gregladen | April 8, 2010
I would have been happier without the background music, but at least she's not you know who.
gregladen | April 8, 2010I was fairly optimistic after my recent doctor's visit, in part because he was able to tell me that nothing bad was happening. I immediately started to make plans for a few short term changes in what I did every day to help with post-operative recovery, to be followed in a couple of weeks with more aggressive therapy.
However, I feel a bit less optimistic, perhaps simply more realistic, after a couple of days doing a few things differently. The truth is that seven weeks of virtual inactivity totally mess up your leg.
In the following video of my leg, I make two motions. In the first…
gregladen | April 7, 2010I'm going to make an argument that you should buy an Apple iPad despite widespread rumors of hardware problems and despite widespread criticisms of its design as funky and flawed.
And by "you" I mean yooz guyz who are skeptics.
In order to get there, to the point of this argument, I'm going to have to define skeptical computing, and to do that, skeptical anything, and to do that, what being a skeptic is. That sounds like a long journey but I promise to be concise.
What is a skeptic? A skeptic is a person (or other sentient, symbolically thinking being) with the ability to make rational…
gregladen | April 7, 2010People keep asking this question, and now I know the answer.
Minnesota State Senator Tarryl Clark. Clark has raised, in a fairly short amount of time, a good bit over one million bucks to run her campaign representing the Democratic Party (locally known as the DFL) against Bachmann. (source)
gregladen | April 6, 2010Science Blogs grows bigger. See this PDF file for details.
Also, tell us what is wrong with the graph!?!?
gregladen | April 6, 2010A piece in the Star Tribune by my friend John Funk:
Friends and family members were grieving Monday for a 20-year-old Marine from Rochester, Minn., whose death Friday in Afghanistan was called "a horrible loss" by his family pastor....
Click Here for the Whole Story
gregladen | April 6, 2010A few years ago, Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh, working for Reuters in Iraq, were killed along with several other non-military personnel in a very badly botched US military operation. Much more recently, Wikileaks has released the half hour long video taken from one of the US helicopters involved in the massacre.
You need to go here and read the story, and watch the long version of the video (pasted below). Especially if you are a tax-paying US citizen, because this is your war. This is you pulling the trigger.
gregladen | April 6, 2010Oh wait, sorry, they weren't "women" exactly ...
they were High School Students. Beaten by school officials. But wait, they weren't really "beaten" exactly ... they were "paddled." Oh, and the fashion choice ... they were prom dresses that were to revealing, breaking a school dress code that a neckline would not go below the "breastbone" and a hem would not go above six inches above the ankle.
So they were actually high school girls paddled by school officials because they were not Amish-looking enough.
The story is here. Strangely, the story is not about the beating of 17 women, but…
gregladen | April 5, 2010... you are going to have to take a century or two of snark from us atheists. Like this:
gregladen | April 5, 2010... for those interested ...
I had a pretty good visit to surgeon today. To date I have been instructed to not use my quads, but for the next two weeks I'm instructed to use them in a limited way (in a highly controlled manner). At the same time, I'm to carry out more aggressive joint flexibility work.
After two weeks, I'm to shift to more aggressive work with quads under supervision of physical therapists. Interestingly, he says I can drive whenever I can get in the car and work the pedals. So maybe a few weeks. Strangely, the LAST step in the process will be removing the brace. The…
gregladen | April 3, 2010Things to Do with a Cadbury Cream Egg - watch more funny videos
Hat Tip: Ana
gregladen | April 2, 2010They are calling it "The wheel, reinvented" and I think they may be right.
H/T Jaf
gregladen | April 2, 2010This might be a little over-determined for my taste, but it does look interesting, and as far as I can tell is currently maintained.
The project home page is here
gregladen | April 2, 2010CHAI RANT!!!11!!
It is time for another Chai Rant.
Years ago, about the twentieth word I learned in KiSwahili was "chai" ... which, if you know Kiswahili you would immediately recognize as a borrowed term becasue it is a very unlikely set of phonemes for that language. In KiSwahili, Chai means tea.
If I tell someone in the United States, for some reason, "In KiSwahili, 'chai' means 'tea'" the usual response will be "Oh, yea, I know that stuff. I like/don't like "chai." Chai is tea with cardamom and cinnamon and bla bla bla...."
And then I have to make the "shut up moron" clamy-clampy…
gregladen | April 2, 2010First, there was plain and simple creationism, a Christian idea that, in an ideal Christian world, would be taught as part of any science dealing with the past, including biology (evolution), geology, and presumably history.
But the constitution stood in the way of implementing basic Christian teachings in public schools in the United States, though that battle took decades. Just as creationists were being driven off he landscape, a sort of Battle of the Bulge occurred, in the form of Intelligent Design.
Intelligent Design is a scientific-looking theory which is really just more creationism…