Gabe & Max

Not the newest, but awesome.

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Title change

You might have noticed that the title of this blog has changed. Maybe you didn't notice and you are just seeing the change now. Either way, this point on the web is now called "Mental Flatulence."

I realized that the title bar of the website had my name plastered all over it, which triggered the update. Mental Flatulence just seems correct. Writing that is mostly un-edited brain-farts, sometimes stinky, sometimes comical, always noticeable.

A quick search shows that I am not the only one with this title:

• Another blog
• A very random grouping of pictures and links
• Livejournal stuff
  

Well, judging by those links, I feel pretty good about my place in the world of mental flatulation.

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Washington, Washing-ton.

George Washington is usually cast as more of a super-hero than any normal politician that we are used to hearing about. In the minds of many children, he single-handedly won the revolutionary war, and was the driving force behind the formation of our United States.

Much of this is probably historical embellishment, pop culture, and plain revisionist history, but Mr Washington had to have done something right to gain all of the praise and trust that he did.

In that vein, his Farewell Address as he was leaving the White House carried many powerful undertones that are eerily relevant today, as we begin thinking about our next president. The full text of the document can be found on wikipedia, though it is somewhat difficult to read, as it is written in a style that is quite out of step with current English writing.

Enter XKCD.com, where the best comics on the web come from. Mr. Munroe has done us all a great service and translated the text of this document into plainclothes modern American English, and has added a bit of humor into the translation as well. Check out the updated version here, it is well worth the 10 minutes that it takes to read through the whole thing.

A few snippets that I found particularly notable:

"Getting in the way of the law for the sake of power plays similarly screws things up. Playing that game creates groups just looking out for themselves, turning crazy splinter groups into a powerful force. Let this get too bad and you’ll probably have the country tossed back and forth wildly as the various parties with their pet issues fight for power, rather than nice, consensual, unified government.

Parties are probably gonna look like they’re helping with one popular issue or another, so you’re gonna want support them, but I bet the guys in charge of them will just turn out to be power-hungry assholes who want to run everything."

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"Control goes back and forth between one party and another, and they just get more and more pissed, and we’ve seen that get really bad in the past. But it also leads to terrible, controlling government and general suckage. This gets the people more angry, they get behind one party leader or another, and that guy just takes that support and does whatever he wants, screwing up the country.

I’m not talking about anyone in particular here, but this isn’t necessarially too far off, and it’s always gonna be a threat, so keep an eye out."

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"I like you all. We’re friends. I’m not gonna hope that you’ll actually remember all this for long, but I can hope that every now and then people will look back on what I said and use it to calm down a crazy political party, remind us not to get tied up with other countries, or to try to expose phoney patriots. That’s the only payment I need — the hope that in return for my looking after you, you’ll look after yourselves."

Well spoken, Mr Washington.

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PumpkinRot.com

I've been waiting for the time that I can have free reign in designing my very own Halloween-horror display. This is that time.

I couldn't think of a much better house than our own for a Halloween display, and although I wont be able to do everything that I want, I can still accomplish quite a lot, I think. You have to start somewhere, and while the yard will likely not be filled to the brim with fantastic frightening flights of fancy, it will at least have a couple of interesting things in it.

Which brings me to the real reason for this post.



PumpkinRot is a guy who takes Halloween seriously (at least, I think that it's a guy). Of specific note are the Scarecrows that are produced over there, which absolutely blow my mind. The picture that I have up here is of a scarecrow called "Blight." I think it is my favorite, it looks as if the pumpkin that was once its head is now completely rotten and falling off its face, a perfect representation of the physical evidence of particularly violent blight.

I have been, how do you say... "Inspired," and I am now working on my own scarecrow, along with a number of other projects that will hopefully endeavor to make this Halloween a good one.

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Time to throw my hat into the ring.

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Million Dollar Idea:

Alright, so here it is in a nutshell: A free energy producing Gym.

Genius, right?!

I know, thanks for the sentiment.

Seriously speaking, there has been a lot of buzz recently surrounding a few ideas that have come out of a myriad of intelligent minds regarding human generated energy, that is, energy generated by our bodies as we move, work, and play. It seems that there is a great opportunity here, for someone with access to a moderate amount of capital to invest in a chain of exercise complexes that are vastly cheaper than normal or maybe even free.



Basic research yields the following:

• An average rider can produce at least 150 Watts of power on a normal bike-based generator.
• Any given day, at a gym, there are can be anywhere between 5-50 people on stationary bikes at any one time, I'll assume that there are at least 5 people on stationary bikes averaged over 8 hours of the day. Probably very conservative estimate, but I have no concrete data for this one.
• There are over 17,000 gyms and health clubs in the USA.

Thus, we have the following equation:

150(watts) * 5(people) * 8(hours) * 17,000(gyms) = 102,000,000(watt-hours daily).

That means that everyday in America we are exercising away over 1 megawatt-hour of power every day. That is enough power to run more than 500,000 computers for 8 hours every single day. That is about $81,000 worth of electricity (at $.08/KWh), and this is an extremely conservative estimate, since this only accounts for the bare minimum, and only for stationary bikes.

Yes, it is silly, and no, this is not any type of accurately researched math, but it is funny how we are willing to burn off that much energy into thin air in order to stay fit. I guess this is where my mind goes when thinking of ways that I could make money, it would be easy to set up a gym that presents all electricity-generating devices (rowing machines, treadmills, nordic-skis, not to mention weightlifting machinery, etc), and tell patrons that however much energy they generate in a month gets deducted from their monthly fee.

It would be difficult to break even at $.08/1000 watts/hr, (that works out to an average of about $.01 rebate for every hour that you work out) but it is at the very least a start! Plus, people would get an instant reward for working out, the more they work out, the LESS they pay, as opposed to the other way around.

I'm not sure if it's even feasible, but I know that I wouldn't have any qualms about going to a gym if it was putting power back into the stream.

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Anywhere.fm

I enjoy finding music that I like. This is probably true for everyone, but it is probably easier for most. I say this because it is very hard to find really good Jazz-Electronic fusion, or Classical-Electronic fusion. Usually all that you end up with is crappy Techno music over well-known bits of Beethoven or Miles Davis. Every once in awhile I will find something that suits my tastes, but those occurrences are few and far between, compounded by the fact that the music that I am enthralled with is stuff that almost nobody else is interested in, and thus refuses to torrent. This means that I would have buy the CD, if only I weren't so broke, so I am left with unending lists of music that I have to buy at some later date when I have "the moneys."

Often I find things that spark momentary explosions in my catalog of artists whose music I identify with. Pandora in particular is one resource that I have pretty much exhausted over the past few years, as the service now plays primarily repeats, which is useless to me (why do I have my own catalog, anyway?) So I was pleasantly surprised when I stumbled upon Anywhere.fm.

This is a community radio service, very simple in its design, and very robust in its application. The essence of the idea is that you make a profile, upload whatever music that you want, and then browse to find people who have similar tastes. Thus far I have four tracks on my profile, and have a number of people that I am tracking, as they have one taste or another that piques my fancy. There is no real social interaction, aside from seeing how many times a certain song or playlist has been viewed/listed to, so it is perfect for antisocial types such as myself. You have no control over others' libraries, you can't queue up songs, all you can do is pick a playlist and hope for the best. I find this absolutely fantastic. I have found more new music that I love in the past day and a half than I have in the preceding year.

Check it out, it's completely free, and there is a bunch of great music to be found in there. As always, my username is LeviticusMky, look me up.

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More on BioShock

Yes, I know you've heard far too much regarding BioShock already, you know that everyone thinks that it is the return of Jesus sheathed in a blood-spattered mask of psychotic shadows.

And it is all this, to be sure. What it is not, however, is everything that it was cracked up to be.

I finished the game on the hardest setting this past weekend, on my PC, here is what I got from it:

Good Things (you've heard these before):

• Fighting things is a lot of fun (seriously, there's no other way to say it)
  
• Amazing environments
• No inhibition with visuals
• Great style, steampunk is a lot of fun.
  

Bad Things (You might not have heard these):

• The game was surprisingly easy, even on Hard
• Your character can end up doing pretty much everything, there is no real specialization, no chance to really excel at any specific thing.
• Very linear for a game billed as "Wide Open"
• Limited number of encounter types, there are none of the three or four way battles that were suggested during development
• Hard to suspend disbelief - the plot is pretty unbelievable, even for a video game.

All of this leads me to one conclusion:

I should have played this on the Xbox 360. The game would have been harder, it would not have needed an intense RPG element, it would have been scarier, and it would look and sound ten times better on a home theater system.

So there, if you haven't played this game yet, good, don't play it on the PC, do the Console route with this game. From here on out, anything that seems like it would be better on the console probably is. These days the PC is really only good for very complex games like RollerCoaster Tycoon or SimCity, which is fine by me!

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September Work Thing!

I started up an impromptu competition with my buddy Alan, back at the beginning of September, and decided that we would have a "project off." This was simply the only way that I could get myself to work on any of the myriad things that I had put off for a long time, and to actually get off my ass and get a couple of useful programs installed on my new computer.

Well, it is the end of September (the beginning of October, yes I'm one day late) and I do actually have something to show for it!



I called it MegaSync, since that's what the project file was named when I started working on it at the end of 2005. I guess it's done now, since I doubt that I'll work back into it, though I can almost assure you that I'll use the footage again.

It kind of sucks that YouTube compresses everything so horribly, since the full-res version actually looks marginally good, and you miss out on a lot of the detail, but it's the internet, we all have to make sacrifices. I think that I'll have to experiment with some other compression stuff on my end, try and find something more compatible with their servers.

So, Alan, what have you to show for your labors?

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