With video reviews featuring the comedy talent of the Geek Comedy Tour 3000 team, we think Through the Wash has the potential to be a hit– but we need your help, so check it out and spread the word!

More importantly however, I’ll be making a slight detour to Cambridge for ROFLcon before heading back to NYC. ROFLcon, if you haven’t heard, is a gathering of everything awesome and fantastic about the internets. Tron guy, Group X, and Leeroy Jenkins are just a few of the internet celebrities attending, and panels will include “Pwning for the Good of Mankind” and “Incubating the Mind Virus.”

Silliness aside, this looks like its going to be an amazing gathering of minds to discuss just what makes the internet such a special place.

Finally, Gotham Books has contacted Kevin and I about having Shcrodinger’s LOLcat included in the upcoming I Can Haz Cheezburger book. More details as soon as we get them.

While I found the piece interesting enough, I wasn’t moved to do much more than contemplate the subject a bit and put it on my ever-growing list of things to research. Mostly unmoved, that is, until this weekend, when I met a girl who really turned my head upside-down.

After the waves of intrusive thinking and tummy-knotting anxiety which exemplify Limerence wore off, I came to a now unsurprising realization: Love isn’t mere emotion, it’s a fundamental change in the way we think; a change we have almost no control over. A temporary all-controlling animalistic psychosis that effects us all at one time or anther, driven by three simple, seemingly innocent enough, neurotransmitters. To take a page from the Radio Lab show, lets take a quick look at them:

Dopamine – Real true deeply passionate Love. That amazing ecstatic feeling that comes from seeing and interacting with that special someone. You get the same rush of Dopamine from crack cocaine that you do from Love.

Norepinephrine – Intense infatuation. Norepinephrine focuses the good feelings of dopamine on that one object of your desire.

Oxytocin – Peace and happy contentment that comes with long-term commitment.

The problem here is that Dopamine and Norepinephrine create such powerful emotion that if we were to keep getting squirts of them over a long period of time, we’d literally go insane. It has long been accepted that excessive levels of Dopamine play a large role in Schizophrenia, and anyone who’s ever had a crush can understand why.

As I’m stuck here with too much Norepinephrine floating around the folds of meat inside my skull, I’ll end our quick overview of the subject here, but if you’re interested in learning more, I highly recommend you check out the bit of audio magic that inspired this post, which I linked to in the first paragraph. In addition to a recorded podcast of the show, Radio Lab has provided a number of interesting articles and links on the subject for your further nerdy perusal.

I recently started writing regularly for one of my very favorite blogs, UNEASYsilence. I’m super excited to be on the team with Dan and Derek, and I’m really enjoying the increased freedom I have in terms of what topics I can post on relative to at Weblogs, Inc. That being said, I have decided that from now on, Geek Friendly will be reserved for niche topics, and that things of general geeky interest will be posted on UES.

Not that I promise to update more often– I’d just be kidding myself.

A few days ago, I was listening to a podcast lecture on the basics of quantum cryptography when I got into a discussion about the nitty-gritty of the subject with my friend Justin.

…
dantekgeek: exponential on a regular computer, but reasonable time on a quantum computer, right?
justinwick: Right right
justinwick: assuming ur in ur quantum computerz, giving them enuff qbitz
dantekgeek: hahahaha
justinwick:
justinwick: schrodinger’s lolcat
…

I quickly searched flickr for a suitable image, and came across Kevin Steele’s fantastic “a box for every cat.” Some quick work in Skitch, and Schrodinger’s lolcat was born.

I figured my circle of friends would get a kick out of it, and that maybe it would be picked up by BoingBoing, but could never have predicted the amount of exposure my little creation has received.

Others had the idea long before I came across it, but for whatever reason, it was my LOLcat which gets all the glory. This puts me in kind of a weird position; On one hand, I don’t want to be seen as taking credit for an idea that was already floating in the ether, but the fact remains that we did create this thing without knowledge of prior-art, and I think that should count for something.

I want to make clear that I couldn’t have made this thing on my own, and it was only through the spirit of the meme, my conversation with Justin, and Kevin’s photo that this thing came to fruition. I am but one small robot on the LOLcat assembly line.

I’m in talks with Justin and Kevin about possibly printing up some t-shirts, but nothing is guaranteed– we might choose to just let this thing stay online, where it was born, and where it belongs.

In celebration of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, I have decided to make public the work of which I am most proud, a 2007 calendar featuring the skylines of 6 beautiful international cities.

About IPSTD:

On this day, everyone who wants to should give away professional quality work online. It doesn’t matter if it’s a novel, a story or a poem, it doesn’t matter if it’s already been published or if it hasn’t, the point is it should be disseminated online to celebrate our technopeasanthood.

The calendar is a 9″x15″ PDF, but it should scale pretty well to 11″x17″, and really should be printed in full color on good paper to get the most out of the work.

Download it here. (Now a ZIP archive of JPG images.)

This evening, Nick Douglas introduced us all to The Vagina Game, in which one replaces words in film titles with the word “vagina.” Collective credit for the examples presented below goes to the channel as a whole. As the game progressed, the rules were bent to allow for the inclusion of television shows, video game titles, and podcasts.

• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Vagina
• Harry Potter and the Vagina of Fire
• Big Trouble in Little Vagina
• Any Given Vagina
• Saturday Night Vagina
• 10 Things I Hate About Vaginas
• The Texas Vagina Massacre
• 50 First Vaginas
• I Know What You Did Last Vagina
• Vaginas of Thunder
• Dead Vaginas Society
• Jay and Silent Vagina Strike Back
• Sixteen Vaginas
• Lethal Vagina
• A Clockwork Vagina
• Clear and Present Vagina
• Crouching Tiger Hidden Vagina
• A Series of Unfortunate Vaginas
• Ishtar
• Fellowship of the Vagina
• Sleepless in Vagina
• Kentucky Fried Vagina
• The Man With the Golden Vagina
• Vaginas Are Forever
• Vagina the Barbarian
• Vaginas are Forever
• Steel Vaginas
• Jesus Christ Vigina Star
• Buffy the Vampire Vagina
• Law and Order: Special Vagina Unit
• America’s Funniest Vaginas
• CBS Evening Vagina with Katie Couric
• Vaginastar Galactica
• Vagina Time with Bill Maher
• Snatch
• Vagina Royale
• Hannity and Vagina
• Vaginas Big Adventure
• Vagina Vagina
• V for Vagina
• The Devil’s Vagina
• Vagina Throat
• Requiem for a Vagina
• Field of Vaginas
• Vaginas on a (motherfucking) Plane
• Dude Where’s My Vagina
• Harold and Kumar go to Vagina Castle
• Vagina of the Dead
• Vagina Fuzz
• Geek Entertainment Vagina
• Vaginaboom
• This American Vagina
• 28 Vaginas Later
• On Her Majesty’s Secret Vagina
• The Shawshank Vagina
• I, Vagina
• Oh Vagina, Where Art Thou
• Intolerable Vagina
• Pretty Vagina
• The Truth About Cats and Vaginas
• Napoleon Vaginamite
• Grumpy Old Vaginas
• The Hunt for Red Vagina
• Crimson Vagina
• Everyone Loves Vagina
• A Midsummer Night’s Vagina
• House of Flying Vaginas
• Blazing Vaginas
• World of Warcraft: Burning Vagina
• VaginaCraft
• Pac Vagina
• Vagina Invaders
• Mortal Vagina
• Splinter Vagina
• Donkey Vagina
• Tom Clancy’s Vagina Recon
• Grand Theft Tom Clancy’s Vagina Recon
• I Think I Married an Axe Vagina

- Lose weight and get healthier through smarter eating and regular excersize.

- Finally learn Python and XHTML/CSS.

- Find more time to read books for fun (as opposed to assigned reading).

- Fully implement and stick with a GTD system.

- Get up and running with Cognitive Creative.

- Fall in love (cheesy I know, but shut up.)

- Other less specific but still important things that I can’t seem to remember.

“Now I’m gonna ask you a bunch of quick questions I’ve come up with that more of less tell me what kind of person I’m having dinner with. My theory is that when it comes to important subjects, there’s only two ways a person can answer. For instance, there’s two kinds of people in this world, Elvis people and Beatles people. Now Beatles people can like Elvis. And Elvis people can like The Beatles. But nobody likes them both equally. Somewhere you have to make a choice. And that choice tells me who you are.”

This famous line from Pulp Fiction got Donovan over at Be A Design Group thinking; what equivalent questions would one designer ask of another? Here’s what he came up with, as well as my answers and justifications for why I answered the way I did.

Sans or Serif? – Sans in almost all situations unless serif is required for stylistic reasons, or in the case of long body copy.

Coated or Uncoated? – Uncoated. I’m a huge fan of the aesthetic achieved by the reflective ink on a matte paper.

Gray or Grey? – Grey. My spelling of this colour is most likely a product of my British colonial (South African) upbringing.

Nano or Shuffle? – Shuffle (2G). The Nano is nice and all, but to be honest I very rarely listen to music in any way other than shuffle mode. This combined with the Shuffle’s diminutive size and sexy looks make it the clear winner in my book.

InDesign or Quark? – InDesign. People still use Quark?

Photograph or Illustration? – Photograph. While both have their uses in different situations, I’m a much better photographer than illustrator.

Justified or Ragged? – Ragged, ideally carefully done to ensure minimal variation between line length.

Symmetry? – Asymmetry, but balanced. Symmetry is boring.

Emboss or Deboss? – Emboss. Not too pronounced though; something along the lines of the letter-pressed look.

RGB or CMYK? – CMYK. This is kind of a silly question, as both are used for very different purposes. However, I work with print more often than working with on-screen stuf

Note: To try and keep with the idea that, “nobody likes them both equally,” I limited myself to answering either one way or the other. In reality though, to be a good designer, one has to be able to adapt to the situation and use all possible tools to accomplish the task at hand.