A quick DST story

For those of you who listened to our show last night (thanks!), this will be old hat.  Sorry, feel free to move on.  But for the larger majority of you who didn't listen to the show (grrr!), it should be as fresh as the sweet mountain air.  Ahem.

So this past weekend was Daylight Savings Time here in the U.S. of A.  Stupid friggin' tradition that needs to be eliminated, if you ask me.  But there it is.  At 2AM on Sunday morning we all dutifully turn our clocks ahead an hour because that's what we've always done.  Or we let our more advanced technology like cell phones or computers or DVRs change the time themselves.  We are benevolent human dictators like that.

But everyone probably has a manual clock or two at home that needs to be spun ahead 1 hour.  And it's inevitable that some clocks suffer the fate of not getting spun ahead for days or weeks, depending on whether you use them often or not.  It happens.  Then someone points it out to you and you feel stupid before fixing it.  I delight in being the asshole who points it out, I have to admit.

So I'm at my sister's house for a birthday party on Sunday when I notice that their wall clock in the living room had been neglected.  I, being that asshole who points this stuff out to folks, tell my nephew, an utterly brilliant college kid in many aspects of life, so that he could change it.

He takes it off the wall, takes a half-second peek at the back of the mechanism and declares that it's too complicated for him and he hangs it back up on the wall.  Seriously.  There was NO WAY he could have processed what he saw in that time-frame, but whatever.  He said it was too complicated to attempt.

Whoa, whoa, whoa!  Too complicated?  I gotta see this.  So I take it off the wall, and it's the same battery-run clock mechanism that we've all seen for decades now.  Something like this, if you aren't sure what I mean.  A battery and a wheel to set the time.  That's it.  Which I did.  Very easily, mind you.  And this kid is much, much smarter than I.  Ahem.

I don't know.  Kids these days can figure out how to sync their mobile phone to their email accounts to their Facebook page to the chip implant in their skulls in a matter of seconds.  But turning a wheel one rotation to change the time on a manual clock...

I fear for the human race once Skynet becomes aware and our youth are forced to handle tasks manually.  That's all I'm saying.

PS - But seriously, he's a great kid.

The Wolf, the Ram and the...Alpha?

I was pleased to discover that a new website was launched over the weekend based upon universe created by Joss Whedon*.

*It really isn't, but fans of Angel and Dollhouse will get that joke. - Earl

It is called WolframAlpha and it is a computational knowledge engine. I don't know what any of that means, but it sounds really cool.  Have any of the nerdlier of you nerds tried it out yet?  I know I've been playing with it for a couple of days.  Fascinating stuff for the inner geek in all of us.

It was launched on Friday, so one of the creepier searches/questions you can ask it is "How old are you?"  It will answer a specific number of days, down to 3 decimal points, from when it was launched/became aware. Or just simply say "hello" to it.  It will respond with a chilling "Hello, human".

:: shiver ::

Or ask it the meaning of life.  It will tell you.  The answer is 42, of course, but you knew that already.  Well, the nerdlier nerds amongst you knew that already.  Right, Slyde?

Perhaps the funniest/creepiest feature of WolframAlpha is the error message that it uses when it exceeds it's maximum test load.

Be afraid.  Be very afraid.

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Note: Remember to play the Bug-Eyed Trivia Challenge every day. Resistance is futile.