106 billion snowflakes

Chuck Palahniuk may have been a bit of a nihilistic fatalist when penning this line in Fight Club.

You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.

But he’s right. In a way.

Have you ever wondered how many people have ever lived on earth?

I have.

The modeling here is interesting. And here’s an infographic from Flickr that seems to be based on the same research.

This means, as the Whitlams famously suggested, that if someone is one in a million there aren’t just five more in New South Wales – there are in fact 106,000 people just like them who have lived throughout history.

Flags of our forefathers

If you took the 200 biggest countries in the world and weighted them by population and laid their flags on top of each other with those weightings determining the opacity of each layer you would end up with a flag like this.

We know this because these guys decided to create a new global country – a one world government of sorts… look out conspiracy theorists.

Journalism and literal blowholes

The exploding whale video is one of my favourite YouTube videos of all time – and is in fact one of the most popular ever uploaded.

The journalist who reported the story in 1970 has now written a book about the story.

“We’re hearing this noise around us and we realize it is pieces of whale blubber hitting the ground around us (from) 1,000 yards away. A piece of blubber the size of a fingernail could kill you if it hit you in the right part of the head, so we ran away from the blast scene, down the dune and toward the parking lot. Then we heard a second explosion ahead of us, and we just kept going until we saw what it was: A car had been hit by this coffee-table-size piece of blubber and had its windows flattened all the way down to the seats.”

Now he’s pigeon-holed as the whale guy.

Linnman, now a reporter and morning host for KEX Newsradio 1190 AM in Portland, said not a day goes by that someone doesn’t mention or reference the story to him.

He has learned to accept his fame and people’s undying interest in the bizarre story by writing a book, “The Exploding Whale and Other Remarkable Stories From the Evening News,” featuring detailed accounts of his day on the beach along with some of his favorite feature stories from his career.

Remote controlled ball makes bowling slightly more palatable

I hate ten pin bowling. Fairly passionately. It’s a crappy game. Mostly because I’m terrible at it. Gutter ball after gutter ball. Maybe I should invest the $1,500 that one of these remote controlled balls costs.

Bulletin Bored

A while back I wrote about how church announcements can be really boring. Here’s one church’s attempt to alleviate the announcement induced slumber.

I can’t decide whether or not this is funny or stupid.

Cardboard cut out Transformers

These cardboard box Transformers costumes will not effectively disguise you as a robot. But they’re cool.

How to get in the news

You’ve no doubt spent years trying to fake a news clipping to give your bizarre scar a fitting explanation.

Well. Here you go. A press clipping generator.

Look at meme – Autotune

The Know Your Meme Team recruited Weird Al to explain the Autotune trend taking the world wide web by storm.

Best of YouTube

How well do you know your YouTube hits? Here are 100 in four minutes.

Get elfed

Elf Yourself is a cool viral Christmas greeting card generator. You should check it out.

You should also check out the Flash Mob inspired ad the service put together…

Guilty pleasures

Some readers may know that I occasionally enjoy watching wrestling – especially with Tim.

I also enjoy a good tilt shift time lapse.

Here are these two interests combined at Hulk Hogan’s recent Australian tour.

Hulkamania from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Cutting a pizza – it’s easy as pi

A bunch of mathematicians (no doubt uni students) have attempted to solve the dilemma of distributing pizza slices evenly to people who have made equal contributions to the pizza buying cause. This article explains.

The problem that bothered them was this. Suppose the harried waiter cuts the pizza off-centre, but with all the edge-to-edge cuts crossing at a single point, and with the same angle between adjacent cuts. The off-centre cuts mean the slices will not all be the same size, so if two people take turns to take neighbouring slices, will they get equal shares by the time they have gone right round the pizza – and if not, who will get more?

It’s complex. Apparently. If you have two diners, and the pizza is cut an even number of times, the trick is to take alternate pieces.

It has been known since the 1960s that when N is even and greater than 2, an answer to the first question is for Gray and White to choose alternate slices about the point P of concurrency.

The conclusion – from the paper that’ll cost you $20 to buy – was this:

It was conjectured by Stan Wagon and others, that for N=3,7,11,15,…, whoever gets the center gets the most pizza, while for N=5,9,13,17,…, whoever gets the center gets the least. We prove this Pizza Conjecture by first showing its equivalence to a (pretty wild) trigonometric inequality. This inequality is proved with the aid of a theorem that counts lattice paths. Our main theorem is sufficiently general that, as a bonus, results concerning the equiangular slicing of other dishes are obtained.

One can only assume all this would be easier with one of these plates.

Good coverage: Sometimes cover songs are better than the original

I’m a sucker for badly sung covers of popular songs. I remember discovering Grum Lee’s now defunct website of purposefully bad acoustic covers sung with a French accent and thinking it was terrific. The site is dead – but Grum lives on, immortalised in YouTube…

Here he is singing a Dandy Warhols number.

The reason I post this is because I just watched this video Dave Miers posted today of a kid on a ukelele murdering the lyrics to that annoying Jason Mraz song.

Breakfast flowchart

If the question of what cereal to eat in the morning is something you can’t tackle without a decent breakfast – thus creating an infinite loop of hunger – then you need this great flowchart. It even takes into account the fact that Australians have a more limited range of cereals to choose from (and perhaps less inclination to make a choice).

The problem with the liberals

You might be thinking, on the basis of the title, that I’m going to talk about politics. If you want to know what I think is currently wrong with the Liberal Party read here.

Today’s rant is about “liberal” Christians.

I don’t think there has been anything more harmful to evangelism than the watering down of the gospel. There are plenty of things atheists could say about what the Bible actually says that would be grounds for choosing to reject God. But nothing annoys me more in the dialogue than those weak kneed Christians who try to apologise for God’s behaviour. Especially when it comes to that archaic ban on gayness (which is a genetic trait so can’t be wrong) or those cultural ideas of marriage and family. Read any forum where gay rights are being discussed (and I’m not actually opposed to gay marriage necessarily) and you’ll see the type of people I’m talking about.

It is important to place the Bible in historical context and to understand what the text meant to the original readers. But these liberals need to go back to reading their Bibles. They’re kind of missing the point. Right from the nation of Israel to instructions for Christians the idea is that at some point God has to be counter cultural – or there’s no point? How are the people of God to be different if everything that’s natural is fair game? It just doesn’t make sense.

Liberal Christianity is less logical than atheism. Atheism functions on a type of rational and logical framework. Liberalism takes a bizarre mix of the supernatural element of Christianity and the emotional anything goes morality of Atheism and tries to blend them. It stinks.

We should expect sin to be natural. In fact, I’d go as far as to say we should have an inherent distrust for anything that seems natural to us, as humans, because human nature is sinful.

I can see where they come from, sometimes, we are called to love people. Loving the sinner but hating the sin can be pretty confusing. But to suggest that certain behaviour is ok for Christians just because it’s instinctive isn’t just a slippery slope. It’s a fireman’s pole. Straight down.

The fundamental assumption of Liberal belief – from what I can gather – is that somehow we, in the 21st century, are better qualified to understand the mind of God than those primitive disciples and their apostolic proclamations – and heaven help anyone who tries to base a worldview on the Old Testament.

Science, culture and psychology have helped us understand our sinfulness better – they do nothing to turn that which God calls sinful into something pure.

That is all.