Mitt Romney is still the man.

Here's an op-ed by Mitt Romney where he makes great sense on how to fix the American auto industry. He should know, he practically grew up in that industry. Here's hoping for 2012!

Annoyance with Billy Mays

This blog post is more audio than text. I'm kind of surprised my voice came out sounding as southern as it did. I really had to work to tone the southern twang down during the parody part.

Enjoy:

If the above embed fails for you, click the button below.

Bones (the TV show)

So the TV show Bones has been a pretty decent one with interesting side stories. But it has come to a point where I have to say no more. The same as I did with Prison Break (it was getting psychotically disturbing). Anyway, why am I discontinuing my on-and-off again viewing of the show Bones? It is because they are trying to make a statement about the acceptance of homosexuality. And, yes, I do not accept homosexuality as an acceptable behavior. This is really unfortunate, I did enjoy the show. I can only remember a few of the advertisers during the show. One is Dairy Queen. I sent them an e-mail which is quoted below. I used this contact page to send the e-mail.

To the VP Marketing Communications:
Today I noted that you are advertising during a show, which up until this point, I enjoyed. Today, however, the show, "Bones", introduced a topic that I find highly offensive and "in-your-face". Especially in light of current political circumstances. I will no longer be watching the show Bones and would suggest you spend your advertising dollars elsewhere.
- a regular Dairy Queen customer,
Jeff Gosnell

WALL-E

So, we were one of the lucky ones (I guess) and received Wall*E from Netflix today. It is a pretty cool movie. Sure there were "save the planet" undertones, but that was just the backdrop to the story. More on that in a moment (I'll save a rant for the end.)

In any case, the movie is really good artistically, but fantastic for sound. I wouldn't say perfect, but an entire course on sound effects in a movie. I wish I could manipulate sound as well as I can colors. Although, I'm not that good at manipulating colors either. Anyway, I wanted to do a side by side comparison of a couple of screenshots. What it is showing is how light is calculated on EVE's shell. You can see the bottom of her shell, with the ambient light, you can see reflections and the shell looks polished. But when EVE receives direct light, as "she" is from the top, it is very refractive and the shell doesn't look as "polished".

Well, shoot, I can't get a screenshot and I'm too tired to try anything else. But suffice it to say, Pixar does not leave out the details... anywhere. How rubble bounces away from other objects. How the tracks on Wall-E move over different objects. It really is cool (and more math than I really care to think about...)

Rant time.
Okay, as I saw the "future" planet with all the junk piled on junk, the very first thing I thought of was, "Wow! Look at all that metal!" Basically, recycling. We have a lot of junk on our planet thrown here and there. Fortunately, a lot of the junk in our landfills are recyclable. Unfortunately, it is kind of expensive to break down the components. But it can be done. Paper, plastic, metals. Some of the things we have problems with are hybrids. A lot of new cars use paneling that is not very recyclable. But it can be, if a company is willing to make the expense.

Having said all of that, don't mistake me as part of the "Green" movement. I'm of the opinion that "sure, the Earth is getting warmer, but that's what it's supposed to do." Humans may be contribute some to the atmosphere, but the belching volcanos, gassy Siberian tundra, and the many cows on the planet do more than humans. The problem with the Save-the-Planet people is that they are greedy. It really is all about the money. When the recycle centers charge you for dropping off recyclables and then turn around and charge the company they sell the recycled material, this is a dead end road of moneyflow. A lot of people would recycle if the recycle centers would pay us for our supply to them as they charge and supply the manufacturers. The world would get cleaner. And places like Haiti, India, and other dumping grounds in the world could get both rich and clean.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2008/jun/10/eyewitness?picture=334634838

slow times

Well, it seems the blogging scene has been slow the past week or so. Paul and Andrea haven't updated since they moved to Utah (I'm waiting to hear how the trip went.) Brian and Amber haven't updated since they started. In my past two posts, I've only had 1 comment each (which is not surprising to me.) But what is surprising is that Noelle has only had 1 comment in her last post (and that was from me!)

Well, anyway, I suppose some of Noelle's next posts will have a lot of comments. At least one of them will. Stay tuned, it will be pretty cool.

We have explosives

How I love a good explosion. Even better when it is a controlled explosion and no one gets hurt. I just learned about BLEVEs from the show "Destroyed In Seconds", though the term has been around a while.

Here is a train explosion:


I was going to embed this next video, but it has foul language (military grunts). So here's a link to insurgent weapons being destroyed. Pretty cool, the video is approximately 2.5 miles from the explosion (count seconds between light and sound, divide by 5 = # of miles.)

Here's another good explosion:


Do a search on youtube for "Bleve Explosion", you'll get a lot of good ones.