Ahoy, it is International Talk Like a Pirate Day and that swashbuckling sister of mine has posted a photo of her adorable little pirate—I would deserve to walk the plank if I didn’t mention it.
Arrgh, check out the jolly catchlights.
If the Simpsons were Star Wars
Clever illustration and animation guy Rich Cando created this Simpsons/Star Wars mash-up that I think you’ll enjoy. Accept for maybe a touch of tweaking in the animation itself, I don’t think Groening and crew could have done it much better themselves.
Glen Hutchinson in the World Long Drive Competition
My brother-in-law, Glen, was in Wyoming a couple weeks ago competing in an Open Long Drive competition and ended up winning a ticket to the Re/Max Long Drive World Championship Tournament in Mesquite, Nevada this October.
Longdrivers.com lists him as the Open Division Winner with a distance of 337 yds 24 inches. I’m looking forward to watching him progress through the 11 rounds that it takes to win the Championship in Mesquite.
(Photo credit to Glen’s talented wife Jackie Hutchinson. IMHO she’s the best photographer in Drayton Valley Okotoks.)
Misquoting Jesus
In 1707, a biblical theologian named John Mill was the first to collect and combine the text of some 100 extant New Testament manuscripts. After 30 years of study he noted over 30,000 various major to mostly slight errors in the different versions of the New Testament manuscripts. His discovery brought to light the fact that so many different versions of the New Testament exist and that the book many people think of as the immutable word of God has an uncomfortably long history of changes.
The following video lecture is a tremendously interesting look at some of the discrepancies by world renowned bible scholar and author Dr. Bart D. Ehrman.
“There are places where we don’t know what the authors of the New Testament wrote. […]
The problem of not having the originals of the New Testament, though, is a problem for everyone—not simply for those that believe that the bible was inspired by God.
For all of us, I think, the bible is the most important book in Western Civilization. It continues to be cited in public debates over gay rights, abortion, over whether to go to war with foreign countries, over how to organize and run our society. But how do we interpret the New Testament? It’s hard to know what the words of the New Testament mean, if we don’t know what the words were.
And so in this lecture I’ll be talking about not knowing what the words were and what we might know about the originals of the New Testament, how they got lost and how possibly they might be reconstructed.”
[Misquoting Jesus| Youtube]
John Lennon’s Jukebox
A few years ago a jukebox owned by John Lennon was discovered. On it were 40 of the famous musician’s favorite tunes. This is a documentary about the songs on that Jukebox and the influence they had on the Beatles.
[John Lennon’s Jukebox | YouTube]
The Amazing Intelligent Resize
Currently if you have a large image that you need to make smaller for the web you can either scale it or crop it. Scaling makes everything smaller and cropping can cut out important content. This incredible video demonstrates an image re-sizing algorithm that is content-aware. It’s pretty cool and I figure it’s something that is going to make someone a boatload of money.
[Content Aware Image Sizing – YouTube]
Surrendipity: 2012
Billions and billions of dollars have been spent in the pursuit of new drugs but vanishingly few useful drugs are actually being developed. Dr. Safi Bahcall, the president and C.E.O. of the biotechnology company Synta Pharmaceuticals, and Malcolm Gladwell talk about how mistakes lead to great scientific discoveries and how big drug companies hamper innovation.
Check out their talk, Surrendipity: 2012 from the 2007 New Yorker Conference.
The Last Lunch
Dawkins on Why We’re Here
Richard Dawkins takes a stab at why we’re here, using science and reason to back up his answer. It’s an interesting and inspiring perspective on an old question.
[The Big Questions – YouTube]
Sagan on Evolution
The following is a clip from Cosmos, where the late Dr. Carl Sagan speaks about 4 billion years of evolution. In the background simple animations morph from one species to another illustrating the point.
Sagan on Evolution – YouTube]