Archive for the 'culture' Category

Wednesday, November 8th, 2006

The Mens Guide To Dating Geek Girls V 1.0

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Let’s face it, sometimes we get tired of dating models. Sure, they clean up well but it gets annoying having to tell her she’s beautiful a hundred times a day and the cocaine bill gets expensive. You might think you have no hope of getting an attractive low-maintenance geek girl and I am inclined to agree ( that you can’t anyway ) but I would rather light a candle than curse your darkness, so here are my tips to try and help. I present to you Version 1.0 of The Mens Guide To Dating A Geek Girl.


Getting Your First Geek Girl

So you’ve seen a geek girl. She’s got the Tina Fey glasses on and the hair is thrown up in a mess, she’s wearing clothes just frumpy enough you can’t tell what kind of body she has. Trust me, my friends, if she’s like any geek girl I have ever known, she has a better body than Eva Longoria. She just doesn’t need to flaunt it because Pete Yorn would never date Eva Longoria anyway. Now you just have to talk to her.

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Thursday, November 2nd, 2006

How Math Can Save Your Marriage - An Interview With The Author Of Geek Logik

Ever have someone tell you a certain pesky question can’t be answered scientifically? Garth Sundem is here to help. He’s the author of Geek Logik and it’s his business to help you mathematically solve life’s most pressing problems.

Garth has created plug-in numerical solutions that help you make decisions while completely abdicating accountability for your actions - because you can always claim the numbers said it was the right thing to do. It’s like the Taguchi Method, only with real algebra and a lot funnier. Here are the kinds of life-altering decisions Garth can help you make:

“How many beers should I have at the company picnic?”
“Should I go to the gym?”
“Do I have a snowball’s chance in hell with him/her?”
“What IS a snowball’s chance in hell?”

I first stumbled upon Garth when I read Esquire this past summer and saw he was able to answer the question “Should I apologize to to my girlfriend?” with the following equation:

D[Rp(Ra+P)+D(Ra-Rp)=A

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Thursday, November 2nd, 2006

Guns, Guitars And Greenpeace

Guns, Guitars And Greenpeace

As a younger man, I was a big fan of Greenpeace.

As time went on, I thought they lost their focus by branching out from protesting nuclear weapons to whaling and trees and basically hanging out a shingle that said, “If you send us money, we will protest for you.”

I watched them change from instilling their people with scientific literacy to educating their people on political activism. Then I watched them turn on me because I was a scientist who didn’t much like exaggerated evidence in the name of fundraising and because I was a sportsman and because I was a businessman.

I’ve always believed that sportsmen - hunters, hikers, mountain climbers - are natural allies of the environmental movement.

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I watched them turn on hunters because of the gun issue. I watched them turn on businesspeople because of the logging issue. I watched them devolve into silliness … hijacking ships, funnelling money to political groups, ramming a French sailboat competing in the 2003 America’s Cup and finally, in the absolute depths of their Klondike Kop level incompetence, running aground on Tubbataha Reef Marine Park off the coast of Manila last year, which they were supposedly visiting because they were worried about global warming. They paid a $7,000 fine and said it was an accident and the millions of dollars in damage done are still not fixed. I imagine the environmental movement wouldn’t have been so lenient if, after the Exxon Valdez accident, Exxon paid a token fine and left the damage.

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Wednesday, November 1st, 2006

Science Determines The Media Is Just Too Darn Suggestive These Days

Science Determines The Media Is Just Too Darn Suggestive These Days

With all this business about girls dressing like tramps and articles stating that 140 incidents of sexual behavior occur on prime-time network television each week I am starting to worry that the media might be a tad over the top.

Sure, you will automatically dismiss that kind of talk as an aging guy romancing the days of his youth. I usually think that also. I know we had suggestive TV when I was a kid. And R-rated movies. We didn’t have the Halloween costumes some of these girls wear but I can’t say that is going to tank our culture. We had Porky’s and civilization didn’t end.

So I sit down next to Lady Scientist to discuss it with her. You know, get the female perspective. She’s watching Veronica Mars on the handy Replay DVR. It’s a rerun but I haven’t seen any of them since the first season so it’s new to me even if it’s from last spring. We are chatting along and suddenly I hear them make reference to a Clint Eastwood movie and then a Mexican comic book character. I guess because the guy she is talking to is a latino cop.

I grab my laptop.

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Wednesday, October 25th, 2006

Science Has Bad News For Goth Chicks - Vampires May Not Be Real

Groundbreaking - and heartwarmingly unessential - research done by University of Central Florida physics professor Costas Efthimiou has attempted to confirm what a generation of suicide girls has always feared - that vampires do not exist.

His reasoning? On Jan 1, 1600, the human population was just over 530 million people. If one vampire existed on that day and bit one person per month, and then each new vampire also bit one person per month, by 1605 the entire planet would be nothing except vampires.

Now, I am okay with there being no vampires, though I think the world would be poorer without that cinema classic, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.

And, without vampires, I would not be able to spend 4 seconds scouring the internet and find pictures like this:

So we can’t just let someone claim they have wiped out a millenium of folklore by doing simple ( very simple ) math. First, let’s deal with the premise behind his numbers. Professor Efthimiou’s research assumes that each vampire bite results in another vampire being created. People, if there’s one thing I know, it’s vampires ( and Thai transvestites, but hey, that is a post for another time ) and I need only point you to the definitive work on the matter, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, to state unequivocally that vampires don’t always create more vampires. They only create vampires out of people they really like, or who have waistlines like Vampira:

Yes, she looks as all women should look; like a sexy, zombie skeleton.

Additionally, back in 2000, in the British series Ultraviolet, it was clarified that vampires wouldn’t feed themselves to extinction any more than we would keep on killing buffalo until they were almost gone.

This was on TV, people. If you can’t believe what you see on TV, I can’t reason with you.

Professor Efthimiou’s simple and surprisingly jingoistic math and logic errors mean that there is still at least some statistical chance that vampires could exist. However, there is also some statistical chance I am a Chinese jet pilot. Yet, since the chance exists that vampires are roaming the earth, it can’t hurt to have a vampire slayer handy.

Everyone goes for Buffy. I’d rather have a little Faith.