Great Scot! It's Doc Brown's Phone!

Funny line in this Times article about the capabilities that will be coming on phones in a couple of years:

Open up the device, point it at the street and ask it to show you what the place looked like 200 years ago, and it offers a photo or video.

Wow! Photos of what places looked like 200 years ago! Truly technology is progressing faster than I thought: apparently phones will have access to time-machine capabilities only a few short years from now...(fn1)

fn1: Some fun history. The first photographic techniques date to the 1820's but took several hours of exposure. The first relatively workable techniques were developed by M. Daguerre in the late 1830's and early 1840's. They took several minutes of exposure. So we are still at least a few decades away from being able to look at photographs of what places looked like 200 years ago, barring the invention of time travel allowing us to photograph them before the invention of photography.

The earliest workable motion picture camera was famously invented by Thomas Edison in the 1890's so we're quite aways away from calling up 200 year old moving pictures, even ignoring the fact that video more specifically referes to electronic capturing of motion pictures, which wasn't invented until the late 1920's by the fantastically named Philo T. Farnsworth. Electronic television, it should be noted, was based on an idea Farnsworth had at the age of 14! And people think teens today spend too much time thinking about television...

Why I hate CSI:Miami

This Youtube clip compiling an amazing number of instances of David Caruso's patented "one-liner while putting on sunglasses" is a good distillation.

To be fair to the Miami version, I don't actually like any of the many CSI variants. The only one I've ever actually seen at any length, though, is CSI:Miami. And it was atrocious. Beautiful, lush cinematography that looks absolutely glorious in HD combined with incredibly cliched storylines, laughable casting choices and pathetically bad acting.

No sir, I didn't like it.

Video of the day

Sorry for the slow posting of late. Know that I am noodling some long posts on various topics. Mostly I'm trying to tone down the invective in them so I don't scare the horses.(fn1)

Also, due to circumstances out of my control, I will be in Anguilla for a wedding for most of this week. I will not be thinking about the internet while I am there so you will have to suffer without my wise guidance.

As a small attempt to make amends, I give you this video of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi taking the time out of his busy day to pretend-hump a meter-maid on his way to the car.

The guy's an amateur. Bill Clinton would have avoided the cameras and would not have gone the 'pretend' route, but rather the full monty.

fn1: In this usage horses = my liberal readers.

Form 1040DEM

On the topic of the apparent optionality of taxes for senior Democrats, this is funny:
























UPDATE: Reader(fn1) CF chides me in the comments for insufficient attribution. My thinking was that the link to the Flickr account hosting the picture would have been enough esp. given that my half-dozen strong readership is generally familiar enough with me to know that I didn't make this up myself.

But since I can't afford to alienate any potential readers and, of course, I also value the readers I already have far too much to ever leave them with the idea that I've tried to steal another's work, here is the full attribution:

The fake form was created by Jeff Dobbs of The Voice in my Head who apparently got the idea from a comment by Ranger at JustOneMinute who was himself apparently inspired by a comment by DaveG at Ann Althouse's blog but Mr. Dobbs also credits this post from Clarice Feldman(fn2) at the American Thinker for laying it all out.

Whew! This attribution stuff is a pain! Guess I should just stick to my own rants and not link to anyone else's creations...

fn1: Or, I strongly suspect, not reader but random one-time commenter though I do hope he or she proves me wrong by reading a couple more posts and maybe even leaving additional comments...

fn2: It occurs to me that "CF" might possibly stand for "Clarice Feldman"? If so, how nice that my attribution correction will come full circle back to her!

Plane crash

People have been wondering how a flock of birds managed to take out a plane.

My theory is that the plane was brought down by a Flock of Seagulls and that after taking down the plane, they ran... they ran so far away...