If only this wasn’t totally in earnest.
Because we all know Jesus was all about capitalism.
Hat tip to Fail Blog, naturally!
Month: November 2009
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Spin it up, and let’s cross the streams!
The LHC is back in business, baby, and Cosmic Variance covers its shakedown.
This past weekend saw the first beam particles in the LHC since the magnet quench incident of September 2008. Protons and lead ions were threaded in two directions around part of the ring before being dumped, and everything worked without a hitch. The graphs show the ion beam spot entering Collision Point 2 before being dumped.
The LHC machine commissioning will pick up where it left off more than a year ago, and the plan is, if all goes well, to collide beams of protons in the experiments at a center of mass energy of 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam) before the end of the year.
I can’t wait for the science to start. Of course, it’ll probably be months before we start seeing world-dooming black holes actual results, but better late than never.
Deepities
Dan Dennett at AAI 2009. Another great talk, about science and religion. I’m going to have to make an effort to attend one of these years.
Minions, best wishes are needed here
Not HERE here. Here. Stephanie’s under the knife, under general anesthetic. This worries me. Generally. Not that I don’t have “faith” in the science behind it, but stuff can happen that nobody foresees.
Not to take the morbid tack here, but whatever would we do without our fearless leader? Who would fill her shoes on the interwebs? So many idiots would go unanswered! We’d all have to give up our day jobs to redouble our efforts of patrolling the net, punching retardery repeatedly where Stephanie is able to crush the opposition with so much ease otherwise. She just makes it all seem so effortless that the rest of us would be hard pressed to fill her role. Seriously, it’s like having a level 80 tank on a ten-man level 20 raid.
(ahem… sorry.)
I’m sure she will be fine. Jodi was fine coming out of general anesthetic recently, though I was fretful enough to take a day off work to look after her. (That didn’t stop a server from crashing before we even got out of the hospital, and after she was discharged I had to head straight into work and sit her down in the server room while I reprogrammed said server with a hand-axe, but that’s another story.) I guess I’m writing this mostly to let Stephanie know she’s loved — not just on the blogosphere, but in real life, in meatspace, where people are honestly touched by and affected by her ideas, her stories, and her analysis.
I know she knows this. I guess I just feel the need to reiterate.
Avatar
This looks beyond epic.
More Hallowe’en party pics
Finally getting around to uploading them. One of these days I’ll set Gallery up properly. Or a Flickr stream or something. I dunno.
RCimT: Monday is Sunday for one day only
A day late, but here’s your Sunday atheist link roundup. Your Cool Atheist of the Week is Canadian comedian Dave Foley, of Kids in the Hall.
Therese: I think if you believe in the basic tenets of the Catholic faith, you’re Catholic. But abortion — some of these peoples’ teachings are — they’re not part of the core Catholicism.
Dave: But isn’t the essential pillar of Catholicism papal infallibility?
Bill: Yeah.
Therese: I wouldn’t say that that’s the core. No, I think belief in the father, and the son and the holy spirit, the trinity, the communion of saints —
Dave: But is papal infallibility a belief of the Catholic church?
Therese: Yes, it is.
Dave: Do you believe in papal infallibility?
Therese: I believe that the pope speaks with an authority of God. Yeah.
Dave: Well, then how can the church ever change its mind about anything unless God gets confused one day?
Wii as a Media Centre
One of the biggest flaws of the Nintendo Wii is that it does not have the built-in media centre that the X-Box 360 or the PS3 boasts. Well, I just finally got around to remedying this, using a combination of Jodi’s new computer’s massive hard drive, the Wii Homebrew Channel, and the open-source Mplayer-CE which can apparently stream over SMB. The interface is a tad cumbersome, having been hacked into the Wii port of Mplayer from its open-source rival GeexBox, but it’s certainly better than the interface available under vanilla Mplayer by miles.
After hard-coding Jodi’s desktop IP address, opening a share and setting the folder permissions so Guest has read-access, then fiddling with the config file on the Mplayer-CE install to point to this share, I was quickly able to browse to and play the Extended Edition of The Cage — the very first Star Trek pilot, on which the later episode The Menagerie was based.
It appears you can set up music playlists, stream from Shoutcast, Youtube channels or saved searches which you have to hard-code into the text-based configuration files prior to booting the app, and can otherwise load every bit of media that Mplayer can handle — and there’s precious little it can’t. I can’t figure out how to pause the playback yet, only stop it entirely — the A button is supposed to pause/play, but it doesn’t do anything. You can skip forward and backward a number of seconds or minutes with the arrows, resize and move the video with the nunchuck controls, and display statistics, but honestly, I’m not looking for bells and whistles. Just having the ability to stream media straight to my TV from across the house without having to go out and buy another game console is freaking sweet. And even if I couldn’t do that, given my cordless phone setup appears to be relatively cranky when paired with my wireless network, then I could connect a USB drive to the Wii and actually make use of that otherwise mostly-useless port.
I can tell you now, this app is going to get a hell of a lot of use in my household. Kudos, homebrew people. You’ve not only made one geek very happy, but you’ve gotten me interested in getting my feet wet with programming a decent interface for this thing.
An ebook reader I’m actually lusting after
After being recently turned off of the Kindle by Amazon’s fast-and-loose copyright policies, I thought I’d have given up on ebook lust entirely. Then along came the Nook, by Barnes and Noble. Two screens, an SD slot, PDF support, LENDING SUPPORT (ye gads! How novel, being able to temporarily give a book to someone else!) that supports both PC and Mac, and built off of Android no less, on top of not being an ass-ugly tablet with a ridiculous user interface, has rekindled (pun intended) my interest. I’d make it a top priority getting Linux support, naturally, but with the device being Android-based to begin with, I don’t know how much work I’d have to put into it, honestly.
There’s a whole lot more on Engadget. The $259 USD price is a wee bit steep at the moment, and I don’t have a lot of occasion to read as during my transits I’m usually in the drivers’ seat and I generally have too much to do at work or at home to read. I still have a mountain of books to slog through, if only I could bring myself to go to bed early enough to get a good hour or two in of reading before sleepy time hits. Maybe an ebook reader might encourage me to do so, as I always have to avoid rustling the pages in order to not annoy the crap out of Jodi who’s usually in bed well before I am.
The only real problem that I can foresee is, the free wifi access is limited to the Barnes and Noble stores, so the idea of using it as a personal Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by coupling Wikipedia and Google Maps becomes much less possible, unfortunately.
Whaddaya think, anyone want to buy me one?