Welcome to the 30 Oct 2000 archive of Stream - you can click the planet to the left to get back to Jimbo's World if you're lost.

18:28

Moby will never be another Crystal Method, Hallucinogen, or even Fluke - their all-original stuff is, frankly, just not up to par with the Greats Of The Techno World.  But good jesus christ, can those fuckers ever generate interest in a totally blah oldskool song with a little techno remix action!  Case in point: Moby vs Michael Jackson - Beat It (mp3, 5.9MB).  Man, anybody that can turn that piece of self-important 80's-pop crap into something that makes me wanna shake my groove thing all night long is due some fucking respect.

If that one grabbed you by the short'n'curlies, fire up Napster or Gnutella and search for "Moby remix".   They've got other really excellent remixes that take you utterly by surprise too - like their James Bond Theme remix.  Tasty!

03:00

First, my official introduction: I'm Keith M, author of the hyper-popular high school drama Smile. I'm commonly thought to be homosexual, and do everything within my means to add credit to this theory, including steadfastly avoiding having sex with girls. Don't ask about the "Freshmaker" thing. Seriously. So I was talking to Laural the other day and she sent me to this website called Master Seeks Second Slave. It's recommended that you read the site through thoroughly at least twice before applying for the position, but if you're impatient to have some dork from Texas tell you what to do, here are some highlights: - If I tell my slave to go with a strange man and serve him for an evening, she will do so. - If I tell my slave to submit to a dog, she will do so. - If I tell my slave how to vote in the next election she will vote as instructed. I'm cool with #1 and #2, but #3 is going too far.

Keith M

Uh, right...

If this isn't a sweet scam, I'll have sex with a girl.

I was kinda fascinated until I read that. Then I became creeped out.

Amen!

There's an option to chat realtime with the owner of the site – he was there, but I couldn't bring myself to start up a conversation with him. What the hell was I gonna say? Give me fodder with which to further berate you? At the end of the day, though, the motherfucker's obviously doing something right. Check out these stats:

Apparently there were pictures of the guy and his first slave on the site, but he took them down once his traffic grew too large. If anybody has them or any way of getting them, I really, really want to see them.

The lesson here is to respect and revere the intense power of a crippled self-esteem. Without it, we might never get to see a woman's stitched together labia.

Jimbo sez: Good going, Freshmaker - now I'm gonna get hate mail from another pissed-off sex slave.

11:45

07:35

07:41

mouseover here to check out the blonde again... pervert.

Check out the Archie cartoon to the left.   Your basic innocuous Archie-type stuff, right?  You got the gorgeous dumber-than-a-box-of-hammers pair of girls, you've got the pair of guys attempting to schmooze on 'em and failing, mostly because they failed to account for the inherent retardation in the chicks.  In other words, it's your basic happy-go-lucky, "this comic is older than women's lib" sort of teenage fun. ... or maybe not.  Not that these two don't look like date rapists anyway, but mouseover here to take a closer look at Jughead.   Scary, isn't it?  Our boy Jug looks downright malignant.   That, my friends, is not only an expression that says "I got a pocketful of Roofies with your name on it", it's an expression that says "and I am not going to be gentle when I've got you comatose and stripped naked on my cabin floor, you dirty little blonde whore!" On a somewhat related note, who the fuck are the Comics Code Authority, and why do Archie "digests" need to be approved by them?

Well, it turns out that I Don't Know Jack™ about Archie comics...

Thanks, Kristy.  I'll be back later, I, uh... gotta go post bail for Jughead now.  (Sorry 'bout that, Jug. )

08:24

You know on toasters, how it has the engraved arrows that point to one particular slot and say "One slice"? Well, HOW does the toaster know which slot you put the bread in (cause you can't trick it. It figures out in a few seconds that you only put ONE slice of bread in AND that you put it in the wrong slot)? AND why does it matter in the first place which slot you put the bread in? Is it possible to find an answer to this all-important question, or is it simply one of those things only the wonderous "makers of toasters" can be privy to?

Well Pele, toasters use a component called a thermistor to figure out when your toast is (probably) done.  A thermistor is a special type of resistor that's designed to react strongly and predictably to the presence of heat - as the thermistor gets hotter, its resistance to electrical current goes up very significantly.  What's this mean as far as toast goes?  Well, the thermistor is mounted inside the toaster near where the bread goes, so that when it gets heated completely, it chokes off more and more of the current going through it.  So the simple answer to your question is, the manufacturer only puts the sensor (thermistor) in one toast slot to save money - and if you don't have bread in between the heating coils and the sensor, it heats up too fast and your bread pops out before it becomes toast.   This is also why the second set of toast you put in the same toaster is never quite as done as the first set - you didn't give the thermistor time to cool all the way down, so it gets all-the-way hot too quick the second time.

But dammit, this is the Ask Professor Stoner column - why stop there when you could go ahead and learn how the whole thing works?  First, we'll have to cover a little bit of basic electrical theory... but trust me, it's really easy.   Check it out:

If you've never learned anything about electricity, you probably don't know the difference between voltage and current.   It's pretty simple, really: imagine a garden hose in your hand with the faucet turned on.  Electricity works just like water in a hose: the current is equivalent to the amount of water that flows through the hose, and the voltage is equivalent to the water pressure.

Still thinking about the garden hose, what happens if the faucet is open all the way, and you don't have a sprayer attached to the other end of the hose?  You get LOTS of water on the ground, but since the hose doesn't resist the flow of water very hard, it doesn't shoot out of the end very far - it just kinda pours out.  In electrical terms, this would be a low voltage, high current circuit - only instead of "pounds per square inch" of pressure, you would measure "volts" of electrical potential.  And instead of measuring "gallons per minute" of flow rate, you would measure "amps" of current.   On the other hand, if you put a sprayer attachment on the end of the hose, you increase the resistance of the hose - and you don't get as much water out of the end, but it really shoots out, right?  That would be a high voltage, low current electrical circuit. 

So a simple circuit looks like this:

So now you know the basics of electricity are just like the basics of garden hoses: no matter what you do, you have a circuit that consists of a water source (a battery or generator in the case of electricity), and it pushes water (electricity) all the way through a hose (wire), through a sprayer (resistor), until it finally goes to the ground.  (In the case of electrical stuff, one of the prongs in your electrical outlet is a "ground wire" that works just like the drain in your bathtub - it takes all that used electricity and puts it to ground someplace nice and clean.)

But to understand the toaster, you need to imagine one more thing: imagine there's a pinhole leak in your hose near the end.  Now, if you have the trigger pulled on your sprayer, you'll barely lose any water at all through the leak, because it's much easier for the water to just go out through the end of the hose.   But if you take your finger off the sprayer trigger, water jets rapidly out of the pinhole leak - so by decreasing the water (current) that flowed through the sprayer at the end of the hose, you increased the pressure (voltage) on the hose, and thus more water (current) escaped through the leak.  If you've got a leak, you've got two different ways for the water to reach ground - and water (or electricity) is basically lazy: it will take the easiest way it can find to get to the ground.

As an electrical circuit, it would look like this:

This is what's called a "parallel circuit": there are two ways to reach ground, one through the end of the hose, and one through the leak.  If you pull the sprayer trigger, you decrease its resistance, so more of the water flows through the sprayer.  But if you take your finger off the trigger, you drastically increase its resistance, so less water flows through the sprayer, but more water flows through the leak.  See how that works?

Okay, now back to the toaster: there's a relay (electrically operated physical switch) attached in parallel to the thermistor.  (Imagine the hose in the second circuit as the thermistor, and the leak as the relay.)  Now, when the thermistor is cold, its resistance to electrical current is very low - so all the current goes through the thermistor instead of the relay.  But as the thermistor heats up, it gets more and more difficult for the current to pass through it - increasing its resistance - so more and more current goes through the relay.

When the thermistor heats all the way through, its resistance becomes so high that virtually all of the current flows through the relay - and when that happens, the relay "trips" - and that relay is what pops the toast back up and turns the toaster back off until next time.

  Validate this site's existence.  Affirm your own.
         Glorify mine.  Sign the guestbook.