Missing Mary Road

all the deaths in the nakatomi building courtesy john mclane.

19-year-old Liu Guojiang fell in love with an older woman, a 29-year-old widow with children named Xu Chaoqin. They eloped and went to live in a cave high on a mountain near Chongqing, China to escape the scandal in their local village. To make the trip down the mountain easier for his bride, Liu began carving steps into the stone of the mountainside. Did I mention it was a high mountain? He carved 6,000 steps! Fifty years later, in 2001, their story came to light when the steps were discovered by explorers. They were still in love and still living in a cave with no electricity. Liu passed away in 2007, holding his wife’s hand. Their story was serialized in China and considered to be one of the best love stories of the year.

the pakistan cricket board has decided to remove shoaib akhtar from the 15 man squad for next month’s twenty 20 cricket championship for reasons best read yourself.

The PCB has withdrawn Shoaib Akhtar from the 15-man squad for next month’s World Twenty20, saying – in an unusually revealing statement – that he had been diagnosed with genital viral warts. Rao Iftikhar Anjum’s name has been sent to the ICC’s technical committee by the PCB as a replacement.

Shoaib’s participation had been in doubt after Intikhab Alam, Pakistan’s coach, said yesterday he hadn’t recovered sufficiently from a skin infection to play the three practice games the Pakistan squad is playing in Lahore.

“Shoaib Akhtar has been withdrawn from the World Twenty20 squad and Rao’s name has been sent to the ICC as a replacement,” a board spokesman said on Thursday.

The PCB’s unusually graphic press release said that a three-member medical panel appointed by the PCB had found that Shoaib was suffering from “genital viral warts and electrofulgration [a surgical procedure] was done on May 12, 2009.”

The panel added that “his wound though healing needs further care and treatment for another minimum ten days for the purpose of healing and to achieve skin cover. The Medical Board further recommended his re-assessment after 10 days.
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the science fiction genre in books and film have long written and shown about the possibilities of time travel and the scenarios that may or may not come with them.  they have nonsensical theories about how you could go murder your parents and be your own grandparents (i’m looking at you heinlein), or you could alter photographs and erase memories a la back to the future, or go see what your future holds in store for you, then go back in time and alter it to favour yourself and then get stuck in infinite time loops and paradoxes.

or not.

discover magazine gets into the nitty gritty of the actual facts behind it all and gets into what actually would be possible if and when we were able to travel back and forth in time. i’ll highlight a couple of points below, click on through to the article to read the rest of the descriptions.

0. There are no paradoxes.

This is the overarching rule, to which all other rules are subservient. It’s not a statement about physics; it’s simply a statement about logic. In the actual world, true paradoxes — events requiring decidable propositions to be simultaneously true and false — do not occur. Anything that looks like it would be a paradox if it happened indicates either that it won’t happen, or our understanding of the laws of nature is incomplete. Whatever laws of nature the builder of fictional worlds decides to abide by, they must not allow for true paradoxes.

1. Traveling into the future is easy.

We travel into the future all the time, at a fixed rate: one second per second. Stick around, you’ll be in the future soon enough. You can even get there faster than usual, by decreasing the amount of time you experience elapsing with respect to the rest of the world — either by low-tech ways like freezing yourself, or by taking advantage of the laws of special relativity and zipping around near the speed of light. (Remember we’re talking about what is possible according to the laws of physics here, not what is plausible or technologically feasible.) It’s coming back that’s hard.

2. Traveling into the past is hard — but maybe not impossible.

3. Traveling through time is like traveling through space.

4. Things that travel together, age together.

5. Black holes are not time machines.

6. If something happened, it happened.

7. There is no meta-time.

8. You can’t travel back to before the time machine was built.

9. Unless you go to a parallel universe.

10. And even then, your old universe is still there.

so drug testing in sport is fairly common now and getting stricter and stricter as years go by. so what do you think happened when a drug tester showed up at the belgian bodybuilding competition in brussells. all 20 of the participants ran off instead of peeing in a cup. can you imagine these giant men running off scared to pee in a cup. no shit sherlock, they didn’t get to be their size just by eating their greens and having their meat.

highlarious i say.

i think abbas referenced him today and it’s the first thing that came to mind so i used it as a title. anyway.

don’t you hate it when you gotta go in the middle of a movie for a break and there’s no way to pause and the second you get up and leave you miss a crucial scene.

well have no fear as runpee is here.

How not to save Detroit: Chrysler is in dire straits and hoping that Fiat will save the company. Join Hoofy and Boo as they watch two turkeys combine in an ill-conceived effort to make an eagle.

Sean Gourley is a physicist who wanted to know more about the Iraq war. He wanted to understand the war via the data — data about attacks, deaths, types of weapons used, locations, and so on. So he and his team started using publicly available data to chart the war and its effects. His conclusions about the nature of war are powerful: there is order in war; there is mathematical predictability in the way fighting forces work. The patterns that underly the Iraq conflict look the same across many conflicts. But what’s most interesting: you can use math to gauge the effectiveness of strategies (like the famous Surge) and chart the nature of a war over time.

Discussed: charting number of attacks versus size of attack (number killed), the pattern of war across the world, an equation to predict the likelihood of an attack in a given country, “so what,” the organizational structure of groups carrying out attacks (as a mathematically consistent value), why insurgencies work, and most interestingly: did the Surge work?

If you’re interesting in statistics or war, have a look:

Microsoft has announced that the forthcoming Windows 7 operating system will contain a number of piracy ‘tweaks’ it says are designed to protect the interests of customers. Under the new regime users will be expected to validate their software in a much more precise way than before. Other Microsoft operating systems and anti-piracy measures, including Windows Genuine Advantage, allowed users to delay ‘activation,’ but Windows 7 will make it harder to ignore repeated messages. According to Joe Williams, general manager for Worldwide Genuine Windows at Microsoft, counterfeit software ‘delivers a poor experience and impacts customer satisfaction with our products, particularly if users do not know that their software is non-genuine.’ Williams gave the example of one piracy exploit that caused more than a million reported system crashes on machines running non-genuine Windows Vista before Microsoft was able to resolve it.

here’s a group trying to compile a list of all the websites that accept the konami code.

i love it. apparrently facebook does too, but have no way to test that one.

More than 200 dancers were performing their version of “Do Re Mi”, in the Central Station of Antwerp. with just 2 rehearsals they created this stunt! Those 4 fantastic minutes started the 23 of march 2009, 08:00 AM. It is a promotion stunt for a Belgian television program, where they are looking for someone to play the leading role, in the musical of “The Sound of Music”.

Two physicists have published an academic paper where they demonstrate, by virtue of geometric progression, that vampires could not exist, since they would almost immediately deplete their entire food supply (a.k.a, all of us).

If you’ve ever read Salem’s Lot (or seen the lame Starsky and Hutch-era miniseries adaptation starring David Soul), then you know that after a vampire decides to settle in your town, the undead begin to multiply at an alarming rate (he bites two friends, who bite two friends, and so on, and so on…).

Putting aside for a moment the issue of how that would impact neighborhood property values, this phenomenon raises an even more pressing question: If vampires are indeed living (unliving?) among us, then shouldn’t we have seen an undead population explosion by now?

Fortunately, our best minds are on the case. Physicists Costas Efthimiou and Sohang Gandhi’s paper “Cinema Fiction vs. Physics Reality” offers a full explanation. (PDF opens in a new window)
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Efthimiou and Gandhi conduct a thought experiment: Assume that the first vampire appeared on January 1, 1600. At that time, according to data available at the U.S. Census website, the global population was 536,870,911. Efthimiou and Gandhi calculate that, once the Nosferatu feeding frenzy began, the entire human race would have been wiped out by June 1602 (thus forever changing the course of history by preventing the invention of the slide rule eighteen years later).

in honour of the new star trek flick coming out this week, thought i’d round up a list of star trek stuff. and since we all love lists, here’s a few that i like.

the top ten TNG episodes. and i really can’t argue with this list, it really is the top 10.

next up we got the top 10 trek characters.

and of course, the best trek inspired devices that are currently in use today.

oh and also top 10 trek technobabble scenes here.

what if i told you that you could have access to 95 old school games…and i’m not talking just pac-man and asteroids here. this is all about the classics.

burger-time, contra, mario bros (before they were super),  qix, 1942, tapper, zaxxon, pole position…they’re all here.

check it out.