This post represents my application to
The Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique.

The Science Scouts are half joke, half alternative to faith-based groups like The Boyscouts. They all generally agree about "The Truth." They also like badges, some of them are funny, others are just plain awesome, and we actually qualify for quite a few! New badges are being released by The Order all the time. If you'd like to apply, simply submit a page like this detailing your qualifications. Below you'll find the badges we've earned and our reasons for their award.

The "talking science" badge

On a near nightly basis, you can count on my wife sitting through more than a few science based discussions. If you are still not convinced, feel free to track down my few remaining friends for conformation.

The "I blog about science" badge

Are you kidding me? Science posts are the very corner-stone of this weblog. Please refer to my Math & Science as well as my Cosmology posts.

The "arts and crafts" badge

Well... I went to art school, and I make robot puppets out of cardboard. I also like to draw images of space and animate them.

The "destroyer of quackery" badge

We all gave a good cheer when "Dr." Kent Hovind was sent up the river.

The "I'm a freaking rock star who sings about science!" badge

Well... rockstar is a bit misleading. We've made rap songs about science.

The "I can be a prick when it comes to science" badge

Don't talk to me about going to Catholic High School. Also, I'm a jerk.

The "I know what a tadpole is" badge

Well, I do.

The "experienced with electrical shock" badge (LEVEL III)

While extracting human hair from a film projector while working as a projectionist at a crappy movie theatre. Entire left arm went numb. Hair was removed, movie continued.

The "I'm into telescopes astro" badge (LEVEL III)

I feel cheap about claiming this one, but it's true. I have seen the rings of Saturn as viewed through the 30-inch reflecting telescope at the Bradley Observatory on the Agness Scott College campus once. It was small but it was A-MAZING.

My buddy (and brother-in-law) Sushisan made an old-school South Park style animated Public Service Announcement for a college project.

It's for SAFER the pro-marijuana advocacy group who promote pot as a safer alternative to tobacco, alcohol, and even caffeine... snaps. (A quick look at their website shows that they aren't anti-alcohol, simply pro-choice) I heard the guys even got contacted by some people from the organization.

You may have met Sushisan while playing Halo 2 online... he was that guy who was an unstoppable killing machine. I played a LAN party at his house with 2 networked Xboxes and about 12 of the dorkiest and most competitive jerk-faces in Michigan. I call them jerkfaces because these guys were soul crushingly good at the game. Once when I held the number one kill count for a brief 10 seconds during a game, they accused me of switching controllers with Sushisan to get points... sheez. And whenever they would sneak up behind you and kill you with a single melee atack to the back of the head they would yell, "Yatzee!!" So... I heard that a lot.

This was hard on me... I've always been the jerk-face playing video games.

20 light years away... Circling a small red dwarf star called Gliese 581 (the star is still 10X the size of our sun: Sol) there sits an Earth-like planet. This planet has a climate similar to Earth's (some cosmologists suspect it ay be MORE friendly to life than our beloved Earth) it has gravity and water. It's got all the right conditions to support life, and it's only 20 light years away. Right now it is designated: Gliese 581c

If we were to transmit a message today to this newly discovered planet on the end of a laser beam traveling the speed of light it would take 20 years for our message to get there. Our message would have traveled 117,492,033,468,146.02 miles. Not that there'd necessarily be anybody there to receive our message. But there might be life...

So Astronomers and Cosmologists have this thing called the Drake Equation. The Drake Equation predicts how probable extra-terrestrial life is in our Universe. It takes into account how many stars *probably* have formed within our Cosmos. (R*) Then the equation narrows that variable down to the stars that may have planets circling them (fp) and is then refined further still to how many of those planets may be capable of supporting life (ne). But we're not done yet... The equation takes into account how much of that life may develop (fl) and then that life developing intelligence (fi), the ability to communicate (fc) and finally... actually be alive long enough to send us a message (L).

It's written like this:

Cosmologists believe there may be billions of planets floating around in our Cosmos, but as of today they have only discovered 220 that exist beyond our solar system. This is due to the mind-blowingly large distances between us and any other planets out there. We're in the sticks, a pale blue dot in a backwater arm of the Milky Way. Although we've been learning sooo much about our Universe in recent years it's still easy to forget how little we really know.

For the Overdroid: Let's Blow up Gliese 581c!!

"Thou shalt not judge a book by it's cover.
Thou shalt not judge "Lethal Weapon" by Danny Glover"

Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip (via metafilter... again)

One of the most famous murals by London's (and arguably the World's) most famous graffiti artist Banksy was recently painted over by Transport for London. Reuters estimates the painting was worth about $500,000.

The Transport for London statement said:
"We recognise that there are those who view Banksy's work as legitimate art, but sadly our graffiti removal teams are staffed by professional cleaners, not professional art critics." (via metafilter)

Seriously sad.

a clip from
Growing Up in the Universe
the 2 Disc DVD produced by
The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science

Our favorite writer Kurt Vonnegut died last night at the age of 84.

God Bless You Mr. Vonnegut. Here is a recording of Vonnegut reading from our second favorite book Slaughterhouse Five. [via wondermark]

so it goes...

Last night we attended the world premiere of Aqua Teen Hunger Force colon Movie Film for Theaters. It was awesome to see everybody from Williams Street, and the film is pretty hilarious. You should go see it.

Here we see Aqua Teen co-creator Dave Willis (who was on our legendary Dodgeball Team "Respek Knuckles") with Aqua Teen voice-over actor Mike Shatz. Mike does the voice of Emory, one of the many bumbling Aliens featured in the movie. As well as guest starring in our cartoon, Mike also performs with me in the improvised Kid's Show we do at Dad's Garage Theatre on saturday mornings.

We were lucky enough to get to go the Unibroue Beer Dinner at The Brickstore Pub. Oh man it was great.

I'm not usually a fan of wheaty beers, and give me a hefe weiss and I'll give you heartburn in 5 seconds flat. Despite this the Unibroue beers were so good even the wheaty ones went down great. And most of them were high gravity Belgian-style.

The dinner was 5 small courses each paired with a specific Unibroue beer.

Braised Shortrib and Garlic Polenta in Unibroue tomato sauce.

This was soooooooo good. The shortribs were MEGA tender! The chef for this Beer Dinner is the new chef at the new Brickstore sister bar the guys are opening. I can't wait to eat there.

Apple announced today that the entire E.M.I. music catalogue (including artists like Fischerspooner, Hot Chip, Kraftwerk, LCD Soundsystem) will be offered DRM free for $1.29 per song.

DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, and if you don't know what it is, you will soon. When you buy a song from iTunes that is DRM encrypted you are limited to the number of uses you have available to you. For instance, a DRM enabled song can only be burned 6 times to a CD. It cannot be copied from your iTunes to anything other than an iPod, and even then it's a huge hassle.

While we're a little bummed out that we need to pay more for DRM free music on iTunes, you can't argue that this is at least a step in the right direction. It used to be that when you bought something, you owned it. Now companies want to "license" to you the "rights" to the object you've bought, some even going to far as to outlaw the re-sale of used DVD's because the "license" doesn't transfer with the physical disc... That's insane! It becomes a maze of rights and ownership where the real loser is the customer.

Many people challenged Steve Jobs to put his money where his mouth was when he said Apple would drop DRMs "in a heartbeat" if the big record companies went for it. Now that E.M.I. is on board, let's see who else steps up.