I was trying not to let Chuckles recent WRN posts shame me into posting but sadly they have finally done so. I’ve been meaning to post for a while but then never really doing it. Mostly out of boredom, my life hasn’t been too exciting lately and I can only spend so long boring the internet before finally giving up.

Just a quick run down of things that are pretty enjoyable right now:

• Fall Weather - I was sick of all that summer stuff
• Everyday is another shooter - this PS3 game is pretty cool little shooter that has a nice lo-fi feel
• On-Demand movies - Ricochet, Idle Hands, and Futureworld
• Capital Amber - Replaced Spotted Cow as my beer of choice

Things I’d like to do for a bit:

• Not have to work. Seriously, I just want to spend a month sitting around doing nothing.
• Orange Box - PS3 version doesn’t come out until Dec. 17 and I don’t want to buy it for 360
• GH3/Rock Band - How tough will it be to ‘play’ guitar and sing the part on Rock Band?
• See a decent movie - Fido and Planet Terror on DVD and Amercian Gangster at the theater

Anyway, we’ll start small and work our way back up to a real post.

P.S. I also have no idea what happened to those posts from July/Aug/Sep/Oct. Blogoblin got them I suppose.

While I won’t have a chance to do much exciting this weekend (I’ll be spending most of my weekend engaged in out of town wedding festivities) I thought it might be a good chance to finally put up a post about the day trip I did last month to look for amphibians.

Many people may not know this but the mid-Atlantic region has the highest salamander diversity on the planet. Spring and early fall are supposedly the best times to try to locate these little guys, so around easter, my gf and I headed down to Prince William Forest Park (even though the Virginia vernal pools are supposed to be better, I don’t own any waders and I didn’t really want to hang out in a swamp anyway) to see if we could find any.

After some trouble getting there (Google maps is the new MapQuest–the bad directions combined with stupid Interstate 95 traffic managed to make a 35-40 minute drive closer to an hour and a half) we eventually hit the park and started looking for salamanders.

While the general time of year was right, the conditions were not ideal. It had been fairly try for the past week or two and salamanders prefer foggy and damp conditions. Still, we heldout hope that we would at least find a couple in the many little creeks and streams in the park.

Basically the way looking for salamanders works is, you find a creek or stream and then turn rocks over. Sometimes there is a salamander there. More often you find bugs.

We did get lucky though and found four or five salamanders.

In all, it was a pretty fun outing. It’s certainly better than just randomly hiking around. Goal oriented nature works for me. If you’re looking for a good way to spend a weekend you should definitely consider catch and release salamander hunting.

A few more salamander pictures in the full post.

(more…)

Here at WRN, we embrace the world around us and celebrate its awesomeness. As you can see from the post yesterday, there are lots of positive things about being a WOMAN. Especially if you go into engineering.

I know the question that you women readers are asking, “But if I’m an engineer, will I still be able to buy things that are pointlessly colored pink to try to appeal to me?” The answer of course is yes.

Don’t worry, just because you’re not actively discriminated against on internet career advocation sites doesn’t mean that there isn’t still that pervading sense that as a woman you somehow don’t need special things labeled ‘For Her’ and with nice pastel packaging with flowers on it.

With that said, I present to you the latest revolution in foot care needs: Corn Cushions For Her.

“But men and women’s feet are about the same. The only difference is in actual foot size, which wouldn’t have anything to do with a corn,” you say. You would be wrong. There is a world of difference that you are apparently not realizing.

Don’t worry though, Dr. Scholl’s has you covered. Now you can finally have a corn cushion that was designed with the special lady parts on your feet in mind. Also, available in a nice lavender color to blend in with your purplish-tinted skin!

I was honestly hoping I would get to bed early this evening but I guess it wasn’t meant to be. Spartacus came today and I attempted to watch it but 1.5 hours in, it’s starting to drag. I’ve been watching the scenes with people walking places at time and half speed so that I can hopefully make it through this 3+ hour movie in maybe 2.5. Anyway, I got bored of that so now I’m going to try to do this post.

While surfing the internet today, I came across this awesome site for convincing young women to consider the wonderful career opportunities available in the wild world of engineering. Naturally a site like this has a youthful energetic name to appeal to the right crowd: EngineerGirl.org.

From the first page, you can tell this is going to be a helpful site. I mean, with it’s generic and rather poor layout and use of a font with curly cues, how could it fail?

Well, some ways it might would be by having 2 of 11 possible items on the left menu link to pages that crash (on their own site). Well, I’m sure they’re not important sections. I mean, how import Women Engineers section anyway? The other link that doesn’t work, the probably less useful Search this Site link.

Don’t let the fact that the section that should have lists and examples of women in engineering doesn’t exist dissuade you though. They also have a Fun Facts section that may inspire you to become an engineer.

The Fun Facts page consists of a list of fun facts and brief descriptions of those fun facts. Clicking on the short descriptions will take you to a more detailed (yet not necessarily more useful) explanation.

Some examples include:

Taum Sauk Hydroelectric Storage Plant
The Taum Sauk Hydroelectric Storage Plant in Missouri was one of the largest stand-alone pumped storage plants before disaster struck.

Wow, what a great thing, this amazing feat of engineering was awesome … UNTIL DISASTER STRUCK. Then, yeah, we don’t talk about what happened afterwards.

Tacoma Narrows Bridge
Engineers learned a great deal when wind collapsed the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

Note to future engineers, it’s not that big of a deal if your stuff collapses, as long as you learn a great deal from it.

Presidential Engineers
Two U.S. Presidents had engineering backgrounds.

Hey, future women engineers, 2 out of 43 presidents (4.7%) have engineering backgrounds. Those two presidents, Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter, are often considered the most sucessful in US history. Also ignore the fact that 24 out of the 43 presidents have been lawyers and that 0 women have currently been presidents.

Draper Prize
The Draper Prize is the highest award given to specifically engineers.

Don’t worry future engineers, good english isn’t a necessity (even if you’re a specifically engineer). Trust me, I know!

There are also a number of great and environmentally friendly examples of engineering like:

The Trans-Alaskan Oil Pipeline - According to the fun fact, it “took $8 billion and two years to build.” [emphasis added] Can you imagine that, over 2 years to build something. I can’t imagine any other construction project that would take that long. Especially not something that cost, you know, 8 billion dollars.

Big Brutus - Apparently a giant electric shovel that is a marvel of engineering. It allowed strip mining at a rate of up to .22 miles per hour. Sadly, “in 1974, Big Brutus had to be shut down because its cost of operation was twice that of the value of coal it recovered.” Ahhh, another example of succesful engineering.

Berkley Pit - This was the largest truck operated open pit copper mine until it shut down in the 1980’s. Now, thanks to great engineering and the shutting down of the pumps that kept it dry, “water began entering the pit … creating a toxic lake.” Luckily engineers also get to try to solve the problems they create so, “Environmental engineers are now working to protect the public and to find some way to treat the water before it gets into the groundwater supply.” Hooray for potential groundwater contamination!

Seriously, this entire site is comedy gold (for further example see Squirrel Cage Jail and Menehune Ditch). I highly recommend it.

I spotted this travesty:

And when I find a woman like this, I just may be run over by a bus:

Could Be the Year He Moves Out of His Parents’ Basement

Clerk: You know, the adult videos are ‘Buy two, get a third free.’
Best girlfriend evar: Really? Honey, go get that one we were looking at.
Boyfriend: What, the one with the two blondes on the cover?
BGE: No, no — the pirates one.
Boyfriend: Okay, be right back.
BGE, as soon as he’s out of earshot: Quick, while he’s gone can you box up that Spiderman statue behind you, too?

Another one that is funny for reasons beyond Science.

A couple months ago, I saw a link to photos of an exhibit entitled Animatus for a Korean artist named Hyungkoo Lee at the ARARIO GALLERY and I meant to post about it then, I just never got around to it. Today I was cleaning up some bookmarks and saw it again so I thought I’d actually put something up.

What’s interesting is that the exhibit consists entirely of skeletons for famous cartoon characters. The artist uses resin, aluminum sticks, stainless steel wires, springs and oil paint to simulate the bones of the various characters.

It’s really cool how he captures the exaggerated features and shapes of some of the most notable characters. The Latin names shown below the images (on the page) are useful for figuring out which character it is supposed to be (if it isn’t obvious). The fact that most of the page is in Korean will mean you’re kind of on your own for other details. I’ve included a couple of the skeletons next to their animated character below.

If you have the time though, I’d recommend you check the site out yourself. The images load kind of slowly but are definitely cool.

I was just watching my TiVo’d episode of Futurama and there was this bit at the beginning that I thought was pretty funny:

Ok, I know a lot of my posts have been whiny and kind of lame lately. And for that, I apologize.

Still, yesterday in my Valentine’s Day web surfing (I was looking for porn) I did come across what may be described as simultaneously the most amazing and also most frightening site ever conceived.

I don’t know why these things exist but I can only thank the Internet (there is only one true Internet) for making them possible.

I also found other cool things like these sweet Law & Order: SVU valentines. Ahhh, good times.