Very funny: Things Creationists Hate. (Off of a fark discussion about Georgia's decision to stop teaching evolution in schools.)
I'm filing this under "Amusing" instead of "irritating".
The Washington Post reports about how various news organizations reported President Bush's dodge of a question on WMD in Iraq. Contrast CBS, ABC, CNN and Fox's reactions to the incident:
On ABC, Terry Moran pulls no punches: "Asked directly whether he still believes weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq, President Bush simply dodged the question."
On CBS, John Roberts sees danger for the White House. "President Bush refused to even entertain the notion today that he received bad intelligence, but if what David Kay says is true, he is facing another massive intelligence failure, right on the heels of 9/11 -- only this time, it's an election year."
On CNN, Dana Bash lays it out this way: "As he made his case for war last year, the president was unequivocal about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. . . . For months, the weapons hunt progressed and none was found, but the White House remained publicly confident illicit weapons would be unearthed. Now, a retreat. No prediction from the president at all, only a reminder that the inspectors are still looking."
On Fox News, Jim Angle reports that Bush remains "steadfast in his view of Saddam, calling him a dangerous man in a dangerous part of the world."
Just for reference, I'm putting up the instructions for creating your own CA and certs and whatnot using OpenSSL.
Read full entry...Instructions: click the picture to swing. See how far you can make the penguin go. My record so far is 320.1.
The Washington Post has a very touching story about one widower's struggle to cope with the loss of his wife more than two years after September 11. He established a fund in her honor with the compensation money; with it he holds intergenerational tea parties as well as writing contests and the like - all interests of his late wife.
"I didn't want [Osama] bin Laden to have the last word on her life," Marshall, 39, said. "She died far too young, and I wanted her to be able to touch people."
The Washington Post has an interesting write-up about bankers supporting Bush in a major way. Definitely worth a read. (And here I thought I was being generous by giving $50 to moveon.org!)
Top bankers and Wall Street executives have Rolodexes brimming with wealthy friends from every industry, people for whom writing a $2,000 check, the new limit for individual contributions to federal candidates, hardly requires a second thought.
Brokers and bankers in New York and across the country said in interviews that they had made dozens of calls on Bush's behalf, helping in part to explain the campaign's ability to raise $130 million in 2003, shattering the previous record for fundraising by a presidential candidate in a single year.
"I placed a cold call to Mercer Reynolds and asked if I could be supportive," said a top executive in a Midwestern office of one of Wall Street's biggest firms. He was referring to the Bush campaign finance director, himself a former banker with deep ties to Wall Street. "Mercer asked me to call clients and friends, and that's what I did."
But there is still hope:
Some Wall Street executives privately disagreed, noting that there are still Democrats at the big investment houses as well as economists who believe Bush's failure to reign in the deficit may lead to higher interest rates, hurting economic growth. "I have a number of good friends who are Rangers and Pioneers," said a Wall Street economist who declined to be identified by name or firm, for fear of angering the White House. "But there are plenty of us who differ from this administration both because of its foreign and economic policies."
I like how economists have to fear retribution from the White House. Lovely little game, this "democracy" thing.
... for a fraction of the cost of a real one. And best yet, the control software is written in Python! link
A video clip showing Sony's QRio robots doing their fan dance: sony_robots.wmv
A video clip showing (what I presume is) a helicopter mowing down some people (which I presume to be "bad guys", maybe drug dealers or terrorists or Dr. Evil's henchmen): helicopter_kills.mpg
Here are some videos of people playing games like Super Mario 3 and and Megaman all the way through in amazingly short times, and with perfect health/99 lives/etc. Link (To download the videos you will need to grab BitTorrent.)
Want to know what everyone was looking for on the Internet in 2003? (Besides porn, of course.) Check out The Google Zeitgeist, circa 2003.
Although, now that I think about it, a Google for pr0n might not be a bad idea... The name is key, though... "pr00gle?" "pr0ngle"? "bOOgle?" Or just the simple "xxx.google.com"?
Apparently my fiancee's sauce has been bottled and is delicious on "Suppen und Saucen". Be sure to get your own bottle of Crystal Sojasauce.
For those who want to BAM! kick it up a notch, check out the Crystal Original Louisiana Hot Sauce. ("Crystal Hot Sauce mit dem Gator!")
Adbusters is trying to make its own anti-branded shoe to compete with Nike, the canonical Global Sweatshop Branded Megacorp that all decent heart-sleeved liberals love to hate. Adbusters basically wants to use Nike's branding tricks to market a grassroots anti-brand, in this case a black spot instead of the Nike Swoosh(TM), and in doing so, demonstrate... what? That McDonald's better register BlackSpotBurger.com, pronto. The main page is here and the scoop is here.
Why can't Adbusters help out Moveon.org and design some really clever, catchy anti-Bush/Cheney posters? Perhaps the letters "W M D" spelled out using photoshopped images of dead Iraqi and American troops from the war... or a graphic representation of how much $87 billion dollars is, in terms of Mars Spirit landers or teachers' salaries.
Knowing our luck, though, 40 years from now we'll discover that Adbusters has been just another Carlysle Group subsidiary all along.
AlterNet.org has an excerpt from the book "Five Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq":
In his eloquent February 27, 2003 letter of resignation to Secretary of State Colin Powell, diplomat John Brady Kiesling, who had served under four presidents, made a prescient warning about what lay beneath the White House’s hubris, as well as how it threatened the very United States leadership in global affairs it claimed to exemplify:
"The September 11 tragedy left us stronger than before, rallying around us a vast international coalition to cooperate for the first time in a systematic way against the threat of terrorism. But rather than take credit for those successes and build on them, this administration has chosen to make terrorism a domestic political tool, enlisting a scattered and largely defeated Al Qaeda as its bureaucratic ally. We spread disproportionate terror and confusion in the public mind, arbitrarily linking the unrelated problems of terrorism and Iraq. The result, and perhaps the motive, is to justify a vast misallocation of shrinking public wealth to the military and to weaken the safeguards that protect American citizens from the heavy hand of government. September 11 did not do as much damage to the fabric of American society as we seem determined to do to ourselves . . .
We are straining beyond its limits an international system we built with such toil and treasure, a web of laws, treaties, organizations, and shared values that sets limits on our foes far more effectively than it ever constrained America’s ability to defend its interests."
After many happy, cold years in the Northeast, my fiancee and I are moving to Austin, Texas. Not only will we be warmer, but we will also be together finally. We are planning on moving in mid-February, and have begun preliminary apartment-hunting down there.
If anyone has any pointers on food, culture, housing, or anything else Austin-related, please share them!
DoctorMac has an awesome list of special Mac keystrokes. (The one that saved my day today was Command+F1.)
eGenix.com has a set of modules that expand the built-ins and some other core functionality for python. Really neat!!
mxDateTime - Generic Date/Time Datatypes mxTextTools - Fast Text Processing Tools mxStack - Fast and Memory-Efficient Stack Datatype mxTools - Collection of Additional Builtins mxProxy - Generic Object Proxy & Weak Reference Datatype mxBeeBase - On-disk B+Tree Database Construction Kit
The 2003 Reith lectures are by Dr. Ramachandran and take the listener/reader through a number of topics in neuroscience. You can listen to the broadcasts and read the lecture transcripts from the BBC site here.