Texas Lou

Archive for the ‘Crazy Ideas’ Category

These are possibly two of the most intriguing and interesting blog posts I’ve ever read (and I’ve read alot of blog posts)!

The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence and The AI Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinction

I highly recommend these posts as well as most anything written by WaitButWhy.com.  They explore some really interesting and unique topics using a casual, informal, and entertaining manner.

If you are intrigued by the topic of Artificial Super Intelligence, as I am, I recommend these two free e-books about fictional rises of artificial super intelligence:

Manna and The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect

Disclaimer:  If memory serves me correctly, these stories contain some adult subject matter that may be disturbing to some.

Many strange things have been happening lately.

On Friday, a meteor exploded over Russia, an event being described as a “once in a decade” occurrence.  The meteor that damaged hundreds of buildings and injured over 500 people happened on the same day that an asteroid named 2012 DA14 came closer to Earth than our own orbitting communications satellites.

Then on Friday, I heard a loud flushing noise at work and blue fluid erupted from a drain underneath my desk.  The strong-smelling chemical was, according to the facilities manager at work, non-toxic and the result of air being unintentionally pumped into the pipe that connects the outside to this drain.  The blue fluid is a chemical used in place of water (due to its ability to evaporate) to neutralize sewage stench.

Friday night, I went to the grocery store and while I was there for less than 20 minutes, I encountered two separate people (they were not together) who were each missing a leg and walking with the aid of crutches.

Saturday morning, Ben was cooking breakfast and encountered this:

According to Google, the bloody egg was most likely the result of a stressed-out hen breaking a blood vessel as she simultaneously laid her egg causing the blood to become trapped inside the shell.  Unfortunately, Ben decided to eat it anyway.  A friend says the Chinese consider finding one of these good luck since they are extremely rare.

Then, after 9 months of searching endlessly for a house, and a day away from submitting an offer for a piece of land on which we hoped to build, we found the perfect house (for us) in the perfect location (for us).  Of course that perfect house is not ours yet but my fingers are crossed!

The odds of all of these things happening, especially within such a short period of time, seems extremely low.  Needless to say, I’m still waiting for something weird to happen!

Today’s lunch was a giant bag of carrots.

Why, you may ask, would a person eat a giant bag of carrots for lunch?  Well, for one thing, it’s healthy.  But really, I ate them because I desperately need to go to the store and this was one of the few acceptable lunch items I had in the house.

So as I was enjoying eating my giant bag of carrots for lunch, a thought struck me.  Could I turn orange from eating too many carrots?  I know I’ve heard this before but wasn’t sure if it is a fact or an old wive’s tale.  So  I decided to turn to my trusty old friend that knows the answer to every question, Google!

And of course, this questions is a commonly asked one (I’m not the only one)!  I found this article which confirmed that yes indeed, you can turn orange from eating too many carrots.  Just to make sure I wasn’t being fooled by the many false facts on the interwebz, I turned to Wikipedia to make sure the information I had found was correct.

Wikipedia also confirmed that there is a harmless condition called Carotenosis that includes the symptom of turning orange (see baby’s nose in screen shot above) and is the result of eating too many carrots (or any other naturally orange food like pumpkins).

So folks, consider that your interesting science lesson for the day and try not to eat too many carrots unless you are working on your Halloween costume!

If you know me well, then you’ll know that I absolutely LOVE to go to the dentist.

I know most people don’t enjoy going to the dentist and actually despise it so much that they go several years without seeing one.

I’m different and I’m strange and I love going to the dentist.  Maybe it’s because I have very healthy teeth and rarely have a bad experience at the dentist.  Maybe it’s because I have a weird obsession with cleaning (I tend to think the cleaner the better, but I know this isn’t always a rational belief).  Maybe it’s because my dentist has a massage chair and a TV in each one of his check-up rooms (although I vaguely recall loving the dentist experience before I was seeing my current one).  Whatever the reason is for my abnormal love of the dentist, I figure there can be worse unusual enjoyments, like trimming your cuticles until they bleed (ok another strange one that I am guilty of) or plucking out gray strands of hair (I no longer am a victim of this strange obsession).

Today I get to go to the dentist!  I get to have my teeth cleaned and will put off eating afterward as long as possible so that my teeth will remain sparkly and white like Edward Cullen (for you Twilight fans out there)!

So I know the above sounds a bit crazy, but we all have our crazy quirks and characteristics that make us unique and this just happens to be one of mine!

One of the worst things you can do at work is burn popcorn.  This terrible offense brings about the punishment of hearing “What’s that terrible smell?” and “Who burned popcorn?” for the rest of the afternoon.

It’s one thing to burn popcorn in your own home where you only risk offending the sense of smell of your loved ones, and really loved ones were made to offend.  But burning popcorn AT WORK, disrupting all of that productivity because each and every coworker HAS to comment on that god-awful smell?  What kind of person would do such a thing?  THE INSANITY!

Ok, so I burned the popcorn…I admit it.  I was distracted while it was in the microwave and I should have been monitoring it very closely.  I apologize VGT and for future reference, for the love of all that smells decent, please don’t talk to Leslie Elsaifi while she is cooking popcorn in the microwave…it can only end badly.  🙂

This morning, as I was driving to work, I spotted two high school-aged kids waiting at a bus stop.  They were both staring down intensely at their cell phones, texting away at their little hearts’ content no doubt.

This image conjured up memories of waiting for the bus on the corner of Kindle Oaks and King’s Castle many years ago and using the time to chat with my peers whom I probably would have never spoken to otherwise if we didn’t have the bus stop in common.  This was something I desperately needed, although I didn’t know it at the time, due to my shy, awkward teen years and my fear of communicating with others my age who intimidated me. 

The two texting teens made me think how ironic it is that the cell phone, a very powerful tool that was invented to increase communication and social activity, actually hinders those very ideas and promotes a taciturn demeanor by providing the user with an alternative focus to engage their attention.  Why would the two teenagers need to communicate with each other and possibly find something in common and maybe even become friends when there is a cell phone there in which they can bury their social anxiety.  It’s like those kids in college who would walk across campus listening to their iPods, thus releasing them from any social responsibilities. 

Perhaps technology, in its attempt to bring the global span of humanity together through faster and more efficient communication, is actually making the human race grow farther apart by allowing us to ignore our gregarious instincts with battery-powered distractions.  Or perhaps the two teens were just texting with each other because there’s no need to let those unlimited monthly texts that mom and dad are paying for go to waste!

I saw someone coming out of the men’s bathroom with a catalogue at work this morning.  It made me laugh.  I’ve got nothing against reading on the pot…I’m all for multitasking.  However, I’m not gonna flaunt this fact at work either.

Although if he was reading work-related materials then I’m sure his boss would be proud that he’s trying to minimize break time by bringing his work into the bathroom with him!

On occasion, I like to share with a random stranger, like the blackjack dealer at my table in Vegas, that when I give birth to my future children, assuming I’m still living outside of Texas, I’ll place a shoebox full of Texas dirt underneath the hospital bed so that I can say my children were born on Texas soil.  People usually laugh and think I’m kidding or drunk, but I’m totally serious.

Of course I can’t take credit for this idea myself.  I have Wikipedia and the father of Colt McCoy, the quarterback for the Texas Longhorns, to thank for this BRILLIANT idea!  According to Wikipedia and several other online sources,

 “McCoy’s parents were from Texas, but his father, Brad McCoy, was working just across the Texas border in Hobbs, New Mexico at the time of Colt’s birth. Brad McCoy reportedly brought a shoe-box of Texas dirt to the hospital and slid it under the bed so that Colt could be born “over Texas soil”. The story may or may not be true, as his father has chosen to “plead the fifth” when asked to confirm it.“

If you’re out there reading, Brad McCoy, I just want to say THANK YOU for this AWESOME idea!  I’m totally doing it!  As a matter of fact, I can’t wait to have kids, just so I can prove to everyone that I am actually going to go through with this!  It’s a helluvalot cheaper than flying to Texas to give birth.

I also plan on naming my first son Dallas.  Dallas Davidson has a nice ring to it, don’t ya think?