Golf GTI Ad Redux
I hadn’t looked into who the body actor behind that groovy Golf GTI ad was. It is David Bernal, AKA David Elsewhere. Normal physics does not apply to this person!
IEEE Spectrum Centerfold
I don’t think I mentioned this here before but the Serpent Mother made the centerfold (yes, literally the centerfold) of the November 2006 edition of IEEE Spectrum magazine. Spectrum is the Time Magazine of the professional geek world.
The Truth of False
Want to inform people that a myth is false? You can’t do it! Merely by talking about the myth, you are reaffirming it in their minds.
Want to “make” something true? Just tell it to your audience repeatedly. Eventually, they’ll mistake being told many times by the same source as being told by many sources the same thing.
This is how advertising works. This is how political attack ads work. This is how selling works.
From On the Media’s “The Truth of False“, aired September 7th, 2007
BOB GARFIELD: Americans may or may not be as sleep-deprived as drug makers claim, but if it were a myth you could try to quash it with the truth. That’s what the Centers for Disease Control Prevention recently did. They sent out a flyer listing various facts and myths about the flu vaccine and labeled them “true or false.” But a study at the University of Michigan found that the CDC flyer actually did nothing to change people’s minds and may have even spread vaccine myths to more people.
Shankar Vedantam, a reporter for The Washington Post, explains that right after reading the flyer, people mostly remembered the false statements as false.
SHANKAR VEDANTAM: But about 30 minutes later, older people started to remember some of the false statements as true, and three days later, very large numbers of older people and significant numbers of younger people also started remembering increasing numbers of myths as true. Continue reading ‘The Truth of False’ »
Armies of Peeps
Images from Ben Thompson’s merciless peep army
SWARM Glamour Shots
Here’s a couple SWARM Glamour Shots that Mark Alexander shot of Erik and myself. It’s mid-August and we’re working at the Box Shop on getting the batteries for the 6 orbs up to snuff for the playa.
Posts de-privatized
I had accidentally marked several blog posts as “Private”. That made it so I could read them but noone else could. Here are most of those posts, de-privatized:
- 3,000 Gallons of Propane View
- More Doings View
- My Style of Humor View
- Photo Credit View
- SpamAssassin, CRM114, Brightmail View
- Each City Has It’s Own Type of Driver View
- Multitasking View
- YAGW: Yet Another Great Weekend (with a rough start) View
- Happy New Year! View
- Condoms Don’t Work Nearly As Well As You Might Have Thought View
- Reinstalled XP View
- Matrix Revolutions trailer View
- The Best Deadly Sin: Gluttony View
- A little bit about Computer Guy View
- Finding Ferranti View
Telemarketing in America is Dead
I’ve posted about the telemarketing Do-Not-Call list before, here
I just came across this site selling telemarketing phone number scrubber software. The most interesting bit is their Recent Do-Not-Call Fines page. A local version is at the bottom of this post.
It’s been about 4 years since I first registered myself on donotcall.gov so I figured it was time to re-register myself and my family (it is supposed to expire after 5 years to give the telemarketers a chance). I found out that they won’t be dropping phone numbers from the Do Not Call registry. The list has 145 million phone numbers in it. Wow, that can’t leave much room for telemarketers…
Recent Do-Not-Call Fines
Date Company Name Fine Amount
11-07-07 Craftmatic (FTC) $4,400,000.00 11-07-07 ADT (FTC) 2,000,000.00 11-07-07 Alarm King (FTC) $20,000.00 11-07-07 Direct Security Services (FTC) $25,000.00 11-07-07 Ameriquest (FTC) $1,000,000.00 11-07-07 Guardian Communications (FTC) $150,000.00 11-06-06 USA Home Loans, Inc. (FTC) $426,782.00 06-02-06 Executive Financial Home Loan Corp (FTC) $1,138,551.00 04-12-06 Sports Authority Florida (FL) $112,500.00 03-06-06 TE Mortgage Corp. (MO) $15,000.00 02-24-06 Book Of The Month Club (FTC) $680,000.00 01-12-06 Total Remodeling Inc. (New Jersey) $151,500.00 12-14-05 DirecTV (FTC) $5,340,000.00 07-31-05 Chesapeake Window and Building (Maryland) $25,000.00 07-15-05 Columbia House (FTC) $300,000.00 06-07-05 Real Time International (Virginia) $196,000.00 05-05-05 EchoStar Communications (Missouri) $50,000.00 03-18-05 ABI Marketing (Pennsylvania) $90,000.00 03-15-05 AT&T (Pennsylvania) $35,000.00 03-03-05 Dynasty Mortgage (FCC) $770,000.00 02-17-05 Braglia Marketing Group, L.L.C. (FTC) $3,500.00 02-17-05 Flagship Resort Dev. & Atlantic Palace (FTC) $500,000.00 02-10-05 SBC Communications (Missouri) $150,000.00 02-01-05 Florida 2004 Settlements & Fines $319,750.00 11-28-04 Solartherm Remodelers, Inc. (Pennsylvania) $1,900.00 09-08-04 Primus Telecommunications (FCC) $400,000.00 08-06-04 Comcast Cable (Pennsylvania) $7,500.00 07-09-04 Shelterguard, Inc. (Ohio) $65,000.00 06-24-04 American Home Craft, Inc. (California) $45,000.00 05-09-04 Sunset Mortgage Co., L.P. (Pennsylvania) $19,000.00 04-12-04 AT&T (North Carolina) $30,000.00 04-12-04 American Communications (North Carolina) $15,000.00 03-30-04 67 Settlements in New York $1,050,960.00 05-01-01 Tennesse Regulatory Authority Settlements $7,000.00 DNC Fine Total:
$19,539,943.00
Yesterday Was Great Fun
Friday morning: got up late… 9am. Lounged around in bed til 10. Had breakfast. I had soft boiled eggs. I haven’t had a soft boiled egg since I was a kid. It was great!
As we were finishing up breakfast, Lorie and Cindy (our next door neighbors) came by and we had a second breakfast. We cooked up a couple more soft boiled eggs… and with the buttered toast cut into strips that you dip into the egg… mmm! And then you use a tiny spoon to scoop out the barely hardened white. Yum! Cindy brought apple crisp and Lori apple pie and pumpkin pie. We chatted and frittered the morning away.
Charlotte and I went to geeking for a while. Charlotte fell asleep for a few hours while I geeked out. She got up at 3.
I didn’t get out of the house til 4 I had been planning on lighting stuff on fire at the Box Shop starting at 2pm. I was a little bummed at myself. I ran around looking for lamp oil; Bells didn’t have any but Cole’s Hardware came to the rescue. JDV had suggested lamp oil for my dangerous experiment.. it turned out to not be nearly flammable enough, but I’ll get to that soon enough…
Got to the Box Shop at 4:45 and set to cleaning out some Hudson sprayers I had gotten at
a yard sale a couple days ago. I got the sprayers for free after chatting with the owners about FLG and how beer and wine is made :-).
I just barely got one of the sprayers working when Ray told me how it was time we go on our beer run in the SWARM Mothership. It was just the two of us since Cory hadn’t shown up yet. So we were off to the Dogpatch Saloon in the Mothership. Ray had just installed a siren… a real woooooOOOOooooo siren along with the ground effects lighting and the ah-WOO-gah horn. It was a pretty nice (if somewhat strenuous) ride. We got to the Dogpatch and they said they were closed; they were only there because they were waiting for supplies for a party the next day. Standing around, a couple people gawked at our crazy transportation device including the lead singer of Spellbound, a Siouxsie and the Banshees cover band. The shorter person she was travelling with had a couple Full Metal Alchemist books under his arm: groovy.
Cory arrived so we decided to go to the wine bar just 2 doors down. We had fun not understanding the wine menu, paying $13 for 3 ity bity slivers of cheese and some $40 mediocre table rosé. At least the serving-lady was nice and they had some fire-art in the back corner. Charlotte showed up and we started having fun. We needed some food so we were off to The Ramp down the street.
The Ramp was dead… kitchen closed and heat off. When the guy called “last round!” (it was 8pm) we decided to head off. We had fun chatting with some people about the Mothership and exchanging wwwoooOOOOoooo’s with a guy in a van with a megaphone set to “woo”.
So it was off to Jordan’s House of Ribs on 3rd Ave. When we walked in (legs burning from the ride), I’ll admit that, at first, I felt a little like Flounder in Animal House. I thought some big black guy was going to walk up to us and ask, “Do you mind if we dance with your dates?” It puts one on edge when one is in an environment that one is not accustomed to. After a few minutes, all was well. Our food arrived and all was well indeed. We talked for a while and had fun. After we finished, Corey asked about my fire experiment again… “Do you have everything you need at the shop?” “I’ve got a gallon of lamp oil in the trunk and a Hudson sprayer ready!” “Well, let’s go!” So we were on our way back to the Box Shop.
Fire Fog:
The plan was that I’d make an aerosol cloud of a flammable liquid a few feet over a flame. Eventually the cloud would settle onto the flame and [whooosh!] the cloud would ignite, burning from near the ground up a few feet. I was a bit worried that I’d create a fuel-air bomb, which wouldn’t be nearly as much fun. That’s when you get the fuel-air mix just right and it burns explosively, creating a blast wave that the Vietcong said was “no fun”.
We settled on spraying oil over a wood fire; getting all the piping for a propane fire going safely would have been a bother and… well, wood fires are easy. I poured 1/4 gallon of lamp oil into the Hudson sprayer and pumped it up. I had some trouble getting the mister nozzle to spray at all so I took it off. So I could spray a sharpie-thick stream of lamp oil onto the burning barrel. When a a 1/5 second blast hit the barrel, it would steam for a moment and then ignite, and the fire would spread quickly and then die down a few moments later. Pretty cool.
We all took turns at spreading the fire around and had quite a bit of fun. I played with the nozzle a bit and finally got it to spray a mist… oil is thicker than water so I had to loosen it a bit. But still no “whoosh”. We then switched to 50% oil / 50% gasoline. That was better. We could get the fire to jump a bit when the mister was working just so but feh. When we ran out of oil, we switched to 100% gasoline. Now that’s what I was talkin’ about! A couple times I was able to get the fire to ignite in mid-air and climb like… like nothing I’ve ever seen! It’s a tiny bit like Nate Smith’s Fire Vortex in the way that the fire sometimes climbs off the ground but certainly it is a very different effect! It’s very much of a “cloud on fire” kind of thing. There are many permutations that I’m going to have to try. I’m very excited about this effect!
We’d know we found a neat effect when we’d all go “Ooo!” at the same time. Or when the person with the sprayer would get “that laugh”. A little bit mad scientist, a little bit… mad hatter!
Ok, now I’ve got to get this going really well. I need MORE POWER! More pressure in the sprayer, finer droplets, more mist on the target, possibly a more flammable liquid like denatured ethyl alcohol. I’m going looking for these systems ASAP!
- Napped and ate the day away
- Went to 5 bars
- Drove a really cool art vehicle around town
- Got plenty of excercise
- Discovered and played with a new flame effect with friends
Weee!