alex mizell -- 49% sacred, 51% profane

11:39: Road trip!

Today I’m driving to North Carolina for this weekend’s Transformus burn 2009.  I am bringing Da Boom and my portable nightclub.  We dance, we laugh, we live, we BURN.  It shall be magnificent.

Here’s some pics I took last year:

Woohoo!  See ya on the flip side!

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18:25:

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13:21: Pea shooter traditionalists decry use of laser sights at annual competition

The Telegraph UK reports on the World Peashooting Championship where George, the 58-year-old reigning champion, used a high tech pea shooter to win again this year, much to the consternation of traditionalists, who use a simple straw.

George’s home-designed device featured a gyroscopic balancing mechanism, a hyper-accurate laser sight, and what he described as “other bits” borrowed from his son’s Nintendo.

The result is a fearsome piece of kit that has helped him to three world championships.

Contestants have to hit a calibrated target, fashioned out of putty, from a distance of 12 yards.

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Pea shooters fight it out for world championships

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11:13: Makes a great blog post!

Come have a steak and a tall boy while you play bingo for awesome prizes! Music by the kaleidoscopic DJ Alex Mizell, hosted by Elvis and Elvis Inc, sponsored by Pabst Brewing. There is no cover charge to play bingo – just bring yourself, your thirst and your best fun-loving friends and get on down to the Brewhouse uh huh thankyouverymuch.

crosspost from Alex Mizell Blog

10:37: Unruly Teen Charges $23 Quadrillion At Drugstore [Spendy]

Kids these days! Hawkins writes, “My lectures about financial responsibility appear to have failed: yesterday [my teenaged daughter] charged $23,148,855,308,184,500.00 at the drug store.” You would think Visa would have caught the error and addressed it, if you were high. What Visa actually did was slap a $20 “negative balance” fee on it, of course.

The embarrassingly-named VISA BUXX card is a debit card for teenagers: parents get reports, control, etc. My daughter has one.

My lectures about financial responsibility appear to have failed: yesterday she charged $23,148,855,308,184,500.00 at the drug store. That’s 2,000 times more than the national debt, which is a paltry 11 trillion.

The ever-vigilant folks at VISA added a $20 “negative balance fee,” and have suspended the card.

When I called, they said that there was a “system problem,” and that the “help desk was working on it.”

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Note: Some readers have speculated that the number is the credit card number, but the OP says in the comments that it’s not:

Wow, I didn’t think of that before I submitted this story to Consumerist. Wouldn’t that be ironic cosmic retribution? Jerky consumer puts VISA’s honest programming mistake on display for the world to make snarky sarcastic comments about… but then it turns out that he’s just posted the debit card number!

Happily, this is not the case. Please carry on with the caustic commentary.

In that same thread, another commenter named mlcastle points out the series of digits fails the Luhn check, a simple checksum formula invented in the 1950s, and so cannot be a valid credit card number.

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Update 2: Hawkins posted a follow up on page 3 of the comments:

I have an update, if anybody’s interested.

The issue was with VISA, not with CVS. Apparently lots of VISA debit card users were affected by it, at several different merchants. Each victim was charged exactly $23,148,855,308,184,500.00.

The folks at VISA have removed the 23-Grillion dollar charge, but not the $20 negative-balance fee. They promise to do so “as soon as this is all sorted out.”

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02:26: Bookmarks for July 14th from 02:21 to 02:21
(from Alex Mizell Blog)

These are my links for July 14th from 02:21 to 02:21:

• Hundreds of free animations, animated gifs animals people most subjects – This reminds me of collecting glitter stickers in folders when I was about 7 or 8…

00:00: Bookmarks for July 13th from 00:12 to 10:59
(from Alex Mizell Blog)

These are my links for July 13th from 00:12 to 10:59:

• Bluehost.com – My favorite host service.
• Pipes: Rewire the web – Mix and mash RSS feeds in a beautiful AJAX gui.

17:00: Yes, Sir, this Is War!
(from Alex Mizell Blog)

Microsoft Office 2010 – for free, on the web. Yeah, you heard me right.
"The company also announced that Office Web applications will be available in three ways: through Windows Live, where more than 400 million consumers will have access to Office Web applications at no cost; on-premises for all Office volume licensing customers including more than 90 million Office annuity customers; and via Microsoft Online Services, where customers will be able to purchase a subscription as part of a hosted offering."

Not to be outdone by Google, who recently announced it was trying to take a bite out of Windows not to mention Office, Microsoft has decided to offer a web version of Office 2010 for free – and it will even support non-IE browsers.

02:00: Hello Kitty Taser Gun
(from Alex Mizell Blog)

Because nothing shows the true cuteness and sweet side of Hello Kitty – and the love and happiness she brings to all – as 50,000 volts of electricity streaming through your body. Hello Kitty Taser Gun.

(via Everlasting Blort)

08:56: Wandering minds are active minds
(from Alex Mizell Blog)

UCSB brain researcher Jonathan Schooler has an intriguing theory about why our minds wander:

The regions of the brain that become active during mind wandering belong to two important networks. One is known as the executive control system. Located mainly in the front of the brain, these regions exert a top-down influence on our conscious and unconscious thought, directing the brain’s activity toward important goals. The other regions belong to another network called the default network. In 2001 a group led by neuroscientist Marcus Raichle at Washington University discovered that this network was more active when people were simply sitting idly in a brain scanner than when they were asked to perform a particular task. The default network also becomes active during certain kinds of self-referential thinking, such as reflecting on personal experiences or picturing yourself in the future.

The fact that both of these important brain networks become active together suggests that mind wandering is not useless mental static. Instead, Schooler proposes, mind wandering allows us to work through some important thinking. Our brains process information to reach goals, but some of those goals are immediate while others are distant. Somehow we have evolved a way to switch between handling the here and now and contemplating long-term objectives. It may be no coincidence that most of the thoughts that people have during mind wandering have to do with the future.

The Brain Stop Paying Attention: Zoning Out Is a Crucial Mental State

(via Kottke)

09:18: ...interprets regulation as damage and routes around it...
French hackers claim to have sabotaged Internet forensics by creating a firmware for routers that cracks nearby WiFi networks and routes your traffic through them at random, creating false trails leading to your neighbors instead of you. They're calling it the HADOPI Router, in honor of Nicolas Sarkozy's crazy Internet law of the same name.
(via boingboing)

Speaking of hackers, I'm really digging on the google logo today in honor of Nikola Tesla:

10:37: Personal Brain 5 free download

15:29:

(from here via jwz click to embiggen)

22:14: People's ideas of time differ across languages in other ways. For example, English speakers tend to talk about time using horizontal spatial metaphors (e.g., "The best is ahead of us," "The worst is behind us"), whereas Mandarin speakers have a vertical metaphor for time (e.g., the next month is the "down month" and the last month is the "up month"). Mandarin speakers talk about time vertically more often than English speakers do, so do Mandarin speakers think about time vertically more often than English speakers do? Imagine this simple experiment. I stand next to you, point to a spot in space directly in front of you, and tell you, "This spot, here, is today. Where would you put yesterday? And where would you put tomorrow?" When English speakers are asked to do this, they nearly always point horizontally. But Mandarin speakers often point vertically, about seven or eight times more often than do English speakers.

21:34: Asynchronous and infinitely extensible

18:27: The default network is a network of brain regions that are active when the individual is not focused on the outside world and the brain is at wakeful rest.

12:47:
( ...cat-like reflexes... )

12:20: Grover's Algorithm

12:20:
overheard on /.

I took a class on Quantum computing, and studied many specific QC algorithms, so I know a little bit about them. A lot of misunderstandings about them, so let me summarize.

Quantum Computers are not super-computers. On a bit-for-bit (or qubit-for-qubit) scale, they're not necessarily faster than regular computers, they just process info differently. Since information is stored in a quantum "superposition" of states, as opposed to a deterministic state like regular computers, the qubits exhibit quantum interference around other qubits. Typically, your bit starts in 50% '0' and 50% '1', and thus when you measure it, you get a 50% chance of it being one or the other (and then it assumes that state). But if you don't measure, and push it through quantum circuits allowing them to interact with other qubits, you get the quantum phases to interfere and cancel out. If you are damned smart (as I realized you have to be, to design QC algorithms), you can figure out creative ways to encode your problem into qubits, and use the interference to cancel out the information you don't want, and leave the information you do want.

( Read more... )

18:30: SMC 06.14.09 Setlisting
Thanks astounded for transcribing the setlist! The players: Jason, Jenn, Liz, Stuart, Parks, Jenny, Ian, Millie, Morgan, Genene, Justin, Aimee, Dunkin' Donuts, Rob, Alex*

Rocky Road
1. Bone Thugs 'N' Harmony - Tha Crossroads
2. Underworld - Ring Road
3. The Shop Boyz - Party Like A Rockstar
4. Portishead - Roads
5. Blur - To The End
6. Pernice Brothers - PCH One
7. Golden Earring - Radar Love
8. Roger Miller - King Of The Road
9. Missy Elliott - Slide
10. Handsome Boy Modeling School - Rock And Roll (Could Never Hip-Hop Like This)
11. Tay Zonday - Chocolate Rain
12. America - Horse With No Name
13. Maynard Ferguson - Gonna Fly Now
14. Weird Al Yankovic - I Love Rocky Road
15. Anthony B - Rocky Road

( ...try another spoon... )