Category Archives: Uncategorized

Perseids are supposed to be spectacular tomorrow night. Which undoubtedly means it will be cloudy here tomorrow night.

This is stupid. It’s 25 people, singing a 3 minute song. Let it slide.

Someone besides me has noticed that our legislators are doing jack and letting the executive branch run riot over them.

Do you know what kinds of diseases can lurk inside improperly handled lemonade? No, you don’t. And neither do I. So obviously, that threat is so severe that medical scientists won’t even tell us about it so as not to create a panic.

She goes out there with her non-union labor selling lemonade for 50 cents, and who knows how many proper businesses that paid all their licensing fees and taxes she was undercutting? She was effectively stealing money from Oregon and the federal government. Thus while President Obama is working very carefully to revive our economy, she is working directly against him. That probably also makes her a racist.

Well, gosh, if they aren’t doing anything wrong, they shouldn’t have any objection to be monitored, right? Isn’t that what we’re always being told about the state’s intrusion into our lives? Just because it’s citizen intrusion into public officials acting in a public capacity shouldn’t make a difference.

The chain of custody argument is a good one though.  Multiple recordings and/or expert determination of tampering is a good idea.

If we build more power plants and update the infrastructure, there would be fewer blackouts. I know I’m no expert in national power grids, but I think it would work.

Yes, this might introduce a slight increase of possibility that something could poison the striped mustard rat, but given the choice between that and old people dying because their AC went out, I know which I would choose. Also, the cost of these new plants might cut into the money to spend on the new multicultural center for black jewish nazis, or the new football stadium, but if occasionally municipalities did something to enhance the lives of everyone and not just the special interests currently throwing money at them it might help everyone’s re-election efforts.

If your stupid DRM didn’t prevent me from reading your ebooks on other devices, you would have had a sale today. As it is, I was forced to search around the web for someone that would let me put the ebook on the device of my choosing. Think about it, won’t you?

Sincerely,
Kristin Hoppe

P.S. Yes, I realize that my problems don’t amount to a hill of beans compared to keeping the publishers happy with DRM.

I’m not a huge motorcycle fan, but this one is beautiful.

Where people click when they use Firefox. They type in URLs, they go back, they scroll down. Duh.

First, a video of the most efficient way to prepare chicken for chicken salad.

B. Washing chickens is waste of time and water. Filthy beasts.

Once again the federal government has lied about a privacy issue. “Of course we won’t store full body scans of you taken at the airport! How can you suggest such a thing?!” “Oh, how did that hard drive get there?”

No one actually believed that they wouldn’t did they?

Val McDermid is a fantastic writer. Oh, if I could write like that.

I watched a Wire In The Blood series on Netflix and thought, why not read it, see if it’s good. And it is good. And I’m not particularly a fan of psychological thrillers, my mystery reading tastes run more to the Golden Age. Matter of fact, I didn’t like the few thrillers I’ve read so far. Too weird. But McDermid’s writing is smooth, perfectly paced with no distracting interjections of artistic flair. I hate it when writers write for you to notice them and not to tell a story. Her writing just pulls you through the story at a breakneck pace and you don’t even notice it. I was two-thirds of the way through the first book before I looked up from it. And realized it was after midnight, and I would be sorry if I didn’t put it down and get some sleep. I didn’t of course. And I was sorry in the morning.

Speed camera numbers are being reduced in Great Britain as the national road budget is slashed and now that local government doesn’t get to keep the funds raised by the cameras they don’t care enough about motorist safety to keep them maintained.

It’s not like anyone would watch after the first week, anyway.

The article starts by saying confusion is caused by too many choices but then goes on to describe confusion caused by shallow thinking and a lack of useful information. I blame crappy articles like this one for the confusion.

Why on earth would we want robots that fight humans? Have they not read any science fiction books ever?

I’d just like to point out that we’ve been afraid of everything for a long time now. Today isn’t particularly special.

A Rainbow Of Books

Books.

I'll keep reading way past when I know I should go to sleep. But there are so many books to read and so little time.

He was a great Nero Wolfe.

Also, Chicken!:

You always want to put safety first in your robots.txt.

Link

I’d embed if I could, but WordPress.com is all “we want to be secure more than we want to let you embed any, possibly insecure, video you feel like”. Weak.

If only Warner Bros. weren’t so uptight about copyrights we could enjoy a short instead of a compilation.

To discover that the oil problem in the Gulf is fixing itself.

This is why I’m so blase about global warming too. The planet doesn’t need us, we aren’t as all powerful as we think we are. We might cause grief briefly to a limited number of flora and fauna, but on the whole, the Mother Nature ignores us and goes on to create far larger problems than we can.

The Library of Congress has acknowledged that there are legitimate reasons to bypass some encryption schemes, loosening the DMCA’s unreasonably strict rules.

So, feel free to jailbreak your iPhone, copy small portions of DVDs for non-commercial purposes and crack your ebooks so you can listen to them read aloud and not worry about the FBI knocking on your door. You know, like they did when you tore the tags off your mattresses and copied VHS tapes.

Also, a federal judge has ruled that it is okay to crack DRM for Fair Use. I expect this to be overturned.

But, here’s hoping things keep loosening up.

Kid trades up from an old cell phone to a Porsche on Craigslist.

About a week late, but props for the lyrics, animation.

There’s some good stuff in there. All linking to porn and cialis, but still.

It is practically imposible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

thanks !! very helpful post [invariable a comment on the most inane post in a month]

I just lacked focus at the time I was playing.

When I die I’m going to leave my body to science fiction.

I hear Glenn Hoddle has found God. That must have been one hell of a pass.

I read blogs on a similar topic, but i never visited your blog. I added it to favorites and i’ll be your constant reader. [I like these ones]

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

The worst barbarity of war is that it forces men collectively to commit acts against which individually they would revolt with their whole being.

Thanks spammers.

Hon. Thomas D’Arcy McGee, politician, Montreal, QC, 1863

What will you actually do once elected?

Traffic cameras in Arizona are being pulled because everyone ignored them.

In January of this year Arizona began considering the shut-down a state-wide traffic cam program. This is because there was wide-spread non-compliance. Many, many citizens of Arizona simply refused to pay their tickets.

I don’t even remember her name, but it was 5th grade. We’d just moved and I’d left an awesome teacher. I have no idea why, but I didn’t like the new lady, so I stopped caring about pleasing my teachers and I stopped doing my homework. A habit I continued right through the rest of my schooling, to my grades detriment.

I remember her as a shrew that didn’t particularly like kids, but at this point, I can’t back that up in any way. If you told me she was the opposite, I would believe you. But something about her sent me off.

No one cares about facts.

Scales of Justice (Detail)

Life isn't fair.

Annoying to receive, useful to live by.

World War II writers should have been fired for cliche abuse.

It makes more sense now.

If I needed a GPS, this is the one I would get. Who cares if it’s accurate, or has good signal strength or anything like that.

Just probably not from the global problem du jour.

Global per capita income, corrected for inflation, had trebled in my lifetime, life expectancy had increased by one third, child mortality had fallen by two-thirds, the population growth rate had halved. More people had got out of poverty than in all of human history before. When I was born, 36% of Americans had air conditioning. Today 79% of Americans below the poverty line had air conditioning. The emissions of pollutants from a car were down by 98%. The time you had to work on the average wage to buy an hour of artificial light to read by was down from 8 seconds to half a second.

Not only are human beings wealthier, they are also healthier, wiser, happier, more tolerant, less violent, more equal. Check it out – the data is clear. Yet if anything the pessimists had only grown more certain, shrill and apocalyptic. We were facing the `end of nature’, the `coming anarchy’, a `stolen future’, our `final century’ and a climate catastrophe.

The Feds are taking control of the BP leak website. To create more transparency. Yes, as the Feds are known for in their websites, and indeed general communications, transparency.

It’s 3500 feet high and they could build a walking path on it. This angers the mountaineers of England.

‘Next they’ll be wanting to put a lift up Everest or filling in the Grand Canyon. It is one of the most preposterous things I’ve heard of.’

See, Everest is 10x bigger. That’s why it’s a mountain.

Life has some cool pictures of writers and their typewriters.

So that’s two of Iran’s neighbors that want the nuclear facilities bombed.

“I think it’s a cost-benefit analysis,” Mr. al-Otaiba said. “I think despite the large amount of trade we do with Iran, which is close to $12 billion … there will be consequences, there will be a backlash and there will be problems with people protesting and rioting and very unhappy that there is an outside force attacking a Muslim country; that is going to happen no matter what.”

“If you are asking me, ‘Am I willing to live with that versus living with a nuclear Iran?,’ my answer is still the same: ‘We cannot live with a nuclear Iran.’ I am willing to absorb what takes place at the expense of the security of the U.A.E.“

And it sounds like others are unwilling to say it aloud, but agree. It’d be nice if they did something about it instead of making us the bad guys though.

Possibly the best artist’s rendition of Neanderthal man I have ever seen. It really captures his poetic side.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”

-Robert Heinlein

Happy 4th of July, everyone!

It’s a steampunk summer. I shall don my brass goggles and endeavor to find a dirigible in  which to enjoy the fine zephyrs.

His Dark Materials Trilogy – Philip Pullman

Oswald Bastable Trilogy – Michael Moorcock

The Difference Engine – William Gibson, Bruce Sterling

Steampunk – Ann Vandermeer (editor)

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 2 – Alan Moore, Kevin Oneill

His Majesty’s Dragon – Naomi Novik (continuation of series dependent on how I like the first book)

Sheepfarmer’s Daughter – Elizabeth Moon

This Scepter’d Isle – Mercedes Lackey

The Aeneid – Virgil

The 3:16 Promise – Max Lucado

The Romance of Three Kingdoms – Luo Guanzhong

You know, I’m okay with standing room seats on airplanes. I wouldn’t choose it on a trans-oceanic flight, but a couple hours or so, sure.

A computer program deciphered a long-dead language. Yay, science!

You can blame Lileks for this flashback:

note: this commercial was not banned in the US.

It’s on ebay. Act quick.

$10 a month for ad-infested access? No thank you.

A nice summary of Europe’s money woes and the the G-20.

At first glance, the G-20 looked harmless.  As predicted, it cost much and accomplished nothing.  No decisions were taken, no minds were changed.  Politicians had their pictures taken; the press hailed mushy communiques as breakthroughs and delusional protesters played silly ‘revolutionary’ games.

That would be fine under normal circumstances; wasting taxpayer money on pointless pageantry is one of the least harmful things the world’s political leaders ever do.

If officials won’t take action, it’s up to you, Real American At the Ball Game, to rip that evil thing out of your neighbors hands and crush it.

So much this.

Know who should be having hearings and seeing what can be done about the legislation, or lack thereof,  that allowed this? Congress.

Peter Jackson may direct The Hobbit. Oh please, oh please, oh please. How else can it all feel like one long story?

The surprising part of these graphs is that test scores remain constant.  Were the tests adjusted for grade inflation?

Not that I’m against school spending. America is dumb enough, it can use all the education it can get. It is one of the legitimate functions of government. Maybe not the federal government though.

$150. *drool* Getting very close to my $100 price point.

A third of the people that didn’t have the income to pay their mortgages a year ago, but the government let them have sweet deals on a refinance, don’t have the money to pay their mortgages now.

The White House and the State of Arizona are setting up to do battle. Be interesting to see how far executive power goes.

General McChrystal said some things about the White House he shouldn’t have to a Rolling Stone reporter.

I can’t believe Cap and Trade on utilities is still going forward. I know I’m looking forward to my higher electricity bill. At least, at the very least, they aren’t trying it economy wide. Yet.

This book was always my favorite of the series.

No doubt the game will look nothing like this, but awesome. Also, Boxleitner!

WordPress.com fails utterly with the whole video embed thing. Thanks for the free blog though!

Since Toy Story 3 is coming out EW ranked the Pixar movies [Danger: slideshow]. Here is my corrected list:

10. Cars
9. Toy Story 2
8. Monsters, Inc.
7. A Bug’s Life
6. Toy Story
5. Finding Nemo
3. Up
4. Ratatouille
2. The Incredibles
1. Wall-E

Cars is by far the weakest story, and the annoying hick accents don’t help it. It’s the closest Pixar has come to mediocre. Up would be higher but it suffered from schizophrenia between the first and second half (it’s a tearjerker emotional growth story, no, it’s a action-adventure caper!).

Making the list I realized that I’m pretty firm on which go in the top and bottom half, but I kept moving them around within their halves. Obviously, I prefer the more serious story lines to the more typical kid’s story. Not that any of them are light on the points they’re making. And other than Cars, I’d watch any of them any time because they’re all awesome.

I put a lot of thought into this. Way more than I should have.

So, our government is now trying to take over BP? Or at least get a piece of it.  A failing company? Good plan. Suck it dry leave the rotting husk for the little people that invested their retirement money in it.

Walmart is going to subsidize college education for its employees.

Questions:

A. What do you do with a Walmart-centric education, won’t it be a laughingstock?

B. Why don’t we toughen up high school back up, possibly flunk some kids, and call the high school diploma the new bachelors?

C. Can’t they go to community college/state school for about the same price, eliminating that whole laughingstock problem?

Jon Stewart rips on Obama’s broken promises.

You’re campaign was premised on reining in presidential power, what happened?

Duh.

All that power that you didn’t like when someone else had it, you decided to keep it. Oh my god, you’re Frodo!

Hope and Change. Things don’t change and all we can hope to do is balance competing interest to keep them from actively harming us.

Stupid un-embedable video. Go here to watch the awesomeness.

Live Play:

I tried to like A Game of Thrones, I tried to like it for 1500 or so pages, but I couldn’t find a character worth caring about with so I got bored with all the jerks and wandered off. Maybe it’ll be better on TV.

Obama signed an executive order setting up a “Lifestyle Health Modification” program.

The nice thing is, eating a twinkie becomes an act of defiance toward the government. The down side is that what I eat is somehow government business. Thanks, Obamacare!

NPR says the Far Right hates soccer because they’re racist. You think it’s going to be  the usual liberal/conservative blah blah blah, but it get fairly interesting at the end.

I think that in another 5-10 years all these kids that have been playing soccer instead of Little League are going to raise the talent pool and interest level of soccer in America.

Voyager 2 is talking to us again.  Hopefully this will avert future problems.

Why Americans don’t like soccer. In lego form. 90 minute game, summed up in one minute, including replays. Also, it ends with a tie.

What global warming may save us from [Cracked, NSFW].

But I don’t. I care a lot.

Malt Salt. Now everything can taste like fish and chips. The Future Is Now!

Thanks to new regulation airplane airbags, you might just survive the initial impact and fire, so you can be eaten by sharks.

The real philosophic question is why these people haven’t drawn the obvious conclusion of their philosophy and killed themselves in a fire. “Yes we are the bane of the universe and are killing the planet and I refuse to bring another life into existence, but my life is good enough to keep, yo.” Perhaps your children might feel the same way?

Was Barak Obama in the Whoomp – There It Is video?

A gigantic building project in a communist country and it’s falling apart as soon as it’s done? What were the odds?

Your ratings can hardly get lower so why  not man up, and use your powers to legislate things instead of letting the Executive Branch and the bureaucracy do the work? Sure, the President takes all the blame for things as they are now, but the flip side of blame is credit and wouldn’t you like some of that? Did you really get elected so that you could question baseball players about steroids and declare June to be National Take A Dog To Work Month?

Also, enough with the corruption. Pretend like you are public servants and stop taking money and gifts from lobbyists and  kick the bastards that won’t stop out.  You wanted all that power and now that you have it you spend it trying to hold on to it. See how that isn’t really helpful to the  nation?

I know they’re crazy ideas, but it might work.

Doom is coming to the economy since taxes are going up next year, says the guy with a curve named after him. I guess I should say more doom is coming.

Politicians shoveling jobs at people to get them to shut up?! I’m shocked, shocked to discover this sort of thing going on. Giving straight up cash has got to be illegal (I sincerely hope), is it surprising they just do it a different way?

I may n0t have mentioned my dislike of Lost and it being lumped into the science fiction genre before, but Wil and Levar nail it here.  (skip to 8:45)

The clown sweatered Wesley on a unicorn pegasus kitten vs.the Scalz-orc.

Wikileaks, using  TOR routers to get information, secret networks infiltrating NGO and government computers, I smell a movie.

I had no idea that cops had to stop questioning you if you invoke your Miranda rights.  Now you have to do that out loud. Of course, my knowledge of Miranda comes mostly from cop shows.

I loved this song when I was much younger and was suddenly reminded of it today. It didn’t age as badly as I thought it would. That whole “pump it up” part wasn’t in the radio edit. Thankfully.

Appalling ads from the 70s. Thank goodness I don’t remember much from that decade.

Why liberalism overreaches. And how to stop it.

Bob Uecker and Jim Powell discussing the furries convention in their hotel while calling a Brewers game.

“…and Braun hits a three run homer. Wow what a blast! Anyhow the ball is being catered by Purina.”

You can borrow from the future for only so long. Sooner or later someone has to pay. And guess what?

So the welfare state is discredited. In the past, we used to be warned that static population growth, vast public-sector employment, early and generous retirement benefits, and high taxes were not sustainable. In recent years, those lectures were caricatured as partisan or hypothetical. No longer. The Greek meltdown — with Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain on the brink — has shown that European socialism does not work. Bankruptcy, not politics, is the final arbiter: Individuals, firms, and nations either buy particular bonds or they don’t. And a nation like Greece, in turn, either pays what it has borrowed or it doesn’t. All the op-eds in the New York Times cannot change that fact.

RELATED: I’m glad that the lousy economy and the East Anglia selective data email debacle has slowed the green movement before they saddled us with even more debt for projects that would, I have no doubt, have had massive, expensive, unintended consequences as politicians tried to be seen to be doing something.

Visualizations of how much sugar is in various drinks.

Related: How much caffeine is in various drinks.

By far, the best variation on the 3 wolf moon shirt ever.

It’s Towel Day.

While the books are brilliant, I’m not about to walk around with a towel all day.

New Firefly fan film coming out this year. Here’s the trailer:

You know, I like swing music, could we bring some metal sensibilities into it because that would make it AWESOME!

You can play the Google logo today.

Supernova is spewing out calcium. It’s just not one of the elements I think about when I think “SPACE”.

Birds prefer better nutrition to arbitrary man-made labels.  Tangentially, I have never understood the dislike of genetically modified foods. High protein, glow-in-the-dark caulicarrocorn? Bring it on.

How animals spend their day.

Does the Taliban/Osama not know that America has a West Coast? Or middle? At first it’s like, ha they’ll never attack here, but now it’s getting insulting. Granted, 90% of American’s couldn’t point out Afghanistan or Iran on a map, but I expect better of a group that makes hating a place their raison d’ete.

I’m really going to regret this post should an attack happen anywhere not on the East Coast.

They’re not from earth, which obviously makes them ideal representatives for the Olympics.

I’m looking forward to the 2012 Olympics, mostly because it means more Boris in the news.

Lost bodies of work that would have been useful for humanity to have. [Cracked, NSFW;  you learn, and you laugh at the inappropriate pictures]

What’s going on in Thailand. Kind of, it does start in the middle of the story. So, Thaskin and the coup d’etat.

Pictures, because that’s too many words.

Mark Steyn. Mockery is one of the best weapons against totalitarianism. One of the best non-violent weapons, I guess I should specify.

Worries of inflation ease as worries of deflation grow. At least the economists always have something to worry about. Keeps them off the streets at night.

Great Britain (and Canada, to a lesser degree) has helpfully gone on ahead of us and shown us the way.

None of the above are “right-wing” in any sense that Steyn or Rumsfeld or Cheney would recognize the term. Mrs. Duffy is a lifelong Labour voter; Mr. Newman is one of those pox-on-all-their-houses types; the property company that fired Mr. Nicholson is so wretchedly politically correct it employed him as “Head of Sustainability,” a title of near parodic bogusness. Yet all fell afoul of Lord Justice Laws’ “irrational, divisive, capricious, arbitrary” laws. Because it’s hard not to. Because once you establish the principle that the state has the right to police ideas, sooner or later one of yours will catch their eye.

…

Real “rights” are restraints upon the state—“negative” rights, as constitutionalists have it; they delineate the limits of the sovereign’s power. But in the modern era “rights” are baubles in the state’s gift, and the sovereign confers them at the expense of individual liberty. Truly, this is an Orwellian assault on the very foundations of freedom.

The Senate findings on the Abdulmutallab failures. Not Abdulmutallab’s, the government’s. Which, from my reading, amounts to; no one talks to each other. Wasn’t that why we got the DHS? And so why have we spent millions of dollars creating another layer of bureaucracy to coordinate these sorts of things (I said laughing at the irony)?

As for the rest, it has to be hard to walk the line between security and police state.  Government agencies should have to have compelling reasons to put people on watch lists. But once they have reasons the response should be fast, decisive and without second-guessing the legal ramifications. I doubt it is possible to nail that line down and we’ll just have to stagger along, hopefully not straying too far to either side.