2^25,964,951 – 1

2^25,964,951 – 1 (yeah that’s over SEVEN million digits long) is now the largest prime number, and not just any prime number it’s a Mersenne prime (this means that its cool and it is a number 2^n – 1 where n is prime as well). It was confirmed recent, and it makes me really happy for some random reason. Meh, its something at least. Here are all the digits (its a 7 mb download).

Candy Makes You Violent

Kraft Foods put out an amusing new line of gummy wonderfulness… and quickly ceased production. Stupid animal rights activists.

These sugary delights were molded in the shape of road kill, complete with tire treads, would naturally encourage violence towards animals according to the New Jersey Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

"It sends the wrong message to children, that it's OK to harm animals. And that's the wrong message, especially from a so-called wholesome corporation like Kraft," said society spokesman Matthew Stanton.

Wow. I can’t decide which is worse: Kraft being at a creative low (ok yes I laughed and tried to figure out where I could buy a bag) or society’s really screwed up priorities. I can’t believe that they actually attacked gummies. You’d think that would be the least of their worries...

Generational Gap

I just got a strange phone call from my grandma.

The contents of the conversation were as follows:

• She complained that we beat Cassadaga Valley in High School Bowl b/c when she went there way back in the day and it was a good school then.
  
• After deciphering what she was ranting about, I told her that we won with four times their score and that the match happened about a month ago.
  
• She told me that next time I was down at JCC for a match I should find the student from Sweden. Evidently she wanted me to talk to him because he came from the county next to the one our great, great, great grandparents came from. And she wanted me to ask him about what life was like in Sweden.
  
• I said there was bound to be a reason they left there to start with.
  
• She said goodbye.

I mean seriously… what the crap. Was there really any purpose to that phone call? I told my parents to start screening my calls.

--Update--
Yes, I am aware this conversation makes me sound like an awful person, but next to this insane and evil woman I'm entirely benign.

Comments....

Something I had noticed before, but not really cared about, was that the comments didn't always function as I wished them to... but now they do... for the most part.

Death to Me... Eventually

So yeah, since traffic has almost doubled on my site as a result of the death and nerd quizzes, I thought I would post my death age so it would be easier for the populous to find.

Amazing, I'm Conservative

I’m just so amazed. I took this political orientation quiz, and I was a conservative of all things. I know! I just can’t believe that I hate things like gay marriage and baby-killing.

What the F--ont?

This is one of the cooler websites I've come acrossed in awhile. This should do much to make life simpler when I'm hutning for that perfect font whilst Photoshopping somthing.

You take any random image (I used the Google logo) and submit it to WTF (What the Font). It will then separate the individual characters (pretty much guess based), and then will ask you if the guesses are correct. It then somehow matches it to the fonts that it is most similar to in a very short period of time. Very, very, very, spiffy.

Warning

Randomly I will read some of my old entries and realize that I made a significant error and / or forgot something crucial and / or I sounded like a blithering idiot. I will then proceed to fix them. Armed with that knowledge I advise that you re-read my entire blog on a daily basis just to find those occasional modifications. Incidentally that has happened in this wee posting. Twice.

Nostromo

So my dad randomly ordered this exceptionally cool device for me. He came across it on newegg, and he being the wonderful father that he is, thought I could use it while killing people on the internet (which is its intended purpose after all).

It’s going to take some serious getting used to, but it will totally be worth it in the long run. I can assign any command to any of its buttons (including the 8 directions of the d-pad), as well as Macros (strings of commands that are executed in a specific sequence [also known as batches]), and I can change its “state” to 3 others (plus the default) so essentially there is room for 4 times the commands.

The feature that caught my eye the most is the Macros, mostly because I tend to be rather lazy. However, it was not the world of gratuitous blood and violence that I thought of applying it to, it was the wonderful world of Photoshop.

As wonderful as Adobe’s batch commands are, they are still kind of annoying and limited. With this I can record the keystrokes themselves, which is advantageous because the batches have the tendency to specify themselves to a given image (by saying do this to this layer name [which drives me insane]).

Anywho, I currently have it set up to for all the primary functions that I require when using Photoshop (basic tools, a few filters, copy/paste, and such things).

But this is definitely one of the coolest devices I’ve used in awhile. It will do much for making me lazier (eventually I plan to set it up so it will run programs, that and I want to get it rigged so I can type one handed [and yes I have tried to set up a keyboard before to do that easier]). It ranks up there with my multimedia mouse (wireless Logitech mouse that has media commands on it), despite the fact that the buttons don’t glow blue.

Jars of Clay

I went to the Jars of Clay concert up in Brockport last night… that was a lot of fun, it reminded me of last year and all the crazy adventures we had then. Good concert, fun friends, amusing random strangers.

Incidently it also reminded me of middle school when I used to listen to them all the time. Those were the days...

The ride home was interesting (I got home at 2:30 am), considering there were times when the road seemed to disappear. However, while we were going through Buffalo, it disturbed me in that there was so much light pollution that I could read without turning a light on in the car. My sincere hope is that it’s not always that bad, but the intensity was the result of reflection off of the copious quantity of snow that was falling.

Behold the Power of Google

I can’t wait for the day when searches like this are possible:

If Google is the Big Brother of tomorrow, that’s ok with me. No matter how often I rant about the Orwellian tendencies, Google is the single greatest thing ever.

Spiffy TV

/. had an interesting post pertaining to a “holographic” television. Essentially its a pane of glass with a rear projector. This, while very cool looking remains impractical, given the excessive amount of room that is required between the projector and the screen (5 feet). Also, random drunken stumbling might contribute to its eventual, and unavoidable, shattering.

However, the design does ensure that the picture will remain sharp and crisp regardless of environmental lighting. That’s about the only way its better than a good ole digital projector (excluding the coolness factor).

Oh. And its $27,000

Die with a T

Random thought of the day:
If you combine enough enough diets.. it all comes back to anorexia.

Lunch

Today, I have a high school bowl match, and inorde to function at an optimal level, I texted Jeff and asked him if he would bring me some Arbys. However, he was running rather late, so he told me that he wouldn’t be able to do so. But a short story shorter, I was sitting here eating my Curly Fries (mmmmh) and I noticed that where I had the ketchup on my wrapper there was a very shinny spot. I can attribute this to one of two things:

1) it ate through the paper on the inside
2) the fry scraped it of while i was dipping

either way i'm currently ingesting an acidic substance and/or some wrapper paper.... for some reason that disturbs me

Hot Air....Balloon

My dad forwarded this to me and I enjoyed it immensely.


Hot Air Balloon

A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost. She lowered her altitude and spotted a man in a boat below.
She shouted to him, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The man consulted his portable GPS and replied, "You're in a hot air balloon, approximately 30 feet above a ground elevation of 2346 feet above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100
degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude.

She rolled her eyes and said, "You must be a Republican."

"I am," replied the man. "How did you know?"

"Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to do with your information, and I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help to me."

The man smiled and responded, "You must be a Democrat."

"I am," replied the balloonist. "How did you know?"

"Well," said the man, "you don't know where you are or where you're going. You've risen to where you are, due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise that you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. You're in exactly the same position you were in before we met but, somehow, now it's my fault."

In Bio....

--discussion on "Better Than Sex Cake"--
Mrs. Cybart: "I don't want to know what you think about that"
Pete: "Lets ask Princeton"

wow...

An Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto

I came across this random declaration, and I really was amused with some of what it says. Granted, its dated by a few years, but its pertinence remains the same.

Here are some random excerpts that I enjoyed:

Why We Fight — An Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (2.0)

“WE THEREFORE DECLARE that both the terrorists and their state sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of mankind, to be dealt with as rabid dogs are.”

“WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies, and the West to hunt down and capture or kill individual members of the Islamo-fascist terror network;”

“WE ARE MEMBERS OF A CIVILIZATION, and we hold that civilization to be worth defending. We have not sought war, but we will fight it to the end. We will fight for our civilization in our thoughts, in our words, and in our deeds.”

Projectile Motion

My dad was watching some random show on OLN and it happened to feature some... interesting activities. One such was a human trebuchet (click the pic for a movie). I found the concept to be rather fascinating. Incidentally it’s a great demonstration of projectile motion, which I now have an awesome formula for (or so it appears).

Well I was at the Rod and Gun last night with a bunch of my relatives, and as opposed to making pointless small talk as usual, I was doodling on my placemat… and I had an epiphany.

I noticed that the Position Versus Time graph for projectile motion is a parabola (good call eh?), and thus it’s specifically for the vertical component of the velocity (duh, it only took me 2 years to realize that). And then I said “OH MY GOD THAT’S IT”, and people looked at me funny.

Anyway, my formula is like the Range Formula ((-sin2theta*v^2)/g), but is much cooler because it will take into account a vertical displacement (i.e.: the projectile is launched from a position higher or lower than it lands).

Yeah, that’s about the only thing I accomplished this weekend.

Demise of Torrents

It appears that the MPAA is getting rather nasty. They have been rampantly smashing Bittorrent sites for a few weeks now, and accomplishing what the RIAA and BSA have yet been unable to do… actually slow down file sharing.

They randomly decided to put up the pic on the right along with a evil little warning that if you download crap you will get caught.

The Bittorrent network, while it requires no centralization, is much more convenient when set up that way, and so they targeted specific sites that hosted these torrent files (which allow you to directly connect to other users… like kazaa but w/o the central server).

Excerpt from warning: "Illegally downloading movies from sites such as these without proper authorization violates the law"

I just want to know how to get proper authorization.

Murder Trial

Well… I was sucked into mock trial. However, one fringe benefit, aside from Angela agreeing to go to Footsteps, was getting to skip school to go watch a murder trial.

Supposedly, and this is piecing info together from a variety of sources… it was a drug related whacking (two individuals were found in a car with holes in the back of their heads and other places). Meh, no great loss.

Such questions as: “What was the cause of death?” amused me. It really reminded me of school (being that they were projecting pictures that clearly showed some bullet holes in the guy’s head).

While the medial examiner’s primary language was not English (imagine the average Dell tech support guy and make him old), I did learn quite a bit from him in terms of the effects of bullets on a person (yes aside from death). For instance, if you hold a gun within an inch of the person and shoot the gasses from the explosion will be propelled into the person in addition to the bullet, causing tearing and “powder burns”.

Anywho, the next witness, a DNA specialist from CA was fascinating. I was proud of myself that I generally knew what he was talking about, and pleased that he was able to explain everything in simple terms for the sake of the bumpkins.

Needless to say, while I would likely die/go insane/cry if I was to sit through such things every day, it was a very interesting experience.

Valentine’s Day

For some peculiar reason I have… always.. been single on Valentine’s Day since noticing that the opposite sex is highly intriguing. It’s just as well, because the general idea of the holiday infuriates me.

Those of you, who know me, know that I generally despise society, mostly because it’s so easy to do so. However, the nerve of a culture to set aside merely one day to express one’s adoration and love for a member of the inverse gender (screw the queers), especially for the profit of commercial entities, is appalling.

I hereby propose that Valentine’s Day is abolished, and instead, one random day each year is selected by each individual to express their undying love and devotion, even if it must involve buying chocolates and flowers and such things (though I would take a simple, meaningful, “I love you” over that stuff anytime).

Love shouldn’t be expressed because it’s Valentine’s Day, it should be freely expressed for the sake of love. Make everyday Valentine’s Day, but don’t plasticize love.

:::steps down off of soap box:::

Whoops

Whoops... I neglected to check a box.. comments from random people are now permitted.

The Art of War

Have you ever freely decided to read a book for the sake of improving your mind, and then found it more pleasurable than picking up some random piece of entertaining fiction?

Well, I picked up a copy of The Art of War (the book by Sun Tzu the Chinese general from 400ish b.c. not the crappy Wesley Snipes movie), and its one of the most fascinating books I've ever had the pleasure of perusing.

The wisdom contained within was the first attempt at formulating a rational basis for the planning and conduct of military operations. In examining nearly any battle plan one can see Tzu's maxims lavishly applied, with only slight changes resulting from improvements in technology and weaponry. Unfortunately for the West, a copy wasn't available until the time around the French Revolution, and even then it was especially widely read. However, rumor has it that Napoleon took a gander at it.

This has inspired me to grab copies of Machiavelli's The Art of War and The Prince as well. Why don't we ever read books like this in English class? We're forced to read other pieces of ethnic literature, so why not some with instructional value and proper sentence structure.

Where is it?

I came across two spiffy innovations in the realm of internet navigation and location information. Two of the greatest companies on the internet have released amazingly ingenious approaches at discovering directions and locations.

First of all there is Google with Google Maps. It is a click and drag map interface with amazing speed and excellent search-ability (just like the rest of Google). Oh, and you can search for a specific type of business, for instance “lakewood ny pizza”, and it returns, not only a list of pizza places in Lakewood, but also their locations on a spiffy little map. Wow. God Bless Google Labs.



A9, Amazon’s attempt at diving into the searching melee, released a new way of looking at the yellow pages. This most recent tool is either an example of how some companies have too much spare time, or, and more likely, an example of the coolness of Amazon. The equipped some trucks with cameras on the roof that would drive down the streets of various cities and photograph the establishments therein. This way they were able to construct a new version of the yellow pages that puts everything else to shame. Not only can you see images of the storefront you’re looking for, but also one is able to walk down the street and see the other businesses and buildings in that general area. Freaking sweet, except for the detail that this will never happen in Jamestown.

Red Sweaters

I can’t believe that I’m actually writing about this, but it amused me.

In English we were coerced into reading “Eleven” by Sandra Cisneros. I won’t destroy your mind by giving too many details, but one of the symbols was an:

“ugly sweater with red plastic buttons and a collar and sleeves all stretched out like you could use it for a jump rope”

Essentially it was symbolic of an unwanted burden. For a homework assignment we had to take a 3x5 card and somehow depict our “red sweater”. I cut out a little red sweater and wrote "the rampant stupidity of entirely too many authority figures" on one side and "its never been done before" on the other.

One of the individuals in my class enlarged it by sticking the card on a ½ piece of foam board and ranted. Incidentally, both my name and Jeff’s were alongside such items as “death” and “divorce”.

When explaining her reasoning for us being on there, she diplomatically said that it was because we are smart. Wow.

The Lesson is...

This was entirely to amusing to ignore. I suppose the important lesson to be learned from this is the difference between water and… cement. I really hope that the kid had his eyes closed...



It also occurs to me that I have entirely too much spare time in school. I really plan to become productive in the near future.

P is for Pepsi

I can’t imagine that I’m the only person in America that was seriously disappointed by the crappy commercials this year.

Evidently the "P" in P Diddy stands for "Pepsi". Or at least that’s the way that he's currently whoring his fame and/or notoriety. For those of you living under rocks or distracted during the commercials, P Diddy’s car breaks down and gets a ride to some random red carpet event in a Diet Pepsi truck.



But then, everyone obtains a Pepsi truck of their own because he had done so.



I mean, seriously, why for the love of all things holy, would society choose such a troll of a role model. Yes, granted, the commercial was meant to be satirical, but the truth behind it rings clearly through.

Being that, we, as Americans are incapable of thinking for ourselves, we have chosen a select few to determine the “cool” items of society. Naturally, I would not be complaining if such individuals were promoting growing a brain, but hell has not frozen over yet (thank goodness it exothermic).

The Circus of Life

Once upon a time…

There was a poor little boy who lived with his father, and wanted nothing more than to see the circus. But, he’s poor and knows that he and his father cannot afford to go see the circus.

But one day, by some miracle, the circus comes to his little town, and his father saves up all of his money so that he can take his son to the circus.

But when the little boy gets there, he covers his ears and closes his eyes and misses the entire thing because he knows that he will love the circus so much that when it’s over he’ll feel terrible.

But really, all that happened was that the poor little boy missed his chance to see something special.


Why give up the chance for something wonderful? Why let the fear of the as yet undetermined future rule one's decisions in the here and now. Yes, there is always the chance of things not working out, but isn't it better to know that, than to leave it in doubt for all eternity?

A Girl's Guy Friend

I came across this somewhere on the internet, and while it doesn't especially pertain to me it amused me to no end.

"A woman has a close male friend. This means that he is probably interested in her, which is why he hangs around so much. She sees him strictly as a friend. This always starts out with, ‘you're a great guy, but I don't like you in that way’.”

“This is roughly the equivalent for the guy of going to a job interview and the company saying, ‘You have a great resume, you have all the qualifications we are looking for, but we're not going to hire you. We will, however, use your resume as the basis for comparison for all other applicants. But, we're going to hire somebody who is far less qualified and is probably an alcoholic. And if he doesn't work out, we'll hire somebody else, but still not you. In fact, we will never hire you. But we will call you from time to time to complain about the person that we hired.’"

Google It!

I can't think of a single image that expresses my sentiments towards most of my school than this.



“Googleing it” would provide the answers to such fascinating questions as "What's international trade?" But then again, in that particular case, having a functioning frontal lobe would provide the same result.

Just imagine, not merely a world without hypothetical situations, but one without stupid people. Yes, kind of impossible isn’t it?

I could never stand being a teacher, unless it was at the collegiate level or if I was allowed to shoot and/or electrocute my students. I give them credit, I really do. Well, most of them.

I am proud.

Physics

I've missed physics. I enjoy the whole aspect of feeling like I don't suck at physics. I suppose taking it for 3 years now has that general effect. The physics blog is going to be entirely too much fun as well.


Shagla is an idiot. I wish we had set him on fire like we wanted to when we had the chance.

Randomness of the Day

These random thoughts/observations/occurances (have crossed/trudged across my mind today)/occured.


I am now signed up for 6 AP tests (Bio, Psyc, Physics C, Calc AB, Govt, Eng Lit). I am in 3 of those classes. I am so going to enjoy this.

I noticed that my Google Toolbar, one of the single greatest things ever (entirely unsurprising... its from Google after all), has blocked 1605 popups since June (the last time I F-disked). The other day I realized that the latest version of the Divx codec has the Google Toolbar bundled with it, and you can thus install it without admin privileges.

My shoutcast server has returned for the indefinite future as a result of me being in school today without music (my batteries for my mp3 player died). If you would actually like to hear my random music ask me for a link.

You can tell its been awhile since you've done physics when you have to think about how to break apart a vector.

Tonight I compulsively sorted my Contact List into 5 groups:

• MSN
• People
• People Far Away
• People I Don't Usually Talk To
• People Needing a Good Stabbing

Eric the Elephant

Included on the DVD is the trailer “The Cost of Creative Genius”, it explains how much time, money, and effort went into the production of TAoETE. However, what it fails to mention is how much of my sanity was lost to it. Its strange how after focusing on one thing for an extended period of time, something on the order of two to three weeks, that it entirely dominates your consciousness for a period of time following its completion.

Needless to say, at 1:03 am today, I finally achieved burning the first functional DVD. The trick was to export it as a folder and then use DVD Shrink to write it to my hard drive as an image for the sake of easy replication. I cannot decide if its amazing or pathetic that this movie feels like one of the first worthwhile things I’ve produced in my life. I’m not entirely sure of how the rest of the world feels about it, but having created something by pouring my soul and mind into it, it feels good.

Fan Mail

We recieved our first fan mail for The Adventures of Eric the Elephant:

Hey slackers,

I rave about this great movie that I had the privilege of being involved in and bring her to the website so that I can show it to her and to our disappointment... NO MOVIE! When is it going to be posted? (And don't forget the outtakes, they complete the experience)

You guys used to throw fits if I didn't have your tests graded by the end of the day, so where the hell is the movie? I know for a fact that it has been completed since 5 am this morning, what have you been doing with your lives? Seriously though, let me know when it is up, my wife is really interested in watching it.

Padge


I've never been more proud....

Pole-In-Face

We were hanging out over on Moonshadow, a “terrain park” at Holiday Valley. It was the 3 rd or 4 th run on there in a row, and I went over the last jump at a rather high velocity and landed rather badly. I would have probably recovered; except for the detail that there was a random individual standing at the bottom of the jump with his pole extended parallel to the ground and perpendicular to the hill. Incidentally, I was aligned perfectly so that the tip of his pole connected with my face. It struck just below my nose, but above my mouth. The fun part was that enough blood ran into my mouth, before I was aware of what was going on, so that I was sitting there coughing it up and having it run off my face. I left a lovely puddle. Oh, the other detail is that the jerk scampered off immediately after seeing that I was breathing.

So we went over to Tannenbaum lodge and I cleaned it and then stopped by the first aid station and got a bandaid and some betadine and skied a few more runs before calling it a night.

Later on, we went to the hospital, got there at midnight, got home around two, with only three stitches. Notice that this was the day after I was trying to finish the Eric the Elephant DVD at 4:30 in the morning. So, me, being rather sleep deprived, decided it would be beneficial for my grevious injury to sleep. And now I'm going to go do that some more.