I'm not an artist

Posted by Johnny at 8:37 a.m.

Here's a comparison between a work of "art" I've produced in Microsoft Paint and one produced by an actual artist using the same exact software. Yes, that primitive, pixel-pushing paint program that comes with every copy of Windows in the world.

See if you can figure out who painted which picture.

Picture 1

Picture 2

Here's the link containing the real art.

Dare: Watch this and not cringe

Posted by Johnny at 3:00 p.m.

I challenge you. Don't worry, it's safe for work.

BOOM GOES THE DYNAMITE!

Scott Adams on Atheism

Posted by Johnny at 8:51 a.m.

I'm going to pillage an entire blog post from Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert), describing the recent elevation in status of atheists amongst Christians in the US. He also thinks Bill Gates, an atheist, should run for president. The post is entitled, "Atheists: The New Gays":

Is it my imagination or have the atheists come out of the closet (in the United States) since 9/11?

Prior to 9/11, it would have been career suicide for a public figure to come right out and say God is a fairy tale. Now it’s a feature of popular culture. You can see it on cable of course, in shows such as BullSh*t, Real Time, The Daily Show, and Southpark. But it’s also a feature of network TV. The main character on House is written as the most brilliant human on the planet, and he’s an atheist. The new show 3lbs has a similar character. I can’t remember anything like that ten years ago.

Famous atheist Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion is #5 on Amazon.com. Sam Harris is right up there with his books The End of Faith and Letters to a Christian Nation. They aren’t selling in numbers anywhere approaching the top religious books, but they are best sellers. When was the last time two books promoting atheism were best sellers at about the same time?

I think the hidden benefit of Islamic extremism is that it freed the atheists from their closets. The old mindset in the United States was that almost any religion was good, and atheism was bad. But since 9/11, atheism has moved above Islam in the rankings, at least in the minds of Christians and Jews in the United States.

Ask a deeply religious Christian if he’d rather live next to a bearded Muslim that may or may not be plotting a terror attack, or an atheist that may or may not show him how to set up a wireless network in his house. On the scale of prejudice, atheists don’t seem so bad lately.

I think that in an election cycle or two you will see an atheist business leader emerge as a legitimate candidate for president. And his name will be Bill Gates.

By then, Bill Gates will have done so much good for the world through his charitable works that combined with his business success he’ll appear more qualified than any other candidate. His early bachelor life and some of his business practices will come back to haunt him if he runs, but he can still win with this simple slogan: “Who would you rather have on your side?” He’ll confess to all of his past imperfections and say that presidents are poor choices for role models. He’ll advise you to look to your parents for role models while you let him run the country.

I doubt Bill Gates is considering a run for president right now, largely because it’s so hard to make a difference from that job. His charities will have more impact. But I think he’ll someday realize that the world needs a rational thinker in the top spot and no one else can win.

At least you’d know he wouldn’t be in it for the money or to speed up the Rapture. He has my vote.

Here's a quote I laughed at: "God is still up there," on global warming.

One more thing: http://how-to-spell-ridiculous.com/

Something Completely Different

Posted by Reid at 1:11 p.m.

In my last year of my program at the University of Alberta, I have had the opportunity to participate in some pretty cool things. One of the coolest was a surgery on a rat. I'm taking this space up on the blog to explain the procedure and show some pictures.

[A note from Johnny: If you're squeamish like I am, be warned. Otherwise, enjoy the rat pictures.]

The rat was anaesthetised with a ketamine anaesthetic. For those of you up on street drugs, that's Special K which has a similar mechanism to PCP/Angel Dust (NMDA-receptor drugs). These drugs are dissociative anaeasthetics, allowing the rat to be dissociate from the pain even if it wakes up mid surgery. It's a good thing, because my rat did wake up a bit mid surgery. His head snapped up while digging around the nerves in his neck. No need for me to explain in words, I have pictures.



Rat = 500g. Note the urine escaping his bladder onto the hot water bottle. Under anaesthetic the rat will loose control of it's bladder and constantly leaks. He's on a hot water bottle and under a heat lamp because of his inability to regulate his body temperature. Well, let's cut him open.
And yes, he is still alive. I need his heart to pump to run the tests.







A nice little incision removes the epithelium. This was done with regular scissors. Nothing too spectacular here. Almost no bleeding, just a bunch of tissue. Now to find the carotid artery.











It's a bit of a dig but sure enough you find a large tube like tissue. Beneath it lies the trachea and carotid, so off we go.











Opened up, you can easily see the rat's trachea. The carotid is just in behind it, so using tweezers you pull up to front as shown in the next picture.









It's tough to tell, but there is a nerve attached to the carotid. This makes the vessel less flexible and nearly impossible to work with. It took two of use to remove the nerve from the vessel.











Use some ties to keep the artery pulled forward and accessible. But knotting tightly on the distal (left) side of the vessel, the vessel swells so we can see it with a bit more ease.










Time to cut. Take some scissors, find the vessel, cut it about half way through and hope for the best. If that clamp isn't on correctly blood goes everywhere, so you hope for the best and cut away.









Success! Now to run a tube into the artery to measure the blood pressure and heart rate. It's a lot harder to do that I would have thought. It probably took longer than the rest of the surgery.








Tie the tube down, flush with heparin to remove any clots and viola! Cannula #1 done. Next is the jugular.












So I skipped a bunch of steps and just went to the tie down of the jugular. It looks sexy, no?

This tube will carry drug directly in to the rat's heart. The experiment called for acetylcholine and atropine to determine the effects on blood pressure and heart rate. The rat lived until the end of the surgery when he was injected with euthenol. It killed the rat within 5 seconds. The other method would be to take scissors and cut its chest cavity open and toss it in the garbage.

All in all, it was a great learning experience and it showed the difficulty of in vivo experiments.

To the anonymous who loves Johnny, just tell him face to face. I am pretty sure it will drive him crazy...unless of course you are a male, in which case you can keep it your little secret.

This oughta hold you

Posted by Johnny at 12:56 a.m.

Ok, this is not going to be a great post. I know several readers have demanded new content, but that's going to have to wait briefly (Reid, you can't demand new content when you haven't delivered in more than a month.)

I figured out who random_handle is (check the comments on this post), and as it turns out, he's an old friend of mine from throughout our pre-post-secondary education days. I have great respect for his opinions, mostly because he knows more than me about almost everything. So when I barf my leftist social commentary onto this blog, I will look forward to his debunking of my "facts".

If I can find the video for a project we did in grade 11 social studies, I'll rip it and post the good parts on this blog. Oh who am I kidding, the whole thing is going up - it's gold. As a group we spent > 30 hours working on 7 minutes of footage. It earned us 100%, however, the awkward genius in the class (we'll call him Bryan J.) hacked something together in 5 minutes that was hilarious in a different way and earned nearly the same grade. My hat was off to him for that, since I respect the least effort, maximal result approach to school. I wonder what he's doing now...

Kristen = Awesome

Posted by Johnny at 11:13 p.m.

This is in response to the only comment left on my last post, which was Kristen demanding that I write a new post.

Proof that Kristen is Awesome
by Johnny

There are people in this world who make you think to yourself, "Wow, he or she is cool." These cool people are, however, few and far between, as most people you meet leave you scratching your head and thinking, "Wow, he or she is a complete idiot." If you unite the cool group with the idiot group and subtract that union from the population of the world, you are left with a very, very small set of people: the Awesome Group. Right now, this group only contains Kristen, and I can prove it.

The proof is actually quite simple. We begin by outlining our basic assumptions. First, we assume that the three groups previously described (cool, idiot, and Awesome) are mutually exclusive. That is to say, a person Johnny cannot be both cool and an idiot, nor can he be cool and Awesome, etc. He definitely can't be all three. You might argue that being Awesome implies that you are cool, but this is not the case. Awesome is so far above cool that if you were to call an Awesome person cool, it would (and should) be taken with great insult.

So we've established that the three groups are mutually exclusive. This is lemma 1. Our second assumption is that no person can belong to a group that doesn't exist, and therefore can only belong to one of the three groups. This is lemma 2. These two lemmas are all we need to prove that Kristen is Awesome.

On to the proof. We will do this in two ways, the first being contradiction. Let's first assume that Kristen is not awesome. By lemma 1, this means that Kristen is either cool or an idiot. Since she is the inventor of the Sexy Kangaroo costume, however, she is neither cool nor an idiot, which contradicts lemma 1. And by lemma 2, she can only belong to one of the three groups, and therefore must be Awesome. QED.

If that wasn't convincing enough, our final proof will be a straight proof and will be simpler than the previous one. For this we must consider her review of the Great Gatsby. In the review, she described how she missed the point of the story and thought it was going to be deep. She also said, "I'm probably going to get some comment from someone explaining to me why I am a complete idiot...," however, no one commented to explain why she was an idiot and thus is not an idiot. The fact that she actually read a book proves that she is also not cool. Therefore, by lemma 1 and lemma 2, she is not cool, nor an idiot and must be Awesome. QED.

I have a bonus proof to offer, which is another straight proof. As I write this proof, Kristen is staying up, waiting for me to publish the post. This establishes that she is not cool, because she is staying up late, waiting for me to publish a lame blog post. But it also proves that she is not an idiot, because anyone who reads my blog cannot be an idiot (this is lemma 3, or something.. who cares). By lemmas 1, 2, and 3(ish), we conclude that Kristen is therefore Awesome since she is not cool nor an idiot. QED.

These proofs, as contrived and unmathematical as they were, were oversimplified and somewhat trite. If you really want proof of the Awesome that is Kristen, you should hang out with us while we invent something Awesome, like electric bowling, or the genetically engineered Dove-Owl crossbreed (the Dowl). Or, perhaps the best proof lies in Kristen's standard response to a question about her motives: "Because I'm Awesome." QED.

Men Dressing Themselves - now in flowchart form!

Posted by Johnny at 8:14 a.m.

From here.

New words whose creation I've been around for

Posted by Johnny at 4:45 p.m.

I invented the word "mottie" today, and realized that I'm sitting on a small lexicon that might do service to others when they're looking for the perfect word to describe something. Here's a partial list (note that some of these are new uses for existing words):

• bring-a-ling (vb.) — Bring.
• executive decision (n.) — The act of using a restroom. (ie: I have to make an executive decision.)
• exfiltrate (vb.) — To exit an establishment in a stealthy or militarily forceful manner.
• jazz (vb.) — To play jazz music. (ie: I'm jazzing tomorrow night at the Beat Niq.)
• johnny (n.) — The act of requesting a date from a member of the opposite sex who is involved in a serious relationship, usually an engagement, due to either stupidity or lack of observation. (ie: I just pulled a johnny on that chick.)
• loserpissed (adj.) — A state of intoxication achieved with less-than-typical effort.
• molish (vb.) — The opposite of demolish. To create something.
• mottie (n.) — A moderately hottie. One who is moderately hot.
• snooker (vb.) — To accurately hit a man's groin, resulting in pain.
• stroy (vb.) — The opposite of destroy. To create something.
  
• teamsmanship (n.) — Conduct and attitude considered as befitting a member of a team.
• tom (n.) — The act of driving through a yellow light as it turns red without altering the speed of the vehicle from the moment the yellow light was observed. (ie: I just pulled a tom.)
• train (vb.) — To ride public transit. (ie: Are you training in the morning?)

If you have any words that you think should be added to our vernacular, leave them in the comments.

Let's hope that I'm wrong

Posted by Johnny at 8:43 a.m.

In case you live under a rock or are stranded on a tropical island in the Pacific, I feel I should inform you that the 2006 US midterm elections are today. The entire world is watching and crossing their fingers for the Democrats to take back the House and the Senate, but the Republicans won't let go without a fight. I should also inform you that the first couple paragraphs of this post will be a rant, followed by some predictions.

Commence the rant.

This has been a bad year for the Republicans, namely because most of them are complete idiots with ethical and moral values that predate the enlightenment. Just go and watch Borat to see how actual Republican voters think, if you can call it thinking. Don't get me wrong, everyone is entitled to an opinion, and I'm certainly not one to rule out economic conservatism, but this is 2006. We don't need to make gay people the new black people - they deserve the same rights and freedoms as straight people, such as marriage. We also don't need to dispose of 500,000 frozen embryos because some Christians believe it will make Jesus cry. You know what might make Jesus actually cry? Not searching for cures to currently incurable diseases and letting millions of real people die.

Since religion keeps trying to slip it into the governmental orifice like a jacked-up frat boy on a passed-out sorority girl, we have to be ever vigilant about who handles our drinks. Ok, that simile was a little over the top, but you get the idea. Even though we aren't Americans, we elected a prime minister who could be the Milhouse to America's Bart. I realize that Canada was mad at the Liberals for scandalously spending money to keep Quebec a part of our wonderful country, but did we really need to do a complete 180? I suppose in Canadian terms, 180 is more like an 18, but it's still a big change. I would be more pissed off about Harper being in office, but I just don't care that much. He'll do something to screw it up, then Eastern Canada will get its brain back and vote in somebody more moderate who wasn't involved in any scandals or any previous Liberal administrations (Michael Ignatieff, anyone?).

Thus concludes the rant.

Speaking of voting, as I mentioned previously, the midterm elections in the US are tonight and the Republicans could cheat in many ways to retain their control. Here are just a few of them:

• The National Republican Congressional Committee could pay to annoy the shit out of potential Democrats by repeatedly robo-calling their houses with messages that appear to be from their local Democratic candidates.
• Black Republican candidates could send flyers around that falsely label them as Democrats in order to trick the less-informed into voting Republican.
• The Republicans could exploit (or possibly even rig) the needlessly complicated and terribly buggy electronic voting machines that falsely register Democratic votes as Republican votes.
• Republicans could capitalize on John Kerry's idiotic attempt at a joke and make it sound like he, a decorated veteran, has contempt for US troops. John, why did you have to speak?
• Giving a nod to Sideshow Bob, the Republicans could capitalize on the "dead vote." Note that this is the only item on the list that they probably haven't done yet, since Republicans are incapable of experiencing fun and thus don't watch old episodes of The Simpsons.
  

With all the methods I've listed (and especially those tucked inside Karl Rove's horn-covered head), I don't see any way the Democrats stand a chance. Actually, I firmly believe the Dems are going to lose, but it won't be due to the fraud that will undoubtedly take place.

I think they are going to lose because > 50% of Americans still live in the 1800s.

This is unrelated

Have Sex, Live Longer

Posted by Johnny at 2:49 p.m.

This article published in the British Medical Journal presents findings indicating that men who have a high frequency of orgasm hold a 50% lower chance of death from coronary heart disease than those who have a low frequency of orgasm. In addition to the findings presented in this article, I've outlined my "research" "findings" on this subject below:

• Women who have regular sex will live longer. This is because the men they are having sex with won't be dying soon, which reduces their fear of not being able to have regular sex and thus extends their life.
  
• Men who have regular sex will be happier than those who don't. Take it from me - I'm not having regular sex (regular = any) and I'm a miserable son of a bitch. Therefore, the key to happiness is abstaining from abstinence.
• Women who have regular sex will be less bitchy. This is a known fact and is good for everyone.
• Men who have regular sex care less about things that aren't sex, and will be easier to coerce into doing girly things. This is good for women, and the men won't notice.

Conclusion: Fuck, I need to get laid. Come on women, these findings speak for themselves and all point to you having sex with me because I'm available. If, for some strange reason, I'm not available, I'm pretty sure my friends Reid and Kevin are both available. Brett is too, but he lives in Texas. But since this is my post, you have to prioritize me over these other guys.