Blizza Blizza

Various commentators are often heard wondering why the U.S. education system is in such poor shape, and pundits around the country are constantly offering ways to fix it.

Did anyone stop to think that maybe, just maybe, the problem isn’t the system?

Anupam Kumar and his family would probably say it isn’t the American educational system that’s the problem. It’s the kids in it. See, when you live in a land where college is practically guaranteed, where you still see the possibility of making a decent living without a college degree, you don’t feel the pressure of having to succeed in school at all costs.

My peers in high school would have done well to study this story of Anupam Kumar and give it some serious thought.

Via Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools comes St. Claire, Inc.’s Industrial Sign Builder. You can choose from a variety of categories for various warning signs, then build a custom PDF with a few clicks of the mouse.

Watch for some products of this nifty program here on the blog.

UPDATE: For example, this lovely warning sign:

UPDATE 2: Here are a few more.

• DO NOT LOOK INTO LASER WITH REMAINING EYE
• DEATH STAR IN USE
• WALKING LIKE AN EGYPTIAN PROHIBITED
• OVERSIZED HEADPHONES MAY NEGATE COOLNESS OF iPOD

Today’s award goes to Thomas Hesse.

I know, I know. “Who the heck is Thomas Hesse?”

He’s the “president for global digital business” at Sony BMG, the recording industry giant. Instead of being remembered merely for having the world’s most pretentious business cards, Hesse will now go down in infamy for this little slip, sure to raise the ire of Uncle Steve over in Cupertino:

It’s just a proprietary decision by Apple to decide whether to play along or not. I don’t know what more waiting we have to do. We think we need to move this forward. Time is ticking, infringement of intellectual property is happening all over, and we’ve got to put a stop to it I think.

OK, let me get this straight.

1) Mac users are all pirates and can’t be trusted.

2) Apple — a computer, not music company, mind — is responsible for writing unbreakable DRM that makes CDs unplayable in computers.

If I were Steve Jobs, you know what I would do? I would call up this Hesse goon and tell him his little tantrum just cost his company any chance of ever having CD copy protection that works under Mac OS. Let fly the Wrath of Steve!

More technical details, and a much better article, at Yahoo.

Red Forman Dumbass Rating:

Especially if they get too long and touch an overhead power line.

Good job on the copyediting, WOOD.

Best non-basketball quote of the night:

I touched her hand. Her hand touched her boob. By the transitive property, I got some boob! Algebra is awesome!

—Steve Smith, American Dad

Fortunately, this time, the guy managed to remove himself from the gene pool prior to reproducing.

Boy hangs himself during prank

Red Forman Dumbass Rating:

And today’s Honourable Mention: Drunk 12-year-old crashes SUV

Red Forman Dumbass Rating:

Does it speak to my nerdish tendencies that I find BBSpot’s Top 11 Yo Momma Jokes for Sci-Fi terribly funny?

Best one:

“Yo momma’s so ugly, she makes robots rethink the First Law.”

Time for the venerable classic, “Good Decision / Bad Decision.” This week’s subject: Michael Jackson.

As many of you know, MJ was found not guilty on all charges yesterday. I still personally believe the man has done dirty deeds (though probably not dirt cheap) with little boys, but it is America, after all, and if this nation has shown the world anything in the last 50 years, it’s that we hold most sacred our Constitutional right to be weird.

Good Decision: In the wake of his latest close shave, Jacko “will no longer share his bed with young boys,” says his lawyer.

Bad Decision: Having shared a bed with young boys in the first place!

This week’s Car Talk Puzzler is a great one:

I’m getting old and a little absent-minded, so my friends got together and bought me a stylish little desk calendar. It’s a cradle for two cubes, each with one number per face.

They figured I probably had enough left in me to figure what year it was and what month it was, but the date was going to elude me. So, this little gift was going to show the date. So, for example, if it were the 21st, I’d rotate one cube until a “2” was showing, and the other would show a “1.” The next day I would know to rotate one cube so, together, the two cubes would read “22.”

With the two cubes, I was able to express every date. For example, if it were the 2nd of the month, it would be expressed as “02.” If it were the 18th you’d put up a 1 and an 8, and so on.

Here’s my question. If you were designing the cubes, what numbers would you paint on each one so you could express all the dates from “01” to “31”?

Easy, right?

Yeah, sure. Now that you’ve figured that one out, genius, try this one on for size, of my own device:

How many unique solutions are there to the above puzzle?

Consider an individual cube “unique” if there is no way it can be rotated to match another cube. To make an analogy with gambling dice, giving the faces in the order (front, right, back, left, top, bottom):

1, 2, 6, 5, 4, 3

is identical to

1, 4, 6, 3, 2, 5

since the latter can be derived from the former by rotating the former 90 degrees to the right around the z-axis.

Good luck.

You have to see some of the expressions on these cats’ faces after they realise they’ve been covered in random, well, stuff.

(also via Dave Barry, which means if you’re reading this blog and you’ve got Dave Barry’s RSS feed in your newsreader, you can apparently quit reading this one)

You should consider giving a Boeing 727 Bus/Limousine* as a gift. Even Travolta doesn’t have one of these!

*no longer legal for flight in U.S. airspace, unfortunately.

(via Jalopnik)

In the ever-escalating war to pander to the prurient interests, the Japanese have just fired a huge shot across Real Doll’s bow. (Warning: second link is definitely not safe for work.)

(via Dave Barry)

A butane-powered V-twin engine for my desk.

Best. Paperweight. EVAR.

(via Dave Barry)

CNN has served up a real gem this week with Chris Isidore’s “Star-Free Finals Are Hurting NBA.”

First of all, what the hell is a writer for CNN/Money doing writing about sports? You don’t know anything about basketball, buddy. And now I’m going to prove it to you.

Isidore places the entire blame for the NBA’s ratings and merchandise sales slide on the so-called “star-free” finals.

Nu-uh.

For starters, Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili pretty much count as stars. Ben Wallace, who has won three of the last four Defensive Player of the Year awards, damn well counts as a star. And compared to some two-bit economist hack, even Darko “The Human Victory Cigar” Milicic is a star. I’m lookin’ at you, Isidore.

The NBA can place the blame wherever it wants, but the problem isn’t the brand of basketball the Pistons and Spurs play. They’re the two best teams — with emphasis on the word “team” — in the NBA, and possibly in the world.

The Pistons utterly destroyed the most star-studded team in recent memory, the 2004 Lakers, whose starting roster consisted of no fewer than four future Hall-of-Famers, a team that was widely expected to sweep the Pistons under the rug and ask for more. As everyone knows, the Pistons rolled into L.A. out for blood, and but for a very lucky shot by Kobe Bryant in Game 2, just flat-out obliterated the hapless Lakers.

The Spurs were NBA champs two years ago, and led the NBA in defense this season. (The Pistons were second.) They steamrolled through the Western Conference playoffs, knocking off the “fun-n-gun” teams of the NBA with ease. Averaging over 100 points a game? Not when San Antone is in town. See if you can score 80.

No, the NBA’s problem isn’t with the two teams in the finals.

The NBA’s problem is largely the result of Team USA’s shellacking in the 2004 Olympics.

Which occurred for precisely the same reason that the 2004 Lakers struggled to win one game — at home, no less! — against the supposedly inferior Pistons. It all comes down to one very tired and overused cliché:

There is no “I” in “team.”

The 2004 Lakers had five individuals on the court, and a couple more on the bench.

Team USA 2004 had 12 individuals. Calling it a “team” would be like calling Microsoft and Apple “strategic partners.” Everyone involved knows it’s a freakin’ joke.

The NBA needs to wake up. Until something else comes along, the Olympics are the World Cup of basketball, the premiere international stage for showing off talent and building “buzz” around individual stars. It’s awfully hard to build buzz when your haphazard collection of individuals gets shown up by a team, led by Manu Ginobili, wearing baby-blue uniforms from some country in South America.

That team wouldn’t have beaten — much less beaten up on — Larry Brown’s Pistons, and it wouldn’t stand a chance against the 2005 Spurs, either (lack of a duplicate Ginobili notwithstanding).

There’s another old saying in the sports biz that Isidore forgot about: “Offense wins games; defense wins championships.”

Viva la defense!

Apparently, as little as ten bucks.

Unfortunately, there’s enough uncertainty surrounding the incident — police didn’t even have suspects until two days ago, and it happened in April — that any halfway-decent lawyer ought to be able to get both girls found not guilty, whether or not they were involved.

Ugh. Someone stop me before I vomit. If anyone tries to rob my grandmothers, I will kill you. Fair warning.

Have no sense of humour. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of these types.

A Long Island resident was surprised this morning when she heard a loud bang on her garage roof. Pam Hearne walked outside to find a leg and part of a torso lying in the yard, apparently discharged from the wheel well of a South African Airways jet passing overhead.

Ms. Hearne lives a few miles outside the final approach fix to New York’s Kennedy airport, approximately where arriving jets put down their landing gear.

Authorities suspect a man stowed away in the wheel well during the aircraft’s stopover in Dakar, Senegal.

Today is the first anniversary of the beginning of my flight training.

I think telling a few of my students that today scared them. Especially the ones who have been flying longer than that and still don’t have their instrument ratings, which I think is almost all of them.

Here’s to a great second year of flying.

Charles Averill, you are today’s winner.

Why?

Because you tried to beat your girlfriend to death. With a Bible!

The trial starts Tuesday. Averill could face life in prison if convicted.

I say we throw the book at him! Ba-dum *ching*

Red Forman Dumbass Rating:

“Oh, shit!” says humanity.

(With a nod to the Onion for the great headline.)

Something even weirder than Cabbages and Condoms (where, by the way, I have eaten, and I have a spoon to prove it): Marton (which, apparently, is the Chinese word for “toilet”). Photos are also available.

(via Dave Barry)