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Fat Man in the Hockey Net Question Answered

I play the occasional game of street hockey with friends, and my heart has been known to skip a beat during playoff season. While I wouldn’t consider myself a hard-core fan, I’m into hockey just enough to have entertained the thought that a grossly obese man might be the world’s most effective NHL goalie.

As strange as it may sound to anyone with a sense of decency, there is actually sound reasoning behind it. Because of the geometry of the game, the potential for one mammoth individual to change hockey is staggering. Simply put, there is a goal that’s 6 feet wide and 4 feet high, and a hockey puck that needs to go into it in order to score. Fill that net completely, and no goals can possibly be scored against your team. So why hasn’t it happened yet?

In hilarious fashion, Todd Gallagher answers the age old question once and for all: Could a morbidly obese goalie shut out an NHL team?

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Say NO! to the Canadian DMCA

The Canadian government is about to bring down Canada’s version of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and it promises to be the worst copyright law in the developed world. It will contain an anti-circumvention clause that prohibits breaking the locks off your music and movies in order to move them to new devices or watch them after the company that made them goes out of business and it will follow the US’s disastrous lead with the DMCA in that there will be no exceptions to the ban on circumvention, not even for parody, fair dealing, time shifting, or other legal uses.

Basically, in the US, it is illegal to even pick the locks of anything that is keeping you from accessing the content, EVEN IF YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO DO SO.

In plain English? You can’t rip songs off YOUR CDs to play on YOUR iPod. The company who runs the DRM system goes out of business? Too bad. Want to unlock your cell phone to run on another network? Nope. You want to copy an eBook that is in the public domain? No way. You want to use a clip from a documentary DVD in your own commentary? Fat chance. You want to backup anything copyrighted that you bought? Think again.
The list goes on and on.

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Bubble City

I’m not sure if it can be considered sci-fi, since Bubble City takes place in the real world involving potentially real technology, but it’s got enough techie panache and thrilling conspiracy that make it the most fun fiction I’ve read in awhile.

Bubble City, a serial novel currently being written by the brilliant Aaron Swartz.

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Why are evolutionary biologists bringing back extinct deadly viruses

I just finished reading the wonderful New Yorker article Darwin’s Surprise by Michael Specter. This is some of the most interesting reading around (at least in my opinion).

I should have been a biologist.

Nothing provides more convincing evidence for the “theory” of evolution than the viruses contained within our DNA. Until recently, the earliest available information about the history and the course of human diseases, like smallpox and typhus, came from mummies no more than four thousand years old. Evolution cannot be measured in a time span that short. Endogenous retroviruses provide a trail of molecular bread crumbs leading millions of years into the past.

And that trail appears to lead to the very roots of human existence and possibly to a cure for HIV/AIDS.

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I Am America (And So Can You!) Satanic Message

It took me a few days to get around to reversing the backwards message embedded in the I Am America (And So Can You) audiobook, but now that I have, let me just say, Stephen Colbert doesn’t disappoint.

While complaining that seniors are from the library card generation, Stephen complains that “They don’t believe in buying multiple collector copies no matter what kind of rare, bizarre, or coded message appears in the first edition” at which point (about 1:18 of track 3) the following audio is heard:

Update: Flash is dead and so is this clip. I’ll put this on my todo list to get it back up and running in HTML 5.

So there you go, proof positive that Stephen Colbert is a liberal and hates America.

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Derek Powazek on Sharing Stories Via the Net

My very good friend, Louise, wrote Derek Powazek (founder of JPG Mag, husband to Heather Champ of Flickr fame and Leta’s Internet Godfather) to ask him if he’s ever regretted his transparency on the web.

Derek’s response: Never tell a story like it’s not about you. In answering her question, he reminds us why it is we keep sites like this. It gives me encouragement to write more about myself, rather than just link-posting which is what I’ve found myself doing a lot lately.

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My Site on Fox 8 News

About a year ago a producer from Fox 8 News emailed me and asked if I would be in Los Angeles anytime in the near future or if I knew of any backmasking experts that could help them do a report. I never heard back from them, and no, I never made the trip, but it looks like they found someone because here is their segment on backmasking.