The "smart" bus

If you've been living somewhere other than under a rock for the last few years, you've probably noticed that you hear the word "hybrid" a lot. Ok, "a lot" is an understatement - "hybrid" has basically become the second most common word in the English language after "the." Your typical hybrid car is one that runs on a combination of gas and electric power which gets over 40 miles per gallon and is usually driven by hippies, yuppies, or any other types of people who might be called "'ppies" for short.

If we can "hybridize" cars to make them fuel-efficient, why not buses? Those big old hogs irresponsibly tool around town, carting kids to school, rock bands to their venues/drug dealers, and compulsive gamblers to Atlantic City, all the while getting something like 6 miles per gallon. Now we could make every bus a gas-electric hybrid to improve that figure to 15 mpg or so. Unfortunately that would not be a feasible solution, as approximately 78% of Americans pride themselves on not being part of the "Prius crowd" and would refuse to ride in such a vehicle.

Fortunately there is another way to make vehicles more fuel efficient rather than resorting to that ridiculous gas-electric mumbo-jumbo: just make them smaller. The "Smart car" is an example of this technique. This Gary Coleman of vehicles has been popular in Europe for years and is just starting to take hold in the U.S. The top 3 reasons to drive a Smart car are as follows:

3) To save gas.

2) To feel like you're playing golf all the time by cruising around in something the size of a golf cart (except without room for your clubs).

1) To "live on the edge" and add excitement to your life by knowing that you're completely screwed if you're ever involved in a crash with anything larger than a pygmy ground squirrel.

If we can shrink cars, why not shrink buses? The fact is that most buses don't use anywhere near their full capacities. I mean it's not like the notoriously global warmers known as the Partridge Family needed those extra 5 rows of seats! Shame on them! As punishment for his egregiously large carbon footprint, David Cassidy should have to be smacked upside the head by Al Gore with the skin of a dead polar bear every day for the next 10 years.

So why not apply the Smart car idea to create a Smart bus? It would allow people to transport fairly large groups around AND save gas and the environment while still maintaining that ultra-cool "bus image."

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The Smart car-bus hybrid might look something like this:

When people see a bus like this, you can rest assured that the first word that will come to their minds regarding the people riding inside is definitely "smart."

Stuff People Like (#1): The first of many rip-offs

Sometimes you run out of good ideas and have to resort to ripping someone off. Other times, you have plenty of good ideas, but what the hell, you feel like ripping someone off anyway for no particular reason. This is one of the latter times.

One of my favorite blogs out there is Stuff White People Like. This blog is not nearly as popular as mine (he doesn't even have 40 million hits yet), but it has pretty good content for a blog that nobody really reads. There are other ripoffs such as "Stuff Black People Like" and "Stuff Asian People Like," which I am not going to link to out of principle because they are blatant rip-offs and I don't condone that type of behavior.

Now for my own blatant rip-off: I am going to do a however-many-I-feel-like part series on "Stuff ______ Like," where each new episode investigates several distinct preferences of a specific demographic group. So here we go with "Stuff People Like," where you will learn about three things that human beings in general enjoy...


Warming up the environment
People have always made attempts to increase the temperature of their environment. The first advance toward this goal was the invention of fire, which could warm up a local area and also had the great side effect of being able to destroy incriminating evidence. A quantum leap forward was made in 1973, when scientists invented carbon dioxide, a mysterious gas that in large amounts has the ability to warm up the entire atmosphere of the earth. Even better, they discovered that it was really easy to make cars and and factories produce a bunch of this stuff. Jackpot! With this the quest to warm up the globe began. This mission was supported by everyone except Californian yuppies, who think their climate is already warm enough and consequently all drive Toyota Priuses, and Al Gore, whose thick layer of blubber allows him to be comfortable at temperatures as low as 30 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.


Frequently flip-flopping on whether they want to accrete matter
If you attempt to track a person's attitude regarding whether he/she wants to gain or lose mass, you're probably going to see more flip-flops than you would if you watched a John Kerry/John McCain debate in front of 10,000 people on South Beach. It is not uncommon to witness a person ravenously gruffle down a double bacon cheeseburger and large fries, and then make a self-contradictory statement like, "Damn! I need to lose these thunder thighs before bikini season." only a few hours later. People are rather silly in this regard. According to my research, the competing forces at play here are the natural human instinct to accrete matter and the need to fit into cars, doorways, and other tight spaces.


Volunteering useless information
One crazy thing about people is that they love to provide useless information to those around them. In fact, 64% of things people say fall into one of the two following categories: stuff nobody cares about or obvious statements. Take the following examples:

1) Stuff nobody cares about:
"I'm running for President of the United States of America in 2008." -Bob Barr
"Hey everyone! I'm going to jump off this bridge! I'm serious - I'll do it!"
"Amy Winehouse just (insert any action here)."
"Remember to make sure that the cooling mechanism is working before you turn on the nuclear reactor."

2) Obvious statements:
"My favorite blog is definitely 'Buffalo This.'" -any human being
"This is a robbery! Get down on the floor!"
"That was really awkward when you accidentally shit needled that random guy thinking he was Timmy."
"If we can just score some points and stop them on defense, we've got a good chance to win this game!"
"Buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo."

These are all highly unnecessary statements. If you are a person, you probably enjoy saying these type of things (sorry for the species stereotype), but there is no reason to do so. Before you say anything, I recommend you think the following: "Do all 6 billion people in the world already know this fact?" and "Do any of the 6 billion people in the world actually give a damn about what I'm about to say?" If the answers are "yes" or "no," respectively, then please do the rest of humanity a favor and SHUT UP!


...and with that, my friends, this blog has officially jumped the shark.

Taking the red pill

Hey there, chief. Guess who's back again with another revelation that's going to change the way you look at the world...or shall I say "world." I have some interesting news that you might be interested to know: you are not real. Nobody is. This is all just a big computer simulation, just like "The Matrix." Seriously.
In case you were too lazy to click on the link in the first paragraph, let me summarize Dr. Nick Bostrom's fascinating scientific paper for you in three words: you are fake. You're just an artificial brain in an artificial world, a mess of circuits somewhere in some mega-supercomputer controlled by future humans, aliens, or machines that are going take over the world after Arnold Schwarzenegger fails to save John Connor. I am fake too, but the difference between you and me is that I make this look good. Everything you see is fake: your mom, the Tooth Fairy, pro wrestling, that stripper's boobs, the $5 Gucci shades you bought off that bum in D.C., you name it. Fake, fake, fake. To be fair though, it is not totally certain that we are living in a simulation. Here are the three possibilities:

1) We (humans) are about to bite the dust, probably at the hands of the Large Hadron Collider.

2) We are never going to run any simulations of past humans or weird hypothetical worlds, and neither will any aliens or machines in the entire universe or any other universe, ever.

3) Everything we know is a pack of LIES and we're really living in a simulation!

Let me explore these three possibilities, which are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive, and examine what the chances of each are:
1) True, the LHC probably will destroy the world. However I feel like the good false vacuum scenario is a little more likely than the rest of them. So let's call it a 40% chance that the LHC destroys the world and also a 5% chance that something else does (probably something related to Al Gore, like global warming or Al eating so much food that there is none left for the rest of us and we all starve). 45% overall.
2) Um...no. Simulations of past worlds or fake worlds are going to be considered way too awesome to pass up by human, alien, or computer nerds of the future. Furthermore, any civilizations that run one simulation will almost definitely choose to run a metric shitload of them, so the vast majority of worlds out there will be simulated ones. So the chances are very high that we are in one. So let's call the chances of the possibility that nobody decides to run any simulations 5%.
3) This is all a simulation and you are not real. 50% chance.

Let me repeat what I just said in layman's terms: there is a 95% chance that we are either not real or we're all about to die. Yes. It's an indisputable fact. Stop crying and get over it, crybaby.

Could people in the future run such a simulation? Yes, obviously. If you don't believe that we will have the technology to do this kind of thing within 100 years from now, then please get back to your Amish community before Brother Jebediah finds out you're surfing the 'net instead of building that barn, Ezekiel.

Why would they run these simulations? Here are my top five reasons (there are many more):
5) To play fantasy fantasy baseball with the fantasy baseball teams of the simulated world.
4) To make a comedy show out of the stupidest things people have ever done (yes, it will include that time you got shroomed up and jumped in the tiger cage).
3) To check out naked chicks in the shower (obviously).
2) To compensate for the fact that they feel inadequate because of the fact that they're not real and just living in a stupid simulation by lording over some other simulation within a simulation.
1) To see if any of the simulated people can come up with any new and exciting additions to the buffalo phenomenon.

I'm really glad the creator of this simulation chose to make me a huge celebrity with millions of adoring fans. I mean, he could have just as easily made me some loser that writes a stupid blog that nobody reads. Whew - glad that didn't happen!

Bummed to find out that you're nothing more than some nerd from the future's Second Life character? Don't be! The good part about the world being fake is that you can do whatever you want with no REAL consequences! Of course certain things might get you thrown into a simulated jail where you'll be simulated cornholed in the simulated shower by a simulated 350 pound tattoo-covered Hell's Angel named Bubba. But at least it's not really happening, right?

So yeah...tough break there, Keanu. I feel for you, champ. The silver lining in all this though is that you still have this awesome simulated blog to read. All right!