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The Lost City of the Incas – Machu Picchu

By: Luan Zuccarello

Machu Picchu is an ancient Inca site located in the mountains of Peru and is definitely one of the first things to do on my Bucket List.  It was built around 1460 AD but was abandoned 100 years later due mostly to smallpox.  The architectural and agricultural techniques put forth by Incas were revolutionary and are the basis for these industries today.  Machu Picchu was built by using polished dry-stone walls.  These walls were put together using the technique “ashlar”, in which blocks of stone are cut to fit together tightly WITHOUT MORTAR!  The Incas were the best stone masons in the world and is said that a blade of grass could not even fit between the stones.  I don’t know about you but I can’t even buy a TV stand from IKEA and put it together, not to mention make it last for over 500 years!

Machu Picchu is said to be a holy site with most of their structures pointed to important Incan astrological signs.  One structure the Intihuatana Stone was said to hold the sun in place and is arranged to point directly at the sun during the winter solstice.  Along with being a spiritual place, Machu Picchu was well fortified atop a high mountain plateau.  The city sits in a saddle between two mountains, with a commanding view down into two valleys and a nearly impassable mountain at its back. It has a water supply from springs that cannot be blocked easily, and enough land to grow food for about four times as many people as ever lived there.  The city was built on levels or platforms that allowed rain fall to pour down and collect at the lower levels.  The Incas planted their crops this way.  The crops that needed more rain fall and water at the bottom and the ones that needed less were planted at the top.  This led to fertile ground, less land erosion, and less work to maintain their food.

In 2007 Machu Picchu was voted as one of the new 7 Wonders of the World.  There is also a legend that Incan women were the ones who made the beer or “chica”.  The women were bigger drunks then the men, often hosting wild parties.  Not any woman could brew beer, she had to be chosen for this task based on beauty and nobility.  The brewery used to get so hot that most of the time these “brew-masters” had to remove their clothing and work in the nude.  Damn….What I wouldn’t give to have been an Inca.

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Ethanol – Drink it or put it in your car?

corn

By: Billy Beerslugger

A couple of weeks ago i was talking to some random person at a bar.  Somehow we got into talking about the environment and in particular gasoline prices, U.S. natural gas reserves and Ethanol.

If everyone switched to using Ethanol instead of gasoline she said would reduce greenhouse gasses by a shit ton.  With Ethanol and those crazy incandescent  light bulbs we could basically forget about global warming.

I’ll admit I fell for this myth as well in the early to mid 2000’s.  I was thinking if I threw some money into one of these Midwest cornfield turned ethanol plant I could make some real money when this whole going green thing really took off.

What I didn’t know is that it takes more energy to make a gallon of Ethanol than the gallon of Ethanol actually provides.  You see Ethanol is made (primarily) from Corn.  This corn has to be  harvested by huge farm equipment which runs on diesel fuel.  The harvested corn then goes through a process including Fermentation, Distillation and Dehydration.  This cumulative process consumes a lot of energy.

The resulting product, “Ethanol” holds approximately 34% less energy by volume than regular gasoline.  Couple that with it’s general higher price (on the East and West Coast) and treehuggers are not only paying more for less Miles Per Gallon but are also producing a whole bunch of Greenhouse Gasses in the process.

“Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley recently examined six major studies of ethanol production and concluded that using ethanol made from corn instead of gasoline would lead to a moderate 13 percent reduction in greenhouse emissions.” (cite).

However, using a significant portion of the U.S. corn crop for energy production drives up corn based food products.  Supply and Demand, Action and Reaction.

Now I’m all for anything that lowers our dependence on foreign oil and if technology advances sufficiently this may be a viable option in the future.  Sadly though, right now, it may be doing more harm than good.

That’s not to say that Ethanol is not useful.  Far from it.  Back in my halcyon collegiate days we took a 40 gallon trashcan, put a fresh trashbag in there, filled it up with water from the shower, threw about a billion packets of Kool Aid in there and dumped a couple of handles of Ethanol (commonly sold in Liquor stores as Grain Alcohol) and you got yourself a kick ass party. Freshman girls were amazed at how great it tasted and Grain Alcohol is a great at lowering inhibitions.

I remember one time when I was dared to do a Gator Bomb.  A shot of Grain Alcohol dropped in to a larger Gatorade bottle and chugged.  While this did cause temporary blindness, when I got my sight back and picked myself off the ground I gotta say I was really fucked up.

In summary, Ethanol may be a feasible fuel in the future.  Today, however, I suggest drinking it rather than putting it in your car.

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A lighter shade of green

styroBy Gene Yuss

We see a lot of “Go Green” propaganda urging you to save the environment. As if I have time to worry about the latest drive to save the whales and kill the babies that the liberals are slamming down my throat…

Any way, some of the statistics are so hilarious that it almost pushes me to the point of environmental unfriendliness in Dennis Leary’s “Asshole” (FYI – Rescue Me is a dominant show and season five premiers 4/7/09).

Statistic on a Go Green Flyer: “It takes a styrofoam cup over 500 years to biodegrade.”

Fact: Styrofoam was invented by the good people at the Dow company around 50 years ago. Initial research began in the early 1900s when The Dow Chemical Company invented a process for extruding polystyrene to achieve a closed cell foam that resists moisture.

Trademark Warning: Today, the Dow Styrofoam brand includes a variety of building materials (including insulated sheathing and housewrap), pipe insulation and floral and craft products. But there isn’t a coffee cup, cooler or packaging material in the world made from Styrofoam. These common disposable items are typically white in color and are made of expanded polystyrene beads. They do not provide the insulating value, compressive strength or moisture resistance properties of Styrofoam products. In order to protect the Dow trademarked name “Styrofoam“, such other material should be referred to by the generic term “foam.”

Conclusion 1: Hippies please watch your use of Styrofoam. Styrofoam keeps you warm in the winter while you pass around your peace pipes. Foam is what I waste like it is going out of style. I waste a lot more foam today (among many other non-biodegradable items) to make up for the slack created by environmentalists. Take that Al Gore!

Conclusion 2: If you continue to use the trademarked Styrofoam I’m going to turn you into Dow’s law department. They may only get your hacky-sack and Grateful Dead albums in subsequent lawsuits, but The Man will vanquish his enemies!

Conclusion 3: Stop making up statistics! It was only invented 50 years ago. You can’t possibly know it takes 500 years. That number either came to you in a psychedelic trip, you got the first foam cup ever and it just degraded (not to mention that you put an extra zero on the flyer), or you just want to impress intelligent people with numbers. You may have fooled Cameron Diaz, but you’re Trippin’ if you think you’re going to get me…

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A Rant

By: Billy Beerslugger

I got text messages from two ex girlfriends today for varying reasons. I mean yea I guess in both cases we said we were going to be friends but who actually means that? If I want to see how one of my friends is doing I call them. I’m like “Hey how ya doing?”, my buddy goes, “Good How you doin?” Then we talk about other extraneous shit like how wasted we got last weekend or “How bout that local sports team? Boy are they sucking/doing well”.

I can hear the tone and inflection of my friends’ voice over the phone. I can tell if that person is happy, sad, laughing, surprised or confused. With a text message I have to read how the other person is feeling (LOL, ROTFL, HAHA). Sometimes I get text messages with just one letter (K). As if it was way too much trouble to write OK.

Phone calls are good because I can get the statement I am trying to convey over to my friend in the time it takes to say it instead of the time it takes for me to type it on a small ass keyboard (and I don’t care how fast you think you are at typing on your Iphone or Blackberry, you’re not beating speech chief).

I can’t tell you how much I hate having conversations over text messages. However, i don’t completely hate texting itself, just the use of texting as an impediment of actual human interaction. When I was a kid I thought by now we would be talking over video phones and stuff like that (which we actually have), but it seems more and more that people are intent on texting, IM’ing and messaging each other on Facebook and MySpace than actually interacting.

So this gets me to thinking about something else. Kids nowadays have it soooo easy (yes I’m going to sound old here). Until the last 5-8 years or so, if you asked a girl for her phone number in high school you got her house number. When you called her you ran the risk of the Dad answering, the Mom answering, an older brother asking you what the hell you wanted. Then you had to say something retarded like “I just wanted to ask Susie about one of our homework problems”. You also ran the risk of another person listening in on another phone in the house and foiling your plot to sneak out and play a little grab ass in the park that night.

You don’t have that now. You just call the girl on her cell phone. Bing Bang Boom, done deal. She might even surprise you with a “Sext Message”, which is a naughty picture of her sent via the cell phone. Maybe she makes a little movie with her friend of them dancing to Lady Ga Ga in bikini’s and puts it on YouTube.

God I envy you High School aged kid. Well except for the acne.

Note: This Rant was written while listening to ZZ Top’s Greatest Hits.

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Big Brother… No not the TV show.

obamahopeprogressNot all news is good news coming from the Obama administration. While the American media focuses on the economy and Cramer vs. Stewart, lost is what is going on with some of our civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution.

The Obama administration voted for Immunity for the Telephone Companies from lawsuits for participating in the Bush administration’s domestic spy program and included new and broad warrant-less surveillance powers in the bill.

However, that isn’t the only infringement the administration has made in it’s first 100 days in office.  They have also decided that the Constitution does not protect cell-site records.  A cell site record is essentially information about what cell phone tower your cell phone is connected to.  Effectively giving away your approximate location at all times that your phone is on.

Now I’m all for using creative ways like approximating a persons location at a certain day/time to put them at the place of some sort of crime.  I’m with that.  I loved the HBO show “The Wire” and can appreciate law enforcement doing everything they can to catch the bad guys.  It has to be within reason though.  If you need this cell-site record to help solve a crime get a warrant and you get the records on that phone.  What is the point of having everyone’s cell-site records available to the government though?  Why does the government need this info so readily available without a warrant?

Jennifer Granick, the civil liberties director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation stated, “Almost everybody in the United States carries or will carry a cell phone… This tracking ability is a means where the government can find out the location of pretty much everybody without much effort or expense.” (from a wired article)

I realize we are in slightly different times.  No president wants another 9/11 under their watch.  Why keep tabs on everyone though?  Why not just the bad guys (or potential bad guys).  And then if they do the tracking just for the bad guys, who’s to say who’s a bad guy?  Under what criteria are you categorized as a security risk or terrorist?  The US Terror Watch list currently holds over 900,000 names and bio’s and adds about 20,000 names to the list every month.

Obviously I’m not the president and am not in charge of protecting millions of American’s.  I am not trying to trivialize “the big picture” in terms of keeping America safe.  Be that as it may, I still like to adhere to what the founding fathers had in mind.  One of my favorite persons of all time, Ben Franklin, was quoted to say, “He who would trade liberty for some temporary security, deserves neither liberty nor security.”.  I think that quote really sums up the point of this post.

Note: Next time I kill a hooker I’m definitely turning my phone off so Big Brother cannot place me at the scene of the crime.

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80’s Flashback – Back to the Future

flux_capacitor
The Flux Capacitor is what makes Time Travel Possible.

One of the greatest movie franchises of all time, Back to the Future starred a childhood hero of mine, Michael J. Fox and an insane but brilliant Christopher Loyd as Doc Brown.  The series as I’m sure you know focuses on time travel and hijinks encountered by going back or forward in time and changing their events.

I’m at the bar today in honor of St. Patrick and I’m talking to my friend.  We got to talking about Back to the Future a little bit and then time-travel.

The majority of the discussion was my argument that going back in time to change an event (say that fat chick you banged in sophomore year) is not possible. I cited the Grandfather Paradox where, if time travel were possible, a grandson could go back in time to kill his grandfather before they were born. Effectively making it so that the grandson was never born. However, if the grandson was never born, how could he kill his grandfather? And thus the Paradox… much like the chicken and the egg.

If you went back in time to stop yourself from banging that fat chick in Sophomore year you would never have had the reason to go back in time to stop yourself from banging that fat chick. See what I’m saying? So this is why I deem Time Travel (or at least backward time travel) to be theoretically impossible.

My buddy comes up with this alternate reality scenario that when you go back in time you are actually in a separate reality coexisting with one’s own (a parallel universe).  That’s like going back in time would actually place you in a separate reality  than the one you actually existed in.  And in this scenario would be able to change the future without worrying about the Grandfather Paradox. Since you are a visitor from the original reality, you would theoretically be able to kill your grandfather in the separate reality without repercussion. Your grandfather in the original reality still fathered your dad and thus your dad had fathered you even though your Grandfather in the alternate reality is dead.

I know, I know this may have been a little over your heads to contemplate right now but think about it.

If anything we proved that debating time-travel when you are 6 car bombs and a couple of beers deep is a great idea.  It’s how St. Patrick would have wanted it.

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My Friday Night

So I decided after a heavy work week that I was going to stay in last night in an effort to conserve energy and get Super Wasted on Saturday in celebration of St. Paddy’s day (really I couldn’t find a drinking buddy).

I spent most of the night in the fetal position, crying and listening to Dashboard Confessional but I did manage to read a couple of things on the interweb about one of my Favorite Subjects, “Net Neutrality”.

Here are a couple of short reads:

Internet Protocol Treaty a ‘National Security’ Secret

“…would criminalize peer-to-peer file sharing, subject iPods to border searches and allow internet service providers to monitor their customers’ communications.”

Web Snooping

“…it was the fact that users had no choice in the matter… people were snooping on their web activity whether they liked it or not.”

People got all up in arms about the Patriot Act’s illegal wiretapping going on’s, but I think more people should be cognizant of web snooping.  Allowing your Internet Service Provider to gather information about your web browsing/data transfer habits etc.

If you want to prosecute people for illegally file sharing you have to prove it and pretty much the only way to prove that (save actually finding illegally downloaded files on a persons physical computer)  is monitoring web/data activity.

Now this isn’t about Illegal File Sharing or not wanting Comcast to know I watch Animal Porn on a regular basis, it’s about spying on you, user of the internet.  If they can snoop on your file sharing they can snoop on your email and online banking etc.  Going back to the whole wiretapping thing, I’m going to hypothesize that people do a lot more or at least as much of their interaction with other people/institutions over the interweb as they do over the phone.  So why don’t we hear more about web snooping and net neutrality on the tv news?  Is it because the same companies that control access to the internet are in cahoots with the corporations that control the TV Networks.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (Fox), General Electric (NBC), Disney (ABC), Viacom/ Sumner Redstone (CBS)  and all their affiliates and subsidiaries have products and services that they would like to sell to you.  Knowing your browsing habits helps them effectively target these products and services for you.  They are already doing this on social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace, collecting information about you to display targeted advertising (you agreed to this in your terms of service).   While this may seem innocuous enough you have to ask what else they are doing.

MySpace: All your data belong to us
FACEBOOK: Federal Human Data Mining Program

I think the moral of the story is the internet is the last source of informational freedom in our country and I for one would like to keep it that way.

Once I figure out an effective way for you the Beerslugger audience to support Net neutrality I will post it here.

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Hedy Lamarr – Inventor / Beautiful Betty

"Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid." Hedy Lamarr
"Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid." Hedy Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr is a veteran of such films as Tortilla Flat, Algiers, Boom Town, White Cargo, Ziegfeld Girl and Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah. She has a star on Hollywood’s Walk of fame. She got naked in the 1933 film “Ecstasy” which I’d love to see or at least fast forward through until she got naked.

While Hedy may be most famous for her acting career the was also very much a scientist.  In 1941 she and composer George Antheil submitted the idea of a Secret Communication System for patent which was awarded in 1942. This early version of frequency hopping used a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies and was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam.

Lamarr’s and Antheil’s frequency-hopping idea serves as a basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology, such as COFDM used in WiFi network connections and CDMA used in some cordless and wireless telephones. (Wikipedia)

How can you not completely fall in love with this chick.  Hot as shit and does experiments, basically invents WIFI.  Plus she had 6 husbands which is right up my alley considering how great at relationships I am.

I’m raising my Victory Prima Pilsner in appreciation of this brainy broad.

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One Laptop Per Child

The OLPC Laptop
The OLPC Laptop

Ok, so I’ve been reading a little a bout this initiative One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) which apparently wants to send laptops to every kid in the world.  Now don’t mistake this article for me not wanting kids in other countries to get free laptops, that’s not what this is about. What it is about is where the fuck are these kids going to plug these laptops in.  I mean isn’t Sally Struthers on TV asking for money to feed these kids and provide clean water?  And this Organization wants to send them Laptops?  Wouldn’t the $200 for the laptop be better spent on that countries school system or something a little more beneficial?  What are the kids going to do for the internet, sit outside of the Nigerian Starbucks and steal the signal?

Am I just going a little overboard on how little I think these 3rd world countries are underdeveloped and impoverished?

I’m not even sure we could give every kid at poverty level in America one of these laptops.  And why the fuck aren’t we focusing on just America when we are falling behind so many other industialized countries in Math and Science?

Again, I’m not against giving kids laptops, I’m really not. But if you’re trying to foster and encourage education across the world pay more teachers and make smaller class sizes and all that jazz.  You give a kid a laptop without supervision and they’ll just end up playing solitare and going on Facebook, trust me, I have a laptop.

Note: I really didn’t go into the details of this cause, I’m sure it’s noble.  I just think of those commercials with flies buzzing around little malnourished kids with rags for clothes and saying, “I don’t think they can eat a laptop.”

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With TV over the Internet and Netflix, Who Needs Cable?

Cable is expensive.  I have regular cable in my room and a box downstairs with all the HD channels and goodies.  I maybe get about 50 channels upstairs with about 4 of those being Spanish Language.  Very rarely do I watch TV if it’s not sports related.  If you haven’t gathered my opinion of reality TV yet I’ll just say I don’t watch it and leave it at that.

Id do, however, watch shows like Lost, 24, 30 Rock, It’s always Sunny in Philadelphia etc.  I don’t usually watch these shows during their original air time, I catch them on the internet at my leisure at places like Hulu.com and network sites like NBC.com, ABC.com and Fox.com.  Mostly Hulu though.

Anyway, I have always been a fan of Netflix . I watched the first 3 seasons of 24,the first 3 seasons of the Sopranos and the entire series of “The Wire” on DVD’s gotten in the mail from Netflix.  Great service.  Recently, I noticed that Netflix was offering streaming content so I checked it out.  There’s a butt load of Movies, Tv Shows and Documentary’s on there “On Demand” and it’s free.  So you get to watch these titles over the internet and the rest in the mail.  You’re allowed to watch up to 8 hours of streaming content per day.  And there’s no additional charge, it’s part of your Netflix subscription.

So between Netflix, Hulu and the TV Network Sites there’s enough crap to watch right there that I would never really need cable.  But then there’s the sports.  I would be missing the Phillies, Flyers and Sixers games.  Though I could purchase an online subscription for MLB, NBA and NHL.

All in all I watch more content over the internet than I do on regular TV and I have a feeling a lot of other people are too.  I use an S-Video cord from my laptop to my TV and voila, it’s an internet TV.

Suck on that cable companies. Suck it hard.