NBA Draft Scouts

My friend Tyler knows more about basketball than anyone I've ever known. He has been obsessed with basketball since at least as far back as the time UNLV scored over 100 points in the NCAA championship game in 1990.
He has coached High School basketball, and professional basketball teams.
He is a former co-owner of the professional team the Grand Rapids Flight.
Currently he is a co-owner of Rivertown Sports, and the IBL team the Holland Blast.
He has started a new magazine.
Check it out.
click here

Prom Night Dumpster Baby

A lot of people think the FOX tv show Family Guy isn't funny.
A lot of people are often wrong.

What Is School For?

Taken From Seth Godin's Blog
Seth's Blog

What is school for?

Seems like a simple question, but given how much time and money we spend on it, it has a wide range of answers, many unexplored, some contradictory. I have a few thoughts about education, how we use it to market ourselves and compete, and I realized that without a common place to start, it's hard to figure out what to do.

So, a starter list. The purpose of school is to:

1. Become an informed citizen
2. Be able to read for pleasure
3. Be trained in the rudimentary skills necessary for employment
4. Do well on standardized tests
5. Homogenize society, at least a bit
6. Pasteurize out the dangerous ideas
7. Give kids something to do while parents work
8. Teach future citizens how to conform
9. Teach future consumers how to desire
10. Build a social fabric
11. Create leaders who help us compete on a world stage
12. Generate future scientists who will advance medicine and technology
13. Learn for the sake of learning
14. Help people become interesting and productive
15. Defang the proletariat
16. Establish a floor below which a typical person is unlikely to fall
17. Find and celebrate prodigies, geniuses and the gifted
18. Make sure kids learn to exercise, eat right and avoid common health problems
19. Teach future citizens to obey authority
20. Teach future employees to do the same
21. Increase appreciation for art and culture
22. Teach creativity and problem solving
23. Minimize public spelling mistakes
24. Increase emotional intelligence
25. Decrease crime by teaching civics and ethics
26. Increase understanding of a life well lived
27. Make sure the sports teams have enough players

MSU is going to the Final Four

Spartans advance to the Final Four after 64-52 victory over Louisville.

Scenes From The Recession

more

Parents Claim Hospital Killed Their Teen For Organs

The parents of an 18-year-old who suffered a brain injury in a 2007 snowboarding accident say his doctors "intentionally killed" him to harvest his organs.

full article here

What Would It Be Like If Dane Cook Was Funny?

and I don't mean the "oh-my-god-i-wanna-punch-that-guy-in-the-face" kind of funny that he already is.

The Global Economic Crisis Is About Power, Not Money

"It's over — we're officially, royally fucked. no empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire."
by Matt Taibbi

full article here

Nintendo's NEW Punch-Out! Game

Punch-Out!! Wii - new trailer

Stephen Colbert wins NASA naming contest

Associated Press
updated 4:35 p.m. ET, Mon., March. 23, 2009

WASHINGTON - NASA's online contest to name a new room at the international space station went awry. Comedian Stephen Colbert won.

The name "Colbert" beat out NASA's four suggested options in the space agency's effort to have the public help name the addition. The new room will be launched later this year.
NASA's mistake was allowing write-ins. Colbert urged viewers of his Comedy Central show, "The Colbert Report" to write in his name. And they complied, with 230,539 votes. That clobbered Serenity, one of the NASA choices, by more than 40,000 votes. Nearly 1.2 million votes were cast by the time the contest ended Friday.
NASA reserves the right to choose an appropriate name. Agency spokesman John Yembrick said NASA will decide in April, but will give top vote-getters "the most consideration."

How To Make A Bettery-Free Flashlight

MAKE has a cool tutorial on how to build a flashlight that doesn't use batteries.
"In this project, you will make a flashlight that works without batteries. Even more amazing, you can recharge it in three minutes and it will run for more than 24 hours. Because the ultra capacitors can be recharged thousands of times, you may save the environment from ever receiving an old flashlight in the trash system."
how to build a battery free flashlight

Solar Refrigerators are on the way

The solar fridge was developed by mechanic engineering students Frederik Knop, Nicolás Ripoll, and Olivier Bernade, the last one a French exchange student.

The prototype is based on adsorption, which Wikipedia explains in the following way:

Absorptive refrigeration uses a source of heat to provide the energy needed to drive the cooling process.[...] The classic gas absorption refrigerator sends liquid ammonia into a hydrogen gas. The liquid ammonia evaporates in the presence of hydrogen gas, providing the cooling. The now-gaseous ammonia is sent into a container holding water, which absorbs the ammonia. The water-ammonia solution is then directed past a heater, which boils ammonia gas out of the water-ammonia solution. The ammonia gas is then condensed into a liquid. The liquid ammonia is then sent back through the hydrogen gas, completing the cycle.

This article was originally posted on Treehugger.com
You can read more here:
Treehugger.com

Time Machine

Double Click on this picture, and then you'll be able to read it.
Look at the one on the bottom right corner.

Bacteria (random facts about)

Bacteria and archaea vastly outnumber all other life forms on earth.
Bacteria are the oldest known life form on the planet.
Most bacteria have yet to be identified.
The human body has almost 10 times more bacteria cells than human cells.

Wolfsheim

Immanual Kant, Jesus, and my Grandfather

I believe that all 3 of these people stated something true, that they came to in different ways, and they all mean basically the same thing in the end.
(also, I'm kind of paraphrasing all 3, rather than quoting directly)


Kant - "Act so that every action of yours should be capable of becoming a universal rule of action for all men."

Jesus - "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

Grandpa K - "Don't ever do anything that would embarrass you if it was on the front page of tomorrow's newspaper, and you'll be OK."

Proof that Cadbury Eggs are smaller than they used to be!

The end of Detroit

Detroit may be the first metropolitan area in the world with thriving suburbs surrounding a dead city.

In the 1920s a New York weekly magazine Outlook actually called Detroit "the most modern city in the world, the city of tomorrow." Now it would be best described as "the most dead city in the world, the city of yesterday."

Perhaps the true irony of the death of Detroit is that it's downfall is rooted in the fact that everyone who had any money moved outside city limits into the suburbs. The suburbs would not exist without cars. The people who made money making cars got into their cars and drove away.

the problem with NASA

what the priorities of NASA should be:
1. Conduct research, particularly environmental research, on Earth, the sun and Venus (the most earth-like planet).
2. locate asteroids and comets that might strike earth, and devise a practical means of deflecting them.
3. increase humanity's store of knowledge by studying the distant universe.
4. figure out a way to replace today's chemical rockets with a much cheaper way to reach Earth orbit.


the current priorities of NASA:
1. maintain a pointless space station
2. build a pointless base on the moon
3. increase humanity's store of knowledge by studying the distant universe.
4. keep money flowing to favored aerospace contractors and congressional districts.

Scientology is crazy

a link to the rolling stone article about scientology
Click Here To Read Article
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/9363363/inside_scientology

here's a link to a short documentary:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD9bCdHqU3s

Detroit Motor Cars

GM, Ford, and Chrysler should merge.

GM has already stated that they want to get rid of or shut down all divisions except Chevy and Cadillac. They have also recently stated that even with $30 billion in bailout money they'll still probably have to file for bankruptcy protection.

Ford has already sold Jaguar, and Land Rover. Next they need to sell their stake in Aston Martin and Mazda. Then shut down Lincoln and Mercury. They also need to sell Volvo, and then they'll be down to just Ford.

Chrysler has already shut down Plymouth, now they need to shut down Dodge and Chrysler branded cars and just stick with JEEP.

If they merged at that point then it would be only Cadillac, Jeep, Ford, and Chevy left all under one company, and they could succeed.
They won't do it correctly though.
They won't be able to pull all of that off however, and they won't merge. most likely what will happen is Ford will end up buying one of the competitors brands, maybe Cadillac or Chrysler and the rest will all go completely out of business within the next 10 years, and there will end up being only one Detroit car company left at the end of it all no matter what they try to do.

Who will guard the guardians?

The movie The Watchmen which is currently in theaters doesn't appeal to me, but one of the basic themes is quite interesting. Who will watch the watchmen?

The question was posed by Plato in his book The Republic.

In the perfect society as described by Socrates, the guardian class is to protect the city. The question is put to Socrates, "Who will guard the guardians?" or, "Who will protect us against the protectors?"
They will guard themselves against themselves.
Plato says we must tell the guardians a "noble lie", convincing them that they are better than those they serve, and it's their responsibility to guard and protect people lower than themselves. We must instill in them a distaste for power or privilege and convince them serve because it is the right thing to do.

This also reminds me of the classic "a watchmaker needs a watchmaker-maker" paradox about how if the universe needed a creator then by that same logic that creator needed a creator of its own.
and it goes on and on.
If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the universe as God.

Deadly Immunity - Autism and Mercury Poinsoning

Apparently Thiomersal is used in vaccines as a preservative, and it contains mercury. Many people believe that the level of mercury that children are receiving with their shots is causing the recent autism epidemic.

This entire article was written by Robert F Kennedy Jr, and was originally published in Rolling Stone magazine in 2005.
here is the link to the online version of the article on RollingStone.com
Deadly Immunity article on RollingStone.com


Deadly Immunity
In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center in Norcross, Georgia. Convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the meeting was held at this Methodist retreat center, nestled in wooded farmland next to the Chattahoochee River, to ensure complete secrecy. The agency had issued no public announcement of the session -- only private invitations to fifty-two attendees. There were high-level officials from the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, the top vaccine specialist from the World Health Organization in Geneva and representatives of every major vaccine manufacturer, including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Wyeth and Aventis Pasteur. All of the scientific data under discussion, CDC officials repeatedly reminded the participants, was strictly "embargoed." There would be no making photocopies of documents, no taking papers with them when they left.