The show I am speaking of is The Deadliest Warrior, broadcast on Spike TV on Tuesdays. Each week, the show pits two warriors against each other in the court of television opinion. Some of the contestants are familiar heroes from history, such as a Spartan or a Samurai, and some are more contemporary, such as The Taliban or the KGB. How can they possibly compare warriors of such different abilities, time period, and weaponry? With Science, of course.

The three “judges” of the contest include a biomedical scientist, a doctor with ER trauma surgeon experience, and a computer programmer. The biomedical guy sets up experiments so that they can test the warriors methods and tactics and get quantitative data out of it. The doctor evaluates the simulated wounds that the weapons make, and judges whether an injury is superficial, debilitating, or just plain fatal. And the computer programmer takes all this data and inputs it into a model that runs 1000 simulated battles between the warriors, deciding who the winner is. The show then stages a choreographed battle between actors dressed as the warriors, with the winner of the computer simulation revealed as the winner of this heated battle.

There are many reasons I love this show. First of all, the “experts”. Since the warriors in question often do not exist any more, they get people to come in who are considered experts on the subject, two people per warrior. If the warrior is an Apache, for example, they can get actual Apache to come and talk about the culture and the weapons. However, when the subject is Celtic warriors, they have to just get people who are interested in medieval history and weaponry. All four people are present during all the tests and weapons demonstrations, and all four people must be contractually obligated to trash talk the other team and offer objections to any spectacular display of martial ability. They are always supremely confident that their warrior will reign supreme.

Secondly, the test subjects. Obviously, they cannot test the lethality of the weapons on real people. But they can use simulated people! One the one hand, they can use synthetic people, such as human dummies made of ballistic gel, which has a similar consistency to human flesh. They pour the ballistic gel into molds with simulated (or real??) bone, so that the dummies have skulls and ribs and everything. They also add in bags of fake blood, so that an inflicted wound will bleed messily. But sometimes, that’s just not good enough! They also use pig carcasses (also with strategically placed fake blood bags) to give that extra bit of realism, as pig carcasses (as you may know from episodes of Mythbusters) offer a very close simulation of human flesh.

Thirdly, the test equipment. The biomedicist adds pressure sensors to skulls and armor, and radar and laser detectors to measure weapon velocity. They film the demonstrations with high speed cameras to get great slow motion videos of maces crushing skulls. Did you know it takes about 80 psi of pressure to crush someone’s skull? I do, now.

Fourthly, the weapons. Each warrior gets four weapons to test in battle. Typically, there is one long range, one medium range, one short range, and one “wild card” weapon. It’s always cool to see each culture/disciplines armory. Samurai katana vs. Viking Longsword? Flamethrower vs RPG? Let’s see what they can do to some pigs!

The way the show is set up, it makes for some interesting and sometimes disturbing confrontations. For instance, the first season finale was a battle between the IRA and the Taliban. Experts were basically trashtalking each other about being the better terrorist. The first show that I caught this season was between the Nazi SS and the Viet Cong. It’s really hard to be a cheerleader for SS weaponry and abilities without seeming like a bit of a Nazi.

But finally, the one thing I love is how they always ignore the giant elephant in the room : the computer model. The experts will constantly argue about the efficacy of the weapons. One heavy weapon will demolish fake skulls, and the opposing experts will say something to the effect of “it’s one thing to attack a stationary dummy, but theres no way you would be able to strike a <insert opposing warrior here> with a weapon that slow”. But they will never say “that computer model way overvalues projectile speed over penetration depth.” This central fiction of the show is hilarious. The proprietary model is considered sacrosanct when in reality its the most important factor in all the rankings. No doubt, Slytherin Studios will never offer up the model Lose Weight Exerciseings for public perusal, but one day enough shows will pass that one could probably come up with the ultimate warrior by inferring the Lose Weight Exerciseing based on previous battles. At this point, I will invent a ancient warrior with a specialized backstory and with special weapons that will crush all others in their path. And then finally, I will get the official title of Deadliest Warrior.

The show is filled with so much testosterone that its impossible for any red-blooded male to resist (yeah, that’s right, if you don’t like this show you must not really be a man). After seeing that SS vs Vietcong battle, I went on wikipedia to find out the battles that I had missed. I was really intrigued to see that an Indian Rajput warrior battled a Roman Centurion earlier this year, and that the full episode was online. Hopefully this will stay online, but you can check it out here (no embed, unfortunately, and 40 minutes long). The weapons that are brought to the table in this one are incredible.

If I find a quiz I enjoy, I’ll just share it. Today, the quiz is “Can you name the city that each metro/subway system is located in, based on the names of three of its stations?“. For this one, you’ll have to select the blank that you’re trying to answer, since otherwise you could just start spamming famous cities. The reason I found this one interesting is that I got 28/32 correct, even though I had only ridden on 10 of them. You can tell a lot, just based on the names and character set.

As I watched that series (originally aired in 2007), I came across this segment, where the Top Gear crew pay an homage (of sorts) to the quality of British craftsmanship. It’s four YouTube videos (32 minutes total), and it’s just about the funniest thing I have watched in the past six months, perhaps even the past year. If you aren’t laughing hysterically at some point in time while watching this, I’m afraid that we can’t be friends.

Over the past weekend, I caught this video up on Fark’s video page. I had never seen it before, and I have to say, I find it positively entrancing. I watch once a day, often more. It’s Italian entertainer Adriano Celentano’s Prisencolinensinainciusol , this video is from roundabouts 1973, and there are few things I don’t love about it. I love the beat and the growl of the guitar. I love the choreography and the outfits. I love the disco-dancing blonde (Should I have been a child of the 70′s? Perhaps. Without the internet, I probably would get a lot more done) Heck, I even like the horns, and in general I hate horn flourishes in songs (you can thank the ska fad of the late 90′s and early 00′s for that). It’s like something Tarantino would put in his movies.

However, the most fascinating thing about this video, in my mind, is that fact that it’s gibberish. He isn’t speaking Italian (except at the very beginning of the video). He isn’t speaking any language. But it’s not unreasonable to think that it’s supposed to sound like English, with its bluesy edge and faux-American accent. And because of this, your mind starts to try and make sense of and form intelligible words (as has been done with great success in some Bollywood videos). The Japanese have a word for it : Soramimi : mishearing words in one language (or in this case, no language) for another language. The intralingual equivalent is mondegreening, like all those people who thought Jimi Hendrix was saying “Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy.” Since Adriano is singing in something close to an American accent, it also makes me wonder if non-English speakers hear their own language or just assume that it’s English.

I am an ignorant American; while I know a bit of German and a slight amount of French, I couldn’t really carry a conversation in anything other than English. But I’ve always thought that if you had me listen to people talking in Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, and Hungarian for one minute, I would identify 6 out of 6 at least 90% of the time, just based on what I know about the languages. What this video makes me wonder is that if I had each of those people pretend to be speaking in one of the other languages (Assuming it doesn’t just devolve into racist stereotyping), would I do just as well?

Stuff White People Like has been going on for a couple of years; the earliest posts on the current incarnation of their website show a date of January 18th, 2008, but I’m pretty sure that’s just when they migrated to their current hosting. The website is, accurately enough, a compendium of things that white people like. While the site owners use the blanket term “white people”, I would consider their focus to be almost exclusively on two groups of white people : yuppie white people and hipster/indie white people. These two groups of people are pretty safe to make fun of. Yuppies are going to be above average on the income scale, so it’s not like you’re picking on poor people or something. As for hipsters and indies, they are often hilariously self-absorbed, so they might not even notice you’re making fun of them. And, since they are white and thus in the dominant ethnic and cultural group in the country, no one is really going to bother calling your racist. Much like almost every other cultural segment of America, both of these cliques engage in hypocrisy that can be pretty amusing when looked at from the outsider’s perspective.

This the brilliance of Stuff White People Like; it is written almost like an anthropologist’s notebook. If you were from another culture, come to study America, how would you blend in with the majority? How would you befriend the white person, gain their trust so you can study them further? The best way is to get them to feel better about themselves, and bring them to places where they will feel comfortable. Perhaps take them to a sandwich shop. Or take them to an ethnic restaurant and compliment them on their adventurous palate. You should be very careful about talking to them about classical music, though, as you might scare them off.

To fully enjoy SWPL, you need to be an outsider, or be willing to put yourself into the outsiders mindset. I first told Cameron and Gina about the website one day over lunch, and when we got back to their apartment, Gina (a Korean woman) rushed to her computer to see if it was as enlightening as I had maintained. For the next hour or so, all Cameron and I heard from the other room was “Oh, it’s so true!” Being graduate-school educated people living in the midwest, we’ve had plenty of experience with yuppies and hipsters (and hipster wanna-bes), and this explains it all!!

Every once in a while the authors throw in a “White People In the News”, for example this post on people doing yoga with their dogs. They take an article, often from The Times, and look at how many SWPL items get covered in the article. In much the same way, ever since I started following this website, I tend to view everything through the prism of SWPL. I might make references to “highly advanced white people”, a phrase I picked up from posts like this one on music piracy. I made two recent trips to Portland and Seattle, two extremely white towns. When in Seattle, Cameron and I went in search of a local doughnut shop, which happened to be in a trendy area. There was a little pond, with lots of people enjoying the weather outside. They were walking their dogs, decked out in their performance clothes. It turned out that the doughnut shop we visited was a local place, and of course it was organic and possibly vegan. I couldn’t help but chuckle at the whiteness of it all. So, as a warning to all you white people out there that I hang out with, if we’re ever somewhere and I just start smirking for no good reason…..don’t take it personally. It might just be all the stuff white people like.

I’ll start with webcomics. Unlike their newspaper-based counterparts, webcomics have the innate advantage of having no arbitrary format restrictions, no arbitrary need to appeal to a broad audience, and no arbitrary need to be family friendly. As a result, many web comics are about nerds and video games, and many include swearing. Today is an exception.

Today, we talk about Dr. McNinja. I discovered this webcomic for myself a few months ago, and I was immediately hooked. Dr. McNinja is a ninja, who is also a doctor. His family is also from Scotland. Or Ireland, depending on where the story needs him to be. Dr. McNinja is surprisingly well written and drawn. The stories are quite long, and the plot lines are absolutely, hysterically ludicrous. His receptionist is a gorilla named Judy. He updates three times a week, and the past 1 and a half episodes (one is in progress) are even in full color! You should definitely check out Dr. McNinja, and you should always remember to check out the alt-text on each message by mousing over the images.

Why are you asking me? I don’t know anything.

But I can mention some of the websites that have provided interesting economic information over the past few years. None of them offer stock advice or anything like that — most of the time it’s just opinion, analysis, and explanation of economic data. While I, not being an economist, am not in a position to critically analyze them, I’ve followed some of these websites for two or three years, and history has borne a lot of what they’ve said to be right, and that has to count for something.

First up is Paul Krugman, for both his New York Times column as well as his blog. He is often shrill, and is probably considered a bogeyman to conservatives — oh wait, that’s probably something in his favor. His column is mostly policy stuff, his blog is mostly econ stuff. But again…he’s often been right.

More recently, I’ve been reading The Big Picture, by Barry Ritholtz. I started reading it probably over a year ago, when the sub-prime stuff started to really heat up, because he does a lot of stuff on housing. Anyways, he’s an econ nerd and laughs at stuff that’s really only funny to Wall Street types like him, but everything I’ve read has seemed reasoned and, again, is often right.

Lastly, there is Calculated Risk. Less analysis, for the most part, and mostly just news. When I was waiting for my bank to fail, I was checking this blog a lot, because they were doing pretty regular posting on the wheelings and dealings going on by the various players.

Finally, I just found out about a series of shows on This American Life that have focused on the current economic crisis and what caused it. In particular, you should look at Episode 355: The Giant Pool of Money and Episode 365: Another Frightening Show About The Economy. Both are available streaming for free, and you can download Ep. 365 for free and Episode 355 for pay. I listened to both today and I highly recommend them, as they go through some of those terms you may have heard about like collateral debt obligations and credit default swaps and explain the incentives behind the sub-prime bubble, all in a very accessible and entertaining way, with lots of interviews with mortgage brokers and corporate treasurers that have been down in the trenches over the past five years.

So, frequent visitors and random guests, I hope you enjoy the links. Since The Internet is one of my superpowers, it’s only fair that I give back to the community.

But still, it pains me to see companies doing stupid things. For instance, I recently decided to start doing the online rental thing. I liked Netflix‘s independent nature, but the first DVD they sent me on my free trial was the wrong one — bad move. I closed my free trial and moved to Blockbuster, because frankly, it was a better value. The plans were the same price, but in addition to having one DVD out a time, I could have unlimited exchanges; I could get a DVD in the mail, watch it, then go to a brick-and-mortar Blockbuster and exchange it for another movie. They would record my mailed DVD as returned, so I would get the next one faster, and I would have a movie to watch tonight. However, my intuition was correct — it was such a fantastic value, that Blockbuster was forced to change their pricing about a month after I signed up, a decision that was met with much outcry. Outcry that was unnecessary, I thought, since you were getting more for your money with the exchanges. Oh, Netflix had the “Watch Now!” thing going, with online viewing to supplement your account, but the selection of things to watch online was uninspiring to say the least. It was clear that Blockbuster was trying to crush Netflix into the ground by outspending them, but in response Netflix merely lowered prices, not once but twice. To top it off, they pledged to improve customer service by employing more real-live people and giving them the power to make the customers happy. After the latest price increase announcement by Blockbuster, I decided to let Netflix take me back (perhaps not-so-coincidentally, the day after I got the price increase e-mail from Blockbuster, I received a please-come-back letter from Netflix with an offer for free popcorn), and I have to say, I’m impressed with the current service. The Watch Now section has selections that I had in my queue, like seasons one of Heroes and 30 Rock and Red Dwarf, along with some classics. And their response time for receiving movies has been eerily fast — I dropped a DVD in a mailbox on Saturday after the last posted pickup time, and Netflix notified me on Sunday night that they had received my DVD and were sending the next one. Just creepy, man. It just seems clear to me that Netflix obviously has a much more efficient process, but rather than Blockbuster trying to improve their processes, they’re just gonna jack up prices and work hard to piss people off, and hope that Netflix fails. Ah well. At the moment, I will say Netflix has impressed me enough to be :

Which brings me to the last item of note….read about this recently. The summary of the summary is that Circuit City came up with the brilliant idea to save money by firing all their most well-paid salespeople (i.e. senior staff who actually knew what they were talking about or at least knew how to sell stuff), and hiring more entry level people who cost less. The result : a 75% drop in the share price, as sales have plummeted. But don’t worry, folks; the genius executive vice-presidents who approved this idea got $1 million retention bonuses to make sure they don’t leave, as I’m sure they are highly pursued by other companies. Seriously, the only reasons you should go to a brick-and-mortar store are if

• You need the product right away
• You need to see/hold the product before buying it
• You have gift cards
• The store had some expertise that could come to bear on your buying decision

That’s just about it. You shouldn’t go because of price, because it is very rare that you can’t find a cheaper price online, unless shipping is prohibitively expensive, but even then it’s usually offset by a lack of sales tax. So, basically, Circuit City took away one of the only reasons that a person would shop there — to talk to a knowledgeable person who knows what they’re talking about. Or at least a slick salesperson who makes them feel good about making the purchase. But at least they saved all that money so they could give it to their executives. I guess it doesn’t make sense to me — but hey, I’m no businessman.

One thing that’s always amazed me about the Internet is about how simultaneously terrifying and fascinating it is. I am a strong proponent of John Gabriel’s Internet…uh… Bad Person Theory (language warning). Give otherwise normal people a keyboard and some anonymity, and it’s quite unbelievable what they’ll come up with.

For me, you can put “deal sites” into the fascinating category. Put simply, if you’re shopping for a something like a computer/laptop or electronics, you are doing yourself a disservice if you don’t visit sites like Slickdeals or Fat Wallet. There are people dedicated to finding and sharing the best deals on products out there, so really, it’s no use trying to keep deals from people. The savvy, deal-obsessive internet users out there will make you pay.

My current obsession is Woot. Besides being the latest word of the year, Woot is the name of a popular shopping site who’s tagline is “One Day, One Deal.” Which, most of the time, is exactly what it is. One item for sale each day, selling until midnight or until they’re out of stock. Usually a pretty good deal. Even if you don’t want what they’re selling, I love checking in because the product descriptions are usually pretty hilarious. Sometimes they mock the product. Sometimes they mock Woot.com. Something they mock the type of person that would buy such a thing. Sometimes they just write fairy tales. Sometimes they mock classic literature. Customer service, while limited, is refreshingly upfront.

Woot embraces the crowd. Every day, each item can be discussed, and the comments always involve people pricematching and saying how much the item sucks. It’s all good. But the most glorious moments are those special days when you go to Woot and see flashing sirens — it’s a Woot-Off! Instead of just one item, there will be multiple items, each new item appearing when the old one has sold out. If you want something, you better snatch it quick. Everyone is anxiously waiting, hovering over the refresh button, looking for the bag of crap. A grab bag of random goods, usually only $1 a bag. Why would you want a bag of junk? Because it might randomly be not junk, like a big screen tv or something. Typically speaking, a few thousand bags of crap sell in less than a minute.

I love it. Take the crowd, whip them into a frenzy by the promise of a random awesome gift for cheap, sell lots of items. And all the while, entertain them with an irreverent attitude. Woot is Jeet-approved. I’ll have to thank Jesse for introducing it to me.

Update 12/26/2006: A great suggestion, anonymous commenter. As of now, Woot is Jeet approved!