TDNCY

I was waiting for my pickup at the Tampa Int’l Airport on Sunday following an academic conference when I realized that there are really a lot of smart people in the world. But, while I waited longer and longer at the airport, I realized, there are some situations that have a tendency to subtract 100 IQ points from these masses of smart people.
Here is a short list of things that I’ve realized that make Smart People Stupid.

#1) Baggage Claim – My bag is on a circular conveyor belt. If I miss it, I HAVE to trample 4 children, 2 grandparents, 3 dogs, and a professional boxer to grab it. MY BAG WILL NOT COME  BACK AROUND. What you don’t know is that there is an incinerator at the end of the conveyor and if you don’t grab your bag at first pass, it will be burned. Evidently smart people know this and act accordingly.

#2) Connecting a computer to an external display – Any kind of display: an LCD, a bigger monitor, etc. I’ve seen more people screw this up before, during, and after very academic presentations than I can count on 10 hands.

#3) Parallel parking – There is absolutely no reason why a smart person should not be able to parallel park. It’s very simple geometry. You put the rear end in, you follow with the front. Really, it’s just that easy.  Actually, I think I could say this about any part of driving.  Smart people suck at driving.

#4) Queuing to Board an Airplane and Deplaning – Okay smart people… you fly a lot.  People need you in places other than where you live. They need you because you’re smart.  Just so you know, for future reference, There’s a seat # on your boarding pass.  This is in reference to where you’re going to sit on the plane.  The nice lady is going to tell you what rows are boarding when over the loudspeaker. All you have to do is match that # to the range of numbers that she reads off.  Really simple. See!  Oh, and when it comes to getting off the plane, don’t be an asshole and try to run ahead of everyone else.  The door is closed. You’re not going ANYWHERE.

#5) Common Sense – Smart people suck at common sense.  I believe that this is where the term irony originated.  I can ask Professor Smith how to find the limit of the space time continuum and the true arithmetic center of a blackhole, but can this man change his oil? How about build a home? Yea, probably not.  The world needs ditch diggers too.

#6) Saving money/finanaces – There are more MDs with crappy credit than any other group of people I’ve ever seen.  Why does being smart make you fiscally irresponsible? Is it becuase you understand what you’re missing and spend irresponsibly? I don’t get it.  Crappy credit, it’s not just for dumb people anymore.

I’m sure there’s a lot of them here that I’m missing and I’ll add more as I think of them.

I’ll let you be the judge

EDIT-Ok, it occurs to me that this might not be the most SFW picture on the net, so i’ll let you decide for yourself. With new window goodness

Click it up, bitches

While i’m at it – this IS the most SFW pic on the net:

A year has passed since HD-DVD was given its fatal blow by Sony and the rest of the Blu-Ray consortium.  I hopped on the HD bandwagon in the Fall of ’07 when I purchased the HD-DVD add-on for the XBOX 360.  While not as robust as a dedicated player, it was much cheaper and it came with King Kong, the first season of Heroes, and five free movies by mail to sweeten the deal.  After Toshiba bowed out, I pulled the trigger on a PS3 so I can have access to Blu-Ray (BD) media and games that I couldn’t play on the 360.

Sony stormed the market with the original PlayStation, and dominated with the PlayStation 2.  However, the PS3 is shaping up to be a bust by comparison.  A year ago, a $400 PS3 bought you a fantastic upscaling DVD player, the most advanced and updatable Blu-Ray player, and game console that was starting to come into it’s own.  Sony has yet to drop the price on the console, and is rumored to still be selling it at a loss.  Microsoft dropped the price of the 360 and it sold like crazy during the holiday season, while sales of the PS3 dropped nearly 10% over last year?  What is the difference?  

Cost is a major determining factor.  A year ago, BD players were still over $500 and the cost was not coming down very quickly.  Now, you can get a brand name player for under $200, which makes the PS3 a much less attractive option at twice the price.  Secondly, there are very few exclusive AAA titles that are worth playing.  Uncharted was somewhat fun, but the end of the game was frustrating as hell, and I just plain gave up on it.  The paid demo of Gran Turismo 5 is VERY underwhelming.  Little Big Planet is innovative, but it just lacks something.  The PS3 has no standardization of online play, which Microsoft excels at.  The Playstation store is clunky and has had a number of redesigns.  Overall, there are a lot of aspects that are good about the PS3 experience, but nothing great aside from movie playback.

With the Wii STILL flying off the shelf, and the 360 selling strong, it is clear that Sony’s approach of using crazy new hardware (the Cell) that is hard to program on has failed miserably compared to the ease of development on the Wii and 360.  Microsoft and Nintendo both set out to make their consoles easier to develop for this round, and Sony did whatever they wanted because they thought they owned the marked and the developers would always support them.  Arrogance has put Sony in a position where Atari, Sega, and not so long ago, Nintendo have found themselves in the past.  And we all know what happened to the first two companies…

BSOD represents the Windows Server from OSX

I was getting ready to connect to the Windows server today from my new iMac. I was trying to remember how to make a quick connect icon on my desktop and ventured into “Get Info” for the server to see what it could offer me. Notice the image on the screen of the monitor in the “preview image” of the windows server.  That’s right, that’s a BSOD, or the dreaded Blue Screen of Death you get when windows experiences a failure of epic proportions.  It appears someone at Apple has a sense of humor.

Alright time’s up let’s do this, “LEEEEEROOOOOOOOY JJJJJJEEEEEEEENNNNNNNNKINS!”

But THIS (new window) actually made me a little horny…

“Super Speed USB 3.0 Unleashed”

 MIT Student Perry Hung over at Separate Realities has created this visualization of the Linux boot sequence. He wrote the following about it on his site:

This is a visualization I made for funsies of a linux boot sequence where each function is a node and each edge represents a function call, direct branch, or indirect branch. Nodes are laid out using an unweighted force-directed layout algorithm, where each node is simulated as if it were electrically repulsive and had springs between nodes.

The little “lobe” on the left is made up the interrupt processing routines (irq vectors, irq_svc, etc). The tail at the top is the bootloader. The main thing in the middle is the linux boot sequence.

The entire graph represents a call chain from the bootloader up until it jumps into userspace to a shell prompt…

And here is the Vista bootup sequence visualization which I found sent to Tech Source from Bohol from a user named Jason over at Junauza: