gregladen | August 3, 2009Olbermann's special comment on heath care politics
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gregladen | August 3, 2009Dave and I were sitting in the back yard of the cabin on Cape Cod, having a beer and watching something get cooked on the grill. Dave was an architectural engineer, and the cabin was in an interior location probably in Dennis or Harwich (can't remember ... I spent a lot of time in cabins on Cape Cod doing archeology and stuff) and we were so close to the town water tower that we had to crane our neck back to read it.
So I said to Dave, "If that sucker fell over in our direction, we'd get wet. And dead."
Dave said, "No way, man. Big things like that don't fall over. They fall down.…
gregladen | August 3, 2009It turns out that our president is totally African. How cool is that? No wonder he's so much less stupid than the average American (as you know, Westerners tend to be dumbed down quite a bit by their stupid culture).
Well, OK, the second part of what I just said is true, but the first part isn't and, in fact, it isn't really all that funny. The "Birther" phenomenon that just won't seem to go away is a truly insidious, and indeed racist, and stupid.
But what is really scary about this is the following: A majority (just over fifty percent) of Republicans, when confronted with the…
gregladen | August 3, 2009Remember the election, when Republican political leaders such as Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh (The heart and brains of the party) and Michele Bachmann (whom I shall not attempt to define) encouraged their followers to be violent? Well, it is happening again, only this time in relation to opposing health care reform.
This sort of thing:
is being done as part of an organized effort by the Republican party.
This sort of thing is happening with greater frequency and greater severity every day. This is the legacy of John McCain and Dick Cheney.
gregladen | August 3, 2009Photo Synthesis is a rotating showcase of the best science photography on the web....
B.N. (Bobbie) Sullivan has a strong affinity for the sea and everything in it. She first learned to dive in 1970 and has since logged thousands of dives. A wish to document the marine life she encountered prompted her to learn underwater photography more than 20 years ago. More recently, she began to write about the marine life she has photographed. A research psychologist by profession, she approaches her subject matter with the mindset of a scientist, but targets her writing to a general readership in whom…
gregladen | August 3, 2009A fake Automatic Teller Machine set up in a hotel lobby can collect PIN's, account information, even credit card numbers. This is why you should be careful where you stick your card. In a moment of great irony, one such machine was set up in the hotel at a conference hosting 8,000 security professionals. They noticed.
The criminals probably didn't realize that they were installing their ATM in a hotel that was soon going to be flooded with more than 8,000 security professionals, he added.
They were smart enough to place the machine in one of the few spots in the hotel where there was no…
gregladen | August 3, 2009Updated"
The USGS gives details of two earthquakes in the Baja region, Mexico.
At UTC 18:33 a 5.0 quake seems to have occurred at 28.931°N, 113.022°W, which is in the Gulf of California (a.k.a. Sea of Cortez) near and south of the island Angel de la Guarda. The second and larger quake, a 6.0 (preliminary) magnitude quake occurred at 29.568°N, 113.578°W is near the same island, but on the other side (north) of it.
It is fun to watch the news agencies get all confused. The only on the scene report we have is from about four hundred miles north-northeast, in San Diego, where the city…
gregladen | August 3, 2009There is now a very simple way to make your own GNU/Linux distribution, called a "linux appliance," at SUSE.
SUSE is a Linux Distribution produced by Novell. It is one of the earlier distributions to make a sustained and effective effort to put Linux on your desktop. Perhaps even on your grandmother's desktop.
WEll, a few days ago, Novell launched a new thing called SUSE Studio, which allows you to develop your own "Linux Appliance."
A Linux appliance is essentially a specialized distribution. The SUSE Studio is a web applicatoi that lets you name the "
appliance," specify software…
gregladen | August 3, 2009And now, for another installment in our series: How The Loon Terns, an exercise in skeptical thinking using Loons as a waterbird touchstone. (In case you missed it, the previous installment was here.)
Common Knowledge: Loons are driven off lakes by boaters. The literature from the 1970s and 1980s makes it clear that there was a reduction in loon populations on lakes that were previously more isolated, and have become more accessible, and suffered greater amounts of boat traffic. Boats cause several problems for loons, including a damaging wake, and presumably it is bad if a loon is run…
gregladen | August 2, 2009Solar energy customers are worried a new fee proposed by Xcel Energy would punish new customers for getting solar panels.
The monthly fee, which would pay for distribution and transmission of energy, would go into effect in April 2010 and would have to be paid to Xcel, regardless of whether the solar customer used any electricity that month....
details
gregladen | August 2, 2009
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gregladen | August 2, 2009From Peep Research:
We all know that Peeps are light, fluffy, and filled with air. This of course begs the question, "What happens to Peeps in a vacuum?" (Surely you were about to ask the same thing, right?)
Details here
gregladen | August 2, 2009btrfs (pronounced as in the title) is the next gen linux file system (you can tell it is a file system because it ends in "fs" which means "File-related stuff."
Valerie Aurora nee Henson gives us "....a behind-the-scenes look at the design and development of btrfs on many levels - technical, political, personal - and trace it from its origins at a workshop to its current position as Linus's root file system ..." here
gregladen | August 2, 2009This is the continuation of a discussion of loons, skeptically viewed. I am not skeptical about loons themselves. I know they exist. In fact, I just spent the last half hour watching Mom and Dad loon (whom I cannot tell apart, by the way) feeding Junior I and Junior II (whom I also cannot tell apart) what I have determined to be mostly crayfish, but also the occasional minnow.
In this installment of How the Loon Terns we will look at breeding success.
In this installment of How the Loon Terns we will look at breeding success.
Common Knowledge: When a pair of loons fails to breed, it…
gregladen | August 1, 2009A central Wisconsin man accused of killing his 11-year-old daughter by praying instead of seeking medical care was found guilty Saturday of second-degree reckless homicide.
More
gregladen | August 1, 2009AlaskaReport has learned this morning that Todd Palin and former Alaska governor Sarah Palin are to divorce. Multiple sources in Wasilla and Anchorage have confirmed the news.
source
UPDATE: Meg Stapleton, Palin's spokesperson, totally denies divorce rumors.
And to commemorate almost one year of being annoyed by Sarah Palin, have a look at this:
This is a very fun video to watch for so many reasons, originally posted on this site on August 31st, 2007...
Hat Tip DNLee
gregladen | August 1, 2009I've been thinking about loons lately. This is not hard do do because every time I turn around there is a loon either watching me fish, yodeling off in the distance, flying overhead, or feeding its babies just off to my right as I sit here writing stuff. This year, the pair of loons that lives in front of the cabin seems to be producing two offspring ... the young ones grew quickly to near adult size and seem fit and healthy as far as one can tell. Last year, the pair living here produced zero offspring.
I had thought the other day of writing something about loons in winter, in part…