Celebrity counterparts

I’m not sure which celebrity resemblance I am more proud of; the pulchritudinous Teen Choice Award-winning star of One Tree Hill, or one of the central founders of thermodynamics.

http://www.myheritage.com

The Wonder Register

It’s been a busy time for me lately. Graduation, job-hunting, moving back home, etc., have all kept me from blogging as frequently as I’d like. I’ll post about all that stuff in due time, but while you wait, here is an essay I wrote for the Des Moines Register. They’re seeking “a new group of Young Adult Contributors… to bring new voices and fresh viewpoints to the Register’s online site and our opinion pages,” and in addition, “those selected will get a blog at DesMoinesRegister.com/blogs and will be invited to the Register for a discussion of issues of interest to young Iowans.” I’ll let you know if I am selected. The following is my application essay:

·································

Recently I pulled the car to the side of the road and purchased a twenty-five cent cup of raspberry lemonade from a child entrepreneur. Sitting on the table beside the requisite cups and pitcher was a toy cash register. I assumed the toy was just for looks – a subliminal message of legitimacy to drive up sales – but when I paid with a dollar bill I could not have been more astounded. The girl pressed a button on the thing and the next five seconds can only be described as surreal. Surely time has inflated my memory of the incident, but I remember bells ringing, plastic pieces moving in perfect harmony, and a large container of cash whirring out from underneath the device. She coolly changed out my dollar bill, closed the wonder-register and politely said thank you. Frankly, I don’t even remember if the lemonade was any good; I couldn’t stop thinking about the toy cash register.

It hasn’t always been this way. When I was a kid, anything that mom and dad didn’t mind breaking was a toy. In fact, something that broke was preferable – two toys for the price of one. An enormous rock in the yard was the tip of massive underground castle. A fallen branch of a tree was a bazooka (boys will be boys). The only real toy I actually remember having was the set of successively smaller colored rings on the spindle, and even those presented a world of possibilities: donuts in the morning and jewelry after dinner. I can’t help but wonder if, as toys become increasingly realistic, children are slowly losing the ability to use their imagination. More realistic does not equal superior. Perhaps it would be better to send them out into the yard for the afternoon. Their imaginations won’t let them down.

Cracking the Digg comment code: An experiment

As far as stereotypes go, I am probably your “average” Digg user. I am 23, male, and I have my own blog. Since joining Digg in Feb. 2006, I have dugg 215 stories while only submitting 16 (I only started submitting fairly recently), none of which made the front page. I have long been fascinated by the dynamics of the commenting system on Digg, so last night I concocted a little experiment to see if I could crack the comment code. It’s no Copernican revolution, but it was pretty successful. Here’s how it worked.

I have seen The most dugg up comment on Digg as well as The most hated comment on Digg, and several other front page stories here and there regarding comments. Reading these stories and perusing the comments of many other Digg stories made two things very clear. If you want a comment to have lots and lots of diggs, the comment must (1) be submitted early, usually before the story hits the front page and (2) be funny or witty.
Read the rest of this entry »

AWOL Apparel

It has happened to all of us. You fall in love with a particular piece of clothing only to one day realize you have no idea where it is or what happened to it. To quote Warden Samuel Norton from The Shawshank Redemption, it just “up and vanished like a fart in the wind!” This has happened to me too many times to count, but there are three t-shirts of which I was particularly fond that are AWOL to this day.

AWOL T-Shirt #1: Limited Edition Final Fantasy VII Promotional, c. 1997, missing since unknown date (pictured at right). I mentioned in a previous post that I received this shirt as a gift for pre-ordering Final Fantasy VII. Displaying a huge video game character across my chest may have both exposed my geekiness and prevented me from getting any dates, but I loved this shirt nevertheless. I did some digging and saw that one of these shirts recently sold on eBay for $40.

AWOL T-Shirt #2: SparkNotes Promotional, c. 2000, missing since unknown date. Two years before SparkNotes was bought out by Barnes & Noble, the company gave away some 30,000 t-shirts in a promotional campaign. As a junior in high school and established internet nerd, I signed up to receive one of their shirts. It was navy blue with the SparkNotes logo on the front and on the back it said - here’s the kicker - “Taking the F out of ucking up.”

AWOL T-Shirt #3: Iowa Starbase Leadership Camp, c. 1995, missing since 2002. Apparently the Iowa STARBASE Leadership Camp (ISLC) doesn’t exist anymore (so says the omniscient Google). It was a camp sponsored by the Iowa Army National Guard for a hundred 5th grade students who demonstrated leadership traits. My class voted for me and so I got to attend Nerd Camp. I don’t remember much about the week except that I fell in love with another camper and we wrote each other letters for a while after camp was over. Anyway, I had my ISLC shirt forever… I clearly remember still wearing it freshman year of college even though it was a little snug and worn thin. I haven’t seen it since.

I know I am not the only one. Go ahead, tell me about your AWOL apparel.

Popped collars

A friend of mine tipped me off to a picture of mine appearing on poppedcallarsarelame.com (halfway down). This is interesting for several reasons.

First, the webmaster is breaking copyright law by using the image on his website without my persmission. You can see on the right-hand side of the flickr page that the image has “All rights reserved”. Apparently all poppedcollarsarelame.com’s webmaster did was a search on flickr for “popped collars”. That search reveals several of the pictures features on poppedcollarsarelame.com such as this one, this one (apparently these two guys are friends; look at the comments) and this one. The first two are protected under a Creative Commons License, but the last one, like mine, is “All rights reserved.”

Second, it is a bit ironic that this particular photo made it to the poppedcollarsarelame.com (I am getting sick of typing that) gallery because our dodgeball team was making fun of popped collars in the first place. This explains why we are all sporting layered polos and why Tom and I have particularly ridiculous hairdos/facial expressions.

Maybe he just really despises popped collars, or maybe he’s just trying to make a few bucks. That would certainly explain the Popped Collars Are Lame.com Store. Regardless, I sent him a message via the contact form on his website with a link to this post. I don’t mind the picture being on the website, but I would appreciate a little more effort put into contacting the photos’ owners.

The return of the scruff

I shaved for the last time for a while this past weekend.

Last year I participated in No Shave November and ended up with a pretty sweet beard. I started growing the scruff at the end of September, so I am getting a head start this time around. I just have to make it past the awkward inbetween stage where it just looks like I am lazy and/or homeless.

I believe this picture was taken early last December, just before I shaved. If nothing else, this year’s Christmastime w/Jake & Tom pictures will be even better.

Five quotes

I came across this meme over at kottke.org.

You go to this website and look through random quotes until you find five that you think reflect who you are or what you believe. Here are mine:

“The universal brotherhood of man is our most precious possession.” (Mark Twain)

“When you give each other everything, it becomes an even trade. Each wins all.” (Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign, 1999)

“Therefore search and see if there is not some place where you may invest your humanity.” (Albert Schweitzer)

“The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.” (Samuel Johnson)

“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.” (e e cummings)

Rouse and Rosebud

Being back in Parmelee was amazing. Much of the journey was blogged on MyUnderground, and Brandon posted several times throughout the week as well on his personal blog. Once we get all of the pictures from the week together, we’re going to put together a video, and I’ll upload it to YouTube once it’s finished. A sincere “thank you” to all those who were praying for us.

I didn’t listen to much music during the week, but when I did, it was Josh Rouse’s new album, Subtitulo. I wrote about Rouse in the first Music of the Month post last September, and when I heard he had released a new album, I got it immediately. It is amazing. It’s so good that I was compelled to write a review of it on Amazon.com, the first I have written for the website. Here’s what it says:

Josh Rouse, I believe, is one of the best unknown singer-songwriters out there today. Subtitulo, while both mellow and upbeat, is a culmination of everything he has done to date. As I listen to this album, I constantly find myself astonished how seamlessly he has integrated sounds he honed on 1972 and Nashville into a distinctly Spanish setting.

Every song is a gem, my favorites are the cool “Summertime”, the catchy and familiar “It Looks Like Love,” and the almost Egyptian-sounding “Wonderful”. This album is a must-have.

Subtitulo is, I believe, my first official album of the summer.

The 3 Step Plan for Surefire Success*

Looking for success and wondering why you keep falling short? Look no further. By following this simple three step program, success is yours for the taking. No more failures. No more disgrace. Both the co-inventor of this program and I have been using this program for more than three years with consistent results: success. The three steps are as follows:

1) Get your priorities straight.

2) Think things through.

3) Make things happen.

That’s it. Now get out there and start making things happen.¹

* The actual name is “The Salzwedel-Bouma 3 Step Plan for Surefire Success,” but that’s too long for a post title.

1. Be sure, however, to get your priorities straight and think things through first. ↩

Fibonacci poems

Gregory K. Pincus, author of the blog GottaBook, has invented what might be the coolest form of poetry since the haiku.¹ He calls them “fibs”, named because of their syllabic relation to the Fibonacci sequence, a pattern in which the next number in the sequence is the sum of the previous two numbers. The first few numbers in the pattern are 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34… and so on. For example:

One
Small,
Precise,
Poetic,
Spiraling mixture:
Math plus poetry yields the Fib.

You dig? The standard fib is 6 lines with the syllables of the lines being 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8, respectively, but they can get pretty long. I have written a few, and I would encourage you to do so as well. You can leave them in the comments. The following are a couple of my own fibs:

Books,
Books,
More books.
So many!
What’s a boy to do?
Take ‘em one at a time, I guess.

Small
Bear:
A cub.
Many cubs:
Well, a baseball club.
The Cardinals²… what’s all the hubub?

For
Peace?
No doubt:
Bonhoeffer.
Plot to kill Hitler?
Surprisingly, also D.B.

“I
Do,”
They said.
Thus, were wed.
Soon after to bed.
Anxious, the reception they fled.

I could go on, but I shan’t. What fibs can you create? I suspect Peter would enjoy this.

1. I know this sounds preposterous, but really… how many forms of poetry have been invented since the haiku? No seriously… I have no idea. ↩
2. Two syllables, i.e. “card-nulls”. ↩

This is getting old, but…

I must say one more thing about the plane and the conveyor belt.

Whether you think the plane will take off or not doesn’t matter. I was talking with Shawn during lunch today about this little riddle, and we had the idea of submitting it to the television show Mythbusters.

Well, as it turns out, many people have already submitted the idea (2, 3), and some believe it will be tested next season.

I can’t wait to see the look on people’s faces when the plane takes off. Although, I have no reason to believe I’ll be watching the show with one person, let alone many.

Four things

I’ll pretend kottke tagged me. I’m not usually one for things like this, but what the heck. It’s a blog thing.

Four jobs I’ve had:
1. Burger King
2. Iowa State Fair
3. Camp counselor
4. Youth ministry intern

Four movies I can watch over and over:
1. School of Rock
2. Rounders
3. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
4. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Four places I’ve lived:
1. Van Meter, IA
2. West Des Moines, IA
3. Decorah, IA
4. Dayton, IA

Four TV shows I love:
1. 24
2. Curb Your Enthusiasm
3. SportsCenter
4. Family Guy

Four highly regarded and recommended TV shows I haven’t seen:
1. Lost
2. The Sopranos
3. Grey’s Anatomy
4. Desperate Housewives

Four places I’ve vacationed:
1. Orlando, Florida
2. Ft. Collins, Colorado
3. Cedar Point, Ohio
4. Greece & Turkey

Four of my favorite dishes:
1. Pepperoni pizza
2. Buffalo wings/buffalo chicken sandwich
3. Almost any mexican dish
4. Ranch dressing

Four sites I visit daily:
1. relevantmagazine.com
2. flickr.com
3. digg.com
4. kottke.org

Four places I would rather be right now:
1. In bed
2. Hanging out with the youth at Valley Church
3. On stage
4. Greece

Four bloggers I am tagging:
1. Barker
2. Ryan
3. The Vis
4. Peter

The plane and the conveyor belt, pt. 3

This will hopefully be the last post on this, although it has certainly been fun.

Take a second to read this follow-up post to kottke’s original post, which is where i received the initial inspiration to pose the question here. He cites this explaination from a guy with a Ph.d in Physics from MIT.

The guy takes the time to reply to all of the comments that were left, and on one of his own comments, he says:

As an exercise, take a billiards ball and roll it very slowly across a piece of paper. Then try to get the billiards ball to stay in place by pulling the paper out from under it in the opposite direction. The friction is insufficient to overcome the inertia of the heavy ball.

Go, plane, go.

The plane and the conveyor belt, pt. 2

Like I said, I did a bunch of reading about this riddle after I thought about it for a while. My brain ended up hurting pretty badly, but a few key quotes helped me significantly. One of the best (and, ironically, simplest) explainations was by a commentor named Jason on kottke’s post. He says:

The point of the riddle is that the motion of the wheels exerts only a minor frictional force opposing the forward movement of the plane. The major force being supplied is from the plane engine, and that force is a forward force. The net force is equal to the forward force minus the negligible frictional force. This obviously produces a net forward force. Therefore, the plane moves forward, regardless of how much the wheels are spinning. The plane is not remaining stationary on the conveyor belt becasue there is a force acting on the plane that is not dependent on the motion of the conveyor belt.

Another good explaination of why the plane will take off can be found here. An excerpt:

The difference between a car and a grounded airplane is that a car uses its wheels to propel itself forward, and an airplane moves itself forward by moving air. They assume that the runway moving backwards would move the plane backwards. This is what would happen with a car (that is in gear), so why not for an airplane? Well, because an airplane’s wheels are free rolling. There is obviously some friction, so there would be some small backwards force, but it would be infinitely small as compared to the forward thrust of the airplane.

Yet another place explains why the plane will take off, although it would initially seem otherwise:

A thought experiment commonly cited in discussions of this question is to imagine you’re standing on a health-club treadmill in rollerblades while holding a rope attached to the wall in front of you. The treadmill starts; simultaneously you begin to haul in the rope. Although you’ll have to overcome some initial friction tugging you backward, in short order you’ll be able to pull yourself forward easily.

So, now do you believe?

The plane and the conveyor belt

I saw this on kottke and I’ve been thinking/reading about it since. Here’s the question:

A plane is standing on a runway that can move (some sort of band conveyer). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyer moves in the opposite direction. This conveyer has a control system that tracks the plane speed and tunes the speed of the conveyer to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction). Can the plane take off?

I talked about it with a couple of people at dinner and I’ve been reading other people’s thoughts on it, and I’ve concluded that the plane will take off (my initial reaction was of course it won’t take off, you idiot). I’ll follow up tomorrow with how I reached this conclusion.

What do you think? Leave a comment.

JakeBouma.com is 'Pressed and Minted, too.
All content on JakeBouma.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.