gregladen | April 17, 2011As Comcast moves towards being the next AT&T (and I'm talking about the ATT of the 1960s, which was more powerful than most countries and more nefarious than Karl Rove and Dick Cheney combined), it gets increasingly strange, self serving, and dangerous as a company to deal with. Over the last year or so, our service (we have Comcast cable) has increased in price and decreased in stations being offered that we will at this point do better by canceling it and adding an antennae (but this is how we get Internet). Now, Comcast offers a thing called "Extreme 105" which costs a bundle even if…
gregladen | April 17, 2011Claims are being made that the situation at Fukushima is starting to improve, but there is no actual evidence of this. We probably (but not certainly) passed the point where nuclear fuel is likely to accumulate in such a way as to cause a major fission event or explosion, but there is still sufficient heat to cause, apparently, water to split into hydrogen and oxygen, or at least, there is concern of this possibility. (Hydrogen explosions have already occurred here early on in the crisis, and there is concern that this may happen again.) All of the basic safety systems are still not working…
gregladen | April 17, 2011Good news: The next version of Internet Explorer will only run on Windows 7. That should be the end of Internet Explorer.
Bad News: Google Video is done with. It will stop existing on April 29th. Well, I never used it so I don't really care personally, but this is why I once said that things like Amazon and Google should be taken over by the government and turned into utilities (you all hated me for saying that). This is exactly like having private companies build all the roads, then one company decides to unbuild its roads to use the asphalt for something else. If you happen to have…
gregladen | April 17, 2011A lot of people got mad at me when I complained about the upcoming switch from Gnome to Unity. (And yes, I know Unity is based on Gnome but it is not Gnome. It is Unity). And yeah, I had some things wrong and some of the comments contraindicating my concern were valid, but many were more like "They know what they are doing, so just accept it" which is a little to Microsofty for me. And, for that matter, for the Linux Community in general, I would have thought. And now we have disconcerting reports that the new desktop which is coming out in a couple of weeks, in a late (but not final)…
gregladen | April 16, 2011Two reposts for your edification:
Tornadoes in Perspective
With all the interest in tornadoes, I thought it would be helpful to provide some contextual data (focusing on US tornadoes).
Damaged houses along Grace St. in St. Peter. (Photo courtesy of St. Peter Kiwanis) One thing that has to be said is that tornadoes are very powerful, but very small and short lived meteorological phenomena. They are like bullets being fired from cheap handguns by incompetent shooters. There are many stories of two gang bangers aiming their rods at each other at short distance, emptying them out, and…
gregladen | April 15, 2011Huxley and I went to Target to look at weather radios and found out that they don't carry them. But the three Target employees that were gathered near the cameras and electronics with whom we inquired were interested to know why we were looking for one.
"You're about the tenth person today who has asked about weather radios. What gives?"
Apparently they missed Minnesota's National Tornado Appreciation Week, which was yesterday1. And, they had missed the news that we were expecting a bad year for tornadoes.
Anyway, Target does not carry weather radios. I didn't really care, because I had…
gregladen | April 15, 2011Kraken: The Curious, Exciting, and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid by Wendy Williams is a new book on the science of squid.
I wondered at first why a popular science book would be named after a legendary creature (the Kraken) but when I read the book and also read up on The Kraken it became clear that the legend is the squid only barely disguised as myth.
Well, not all Kraken are real ....
.... but the ones seen by ancient Europeans (after all, the word "Kraken" is probably based on the word for octopus) may well have been giant squid washed up on shore, which for a long time was…
gregladen | April 15, 2011WTF does that mean? How can an icon, a visual representation of something like a file or program, be "unused" if it is sitting there ... looking like something? As I sit here writing and grading papers and stalking people on The Facebook and working on a graphic for an upcoming blog post on squid on my Linux box while it updates several applications, installs essential security patches, and downloads a new kernel, all without incident or difficulty, my stupid and annoying windows machine, which has one job ... charging my iPod and updating it's library off in one wing of the Blog Cave ... is…
gregladen | April 14, 2011Best little YouTube video you'll see all day, maybe all week:
Hat Tip: Kate Monson and Yatesh Singh
gregladen | April 14, 2011God will be the guest speaker at this Sunday's Humanists of Minnesota's Spring Banquet, and Scott Lohman will interview him on Atheist Talk Radio. I am not making this up. Below the fold, some advanced video God's people sent out, and details on this coming weekend's events:
"Mr. Deity," Brian Dalton on Atheists Talk #112, April 17, 2011
Brian Dalton is the writer, producer and director of the slyly subversive webcast comedy series "Mr. Deity." Mr. Deity has created our Universe with love and affection; mostly. This was not a simple production, you see, and there are many aspects to…
gregladen | April 13, 2011Today, I took out the trash. I may or may not have taken the trash out last week, but I can tell you that the last time I did take it out, whenever it was, I had to drag the trash barrel across ice. Yesterday I went to the gym without a coat or jacket. That made me have to decide if I wanted to go to the locker room to stow the contents of my pockets (car keys, etc.) or just keep those things in my pocket. The grass outside is green. We expect snow on Friday.
Where I grew up, in what is now known among gardeners and cooperative extension agents as Zone 5b (though a short drive from a…
gregladen | April 12, 2011The most significant news seems to be the raising of the level of this accident, on the international scale of how bad things get at nuclear power plants, to the highest level, which is also the level set for the Chernobyl accident. This does not mean that the Fukushima Disaster is the same as the Chernobyl disaster. They are different situations, different technologies, and different things going wrong. However, it is now official: On the scale from TMI to Chernobyl, Fukushima is officially Chernobyl. But different.
An earthquake on April 7th had knocked out power at the Fukushima…
gregladen | April 11, 2011A lot of things are broken because we fixed them. Somewhere out there is a web site that specializes in listing these things; Please let me know if you have a link, I can't find it at the moment. There is a web site that specializes in these things called "This is Broken" run by Set Godin (see video below). Anyway, it is annoying when some advancement causes something to not work. And it is especially annoying when the advancement is something that specifically should cause something to be improved in a certain direction and instead it gets unproved, er, messed up in that direction.…
gregladen | April 10, 2011Aardvarchaeology blogger and renowned skeptic Martin Rundkvist and Swedish journalist Yusie Chou discuss their impressions of the Twin Cities, Swedish atheism, journalism, Chinese history, culture conflict and change, skepticism, humanism, Politics, archaeology, Vikings, and so on. Here. Enjoy!