Dave Schumaker

Happy Tuesday mourning morning!

If only 15 years remain, the odds of frittering them all away still remain high. Congress and the president are now in gridlock; the American system is flooded with corporate money meant to jam up the works; and there is little suggestion that any issues of significance, including our wars, our bloated national security state, our starved education system, and our antiquated energy supplies, will be addressed with sufficient seriousness to assure the sort of soft landing that might maximize our country's role and prosperity in a changing world.

Apparently, I'm on a physics kick as of late.

Artist unknown

[Via Science Punk]

This is a pretty great video, featuring a high speed camera on a train, looking at a passenger platform as it passes by. More info here.

It could be one of the coolest visual examples of special relativity that I've seen!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1xSa7gcYmU

[Via Kottke]

An awesome series of posters, that's what!

[Via Creative Overflow]

Saw this posted a few months ago, but I am finally getting around to reading it now. It's an interesting piece by Slate on how soccer nearly became a popular American sport in the 1920s.

In the 1920s, soccer was big in America. Not big in the way that baseball was big (this was the era of Ruth and Gehrig) or college football was big (these were the days when Ivy League rivalries played out as violent eruptions in the mud), but at its height, the top American soccer league had tens of thousands of fans, featured some of the world’s best players, and looked set to challenge the fledgling NFL in the competition to supply the nation with a post-October pastime.

(via Instapaper)

Yum!

April 11, 1954

April 11, 1954 was the most uneventful and boring day of the 20th century. Every day something of significance occurs, but nothing remarkable had happened on the said day in 1954, according to experts who inserted over 300 million important events of the century into a computer search programme to calculate.

This is kind of amazing. I'd love to see this parsed based on specific dates -- for example, what was the most boring day (according to this algorithm) during my life? I'm sure there are a few dates in high school or college that come to mind.

[Via Daily Dish]

There are some pretty cool designs here!

[Via Evan]

We were supposed to take the Amtrak Coast Starlight train down to Southern California, but it was severely delayed due to bad weather in Oregon and Washington. Changed trains, taking San Joaquin to Bakersfield and then a bus to Los Angeles.

Here we go!

Man, wouldn't it be nice to have a high speed rail system in California?

Sneak attack!

We're 3/4 the way through a bottle of wine when we hear over the intercom, "Remember folks, you're not allowed to drink your own alcohol on the train, or we'll remove you and your alcohol from this train." Crap!

On another note -- the Central Valley is a lot more fun to look at when you aren't driving through it.

It was 4AM. MEEEEOOOOOWWWW! Crash! Thump! Thump thump thump! Boom! MEEOW! Bang! *BOOM*! Crash! Pow!

It's a good thing Tosh and Tegan are so cute. Because I'm not too happy with them waking up the whole neighborhood every night. When I see them curled up like this, I almost feel bad for considering giving them away. Or shooting them with a NERF gun.