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I just went through the back archives for A Softer World. I suspect the creator would resist this label, but it’s sort of a hipster comic strip. It seems to try too hard in a lot of them (maybe that’s just a natural consequence of doing 250+ of them), but there are flashes of brilliance there too. I’m assuming those are the ones that are more honest an poignant, but maybe those are just the ones with the best lies.

Anyway, it’s worth checking out. via

Do you suppose I should be concerned that I drifted off to sleep while watching TV and when I got up, I had cobwebs all over my face? I mean it couldn’t possibly have been more than like 10 minutes or so.

It is still June 19, 1998 isn’t it?

Dang, that’s an interesting looking knife. Too bad it’s not available until November. Hey, my birthday is in November. I think that 2 + 2 might just equal the Leatherman Skeletool.

Cadbury’s A Minute and a Half Full of Joy is one of the best viral videos I’ve ever seen. I defy you to watch this to the end and not smile. Every time I see it, I laugh out loud. Now, I want some chocolate. The only problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to link directly to the video.

This is a surprisingly interesting and informative discussion of the recent Fed actions, and what it means for the various financial markets.

According to the article, Hope on the Battlefield, less than 1 in 5 US soldiers actually could bring themselves to shoot at the enemy during World War II. It seems that killing is something that most people are quite reluctant to do, and while people would risk their own lives trying to help comrades, when it came to shooting at the enemy they deliberately aim a little high to make sure they miss.

The article goes on the talk about training techniques that the US instituted to raise that number to 9 in 10 soldiers instinctively shooting at their enemies. That part of the article was fascinating to me. I’ve been on the periphery of watching an organization try to change the behaviors of a large number of its employees, and it can sometimes seem like a task that is hopelessly out of reach.

The US military though, which must be one of the most complex bureaucracies ever conceived was able to implement a new training program that had stunning results. I’d really like to find out more about how they did that and whether any of that could be applied to other training needs.

I took a two week road trip up the western coast of the US and into Canada. Naturally, I took a ton of pictures.

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Orb is a fun game.

The article When Brain Damage Helps contains a logic problem that is much easier for somebody with a specific type of brain damage to solve.

I had no problem solving it, so I assume that means I have brain damage (actually, about 43% of the non-brain damaged people were able to solve it compared to 80% of brain damaged people, so I probably haven’t been lobotomized in my sleep). Awesome. I wonder what other super powers I have.

I drove up to Santa Barbara and went out on a whale watching boat trip. It was a fun day. Some of the whales got almost within touching distance, and there were hundreds of dolphins swimming and jumping around. It turns out it’s not very easy to photograph whales. You basically just get a bit of gray — and given the cloudy and foggy day, that means that the whale, the water and the sky were all kind of an uninteresting gray. I did what I could though, and you can see a few whale watching photos here.

I had a few hours of light after the whale watching trip, so I stopped in to the Santa Barbara Zoo as well. You can see some zoo pictures here.

By the way, when they tell you that even when it’s cloudy you can still get sunburned… you should totally believe them. I’m terribly red right now.