In old cartoons, when someone had an idea a light bulb would turn on above his head. In real life though, though, there is only one idea that can turn on a light bulb above your head and that idea is: “I want to turn on that light in the ceiling.” This is because light bulbs don’t run on ideas. They run on electricity!
Before electricity, there were only candles. Candles were ok for light but they can’t do a lot of other stuff that electricity can do. For example, you can’t charge your cell phone using a candle, and even if they never discovered electricity and instead made a way to charge cell phones using candles, you would get wax all over your cell phone. Then you would have a fully charged cell phone but you wouldn’t want to use it because it’s all waxy and embarrassing. So it’s obvious why people decided to use electricity instead, although candles are better Mother’s Day presents than electricity.
Now we’ve get electricity from the plugholes in our houses and apartments but it wasn’t always like this. Before normal electricity that comes out of walls, there was only wild electricity coming out of clouds. Wild electricity still exists and it’s called lightning.
You might be mad and thinking, “all this time I pay for electricity through the walls when there’s all this free electricity outside?” Well before you call the electric company and say, “Cancel my service. I’m going to use lightning from now on,” consider this: it’s pretty hard to get wild lightning. For example, let’s say you see a lightning storm coming and you want a milk shake, so you put milk and ice cream in a blender and then put it outside, there’s no guarantee that the lightning is going to strike your blender in the right way to make a good shake. It might strike it and melt everything, even the blender. Or it might not strike it at all. Or it might strike it just right but then a bear or a deer or something might take it. So wild electricity is always risky.
In the olden times they had a special way to get wild electricity. They would tie keys to kites and then fly them in front of the lightning. This was to send a message like, “hey lightning, look. I trust you enough to give you the keys to my house. Why don’t you trust me and give me some of your electricity?” That’s harder to do these days because people have more keys and it would be hard to keep track of which ones have been electrocuted.
Electricity powers everything, except for stuff powered by gas. Gas and electricity are competitors in the market of stuff that makes other stuff turn on. Gas can make cars go faster than electricity, but electricity doesn’t smell as weird as gas, and if you get a bit of electricity on your jeans people won’t think you’re a mechanic like they would with gas.
When the power goes out, we get to see what it was like for people before electricity. It get’s really dark and quiet at night and you can’t flush the toilet so it get’s kind of gross, just like for people a long time ago.
Categories: Technology · history
Tagged: awesome, electricity, history, humor, Technology
In the past, there were only pianos, so most music was pretty boring and only listened to by people who wear tuxedos even when they’re not going to a wedding. Luckily for cool people, guitars were invented so that music could get awesome. But even with guitars some music today is still pretty lame. This is because people are not using the best technology available to be as awesome as possible.
The first problem is that guitar companies are still making acoustic guitars. The word acoustic means “not with an amplifier.” Because there are no amps, acoustic guitars sound soft and dumb and make people who play them think they can sing in a sad and quiet way. For this reason, acoustic guitars should really only be used if there’s a power outage.
Even worse than the acoustic guitar is the acoustic bass. Acoustic basses are so big that the people who play them need to put them on the floor and stand behind then. When other things are big, it’s usually because you need more room to fit crazy badass stuff in them. This is the case with stuff like tanks, helicopters and sharks. But big giant acoustic basses are hollow in the middle. This throws off the ratio of room for awesome stuff to actual awesome stuff inside, making acoustic basses not awesome at all.
So the first step towards awesomeness is using an electric guitar or bass. But when people have electric guitars, their music can still sound not so cool. This is because you need sweet foot pedals. What do foot pedals do? Well, you know when you’re walking around in the woods and you find one of those weird puff-ball mushroom things that you can step on and they puff out a cloud of powder-stuff? A foot pedal is like that but instead of puffing out a cloud of mushroom powder, foot pedals puff out a cloud of awesome rock!
It’s also important to choose the coolest-looking guitar. Most people think that, since a lot of the time you’re listening to music without seeing the band, any electric guitar will do. But if you’re a guitar guy, it’s important for you that you have totally sweet guitar. It’s like if you’re on the phone and you’re eating really sour candy: even if they can’t see it when your face gets weird and your eyes start to water, people might still be like, “Are you ok? You sound weird and uncomfortable.” Then if you say nothing’s wrong, they get mad at you for lying. This is just like when I get mad because I can tell some guy is not rocking enough because he’s probably playing a guitar that’s boring looking.
I’d like to end by thanking guitar scientists for everything they have done to make music cool, but also to warn them that the battle against lameness is not over yet. Wherever there are acoustic guitars and boring looking guitars and big dumb basses there is the possibility of a guy who thinks it’s cool to write songs about crying and to play those songs while making weird sad faces. So keep pushing forward, guitar scientists, towards a time when guitars look like killer robots and they all have whammy bars.
Categories: Technology · music
Tagged: awesome, guitars, humor, music, rock, Technology
October 26, 2009 · 1 Comment
Why Grass?
Scientists always say that plants are really great. This is kind of like saying things with two wheels are awesome and fun. It applies to some of the stuff with two wheels – like speed bikes, some mopeds, and sweet mountain with shocks– but not all of the stuff – like those weird bikes that old guys ride sitting down or cars sawed in half. It’s the same with plants. Crazy jungle bushes are great, but some plants are just lame. One lame plant that we put up with year after year is grass. But why? Why don’t we use technology to make our lawns cooler? Here are some ideas.
Stainless Steel Lawn: Ever walk into someone’s kitchen and think, “Man something about this place makes me feel like I just walked into the future!” It’s probably because they have a stainless steel fridge. Now imagine your entire front lawn made of stainless steel. It would be like if you built your house on top of a giant, lumpy spaceship! Also, you could use grease for year-round sledding! And you wouldn’t get really wet afterwards, maybe just greasy!
Mini Trees: Laptops used to be big and clunky but now they’re small and more awesome. I say we do the same thing with trees. Imagine if you had a whole forest right in your front yard. You could probably make a lot of money, because if a movie director wanted to make a movie about giants, they’d pay to use your yard! Plus, then you’d get celebrities in your yard!
One giant swimming pool: Who says swimming pools need to be in one part of your yard? What if you had a swimming pool that was your whole yard? It wouldn’t be too different if you think about it: you have to water your yard if it gets dry and you would put water in your pool yard if it got dry; when you wake up really early the grass in your yard is wet and if you woke up with a pool yard, that would be pretty wet too. The big difference is, if you sit in a boat in your grass yard you look weird, but if you sit in a boat in your pool yard you would look awesome!
Dancing light-up grass: This would be grass that looks normal most of the time, but then if you wanted to, you could plug your MP3 player into it and it would start dancing and glowing and turning different colors. People would be like, “man, that guy must know how to party! Even his lawn is rocking out!”
Our forefathers had grass yards and so it seems like we should too because it’s traditional. But our forefathers also wore weird curly wigs that made it look like they had white hair even if they were totally young. The “fore” in forefathers is short for “before” as in “before we had any cool stuff.” Maybe we should try to be Fterfathers, where the fter stands for “after” as in “after we got rid of the lame stuff.”
Categories: Technology
Tagged: awesome, future, grass, humor, party, Technology
Pro-bowlers and people who work on computers have one thing in common: they can both hurt their hands at their jobs. A pro-bowler could hurt his wrist if someone accidentally puts some super glue in the finger holes on his bowling ball. Then his fingers could get stuck without him knowing and when he goes to roll his ball hard towards the pins, his hand might come off with the ball and go down the lane and score a strike. With computers, you don’t get any points for hurting your hands.
On the scale of what’s dangerous for your hand and what’s not, computer keyboards are medium dangerous. Some things that are less dangerous than using technology are turning doorknobs, pointing at stuff and touching sand. Some things that are more dangerous for your hands than technology are punching mirrors, reaching into fire, and checking if big turtles are snapping turtles or normal turtles using your fingers. Some other medium dangerous things are high-fiving musclemen who are usually gentle but can get excited and entering knuckle-cracking contests.
I didn’t know keyboards were dangerous until my roommate, Greg, started complaining about his wrist hurting all the time. I asked if it had anything to do with him wearing the really stupid-looking bracelet that his girlfriend got him and he said, no, the bracelet was soothing and not painful because it showed their love for each other (lame). He said his wrist hurt because he typed at work all day. He said if it got really bad he might get something called carpel tunnel syndrome.
You’re probably thinking, carpel tunnel syndrome? How am I supposed to remember something as weird-sounding as that? Well, I have a way. Imagine you work at a place that also has a room for an orchestra to practice music, so you carpool with some orchestra guys. One day, you try to take a shortcut through a tunnel, but you get stuck in a traffic jam underground. You’re going to be late for work so the orchestra guys start freaking out because they need time to warm up, so they take out their giant horns and stuff and start warming up in your car, which is really small. This carpool tunnel situation can get uncomfortable, just like carpel tunnel is uncomfortable for your wrists if you type too much.
Unfortunately there is no way to avoid using keyboards for a lot of people. You might be able to get a microphone that types into your computer for you, but that could get embarrassing. For example, what if you work for a doctor typing up stuff his patients have said to him? There might be a patient who had butt problems and was like, “my butt hurts, and it smells pretty nasty, and I looked at it in a mirror and it looks pretty gross too.” You would have to say that and if hot girls were walking by, they might think you’re talking about your own butt.
So the only thing to do is take breaks when typing and don’t type too hard. Also, look for signs that would make typing even more dangerous than it usually is, like if the keyboard is really hot and melting or there’s a big poisonous snake on it.
Categories: Health · Technology
Tagged: awesome, hands, Health, humor, snakes, Technology
Remember that song when you were a little kid, “The wheels on the bus go round and round”? If you don’t remember, here are some of the words to remind you: “The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round.” I bet when you were super young you didn’t realize that this song is about technology! And the technology part isn’t the bus, or the part about going round and round. The technology part is the wheels!
The wheel has been around for a long time, but not as long as the circle. Actually, wheel was invented when a caveman drew a circle and another caveman was like, “Hey if that thing was puffier, I bet it would roll down hills super easy.” (This was all said in caveman language.) Other stuff was invented from circles too! In medieval times, a bunch of guys were staring at a picture of a circle and one was like, “Hey, if we made this things out of fancy material that would break if you dropped it, I bet it would be a totally sweet thing to eat food off of,” and that’s where plates came from. In the fifties, a bunch of musicians looked at circle pictures and one was like, “Let’s put music on these things, and make it so you have to spin it to get the music out,” and that’s where records, and eventually CDs, came from!
In fact, the invention of the wheel was so impressive, that now, when inventors try and make something really big and crazy, people say they’re reinventing the wheel. I think this is sort of stupid! I wouldn’t be that hard to reinvent the wheel, because it’s already invented. You could just take a wheel, make some new designs on it and be like, “look at my new invention!” That’s why I think we should change the phrase, “reinvent the wheel” to “invent something that is as hugely important to how things work on Earth as the wheel was when cavemen made it a while ago, probably using rock tools.”
If you don’t think the wheel is important, imagine a world where they were never invented. There would be no cars or bikes or mopeds. When you wanted to leave and sound cool, you couldn’t say, “Let’s roll!” because, without wheels, rolling might never have been discovered. Instead you would say, “Let’s leg!” because people would either walk everywhere or ride horses. Parking lots would smell like a farm because they would be filled with horses tied up to stuff. Then if you went to a movie and it was awesome, you’d be really excited until you went out into the parking lot where the gross horse smell would make you forget the awesomeness of the movie.
So wheels have made for a better world, but I, for one, think that, if we keep using them, they’ll get totally boring and lame. That’s why it’s time for car scientists to really start trying to make hover cars! Also, it would be cool if car scientists made cars with a button you could push and the car would change color. That way, if you pulled into a parking lot and there was the same car as yours, you could press the button and feel like an individual.
Categories: Technology · history
Tagged: awesome, history, horses, hover cars, humor, Technology, wheels
Have you ever been hanging out with your friend, and everything is normal until all of the sudden he puts on some weird shoes and says, “hey man lets go shoot some hoops”? You might think that what your friend wants to do is throw hula-hoops in the air and try and shoot them with a BB gun. But actually, your friend is talking about playing the game of basketball.
Basketball is the game where there are baskets and two teams trying to get the ball into the right one. One lame thing about basketball is that the teams know which basket is theirs at the very beginning of the game. I think it would be cooler if the teams didn’t know and had to guess. Maybe the announcer could give say things that seemed random but were actually clues. At the end, they would tell everyone which basket belonged to which team and then, on the big screen above everything, there would be a flashback to all of the clues and then the players would be like, “We should have known all along!” and it would be really suspenseful.
Unlike other games where you can grab a ball and run with it, in basketball you need to bounce the ball everywhere you go. This is called dribbling. Nobody is sure why dribbling exists, but there are theories. Here’s one of mine: the guy who invented basketball threw a party to show people his new game where you run around with a ball trying to score points. To look cool, he had a special new ball made and at the party, the ball was still hot and fresh from the ball factory. So when the guy went to show people how to play, he couldn’t hold onto it for very long at a time and had to bounce it. Since there were girls at the party, he pretended it was what he always planned to do so he wouldn’t look like a loser in front of them.
If you’re watching basketball on TV, you might notice that when people score a normal basket, they get two points. What if other stuff was like this? Like lets say you used to be a sailor, and you are walking to your new job, which is in a boring office. Your walk goes past a lake and there is a guy with a boat who’s like, “One boat ride for dollar, step right up!” You miss the water and have some time and a dollar, so you’re like, “Ok.” He takes you around the lake, but when you get the place where you should get off, the guy starts going around again. When you ask him what’s going on, he’s like, “One boat ride is twice around the lake.” You’d be late for work. That’s what it would be like if life was like baskets in basketball!
Basketball is a really great game to play with friends. While not everyone is as good as the pros, anyone can play basketball and have fun, unless you get creeped out by the sound that a basketball makes when it bounces on a basketball court. Then basketball would be more scary than fun.
Categories: Life stuff · sports
Tagged: awesome, history, humor, sports, Technology
Sometimes, when I’m watching television, I think, “Man, this is so great that I don’t need to stand at all in order to do this! I wonder what it was like to watch television before chairs were invented.” Then I feel better when I remember that chairs were invented before television. But this doesn’t mean that chairs weren’t changed by technology, by which I mean, chairs were changed by technology!
One thing is that there are less stools around. Think about it: there’s no front or back to a stool, so you don’t know which way to sit on it! With technology being so advanced that you need to pay attention to it all the time, a stool would be dangerous. If there were a bunch of stools around a television, you might sit down with your back to the screen. Then you would still hear the funny stuff that people say, but you might miss it when someone makes a funny face, or when the joke is that someone falls down. It was like this in school too! In subjects that were hard and boring, like math, there were chairs so you would pay attention. But in subjects that were fun and easy and didn’t mean anything, there were stools, like in art class.
Another thing is that chairs have more cushions than before. A long time ago, it was dangerous to get comfortable so chairs weren’t as soft as they are now. The danger came from the fact that, to keep things from getting too boring, someone could randomly yell, “Draw!” and everyone would have to jump up and shoot old-timey guns at each other. This has been replaced by action-packed television shows that don’t require getting up fast, so chairs are softer.
But television isn’t the only kind of technology that has affected what we sit on. Office technology has been big for chair history too! A long time ago, when people just wrote stuff on paper and then sent it out using mail or trained eagles, chairs at desks didn’t have to move at all. Now, with so much stuff on desks, like a computer, a printer, a fax and speakers, desks have gotten bigger and you can’t reach everything from one place. This is where the rolling chair comes from. When there’s so much technology that we need to build desks that have really high shelves to put it all on, they might invent rocket chairs, or if people starting keeping their office stuff in several different rooms because they have so much of it, chairs would need to teleport.
If you look at pictures of old chairs and pictures of new chairs, you might think, “what are chairs going to look like in the future?” That’s just the thing: the chairs of tomorrow will probably look sort of the same. There will always be chair artists and chair scientists trying to make the coolest-looking and most comfortable chairs possible, but there will always have to be a place for your butt and a place for your back. (Unless technology is invented that makes it so people can get rid of their butt and their back. If that happens, chairs could look like anything!)
Categories: Technology · history
Tagged: awesome, chairs, changes, future, history, humor, Technology
In the olden days, when computers had just been invented, you couldn’t pick a cool background because computers had numbers instead of pictures. These early computers are called calculators. Now computers let you choose any sweet picture to use as your background. But like they say in superhero movies, with great power comes great stuff to think about. A lot of places are offering free wireless internet, which makes choosing the right picture more important than ever. Here are some pictures to consider for your computer:
Rocket Ship Taking Off: Not many people are allowed on rocket ships, because they’re really scientific. So if you put a picture of a rocket launching on your and someone is like, “Hey, nice picture,” you can look cool by saying, “Oh yeah, it’s a hobby of mine.” The first thing people will think is “Whoa that’s cool that he’s been to space.” The second thing they’ll think is “Wait, if space is his hobby, what kind of super crazy stuff does he do for a job?” Then they’ll be more impressed!
“This is a Replacement Computer”: Is your laptop getting a little old? Do you feel embarrassed to bring it out in public? There’s an easy way to fix this! Just take everything off your desktop, and set your background to be a picture that is all white except for a thing in the middle that says “This is a replacement computer.” Then if someone says, “That’s a lame laptop,” you can be like, “Yeah it’s the one that the computer-fixing store leant me while they worked on my real laptop. I broke it mountain climbing.” (Warning: this one requires some mountain research. Try searching “ten most awesome mountains” or something.)
Kittens: A while ago, kitten pictures would just be for girls, but that has changed thanks to new kitten picture advancements. Now you can get pictures of kittens wearing cool sunglasses or kittens in an awesome sports car. I even found a kitten picture where a kitten was giving a middle finger! And I didn’t even know kittens had fingers!
Standard Background: A background that your computer comes with says, “I just got this thing and I don’t know how to use it.” But sometimes that’s exactly what you want to say. For example, let’s say you’re near a really pretty girl who’s using a computer. You might be able to get attention by pretending you don’t know anything about how to use yours. Say things like “What is up with all these buttons with letters on them?” or “What kind of typewriter is this anyway?” The girl might feel bad for you and come over to help. When she tells you what to do, be like, “Oh wait, I think I get it.” Then start doing a lot of cool computer stuff. That way she’ll think you’re super smart since you learn so fast, and she might be into smart guys.
If you’re computer has a setting where the background can change, make it be changing between a bunch of really old paintings that are famous. Then just stare at it, and if someone walks by, say “Just some stuff I’ve got in the hallway at my house.” Then say your house is a castle. (Warning: Don’t let anyone come see the art in your castle, unless you really have art and a castle.)
Categories: Life stuff · Technology
Tagged: awesome, calculator, humor, laptop, pictures, sweet, Technology
When people came over to my house when I was a kid, they would see our big satellite dish and be like, “Whoa! Does you dad work as a spy for the government and get super secret updates beamed through that thing?” And I would be like, “Yeah.” They would think I was really cool, and then for dinner we would have frozen pizza and my friends would be like, “if your dad is a sweet spy, why do you guys eat frozen pizza? Shouldn’t you have a pizza chef, like from Italy, that works for you full time?” And that’s when I would have to admit that my dad wasn’t a spy for the government and that our satellite dish was just for TV.
Satellite is the opposite of cable. The difference between satellite and cable is that satellite television comes from outer space and cable comes from wires that run underground in the sewer (I think). There’s good stuff and bad stuff about both of them. Like if you have satellite, you feel cool because you’re talking to things in space every time you change the channel, but then if there was an intergalactic war, what would happen to TV as we know it? By having cable your supporting earth by saying no to space, but then if the sewers flood or alligators start gnawing on the wires, your picture might get fuzzy (I am pretty sure cable is in the sewers.
The big satellite dish I had when I was kid was from the time before they started making the really tiny ones that everyone has now. While the new small ones work better and don’t take up your whole back yard, I like the old big ones more. It’s kind of like having a rhino instead of a poodle for a pet. The poodle would be better behaved in the house and win more dog shows than the rhino, and with a poodle you don’t need to worry about it getting moody and trampling your car. But at the end of the day if you have a poodle, you can’t be like, “I have a pet rhino” and make people think you’re cool.
The sweetest thing about big satellite dishes was that they actually moved. One summer, me and my older brother, Lester, got walk walkie-talkies and I sat out next to the satellite dish with a piece of paper and Lester changed channels. He would tell me over the walkie-talkie what channel he was turning to and I would see where the dish pointed and make a channel map on my piece of paper. I got really into it, like I could see where the satellite was pointing and know what channel someone was watching without even looking at my map. Even these days, I still think stuff like, “There’s a storm coming in around channel five” or “There’s a cloud that looks like a laptop over channel nine.”
So what can we use those big dishes for now? Well if you live off a highway and you had a barn, you could hang a sign on the barn that says “Spot” like it’s a dog house and you could put the dish in front of it half full of dog food. Then you could make money on a roadside attraction for the biggest in the world. (And you don’t even need to have the biggest dog in the world to do it! You just need to point to the barn and say, “He’s sleeping”!)
Categories: Technology
Tagged: advice, awesome, cable, humor, old, satellite, Technology
Cell phone reception is like a wedding reception because they both involve talking to people. If you go to the wrong place, your wedding reception could be really bad, like a place where there are lots of bees or a tropical island where a violent tribe that hates weddings lives. This stuff is pretty easy to avoid because there will be clues, like big bee hives or burning wedding cakes all over the beach. Going to the wrong place can also make your cell phone reception bad but it’s not as easy to avoid. That’s why it’s important to know the steps to take if it happens to you.
Step 1: Before you end up in a place with bad reception, keep an eye on your bars. If you are driving and you notice that your bars are going down, ask yourself, “Is where I’m going really that cool? Cool enough to not be able to talk on my cell phone? And if it is that cool, won’t I want to call someone and tell them how cool it is?” (Important: this only applies to the bars on your phone. If you drive past a bar, like where people watch sports and drink beers, and it goes down, like the whole bar falls over, this does not mean you are losing cell phone reception. In fact, if you have cell phone reception and a bar falls over while you drive by, you should probably call someone.)
Step 2: If you end up in a place with bad cell phone reception, try not to panic, but if you really want to, you can panic a little bit. Think about it, your cell phone’s not working, so who’s going to know? It’s not like someone’s going to call you up, hear your panicky voice and then uninvite you to a bunch of sweet parties for people who are always calm.
Step 3: Don’t scare the locals. The people around you have bad cell phone reception so who knows if they’ve even seen a cell phone before. Keep your cell phone in your pocket.
Step 4: If you forget to put your cell phone away and someone asks you what the thing with buttons and a screen is, say you’re a scientist and you invented it.
Step 5: See what other technology these people are missing. If they don’t have computers and televisions, drive home, grab your computer and your TV and then come back. Show the people your stuff and say made it all and when you said you were a scientist before, you meant that you were a wizard.
Step 6: Once they believe you’re a wizard, run for mayor. You’ll get elected (who wouldn’t vote for a wizard?).
Step 7: Since the town doesn’t have cell phone reception, it’s probably pretty lame, so only stay mayor for a little while. Make sure to stay long enough to be able to mention it when you’re trying to get jobs or when you’re talking to attractive girls.
Categories: Technology
Tagged: advice, awesome, Cell phone, humor, sweet, Technology
