Tour has been going well so far.  David had a very drunk dude serenade him last night.

This video is unrelated to that incident but still well worth your time if you like to see totally unexpected things happen.

+ why oil is so expensive

This is why oil is so valuable: one tank of gas from a typical S.U.V. has the energy equivalent of more than 60,000 man-hours of work-roughly 100 men working around the clock for nearly a month. That is the power that the American consumer can access for about $60 at the gasoline pump. If gasoline were a person, we would be paying 10 cents an hour for his labor. Easily accessible reserves are running dry, though, which means that the industry must develop increasingly ingenious-and costly-techniques for getting at the oil. Deepwater drilling, for example, now happens so far offshore that rigs can no longer be anchored to the seabed; they must be held in place by an array of propellers, each the size of a two-car garage. The cost of deepwater drilling is close to twice that in shallow water.

Read the rest at Constant Siege

+ Kahn Academy: Cutting the Middlemen out of Education

The most popular educator on YouTube does not have a Ph.D. He has never taught at a college or university. And he delivers all of his lectures from a bedroom closet.

This upstart is Salman Khan, a 33-year-old who quit his job as a financial analyst to spend more time making homemade lecture videos in his home studio. His unusual teaching materials started as a way to tutor his faraway cousins, but his lectures have grown into an online phenomenon—and a kind of protest against what he sees as a flawed educational system.

Read the full article HERE.

+  The new Balance and Composure song Kaleidoscope is soo fucking good.  Listen to it HERE.  They’re releasing a split with Tigers Jaw in May which features 4 new songs from both bands.  I’m really looking forward to that.

+ 4Chan founder interviewed at the TED conference.  Nothing really profound happens in the interview but it is interesting to learn that he started the site at 15 and he doesn’t look as nerdy as you would think the founder of 4 chan would look.

+ This is pretty amazing.  The Bloom Box is a small wireless device that can generate power without being connected to the grid.

Depressing Things

+ Girl sings a cover of Tik Tok by Kesha on youtube and gets flamed horribly.  People on the internet are pricks.  StreetBoners has some funny stuff to say about it.

It’s more abuse than anyone in human history has taken. She’s like an experimental crash-test dummy for a bleeding-edge form of online punishment: rapid-fire, anonymous, continual, explicit, targeted, specific. It’s life-changing, serial-killer-making EGO DESTRUCTION.

Even the worst American Idols are not exposed to this degree of punishment. Their millions of mocking viewers can only laugh in their livings rooms — they can’t directly lash out…

Observations:
A) WHAT the fuck is wrong with her parents that they could expose her to this? This girl is not just overweight, she’s also got some kind of developmental issue. WHERE the fuck are her parents? The trailer can’t be that big.

B) WHAT the fuck is wrong with humanity? It’s so great to see how people REALLY act when they have anonymity. It’s like staring into a stranger’s eyes from a subway platform once the subway doors have closed — you each know the other guy can’t physically get to you, so all bets are off.

C) Every ten comments or so, someone surfaces who can’t bear the raw and terrible honesty of nature. They tell her how beautiful she is, and how if she keeps at it, she can make all her dreams come true. These people are worse than the haters; by giving her these droplets of hope, they are keeping her addicted to the punishment channel like a smack addict crawling through a burnt-out poppy field.

What a clusterfuck.

+ If you’re worried about the economy read this article and figure out that the future is looking bleaker than you had imagined.

Last spring, an organization called JobNob began holding networking happy hours to try to match college graduates with start-up companies looking primarily for unpaid labor. Julie Greenberg, a co-founder of JobNob, says that at the first event, on May 7, she expected perhaps 30 people, but 300 showed up. New graduates didn’t have much of a chance; most of the people there had several years of work experience—quite a lot were 30-somethings—and some had more than one degree. JobNob has since held events for alumni of Stanford, Berkeley, and Harvard; all have been well attended (at the Harvard event, Greenberg tried to restrict attendance to 75, but about 100 people managed to get in), and all have been dominated by people with significant work experience.When experienced workers holding prestigious degrees are taking unpaid internships, not much is left (for everyone else.)

+ Here are a few things I’ve been looking at:

Sleep Cocoon

Rare Photos of Famous People

A few of these blew my mind.  Particularly this one of a young Christopher Walken.

+ Here are a few things that I’ve been reading:

The House Behind the House – A family discovers a lavish hobo lair hidden in the forest behind their new summer home.

Five Ways the Ipad will Change Magazine Design

Pianos got posted on the front page of punk news today.  Half of the comments are people hating on our name which is something we always hear.  I like that someone made a Degeneration X joke, though I don’t really know where it came from.  Maybe it’s because we look like bad ass wrestlers in the photo?

+ Ballin’ Chimps

I was listening to an episode of This American Life earlier today that featured a segment on a Chimpanzee Retirement center.  Apparently in the mid-90′s, during the race to cure AIDS, hundreds of chimpanzees were captured and brought to American research labs because it was suspected that, since human and chimp DNA is nearly identical, they might offer some good clues on how to cure the disease.  Well, researchers soon discovered that the chimps weren’t of much use to them since they are unable to contract the human strain of the HIV virus.

This presented labs across the United States with an odd ethical dilemma.  Should we euthanize our closest animal ancestors – these ‘near human’ chimps?

The Clinton administration had a soft spot for these monkeys (0r a conscience) so in the final days of his presidency Bill Clinton passed a bill to build a federally-funded Chimp retirement center in Shreveport, Louisiana, commonly known as Chimp Haven.

That little history lesson was just a precursor to two bits of information that I find really interesting about all of this:

1)  Chimps love to watch television.  Since most of these chimps came from government research labs they were exposed to doctors in white lab coast quite often.  Subsequently their favorite show to watch on television is ER.

2)  Cheetah the Chimp, most commonly known for his role in Tarzan, is the most ballin’ chimp to ever live.  While you sit in your cramped 1 bedroom apartment staring at your laptop try to imagine this chimp lounging on his plush floral sofa, drinking bananna smoothies and watching Most Valuable (and/or Vertical) Primate on repeat.

Cheetah is a recovering alcoholic:

In his younger days, Cheeta liked a beer. But, unlike others stars, there have been no sex scandals or stints in rehab.  “Cheeta hasn’t had a drink in 16 years,” said Dan. “And there have been no scandals. He likes to eat but I have to watch his diet as he’s diabetic.”  The chimp has his own state-of-the-art music system, TV and video. He also likes to play piano.  And like other big-screen stars of yesteryear, he likes to watch his glory days over and over again.

Dan revealed: “He enjoys watching his old films with his grandson Jeeter. We sit and watch TV together, but I have to keep an eye on him or he raids the fridge.”

(via The Sun)

I’m sure everyone has given a few minutes of thought to the idea of being reanimated in the distant future.  Well, now there is hope.

“The rat sniffs the air a few times, and within a minute, his naturally twitchy movements are almost still. On a monitor that shows his rate of breathing, the lines look like a steep mountain slope, going down.

At first glance, that looks bad. We need oxygen to live. If you don’t get it for several minutes — for example, if you suffer cardiac arrest or a bad gunshot wound — you die. But something else is going on inside this rat. He isn’t dead, isn’t dying. The reason why, some people think, is the future of emergency medicine.

You see, Roth thinks he’s figured out the puzzle. “While it’s true we need oxygen to live, it’s also a toxin,” he explains. Scientists are starting to understand that death isn’t caused by oxygen deprivation itself, but by a chain of damaging chemical reactions that are triggered by sharply dropping oxygen levels.

The thing is, those reactions require the presence of some oxygen. Hydrogen sulfide takes the place of oxygen, preventing those reactions from taking place. No chain reaction, no cell death. The patient lives.”

Read the Full Article HERE.

FYI:  while searching Google for an image to put in this article, the picture that came up most often was the cover of Linkin Park’s Reanimation album.  Coincidence or Fate?

]]> http://stokingtheroots.com/2009/10/18/how-to-cheat-death/feed/ 0 http://stokingtheroots.com/2009/09/14/this-is-for-you-blue/ http://stokingtheroots.com/2009/09/14/this-is-for-you-blue/#comments Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:36:58 +0000 Chad http://stokingtheroots.com/?p=2151 + Cheap Healthcare

If you’re a young adult who is lacking health care you may want to take a look at this article:  How I Pay $85 A Month for My Health Insurance Policy

+ New BlogNigger Article

“I was standing in line at the DMV last week, waiting to renew my driver’s license and pretending to be Black. Every time I hang around RealBlacks©, I act about 90% Blacker. I’m so socially dynamic (read: full of shit) and so desperate to be liked, that I change my behavior depending on my surroundings. I’m like an insecure chameleon on Ayds.

Blacks at the DMV? Yes. There were. In fact, I was standing next to one that was gay, fucking RIPPED, and darker than Seal.

Now, the one sub-species that enthralls me more than any other is the HOMOTHUG. I could listen to these niggas talk all day — flamingly gay, tougher than leather, and black as the queen of spades.”

- What’s Behind America’s Assault on Obama?

I went to my final court hearing this morning to tie up the loose ends on my pool-hopping-trespassing charge and I saw a HOMOTHUG decked out in full biker gear regalia.  (I just went to urbandictionary.com to see if HOMOTHUG was actually a defined word, which it is, and during my scroll down the page an ad showed up for a website called gaythugdating.com – I was unaware that this subculture existed)

Ris Paul Ric – Purple Blaze

Ris Paul Ric, aka Christopher Paul Richards, is the former guitarist for Q and Not U.  This release is interesting.  You can tell he used to play guitar in Q and Not U because he uses very similar chord structures.  Here’s a more in depth review.

Myspace

Download: Ris Paul Ric – Purple Blaze

Milemarker – Frigid Forms Sell

This is the guy responsible for making nautical star tattoos a trend.  Why are they so sweaty?

Myspace

Download: Milemarker – Frigid Forms Sell

I’m going to be gone for the next few days because my sister is getting married.  I may or may not post depending on if Dani brings her laptop along.

+ New Gladwell book

Kottke just posted the links to read the articles published in Malcolm Gladwell’s new book What the Dog Saw.  Gladwell’s writing is always enjoyable.

+ I Am T-Pain App

I don’t know that much about T-Pain aside from the fact that he loves to use vocoder’s on his tracks and that he’s the spokesman for a new iPhone vocoder app called I Am T-Pain.  The video demonstration they put together is awesome.  It gets really good around 1:40.  Mike or August, please download this app now.

gotta go.

Aside from not sleeping the entire time it was definitely an eye-opening experience.  Most of the dudes I was locked up with were in for petty drug charges or similar misdemeanors.  A few were there with bigger offenses –  one guy assaulted his cousin, and another beat his wife – but nobody was hostile.

Anyway, Here’s something I think is cool.

+ 1001 Rules For My Unborn Son

Apparently my mom and sister were at a party with a psychic who read their fortunes and told them I would be having my first child in one year – then I randomly stumbled upon this website.  Are the stars aligning to bankrupt me?

The title is completely accurate.  1001 Rules is a blog where a soon-to-be-father is compiling a list of rules for his soon-to-be son.  Most of his rules include quotes, pictures, or songs and are usually right on the money.  This is also a very smart idea because he already has a book deal lined up.  Hello, college fund.

355. Never request a joke or impression. They’re never as good on command.

321. When it comes to opening presents, no one likes a good guesser.

136. There is no better remedy than a dip in the ocean.

Kind of kitschy, but whatever, they’re still cool to read and think about.

Vist 1001 Rules For My Unborn Son.

+ Brokencyde – 40oz.

I heard these guys got jumped on Warped Tour which is kind of shitty.  But after listening to their album, which is full of rhymes about doing drugs and fucking girls, I can imagine how much they suck in real life so I guess violence is kind of justified in this situation.  I can’t believe anyone actually enjoys this music.

+ The Pentatonic Scale

My man Bobby showing off just how natural music making is.

+ the above are both from the punk guy

+ The Immortal Jellyfish

The Turritopsis Nutricula is able to revert back to a juvenile form once it mates after becoming sexually mature.  Marine biologists say the jellyfish numbers are rocketing because they need not die.  Dr Maria Miglietta of the Smithsonian Tropical Marine Institute said: “We are looking at a worldwide silent invasion.”

- Via The Telegraph

Soon the world’s waterways will be nothing but big bowls of painful electric jelly.

Check out the Wiki Article HERE.

+ Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem…

“Who knew Jerusalem was so like the Jersey shore?”  (via The Constant Siege)

+ Top Ten Graphic Novels

The Comments are where the good stuff is at HERE.