I was surfing reddit today as I do most days, and happened upon an intriguing post regarding a confused christian looking for some answers.

The reddit post started innocently enough with an anonymous screenshot [below] from a biblical forum. The reddit community took flight with this one, as they do with most of their posts, and dove deeper into the story. Some quick investigative work yielded the location of the original thread. That’s where it became interesting. I invite you to check out some of the responses in that thread as some of them are quite thought provoking.

Here’s where it started:

If you found this as interesting as I did, you should read the spawn of comments on the reddit page as well. Some of the people signed up on the forums and posted, but the moderators locked the thread due to “non-christians” posting, which is strictly against the rules.

Pretty damning piece from the NYTimes:

A text message initially travels wirelessly from a handset to the closest base-station tower and is then transferred through wired links to the digital pipes of the telephone network, and then, near its destination, converted back into a wireless signal to traverse the final leg, from tower to handset. In the wired portion of its journey, a file of such infinitesimal size is inconsequential. Srinivasan Keshav, a professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, said: “Messages are small. Even though a trillion seems like a lot to carry, it isn’t.”

Perhaps the costs for the wireless portion at either end are high — spectrum is finite, after all, and carriers pay dearly for the rights to use it. But text messages are not just tiny; they are also free riders, tucked into what’s called a control channel, space reserved for operation of the wireless network.

That’s why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted.

Professor Keshav said that once a carrier invests in the centralized storage equipment — storing a terabyte now costs only $100 and is dropping — and the staff to maintain it, its costs are basically covered. “Operating costs are relatively insensitive to volume,” he said. “It doesn’t cost the carrier much more to transmit a hundred million messages than a million.”

Just makes alternatives like this all that more desirable.

Postin this for J-Pants

Good morning juicers! This single post episodic blog series is about whatever is in my head when I am awake. Since Maggie and I finished up Hot Fuzz last night, a movie by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, I thought I would say a few interesting things about it.

For everyone who has seen Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead, you may have noticed that they follow in the same comedic style of movie rediculousness. They were partially parody (Shaun of the Dead being zombie horror and Hot Fuzz being an action flick) but at the same time remained much more true to the content than other parody films like Scary Movie or Spartains or any of those films. The style is very unique. And yet his other films, like Run Fatboy Run, are not in this same vein. In order to categorize these films, he has put Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz into a trilogy that he calls the “Blood and Ice Cream” trilogy, clearly for their ridicilousness. The third movie has yet to be released, was called or codenamed “The World’s End” and is a science fiction spoof. Ice cream plays a role in all of these films, where red strawberry ice cream played a part in Shaun of the Dead (representing blood), blue ice cream in hot fuzz (for the police force) and green ice cream will likely be featured in the next movie.
Anyhow. Thats all. Just my thoughts for the morning!

Oh, and Simon Pegg and his doofy partner Nick Frost were flatmates before doing movies. Which Maggie thought was cute.

Favorite quote of the movie Hot Fuzz: “Did you tell him to cool off?”

Final post thought. I would properly link this post up and quote and reference but if I don’t pay attention to Maggie right now she is going to kill me. Sorry Brian. Blame her.

Q-Tip – “Renaissance Rap” from Three/21 Films on Vimeo.

YEAH ROB!

Here are a few albums from 2008 that I particularly enjoyed. I have a hard time talking about music, so my descriptions will be for the most part, useless. To one-up Rob, I threw in some listenable tracks. Booyah!

(Formatting this post was a bitch. Please excuse its slovenly appearance.)

Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes : I really can’t say enough good things about this album. That’s all I have to say about this one. Seriously though, this is quickly becoming one of my favorite albums ever. No joke.

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Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago : This album is so goddamn sad. It’s also a really great Winter album. It should be, seeing as their name is literally “good winter”.

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The Magnetic Fields – Distortion : I have a soft spot for these guys. I’m not really sure I can articulate why. They write very simple songs. I think that appeals to me.

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The Mountain Goats – Heretic Pride : It’s The Mountain Goats! The same band you know and love back for another installment. I haven’t listened to this album as closely as some of their others, but I’m convinced of its quality.

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Why? – Alopecia : This and Fleet Foxes tie for my favorite album this year. Why? is all about the lyrics, which are inventive, illustrative, and sometimes offensive. This album requires some attention to appreciate fully.

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Al Franken appears to have come out of challenge-ville with a slim lead:

The Star Tribune reports that Al Franken holds a 48-vote lead over Norm Coleman, with thousands of withdrawn challenges having been added back in to the respective candidates’ totals. This number would be roughly in accordance with the 35-50 vote lead projected by the Franken campaign.

Coleman is pretty screwed here.  He doesn’t have a whole lot going for him, and his only real possibilities for gains will be from rejected absentee ballots and possible reduction in Franken votes due to alleged duplicate ballots.  Both avenues appear extremely unlikely to net him enough votes.

Let’s stop and give a hand to the Minnesota State Board of Elections and the Minnesota Secretary of State.  This recount has been handled fairly well, given the circumstances, and things will likely be resolved in a decent manner.  Also, I think Minnesota has set the standard for transparency during a recount process, by posting vote totals and procedures online, as well as displaying the review boards decisions live on flat panel TV’s.  Also, the Minnesota Star Tribune has been indispensable during the process, providing all challenged ballots online for your perusal.

So, I say: Good job, Minnesota. (Even if FoxNews doesn’t think so…)

lol.

Obama is presenting weekly addresses to the nation ala FDR. Due to technological advances, you can find the videos on hulu instead of your local AM band.

This is his most recent address.

I forgot how much I love this band.

So I figured it’d be a cool idea to have a list of some albums that we’ve all listened to this year.  Not necessarily a Top 10 list or anything of the like, just a list of some of the music that my fellow Juicers have been gettin’ their swerve on to.

Try to follow the format…or expand if you’d like.

I (Rob) listened to:

Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend : I got made fun of this during the Mayercraft Carrier (Adam I’m looking at you ) for how much I love this album, but it really is that good.  It just has that really nice sound to it.  It kinda reminds me of Paul Simon (not that a statement like that is original, but still), and…I just like it.

Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes:  I have a funny feeling this might be on a lot of our lists. This album is absolutely fantastic.  ”White Winter Hymnal” in particular has been (as I just told Eric) my “Winter Jam”.  I’m digging this renaissance of folk-type music, partly because one, the songs actually tell good stories (Silver Jew’s new album almost falls into the category for this reason, but I wouldn’t really consider them Folky), and two, they’re folk songs that I can actually listen to repeatedly.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! :  I won’t lie, I just started listening to this about a month ago, and as I’ve Juiced about before, I’ve been digging Nick Cave as of late.  His music comes off as a weird mix of Johnny Cash and Tom Waits (more of the latter than the former really), and is just as good as either of them.

David Byrne and Brian Eno - Everything That Happens Will Happen Today : I poked fun at Adam before, but I have to thank him for being the one to introduce me to the music of David Byrne (his solo stuff, not necessarily the Talking Heads).  I haven’t listened to much of Brian Eno’s stuff (although I’ve listened to some of the album’s he’s been part of producing), but I really really like this album.  I just like David Byrne’s voice in general, it has a really nice eerie quality to it.  Combined with Eno’s “beats” if you will, they make a perfect audio combination.

Q-Tip – The Renaissance : Not so well known of a fact;  I LOVE A Tribe Called Quest.  I would love nothing more than if they got back together and just starting churning out albums again.  Until THAT happens though, I am A-OK with albums from Q-Tip if they are of this quality.  This album seriously sounds like what a modern Tribe album would sound like.  It’s an awesome mix of jazz, hip hop, R&B, and soul.

So that’s five albums from me (in no particular order, mind you), that I really liked this year.  I will say that I’m not claiming myself as some sort of accomplished music-reviewer, I’m just listing what I really liked to listen to this year.

So Juice the Blog, what’d you listen to this year?

(Either edit this post to follow up, or create new posts…or hit up the comments)

I was thinking earlier that when we’re old, we’re going to be saying things like, “Dude, I remember when ipods were one gigabyte and didn’t have cameras in them,” the same way our grandparents were like, “I remember when a hershey bar was five cents,” or “I remember when they invented toaster ovens.” This is funny to me.