Deans to Students: Stop drinking illegally, start drinking legally

A bunch of college presidents in the US have put together a statement calling for lawmakers to lower the drinking age from 21 to 18. Their rationale is that if it's not illegal, students will feel less compelled to drink a ton of booze at once (i.e. the "predrink"), opting instead to drink a ton of booze spaced out over a whole night (i.e. the "Thursday").

A drinking age of 21 is pretty ridiculous when you look at it in the context of other global drinking ages. But hey, at least the United States has some powerful, influential allies in the "no alcohol until 21" club: Paraguay, Indonesia, Pakistan, India (but even then only in certain states), Oman, the UAE, the Ukraine, the Northern Marianas, Fiji and Kiribati.

Superfluism - A semi-annual review

I just took a look at my blogging output for the last few months, and I think some definite conclusions can be drawn concerning my procrastination habits.

You Oughta Know, Dave

I just heard this interesting tidbit last week and thought I'd pass it on. Alanis Morissette's 1995 hit "You Oughta Know", a pretty harsh appraisal of an old boyfriend of hers, is about none other than Dave Coulier, best known for co-starring with Arleen Sorkin (and later Tawny Kitaen) on the immortal classic "America's Funniest People" (also he was in Full House or something).

It's true! Maybe.

Bonus trivia! Tawny Kitaen was also the girl in Whitesnake's video for Here I Go Again, which is so awesome I have added it here for your daily fix of "girl-doing-cartwheels-on-expensive-cars-while-guys-with-perms-stare-intently-into-the-camera". You know you want it.

More on Georgia

This is almost too sad/hilarious to be true.

Almost.

The McDonald Offensive

Fun fact: the Russia-Georgia conflict is the first war ever started between two countries who both have McDonald's franchises.

Why does that matter, aside from being an interesting bit of trivia? In his book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman observed that no two countries with McDonald's restaurants had ever entered into armed conflict (at the time of publication in 1999). He cited this as proof of the pacifying effect of globalization. His underlying reasoning was that countries with heavily interlinked economies will not go to war with each other for fear of disrupting mutually beneficial trade links. Unfortunately, Russia didn't get the memo, and no amount of McRibs was able to keep Russian tanks from rolling into South Ossetia.

Untriennium

Here's an interesting bit of obscure, theoretical atomic physics trivia for you: there's a cap on the number of possible elements that can ever exist, according to our current understanding of physics, and the highest element theoretically possible is element 139, untriennium.

It seems like scientists just keep smashing stuff together at higher and higher speeds, and discovering higher and higher numbered elements. Heck, we've already observed Ununoctium (that'd be element number 118), why not just keep going forever?

It turns out that the speed of an electron orbiting an atomic nucleus is proportional to the number of other electrons orbiting the nucleus (that's a gross simplification, but bear with me, I'm an engineer... it's what we do when reality is annoyingly complicated). It also turns out that as soon as you get more than, say, 137 electrons in orbit, things start to go wonky. Bohr's classical model of the atom says that the speed required of any atom after the 137th would have to be faster than the speed of light, which a lot of fairly smart physicists are convinced is impossible. If you refine the model a bit and take the effects of relativity into account, you can actually squeeze a 138th and 139th electron in there, but no elements beyond number 139 are allowed without breaking physics.

Neat!

Little Miss Count Along

I don't know how I made it so far in life without knowing about this.



Ok, so the Spin Doctors were on Sesame Street, teaching people about the value of sharing, you may say. Big deal. But would you be so callous if you knew their music made it on to Sesame Street again, this time being covered by The Count? Exactly. Behold the greatness of Little Miss Count Along.