The Great Emu War

For my last blog post of the semester I decided I would write about one of the funniest moments in history in my opinion. During the 1930's in Australia, a certain species of flightless bird was causing a bit of a headache for local farmers. The emu, a bird native to the area, had been damaging the crops of the farmers in the area for decades and in 1932 the farmers decided to fight back. The local agrarians enlisted the help of Major G.P.W Meredith of the Royal Australian Artillery to devise a way to curtail the threat. In regular army fashion the Major decided that the best way to take care of the emu, was with good old fashioned machine guns. This is how this panned out, the Major, accompanied by two of Australia's finest carrying machine guns started out into the bush in early November to hunt the bird. After searching for the emu for hours eventually the soldiers found a few a few hundred yards away. The soldiers fired on the birds, which did nothing other than scare them away, much to the dismay of the men. After repeating this a few times the Major decided to mount one of the guns on a truck to give chase to the birds. Since this is 1932, this idea was not as glamorous as it sounds, as the truck only made the gun less accurate. After weeks of searching however the soldiers discovered a large flock of the bird, and decided to try and ambush the emu. In position, the birds were spooked into rushing their position. The soldiers waited until they were in point blank range, then started to unload their guns on the birds. Instead of mass destruction of the species, the guns jammed after about 12 had been killed and the rest scattered. The men, disheartened gave up their mission, and faced international ridicule for their mission. After a number of other similar attempts, the Great Emu War was deemed a failure by every party involved, except the emu, who were victorious. I think my favorite quote from the who experience was from an ornithologist, Dominic Serventy; “The machine-gunners' dreams of point blank fire into serried masses of Emus were soon dissipated. The Emu command had evidently ordered guerrilla tactics, and its unwieldy army soon split up into innumerable small units that made use of the military equipment uneconomic. A crestfallen field force therefore withdrew from the combat area after about a month.”

http://www.emugigs.com/emuwar/

http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/4508317

An Interesting Story

So here is my take at an interesting story, it should be just as appealing as the one told in class. Once upon a time, there was a philosopher who was thinking to himself, "I wonder how a person can be once upon a time?" At that point the philosopher realized that this phase is simply a convoluted way of saying, at one point. He thought to himself, " Librarians all over the world, are confusing the children, perverting our future and at one point this was considered to be a good idea." Once the philosopher noticed this, he took it upon himself to make sure that not a single child would be confused by Victorian era English ever again, until the end of time. He posted up in libraries, coffee shops and outside houses; watching, waiting for someone's mother to pick up a children's book or start watching a Star War's movie. But this was to no avail however as the irony of the event soon become evident. That a philosopher, whose job it is to think about ironic statements and events; did not realize that stalking families like this would be akin to stalking. And then everybody died, and the earth was red as blood., bunnies.

History of Virginia Tech

For this weeks post I thought that it would be interesting to discuss briefly the history of our school up to the present day. Virginia Tech can trace its history back to 1892, when the Virginia General Assembly purchased the buildings of the Preston and Olin Institute with the intent to begin a school. This was made possible by funds from the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act; which budgeted federal money for the creation of land-grant colleges. The land was turned into a military school called Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College. When the school was first opened, it did not resemble a traditional four year institution, instead the school served as a military school; the military tradition lives on today in the form of the corp of cadets. As attendance increased the president John McBryde organized the curriculum into that of a four year college and soon after the name was changed to Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College and Polytechnic Institute. The new name happened to be a bit too long, so soon after the name was shortened to Virginia Polytechnic Institute. In the years that followed the 1896 name change, VPI experimented with partnerships with other colleges as well as changing the mandatory corp of cadet requirement for male students from all four years to only two. During the tenure of T. Marshall Hahn, the president from 1962 to 1974, VPI experienced rapid growth as a college. Hahn had the goal of turning the school into a major research institution, and to achieve this authorized the the construction of new buildings as well as increasing the student body by about 1000 students a year. Hahn is also credited with opening the corp of cadets to women, making VPI the first college in the nation to do so. Towards the end of the 20th century, Virginia Polytechnic Institute official changed it's name to Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Today, this name is shortened to Virginia Tech because the full name is just too long.


http://www.unirel.vt.edu/history/

Electric Car Conversions

    A new trend is gaining speed among the mechanically savvy, one that allows them to spend less time at gas stations. Turning gasoline powered automobiles into electric powered cars is a hobby that saves tinkerers money. This interest in electric cars is a combination of multiple events; rising gas prices, environmental concern, or simply curiosity are turning car owners with a little know how, and a few spare bucks into electric car owners.
    The process is somewhat straightforward for a gear-head. First, anything that can be removed typically is, this includes; the engine, radiator, gas tank, spare tire and back seats. This "stripping" of the car brings the weight down, and this is one important aspect of an electric car. The lighter the car, the longer the drives that can be made, as excess weight drains the batteries faster.
    Secondly, a number of supplies must be either bought, salvaged or traded for. This is not an exhaustive list, but it includes a number of car batteries, the more the better, an electric engine, some circuity supplies, and a lot of wiring. These supplies are the basic requirements to have an electric car, however some builders spend more money on purposed lithium ion batteries designed for such cars.
    The next step is to put everything together and is the most complex. The are not very many guides for this sort of thing, they can be found but they are not tailored to different models of car; most of them are just for the wiring. What is difficult about this step is managing to fit all of the parts in the car. Depending on your build, there could be upwards of 8 car batteries that have to fit somewhere. With them in place, the engine is typically attached to the existing transmission with a conversion plate. The final piece that needs to be added is the circuity aspect. These can be ordered from a company or hand designed, it is up to the builder. What these do is turn the "raw" supply of power contained in the car batteries into a controlled, regulated flow of energy.
    With everything in place, it's time to go driving. These cars have a recharge time of anywhere from 12hours to a number of days, it depends on the quality and quantity of the batteries. A typical build will be some kind of manual car, with 8 car batteries, which holds 96 volts of energy to power the car. These cars can drive anywhere from a few miles to upwards of 50 miles before a recharge is needed, it all depends on how the car is driven, faster speeds drain the batteries faster. There is one thing that I have neglected to mention that makes electric cars superior to gas cars for performance, acceleration.  Electric cars have some of the fastest 0-60 times of ANY automobile, for instance the Audi e-Tron has a 0-60 time of 4.8 seconds, tied with a BMW 325i.



http://www.audiusa.com/us/brand/en/exp/progress/Concept_Vehicles/audi_e_tron.html
http://www.zeroto60times.com/BMW-Bimmer-0-60-mph-Times.html
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/electric-car7.htm
"2 years on a high school electric vehicle team."

1984

So as some of y'all know, I have been re-reading one of my favorite books of all time, 1984 by George Orwell. I first read this novel in the 11th grade in high school, and at the time did not take the time to enjoy it as much as I would have liked seeing as I had to read a few chapters a day. This time I was able to take my time and read a little at a time and focus more on the little details. If you haven't read the book, it is one of the classics in dystopian fiction. The story was written after the 2nd world war, and is somewhat of a warning from Orwell about how he thought the world might be in 1984 if communism continued to sweep the globe. 1984 follows a period of time in the life of the protagonist of Winston Smith, a member of The Party in a fictitious country called Oceania. The Party is the ruling body of Oceania, which is the combination of the America's, Great Britain and a few various other nations. The Party is led by the mysterious Big Brother, an ominous person who keeps a watchful eye on all of Oceania's citizens. Winston is what amounts to an "average joe" in this society and at the point in his life where the novel follows him, he is wrestling with the question of whether or not life was always so controlled. Citizens, or comrades as the are called, are under constant surveillance from The Party, and most actions that are contradicting to Party laws, carry a death sentence. These laws, or principles of INGSOC, which is short for English Socialism in the language of the novel, are in place to effectively make it impossible to rebel against The Party and Big Brother. Telescreens, which are televisions that watch you as you watch them, are a fixture in any party members house. They allow Big Brother to watch any comrade, at any time, for any reason. This invasion of privacy is so encompassing that there is a principle of INGSOC banning "thoughtcrime" or the act of simply thinking thoughts that are against party doctrine. Without going into too many details, Winston ends up discovering the reason for such invasion in the lives of others, and the reason why Big Brother is forever. If you are bored this summer I would highly recommend this book, as it entertains the reader while at the same time makes you aware of what life could be like if government becomes too big.



"1984 by George Orwell"

My Problem with the American Political System

            So ever since I was a little boy, I have been told about how America is the greatest country on earth, land of the free home of the brave. What my patriotic teachers should have been telling me was that America was the greatest country on earth and that my generation is responsible for turning us around. Ever since the end of the Cold War, America has been on a slow decline, economically and in both foreign and domestic policies. You can point fingers at Democrats and Republicans but it is not going to fix anything. The truth is, that our nation is being governed by a system that while being revolutionary in the 18^th century, is outdated. I bet you didn’t know that Thomas Jefferson had intended the United States Constitution be rewritten every 19 years, believing that “the dead should not rule the living.” While he did not write the Constitution, that was James Madison; his point is still valid; American’s today are not supposed to be governed by a set of 200 year old rules. Since there have been no major changes in American politics, 200 years of the same old process has bred an oil that can loosen up the political machine, money. Today politics is as much about swapping money as it is about being an old white male. The reason that we the people are getting the rug pulled out from under us is because the average politician today is just that an average politician. So when a law is written by Lamar Smith, and by written I mean paid to introduce a bill that was written by the largest players in the entertainment industry, that threatens the existence of a free internet; two things that are apparent. A, his political action committee received a large donation from the entertainment industry, and B, Lamar Smith doesn’t know anything about how the internet works. SOPA would have allowed the government to watch the internet activity of any American, without their knowledge with the purpose of catching citizens, who download music illegally, a major breach of our basic rights. What would turn America around is not electing more politicians, what we need are people who are knowledgeable. Experts in fields should be writing our nations policies, because they know what the problems are, and that years of throwing money at issues only makes them worse. What we need are scientists, educators, mathematicians, engineers and doctors running this nation instead of “career politicians.” These are people whose job it is to solve problems, so I’m not saying they would fix America but they would probably do a better job than what we have now.


http://www.usconstitution.net/consttop_newc.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Election_Commission

Forgetting Joseph Kony

What you see above this text is a screenshot of something that is truly as interesting as it is scary. It is a graph of the amount of times that "Kony" was searched in Google. For those of you who are unfamiliar the Kony that is being searched is the Joseph Kony or the Lords Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda. The LRA are infamous for taking children and forcing them to serve as soldiers in this man's army. Horrendous right? It is, he is terrible person who should be brought to justice and something truly needs to be done to stop him. Well this is what is interesting about this graph, and what is interesting is that this trend of spiking and then dropping back to almost nothing a month later was also common on other websites, Facebook, Twitter as well as major news outlets were all full of statuses, tweets and stories about Kony and his child soldiers. Why I bring this up is to make the point that it was everywhere, everyone knew about Kony and the LRA even if they couldn't point to Uganda on a map. There was a mass influx in every form of media on this topic, and then as fast as it blew up, it died out. You can see how a week after the spike, the Google searches are back to almost pre-spike levels, people just we're not searching for info on this man anymore. This whole experience could almost be the topic of a doctoral thesis in psychology, how the internet has desensitized us as humans. We are becoming inundated with knowledge every time we get online and it may not be a good thing for us. We have the attention span of goldfish nowadays, this Kony thing is not an isolated incidence. Remember the Fukushima reactor in Japan, or the Deep-water Horizon oil spill in the Gulf? Both had similar trends, an immediate explosion of attention, interest, and donations and then it's as if it never happened. I'm sure that if you were in the middle of these disasters you wouldn't be so apathetic, but the fact that we are able to know that terrible things are happening in the world, want to help in some way and then as soon as the news stops covering the story, forget it even happened is extremely alarming. Just thought that maybe you all may have your own thoughts on this, feel free to share.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Kony

Spring Break

So this blog is going to be more of a rant of how bad my spring break was, because it was pretty bad the majority of the time. To start off my break, we go to Friday after classes. For some reason it is raining cats and dogs outside, and it is impossible to find a spot to park my car to load it up to leave. I ended up leaving it in the Cassell lot and had to run all of my stuff to the car in two trips. By the time I was able to get into my car I was soaked to the skin which made the following trip up 81 all the more pleasant. For those who have never tried to leave Blacksburg when everyone else is, 460 becomes nothing short of one great big backup, with everyone trying to get on at different points. Did I mention that this time it was still raining horribly? So after a 4 hour car ride home, one that usually takes 1.5, I was able to have a nice evening with my family until work the next day. Now I cannot complain about my job, simply because I have one, but the ideal spring break is relaxing with your friends down in Florida, not working 9 hour shifts at a hospital pharmacy for 8 days straight. But I enjoy my job so that is the only negativity that it shall get. The icing on the cake that is my freshman spring break is that somehow I managed to be the passenger in a Gator ATV that was flipped on its side, on Saturday night, 2 days before the start of school again. Let me explain where I was. I was in Highland County, at a friend’s house, an hour from the nearest hospital; a hospital that does not even have the capacity to treat my injuries. So the Gator flipped and at this point I am going on what people have told me because I received a mild traumatic brain injury from the wreck. The Gator was lying on top of me, my head to be exact; the ground was soaked from rain so that cushioned the blow a bit. My four friends who were with me ran over and proceeded to lift the vehicle off of me. What happened next I do not remember either, but from what I gathered from them; there was a very fast drive back to the closest hospital, they would not treat me so I was then medevac’d to UVa. I later woke up after a 2 day stay in the ICU. So how was your break?

Mardi Gras

This Tuesday, February 21, 2012 marks the end of an annual festival that has been held for hundreds of years, this event is called Mardi Gras or Carnival. I want to talk mainly about Mardi Gras in New Orleans, because I was recently down in the bayou, but first some history about Carnival. Countries around the world celebrate Mardi Gras as a celebration before the Catholic holiday of Lent, which is a period of sacrifice from Ash Wednesday until Easter Sunday. In a nutshell Lent is a period of 40 days in which members of certain branches of Christianity give up some aspect of their lives be it a type of food, alcohol, driving, watching television, the possible sacrifices for Lent are infinite. So of course in preparation for this “fasting” as some call it, there is typically some form of celebration in major cities, that have a large percentage Catholic or Anglican Christians. So how does New Orleans play in all this jazz? Punny right? Well the Big Easy is host to arguably the largest Mardi Gras celebration in North America. In a tradition that has continued officially since 1833, New Orleans hosts around a week of celebration for locals and visitors either out of state or even out of country. Mardi Gras in New Orleans typically kicks off on Thursday night the week before Lent and continues until Fat Tuesday. Oh you’ve never heard of Fat Tuesday before, let me explain. Fat Tuesday is “the day” to celebrate Mardi Gras at midnight on Fat Tuesday the celebration is over and everyone goes home. The day gets its name from a tradition of enjoying fatty foods the night before the 40 days of fasting begin aka Lent, and the name has stuck. The celebration itself consists of parades, live music, dressing in flashy costumes and collecting souvenirs, the most common are beads. The parades are put on by the different krewes of the city; a krewe is simply an organization that puts on a parade and sometimes a corresponding ball. The krewes are a board of sorts who decide amongst themselves and the local government how and when the major parades and celebrations will be held. One each day there are typically parades on the major streets put on by krewes and at night there are parties on the streets in the French Quarter, the old section of New Orleans for those who are “of age,” the most popular of which is Bourbon Street. This continues every day until Fat Tuesday on which there are balls and some historic symbolic mumbo jumbo in addition to the parades and partying. All in all Mardi Gras in New Orleans is a celebration that is as historic as it is fun. These days many of the people who go to Mardi Gras in New Orleans have no intention of fasting for Lent and are only looking for a good time. So on Tuesday when you are bored in class on Tuesday just remember that you could be down in New Orleans eating a Po’boy and enjoying a hurricane, if you are of age of course.

·         http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Orleans_Mardi_Gras

·         http://mardigrasday.com/

·         http://www.mardigrasneworleans.com/

Reddit is like quicksand

Today I Learned(TIL) is an interesting sub-Reddit on the popular blogging website Reddit.com. Without going into too much detail, Reddit is a blogging website where as a member one can blog about anything they want, usually it is to spark a conversation within the blog. Depending on how well the blog is writing or how interesting the blog is, a blog may be “upvoted” and depending on how many upvotes a blog has depends on the order of the list of blogs on the main page of Reddit. The more upvotes a blog has the higher the blog goes on the list with the ultimate goal of being a blog on the front page of Reddit. A sub-Reddit is simply a smaller form of Reddit within Reddit with the purpose of categorizing blogs based on the topic of the blog. So Today I Learned is a sub-Reddit where Redditors can post interesting links to websites where the poster found something that is not common knowledge, hence the name Today I Learned. So today I learned that no one can actually drown from quicksand, interesting right. Hollywood among other factors has skewed the public’s idea of how quicksand works. Quicksand is a mixture of sand, water, clay and salt, which when in the right concentration creates an amorphous solid. When the mixture is not disturbed, the quicksand has a solid form, but when something such as a foot is placed on the quicksand, it snaps out of equilibrium. The sand falls to the bottom of the mixture and the water stays on top, this is why when you fight the quicksand you sink. If the motion stops, the mixture starts to become solid again, the whole process is similar to the corn starch and water solution that you may or may not have seen growing up. Anyways many people think that this is the end of the road for them, that they will sink into the ground never to be seen again. This is false, because quicksand is roughly twice as dense as humans are so according to Chase Smith, you would only sink half way.

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/articles/article/whatisquicksand-1/

http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned

Super Bowl Ads

Since we are in the middle of an advertisement project I thought that it would be appropriate to blog about one of the biggest if not the biggest events for advertisements, the Super Bowl. Ever since the first official Super Bowl in 1966, the event has been the “world championship” of professional football. The game originally started as an end of season tournament between the NFL and the AFL before the two organizations merged to form the NFL. Today the game is an annual event in early February, and holds the distinction of drawing more than 100,000,000 viewers every year. This large number of viewers is enticing for companies, as they can reach an immensely large number of viewers with one advertisement. The NFL knows this and charges big bucks for air time, for example, in 2010 it cost 2.5 million dollars for a 30 second commercial. With all of the money flying around for air time, companies usually invest heavily in commercials creating unique gems that appeal to a large viewing audience. This provides another aspect to Super Bowl viewership; some viewers that may not normally watch football are drawn to watch the game because of the high volume of entertaining, quality commercials. Many popular commercials come out of these games, many of which create unintended results that did not exist before the game. You may remember the phase “whassup” from the early 2000’s, this was a phrase from a popular Budweiser commercial or the 2010 Snickers commercial that is attributed to rekindling the career of ageing actress Betty White. While there have been no end to clever commercials created by large companies, some of the most popular are coming from a new trend in advertising, letting consumers create their own ads and let the internet vote on the ad that they would like to see the most. Doritos has been doing this quite frequently in the past few years, allowing them to only have to purchase air time, and submit a popular ad without having to spend a dime on creating it. In conclusion, the “big game” draws people from all over the world to take a break from their busy lives to watch grown men run into each other, and enjoy the annual apex of commercial advertising.

·         ""They're up: With a stop at Comerica Park, the friends starring in Budweiser's 'Whassup' commercials say hello to success, thanks to the beer guzzling of Damien Stanworth"". Detroit Free Press. April 21, 2000

·         http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Football_League

·         http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/01/11/sportsline/main6082591.shtml

·         http://www.nfl.com/superbowl/history

·         Superbowl-advertising-30sec-1967-2010.png‎

A Clockwork Orange

I just recently finished Anthony Burgess’s dystopian novel, A Clockwork Orange. For those of you who may not be familiar with dystopian novels, a dystopian novel usually takes place in a future society, although not always, and is characterized by misery, squalor, oppressive governments and any host of other deplorable aspects of life (1). Arguably the most famous dystopian novel is Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. Which is about a society that seems perfect or utopian but on closer inspection, the whole society is morally on its head. Anyway another good book should you find yourself in need of one. A Clockwork Orange takes place in futuristic England, in what is supposedly London. Note that this book was written in 1962, so the future in the book seems more like the early 1970’s but the themes are still very relevant. The book follows the exploits of Alex, who is a teenager growing up in the declining state Great Britain. Alex with his gang, go out and terrorize the city at night, robbing, raping, and beating up whoever they see fit. Without giving too much of the plot away Alex eventually is forced to change his ways, to the point where he physically cannot do harm to others. This is where the main theme of the novel comes into play, even though doing evil is wrong should we be allowed to force wrongdoers to do good? Again, I do not want to give the plot away so I will have to leave you hanging about how this theme materializes in the novel, if you want to find out I recommend reading it or at the very least watching Stanley Kubrick’s movie based on the book. A Clockwork Orange is very psychologically challenging with many disturbing acts of violence, the book used to be banned.

1.      http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/dystopia

"Who am I?" asked by myself

According to www.facebook.com Carter Moore, has the middle name Allen. His favorite sports include anything with a ball such as; soccer, football, baseball, and basketball. When reading about his interests; watching movies, hanging with friends and working out are all interests of his. Further reading suggests that he is enjoying his time at Virginia Tech, where I assume he is studying engineering according to his most recent status, “Engineering homework is gonna kick my tail!” As I scroll through his pictures it is interesting to note that many of his pictures do not appear to have been taken in the US of A. It seems as if he has been to England, Italy, Mexico and Romania before, or he is quiet good at Photoshop. By jumping over to www.Twitter.com Carter seems to be a somewhat modest tweeter, with only 69 tweets to his name as well as most of these about taking a nap or doing homework. Flying to the other side of the internet to http://www.augusta.k12.va.us/70562012510945377/site/default.asp which was his high school’s website, I dug up that Carter was president of the SCA his senior year. A quick Google search for “Carter Moore”, turned up numerous tattoo parlors, all apparently owned by yours truly. As many of his friends know, Carter seem to really like getting up for his 8am English class as 8am is the best time possible for blogging and doing English things. Perhaps it would be of interesting note that Virginia Tech made a heinous error when calculating Carters grades, where he should have gotten a 4.OH he received a 2.OHNO. There must be a typo in there somewhere? This seems like it should be a somewhat satisfactory introductory research based look at the one named Carter Moore. Like Bigfoot however he is elusive and quite a handful with the ladies.