Snicker.

(if the deadspin videos don’t work, just go to YouTube and there are plenty to choose from)

Most of the people who read this blog know me personally. And most of those people know that my poker playing has been curtailed a lot the past couple of years because I quit my decent paying energy trading job to found a startup company. As a result, I don’t have much fun money aside from what my wife provides as she supports our family, and my gambling (at any stakes) isn’t something that she likes – and shouldn’t be expected – to subsidize. So I don’t play much poker aside from $10 kitchen table games with guys from church every few weeks.

That said, my new company continues to grow, we’ve got enough funding now to continue with our startup phase and actually hire people, and we’re about to start actually making money.

So what?

Well, my company is in the business of making synthetic natural gas: SNG. And SNG also stands for something else, as many people here very well know. Very rarely does Google deliver me daily news alerts that contain news about the MY kind of SNG, but I regularly get inundated with news about the other type of SNG.

And I’m almost to the point where I can start paying attention to that again. Which is nice.

Is it a coincidence that Fro is moving back just as this is happening? Maybe not, but I’m sure he could use the money.

LSFW, especially if you work near old biddies. The joke is also the soundtrack, so turn it up.

Has it really been almost 2 months since I posted? Man, I’ve been busy.

I just finished reading Superfreakonomics which is by the same people who brought you Freakonomics. I definitely enjoyed the sequel as much as the original because it continues to get you to look at things from a perspective different from the accepted norm. When you apply the books basic principle, that people respond to incentives, to your own life, it can help in your job, relationships or community by getting you to ask what incentive am I giving people to do things in a way that I would like them to be done. I think it also helps you in becoming a more independent thinker who doesn’t just accept something at face value because it is what the majority thinks or it is endorsed by an “expert”.

I also found the chapter on global warming and the ensuing reaction to it very interesting. The authors in a nutshell say that if you accept that global warming is occurring and that it could at some point have catastrophic impact on the earth as we know it, and if you accept that reducing carbon emissions, which is the current solution espoused by the environmentalists, is happening too slowly to prevent a possible global warming catastrophe, wouldn’t it be good to pursue a quicker, less costly, and more efficient way to reverse global warming? Their challenges to the current accepted thinking and their ideas for a quick solution have both been ripped by the environmentalist crowd (see some of their responses here). What I find funny is most of the responses seem to be more outraged that they had the audicity to challenge the current science and those that support it, rather than being thankful that someone which ideas different from theirs were trying to be helpful in coming up with a solution that would help everybody. The authors, though, appear to be more than up to the attacks that they have received. See here.

You have to wait for quite a bit (the dancing is actually kind of impressive) or you can just skip ahead to around 2:00 or so.

The quality of that pole installation seems to be rather typical of most Russian things I’ve encountered in life.

Somebody posted this on Shaggy and I thought it was worth a repost here. You can skip ahead to 1:20 for the good part.