Pelanne.Com

In the spirit of yesterday’s post, the one-two combination of time wasteage during the year of 1993 was generally opened with Ren and Stimpy and smoothly closed with Beavis and Butthead. Beavis and Butthead, sprung from the genius mind of Mike Judge, was the current day Aqua Teen Hunger Force set to a grunge soundtrack. It celebrated a strange combination of innocence and absolute stupidity which made us all feel good….somehow.

Beavis and Butthead were complete tools, and for reasons not quite grasped now but certainly poked at with a stick of warm of nostalgia, we as students ordered large quantities of extremely cheap pizza and were very diligent about carving time out of our busy schedules of putting off our studies to commune on the thrift store couch and watch ‘em.

Beavis always had a certain fascination with fire, not unlike many people I know still (that’s about half of the reason to go camping, y’know). This video clip depicts this fascination in what was one of the funniest moments of the series.

1993:

• First year in an off-campus apartment - it was crowded
• Met my future better half, and thank goodness for that
• Finally locked meself into what would become a physics major
• Attended my first full Phish show - it was muy good
• Scored an extremely lucrative job constructing sandwiches for tourists
• Started growing hair to a length I now pretend never occurred
• Visited my childhood house one last time before it was bulldozed
• Purchased and promptly ignored my first and last fishing license

That year, I was also introduced to the awesomeness that is Ren and Stimpy, the trials and tribulations of a cat of dubious intellect and a tightly wound chihuahua.

One of the finest characters in the series was Powdered Toast Man. Powdered Toast Man is a superhero who strives to do good, yet flies backwards, and has a little trouble prioritizing. He’s more like the rest of us than it first seems, though with more of a confectionary bread product theme.

Below is the clip in which we are first introduced to him. I just about died laughing the first time I saw this, and almost keeled over once again in watching it today, thirteen years later.

Now, I’m a giant fan of grilling. I try to get out there at least two or three times a week and oxidize my food amongst the elements. Heck, until I discovered that I have the cholesterol level of an old man, I used to have a yearly Month of Grilling (aka, June), where every dinner was done on the grill.

I got to hang out on the porch nightly, swaddled in delicious, savory smoke, my glazed eyes focused on some non-existant spot somewhere beyond the setting sun, a cold beer sweating in my hand. A wandering, untamed wind whipped my untucked shirttails behind me in a devil-may-care manner, kind of like the image at the top of this page. I was tapped into the dinnertime testosterone mainline that has fueled man since the dawn of time, and I felt a certain rugged kinship with my culinary forefathers as I invited the smoky muses of Char and Broil to my table.

It was all quite good.

Somewhere in Japan though, some big nerd had to go and take it too far.

I present the USB-powered BBQ. It’s very efficient. All it requires is six PCI-based USB cards that have five USB slots each - that’s thirty friggin’ USB cables, if you’re doing the math. Take all that cabling, lop off the ends and channel them down to a couple of wires. Now apply their collective power to a something with really high resistance - Ohm thinkin’ some kind of coil (<pause for laughter>).

Then cook something on it.

This has been audibly cracking me up since day one - it’s essentially old-time (or is that olde-tyme?) clip art paired with absurd (and sometimes NSFW) captions. They do one a day, and it’s good therapy.

Here’s an example of the coolness:

Tons more at Married to the Sea.

I. I got to listen to an unfortunate fellow short out the building’s electical system with some appendage, fall from the ceiling, and dislocate his shoulder, all through a wall from the adjoining room. It was creepy.

II. I cleaned out my garage. It was dusty.

III. A guy murdered two people in my town, then evaded capture for 35 hours (they had to shut the town down). He was caught. It was sad.

IV. I got stung on the bottom of my foot by a wasp. It hurt - a lot.

V. My cat got stung on the tongue by a different wasp. It hurt her - a lot.

VI. I went on six runs. It was hot.

VII. I got to kick it on a protected beach on the Atlantic Ocean for a couple of days. It was nice.

VIII. I filled up my car 6 times. It was expensive.

IX. I microwaved two light bulbs. It was colorful.

Here is a helicopter hovering pretty much over my house during the hunt for the guy in Act III, as taken by Steven White from his office in the nearby Corporate Research Center (which was under lockdown).

Steven, btw, takes lots and lots (and lots) of crazy good pictures, which you can peruse here.

In the world of nerds, the ability to solve Rubix cubes seems to be one of the de facto litmus tests. Me? My ability is somewhere between pathetic and abysmal - I gave up at the age of 10.

This guy, however, is good. He solves a mixed cube in just over twenty seconds. With one hand. Let’s hear it for the opposable thumb.

Not unlike the many laughing babies video a couple of weeks ago, I find myself strangely disconcerted by this hacked together contraption that was built to dispense cat treats.

Maybe it’s the foreboding clicking noise it makes, or just that someone would think to make this.

Just got back from hot and hazy eastern shore environs of Chincoteague, way up in the northeast of Virginia. The place is very nice - they have wild ponies, crab cakes, old lighthouses, and beaches filled with pale and vaguely shapeless people.

I fit right in.

It was so far across the state from my town that most every person that asked where I was from did not know where Blacksburg was, even though it’s the hometown of their state university.

Four days of R&R did wonders for the soul. It also emptied the wallet and filled the stomach in inverse proportion.

After achieving a Danger-Will-Robinson-red sunburn and wearing down the strings of my old guitar a bit, it was a long drive and a quick dive back into the daily routine.

And so with that introduction, I present various and sundry videos of crap being blown up in microwave ovens by folks braver than I:

• Lightbulb
• Jar
• CD
• Gunpowder (unsurprising)
• Furby (sad)
• Bic Lighter
• Grape
• Soap Bar (cool)
• Compressed Gas (um, bang.)

And equally cool, if not more cool, here are some videos depicting the joys of superheated and supercooled water.

Apparently, if you heat water in a smooth, unscratched and still container, it can raise above it’s normal boiling point without boiling. All you need to do is disturb it some, and it immediately gets angry and flies everywhere.

• Superheated Water

The same principle applies for cooling water. Disturb it, and it freezes in about a second. This one you can do at home without too much fear of singed eyebrows or scalding liquids.

• Supercooled Water

The last post was about a somewhat inspirational figure who pushed the limits back in the early sixties. Specifically, the limits of going extremely fast.

One of the things NASA was testing during those missions was the kinds of forces that a human body would be subjected to, both at the extreme low pressures at high altitude (read: right hand swelling up like a football) and the extreme high speeds of returning to the earth.

G-forces are an interesting lot to consider.

Commercial aircraft can handle just over 4 g’s before falling apart. Similarly, the human body will sustain up to 4 to 5 g’s for short periods of time, at which point it will react by letting the blood drain out of your brain, smoothly dropping you into unconsciousness. When jet pilots pull high-speed maneuvers, they can achieve up to ten times the force of gravity for moments, but they wear pressurized suits which helps keep body fluids in check and in your head.

Typically, the limit of survivability for sustained (and in the high ranges, short-duration) g-force is somewhere between 20 and 40 g’s (not too many people are keen to test this, so there is not a lot of data).

So, with that in mind, check out these stats:

• In the late seventies, British racing driver David Purley survived a deceleration from 108 miles an hour to zero in a distance of about 2.16 feet, causing him to endure 180 g. Somewhat unsurprisingly, he suffered 29 fractures, 3 dislocations, and 6 heart stoppages, but lived to tell the tale.
• When a red-headed woodpecker hits the bark of a tree with it’s beak, it has an impact velocity of over 21 km/h in effectively zero feet. As a result, bird’s brain experiences a jet-fighter-like 10 g’s during deceleration
• When reflexively ‘jack-knifing’ into the air to escape predators, the click beetle averages 400 g
• According to a study in the medical journal Spine a decade ago, hopping off a step generates 8.1 g’s for a very short time. In addition, you experience up to 10.4 g’s when you plop down into a chair, 3.5 g’s when you cough and 2.9 g’s when you sneeze.
• Modern roller coasters are lightweights - they generally don’t take you past 3 g’s

The moral? Don’t cough during your next roller coaster ride at Six Flags. And definitely don’t bring along a click beetle.

If you found this interesting and want to seriously nerd out, check out this article, called “High Acceleration and the Human Body”.

This is a really cool story. Essentially, this guy is the first man in space.

In 1960, we hadn’t put a man up beyond where planes could fly, and had very little idea about what those conditions would do to a human. NASA began testing higher and higher elevations on humans, first with high-flying planes, then with high altitude balloon jumps.

On August 16th, 1960, after three hours spent rising through the thinning layers of the earth’s atmosphere in an open gondola, Joe Kittinger evened out and drifted for eleven minutes, waiting for the winds to blow him to his jump location over New Mexico.

Visibility was a cool 400 miles in every direction. His altitiude was 102,000 feet.

When he reached the jump coordinates, he disconnected his pack from the balloon support systems, went to the edge of the gondola, paused a second, then jumped…

Due to the thinness of the surrounding atmosphere, he would momentarily reach Mach one, a standing speed record for unpropelled human flight.

His description of the experience:

“I had gone through simulations many times - more than a 100. I rolled over and looked up, and there was the balloon just roaring into space. I realized that the balloon wasn’t roaring into space; I was going down at a fantastic rate!

When the chute opened, the rest of the jump was anticlimactic because everything had worked perfectly. I landed 12 or 13 minutes later, and there was my crew waiting. We were elated.”

Here’s a two minute clip with some video footage of the actual jump: