Purple Monkey

What happened here?

The University of Arizona has a farm. Several of them, I think. This one is officially known as the University of Arizona College of Agriculture Campus Agricultural Center. It's in an odd place for a farm, sort of in the middle of an urban/suburban environment.

The U of A has a sign for their farm. The sign is at the northwest corner of Campbell Ave. and Roger Rd.

A few weeks ago I noticed that the sign had taken some pretty serious damage. I don't know what happened or how long ago it was, but it looks like there was a lot of energy involved, fire, and moderately intense heat.

There are three competing theories for the cause of this damage:

1. A car went through the fence. Maybe it was traveling north on Campbell, tried to make a left onto Roger, and then the left went bad for some reason. Maybe it caught fire at some point and that's what burned the sign.


2. Lightning. Maybe the sign was struck. The fence and reflector posts bent toward the sign make this less likely, as does the presence locally of several taller metal poles.


3. Gas Problem. There is exposed plumbing visible poking up from the ground in Figure 2 and Figure 4. Is it gas plumbing? Could this have caused or contributed to the problem?

I am going to try to get to the bottom of this.

Labels: images, mysterious

The Steri-Strips are off. They came off at about 7:30 pm 12 July 2006. As far as the contest goes, it's sort of too close to call and I think we have a three-way tie. Well, unless the prize is expensive, in that case I will "randomly" choose the lucky winner from among the correct entries received from aerospace engineers living in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.

The wound itself is looking good. Too good, as a matter of fact. It looks so good it's sort of boring, so I developed (actually refined, since I used a similar process once before) a process I call "Zombification" which is designed to make relatively non-disgusting wound images look like disgusting wound pictures again.

The proprietary Zombification process whose mathematical description is a closely guarded secret is now fully automated and reproducible. The automation of the Zombification process allows for different images to be Zombified in a systematic way, providing for detailed comparison and analysis.

Labels: images, mysterious, wounds

About 20 years ago, David Byrne made some predictions about the future. He recorded these predictions in the song "In the Future" on the album Knee Play. I think about the song a lot, even though I probably only heard it a few times. I don't even remember how I know the song. My best guess is that Scott Souter gave it to me, but I don't remember.

IN THE FUTURE

In the future everyone will have the same haircut and the same clothes

In the future everyone will be very fat from the starchy diet

In the future everyone will be very thin from not having enough to eat

In the future it will be next to impossible to tell girls from boys, even in bed

In the future men will be 'super-masculine' and women will be 'ultra-feminine'

In the future atomic fusion will enable us to build a skyscraper with the energy obtained from a grain of salt

In the future through genetic surgery there will be a race of menial workers, studs, 'whores', TV personalities and politicians

In the future half of us will be 'mentally ill'

In the future there will be no religion or spiritualism of any sort

In the future the 'psychic arts' will be put to practical use

In the future we will not think that nature is beautiful

In the future the weather will always be the same (relative to the way it is now)

In the future no one will fight with anyone else because anyone can be anything he or she want to be

In the future there will be an atomic war that will reduce the survivors to savages

In the future water will be expensive

In the future all material items will be free

In the future everyone's house will be like a little fortress

In the future everyone will think about love all the time

In the future TV will be so good that the printed word will function as an artform only

In the future people with boring jobs will take pills to relieve boredom

In the future everyone but the wealthy will be very happy

In the future everyone but the wealthy will be very filthy

In the future everyone but the wealthy will be very wealthy

In the future communication/distribution systems will be so good that no one will live in cities

In the future farming will be managed through a nationwide computer hookup

In the future there will be mini-wars going on everywhere

In the future political and other decisions will be based completely on opinion polls

In the future only the very wealthy will be able to travel or move out of their houses

In the future individuals with soldier inclinations will go out for 'killer' sports

In the future there will be machines which will produce a religious experience in the user

In the future there will be a classless society, no one richer than anyone else

In the future people will constantly be having plastic surgery, altering their features many times during a lifetime

In the future there will be many mass suicides

In the future there will be groups of wild people, living in the wilderness, who will rob suburbanites

In the future there will be only paper money which will be personalized

In the future everyone will only get to go home once a year

In the future everyone will stay home all the time

In the future we will not have time for leisure activities

In the future we will only 'work' one day a week

In the future our bodies will be shrivelled up but healthy and our brains will be bigger

In the future there will be starving people everywhere

In the future no one will be able to afford TV or newspapers, resulting in no one knowing what's going on

In the future people will live in space

In the future only the very wealthy will have pets

In the future the poor will be regulated by the rich

In the future everyone's house will be a total entertainment centre, with video, pills, dancing, sex tools, holographic movies, and game machines

In the future everyone will have his or her own individual style of very way-out clothes

In the future we will all eat our favorite foods, only they will all be synthetic

In the future we will [attempt to copulate with] anything, anytime, anywhere

In the future there will be so much going on that no one will be able to keep track of it

Labels: weird

The two Richards flew away. It was sad to see them go, but now they're off eating stuff and flying around and sitting on telephone wires and whatnot. It's probably more fun than just hanging around in an old bougainvillea bush, anyway.

Labels: animals, images

The Steri-Strips really put a damper on my attempts to document the wound healing process. They're not going to be on much longer, though. How much longer do you suppose? Make a guess and send in your answer using the contact form to your right. I will "randomly" choose a winner from among the entries which most closely predict the date and time that the Steri-Strips will come off. That lucky winner will be eligible to receive a fantastic prize or prizes, possibly even one of the popular www.thinksimian.com T-shirts emblazoned with images as seen on this site.

Labels: images, mysterious, wounds

I always kind of wondered how important it really is to change motor oil. The last time I changed the oil in my bicycle engine, I saved some to compare it to fresh oil. I used SAE 10W-30 motor oil in my Honda GX-H50 50cc engine. On the left I show fresh oil and on the right I show oil after I ran it for 11.7 hours.

The oil definitely changes color. Whatever is in it doesn't settle out, either, because the bottles you see had been sitting just like that for about 10 months or so before I got around to taking the pictures.

Whether or not the darker oil, which I guess one might call the dirtier oil, is any worse for the engine than the fresh oil is, I don't know. But I do know that motor oil gets very dark after only having been run for a short time.

Labels: images, serious

You know what I wish?

I wish I could have access to my Favorites list in Internet Explorer from any computer I happened to be using, without having to use a third-party portal kind of website, or any software other than Internet Explorer. I hope none of the approximately 100,000 people who read my blog each day (including the 99,950 people who use the Bashas' computer network in Mesa, Arizona and who seem to compulsively keep re-checking to see if I really did say bad things about the service I consistently receive at AJ's Fine Foods in Tucson, and who send me hate mail via the form to your right (AJ's Fine Foods happens to also be one of the search terms in Google that drives the most traffic to my blog)) email me with suggestions for different third-party toolbar software or websites or other crap like that. I just want it built into every copy of Microsoft Internet Explorer.

I think a good thing to do would be for Microsoft to make it so that in Internet Explorer you could go up to the Favorites menu and choose something like "Use Remote" and then when you checked that, a dialog box would come up that asked for a username and password. Then, when you enter your username and password, all of the favorites you have stored with Microsoft would appear in your local Favorites list, no matter where you happened to be.

When you add a Favorite to your list, Internet Explorer could give you the option of either adding the favorite only to the local computer, or adding it to the remote favorites server, or both.

That way, I'd always have access to all my favorites no matter where I went.

Why would Microsoft go to the trouble of setting aside 500k or 1MB of storage space for every single person who uses Internet Explorer, not to mention all the bandwidth it would take to serve out all those Favorites to people? Two reasons:

1. It would make my life slightly better.


2. They could probably make a ton of money.

How would they make money by storing my Favorites for me? If Microsoft stored all of my favorites, they'd know all my favorite things. They could contract Google to look at all my favorite things and decide on five ads to serve me up that would most likely get a click from me. The ads could simply appear in my Favorites list above my own stored Favorites. The ads could look just like my other Favorites, maybe separated from the regular ones by a small line in typical Google unobtrusive text-ad style, and they'd be there right on top enticing me to click on them.

Google could serve all their regular network partner ads that they serve out everywhere, and they could charge for the clicks just like they always do. Then they'd split the ten cents (or whatever the auction went for per click for that particular Favorites profile) with Microsoft and Google would be happy, Microsoft would be happy, and I would be very happy because when I was at my parents' house and I saw a website I liked, I could ad it to my remotely stored favorites list, then when I got home I'd have it right there ready to use.

Plus, I find Google ads to be unusually entertaining, particularly in Gmail, so I think I'd actually like having the ads in my Favorites List.

That's what I wish.

Labels: serious