res ipsa loquitur

Anyone who works with computers can understand this guy: after a night of drinking, Joshua Lee Campbell allegedly returned to his workplace (RANLife Home Loans) and opened fire on their computer server with his .45-caliber handgun.

According to prosecutors, Campbell called police and claimed that he had been "mugged, assaulted with his own firearm and drugged" by an assailant who then shot up the server; but Campbell's acquaintances told the cops that they had seen him drunk, armed, and threatening to shoot the computer -- and maybe himself.

I've been programming computers for (counts on fingers) 29 years. (Great ghu, is that right? Yes...my first programming class was in the summer of 1981, at the Maryland Summer Centers for Gifted Students' "Center for Advanced Studies" program.) Trust me, I know the urge to employ a high-velocity lead debugger all too well!

When you combine Glenn Beck, the Tea Party, and the recent bizarre historical revisionist attempt of the right wing to claim the Civil Rights movement as a conservative one, you know there's going to be some laughs. Beckites and tea baggers from all over the country are heading to D.C. for a rally on the anniversary of King's "I Have a Dream" speech. The only problem is, D.C. is full of, you know, black people; so a Maine Tea Party group has offered some interesting advice on how to stick to "safe" areas of the city, with such helpful tips as staying off of the entire Green and Yellow Metro lines -- keeping you safely away from such dangerous areas as the National Archives, Howard University, the University of Maryland College Park, and the U Street corridor.

When I head down to D.C., by the way, I usually drive to Greenbelt and take the Green Line downtown. Guess I've just got more guts than these teabaggers. (Of course, I am from Harm City -- okay, the suburbs of Harm City, but still -- so I don't scare easy.)

Things that make me smile: a functioning printer made from Lego and a felt-tip pen.

As i have said before, I miss having a sane conservative movement in this country. While social conservatism has pretty much always been an intellectually bankrupt attempt to institutionalize a system of prejudice and privilege, I'd like to have some good fiscal conservatives around, some button-down bean-counters making sure we get the best deal for our dollar. As unabashedly leftist as I am, there are a few things where you'll find me in agreement with a stereotypical GOPer -- I'm opposed to excessive regulation on small business, for example (since I run two of them), and to overly strong gun control laws. I'd like to have some Eisenhower-style Republicans (updated with the past 50 years of social progress) around.

But instead, we get Republican politicians like Colorodo gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes, who believes that efforts by Mayor John Hickenlooper to make Denver more bike-friendly are "converting Denver into a United Nations community."

Says Maes, "This is bigger than it looks like on the surface, and it could threaten our personal freedoms...These aren't just warm, fuzzy ideas from the mayor. These are very specific strategies that are dictated to us by this United Nations program that mayors have signed on to." He is apparently talking about the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, an international sustainable-development association with 1,200 member communities, including 600 in the U.S.

Polls show that Maes, a Tea Party favorite, has pulled ahead of former Congressman Scott McInnis, the early frontrunner in the Aug. 10 primary for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. Maes acknowledged that some might find his theories "kooky," but he said there are valid reasons to be worried.

"At first, I thought, 'Gosh, public transportation, what's wrong with that, and what's wrong with people parking their cars and riding their bikes? And what's wrong with incentives for green cars?' But if you do your homework and research, you realize ICLEI is part of a greater strategy to rein in American cities under a United Nations treaty," Maes said.

...

"Some would argue this document that mayors have signed is contradictory to our own Constitution," Maes said.

Don't tell Paul Simon, but the last roll of Kodachrome ever produced by Eastman Kodak has now been developed at Dwayne's Photo Service in Parsons, Kansas. Dwayne's is the last place still processing Kodachrome, or at least the last place certified by Kodak to do so.

Kodachrome, a color slide film favored by professional photographers, was produced from 1935 to 2009. This last roll was shot by Steve McCurry, a freelance photojournalist whose work has appeared in National Geographic magazine; National Geographic Television was on hand to document that last roll.

Dwayne's will be ending its Kodachrome processing service in December, so if any of you shutterbugs have an old roll in a drawer somewhere, get it in soon.

Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize winning physicist and one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century. He was also a drummer, an artist, a ladies' man, and a raconteur. His book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! is a collection of stories about his adventures. This excerpt, where Feynman takes a graduate-level class in biology while he's at Princeton, just to see what's going on in other fields, is one of my favorites.

The next paper selected for me was by Adrian and Bronk. They demonstrated that nerve impulses were sharp, single-pulse phenomena. They had done experiments with cats in which they had measured voltages on nerves.

I began to read the paper. It kept talking about extensors and flexors, the gastrocnemius muscle, and so on. This and that muscle were named, but I hadn't the foggiest idea of where they were located in relation to the nerves or to the cat. So I went to the librarian in the biology section and asked her if she could find me a map of the cat.

"A map of the cat, sir?" she asked, horrified. "You mean a zoological chart!" From then on there were rumors about some dumb biology graduate student who was looking for a "map of the cat."

When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.

The other students in the class interrupt me: "We know all that!"

"Oh," I say, "you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.

As I have mentioned, I pretty much grew up on Star Trek. Which is why, despite not being a cat person and therefore not a follower of the whole LOLcat thing, this LOLcat take on "The Trouble With Tribbles" ("We Has Tribbles and Also Troubles") had me, well, LOLing.

Gizmag reports on the explosion of "extreme beers" containing more than 20% alcohol.

Typical beer has around 4 to 6% ABV (alcohol by volume); particularly strong beers using special strains of yeast and careful brewing can get up around 12%, giving quite a surprise to the unwary drinker.

In the 1990s, Samuel Adams upped the ante with their 17.5% ABV Triple Bock (1994), 21% Millennium (1999), and 24-27% Utopia series (2002-2007): beers said to be more like brandy or port than traditional beers, but still made without distillation. (No, I haven't tried any of these yet. You buying?)

Then, just over a year ago, interest in the century-old technique of "ice distillation" heated up. Ice distillation takes advantage of the fact that water freezes more easily than alcohol: freeze beer just right, and you can remove much of the water (as ice) and get a stronger beer left behind. (Note that according to the wik, freeze distillation can also concentrate poisonous compounds like fusel alcohols; so don't try this at home.)

Breweries using this technique have been in an arms race recently, rapidly taking the record from 31% ABV to an astounding 43% -- 86 proof, the same alcohol content Jack Daniels whiskey used to have (before JD's wimp-out of a few years ago).

"I am confident we can get to 50% with all the right qualities,", says Georg Tscheuschner of Schorschbräu, the maker of the 43% "Schorschbräu Schorschbock".

Comic book geeks know that Master Splinter -- the rat who was the sensei of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles -- obtained his skills when he was the pet of a ninja master. He would observe and mimic his master.

Apparently, then, the bear seen in this video was once owned by a master of bojutsu, the art of the wooden staff.

While some have suggested that the footage is fake, the Telegraph has corroborating information about the "Kung Fu Bear": he's at the Asa Zoo in Hiroshima, where zookeepers encouraged his hobby by giving him sticks.

(A nice historical overview of bojutsu and jojutsu is at koryu.com.)

Somewhere in my parents' house is an old elementary school photo of me in a Spock shirt. I don't mean a t-shirt with a picture of Mr. Spock on it (I've got one of those now), I mean a dark blue tunic with a black collar and a silver patch in the shape of the swooshy stylized rocketship of the Enterprise (later, Star Fleet) logo, with the Science department symbol (an oval inside a circle, that always looks like a basketball to me).

When I was in high school, my physics teacher dubbed me with the nickname "Spock".

Clearly, as you can tell by the beard, I grew up to be the Evil Spock; nevertheless, this article at io9, "How You Can Live Like A Vulcan Without Bleeding Green", is right up my alley.

Vulcans have something most made-up races can only dream of: a central contradiction that's ultra-compelling. They're overflowing cauldrons of passion, who have mastered their emotions to such a high degree they appear almost robotic. No matter how pissed off or freaked out you might ever get, you can't be as hot-blooded as a Vulcan. And you'll have to work pretty hard to be half as cool.

Vulcans have a philosophy, a way of life, and a spiritual discipline. And they get things done. Best of all, you don't really need alien physiology and fancy powers to embrace the Vulcan way of life.

...

So here are ten ways you can live like a Vulcan, starting today.

Their advice is pretty good, including items such as: wish other people long life and prosperity, celebrate diversity, become a vegetarian (Spock was, as best I can recall, my only example when I stopped eating meat in the early 80s -- vegetarisn were not yet everywhere!), and learn to meditate.