Brain Drippings

No, not the crappy, but kinda fun, TV series, but the first potentially Earth-like planet has been discovered a mere 120 trillion miles (20.5 light years) away.

Now, as we all know, my Maserati Does 185, so if I hopped in right now, it would take a mere ~74,000,000 years or so to get there. At a million miles an hour, we’re still talking about ~14,000 years. Even at 5% the speed of light, we’re looking at ~400 years to get there.

Where’s a handy wormhole when you need one?

Exit, pursued by a bear.

The great american novelist Kurt Vonnegut has died.  Eighty-four years wasn’t long enough.

Well, a Halle Berry movie may win another one of those coveted March awards. No, not the Oscars, the Razzies. To be fair, her performance is not bad, and Bruce WIllis is quite good; to bad the movie is complete crap. No, seriously, it’s bad. So bad I was shocked to see it was shorter than the four solid hours it felt like. Heck, it was less than two hours, but I am half-convinced that involved some sort of time-flux, perhaps with a McFly and a Delorean. It couldn’t have been that short. I’ve had more entertaining days getting my teeth cleaned.

The movie shows some promise at first, but quickly falls into a spiral over ever escalating stupidity. It could have also sorta redemed itself at the very end with a somewhat interesting twist, but even that is ruined with the final shot of the movie where the entire audience simply groaned. Whether this was at the stupidity on screen or the cumulative pain of the previous 109 minutes is not clear.

Last year I talked about the possibility of the US dropping the 1$ bill. Now the US is minting new dollar coins featuring the US Presidents, in order (Wonder if Cleveland gets two coins? :). They are the same size and weight as the Susan B Anthony and the Sacagawea coins, and the same color as the latter coins. We are promised 4 coins a year until, presumably, we run out of dead Presidents. The next President will be #44, so we will be done in 11 years for sure, and possibly 10 depending on how long Bush Sr and Clinton and ButtHead survive (You have to have been dead 2 years to be featured on a coin or stamp in the US).

The trouble is, until the supply of 1$ bills is curtailed, the coins will always be also-rans. I still stand by my idea of simply stopping production of the bills and to also mint a new 2$ coin. After all, a dollar now is worth about what a dime was when my father was a kid, so it seems silly to have that be a bill.

Well, someone has managed to get the TV (Apple TV) to boot OS X without cracking the case. Sweet! This will be my next hardware purchase to replace the aging TiVo in the bedroom.

There’s a video on Google Video showing Tom Lehrer performing some of his math songs in 1997.