Just finished watching the BBC series Walking With Dinosaurs.

One major question was raised by the last two episodes: since when have dinosaurs been warm blooded? Back in the 1980's, I can clearly remember this being a hotly debated topic. While it makes sense to me that dinosaurs living in the cold climate of the south pole must have necessarily adapted either warm-blooded and/or hibernation survival strategies, did Robert Bakker manage to win the "Tyrannosaurus is warm-blooded" argument that shows up in the last episode? If he did, I'm sorry that I missed that conference.

Ed. (3.07.05): I've been informed that this was OK. Sorry BBC. I'll do my homework better next time. Of course, if you think about it, endothermy makes all the sense in the world. I wonder why it seemed so strange to me, then.

Just listened to Harry Shearer's "le Show" for the first time. Meh, not very impressed. I much prefer my "gee, isn't the government screwed up" commentary from John Stewart. Shearer seemed to be flinging out cultural softballs. I prefer Comedy Central's curveballs.

Here ends the baseball metaphor. Conclusion: meh.

Oh, and there was no naked. Sorry for the confusion. Turns out I agreed to make potato dumplings. Boy, would that have been embarrassing.

I may be wrong...
I hope I'm wrong...

But I think that, just maybe, I might have kind of promised two friends of mine that I would run around naked in the backyard at midnight. Umm... stay tuned to find out.

Bamberg won the German national basketball championships. There have been cars driving down the street honking their horns for an hour now. I don't expect it to let up at all. Go GHP Bamberg! Shut up, you jerks with your car horns!

The sociology experiment is over. After 5 days, a nice person did finally put my bike back up. Even better, he seemed to do it not out of necessity, but out of consideration. Thanks, Germany! You're swell!

Germany: 1 bike / 5 days = .2

Next, I will expand my research to other countries and continents. I encourage you to calculate the bike/day ratio of your own country.

Sociology Experiment. Day 4.

Several people have taken and/or returned their bicycles today. Still change in bike position, but I'm noticing that not having my bike is incredibly inconvenient for traveling around town. It's 31º outside, and time spent on a rapidly moving open-air vehicle would be appreciated. In contrast, the buses are swealteringly closed-air.

Exhibit 1

Sociology Experiment 1
tags: bike bamberg sociologyproject

For the record:
1) This violates the Policy, but the Policy is (as of now) bunk.
2) I didn't notice the shotgun blast mark on the wall until after I had taken the photo. 10 points to Germany for being more ghetto than my apartment in the States.

Sociology Experiment!

On Friday, my bicycle got knocked over. It being a day On Which I Did Not Want to Go Outside (you know what I'm talking about), I didn't bother to fix this.

My reasoning at the time:
1) I'm not really worried about it
2) I know who did it, and I'm sure it was an accident
3) I expect this person to Right his or her Wrong

#3 has turned out to be a false assumption.

Not only has my bicycle not been turned upright, but all the other bikes that were knocked over at the same time have been righted! Is this some sort of anti-American statement? Is there some weird I'm-not-going-to-clean-my-room-and-you-can't-make-me thing going on here?

Now, I'm the kind of guy who would take the three seconds it would take to right the bike. Especially if I had knocked it over. So what's the deal, Germany?

It's now a sociology experiment. Let's see how long it takes for someone to fix the bike.

Hypothesis: It will remain on the ground until someone needs the bike-parking space for their (upright) bike.

Everybody put on your sociology caps. Here we go!

Deutschland 3, Tunisien 0

Ballack didn't play hard enough, and all three goals came fairly late in the second half. Throughout the first, Tunisia consistently out-handled the ball, stealing possession time and again. If the German national team wants to get past Australia in the next round, they'll have to play a hell of a lot smarter.

I've been accruing self-made PDFs at an incredible rate (I've gone from 0MB to about 50MB in three weeks, and I expect the number to continue growing exponentially), and I need some way to plow through them for useful information.

I don't have Tiger yet, so Spotlight isn't an option. And there's still no word on whether Google will bother porting their search program over to OS X at any point. So, I'm trying out blinkx. Updates to come.

When I read Job's announcement, my jaw hit the floor. This is what I've been hoping for ever since OS X came out. (Hmmm, that must have been, oh, about five years ago...)

Let the pedantic speculation begin about why ASoTV didn't tell us! Could it be that his hints about a movie streaming service over AirPort was a clever red herring?

This is a big shift for the second-largest OS maker in the world; hence, it's probably the biggest news in the last five years. (The Google IPO was only news to Wall Street; clearly, Google Maps was already under development and would have been release with or without the IPO.)

Scenario: Jobs doesn't want to be scooped. So, somebody drops a juicy, but ultimately uninteresing and not-that-earth-shattering tidbit to the geeks over at slashdot. The internet waters boil for a few weeks over whether or not this guy is for real. Meanwhile, backstage....

It makes sense, especially considering all the problems Apple has been having recently.

Honey came in and she caught me red-handed
Creeping with the girl next door

At the Asparagus festival(!), I see a pay-per-ride swing set for the children to play on. The swings are shaped like dragons and unicorns, and the operators pump parents for shiny 2€ coins.

Beneath the stage on which the swings have been erected blares the sweet melody of Shaggy's "It Wasn't Me." Umm... Germany, could we have a brief word?

Picture this, we were both butt naked
Bangin' on the bathroom floor

Some days its really hard to tell whether Europe swallowed the Dada movement whole, whether they are making fun of American pop culture, or whether they just don't get it.

Once again, overly-determined biology versus cultural influences. (printer-friendly)

Ironically, this new 'evidence' just furthers my suspicion that autism is really a socially-constructed phenomenon, rather than a biological disorder or disease. A lot of my German friends can't tell when I'm being sarcastic, but that doesn't mean they're autistic, now does it? No, of course it doesn't; we're peering into a part of our bodies we don't fully understand with methods that we cannot vet. Nothing about this article suggests that we understand why this happens, and whether it's a disorder, a normal variation, or something else entirely.

From Theodore Dalrymple: "Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed)."

Something similar has happened with autism, I believe. Instead of disorderly children in need of extra attention and socialization, these children are ill, need to be put in the care of "experts," and *tada!* require medication. Send in the clowns.

[My apologies to Doug Flutie.]