How does a blender work?

"How does a blender work?" is the thinly-constructed "motivation" for another lovely application of high-speed video cameras. If we ask a question, then setting things on fire is science!

Slow motion: bullets through candy

The Discovery Channel video podcast is sometimes so cool. They can afford the nice, expensive cameras to shoot this:


I am impressed that the sharpshooter can hit a candy that is smaller than the bullet.

Dollhouse finale

Let me get this right: you have the technology to simultaneously reset the brains of everyone on the planet, but it must be triggered manually? What about remote controls? Timers? A long piece of wire?

Oh, well. That's over. Please, Joss Whedon, do something better now.

P.S. I'm watching TV because I'm sick.

They are but pawns

There's simply too much political optimism lately. How about a reality-based perspective?
Alternatively, this would be a rockin' episode of Doctor Who.

We detest Olympic commentators

It seems that they are employed to be logorrheic, often abhorrently so. At least, we of the axis believe so. (This post is authored by fontesefontes++, i.e., "axis".)

Men's all-around gymnasts are like Chinese pandas: they're extremely rare, and decreasing in number.

... and we establish breeding programs for them!

If there's one thing that's important in Japan, it's honor.

Also, rice. Let's not forget any stereotypes!

A fantastic Olympics quote

TV commentator on the US girl's gymnastics team: "It must be like Waiting for Godot for those girls waiting up there."

... No, no it's not. The only similarity is the title.

The Smallest Integer

A quick summary of The Incredible Hulk:

You wouldn't like me when I'm... hungry. Don't make me hungry... Do you remember when we were at Harvard and we participated in those induced hallucination experiments? It was like that, only a thousand times more intense... I want to get rid of it, not control it... They want to make it a weapon... You don't understand, something very bad is going to happen... If I am off by even the smallest integer, this could go drastically wrong...

Things that can happen if you are off by even the smallest integer:

1. Nothing. By absolute value, zero is the smallest integer. Additive identities have a habit of not doing much... under addition!
2. Immediate death. It just sometimes happens. A doctor said so. Reference.
3. Partial credit.
4. Off-by-one errors. (If you are not convinced that zero is smaller than one.)
5. Wouldn't 'The Smallest Integer' be a great name for a rock band?
6. Bad dialogue (cf. 2, above).
7. One is the loneliest number that you ever knew...
8. The other integers feel slighted. You won't get invited to their parties any more. Good job. Working in unary sucks, doesn't it?

Thus begins the storm!

Visiting home is the only situation where I am exposed to television. On this visit, I haven't actually watched any television, but it has been a frequent conversational topic. M. mentioned the show Jon and Kate Plus 8, whose stars are a family with eight children from only two pregnancies (twins, then sextuplets). Nevermind the fiddly details or our ridiculous conversation. The take-away message was this: it would be improved if, each week or month, they all voted one kid off the show.

Please?

This post begins the fontesefontes co-vacation. Expect more!