Category Archives: Uncategorized

You may remember the article discussing why we don’t hate communists like we hate Nazis.

Here’s a bit of a response and then a rebuttal. And as with all (okay, maybe not all, but every one I’ve ever heard) debates, they argue past each other. I think Radosh is being a bit nit-picky and missing the original point, but hey, I’m not a author or fellow or anything like that.

The Geek Alphabet. It’s pretty awesome.

An actually funny SNL skit. Okay, maybe mildly amusing is a better term. I give them credit for not being actively annoying.

The USGS has a video about it here.

The Big Picture has pictures, oddly enough. #26’s caption is particularly amusing.

Nova’s Zombie Mountain Will Eat Your Brains is overwrought, but does have a very nice depiction of the first eruption.

It didn’t impact me at all  since I lived in South Gate, at the time. But my grandparents got us little vials of authentic ash from it. And a coconut from Hawaii.

The 10 worst internet ideas. Also missing, pop-under ads.

Youtube is 5 years old now. Geez, I remember when we had to post our videos as animated gifs. Those were the days…

The last space shuttle Atlantis launch is today at 2:20pm EDT. You can watch it live here.

And then I guess we sit around and twiddle our thumbs hoping we don’t need to get into space for anything, like science.

Mythbusters bridge of duct tape.

The lousy global economy is showing the cracks in everyone’s big plans. The Euro, Kyoto.

A dirt cheap USB microscope for your cell phone. Not actually available yet, but still, awesome.

Communism.

Bureaucracy. The hardest word to spell in the English language. I blame the French.

A tiny violin plays for Somalian pirates as they claim Russia shot them instead of just turning them adrift on the ocean.

UPDATE: Russia kills the organizers of the March metro bombings.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said there had been no option but to kill the “terrorists”.

“Those who put up resistance have to be eliminated – you cannot show pity,” the Russian leader was reported as saying at a meeting with Mr Bortnikov.

If they would just confine themselves to the guilty, which I doubt they do, I would applaud their technique.

Jupiter is trying a new look. Scientists don’t know why. I’m guessing because it’s about to collapse into a star.

There’s loose talk (again) about the government seizing 401(k)s and turning them into a Social Security like fund. Because that’s worked so well we need to have 401(k)s in the first place, if we don’t want to starve in our old age.

Jeremy Clarkson talks about class warfare and the Porshe 911 GT3.

Sweden thinks so.

New technology, new complaints about people stealing IP. [Cracked, NSFW]

Voyager 2 is having problems communicating. It’s going to be mad when it comes back.

Rubik’s Cube, Android, Legos.

A really cool interactive 360 degree view of Paris (Danger: it plays music).

The future is out there and they’re going to figure it out. Of course, we know the flaw of psychohistory is that it can’t predict the actions of an individual which will allow an telempathic megalomaniac to take over the universe. Oops.

Lileks has several fantastic lines in this essay. Which I will now spoil for you by quoting. (Kidding, there’s more in there.)

If you react otherwise, you’re a squinty-eyed Bubba who thinks this here country started goin’ downhill (spit) since we started lettin’ Veetner-mesians (spit) come in and run restaurants. Not saying they don’t make good rice because they do ‘n all, but this all here’s a Christian nation. And ah say that in full reee-cog-nition of the Deism of some Founders, inasmuch you can place Deism outside of the bound’ry of angnostercism and link it to yer monotheistic assumptions.

…

It must be terribly frustrating to the jihadis: we’re completely upfront about our goals and rationales, and they still don’t take us seriously. What do we have to do?

Apparently there’s some flooding or something in Nashville. I wish every disaster got this level of coverage instead of the endless hours of mindless speculation based on very few facts we normally get with a disaster.

What Nashville really needs is for some European to complain that the US can’t take care of its own people. That’ll get the help pouring in.

I want tacos.

Pictures from the Vietnam War.

I’m not saying “Hurray, coat the Gulf of Mexico in oil!” but some perspective on how much oil has been spilled is a good thing. When the news is reporting that a second, yes a second, bird has been rescued from the oil, it might be time to tone down the rhetoric a bit.

Facebook’s eroding privacy policy in handy timeline form. It’s about time for a competitor to pop up and steal everyone away.

Denver Post has an awesome collection of WWII Pacific Theater pictures.

Muppet’s Bohemian Rhapsody was nominated for a couple of Webby’s so they gave us an audio commentary and Animal calling his mama.

“Something needs to be done,” said Jim Kleczka, a doctor at Froedtert Hospital and the Medical College of Wisconsin who participated in a news conference Tuesday with Uecker. “He’s at high risk of something bad happening.”

Dumb it down, Poindexter.

Japan is going to launch a space yacht with solar sails.

Everything I know about solar sails I learned from that one DS9 episode where Sisko rebuilt one and got blown into Cardassian space, so I don’t really have much to add here except I hope that the Japanese one doesn’t get sucked through a tachyon eddy and into enemy space.

Clean air, bad for the environment.

I couldn’t care less about Iron Man 2 or AC/DC, but this is an awesome lightshow.

8 minute HD video of the first 30 seconds of the Apollo 11 launch.

Why Congress can’t win against Unintended Consequences.

The United States Code — containing federal statutory law — is more than 50,000 pages long and comprises 40 volumes. The Code of Federal Regulations, which indexes administrative rules, is 161,117pages long and composes226volumes.

No one on Earth understands them all, and the potential interaction among all the different rules would choke a supercomputer. This means, of course, that when Congress changes the law, it not only can’t be aware of all the real-world complications it’s producing, it can’t even understand the legal and regulatory implications of what it’s doing.

Google Streetview team is scanning private wifi networks and recording MAC addresses in Germany.

Bonus quote:

Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently said internet users shouldn’t worry about privacy unless they have something to hide.

Jonah Goldberg has a long, but good, look at what socialism is and what it looks like in America today.

Because Marxism was taken seriously as an economic theory for so long, it gave socialism an empirical patina that it otherwise lacked. But at its core, socialism remains a rationalization for a fundamentally tribal and premodern understanding of economics.

The “pragmatic” Obama is only interested in “what works” as long as “what works” involves a significantly expanded role for government. In this sense, Obama is a practitioner of the Third Way, the governing approach most successfully trumpeted by Blair, who claimed to have found a “third way” that rejected the false premises of both Left and Right and therebylocated a “smarter” approach to expanding government. The powerful appeal of this idea lies in the fact that it sounds as if its adherents have rejected ideological dogmatism and gone beyond those “false choices.” Thus, a leader can both provide health care to 32 million people and save money, or, as Obama likes to say, “bend the cost curve down.” But in not choosing, Obama is choosing. He is choosing the path of government control, which is what the Third Way inevitably does and is intended to do.

John Tesh rocking out + Zappa dance moves = horror of a level unknown to mankind before now.

The Big Picture has pictures of Sudan what with the voting thing going on.

Number 37 was particularly striking to me.  I carry more personal possessions on me than she has in her entire room.

As someone  who actually has a stake in this and has kept an loose eye on the situation, Walt Minnick has been a better congressman than the previous (Republican) one. The Republicans in Idaho better bring some game if they want back in.

Hulu is going to start charging for older episodes and put in more commercials.

In math class, I always hated how they made you do things the hard way first and then after weeks of struggling said, “but you can do this in your head if you just do it this way, now let’s move on”.  It’s not like I understood the concepts until I was applying them the next year anyway, why not let me do it the easy way to start with. *shakes fist at math teachers, all of them*

This girl did something about it and found a simpler way to describe triangle inequalities.

This top 10 list of the Hitler Reacts To… meme actually does capture the best of them [NSFW subtitles]. Get them now before the studio makes Youtube yank them.

Dominos of economic effects of the Icelandic ash  shutting down airlines in Europe. It starts out well enough but they get increasingly lame as it goes on. The teacher from New Jersey is particularly pathetic.

Personally, I wonder what it does to the EUs carbon emission quotas.

The best model of Bilbo’s house you’ll see today.

The biscut and gravy machine. It’s appalling and awesome at the same time!

Pictures from back when robots were awesome and foreign planets were ripe for the taking.

After the first guy did the blank canvas thing you wouldn’t think they’d let other artists do that. Are the later ones somehow saying more? or less?

It is important that we know these things.

Also this:

Frank J. knocks it out of the park.

But American citizens keep coming up with the oddest objections to what politicians are trying to do. Representative Phil Hare was explaining how he was using his miraculous legislative powers to cure all sick people, and do you know what someone asked him? Whether it was constitutional.

What the hell? What does that have to do with anything? So Rep. Hare, quite startled by this idiocy, said, “I don’t worry about the Constitution.” Why would anyone worry about the Constitution? If it ever comes up, you just wave your hand and say, “Commerce Clause!” and that should cover it.

Lileks talks taxes

Would they raise enough money? I don’t know. But the point isn’t to design a tax system capable of supporting the government, but to devise the simplest, fairest tax code devoid of niggling manipulations, and tailor the government to fit the revenues. Heresy! Which is why you fear reform is doomed. What was the last enormous government program anyone succeeded in whittling down to something tiny and benign?

Congress needs to nut up and wrest authority back from the Executive branch. They have been needing to do this for 10-15 years, so I’m not really expecting them to stop having hearings about steroids in baseball and take the fight to the regulatory bodies for their due. Then they would be responsible for stuff and how could the pass the buck when it comes to reelection time?

You can’t have the things you want until you pay for the things you need. New Jersey’s governor acts responsibly with the budget. Congress should pay attention, maybe take some notes and try applying this to the national budget. I admit the line between need and want is harder to define at a state or national level than at a personal level.  All the more reason to be careful about what you start chucking money at.

Thinking about monopolar magnets hurts my brain so I’m going to stop thinking for the day and go post comments on Youtube.

I’m not sure how I feel about this mashup. I kind of like it, but it’s dang depressing at the same time.  Well done though.

The New York Times resurrects the cilantro debate. Thanks NYT, that’s what America needs right now, more division.

BTW, it tastes bad  and you’re a bad person for liking it and if your salsa didn’t rely on great handfuls of the stuff for flavor, then it would be a good salsa.

Obama puts manned space flight back on the table. Go big government!

It should not be illegal to record cops anywhere, anyhow in public. And by cops, I mean all local, state and federal law enforcement officers of any kind.

Quasars don’t care about time like they should.

The coming social security failure in handy chart form. Thank you soooo much, Mr. Roosevelt. And all the politicians since then that have refused to fix it. I’ve enjoyed paying large sums of money my entire life for nothing. I mean, I figured out this would happen when I was 12-ish, so it’s not a surprise, but it’s still annoying.

And my deal is still on the table, Feds. Keep what you have, let me stop paying in and I’ll not ask for any money when I retire.

I’m just saying I wouldn’t have chosen “Red Shirt” as my defining characteristic in my anti-government movement. Pictures here.

A couple of clever counter-points to Nancy Pelosi’s “don’t worry your pretty little heads about the details” comment about Obamacare in this post.  And let’s not even touch the class and gender issues that comment raises. There’s a reason I know how an internal combustion engine works and how to do minor maintenance on it, woman. Okay, so I touched them, but I’m walking away now.

Spirit Airlines now charging for carry-on, yes carry-on, if you want to put in the overhead bin. For now, you can still bring a purse or laptop for free.

The world desperately needs an alternative to airlines. I’m thinking transporters or teleportation.

I love that he doesn’t try to bs his way through. And the laughter from the other broadcasters.

How to get rid of any stain.

The pros and cons of the Google Book Settlement and its effect on copyrights and privacy.

Here’s the video of the whole “Guam tipping over” thing, which from reading headlines, I assumed was just a case of people taking a misspoken point and running with it along the lines of the internet being a series of tubes, not trucks (which isn’t nearly as bad a metaphor as it was made out to be), and I’m still not convinced it isn’t. [wow, long sentence, editing is overrated.]

I am surprised that someone who expresses their thought so poorly can get elected to Congress. Maybe I should run.

Props to the admiral for not busting out laughing. I would have.

Somoli pirates attack a US Navy frigate. Seriously, what were they thinking?

The skiff was no match for the missile-guided frigate USS Nicholas, which returned fire and quickly chased down the boat.

Ya think?

Lifehacker has a very good list of what all the cool kids are doing today.

I’d say this was an April Fool’s Joke, but I got burned declaring that Google wasn’t going to give you free email with 1G of storage back in the day, so I’ll hold off.

Halo: The Movie – I actually can’t tell if this is real.

I have no idea how ThinkGeek is so awesome year after year with fake products that should be real products.

Ars Technica has a Cthulu Choose Your Own Adventure.

Either way, it’s slightly gruesome, delicious and Not Safe For Diabetics.

Remember kids, pickle jars and mushroom soup should only be used for good.

A video from Cato Institute.

The 4th annual Peeps Show [danger: slide show]. I love Goodnight Peep.

Your moral reasoning can be disrupted by appropriately placed magnets.  Our brains are frighteningly powerful yet fragile things.

Rehabilitating Pharaoh.

Protons are colliding at LHC and we are not sucked into a black hole, destroyed by time travelers or in another universe. Darn.

It also shows us that physicists shouldn’t even attempt to dance.

The Library of Congress has actually put together a useful site of the WPA posters. Which are awesome. And available in absurdly large files sizes. Which is also awesome.

I really wish the Communists hadn’t take over the whatever their art style is called (social realism? constructivism? I don’t know, we didn’t get that far in Art History class) because it looks awesome but screams communism, so I’m torn about it. Like this shirt. Will people glancing at it think I’m a commie pinko? I don’t want that.

It more like the list of the most disappointing followup novels, which I wouldn’t disagree with, but these almost all start out with groundbreaking or at least good books. Also, this person has no sense of period or proportion and gets upset at authors writing in the time they are in. I wonder what his (I assume sexistly) list of the best series of science fiction are.

I don’t deny that the series listed were written into the ground and should have stopped somewhere around 3 or 4 books, sometimes 1 was enough *cough*Dune*cough*. And Ender’s Game books should be on the list.  But Dune? Foundation? Lensman? How can you even talk about great science fiction without them?

Also, how do you compare Honor Harrington and Pern, which are entertaining fluff with Dune and Foundation?

Surgeons does a nerve graft on a  kid which they think will reverse the paralysis in his arm due to transverse myelitis. Which sounds like a good idea, but I have questions.

Why dont’ they plug it into the right place?  Was it damaged? What happens when he wants to shrug his shoulder? This is the problem with journalism today, they don’t answer the right questions.

Apollo 13 finally made it to the moon, in part.

Some boffin gets awesome photos of Earth from space with his point and shoot camera.

It starts with Fibonacci and phi and quickly gets out of hand, but it looks awesome and has nice music.

And because it’s there:

Mrs. Boldt used to play this as an intro for all her math classes. Which is part of why I took 3 years of math with her. That and she was a good teacher who actually taught me stuff despite my unwillingness to do homework.

Nice to see NCAL is still going strong, despite the hideous web design.

So, here’s some songs I put together for an Easter playlist for work. And since I put the effort into it, I’ll share it with you. You’re welcome.

O Come and Mourn – Indelible Grace III (amazon)
When I Survey – J. Brian Craig (amazon)
Sweetly Broken – Jeremy Riddle (amazon)
Jesus Went To The Garden – City On A Hill: The Gathering (amazon)
How Deep The Father’s Love For Us – Craig and Dean Phillips (amazon)
Easter Song – Keith Green (yes, Keith Green rules over 2nd Chapter of Acts) (amazon)
Nothing But the Blood – Jars of Clay, Five Blind Boys of Alabama (amazon)
Oh Happy Day – Aretha Franklin (amazon)
It Is Well With My Soul – Jars of Clay (amazon)
I Will Rise – Chris Tomlin (amazon)
Redemption Song – Adie (amazon)
Christ Is Risen – Jeremy Riddle (amazon)
Come Ye Sinners – Robbie Seay Band (amazon)
We Remember – Marie Barnett (amazon)
I’d Rather Have Jesus – Jacob’s Trouble (ha, it’s out of print, you should have bought it in 1991 when you had the chance)
Jesus Messiah – Chris Tomlin (amazon)
Everything – Tim Hughes (amazon)
These Thousand Hills – Third Day (amazon) (this also should be the Jacob’s Trouble version, but at least Third Day’s is in print)

Pop quiz, hot shot: What make this so awesome?

a. Ghost in the Shell action figure

b. coffee

c. Tachikoma theme

d. all of the above

John Hodgeman and Patton Oswalt answer sci-fi questions, Jeopardy style. Totally worth the time to listen.

Wired article on the future of  tablets and the coming obsolescence of desktops/laptops. Yes, once again, the desktop is dying.

Like I said when it came out, I think iPad is the answer to questions no one is asking, but I fully expect my next netbook to be a tablet. Which will be awesome.

I love the ingenuity of people.

Does anyone else see the flaw in this bill?

Smoking would be defined as any process of inhaling tobacco and exhaling smoke, or any other substance or vapor that can be inhaled and exhaled.

On the other hand, it’s New Jersey, so breathing the air probably is bad for you.

The British military is developing force fields to protect tanks and stuff. The Germans have the beginnings of an invisiblity cloak. This is awesome because teleportation, phasers and my condo on the moon can’t be far behind.

The BBC has its photography master classes available for you online.

A handy little flash thingy that shows how Obamacare will affect you.

VDH: Crossing the Rubicon

No, instead, the bill was about assuming a massive portion of the private sector, hiring tens of thousands of loyal, compliant new employees, staffing new departments with new technocrats, and feeling wonderful that we “are leveling the playing field” and have achieved another Civil Rights landmark law.

I, for one, am please to see the states asserting their rights on anything. They should try it more often.

Obamacare fact sheet. And it’s not so much facts as conjecture and projection, but that’s all anyone has right now.

The coming culture wars spinning off from this bill.  None of which would have to happen if the government could mind their own freaking business. It astounds me how well the Obama machine has used the recession to infiltrate government into business. It’s going to take us 20 years to repeal all this crap. On the other hand, the Democrat majority will end sooner than I thought it would because of this.

Bill Whittle brings the bad news.

Barack Obama is, to the liberal cause, a politician that comes not once in a decade, or once in a generation, or even once per century. Barack Obama is, to them, a once in history opportunity for progressives to control this country, and they will fall on a forest of swords to achieve those ends because this is the best chance they have ever had or ever will have to permanently shackle the people to the state. They know that this Health Care fiasco will cost them the House and now perhaps the Senate in November, but that new Congress will not seat until January and in the ten months between now and then they will, I predict, start an orgy of legislation that will make this Health Care circus look like a tea party.

And a bit of hope:

It is true that no nation has in the past ever recovered from the cycle of entitlement, moral decay and aristocratic rot that we find ourselves in. But it is also true that no nation — not one in history — was established precisely in opposition to these cancers. It is also true that never before have common people — otherwise known as the Host Organism — had the means to speak directly to one another, as we are here. It is true that if there is to be an historical exemption to the Cycle of Civilization it is only here that it will occur, and it is also true that the concepts of Free Will and Destiny are antithetical to one another. One of them is true and the other is not. It is my belief that you can chose to abandon Free Will and chose to believe in destiny and historical inevitability, or you can take the risk to believe instead that there is a new world populated by optimists and dreamers, but dreamers with rifles as well as quills and parchment… People who have never surrendered and for whom the very idea of defeat and despair is anathema.

Heredity isn’t as cut and dried as we’d like to think.

Space dust looks much cooler than the dust in my house.

Reflections on the Revolution.

The result is that we are witnessing  a quiet but insidious revolution. At home, if successful, the state and its vast array of newly hired employees, will administer our health care system, as well as education loans (and that will need a sort of new agency like the Postal Service or DMV). We now take for granted take-overs of much of the automobile industry and financial organizations. Should cap and trade pass, the administration would be dictating energy use. If you add it up — going to the doctor, driving a car, stopping by an ATM, flipping on the lights, taking out a student loan — you could run bump into a lot of new federal bureaucrats. And that’s the point, isn’t it after all?

23 years of C-Span archives are available for all your sleep-aid needs.

Messages sent to the Department of Defense. I didn’t realize they were taking suggestions.

More than you ever wanted to know about how robots “think”.

Where’s my Three-Laws-safe personal robot slave?

There may be a brown dwarf out in the Oort cloud named Nemesis, apparently, sending asteroids our way. Awesome. It’s all very vague and speculative at this time.

How Mega Shark can take down an airliner at 6000′.

Pool is an inherently cool game, but this table seriously ups the ante.

Well, because these “quiet men” do not “raise their voices”; because they sometimes speak in soothing tones of brotherhood and peace; because, like other dictators before them, they’re always making “their final territorial demand,” some would have us accept them at their word and accommodate ourselves to their aggressive impulses. But if history teaches anything, it teaches that simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly. It means the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom.

And if you’re too young to remember it or don’t think Communism is  evil read: The Gulag Archipelago and Gulag: A History.  Also, read this article on North Korea.

The oldest people in the country dying at an unprecedented rate.

They were in their late 70s when I was born. And I’m not particularly young.  I wonder how their retirement savings held up.

I don’t understand why
But it makes me laugh out loud
You should look at it

Tron: Legacy trailer = awesome.

Here’s hoping the plot is decent. It doesn’t even have to be a great plot, the original wasn’t overly deep really, decent will be okay.

Scientists have found heavy isotopes of anti-hydrogen. I’m really unclear on what this means to me.

The Register has a cool 3d periodic table.

Why Christians write Fantasy and Jews write Science Fiction.

Popular Science has release 137 years worth of back issues to the public. Free.

Flying cars have been popular for a long, long time.

The Big Picture covers the Holi festival in India, which is probably the coolest looking celebration in the world.

Ubuntu has managed to take the worst looking (of the major players) default theme and dig deeper into the pit of ugly they choose their colors from.

VDH brings the historical perspective on the importance of allies. That’s why I like him.