Captain Planet, but I’m pretty sure he’d be pissed off right now. Normally I’m a Ted Kennedy fan, but his opposition to the Cape Cod wind farm is a deal breaker for me. To anyone not living on the Cape, it reeks of rich people trying to block anything to preserve their property values (which it will have little effect on). Now, if the wind farm was off any other coast (6 miles out) there wouldn’t be anything the state could say about it, since the state only controls 3 miles out. That’s not how it works on the Cape though, and Kennedy is pushing legislation that would allow Romney veto power over the project. Eh, I guess I just wash the taste in my mouth out with a pipin’ hot bowl of foreign oil…

Now you can avoid embarrassing social situations, with this handy page of Simpsons quote, you’ll never be left searching for the right words; guys will envy you, women won’t be able to resist you, jocks will probably try to beat you up.

The page breaks down some more well-known Simpsons quotes, the context in which they were used, and in what situation they would be appropriate for you to use. Because nothing is more embarassing than quoting Episode F132, when everyone knows it should have been Episode F514, idiots.
To anyone who doesn’t like this post… “Don’t Have A Cow Man”…Thanks Simpsons!

So, once again Rasta is up in the air…now, is it me, or does there seem to be a lot more irresponsibility at the house these days, or am I getting older and it just seems that way? Anyone else care to comment?
Well, if Rasta doesn’t end up happening (geh, again?!), then I’ll have a big ol’ BBQ with all the associated revelry at my place in Worcester, if you guys still want to head in to the Woo. Apparently, we will know Saturday by 3pm or so. If you didn’t get the link yesterday, check this out.

Not sure how I feel about this.

Considering the fact that unless you are native-american (you were here first) or you are african-american (you were forced here as a slave), then *YOU* descend from immigrants! Isn’t that what this country is all about? “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-lost, to me.” Then again, our forefathers did kill more than 15 million native-americans just so *they* could have a home. Maybe being hypocritical is actually what we are all about.

Other factors: Don’t immigrant workers end up doing the work that we don’t agree to do? And also, if you are an immigrant, I basically consider you a refugee, because you left your home country. It means conditions were unfavorable there, and if any of you lived in conditions like that, I wouldn’t be surprised to see you trying to make a better situation for yourself. I don’t care if the reason you are leaving is because of political unstability (not your fault), or just crappy economics and you need more money (not your fault). These are human beings who have decided to leave their homes, the place they were born. It must be hard for them.

The main arguments against allowing free immigration are that we want everyone in the computer, which I understand, and that they don’t pay income taxes, since they are not registrered with us. I can see the point, but in reality, those 12 million immigrants in california are paying sales tax on everything they buy, which must amount to billions annually for california. So it’s not like they aren’t paying anything.

To finish it off, NAFTA, CAFTA, and GATT have destabilized central america and mexico in particular. This means that our own trade agreements are *causing* this influx of immigrants. So we should actually be apologizing to them!

I would really like to hear comments from the other side. And I’m not going to pretend that I understand all of the subtlties of the effect that trade agreements have on immigration, but maybe one of you does?

I realized this morning that I can’t remember hearing anything at all about the country they call “Japan” in the last 6+ months…. So I ask this – what is the last bit of news you remember hearing about Japan? I honestly can’t think of anything.

Second thought – anyone know of physical proof (i.e. outside the Internet) that it still exists?! Something smells shady. Or maybe I’m just dumb and that’s only what they used to call China. Hmmmm….

We got screwed, our generation got Vanilla Ice when we could’ve gotten this guy.
does the guy look a little like a younger thinner Jason Giambi? He even wears a yankees jersey. Cheeko, I’ll await your assessment.

Here is the Video

Well, if so, read this and you never know where you might end up.

Washington Post Gallery, James Cohan Gallery, & Extensive Gallery

This guy makes various sized sculptures of humans, some are huge, and others are tiny. They are so realistic it’s unbelievably bizarre. I’m not sure what his deal with naked people is, but the work is cool looking. If you are at work, beware of some nudity, but hey it’s art, right? Specifically, in the second link, there is a piece with a nude mother with a still connected baby lying on her. It’s pretty gross, and pretty interesting.

Wikipedia says “Mueck’s sculptures faithfully reproduce the minute detail of the human body, but play with scale to produce disconcertingly jarring visual images.”

Oh yeah, number 9 in the Washington Post gallery looks like Dan Kohler. It’s actually of a boy, but the top of the face looks alot like Dan.

Page here.

This movie was taken over 48 hours. It depicts zebrafish development from the single-cell stage to hatching. Cell division can be seen easily at the beginning of the movie. Formation of the head, tail, eyes, and body are also clearly visible.

There are other interesting videos, too, but I thought this was the best one.

So not 10 minutes after I finish a comment about the evils of the broadcast flag, do I bounce over to slashdot and see this pile of steaming horse shit.  I gave the link to the /. article instead of the article itself in case anyone cared to read the commentary.

In short, they are taking one of the worst conceived pieces of legislation ever written (the DMCA) and taking it a step further, allowing our Gestapo police state to use its full power to pursue copyright and IP infringers. To make it worse they’re tying this to being a “key source for funding terrorism”, as if Osama and his boys are bootlegging DVDs and the latest Britney Spears tunes to fund their war. The real story is more likely that the major media outlets paid lots of money to senators on both sides of the aisle in order to “protect” their income lines and in the process destroy any and all fair use rights we as consumers would have.

A side note (though we’ll see how it shakes out this time), this tends to be a fairly party neutral issue. More than any other issue, these copyright ones highlight very clearly that Washington is for sale. The support and opposition for these bills crosses party. The people who generally support them receive millions of dollars from Hollywood and the recording industry, while the opposition tend to come from techy regions with very strong funding and support from technology vendors who would lose out to the laws.

God I hate the copyright/IP situation in this country. Give me back 20 year copyright, and a viable public domain.

Article here.

It’s this sweet device where you push against an image on a projector screen, and the part of the image that you touch moves backwards in time, and then it flows back to the future. So you wave your hand all around the image (it was a video and you are looking at the last frame), and you observe these time “currents” of old points in the video moving towards the final frame.

Kind of hard to describe, but the videos on the site are really cool.