I’ll leave you with a Ralph Steadman illustration from the end of Hunter S. Thompson’s oversized hardback The Curse of Lono (pages 178-179).

Aloha and mahalo.

This article was amusing, if you care about the grand, elaborate façade China has put up for the Olympics: “Life of Reilly: The Chinese government did everything but put up a fake blue sky.”

Besides total domination by the likes of Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt, Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh, and a handful of others, the shadiness of the Olympic proceedings in China seems most predictable of all.

I know I say this every Olympics, but in contrast to popular sentiment, I dislike watching most of the judged events, such as gymnastics and synchronized whatever. They often seem rigged, or at least easily manipulated. I enjoy the track & field and swimming events the most . . . the races against time or feats of distance. Seems much more objective. The rivalries between the U.S. vs. Australia in the swimming events and the U.S. vs. Jamaica in the sprint events are fun. Except when those teams drop their batons and get disqualified off the podium.

Lastly, did you see this story on Thursday about people in Washington supposedly going insane after taking tainted drugs? Well, here you go: “Tainted drugs causing odd behavior in Spokane.” The information is slight, but it’s a bizarre story for sure.

Have you seen online ads that say: Tired of high gas prices? Want to run your car on tap water? Learn more now!

But before you “learn more” below, here’s a Wikipedia quote for all you conspiracy theorists afraid of Big Oil and lamenting the marginalization of alternative energy options: “Free energy suppression is a conspiracy theory that claims that advanced technology that would reshape current electrical generation methods is being suppressed by special interest groups. These groups are usually related to the oil industry, to whom current energy generation technology is profitable.”

Though I am fascinated by Nikola Tesla (and other allegedly suppressed inventors), at the moment I am more interested in Stanley Meyer’s water fuel cell and water-fueled alternative energy possibilities. Stan Meyer produced nine U.S. patents in the 1980s relating to his water-powered car. However, Meyer’s “water fuel cell” is reportedly a perpetual motion machine and thus could not have existed quite the way it was portrayed in the media. Such machines violate the known laws of physics.

But, say, what if you only wanted to improve your car’s efficiency with a hydrogen fuel system, not power your entire car? Well then, perhaps you’d like to convert your gas-guzzling beast into a water/gas hybrid vehicle using a hydrogen booster!

There are dozens of scammy-looking websites (and eBay auctions) out there clamoring to take your money in exchange for DIY conversion kits that show you how to build water-fueled devices to improve your automobile’s gas mileage. Most claim to sell a water conversion guide detailing how to use electricity from your car’s battery to separate water into HHO gas (a process of water electrolysis). The pitch is that HHO (also known as hydroxy gas or Brown’s gas or oxyhydrogen), burns effectively and supplies significant energy to help run your car, while producing only clean water as a by-product. Apparently, an HHO generator (that you build yourself using hardware-store parts) splits the hydrogen and oxygen out of water, via electrolysis, for use in internal combustion engines. The mixture of HHO gas is then supplied to the engine’s intake manifold or carburetor. The websites claim that HHO can be beneficially added to the intake airflow of a gasoline or diesel engine.

To a point, it makes sense that a decent electrolysis kit could improve your gas mileage. But, really, doesn’t the energy required to make the hydrogen and oxygen exceed the energy released by its combustion in the car’s engine? Being out of college chemistry and physics for 10 years now, am I missing how this doesn’t violate the first law of thermodynamics?

I guess the benefit of a hydrogen booster is conceivable if you think about the HHO as an additive in the fuel tank system—as such, it could improve gas mileage by cleaning up the fuel system and augmenting the actual combustion. Laws of physics intact, it does seem somewhat reasonable that an HHO fuel cell could enhance a vehicle’s combustion, lower the pollution, improve the efficiency of the engine, and lower fuel costs. But I should also note that I really don’t know what I’m talking about. I do know that hydrogen is highly explosive (see: Hindenburg), so any “safe” system should not be producing or storing much of this combustible gas at any given time. That would not be a good thing for do-it-yourselfers. I am curious about how viable this concept actually is and to what degree online scam artists and hoaxers are overrunning its level of usefulness with spam and pseudoscience. I have trouble believing that one of these HHO devices could improve fuel efficiency by more than 5-10%, at best. But I’d love to see evidence otherwise.

Here are some interesting related YouTube videos on alternative energy: CES: Horizon Turns Ordinary Tap Water Into Electricity (from TechWebTV), Water Power (from Fox 26 News), and Project Energy (a CBS program featuring “water fuel” and Stephen Meyer, who is Stanley Meyer’s twin brother).

Wait, Stan Meyer died of a cerebral aneurysm (or, according to shadow government enthusiasts, was poisoned) at a restaurant in 1998, but he has a twin brother Steve who is carrying on his water-fuel work? Really?

Back to the DIY water fuel cell: Apparently, even the Greenville Police Department in South Carolina is claiming that Water4Gas hydrogen generators improve their gasoline and diesel fuel consumption.

Eh, I think I’m going to go watch some more Olympics.

Last night, Michael Phelps completed his historic sweep of eight gold medals at the Beijing Olympics, setting seven world records in the process. An amazing feat, which eclipsed Mark Spitz’s seven-gold performance at the 1972 Munich Games. Now Phelps has 16 medals from the past two Olympics and 14 of those medals are gold. No one else in modern Olympic history, ever, has earned more than nine gold medals total. The consensus seems to be that Phelps is the greatest Olympian of all time, and that he saved the Games. Plus, he could easily return for a third and even fourth Olympics, as he’s only 23 years old.

Perhaps we can figure out how to modify our automobiles to run on press coverage of Michael Phelps instead? I’m pretty sure its an inexhaustible (or at least renewable) resource—per the criteria of natural resources conservationists.

Here’s an amusing headline from a couple of days ago: “Giant dog turd wreaks havoc at Swiss museum.” The Guardian newspaper reports: “A giant inflatable dog turd created by the American artist Paul McCarthy was blown from its moorings at a Swiss museum, bringing down a power line and breaking a window before landing in the grounds of a children’s home.” The Zentrum Paul Klee also describes the work: “Paul McCarthy will be subverting the otherwise harmonious landscape sculpture of the Zentrum Paul Klee with his installation Complex Shit – a giant pile of dog faeces.”

My man, Paul McCarthy. He’s one of several contemporary artists I especially enjoyed studying in art history classes. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about American artists Jeff Koons, Mike Kelley, and Paul McCarthy, Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, and Canadian Aboriginal artist Brian Jungen . . . specifically, how they use/subvert mass-produced commodities and represent the “cute” commodification of animals, cultures, and objects in their works. Their art often features anthropomorphized playthings and the appropriation of objects from popular culture.

Paul McCarthy is arguably most famous for his 1970s and 1980s performance art involving the violent and comic use of rubber masks, toys, and food-based props. In the Paul McCarthy at Tate Modern exhibition catalog (2003), McCarthy says: “To put an un-refined clumsy appearing object into art is a political act.”

Which reminds me of this quote, in which South Park co-creator Matt Stone is talking about Team America: World Police:

We’re just telling people to lighten up and not take themselves too seriously. What are my politics? Setting a puppet on fire. That’s my politics.
–Matt Stone, USA Today, October 11, 2004

See quotedump.com for many more quotes I’ve collected.

A friend sent me this comic strip archive I’d never seen before, Buttercup Festival by David Troupes (AKA Elliott G. Garbauskas). He also created Green Evening Stories. This year, Troupes started Buttercup Festival Series II, a new webcomic. I really like his work.

If you didn’t see it, be sure to check out the Americans’ amazing gold-medal comeback performance in the men’s 4×100 freestyle relay: “Lezak runs down French to win relay gold for U.S.” This means that Michael Phelps’ quest for eight gold medals at one Olympics is still alive. ESPN has provided some classic sports achievements to compare to the 400 relay: “Dramatic relay latest among fantastic Olympic, sports finishes.”

The first episode of Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People is out. It’s titled “Homestar Ruiner.”

So, if celebrity deaths come in threes . . . (OK, wait, put your critical thinking abilities on hold and let’s pretend we aren’t forming patterns from random data) . . . did Estelle Getty from “Golden Girls” begin the trilogy of deaths that Bernie Mac and Isaac “Chef” Hayes just finished? Or was Estelle part of an earlier series, maybe the one that included TV journalist Tim Russert? Should we be waiting for a third? And does this game require all recently deceased individuals in the series to have something in common, such as profession or ethnicity or geographic location, in order to complete the series? Can I get a ruling?

Speaking of rulings, The Onion reports: “Supreme Court Rules Death Penalty Is ‘Totally Badass’” and will continue to rule on the basis of awesomeness rather than constitutionality.

In music-related news: The Year Zero Case Study is a great overview of the alternate reality game based on the Nine Inch Nails concept album of the same name. Radiohead and aniBoom have chosen four grand winners in the In Rainbows Animated Music Video Contest. And people keep making cool stuff with the “House of Cards” 3D animation data that Radiohead released last month, such as a time-lapse LEGO bricks interpretation of the song.

See, it’s not just your soul that’s being crushed. It’s everyone’s! The joys of design by committee are limitless. One early GraphJam comment says: “And if the committee fails to destroy the creativity, enlarge the committee!”

For more graph humor and song chart memes, visit GraphJam. Be sure to enjoy your cubicle today!

On Friday, the 2008 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony will be held at the Beijing National Stadium. It is scheduled to begin at 8:00 pm CST (12:00 UTC) on 8 August 2008. The number eight is associated with prosperity and confidence in Chinese culture.

At long last, the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in China are almost here, so why is everyone so sad? “Pollution, Internet, doping dominate Olympics lead-up.”

Oh, problems with the internets, you say? While not directly related to government censorship, here are a couple of articles I collected last weekend about broadband Internet provider Comcast (of which I am a customer) and the Federal Communications Commission ruling against its BitTorrent-blocking activities: “The FCC on Comcast: Confusion in spades” and “F.C.C. Vote Sets Precedent on Unfettered Web Usage.” This case is sort of victory for consumers and privacy rights protection . . . as far as lame, baffling victories go.

Speaking of civil liberties, listen to Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig on the coming “i-Patriot Act” and be afraid of his i-9/11 predictions. His perspective on the ramifications of a cyber-terrorism event is interesting, though I think he exaggerates the government’s competence to create an Orwellian state. That said, who is writing bills like the Patriot Act so far in advance and then shelving them . . . to be quickly passed into laws in the aftermath of a national tragedy/crisis?

In other FCC-related news: Satellite radio recently got more interesting following the merger of Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Radio, a merger that was held up by the FCC for 18 months: “Sirius Chief Undaunted by Challenge.” Go, FCC, go! Efficiency! Coherence! For the WIN!

I have one more news mention from the recent past: “YouTube Has Speech-to-Text Functionality…and it Works.” Here’s a link to Google’s speech-to-text blog post from July: “Political videos meet Google speech-to-text technology.” Cool. Videos are continuing to become more easily searchable.

Also, while watching such entertainment from the 1960s, these retro ball chairs (which are customizable reproductions of Eero Aarnio’s famous Ball Chair) would be the perfect place to lounge. If only I could justify the purchase of a $2,000 retro chair. The Inmod.com site has a nice iBall Chair Color Selector Flash application.

Speaking of balls, how about this 6-inch orb-shaped computer: Tiny E-Ball touted as PC of the future. The smallest PC ever made? I like the first comment of the article:

Maybe it’s an aesthetic/coolness thing, but why a ball and not a brick? Will my computer roll over to me when I whistle for it? “Come here ‘HAL’ I need to imdb a famous robot name.”

Upon further review, the E-Ball is Apostol Tnokovski’s entry in the Next-Gen PC Design Competition. Pretty cool.

Returning to well-designed furniture for a moment, I’m fond of a couple of Herman Miller pieces: teardrop-shaped Q Tables (see Google Image Search) and Aeron Chairs.

I’ve been meaning to mention this for awhile: Nando Costa, a Portland-based graphic artist, creates some amazing work. He also runs a design and animation studio called Nervo. A very cool design company, Sapien, located in Brazil, sometimes does Flash work with them. I enjoy their stuff.

This killed me: Art Fail. It’s almost as funny as Understanding English Fail, an all-time favorite. I love the looks on their faces. It’s priceless. OK, here are two lolanimal favorites from last winter that I don’t think I ever linked to: Hay Sup and Oh… uh… hai.

Lastly, what will the logo and jerseys of the Oklahoma City NBA team formerly known as the Seattle SuperSonics look like? You know, once they’ve selected a mascot. ESPN’s Uni Watch reports: Meet the Oklahoma City uni finalists.

On a movie-related note, a friend sent me the Step Brothers Duel promo. I haven’t seen this new Will Ferrell movie and I’m not particularly excited to see it, but the programming behind this Flash application is cool.

I advise you to skip over the following two paragraphs and watch the YouTube videos below if you’re not into web programming/design:

The Step Brothers Duel appears to be customized Flash object layering/rotation on top of an FLV video clip. You upload a photo that gets placed into an object that’s manipulated around at different angles on the underlying video. The developers did a really good job with it, including alpha transparency layers on top of the uploaded image to give the appearance of lighting/reflection. The video and the photo layer are very synchronized, with just a little jitter from probably having to hand-tune the top layer. In Flash, since it is possible to swap movie clips at runtime, they may have created the whole thing with a stand-in photo (with rotating, alphas, etc.) that is switched to the uploaded one before viewing. (By the way, this site will also call your friend’s phone and play an audio clip, but I’m more interested in the Flash part.)

The Step Brothers Duel reminds me of OfficeMax’s Elf Yourself application from the holiday season (mentioned last year). That site is down for now, but it allowed users to upload photos that replaced the faces of four dancing elves. You could size and adjust the images to move the face locations into the correct spots, once you uploaded your photos. Cool stuff. I need to improve my ActionScript skills.

And now for a bit of YouTube:

Watch the heartwarming story of Christian the Lion (be thankful that I’m linking to the version with Sigur Rós music in the background instead of Whitney Houston or Aerosmith). Lions are just big housecats, really. That can eat you.

Here’s a squirrel waterskiing. No, really.

David Firth just released a new stop-motion short film called “Crooked (Orcus) Rot,” full of mannequin heads and rubber hands and blood. If this Svankmajeresque video is too creepy for you, then you’ll probably find the next link delightful.

Watch two cute little British brothers: Charlie bit my finger. “And that really hurt, Charlie, and it’s still hurting.” I had to watch this one a couple of times.

Christmas presents in July

The first anecdote is how the U.S. Postal Service just delivered a couple of packages containing Christmas presents to us – like, last week – that were mailed by family members in mid-December 2007.

We received a letter in our mailbox from a local USPS supervisor, which read as follows:

To Whom It May Concern:

We recently retrieved a package from your parcel locker lock box. This package has been in the lock box for some time. In the future there will be a key in your mailbox which will be an indicator that you have a package to pick up from your parcel lock box.

Thank you,
Kevin
Supervisor, Customer Services

Gee, thanks, Al Gore. (See lock box, if you missed the reference.)

You know, it would have been just swell if they’d actually given us a key to the parcel locker in question seven months ago, back when Mom’s Christmas cookies were still edible and the photos didn’t have heat and moisture damage. We’d written those particular presents off as lost long ago. But for seven months they were just sitting in a lock box, mere feet from our apartment building, unbeknownst to us.

The plight of the lost bungee cords

A friend of mine rides his bike a few miles to work each day. On this ride, he says he finds a bungee cord alongside the road every couple of months or so. This has caused him to wonder how many bungee cords are lost on U.S. highways each year.

Based on his personal experience, his conservative guess on lost bungee cords is about four bungees per mile of road per year. Though he says he actually finds more than this amount himself, but not all highway roads may be so bungee-rich.

Before actually doing research, he estimated that about one million bungees are lost on American highways each year . . . because he’d guessed at the amount of highway in the United States. How? By quadrupling the 80,000 miles of highway/interstate system that existed in the 1920s (or so he remembered reading) and then multiplying by four.

Well, I took it upon myself to push this intrepid bungee-calculation effort a step further, by locating modern data on the number of miles of highway in the United States, using what we call “teh internets.”

Here’s some information I found:

• There are 3.95 million miles of roads and streets in the U.S. (as of 2000)
• State and federal roads combined are currently about 0.9 million miles
• The National Highway System (NHS) of the United States comprises approximately 160,000 miles
• The entire Interstate Highway System, as of 2004, had a total length of 46,837 miles

The Google search of beauty that resulted in this useful bevy of data was the following: “united states” “highway system” total miles of road.

This piece of information (while not useful for our current calculations, but interesting for comparison) was repeatedly found accidentally: There are approximately 233,000 miles of railroad track in the United States, and 143,361 total miles operated for all freight railroads in North America.

Given these new, modern statistics for U.S. roadways, our totally scientific estimate for bungee cords lost on state and federal highways is now just under four million per year.

That’s a lot of lost bungees. Perhaps we should establish a nonprofit bungee recovery/rehabilitation shelter and adoption center? No bungee left behind!

If you’re in the IT industry, this is awesome: The Website is Down. Also, here are a couple of notable technology articles from last week: “Google Introduces a Cartoonlike Method for Talking in Chat Rooms” (for fans of Second Life and similar avatar-based online communities) and “Experts discover major Internet flaw” (concerning the design of the Internet’s address system).

The Nadal-Federer Wimbledon final was an epic match for the ages. Nadal actually pulled it off this year. This tennis article was pretty amusing: “Andy Roddick Beat Me With a Frying Pan.”

The 2008 Tour de France is ongoing, minus like 10 stars that have been banned from the event for doping.

I didn’t know this story about the intersection of 1996 prep star James Felton and then-unknown Tracy McGrady at Adidas’ ABCD basketball camp: “The Wrong Side of Great.” It’s interesting how a single event can trigger major changes in a person’s life. I think we can all point to certain happenings in our own lives where something or someone changed our life direction dramatically.

This is pretty funny: Cats on a Treadmill. And this guy makes some good hip-hop violin music: Paul Dateh (see video).

Lastly, enjoy this video: The Escapist presents Zero Punctuation: Webcomics.

Below are six pairs of tennis shoes I donated this week. I tend to destroy about one pair of shoes per year, especially from playing tennis every summer. I guess I was waiting for a chance to make these old, holey shoes useful somehow. Lily the 12-week-old kitten was interested. She had to investigate each shoe:

My first tennis tournament of the year is this weekend, in Monmouth/Independence. Wimbledon is also finishing this weekend. I am anxious to see Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal in the men’s singles final and Venus and Serena Williams in the women’s singles final. But what about the faceless aliens roaming about at Wimbledon?

Someone besides Serena and Maria Sharapova is becoming famous for her bizarre/skimpy tennis outfits: American Bethanie Mattek. Though the fashion sense of this one may be lacking. The Daily Mail says her outfits “have a bit too much bounce even for a tennis player.” Read/see more: “Tennis star serves up a treat that mesmerises ballboy.” The new, trashier Anna Kournikova?

Below is the second half of the 20 lb. watermelon from last weekend. He’s a bit angrier, but equally delicious. This guy has apricot halves and dried cranberries for eyes and sugar snap peas for eyebrows. I wasn’t planning on making another goofy watermelon face, but it just happened. I was eating it with a spoon and suddenly realized that I had made an evil mouth. So I foraged in the refrigerator for suitable face bits and quickly came up with this:

This parody video series is funny: David Blaine Street Magic Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5.

Have a Happy Fourth of July tomorrow!