Academic Earth is a collection of free online college lectures available to everyone. It certainly doesn’t have a comprehensive coverage of subjects, and you certainly aren’t going to get any sort of credit from them, but if you have always wanted to sit in on an MIT course on Linear Algebra, a Berkley Introduction to human anatomy, or a Yale course on Polictical Philosophy, it has you covered. Did I mention its free?
Well I guess this is one way we could finance education, though it would seem rather odd to have an ad on a test I was taking.
As cool as this is, I really wish it existed as a physical, not on my computer screen, clock.
Not sure if this is actually useful to anyone (it is not likely to be useful for me), but I still think it is kinda cool that you can order your own custom fabric and it isn’t terribly expensive.
So, guess what everyone? It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and since that is a holiday of sorts, odds are that Amy and I are celebrating an anniversary of some sort. Holiday’s are sort of a magnet for our special events. We got married on the 4th of July, engaged during Memorial Day weekend, and you could say we had our first date on St. Patrick’s Day exactly 2 years ago. That last bit was qualified a little because we have several first dates depending on how you define things.
We first went out to eat together a week or two earlier with her sister and niece. She had come to the Henegar Center Variety Show in which I was performing a Jekyll & Hyde song. A big group of people were going out as a group, but the chosen location ended up being too loud and smoky to have a 5 year old there, so we branched off from the main group.
The first time we met up to specifically hang out by ourselves was the day after St. Pat’s Day. She drove down to Melbourne and we took an extremely long and cliche walk on the beach at sunset/ in the moonlight. It wasn’t suppose to be that long, but somehow we ended up a couple of miles down the beach before we realized it, and the sun sort of snuck behind the horizon. It got very cold, very fast, but we eventually made it back with only a pulled calf muscle and an laser pointer attack. This is what we officially consider to be our first date, mostly because it is what I eventually based my proposal on, minus the pulled muscle and laser pointer.
The events of St. Patrick’s Day came about rather easily. A bunch of Henegar people were going to the Melbourne St. Patrick’s Day parade and I took it upon myself to invite Amy. That 5 minute conversation ended up being a couple hours long, at which point her sister suggested I just come to their house to hang out. I, of course, did so and the conversation ended up lasting another several hours before I sleepily drove home around 3AM. The next day, after the parade, Amy was going to a Relay for Life event, which I tagged along for. This resulted in me meeting not only her entire family, but most of her co-workers, and her entire elementary school class. With all the awkwardness that goes along with that over, we went back to Melbourne for the block party. We talked through most of that party too, in complete disregard for the fact that we had already spent 14 straight hours together. It was at the end of that, despite the lies that Amy might try to convince you are true, SHE kissed ME. (Aside to Amy: You see? It’s on the internet. I must be true, since the internet never lies.)
Zoom forward two years. We’ve been married for seven great months, and looking forward to many, many more. I love you, Amy.
You know how fast food restaurant advertisements and in-store displays have beautiful looking food, where the burgers, buns and tomatoes are all perfectly round, the cheese is perfectly centered and ever so slightly melted, and salads consist of a perfectly even distribution of each ingrediant. Well, yeah reality doesn’t match that.
In case you were not aware, Pixar hides alot of easter eggs in their movies. This is just one more reason I really love their work.
Get Rich Slowly recently ran an article explaining how the income tax bracketing system in the US actually works. I have to admit that I was under the incorrect assumption that you fell into a certain bracket and your income was charged at that rate, and if your earnings changed and you ended up in a different bracket, your rate would change. In reality, the system works in a much more logical way. You are charged the matching percentage for the amount of money you have in each bracket. In other words, if you are just a few dollars above a tax bracket boundary, reducing your taxable income to just below the boundary is only going to save you a couple of dollars in taxes, not a couple of percentage points. As that probably doesn’t make a lot of since how I am explaining it, you should probably just read the article.
While I am personally more in favor of getting rid of the income tax system we have now in favor of an entirely spending-based system, this makes the bracketed income system make much more sense. Rather than being a “you have more, so you pay more” system, the government is actually creating more of a artificial return on investment. Everyone keeps 90% of the first few thousand dollars, and 85 % of the next 20 thousand dollars, and 75 % of next 50 thousand, and so forth. Whether all this is good or bad, I leave for the reader to decide, but I at least like the truth better than my previously held, but incorrect, understanding.
As a perfect example of the kind of thing that just wouldn’t happen without the internet, I give you the speech accent archive. Basically, it is a bunch of random people from all over the world reading the same sample script in English. So if you are trying to figure out what a Madrid, Spain accent sounds like, as compared to a southern italian accent, you can listen to the various samples and get an idea. The execution isn’t perfect, it could stand to have more than one sample from a location, and I would like to hear different text, but still it seems to be pretty useful.