"Jesus" action figure

Jesus action figure! Cures leprosy and restores sight to the blind. Requires 2 AA bateries.¹

¹ Not included

Best. Toast. Ever.

- Person #1: ... por el poder de...!

- Everybody: ... [wtf?]

- Person #2: Thunder! ... Thunder! ... Thundercats!

[Everybody raises their glasses]

- Everybody [while clinking their glasses] HOOOOOOOOOO!

I love my group of friends =D.

Tool fail

Por esto no hay que usar una botella de plástico como martillo para golpear una aguja:



Y menos si tiene agua mineral adentro.

Analyzing the world through their search queries

Prioridades (Brasil):



Sin qué hacer (Canada):



Sospechoso (República Dominicana):



Otros sin qué hacer (Hong Kong):



Consistencia (Suecia):

(btw según Google Translate, systembolaget significa "systems company"... who knows)

One-hit-wonder hysteria:



And finally, media hype (global):

Donald Knuth on his writing style

Yes, I always try to keep a potential reader in mind - basically somebody who is reading my book because they want to, not because they must, and somebody who has a natural ability to do computer programming. Only about 2 per cent of the population really "resonates" with programming the way I do; but somebody ought to write books for that 2%, and I try to be one of the authors who does so. Instead of trying to impress the reader with what I know, I try to explain why the things I've learned impress me. [My emphasis]

Full interview here.

+1 for interdisciplinarity

Ending quote from The Emperor of Scent:

"My father always said if you translate a proverb from one language into another, you pass for a poet. The same for science. Work strictly within one area, and it's diminishing returns, hard to make progress. But translate a concept from its field for use where it is unknown, and it is always fresh and powerful. In buying outside, you are doing intellectual arbitrage. The rate limiting step in this is your willingness to continuously translate, to force strange languages to be yours, to live in between, to be everywhere and nowhere."

Smells, music, antibiotics, and other things

Estoy leyendo "The Emperor of Scent", de Chandler Burr, acerca de Luca Turin, un científico con una teoría interesante acerca de cómo olemos. Propone que tenemos un espectroscopio de efecto túnel (electron-tunneling spectroscope) orgánico (hecho de proteínas) en la nariz, que analiza las vibraciones características de enlaces atómicos en las moléculas, y cada combinación diferentes de enlaces tiene un olor particular (como acordes musicales).

El libro está interesante, y he encontrado varias ideas/frases de él que me han gustado/entretenido, so I'll just stick them here.

Este es un extracto donde vienen sus ideas acerca de la belleza en los olores y del dilema natura VS nurtura acerca de cómo apreciamos los olores (los franceses con sus quesos, por ejemplo):

His second view on the nature versus nurture of smell, firmly held, is that one should seek the full spectrum of smells in one's life. "France", he says, "is a country that understands that, much as in music an orchestra is not just violins, the range of smells that makes life interesting includes some rather severe ones." So what determines what we like to smell? "Your taste in smell is part biology and part culture. Everyone who smells rotten cheese the first time — take Époisses, where you smell it about three rooms away, and one that is even more rare and heavenly and makes the Époisses positively spartan by comparison: Soumaintrain, from Bourgogne, specifically from Saint-Florentin, near Auxerre. When they smell that, Americans think, 'Good God!' The Japanese think, 'I must now commit suicide.' The French think, 'Where's the bread?'

...

Theres' a vibrational fifth in esters, you know. I've always thought that esters, fruity, are Mozart. The melon notes — helional, for example — strike me as the watery Debussy harmonies, the fourths. Beethoven in his angrier moments is quinolines, which you get in green peppers. Thus Bandit, a dark, angular Beethoven string quartet. There's a lot of perfumery that smells like Philip Glass's minimalism, a deceptive simplicity. Mitsouko I think is pure Brahms, the string sextets, extremely intricate but rather monochrome. Tommy Girl gives you Prokofiev's First Symphony.

But the rotten cheeses. Put it this way: Sauternes, this incredible thing, is a wine that is the direct result of rotting grapes being eaten by a mold. I mean, in an American hospital they'd hand out antibiotics to exterminate half the food in France.

Hablando de un vino (Sauternes):

A great Sauternes is a perfectly proportioned thing. Rieussec makes big-boned, stocky affairs. The '59, in a bottle for forty years, comes out the way James Bond emerges from a wet suit in a perfect tuxedo. It looks at you and murmurs, 'What kept you?'

Day C

Corny cornered corns crankily chop crooked crocodiles' crumbs. Can cheese crops create cold cancer? Cream crushes cyanide cans. Cool.

Best. Beer name. Ever.

Tactical Nuclear Penguin.

Y para acabarla es la más fuerte del mundo (31-32% alcohol), según este artículo.

Day B

Blueberry brewers bark besides big, burnt barns built by brimstone blobs. Beer bunnies bend baskets behind boring bromide bubbles. Bah.