No particular plan for tonight’s blog entry, so I will just wing it. Sometimes I have plans, sometimes I just have the root of an idea and explore it further, like in last night’s entry, and sometimes I just plain extemporize in blog form.

Luckily, I am a talented communicator, so even my ramblings are articulate and well phrased.

Almost done watching Sword Art Online. Only one episode left. Technically, the villain, Suko, has already been defeated, at least in the virtual world.

But he is such a loathsome sleazebag that I would not put it past him to have some sort of bullshit waiting for our hero Kiruto in the real world.

God, he is loathsome. You end up hating him so very, very much. In fact, and I don’t do this often, I would put him the same category as Kai Winn from Deep Space Nine, in that I hate him too much. There is such a thing as making your villain too villainous. If you go too far, they stop being the villain you love to hate and they become the villain you just plain hate.

Sure, that makes you want to see them die, die, die, but no matter how bloody and spectacular their death (and Suko went down hard), it still cost you more (emotionally speaking) than any satisfaction you could get from their bloody demise.

GIAGBIMOA. (God I Am Getting Bloodthirsty In My Old Age. )

It’s like they can’t die enough.

In almost completely unrelated news, check out this kickass solar road technology.

A lot of people have proposed the idea of a solar road, where entire highways and superhighways are turned into solar collectors and we all get free electricity from all that road surface.

But these people have impressed me with just how thoroughly they have thought things through (always a big hit with me) and just how marvelously they have leveraged the power of design (another rave fave) to make something far more amazing than its original design goals.

The hex-shaped bricks that would be the building blocks (hey, roads will look like hex paper!) not only collect solar energy, they use said energy to both light up the road (and with no blackout areas between lights) and to keep the road surface warm enough that snow and ice can’t form there.

And it’s not limited to roads, either. Any place that is currently paved could use it. Parking lots, playgrounds, rooftops, you name it… it could be solar.

Just think of that. Roads that never ever ever need the snowplow or the ice truck. Think of the money that would save, and the increase in inclement weather driving safety.

Heck, even if it didn’t light itself and produce way more energy than it uses, it might be worth it just for that!

But it does all three, and that makes it a truly magical (in the sub-Clarke sense) technology. It doesn’t just solve the problem it set out to solve. It does so in a way that could truly change the world.

Another fun sort of science related thing I found recently and utterly love : Spurious Correlations.

Someone, possibly named Tyler Vigen (Tiger Vegan?), has gone to the trouble of finding unrelated data sets that happen to graph alike and used them to demonstrate the absurdity of confusing correlation with causation.

For exammple, check this shit out :

Stop NASA before it kills again!

As always, click to enlarge.

As you can see, the chart clearly demonstrates a 99 percent correlation between the amount spent on space travel and the number of people committing suicide by hanging, strangulation, and suffocation.

Clearly, something NASA is doing with that money is driving people to off themselves in horribly strangly ways. Obviously, by increasing our knowledge of just how puny and insignificant we are in the face of a vast and uncaring cosmos, NASA is driving more and more people to strangle themselves in creative ways as a final act of defiance against a cold unfeeling Universe.

It’s the only logical explanation!

Seriously though, that site is my idea of high level satire. It is, admittedly, not for everyone and you have to have a pretty specific mindset to really appreciate it, but for me it is a marvel and a delight.

Is there such a thing as being a logic nerd? Or maybe a high level cognition nerd? Because I am passionate about teaching people to think better about important things.

There is so much confusion and disorder in the world created by the bastards in charge by simply exploiting people’s inability to parse through complex information and thus they have no choice but to trust the thoroughly corrupt priest class of economists, financial advisors, and other people in the graft industry who are there to part middle class people from their money and are most definitely not your friends.

So what is needed is thought leaders who can demonstrate the kind of thinking that negates the obfuscation. It is the sort of thing the Daily Show does, but we need people who can do it on a far more serious, simple, and relatable level.

The sort of people who can destroy the positions of the forces of evil with simple, no-nonsense, common sense questions that anyone can understand. That would go a long way towards stripping these bastards of their remaining rhetorical cover and help unite people against the forces of anti-Christian, anti-moral, anti-The People sentiment.

Honestly, I think it will take a new political movement and a new political party. The brands of all the usual parties, both here and in the USA, are too tarnished to be able to provide a uniting force.

A new party/movement, though, could take the best of all the old options and turn them into a single message, one that could appeal to people of all political stripes as being the one party that can actually provide solutions because they are beholden to nobody but the people.

It would have to be crowdfunded, obviously.

Food for thought. Talk to you tomorrow, all you wonderful people!