AN extraordinary account from a German army medic has finally confirmed what the world long suspected: Hitler only had one ball.

Link

I was on the fence, but a few of my RL friends are picking it up so I figured I might as well.

Much like every other OpenSource program I’ve downloaded or started using in the last year (since getting my new computer), I’m finding that Rockbox has all the functionality of the programming that it replaces and then a whole lot more on top of that.

If anyone has an MP3 player and is looking for a replacement firmware, I highly recommend Rockbox.  It has supported firmwares for over a dozen different players, including iPod.  To be fair, it isn’t nearly as cool as the iTouch or iPhone, but it is still pretty cool.  I mean, I can play Doom! on my MP3 player.

Also - the Sansa firmware can only handle a 2GB MicroSD card, but Rockbox can support up to 16GB (at least - that’s all I’ve seen tested so far).

All that to say - I fixed my MP3 player and I can now not bitch and moan about the crappy programming that came native with the Sansa.

Link

Jurassic Park? Still not close to being real.

But cloned woolly mammoths just became more possible, thanks to Japanese researchers who announced Monday that they’d cloned dead mice that had been frozen for 16 years.

When animal tissue freezes, cell walls burst and the DNA inside the cell nuclei can be seriously damaged. Because of that, most scientists had assumed it’d be impossible to get any good DNA from the thousands of frozen mammoths thought to still lie in Siberian permafrost.

The Japanese team figured, however, that the high concentration of sugar in brain tissue might preserve DNA. So they ground up frozen mice brains, found some useful DNA and put it into unfertilized live mouse eggs.

The resulting embryos were used to create stem cells, which in turn made more embryos. At the end, 13 mice were born.

Cloning mammoths would probably be tougher, since the temperatures of the frozen carcasses have fluctuated a lot over tens of thousands of years. If good DNA could be found, donor eggs could be used from Asian elephants, close relatives of mammoths. (African elephants are more distantly related.)

“It would be very difficult, but our work suggests that it is no longer science fiction,” team leader Teruhiko Wakayama of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, told New Scientist magazine.

I think this would be kind of cool.

The baby’s room used to be my office, so we had to move my desk into my bedroom.  I’m pleasantly surprised by how well my desk fit after some rearranging and how well my game collection fits on the shelf we picked up at a garage sale a couple months back for this purpose.

Now, this seems to be complete rumor with no evidence, possibly brought on by the recent demise of WizKids.

I bring this up more as a thought exercise, could Wizards be shut down or enveloped under the larger Hasbro umbrella?

My comp decided to die on me a few months back, and after I finally got it fixed, a number of interesting events have occured. From me getting married to a promotion at work to partner and various other things, I’ve been busy.

Anyway, I guess the point is, I’m back!

[youtube]psIxlKyjQeg[/youtube]

I watched this game live (on TV) and I still couldn’t believe it. Never in NBA history has two teams scored a combined 8 points in 1.9 seconds, nor has a Blazer ever scored 5 points in 1.9 seconds. Portland has had a really rocky start to the season this year with Oden getting injured again. This win was a huge morale booster.

And I went from an autumn desert weather (which was around mid to high 90s) to a foot plus of snow.... Thank God for Fort Drum weather!

Lastly, I would like to call the attention to those of my brethren who have shed their blood for their country.

SSG John Linde- Killed in Action
SSG Carletta “Doc” Davis- Killed in Action
SGT Derek Stenroos- Killed in Action
PFC Adam Muller- Killed in Action

SGT Jason Booker- Shot by Sniper (doing great by the way).

Thank you.

This isn’t a thread about the parties. They’ve been around for over a hundred years and have been building their platforms for decades.

This isn’t a thread about our positions or policies or hopes for Election Day in the US, save one:

I voted. Have you?

That’s the essence of America. We get a say. Mine came last week during pseudo-early voting. New Jersey has a no-excuses absentee ballot, and this year, the county I’m currently living in has been trying to get out the vote. So last week, I took a ride over to the Voorhees Town Center (a recently-renamed shopping mall) to the Camden County Store. I got there right as the mall opened at 10:00, and was already in the back of a line of at least 30 people wanting to vote early. It was a two-step process: we had to fill out an absentee-ballot application, then wait for the clerks to call out our names and process our applications before we could fill out (and mail) our absentee ballots (Camden County was even good enough to pick up postage).

While I was waiting in line, I sat next to an older gentleman named Joseph. Joseph was in his seventies and was grinning ear-to-ear. He leaned over and asked me if I could make sure to keep an ear out for when they called his name, because he couldn’t hear so well over the growing-crowd. Indeed, by the time we had each finished our applications, there were over 60 people in and out front of the Camden County Store in line to vote. I told him I’d do just that, and we got to talking. Joseph lives a little less than a mile from where I go to school, and he was glad that “kids are voting”. I asked him what he thought of the early voting (even New Jersey’s somewhat round-about method), and his reply was unequivocal. “This is the greatest idea they’ve ever had.” He wants 100% voter turnout every year, and any steps we can take towards that, well, that’s what Joseph wants. Joseph never misses an election. He said he doesn’t want people in Washington and Trenton to forget who they work for.

By the time that Joseph and I were called in to get our absentee ballots to vote, there were probably almost 100 who had either voted or were in line to vote at the Camden County Store. Lots of elderly, plenty of guys in their full Phils regalia (this was Monday, before they’d clinched the World Series). We shook hands after we’d finished and put out ballots in the mailbox in the store, then went our separate ways. I had to cut through Macy’s to get back to my car, then get back to school for my next class.

I’m not going to hold a mini-rally here and tell you how to vote or why I voted the way I did. I have my reasons, and you have yours. DA’s a non-political site, so those sorts of posts don’t belong here.

Consider this just a reminder to get out there and vote. The lines are probably going to be long, almost without precedent. But it’s worth it.

Take it from Joseph: “Everyone should vote.”

I have. How about you?