stephan.com
scattered thoughts

I lived in Tampere, Finland from 2/99-8/01
I can fool Finns into thinking I am a Finnish native for 5 or 10 minutes at a time, as long as they are drunk and we are in a loud bar and I stick mostly to their non-glossed utterances (”mmm,” “yö,” “nii”) or simple phrases (”selva,” “mitä kuulu?” [...]

Amusing game at Altoids.com

According to the Mayan long count calendar, the world will end on December 21, 2012. Mark your calendar. In general, if there’s something you want to do, I recommend doing it before then.

Wow, this looks cool!
Spider-Man India interweaves the local customs, culture and mystery of modern India, with an eye to making Spider-Man’s mythology more relevant to this particular audience. Readers of this series will not see the familiar Peter Parker of Queens under the classic Spider-Man mask, but rather a new [...]

I’m writing this because I just got some paperwork about stock options from the company I used to work for, and I thought I might write a primer about what options are. Economists and other interested readers - be gentle this is a layman’s view.
Short introduction to options. Futures exchanges (i.e. options) [...]

I’m embarrassed to say I’ve been anxiously awaiting the street availability of C2. Brought myself home a nice little 8 pack from Ralph’s.
Couldn’t wait for it to get cold to try it, so I’m having it heavily diluted with melty ice, which suits me fine. I’m actually rather a fan of warm, flat, [...]

Super Size Me
A film of epic proportions

“I have a theory about McDonalds, and that is that everything they make is all one thing. And in the back, they have this big vat full of this ’stuff,’ and these little molds come by and SCHLURP! Hamburger SCHLURP! Malt SCHLURP! Paper box SCHLURP! Here’s your change.”

Steve [...]

I saw Super Size Me yesterday and ya know what, that movie made me hungry. It didn’t help that I didn’t have lunch. Specifically, it made me hungry for McDonalds.
I won’t go into my rebuttal in depth right now, I’ll probably post my paper after I write it, summary is that, hey, it’s [...]

OK, attacking the problem of how much Plutonium costs per atom…

First of all, I’m guessing somewhere in the neighborhood of 1/100 of a cent, but I could be off by several orders of magnitude…
The first step is to figure out how much Plutonium costs. Tough call. I’m particularly interested in the “terrorist price” [...]