About
My name is Jeff, and I write this blog. I work as an interface designer in Denver, CO. I am also an amateur musician and an atheist.
Yearly Archives: 2011
Elephants have useful penises
You see that skinny leg around where you’d expect the elephant’s penis to be? That’s his penis. He’s standing on his penis. It’s prehensile too. Which is nice because full-body humping is difficult with a big elephant body.
Tagged elephants, penises Leave a comment
Face & Skull
Tagged faces, skulls, typography Leave a comment
Soldier Bear fought in WWII
Voytek was a bear who was adopted by Polish troops in Iran in 1943.
When Polish forces were deployed to Europe the only way to take the bear with them was to “enlist” him.
So he was given a name, rank and number and took part in the Italian campaign.
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If you get religion to make yourself happier, be sure to get a lot of religion
Dan Ariely, Daniel Mochon, and Michael Norton polled people in the UK about their religiosity and their well-being. Of the non-religious, atheists were happiest, followed by agnostics and the just plain non-religious.
For the religious respondents, the researchers asked them how religious they were, and that response seems to have a strong relationship to happiness. The least religious religious people were on average happier than the agnostics but less happy than the atheists. The moderately religious were the least happy of all, but past that point, religious people just get happier the more religious they are. The most religious people were way happier than everybody else.
So hurray for them.
Tagged agnosticism, atheism, happiness, religion Leave a comment
It takes a society to make a cheeseburger
Waldo Jaquith considered making a cheeseburger from scratch. That is, truly from scratch.
I realized that my prior plan hadn’t been ambitious enough—that wasn’t really from scratch. In fact, to make the buns, I’d need to grind my own wheat, collect my own eggs, and make my own butter. And I’d really need to raise the cow myself (or sheep, and make lamb burgers), mine or extract from seawater my own salt, grow my own mustard plant, etc. This past summer, revisiting the idea, I realized yet again that I was insufficiently ambitious. I’d really need to plant and harvest the wheat, raise a cow to produce the milk for the butter, raise another cow to slaughter for its rennet to make the cheese, and personally slaughter and process the cow or sheep.
He concludes that a cheeseburger couldn’t have existed until about a century ago, when our society had developed to the point that it could bring all this stuff together in the same place at the same time.
Tagged cheeseburgers, food, society, waldo jaquith Leave a comment
