Editorial & Opinion
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »You Look Like A Million Dollars, But What Does A Trillion Look like?
[ 3 Comments ]Posted on March 7, 2009 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Saturday, March 7th, 2009Putting Things In Perspective
 Yeah, you look like a million dollars, but this is a hundred million… |
All the casual conversation about trillion-dollar budget issues lately reminded me of how poorly most of us understand numbers as they relate to reality. For instance, ask a person how far away the moon is: 24,000 miles? 240,000 miles? 24,000,000 miles? Don’t feel badly if you don’t know yourself. To put things in perspective on that scale though: if the sun were a beach ball about 2 feet in diameter, the Earth would be a pea 215 feet away (about a small city block), and the nearest star would be about 11,000 miles away. To put a trillion in perspective, the MegaPenny Project uses an image of a trillion pennies next to some familiar architecture. If you’d rather see examples using hundred-dollar bills, see this PageTutor.com page which utilizes Google Sketchup. Another way to look at things is to ponder what you could buy with large sums of money. For instance, WhatWarCosts.com tells us that with their estimate of $323 Billion spent on the war, you could hire 577,648 teachers for 12 years, or bribe every member of Congress 6,037 times. Which, on reflection, has probably in fact happened over the last couple of years. There are hundreds, if not thousands of sites out there with examples like this; one of my favorites is that with a trillion dollars we could pave the entire U.S. interstate highway system with 23.5-karat gold leaf. If you’re tired of bailed out bankers having all the fun, and you’d like to try spending trillions of dollars yourself, try The Three Trillion Dollar Shopping Spree. And if you missed it when you were a kid, check out the classic kid’s book How Much Is a Million
Laughing Your Axis Off
[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 3, 2009 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009A Collection of Humorous Graphs & Charts
Looking at yesterday’s Dow Jones chart probably didn’t make too many people happy, which is why I thought it might be nice to take a look at graphs and charts that WILL make you happy. A classic in this medium is the Percentage of Chart Which Resembles Pac-Man chart. Ingeniously recursive. For some reason, music-related themes are particularly popular; GraphJam has so many submissions in this category that it’s hard to find the actually funny ones. No worries, there are plenty of collections elsewhere, like this collection of humorous musical graphs (which somehow managed to omit a couple of important ones like Jay-Z’s 99 Problems and Classification of Young American Females According to Brian Wilson). As you might guess, the tech industry is also partial to this kind of goofing off, so we have collections like A Completely Unscientific (Yet Accurate) Look at Social Sites. And crappy graphs are such a familiar element of doing business that there’s even an online Crappy Graph Builder available to punch up your mind-numbingly dull PowerPoint presentation. No need to get all fancy and technical though, in the clip featured here, comedian Demetri Martin should have you laughing out loud with only an easel, a large sketchpad, and a some simple hand-drawn graphs. View video full size here if you prefer. Read the rest of this entry »
Scientists Discover Purpose Of Internet
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on February 27, 2009 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Friday, February 27th, 2009As You Suspected, It’s For Wasting Time Between Actually Doing Things
It’s been pretty well-established that the primary purpose of the Internet is to waste time between actually doing things. So today, we’re here to help you out with that. Sort of taking things to new heights of purposelessness, we have the on line Soft Drink Generator, brought to you by the same people that brought you the Church Sign Generator, among other things. With an amazing variety of options, you can easily waste an hour creating the perfect personalized product, which you can then order as a refrigerator magnet or other useless object, and pay an insanely high price for it, with money you don’t have. If you want to waste time for FREE, Facebook is the probably the latest “best of breed” site for time-wasting. If you’re a Facebook user, and like me, prefer to use the status box for entertainment rather than actual personal updates that no-one cares about, telling everyone how crappy you feel today, you may occasionally run into a wall when trying to come up with a clever post. Not to worry! Without looking very hard, I found several “Facebook Status Generators” right away, the best probably being Generatus.com, which lets you customize gender and pre-filter words (it would at least be fun to find out your supposedly upbeat and witty friend is using one of these!). And back to reality: if you actually have a job, and if it happens to involve generating headlines or taglines for real media or products, you might find The Advertising Slogan Generator handy. Where else would I have found useful taglines like “Choosy Mothers Choose Ian” or “Men Can’t Help Acting On Ian” or “Promise Her Anything, But Give Her Dissociated Press“. And if we haven’t helped you waste enough time yet, you really should just follow our Monday De-Motivators. Or suggest a time-waster in the comments, if you know of a good one. Happy time-wasting!
Bernie Madoff “Smash Me Bernie” Doll
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 18, 2009 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009It’s the latest in Piñatas
You know times are bad when Donald Trump files for bankruptcy and Warren Buffet loses 25% of his fortune in a single quarter. And to add to our woes, the banks we bailed out are lobbying against us, the war that bled us dry was making U.S. Military officers rich, and there are more stories than I care to link to about all the other ways that bankers have enjoyed the high life while we lose jobs, homes, and hopes. So where can a person turn to express some of the anger and frustration? Why, a Smash Me Bernie Madoff doll, of course. In their words, “This wonderful action figure capturing Bernie in the ‘I am about to stick this poker right up your ass and take the spare change out of your pockets’ position can be yours for just $99.95” You might want to order a few, because for a while they’re offering the doll with a limited edition hammer to smash it with. The only hope we have otherwise is that since Greenspan’s been so wrong in the past, his proclamation that the recession will surely be the longest and deepest since the 1930′s is dead wrong as well.
Monday Demotivators: The Presidents Day Edition
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 16, 2009 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Monday, February 16th, 2009Funny, he looks remarkably like his prehistoric ancestors. Although all you bankers out there have the day off anyway and don’t deserve any Monday Demotivators, we’re sticking to our tradition of doing our best to make you waste time and be late for work on Monday morning. Why DO they call it President’s Day, anyway? [...]
 Funny, he looks remarkably like his prehistoric ancestors. |
Although all you bankers out there have the day off anyway and don’t deserve any Monday Demotivators, we’re sticking to our tradition of doing our best to make you waste time and be late for work on Monday morning. Why DO they call it President’s Day, anyway? It should be called “No Banking For You ‘Cuz All The Lazy-ass Bankers Have The Day Off Day” or something. Anyway, in keeping with the holiday theme, let’s rob a bank. Although robbing a real one might be fun, let’s stick to pretend bank robbing with The Bank Robber, which took so long to load and had so many instructions that I didn’t actually try it. Let me know how that worked out for you, it looks pretty clever. For the more brain-dead (like me) here’s a simple shoot ‘em up bank robber game. You just, well…shoot ‘em up. On a presidential note, you could always revisit the glory days of Bush Shoe Tossing , or de-evolve ex-President (man I like the sound of that) Bush with Darwin’s Devolve Me. And for some completely unrelated random fun, try Shopping Cart Hero. Yeah, downhill shopping carting is all fine and dandy until someone LOSES AN EYE or something. And lastly, in what seems to be common theme with Flash games, shoot some cute, helpless Roly-Polies with a cannon.