gregladen | November 8, 2009Fight! Fight! The librarians are fighting about software!
I never realized how tough and ideological librarians were until I sat on a University committee on IT. The Librarians were always giving the administration a hard time about their knuckleheaded decisions regarding software, passwords, etc. These people are totally radical, extraordinarily well informed (they actually read the theoretical literature on passwords and software licensing) and are very very scrappy because they know that as the end of civilization approaches and the libraries are burned to the ground they are all going…
gregladen | November 7, 2009From the NCSE:
The phenomenon of Islamic creationism was addressed by two major newspapers, The New York Times (November 3, 2009) and the Boston Globe (October 25, 2009), in the wake of a recent conference at Hampshire College on evolution in the Muslim world. (Webcasts of the conference presentations will be available on-line by November 15, 2009, according to the conference website.)
The Globe's article began arrestingly, with the news that the Arabic-language version of Al Jazeera's website -- a major news source in the Middle East -- triumphantly misdescribed the recently described early…
gregladen | November 7, 2009When I was a kid, my friend Karl and I illegally snuck into a movie theater to see "The Mark of the Devil" (or words to that effect) then just out. We didn't sneak in because we didn't have the money. We snuck in because we were 13 or so and that was the only way we could see the movie, which we knew, by the way, was fiction.
But some people don't know that this whole "Mark of the Devil" thing is fiction.
There is apparently a lawsuit going on right now by some farmers in Michigan, including but not limited to Amish farmers, claiming that te legally required tagging of livestock with…
gregladen | November 7, 2009I don't mean blog posts or emails. For blog posts I use souped up gedit, and for emails I use pico. (There was a time when I thought I'd be using emacs for both of those, but emacs suffers from a deep philosophical dysfunction.) I'm talking about longer documents that have sections with headings, bibliographies, etc. I may well make this transition with the never-ending paper I'm writing with Lizzie.
It is hard to describe the difference between what are called markup systems and, say Microsoft Word, OpenOffice.org Writer, or AbiWord to people, especially to some of the newer people who…
gregladen | November 7, 2009Michel Bachmann has absolutely no sense of proportion in her personal statements (as a member of congress) or in what she encourages or allows happening around her. She is also an extraordinarily dishonest person. That first bit ... lack of sense of proportion (or shame) is well addressed in the following appeal from Representative Israel. The second will be clear if Bachmann or her associates at Fox respond to this video.
gregladen | November 7, 2009This will make you laugh. Then you will realize that there is nothing funny here. Nothing. Then you will cry. With Glenn Beck. Cry for Glenn. Cry for our nation. And if you think I'm joking that's just what they made you think.
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The 11/3 Project
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes
Political Humor
Health Care Crisis
gregladen | November 6, 2009One of the leading indicators for behavior and intent is gaze direction. Many under cover detectives use this cue to figure out who may be predators in a crowd. In work for NBC Sports, Nils Krahnstoever has shown that we can track the gaze direction of football players providing a whole new level of sports analysis.
Spooky. Check it out.
gregladen | November 6, 2009Two dead. Then alive.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Related:
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
gregladen | November 6, 2009She wants to spill the blood of liberals. I think she should be locked up.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
gregladen | November 6, 2009A campus religious leader is unhappy about a study at Duke University that invites female students to attend parties where they can buy sex toys....the director of the Duke Catholic Center has lodged a complaint with researchers.
The study has of age female students attend "tupperware style" sex toy parties, and complete a survey before and after. They have IRB approval.
source
Note: Abel Pharmboy has blogged about this here.
gregladen | November 6, 2009Divining sticks that consist essentially of an antenna not even attached to a radio (which might make it slihgtly useful for listening to music and stuff), and costing between 16 and 60 THOUSAND DOLLARS each, are being used as the main technology for detecting bombs at check points staffed by the Iraqi army.
The US Army has told the Iraqi army that this does not work, but they don't care.
"I don't believe there's a magic wand that can detect explosives," said Maj. Gen. Richard J. Rowe Jr., who oversees Iraqi police training for the American military. "If there was, we would all be using…
gregladen | November 6, 2009From the NCSE:
NCSE's executive director Eugenie C. Scott was invited to debate Ray Comfort, a creationist in the news recently for his plans to distribute copies of the Origin of Species with his own introduction, on the God & Country blog of U.S. News & World Report. Comfort began the debate on October 29, 2009; Scott replied on October 30, 2009; Comfort responded on November 2, 2009; and Scott replied on November 3, 2009. The debate, according to Dan Gilgoff, who maintains the blog, elicited "more feedback than any other issue on this blog has received over any similar stretch in…
gregladen | November 6, 2009The numbers are vague. The shooter is identified as 50 year old Jason Rodriguez who opened fire in an office building in Orlando, Florida, killing 1 and wounding others. He was a former employee of where he did the shooting.
The killer is at large. They think he took off in his 2002 silver Nissan SUV. Plate: D119UX.
Turn on the TV now if you want to watch the Amazing Fluctuating Numbers of dead and wounded. I just watched the number shot go from 7 to 9 within one sentence.
gregladen | November 6, 2009First,
Paul Ingraham is Vancouver Registered Massage Therapist and science writer who criticizes questionable practices in alternative health care -- and his professional regulator calls it offensively unprofessional and wants to censor his website with tens of thousands of dollars in legal defense expenses at stake.
Science-based alternative health? Rebellion within the alt-health ranks? Juicy.
details
Also, I heard a rumor that Bora of A Blog Around the Clock will be on the show as well.
gregladen | November 6, 2009First off, Major Hasan, the Fort Hood Shooter is not dead. He's in custody, wounded. Interesting how he was dead for much of the day yesterday. You'd think they'd get that straight.
Second, Hasan is not os "Muslim Descent." There is no such thing. Islam is a religion. He is a Palestinian American.
Third, even though it is true that Fort Hood is the largest military base in the world, it is not (necessarily) true that it has "suffered a disproportionate share of losses" in the Iraq and Afghani wars. It is bigger. It has more. Proportionate means you adjust for size, stupid newsman.…
gregladen | November 5, 2009So, we were at the hospital doing a standard midwife visit, and the pediatric nurse managed to fanagle me an H1N1 shot (they want caretakers of infants to have the shot). So I am now fully inoculated. We also probably have a baby name picked out, but I'm not going to say what it is.
Then, leaving the hospital and heading back north, we saw it ...
I think it was an F 15, but I could easily be wrong about that. It was heading south in what looked like a circle-the-airport formation. Then a second one following the first.
I clicked on the radio and in moments heard about the shooting at Fort…