Cereal Killers and Coconut Crabs

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Reason: school. No more questions, man.

I was on the Penny Arcade Forums the other day. The entire place is a receptacle for amazing banter. I think they should scrap the webcomic and just headline that forum, because they have their act together on there. In some thread, someone mentioned ‘coconut crabs’. I immediately thought of something on the Red Lobster menu. I felt it was out of place in the context in which it was mentioned.

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

HOLY SHIT OF GOD. That is one of the craziest animals ever. Usually that sort of size applied to a common creature is something you find in nightmares. Seriously, if I saw one of those things, I’d have to try and wake myself up. It might even convince me I was stuck in a dream, and I would pass out trying to shake my consciousness into a higher level of reality. There are a few things from that article I would love to point out, for the record.

- ‘Leg span of 1m’. For reference, about the height of some small children.
- ‘During a tagging experiment, one coconut crab was observed catching and eating a Polynesian Rat’. If everything in Polynesia is as disproportionally large as the crab itself, that’s pretty impressive.
- ‘The coconut crab climbs trees to eat coconuts’. I love the mental picture of a meter-large crustacean hanging above me in a tree. I might by a few to put in the trees around my house.
- ‘The claws (chelae) can lift objects up to 29 kg (64 pounds) in weight’. I’d like to point out the small children reference point again.
- ‘A coconut crab may attack a person if it is threatened’. No comment necessary.

Interestingly, this animal is of the order ‘Decapoda’. If I recall correctly, Dr. Zoidberg from Futurama is of the ‘decapodian’ species. He doesn’t seem as menacing as one of these buggers, though. Also, I believe the article is in error when it lists the family as ‘coenobitidae’. I’m pretty sure (with my vast knowledge of biology) that the coconut crab is in the family ‘coenobitidAWESOME’.

What other animals would have an exponential increase in crazy awesome-ness with respect to size increase? I read an article a while ago about ‘water bears’, and now the seeds have been planted, and I’m imagining the grand possibilities.

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

Right of the bat, this animal is freaking sweet. You can tell God had his shit together when he created this tough bastard. A few things to point out.

- ‘They can survive temperatures close to absolute zero, temperatures as high as 151 degrees Celsius, 1000 times more radiation than any other animal, nearly a decade without water, and can also survive in a vacuum like that found in space’. It seems like these things don’t need anything at all to beef up their defenses. I think this qualifies as ‘indestructible’.
- ‘Most tardigrades are phytophagous or bacteriophagous, but some are predatory’. It doesn’t say what their natural prey is, but if I may speculate… small children?
- ‘Tardigrades occur over the whole world’. Perfect for world domination, of course.

This minuscule creature is a fucking tank. Now imagine it 10^4 times as large. That thing would fucking beast you and rape your wife. And how would you kill it? The temperatures and pressures from an explosive wouldn’t even phase it. No dirty bomb could stop it. It would be impervious to isolation. And we can’t shoot it into space obviously. That would just bear a new race of space-faring tardigrades. Even if you couldn’t make tardigrades giant monolithic walking fortresses, you could at least give them the honor they deserve. I think a water bear would be perfect as a cereal mascot. Except it would probably eat the Trix rabbit, maul Captain Crunch (or sink his fleet), rape Lucky, and shit all over those tiny Rice Krispies elves.

I think perhaps there should be a massive cereal mascot melee to determine which cereal is the superior. And then everyone would just buy that one. My money’s definitely on that bee from the Honey Nut Cheerios commercial. He’s less of an icon, and more of a meaningless worker bee in a dangerously large totalitarian wasp state. I don’t think he’s really that special, kind of arbitrarily chosen. After all, those bees are all equal. Except for Stalin Bee, who would probabyl make a better cereal mascot anyway. There’s safety in that kind of father-knows-best insect state. If Lucky, say, tried to swat at the protagonist bee with a blue moon spell or some shit, the entire hive would swarm all over his ass. And no stupid red balloon shit to escape. Those bees would just fly up and sting his ass all across the sky.

Today’s lesson, there are three supreme beasts: bees, tardigrades, and coconut crabs. If we could have house-size tardigrades parachuting down while dropping coconut crabs carrying hives of angry hornets, we’d have a winning strategy in Iraq.

After all, that’s what they used in Vietnam, right?

Ambigrammar, so to Speak

I have recently become enamored of ‘ambigrams’; artistically rendered words which either retain their identity or switch to another, appropriate one when rotated 180 degrees. Rotational symmetry has always fascinated me; I don’t know why I didn’t pick this up before. A lot of what I do and many tricks of the trade are derived from one site I found the other day, <http://www.johnlangdon.net/index.html>…

I am still a beginner, but I have created a few ambigrams myself, two of which I have hosted on this blog. Without further ado, here they are…

“Leonidas”:

“Father”:

Fear of a Dead Planet?

Max Brooks, you da man. Only you are awesome enough to set up a physically realistic source of canonical information about the living dead.

For those of us who don’t know who Max Brooks is, he is the son of famous director Mel Brooks, and he is the single greatest source for zombie literature. His first zombie book, ‘The Zombie Survival Guide’, laid the groundwork for understanding the behavior and characteristics of the undead, and instructed how to effectively defend one’s self against them. The follow-up ‘World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War’ detailed an in-depth account of a fictional war against the undead, set sometime in the future. Additionally, this book’s movie rights were acquired by Paramount Pictures, and they plan to churn out a film. Something I look forward too.

After voraciously reading these two books, I am now well versed in zombology, and have formulated a few tips for those looking to keep themselves from being turned into food.

Tip 1 – Don’t run from zombies. They shuffle towards you fairly slowly, despite their gnawing hunger, so running will only tire you out. Save that running when you’re completely surrounded, not when a single one confronts you in an open space. It’s become apparent that many people meet their doom when they collapse from exhaustion, after running from zombie after zombie. Don’t be one of those people.

Tip 2 – Try and stay the fuck away from them. In an Earth devoid of people, Zombies would be spread evenly across its face after a while, because their movement is basically random. In reality, they tend to gather where they know there are living people, so as long as you keep out of sight, you probably won’t encounter many to begin with. It seems that you could hypothetically live until your natural death in a room with enough supplies if you kept it locked and made no noise or let no zombie know you were there. But if one does know, it’ll attract every zombie in the vicinity, and that’s really where the trouble starts.

Tip 3 – Don’t work. Make the zombies work for you. Need to get a large amount of supplies somewhere? Wasting energy means wasting food, so just find a zombie, bind it down, and cut out it’s vocal cords so it can’t moan. Then, tie a rope around it’s waist, tie that rope to a cart full of supplies, and just lead it somewhere. If you have a permanent domicile, zombies are a good source of labor for working a mill or plowing a field. Another hypothetical involves a large transparent hamster wheel hooked up to a battery charging implement.

Tip 4 – Don’t fuck tha police. If authority is still present, they can probably still whoop your ass. Either join them, manage to convince them to let you go it with your own party, or if they’re forcing you to stay, find a tricky way out, all dependent on how they’re handling the undead situation. As cool as it would be to take over a police force worth of guns, nightsticks and donuts, chances are you’re just gonna get shot.

Tip 5 – If you have enough electrical power to handle it, get an R/C monster truck with a mounted live feed camera. Zombies only go for living things and completely ignore everything else, so this would prove to be an effective reconnaissance measure which doesn’t risk valuable human life. A similar methodology can be applied to many other things. Don’t have human guards, use infrared beams, or more crudely, tripwires which set off air horns. And when it comes time to bait, never use people. An animal will do just as nicely, and is ostensibly less precious (fuck you, PETA).

These tips were either ideas not touched upon in Max Brooks canon, or were only referenced offhandedly. Feel free to add your own.

I can hate American Money without being a Communist!

Since I work at a supermarket, I get to deal with how screwed up our currency is on a near-daily basis. Ideally, we’d just make the switch to electronic tender, but some people aren’t quite ready for that sort of sophistication yet. The least we could do is reorganize our coins and bills.

There should be a sort of standard so we don’t use certain coins and bills too often, and some not enough. It would be about equal up to the dollar. Pretty much anything you can buy today is around a dollar at least, it’s arbitrary as to whether it’s 23 cents or 97 cents off of some whole dollar quantity. In other words, we should be supplied effectively by an equal number of all types of coins.

Currently, nickels are almost completely worthless. Not in the sense that they aren’t worth enough money, but that they serve no purpose. They are used far too little, because you never use more than one nickel for without being redundant. If you have two nickels, you would ideally use a single dime. On the other hand, pennies are decent because they you need five of them before you can replace them with another type of coin. Dimes are in between. On one hand, they’re useful for replacing nickels at large, but the gap between dimes and quarters if a little crappy. Three dimes almost necessitate the use of a quarter, but it’s not too bad because then you would need a nickel. Still, it’s not too bad. Quarters are alright, because three is a fair maximum number.

I think we should have only pennies, nickels, and a twenty cent piece, appropriately called a fifth. This way, five pennies to a nickel, four nickels to a fifth, and five fifths to a dollar. This is a nearly even distribution which keeps the hundred cent to dollar ratio, a standard considering our decimal number system.

The optimal change system would have the best ratio between number of coins used for change up to a dollar. Another factor is the net number of coins, because no one wants to carry that much change around. My system is slightly heavier (more coins used), but vastly more effective in equality of change.

In both the current system, and my system, there is a simple penny and a simple nickel, so the average use of pennies is the same, and since the roll-over is at five, the average number of pennies per change set is 2 (0+1+2+3+4/5).

Here’s a list of optimal change combinations for both systems for change multiples of five, since the pennies are the same for both systems.

Total — Current System — My System
0 — 0 (0) — 0 (0)
5 — 1n (1) — 1n (1)
10 — 1d (1) — 2n (2)
15 — 1d 1n (2) — 3n (3)
20 — 2d (2) — 1f (1)
25 — 1q (1) — 1f 1n (2)
30 — 1q 1n (2) — 1f 2n (3)
35 — 1q 1d (2) — 1f 3n (4)
40 — 1q 1d 1n (3) — 2f (2)
45 — 1q 2d (3) — 2f 1n (3)
50 — 2q (2) — 2f 2n (4)
55 — 2q 1n (3) — 2f 3n (5)
60 —2q 1d (3) — 3f (3)
65 —2q 1d 1n (4) — 3f 1n (4)
70 — 2q 2d (4) — 3f 2n (5)
75 — 3q (3) — 3f 3n (6)
80 — 3q 1n (4) —4f (4)
85 —3q 1d (5) —4f 1n (5)
90 — 3q 1d 1n (5) —4f 2n (6)
95 — 3q 2d (5) — 4f 3n (7)

— Current System — My System
Max Coins (99 cents) — 9 — 11
Av Coins (no pennies) — 2.75 — 3.5
Av Coins (pennies) — 4.75 — 5.5

Current System (p:n:d:q) Ratio – 20:4:8:15
My System (p:n:f) Ratio – 20:15:20

As for bills, the situation is slightly different because ones need to be more common because they are used not only as change up to the hundred, but also for small purchases, such as my only sustenance, candy bars. So as the value of the bill increases, the rarity increases somewhat. However, a similar 1 5 20 100 relationship works well here as well. The ten is redundant in our current system because it makes the five less useful, and it itself is unnecessary because two tens are replaceable with a twenty.

God damn, the U.S. mint should hire me.