The More Things Change...

I was looking at some cartoons on Gocomics when I saw this old Bloom County cartoon. It was originally published in the Washington Post and later released as part of a collection called "Loose Tails"—in 1983—twenty-five years ago. When you consider that the issue of Intelligent Design versus evolution is still being argued about in the courts, it's pretty amazing to see people still arguing. The whole series of Bloom County's "scientific penguinism" cartoons can be seen here.

Laughing at the "N-word"

A recent Usenet thread led to this Daily Show segment. It does a good job of poking fun at racism and political correctness. It's the essence of what makes The Daily Show good in my opinion.

The Evolution of the Eye

I can't remember where I first ran across this video. (Which is pretty pathetic since it just a couple of hours ago.) It deals with how eyes evolve in invertebrates and takes on a classic "intelligent design" argument that some organs, like the eye, are simply too complicated to have ever evolved without some sort of master "designer" interfering.

Bad Astronomy, Good Explanations

Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy website started out mainly as a forum for nitpicking the science in movies (hence the name) but over the years, Phil has turned it into a valuable and entertaining way of educating people about astronomy. Here's a video of Phil answering an intriguing question, "why don't giant clouds of gas dissipate in space?"

Palm—Always Dying, Never Dead

It seems that every time I look on the Internet, I see someone asking "is Palm dead?" And the answer from disgruntled Palm PDA and smartphone users is usually a mixture of bitter agreement, hand wringing, and denial. I try to take these comments with a grain of salt. Palm has been "dying" for most of its more than decade-long existence. I seem to recall the first "Palm is dead" posts appearing on Usenet almost as soon as Microsoft introduced Windows CE in order to create devices which would compete with PalmOS PDAs—that didn't happen. Searching through Google's Usenet archive, for the words "palm dead" the oldest thread on the subject of Palm's imminent death is dated May 27, 2001. That was seven years ago and Palm still hasn't died yet.

A lot of this is the natural Internet bitching and moaning that has always dominated Internet discussion. Part of it is that Palm has been legitimately in trouble several times over the years since they went public at the height of the dotcom era. But I think that a lot of it has been Palm's own fault. Palm has always been a very secretive company and yet it also makes a lot of clumsy attempts to reach out to its users. A good example of these problems is the Palm Foleo fiasco. For years Palm had hinted at the existence of a new class of mobile devices that they wanted to sell. Palm's founder Jeff Hawkins dropped tantalizing hints for almost two years. When the Foleo was finally near completion they hyped the device to jaded users who were skeptical of its modest specs and high price. And then, they abruptly decided that the device was flawed and canceled its release. And as a final insult, several rival companies quickly released similar products which sold very well. I can't help but think that a disaster like this one could have been avoided if Palm had communicated earlier and more effectively with its users.

Nerds Weigh-In On Presidential Race

So I was reading about astronomy on The Daily Galaxy when I saw that they linked to this video. It's an amusing take on the Democratic presidential primary done in Star Wars terms.

Rewatchability: The Dunder Mifflin Org-Chart

I watch too much television and one of my favorite shows is The Office. One of the things I like about this show is that I can watch it again and again and find new things that make me laugh. One example of why came when I noticed something interesting about a recent episode.

In one scene, they show the office's organizational chart. I had to pause the action to catch all of the jokes. The women of the office for example, all have little icons to denote their gender and whether or not they have reached menopause, and are connected by pink dotted lines which supposedly denote their menstrual cycles. That last part was explained by Dwight who drew up the org-chart but the rest has to be seen to be believed. More little jokes abound in the chart. Oscar, who is gay has two little interconnected male symbols by his name. Creed Bratton, who has a reputation for being sleazy, has his name in quotes—implying that this is not his real name. Toby, the HR rep, has a Star of David by his name which implies he's Jewish. The two black men in the office, Stanley and Darryl have black power fists by their names. And Kevin has what appears to be a four leaf clover by his name.

This is hardly a new thing, cartoons like The Simpsons and Futurama have always had visual jokes that only appear on the screen for a fraction of a second. But these little things help keep me entertained and I suspect that I'm not alone in this regard.

Cool and Educational

Here's a very cool flash animation which shows the planets of the solar system (and a few extrasolar systems) and their orbiting moons. You can zoom in and out and see the moons spinning faster and slower. It's quite mesmerizing to see the moons around giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn buzzing around their parent worlds like swarms of bees.

This is Different

Bill Gates as the voice of Kermit the Frog praising Apple computers.

Gadget Watch

I always notice when characters on TV use gadgets like cell phones and PDAs. It's a little obsession that began with an episode of Angel where a lawyer decapitated another lawyer with a signal sent from her Palm III. Similarly, I was constantly amazed at the things that Jack Bauer could do with his Treo. So I was very interested to see Floyd on 30 Rock—the show which is the inspiration for the name on this blog—using the relatively new Palm Centro. I think that I've also seen a number of characters on CW sitcoms using the Centro.

This would seem to be good news for Palm as they seem to have lost the cast of How I Met Your Mother. Most of the characters on this CBS sitcom used to use Treos and have gradually migrated to iPhones. The iPhone is particularly popular as a TV prop these days. The most prominent of the iPhone's many TV appearances appear to be on the canceled NBC series Journeyman and on CBS' vampire series Moonlight.