Sunday, January 24, 2010

Elephant Checks Luggage


For those of you who thought consumer reports was the best way to find out the quality of various brands and products, I bring you Consumer Elephant Ponya.  Ponya was given five luggage bags filled with food.  Checkout the video below.





It's quite clear, price was not a deciding factor in the success of preventing the elephant.


How would you protect your luggage?

[via CBS]

Thursday, January 21, 2010

11-Year-Old Causes Bomb Scare with Gatorade Bottle Based Science Project


Well the title pretty much says it all.

An un-named, fairly genius 11-year-old built a motion detector using gatorade bottles and some electronics.  Unfortunately, some idiotic VP flipped a shit and called the bomb squad to investigate the science project.  The bomb squad searched the entire school (and evacuated it), the kid's home, and x-rayed the science project.

In the end, when everyone calmed down and realized this really was only a genius science project, the principle didn't apologize.  He simply suggested the child and his family seek counseling.

Lesson of the day: If you're smarter than your principle and he's a jerk, you're fucked.

[via Gizmodo]

Monday, January 18, 2010

"Texting While Walking": The New Epidemic


So we've all heard of all the dangers associated with talking and texting on phones while driving.  Recently, they realized that banning texting while driving hasn't come close to solving the root of the problem: most people can't multi-task to save their life.

Even simple tasks such as walking without serious injury have proven too  complex when paired with the important task of texting someone on your phone.

In 2008, over 1000 people in the US went to the ER for injuries resulting from texting while walking.  This is double the rate of 2007, and 4 times as much many people as 2006.  While 1,000 people in a country of over $3 million may sound insignificant, it's increasing at an astronomical rate (doubling every year).

One must also realize that these 1000 people are a small subset of those injured or embarrassed for mishaps from texting while walking: all those people who walked into poles or parked cars, but were not injured enough to go to the ER.  All of this came from an Ohio State study (yes, they are now studying it) which found the injuries to include concussions, broken appendages, and sprained ankles.

Gizmodo adds that this is part of an increasing problem of multi-tasking and information overload in today's society.  Scientists are studying the effects of this "grey matter" on our activities.  Their current results are bad: talking or texting on cell phones takes up so much of our attention we lose our survival instincts.

It's sad that texting or talking to a friend is more important to us then staying alive.

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Blog Changes Completed

Hey,

Just wanted to let you all know that the changes to my blog are now complete.  Sylvia and I decided that since she had barely been posting, and she wanted a separate blog for her trip to Greece, it was time to part our ways.

I also realized that www.lifeofthemindequalsdeathofthesoul.com was not the ideal home for my blog.  In fact, I didn't even come up with this title.  Jessica stole it from Rohan.  Therefore I have moved my blog to a new, more appropriate home: http://blog.galbutnotgirl.com/  All of the old links will continue to work through November of 2010, when my old domain expires.  I will likely let it expire, although I may choose to renew it later.

One might ask why I chose "blog" instead of "www" as my subdomain.  I realized that I really need to look to the future.  I began my blog on a whim one night with Sylvia and Jessica.  I guess you could say we broke up because of artistic differences: Jessica felt we were censoring her by telling her she can't write that all UChicago students are alcoholics, while Sylvia and I disagreed.  Our blog was located at http://lifeofthemindequalsdeathofthesoul.blogspot.com/ at the time.

Ultimately I realized we needed a better home for our blog: one without "blogspot" in the url.  Thus, http://www.lifeofthemindequalsdeathofthesoul.com/ was born.  This was both a triumph and a mistake: while it was great to have a new, stronger home for out blog, this name, and the "our" aspect of the blog was quickly losing meaning.  This blog had really become "my" blog, I was just still insisting that it was our blog.

This week, Sylvia and I really decided that we should finally part ways.  I now had my own blog.  The problem was, the blog's name really didn't make any sense: it was long, it wasn't mine, and I didn't really feel any connection to it.  I really needed to change it.  So I decided to fall back to my classic URL (which Jess actually created): GalbutnotGirl.  This brings us to my new domain: http://galbutnotgirl.com/.

This still leaves one question though: why did I choose the subdomain "blog" rather than continue with "www" as I had in the past?  I realized I really need to look towards the future: I had already made major changes to my blog twice in the past year, and I really didn't want to do it again.  While currently I only have a blog (hosted for free by blogger), it's fairly conceivable, and probable in fact, that I will want an actual website in the future.  By hosting my blog at http://blog.galbutnotgirl.com/, I solve this problem.

Until I have a need for an actual wesbite, http://www.galbutnotgirl.com/ will forward you to http://blog.galbutnotgirl.com/.  Visiting http://galbutnotgirl.com/ will also forward you to the same site at the moment.

I also want to change the title of my blog.  "Gal but not Girl" just sounds like a kind of stupid title.  As a URL though, it's pretty good.  For the time being, I'm keeping my old title: "Life of the Mind = Death of the Soul."  However, if you have any awesome suggestions for a new title, please post it in the comments or facebook me or whatever.

Hope you like my new blog,

Gal

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Changes To Blog

Hey everyone,

I just wanted to let you guys know that I'm gonna be changing some stuff on the blog in the next few days, so if you're having problems accessing the blog during this time, I apologize, and I'll send you a new post when everything is fixed after.

Gal
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