Ohhhh SNAP

And yet, I agree completely. The man is merely deluded. I mean, what else can be said about someone who honestly thinks he’s had any real experience whatsoever with an invisible man, and not only that, but considers this nonexistent entity a “rock” in his life?

Ohhhh SNAP
{advertisement}

Wedding stuff

Date is confirmed — February 5th. And we’re ratcheting down the costs significantly by going to the court house and following up with a night at a pub, instead of doing a big to-do. Not a lot of details yet, but I still intend to have it digitized and broadcast to the interwebs for all two of you to watch.

Also, I think we’re going to take down the wedding blog. I’ll import all the posts into my main blog, and give it a category of its own. Frankly, I think we’re not making enough progress on the planning and not posting nearly enough on the topic to merit its own blog anyway, so it’s just silly having it up. So, yeah, I’ll do that… eventually.

Wedding stuff

Random Science Crap in my Tabs

Phil Plait has a cool animated gif of Io passing in front of Ganymede, taken by an amateur astronomer. The title of the post is a Star Trek: Next Generation reference, one that actually made me chuckle. Plus, Phil makes a great defense of science at the end:

In my line of work (y’know, truth promotion) I hear from people who think science is all guesswork. “Yeah, but how do you know?” they ask. The answer is: math. And physics. And chemistry and optics and engineering and Kepler and Newton and Einstein. We know because we test our assumptions, and if they don’t hold up they’re gone. We keep the good stuff, the stuff that’s proven itself. And eventually we get models that are so good they can predict when and where two objects hundreds of millions of kilometers away pass in front of each other.

Greg Laden’s covering this latest batch of tornado activity and ties it in with global warming and the fact that science ignorance is exploitable by the cynical and profit-motivated.

The Baby Boomers are apparently still getting high, though the Obama Administration is not considering legalization of marijuana as a potential revenue source / reduction of justice system overhead. That’s sad. No options should be taken off the table in this economic crisis, not the least of which being one in which an entire class of people become criminals for smoking the wrong leaf. Or having the wrong kind of sex, for that matter.

It’s well known (among people who know me in meatspace anyway) that I have no navigational skills whatsoever. At least I’m not alone. Strangely, I can navigate perfectly well when there’s a mini-map on the screen in video games, but when I’m in real life, even with a GPS Nav system of some sort, I still get a little panicky when I don’t know where I am or where I’m going. My father was always the same way. Vacation car trips were always tense.

And for the geeks out there, here’s a walkthrough on how to build your own Apple 1 replica. My only issue with this is that it uses a pre-printed circuit board and has all the chips and connectors in a kit. That’s not nearly “from scratch” like the article claims. Then again, “to make an apple pie from scratch, you have to first create the universe”, so… yeah.

I think it’s about time I make an official Random Crap in my Tabs category!

Random Science Crap in my Tabs

I weigh 81.64kg

There’s a few aspects of the metric system that even Canadians can’t get into our heads. For instance, for a person’s height and weight, we still work in pounds and feet/inches, and for recipes, we still use cups and teaspoons, for some unfathomable reason. Despite measuring everything in the scientific field using metric, all distances except for our own height in meters/kilometers, and all volumes of liquid and solid matter in liters which correspond to cubic meters (1 milliliter = 1 cubic centimeter), we still have problems with the human measurements for some reason. I’m not immune — in my last post I did exactly that, saying I weigh 180lbs. But here in Canada, I actually weigh 81.64kg! Those of you looking to lose weight should move up here post-haste.

Anyway, all of this was meant as a prelude to linking you to something epic — CyberLizard’s first post in a week! Yes, this is a blatant attempt at shaming him into posting more, but it’s also an attempt at boosting his readership as this is some pretty cool stuff about how we actually measure our international units. Such as:

The second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom (official BIPM definition).

Too cool.

I weigh 81.64kg

Last night I learned two important lessons

I just came off my second consecutive overnight shift, after our SonicWall router/firewall/VPN appliance, on which we rely for all routing to our other sites and to our various clients, died of a blown power supply after an apparent electrical spike. The first overnight was spent patching together a bunch of crappy Linksys routers to do routing to the various links, and we were forced to route all internet traffic over to our sister site (over a horrifically slow link). As this is a work story, you’ll forgive me if details are extremely sparse.

Continue reading “Last night I learned two important lessons”

Last night I learned two important lessons

Random Health Care Reform Crap in my Tabs

Here’s another rundown of the random crap that’s started to accumulate in my Firefox tabs, to do with the American health care war being waged presently between people who want people to have access to health care, and people who want to continue denying access to health care in order to make a profit.

Lou Dobbs took a tour of other countries’ Single Payer systems and was shocked to discover they were neither crap nor socialism. (Then he went on a rant about illegal immigrants, I bet.)

Mike Haubrich has two great essays up at TUIB, one about the propensity to defend “free market” health care at the cost of even people’s lives, and the very real burden on the economy that private and employer-based insurance entails. As always, Mike is impassioned, eloquent, and absolutely correct.

Thom Hartman has an idea: let all Americans buy into Medicare. Since Medicare works, why not just expand it, instead of a whole new system? Though I’m of the belief that this reform would not go far enough to remedy the health-care-for-profit setup that the free market has saddled you with, one must not let the perfect become the enemy of the good. It would be a start, and certainly a hell of a lot less government-expanding. The only problem would be the refrain of “where will you get the money?”

To which I answer, try actually taxing people on more than their first $90,000 dollars in the social security tax cap. Yes, the rich pay higher taxes already, but guess what? They only pay that higher tax on the first tiny sliver of their multimillion dollar incomes! Plus, the capital gains tax was lowered from 20% for the higher tax brackets down to 15% in 2003, and look what happened to the economy. Lower income significantly, AND increase spending by a trillion dollars on a needless war? Gee, let’s ask Paulson or some other Bush crony what they think might happen! The Teabaggers who complain about this idea would see absolutely no increase in their own taxation rates, as they are by no stretch of the imagination rich enough to qualify for these higher taxes. This smacks of “eat the rich”, but honestly, how many millions do you need? Can’t you spare a bit of your walking-around, pocket-change, latte-money as part of your social contract with the country that provided you the opportunity to GET rich?

Greg Laden’s noticed a trend, at the same time: the deathers, the birthers, the teabaggers and the people who conflate Obama with Hitler are incredibly endemically racist, and are using their favorite conspiracies to cover up this fact about themselves. People who sidestep the issue of race are no better, as they are tacitly allowing the retardery to perpetuate.

Retardery like this woman comparing access to health care with Naziism, earnestly, at a town hall meeting with Barney Frank. And Frank dismantles her, then without missing a beat handles the rest of the crowd with aplomb. What a guy. Greg also covered this, with a shorter clip of the video.

And the astroturf has finally gotten so blatant that even Fox News is forced to report on it. And critically, at that! Wonders never cease.

Finally, in an attempt to tie together all the astroturf campaigns, the birthers/deathers/teabaggers/etc., Buzzflash explains how much of The South really feels about the resolution of the civil war — in their hearts, the South never really conceded, so the racists have driven their beliefs underground using coded messages. John Edwards was right — there are two Americas.

Random Health Care Reform Crap in my Tabs

Harassed because he’s an atheist

Hemant Mehta, the Friendly Atheist, is being harassed by the Illinois Family Institute for the egregious crime of being both atheist and “out of the closet”. Laurie Higgins, leader of this wretched hive of scum and villainy, has implemented a smear campaign in an attempt to get Mehta fired from his position as a math teacher — ostensibly because being an atheist makes one unfit to teach children.

I still have a lot of problems with coming out to friends and family and co-workers for exactly this reason. The religious have co-opted the word atheist to mean all manner of vile and fallacious things, and it’s gotten to the point where jokes against atheists are laughed at on television with nary a person taking umbrage. A similar joke aimed at any other minority group would raise the hue and cry, and advertisers would be targeted, but with atheists, it’s perfectly okay to insult and demean them because belief in a deity is endemic to being human and we are therefore subhuman. It’s for this reason that I’m always very careful letting co-workers know about my blog, as if it becomes public knowledge where I work, I might get targeted for this same kind of harassment from intolerant religious folks. I don’t know whether my boss would much care about my lack of belief in deities, but having someone outside the company complain widely to people inside the company and higher up on the food chain than I am might lead to a great deal of unmerited discomfort.

There’s more information about Mehta’s fight at the Examiner, and a great deal more at Hemant Mehta’s own blog.

Harassed because he’s an atheist