A few weeks ago I came across an evil ice cream truck ( Read more... )

So a week ago today, I went under the knife. I went in for a follow up today and they took a panoramic x-ray where I could see exactly what they did ( Read more... )

So the delightful culture of the suicide club is on the rise in Japan.
Here's the executive summary: It's easier to off yourself in a group than alone (a not entirely surprising quirk of mob/group psychology) and some unusually motivated depressed people have leveraged the Internet to make exploiting this loophole in human survival instinct a ( Read more... )

So this weekend I played in the Central Florida Chess Club Championship. When I entered I thought it was going to be sectional, meaning I'd be able to play people who have the same rating as me. That'd be awesome, because at 1288 I'm way under-rated and with all the work I've been doing I expected to have an excellent shot at winning ( Read more... )

Ganked from Xenophile:

TALLMANSVILLE, West Virginia (AP) -- Some of the 12 coal miners who died in the Sago Mine disaster scrawled farewell notes assuring their loved ones that their final hours trapped underground were not spent in agony.

"Tell all I'll see them on the other side ( Read more... )

Once in awhile someone asks me about the possibility of computers completely "solving" chess - coming up with a perfect opening that accounts for all possible moves and leads to a win no matter what the other side plays - possibly using a technique like massive distributed parallel processing (SETI@home style ( Read more... )

I've got a lot to post about, but in the meantime... Some fool in Ohio created a ridiculously elaborate Christmas light set up, and then somehow programmed it to perform, for lack of a word that describes a house blinking frantically, along with Trans Siberian Orchestra's "Wizards of Winter ( Read more... )

Saturday night was my bachelor party ( Read more... )

In this article from The Guardian, they talk about how a cardinal recently affirmed the celibacy rule for Catholic priests ( Read more... )

I'm reading entirely too many books:

The Soul of the SwordThis is a anthropological history of weapons and war. It starts with pre-homo sapiens and goes from there. The really early stuff, which I take to be the guesswork of various great minds, I've heard at least bits and pieces of previously. Did you know that they think we pushed the ( Read more... )