Updates

Posted on 1 March 2010 by Larry Russwurm

Cheaters:

Even more suspiciously, Canada finished the Vancouver Olympics with 14 gold medals. This many golds is a record for any winter Olympics by any country. Bear in mind Canada’s Own the Podium program has only been going for 5 years and official word had been that 5 years was too short to win in the gold medal count, let alone set a record.

Open Call for Cartoonists;

Not surprisingly, I received no submissions of artwork. I thought I was dealing with too small a pool of people and was right about that. I will eventually get around to cartooning the two IOC cartoons. They’ll be up well before London 2012 for those who might want to link. Now that it’s past the date for the Vancouver Olympics, the VANOC cartoon will never be drawn. Too bad because after Canada’s good showing (see above), I’ve heard VANOC being praised more than I’d like.

But mostly I feel I got no submissions because I referred to potential submitters as victims. As one victim to potentially another, I’ll try to sharpen my language next time.

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Cheaters

Posted on 27 February 2010 by Larry Russwurm

At one time Canada had a national embarrassment. You see we held the summer Olympics in Montreal in 1976 and we failed to get a gold medal. It was such a blatantly honest performance that the IOC let us host another Olympics only 12 years later.

So, in 1988 we held the winter Olympics in Calgary. Embarrassingly enough we again failed to win a gold medal at a games we were hosting. Not willing to repeat the 12 year thing for our honesty, the IOC let us host another Olympics a longer 22 years later.

Now before we get to Vancouver 2010, we should have a little reminder. Since 1976, the USA, a country with 9 times Canada’s population, has only hosted the Olympics 4 times. Our little nation with 33 million has hosted 3 times. I can only believe we’ve been so privileged because of our blatant honesty. True Ben Johnson was caught cheating in the Seoul 1988 summer Olympics but we dealt with it. And did I say we were obviously not cheating on the whole or we would have won a gold in Calgary or Montreal.

In the 2010 winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada has caught the cheating bug in a big way. We could have made it plausible by winning one or two gold medals. But no, we went out of our way and have now won 10 and may even win more gold medals than any other country. Any more and we break the record for most golds by a host country in the winter Olympics. We could have made it look likely. But now the world is going to see us as one great big cheater.

Sure we pretend it was the “Own the Podium” program that got us all those gold medals. But doesn’t that very name sound almost like a threat. As in ‘we own the podium so the rest of you nations had better cooperate’.

Now that we have come of age as cheaters what of our upcoming Olympic bids? Toronto has tried a couple of times to attract the summer Olympics. But now the IOC sees right through Canadians and our cheating ways. It looks like the earliest Toronto will see itself hosting the summer Olympics will be in 2100. Thanks a lot Vancouver.

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Another Fine Back Up

Posted on 20 February 2010 by Larry Russwurm

Lines are needed during any spacewalk. In the frictionless environment up there, the only thing to push off against is the spaceship. There is nothing to push back against to get back to the spaceship. Thus, the line is the only thing that will get you where you want to go. What if it breaks?

Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Indeed, in frictionless space this is how the spaceship moves. It energetically throws mass out it’s rear.

If the spacewalker has say a wrench, she has a back up for the line. She can throw the wrench away from the ship and back towards safety. But what if she has nothing to throw?

If only the astronaut could somehow inhale inside the suit and exhale outside it. The exhale would nicely propel her. Being able to breathe and spit at the same time would be nice, too.

How about making the suit such that the urethra was exposed to the vacuum? Imagine peeing your way back home to the spaceship. Unfortunately, you wouldn’t be able to see where you’re going easily.

Which leads directly to another available orifice on the astronaut’s body. You could design a suit such that you could fart your way back to the ship. And if you really have a lot of momentum in the wrong direction, there’s nothing like explosive diarrhea to bring you safely back to base.

Laugh at all this as much as you want. But mark my words, if we develop spacesuits that allow such actions, one day an astronaut’s life will be saved because of it.

Posted in Humour, Science | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Slackers

Posted on 13 February 2010 by Larry Russwurm

The spectacle that’s called the Winter Olympics is soon to start in Vancouver and that got me to thinking. Why is it that athletes are still setting world records? And it seems that they are doing it with regularity. I’d like to see the statistics; are world records still coming at the same rate as they did many years ago?

If they are, I can only come up with two plausible answers. The first one sounds preposterous. The species is becoming better, stronger and faster. Maybe even one day man might be the fastest land animal. Sounds ridiculous at least to my first impression. What could possibly cause this? Maybe it’s something like the height thing. You know, the statistics prove that on average children will grow to be taller than their parents. Maybe that’s because of better nutrition. Also, at least some sports heroes are breeding with each other. This can be a standard breeding procedure to get a better species. Cows for instance have been bred to produce more and more milk. It works. There is quantitative evidence. It’s just that most times, world record holding athletes are not from successful athlete / successful athlete parents.

The other possibility is that successful athletes are slackers. Don’t get me wrong, I know how hard it is to work out and train constantly. In that regard I have high esteem for successful athletes. But do they do enough? It seems to me that they might be slowing down a bit in this regard after they are deemed successful. A great proportion of their life is taken up with a single minded purpose to be the best in the world. Even this might not be enough for some. To prove they are the best they may try for a world record. But what happens once they achieve this? They have nothing left to beat. Do they then say ‘enough with the drive I’m good enough and now want what the world can offer’? If another athlete can beat their record 5 years later why couldn’t they have trained that much harder for a record that can’t be beaten?

I personally think these successful athletes do slack off after becoming “the best to date”. Maybe that single minded pursuit of their dream has left their life lacking in other ways. Maybe best to date is enough for them. But I propose that those same athletes would have had more left and could compete with the athletes of a later time. Maybe it’s just the lack of goals left after you get a world record. Could this say something about the human spirit?

Maybe the rest of us are slackers too. It might be less obvious than in sports but could be true. The most obvious to me is in the field of rock music. I think some of the fans are like me and could care less about the age of the performer and only about the music. But it has become obvious to me that as an artist grows older, eventually their music seems not as good. It can take a long time, sometimes twenty years or more but to me it has happened to every artist I know about. And in rock music, the artists cannot use age as an excuse, they don’t have to deal with being unable to perform because of body changes like the athletes do. Either there are negative brain changes as we age or these rock musicians are slackers, too.

Maybe there is something to the expression you have to stay hungry. Success seems to eventually lead to slacking. Maybe we as a species need to try to rise above the herd more often and for longer.

Posted in Humour, Sports | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Open Call for Cartoonists

Posted on 7 February 2010 by Larry Russwurm

I haven’t been keeping track of any stats on this site, like how many views I get per article and such. I’m just crossing my fingers that there is a large enough critical mass of you that at least one of you is a fine upstanding cartoonist or willing to dip your foot in the cold, cold water of cartooning.

I myself have cartooned before, a political cartoon in my university days called Jacques O’ Christmas Tree. If you are thinking by name alone that the title character might be a jack o’ lantern head on a Christmas tree body then you would be right. I am retooling right now and hope to start doing a Jacques O’ Christmas Tree comic strip.

The transition from political to straight humour isn’t a perfectly clean path. A couple strips I developed for Jacques (the new strip) were straight political humour involving the International Olympic Committee. I even came up with one for the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.

It would be ideal to publish these now, with all the buzz of the upcoming Olympics. But I still haven’t compiled my scanner and still don’t know how to use it. So I am trying to reach out to any of you who are cartooning inclined and have a scanner. I will provide the 3 jokes. Just please draw the cartoon and scan it into jpeg format. Then email it to me with the jpeg being the body of the letter and your name can either be on the drawing or list it in the title of the email and I will put it up at this site with accreditation.

I’m not offering any compensation for the work I’m requesting. So let it be known, if I end up with no nibbles from this it just proves that being a cheap bastard doesn’t pay. But also let it be known that I haven’t received one scrap of compensation for this site as of yet. So come on, be a victim with me. The email to send your work to is larry@larryrusswurm.com .

IOC Cartoon #1:

Panel 1 :

The back of someone’s head looking at the outside of a store. Up above it says “Cubehead’s Furniture Warehouse”. There are two signs in the window. The first one says “Coffee tables $200”. The other one says “Wrecked Coffee Tables $250”.

Panel 2 :

Same person talking to an obviously cubeheaded individual. “I don’t get it Cubehead! How come the wrecked coffee tables are more?”

Panel 3 :

Close up of Cubehead speaking. “Well someone didn’t use coasters and left rings…”

Panel 4 :

Cube head still speaking. “…5 rings in a pattern the IOC would get upset about!”

IOC Cartoon #2

Panel 1 :

Man talking to a woman. “Did you hear about the latest crop circles?”
Woman, “No, why?”

Panel 2 :

Man, “They’re rings in the shape of the Olympic symbol!”
Woman, “So?”

Panel 3 :

Man,”The IOC must be in a useless manic state right now…”

Panel 4 :

Man continuing “…who are they going to sue? The farmer? The aliens?”
Woman, “Maybe the farmer will sue the IOC!”

VANOC Cartoon

Panel 1 :

Commentary bar at the top of the panel reads, “Meanwhile VANOC was annexing culture…”
Normal looking man talking, “I’ve got something that might help us stay in the black!”
Man in conical hat, “What’s that?”

Panel 2 :

Normal Man, “We’ll trademark “A Christmas Carol” all except the first word and last!”

Panel 3 :

Normal Man, “Then we can sue all the publishers of that book for violating our trademark!”

Panel 4 :

Man in conical hat, “Hmmm! After all Dickens did set it in winter. It’s like he was asking for it!”

UPDATE: Both IOC cartoons were published in a July post using the online service Bitstrips. They can be seen here. The VANOC cartoon’s effectiveness died with the Vancouver Winter Olympics. The IOC cartoons can live for other Olympics. London 2012 for instance.

Posted in Art, Humour | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Power Equals Momentum Equals Force

Posted on 2 February 2010 by Larry Russwurm

Right now on the Canadian Television Network (CTV) they are airing an ad for the upcoming Vancouver Winter Olympics. I want to throttle the copywriter because they equate power with momentum and force, terms which don’t even come close to equating if you use the physics definitions.

I know what you’re thinking. “Larry,” this is your thought, “you are being too anal. Perhaps the copywriter is just using the looser English definitions of these three words.”

Now as much as I hate it, this is usually a bye. Ordinarily I’d have to just take back the threat to the copywriter and bite my tongue.

But, this time the copywriter takes pains to introduce the physics definition of momentum. He defines it as mass times velocity.

Why can’t the copywriter also look up the physics definition of force and power? If he did he would realize that these three terms are indeed very different.

This copywriter has confused a new crop of Canadian physics students. His lack of insight makes it harder for the rest of us to make clear what is meant by physical terms.

I guess I’m mildly pleased that he didn’t use the terms energy, work and inertia to totally take us back to the dark ages. Yes, I shall stick with that old saw, that things could even be worse than they are now. This way I won’t be thrown out of CTV’s copywriting office by a team of large security guards.

Post script. I thought I may have been overstating the idiocy of the copywriter from CTV. So I recorded the ad and transcribed the offending part. The transcription follows:

“Momentum. Momentum is the power that exists in a moving object. It is mass times velocity. It is the fundamental force of motion.”

Power is defined as energy/time. Since they explicitly say “the power that exists in a moving object” they presumably mean kinetic energy / time. But who can tell with such confusion about fundamental definitions?

And how about force being “the fundamental force of motion”? Force is so tied into the concept of motion that its definition is Newton’s Second Law of Motion.

Yup. Guaranteed to confuse the new crop of high school physics students.

Post script 2. I finished this Feb. 1, but will wait till tonight past midnight to publish. That way this B.S. science commercial will be called out on that ultimate B.S. science day : Groundhog Day.

Posted in Science, Wee Bit O' Humour | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

The Brain Drain Revisited

Posted on 30 January 2010 by Larry Russwurm

In the previous post I tackled the brain drain problem: highly skilled and thus “brainy” Canadians moving to the United States in search of better pay or careers.

Let’s examine that highly skilled equating to brainy assumption for a minute. Does no one in the press recognize that highly skilled does not necessarily mean brainy? Remember the stereotypical ‘absent minded professor’. It’s not hard to get the idea of someone being well trained in one category of intelligence while being sadly lacking in other areas. Indeed, I think this is what the ‘absent minded professor’ stereotype is meant to illustrate.

So, the Canadian “brains” might be deciding to move due to an impaired judgment process in their non-specialty areas like lifestyle.

Let’s look at one important stat. The murder rate. You need a fairly large city to compare murder rates with, because smaller centers can vary widely, year to year.

So I’ll take the biggest city in Canada, Toronto, and note that that city had a steady murder rate over the two years of 2000 and 2001 of 61 murders in both years. Now which American city to compare with? Here comes the art in this comparison. Detroit has roughly the same population and is also a Great Lake city. Indeed these two cities are connected by a 5 hour drive. The murder rate for 2000 was 396 in Detroit and 398 for 2001. That means you have about a 6 times greater chance of being murdered in Detroit than Toronto.

Maybe you feel this is an unfair comparison. I guess it is. On average the American murder rate is only 3 times that of Canada’s. I just can’t help comparing Detroit and Toronto because I live on the road between these two cities.

Want to live the longest life possible? That, too, might be a consideration of these so called “brains”. In a recent year, Canada’s average life expectancy was 78.1 years. The U.S.? 76.8 years was the average.

And now, if our “brains” pay attention, the economy in the current recession has been better up here than down south. Sure your job may be offering more. But if you are planning the move with family, the others might not fare as well as you.

So here you are “brains”. three good reasons not to move south of the border. Don’t worry if none of these reasons are your specialty – I checked for you. But then again some of you are probably so “idiot-savant” my coaxing and attempting to reason with you is probably lost.

Hey, maybe those of us left here are meant to be in an intellectually better rounded populace.

Posted in Politics, Wee Bit O' Humour | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

The Brain Drain

Posted on 24 January 2010 by Larry Russwurm

For those of you who don’t know, a brain drain is said to exist from Canada to the United States. The U.S. is said to be luring Canada’s most sought after and brightest with offers of more money and better jobs. The Canadian media laments the loss long and loud to whomever is willing to listen. A tragedy, they say. Perhaps they cannot figure out how we are to maintain our standard of living with this going on.

I disagree.

No I’m not going to bore you with tales of Canadian immigrants coming in with their own skills. That has already been done. And perhaps they have plans to eventually go to the States as their ultimate destination.

I hope the brain drain continues. In fact, I really wish it would pick up the pace. Why?, you ask. Because eventually I hope to be the undisputed most intelligent person in Canada. The smartest in a whole country. How many people can say that? 200?

Imagine. Being the most sought after for any job. No one stepping on your little personal theories and saying wrong-o, Charlie. No one else being a know-it-all so you could fill the air with all the little trivia you happen to know. It sounds like quite a good system.

There is a downside to it all. What if the brain drain continues and continues and continues? Canada’s population would recede. What if I find that all the smartest people left and now there’s only me?

Well I’d still be the smartest person in Canada. Pessimists would point out that I’m also the stupidest but I wouldn’t hear it being across the border from them.

But I’d get lonely. So what to do? The U.S. has a 9 times bigger population base than Canada right now. Statistically there’d be about 9 people at the same intelligence as me. Nine of them! I could pick and choose who I wanted and bring them up here so I wouldn’t get lonely and still be the smartest person in a country.

Posted in Humour, Politics | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Maybe Uranus Will No Longer Be the Butt of All Jokes in the Solar System

Posted on 19 January 2010 by Larry Russwurm

We amateur astronomers and other language police have all shook our heads when the many, many of you have mispronounced the name Uranus into common English words. We have then chastised you although we were once amused by this low humour at an earlier point in our own lives. We’re too mature to laugh anymore, or so we tell ourselves, when the truth is we no longer laugh because it is such an old, old joke.

But maybe the times are a-changing. It has now been speculated that Uranus harbours the correct conditions for liquid diamond seas to exist. And what you may ask would be floating in these seas? Nothing but mammoth diamond icebergs. Uranus may have just gotten its most perfect revenge on the English speaking world.

I must say when I wrote my introductory post about changing turds into diamonds, I never thought there could be such symbolism in the heavens. You can make fun of the richest planet in the sky but you can never do it again to its face. Well played, Uranus.

Posted in Humour | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

What I Don’t Like About Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics

Posted on 16 January 2010 by Larry Russwurm

Isaac Asimov wrote many stories and books containing his 3 Laws of Robotics. I would argue too many stories utilized the 3 Laws, and indeed I remember those who expressed concern that Asimov was tying together too much of his science fiction in the 1980’s. I now agree and see this as a weakness. You see, if the 3 Laws fall, many other stories are in some jeopardy.

Being an Asimov fan, at first I wanted to build upon the three laws in some way so I took a serious look at them some time ago. Instead of finding something solid to build on I began seeing weaknesses. To show you those weaknesses it’s necessary to state the 3 Laws.

Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics

1.A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2.A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the first law.
3.A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second laws.

The first problem I found with these laws is not very damning. It’s simply this : the first law is of course an order given to robots by human beings. It’s just that this takes precedence over every other order. Sure the laws can be programmed as is, it’s just that philosophically it sucks.

But I kept looking at the 3 Laws and it became apparent that the first law, especially the part about inaction would be a total bitch to program. And don’t forget that people see themselves as mentally injured and mentally coming to harm. I can imagine new injuries and what inaction spawned them being added 3 centuries after beginning with the 3 Laws. Would we ever be done programming the first law? Or would we ever trust A.I. Robots to decide these things?

More importantly, the first law would consume robot’s lives. Reshingling the house? That helpful robot maid (there’d be one in every house) will come up and say “Wouldn’t it be better if I did that? Gravity don’t you know. Be a dear and download the proper program for me.” Knowing the nature of contagious things, the robot maid would be an obsessive cleaner and try to bar contact with as many people as possible.

Most importantly, after hearing about Neighbourhood Watch and what it’s for, those robot maids would excessively stare out of the windows. When told to do their jobs, they’d say “The first law don’t you know.” Because of the first law, they wouldn’t do what they were built for.

And how long would it take before some 11 year old who couldn’t even be charged, started ordering robots to destroy themselves? It seems Asimov forgot about just how destructive kids can be. It seems doubtful to me that any homeowner will willingly allow such a thing to happen after investing presumably thousands of dollars in their robot.

What good do I see out of Asimov, now? Well I see him as a sort of kindly father figure. With the first law it seems to me he is trying to put a minor hero on every street corner. With the second law he lets the average robot owner have more power than ever before. With the third law he tries to protect this kindly vision. But I really think it’s time for different and new ideas about robotics.

Posted in Science Fiction, SF Criticism, Wee Bit O' Humour | Tagged , , | 1 Comment