Friday, December 19, 2008

Figures

My first day off in weeks, and I'm stuck patrolling the house. A police helicopter has been circling our neighborhood for the last 20 minutes -- it gets so close to the house that it makes the floors shake. Nobody's answering the phone at the local police station, so presumably everyone in the neighborhood wants to know what's going on. Meanwhile, I've got the Mossberg 500 loaded and I'm good to go.

Update: Chopper gone, crisis averted. Now I can go finish my Christmas shopping.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Techno Viking

A techno Viking muscleman spazzing out to the beat in the streets of Berlin at the annual F*ckparade just makes my day. The original video featured a monotonous techno-beat, the kind that is supposed to be irresistible if you're hepped up on goofballs (as this guy apparently is), but the Michael Jackson version is infinitely better



I like the bit of drama at the beginning. Who says chivalry is dead?

Monday, December 15, 2008

Quote of the Day

From Ebert's review of The Day the U.S. Failed to Elect Al Gore

Keanu Reeves is often low-key in his roles, but in this movie, his piano has no keys at all. He is so solemn, detached and uninvolved he makes Mr. Spock look like Hunter S. Thompson at closing time.

Friday, December 12, 2008

Bison Armory

Bison Armory is go! As a wholly owned subsidiary of Fudge Enterprises, Bison Armory will be selling AR-15 barrels in 6.8 SPC. This is a little side venture on my part in order to fill the gap left by Tim Hicks at Ko-Tonics/Cardinal Armory since he went out of business.

These barrels are made by E.R. Shaw, the same company that made Tim's barrels, and they will be made to the same specs. We're going to benefit from Tim's effort, and I'm passing the savings on to the customers. This will be more of a hobby business for me, and as such, prices will be substantially lower than if I was doing this full time. Furthermore, we will not be taking credit cards any time soon. Payment will have to be by check or money order.

The good news: we're taking pre-orders for barrels! No payment necessary until E.R. Shaw starts to make them, which won't be until spring 2009.

More info is posted at our new blogger site: Bison Armory.

Me so smart




There Are 0 Gaps in Your Knowledge



Where you have gaps in your knowledge:

No Gaps!

Where you don't have gaps in your knowledge:

Philosophy
Religion
Economics
Literature
History
Science
Art


Monday, December 08, 2008

Cheaters

A couple of my students are about to learn the hard way that cheaters never prosper. Or at least not when they are so unclever as to announce their duplicity to the professor by committing one or more of the following careless blunders on a term paper. (N.B. These are problems for the casual plagiarizer who only wants to borrow select phrases from another source, not for the serious plagiarizer who plans to copy/download/buy entire papers.)

1. Sudden changes in tone. If you are interspersing your prose with text copied directly from another source, massage the wording of the copied text until it blends with your writing style and conforms to an appropriate level of mastery on the subject. This makes it more difficult for your professor to Google suspicious phrases.

Here is an example of what not to do:

There are many huge and awesome applications for astronomy in the real world. It is extremely important that we find out ways to show these amazing ideas to the general public who don't know very much about what kind of stuff is out there. One example is the charge-coupled device, or CCD, which is an analog shift register, that enables the transportation of analog signals (electric charges) through successive stages (capacitors) controlled by a clock signal. Charge-coupled devices can be used as a form of memory or for delaying samples of analog signals. Today, they are most widely used in arrays of photoelectric light sensors, to serialize parallel analog signals.
Unfortunately, in order to properly massage the borrowed passage (copied from the Wikipedia entry on CCDs, by the way), you would have to make an attempt to understand it, and you are either too lazy or too pressed for time because you waited until the last minute to write your paper.

2. Sudden changes in font. Your professor is reading a passage of your paper and notices that the font changes mid-sentence from black size-10 Times New Roman to grey size-12 Arial. This is likely to arouse suspicion, and could lead to Googling of the phrases that stand out.

Example:
There are many huge and awesome applications for astronomy in the real world. It is extremely important that we find out ways to show these amazing ideas to the general public. One example is the charge-coupled device, or CCD, which is an analog shift register, that enables the transportation of analog signals (electric charges) through successive stages (capacitors) controlled by a clock signal. Charge-coupled devices can be used as a form of memory or for delaying samples of analog signals. Today, they are most widely used in arrays of photoelectric light sensors, to serialize parallel analog signals.
Busted.

This is not a problem if you learn to use a markup language like LaTeX. For Word users, here's a tip: Use ctrl-a (or command-a on a Mac) to select all of the text, and change it to one style, one size, one color.

3. Awkward paragraph structure. Sentences that fail to wrap properly onto the next line constitute obvious signs of copy-and-paste. Take the time to proofread your plagiarized work to ensure that the paragraphs look like you typed them yourself.

Example:

There are many huge and awesome applications for astronomy in the real world. It is extremely important that we find out ways to show these amazing ideas to the general public. One example is the charge-coupled device, or CCD, which is an analog shift
register, that enables the transportation of analog signals (electric charges)through successive
stages (capacitors) controlled by a clock signal. Charge-coupled devices can be used as a form of
memory or for delaying samples of analog signals. Today, they are most widely used in arrays
of photoelectric light sensors, to serialize parallel analog signals.
High Google probability, especially if you have been so careless as to commit either (or both) of the first two blunders.

Tip: Leave more than five minutes prior to the deadline to glance over all the pages and make sure nothing stands out.

Of course the simplest way to avoid the pitfalls of cheating is not to cheat. You will feel much better about yourself, too.