badmigraine
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Posts posted by badmigraine
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I don't know.
Back in the caveman days, I used to hide a lot to stay out of trouble and avoid being eaten by carnivores with giant gnashing teeth.
Now, in the bar days, I am a caveman trying to get noticed, maybe even eaten, but still fail to fulfill my biological destiny.
I am consuming a lot though, which is supposed to be a good thing.
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What? I don't buy that.
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Just came across this...now if I can only convince the wife. QT vid link right here
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Purchasing a branded product mainly based on trust, prior satisfaction, quality, etc. (Example: nekobi prefers Birkenstocks because they're comfortable and reliable)
VERSUS
Purchasing a branded product mainly to show status, style or conformity. (Perfect example: an unemployed teenager with an 80,000-yen Gucci bag walking around Shibuya)
Of course there is some overlap here. For example, if you think Brand A makes a great product, then naturally you don't mind showing it off, bragging about it, or recommending it.
The converse may be true too. Status brands can't maintain if they put out a crappy product.
In the former case, who could argue with it? You buy the good stuff that you like.
In the latter case, it's hard to see the good points about such superficial behavior. I suppose it's fun if you have money and enjoy style, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's a very human, vigorous, positive trait to want to look good and be seen as successful. The problem I see is the perversion of this impulse in certain quarters, where people fetishize status brands to the extent that it affects their entire lifestyle, or leads them into strange predicaments (enjou kousai, shopaholics, massive credit card debt, environmental havoc caused by superconsumerism, etc.).
Brands and brand science. In many ways, this is our own Matrix. A fairy-tale of multilayered disinformation and hype with one goal: sell product. Not an evil goal, but some of the effects are questionable.
Look at it this way: just one company, The Gap, has an annual advertising budget of half a billion dollars (per AdBuster magazine, Vol. 11 No 6 Nov/Dec 2003).
$500,000,000... That's a lot of money, and that's only one company.
Nothing intrinsically wrong with this, I think. I'm a free marketeer myself.
But just think about the power to control what you see, read and hear that $500,000,000 would give you.
Now add all the other enterprises inviting you to spend: meat, computers, recreation, automotive, pharmaceutical, travel, financial...
There is no dark agenda here, but it's interesting to look at "alternative" information sources too. Nobody is fully informed, nobody knows everything, and there is no bias-free magic road.
But at least there is the Internet for when you get tired of wallowing in the major global info/news/commercial feed.
I suppose in the old days you had to subscribe to some pretty weird publications to find out what really goes on to put a steak on your plate or deliver a pair of Nike shoes from the hands of a 10-year-old worker to your shiny local shopping mall.
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Best way to learn powder:
Spend a week at Niseko Hirafu.
You won't be sorry!
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Thanks for the props, but really...are you living in such an English- or Danish-deprived area that you must resort to the likes of us, the disreputable Snow Japan posters, to get by?
Sheesh.
I wish I'd lived in an English-deprived area like that. Must be good for practicing Japanese language skills!
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Great. Thanks to that choice of words, this forum is now under full surveillance by AEGIS.
Only a matter of time until the black choppers get here, folks, only a matter of time.
Do you think we can convince them to take us heliskiing?
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I thought the recent remake of TCM contained some rather deep, excellent character studies.
The wheelchair-bound legless dirty hick with washable colostomy bag, for example. What a memorable portrait.
Another redeeming feature of the film: many of the locals had teeth suitable for dental case studies on worst-case scenarios.
It was all positively Faulkneresque...that is, if Faulkner had been a mortuary science student moonlighting at a battoir and the American south were actually an amalgam of Deliverance's Appalachian family values, the reanimated corpse school of beauty, Andy Griffith meets Evil Dead, and, of course, Dr. Lecter's Slim Jim-factory catering school.
Worth a look, if only to update yourself on what Hollywood can do to teeth after Bobby Peru's memorable screen-filling mouth-ups in Wild At Heart.
Dollar fifty movie night anyone?
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Ocean, may I suggest a few cold bottles of "isolation transformer" then?
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Good point! Head's explanation is interestingly misleading, isn't it. That's what ads and sales are all about...suggesting that you might get something from nothing!
Nobody (except maybe Head on their website and technical explanation of their "Intelligence" system) is outright claiming the impossible--that this system adds energy out of nowhere in violation of the laws of thermodynamics...
I don't see any battery packs on those skis, either.
The chip probably uses only a microcurrent portion of the power generated by piezoelectric fiber deformation to analyze the signal pattern and generate the optimal pulse response.
The back end of the chip could be a regular op amp providing gain to this microcurrent signal analysis output. It would be powered by whatever current/voltage isn't being used to run the microcurrent signal analysis part of the chip. That would probably be most of the total power generated by the fibers in the first place.
In summary, there might be a seven-fold amplification just as described in Head's ad copy. However, it's seven times the clipped microcurrent output of the chip, not seven times the power initially generated by the fibers. No net system gain.
Another possible explanation: the amplifier referred to is not a "power amplifier". There are all kinds of amplifiers, not all of which need an external power source or provide a gain or increase in voltage or current.
One type is called a "passive amplifier". The most commonly seen passive amplifier is a plain old TV antenna or a satellite dish...these use physical characteristics to collect signals and focus or bundle them together and this is dubbed "amplification"...even though they have no external power source and do not add net energy. Think about a "magnifying glass" which creates surprisingly destructive energy out of plain old light (how many ants did YOU fry on the driveway as a kid?).
It could be that the chip in Head's ski is this type of passive amp, merely collecting the input from seven wires off the piezoelectric fibers. Could this be the "amplified seven times" to which their website refers?
Other non-powered amplifiers can do things like modify this or that part of a signal input, such as altering the duration or amplitude of waves, without increasing net system power. The output is reductive transformation of the input, rather than a net gain, thus it requires no extra or external energy source.
More likely, there is a big decrease in total power...instead, power is sacrificed to effect the desired transformation.
Other types of non-powered amps merely separate or clean up signals to remove distortion or isolate data. This is sometimes done through induction (no external power source required--another name for this is "isolation transformer"). People used to have these on their turntables or pre-amps to clean up the signal and cut out noise, before the signal entered the powered amplifier and got boosted.
So no need to break the laws of creation here. Let's leave that to us skiers and boarders during our onslope antics.
Well then. If you've made it this far, how about a reward? The Optic Flare Girl-of-the-Month page.
Science...it's sexy!
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And here I was thinking "metrosexual" meant a groper on the Paris subway system...
That, or a guy who uses the metric system, not inches, to measures the length of his manhood.
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I went to one of these a few years ago...some nice stuff, some not-so-nice stuff, some counterfeit stuff.
Picked up some cheap sunglasses and some Whiskey vids that are still in regular use!
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Ask Mogs about his Disney collection!
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You're all welcome to come to Walled Lake, Michigan.
There's a fridge full of cold beers of all types, half a dozen bottles of decent Napa Valley Cab, a cupboard full of chips, an extra bedroom and a very comfortable sofa.
YOu can stay for the Michigan-Ohio State game this weekend? Big Ten championship on the line and all that.
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Anybody with a cell phone camera can send pics to my PC. Sure they're miniatures, but it's fun to see a bar shot, ski shot, funny face or, in the case of Mogs, one-night-stand shot.
But how about the other way? I mean, sending pics from my PC to a keitai? This would be fun.
Can it be done?
I found nothing about it on the Japanese DoCoMo and J-Phone sites. Googling it failed to turn up anything useful in either J or E.
I looked at a pic I received from a Japanese friend's keitai and noted its file type, size, pixels, etc.
Then I took a pic from my digital camera and adjusted all the file and image properties to match exactly the picture I'd received from my Japanese friend's keitai.
Finally, the acid test: I attached this modified, miniature piccy to an e-mail, then sent it to my friend's keitai mail address.
The result?
The e-mail came through fine, but there was no picture or attachment. Somehow, the J-Phone server stripped the picture from the mail.
Anybody know whether it's possible to send pics from my PC to a Japaense keitai, and what the trick is?
Ta.
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Great...another remake.
Give me movie versions of old cartoons over remakes of old movies.
Better yet...don't give me either of them!
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Just a crazy idea that is probably unworkable, but can you burn QT player onto a CD, then run QT movies off the CD in your work PC's drive?
? ? ? ?
Computer experts please advise Mogs!!
Work has forced him to have this problem for years now.
Just not effing fair!!
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Gone dotty, I'd say!
My real theory:
These dots are really axles seen from above. The "db" can swing open into a "pq" like the Transformers or the Thunderbirds.
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Maybe the best marketing pitch would be to bill it as one of those "scratch-and-sniff" thingies.
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I keep a dai-jokki in my freezer. It gets really cold...when I fill it with lager from a bottle in the fridge, small ice needles form in the beer and it is oh-so-delicious!
Great on a hot summer day.
Mind you, good-tasting beer doesn't need to be that cold. If it is, then you can't taste it properly.
As for the mouthwash glasses, we picked up some Kolsch beer glasses the other day that are eggshell thin and like very tall shot glasses. They make all kinds of things taste better.
Seems the glass really does make a difference for some beverages.
Hey Ocean, any good beers on tap or in bottles in your new digs?
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Ocean, when said about evolution etc. that it was "the other way round", I thought you were going to postulate that we should not talk of the scrotum being outside the body...rather, we should talk about the body having evolved outside the scrotum.
Put another way, the body is a life-support unit evolved by the scrotum.
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Different issue really, but I would take a car to a car mechanic, and not to a plane or motorcycle mechanic.
Let's hear it for female gynos and male urologists!
HOORAY!!
Nov. 28 is Buy Nothing day
in General off-topic discussions
Posted
Let's face it. Look at that Expedition sitting out there... I'm a good consumer.
But I'm pushing for Buy Nothing day for non-political reasons:
I'M BROKE