gregladen | July 28, 2009Europeans laughing at each other:
A Swedish couple in search of the isle of Capri drove to Carpi, an industrial town in northern Italy, because they misspelt the name in their car's GPS.
Italian officials say the couple asked at Carpi's tourist office where they could find Capri's famous Blue Grotto.
...
"Capri is an island. They did not even wonder why they didn't cross any bridge or take any boat," said a bemused tourism official in Carpi.
bbc
gregladen | July 28, 2009The Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday voted to approve Sonia Sotomayor as the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice over nearly solid Republican opposition, paving the way for a historic confirmation vote.
source
Only one Republican voted in favor of Sotomayor (Linsey Graham). What bunch of morons.
gregladen | July 28, 2009Hi everyone; this morning at 8:00am, July 14/09, I proceeded to the Denny Island aerodrome, located on Denny Island in the midst of the BC Central Coast archipelago, aka "The Great Bear Rainforest" where I broke open the welded steel cover and dismantled and destroyed a large seismic shot which was slated for blasting in the early morning hours of July 17th, 2009. I took this action alone, without the participation or knowledge of any other person, association or organization. I accept full and sole responsibilty for my action and look forward to the consequences.
And so reads the on line…
gregladen | July 27, 2009Is the Natural World a valid source of guidance for our behavior, morals, ethics, and other more mundane areas of thought such as how to build an airplane and what to eat for breakfast?1 When it comes to airplanes, you'd better be a servant to the rules of nature (such as gravity) or the airplane will go splat. When it comes to breakfast, it has been shown that knowing about our evolutionary history can be a more efficacious guide to good nutrition than the research employed by the FDA, but you can live without this approach and following FDA guidelines will not do you in. A naturalistic…
gregladen | July 26, 2009"Human nature" is an interesting topic. People will argue over the definition of human nature, but regardless of what people think or say, it is reasonable to assume that all humans share a psychological and developmental framework to the extent that any two people raised in the same background will 'turn out' similar with respect to several behavioral traits or tendencies. Also, a pair of twins separated at birth and raised up in very different cultures are likely to exhibit more differences than similarities owing to the different cultures but perhaps some set of seemingly uncanny…
gregladen | July 26, 2009Cambridge Police: A matter of black and white is revised (just the first several paragraphs)
gregladen | July 25, 2009Carl Zimmer tells us:
Facebook lets 3rd party advertisers use your posted photos without your permission. To opt out: Click on SETTINGS (located on top of page in blue bar, next to logout); Select PRIVACY SETTINGS; Select NEWS FEEDS and WALL; Select the TAB that reads Facebook Ads. There will be a drop down box; Select NO ONE. Save your changes & then pass this on. [Thanks to Virginia Postrel]
ADDED: You may need to turn off ad blocking to make this work.
gregladen | July 25, 2009My friend Car2D2 told me about this, so I eventually tracked it down to share it with you.
Check it out. .
Snap on tools, indeed.
gregladen | July 25, 2009This fall, Harry Potter fans will get the chance to step inside the famous wizard's magical world through Harry Potter: The Exhibition, which opens at the Museum of Science, Boston on October 25, 2009, at 9 a.m. Tickets are now available online at mos.org or by calling 617-723-2500, 617-589-0417 (TTY). Visitors will be able to experience dramatic displays inspired...
The Exhibition made its highly successful global premiere at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry last April and will run there through September 27, 2009,
details from BMS
gregladen | July 25, 2009Jud Süà is a 1940 Nazi anti-Semetic propaganda film that was widely loved in much of Europe, especially Germany (and also vilified and banned in various places). The production and showing of this film was a significant moment in the development of the widespread German hate of the Jewish People that facilitated a nearly successful attempt at their utter extermination.
In other words, Jud Süà played a measurable role in the development of mid 20th century racism to the ultimate conclusion which racism, unfettered, always leads: Holocaust.
John Ubele is a hate-mongering white…
gregladen | July 24, 2009UPDATED (based on feedback from commenters, new information, and some other data)
Is racial bias ever a factor in police work? Was racial bias a factor in GatesGate, the recent incident in Cambridge Massachusetts involving Harvard scholar Skip Gates and the Cambridge Police? Here, I want to relate an incident in which I was involved in which a very strong racial bias clearly occurred, in which the police tried to arrest a black man principally because he was black even though he was totally innocent, and at the same time, gave undue sway to a white man. First a little context, then the…
gregladen | July 24, 2009So a laptop with a half-unplugged memory chip is brought into a shop. The techie fixes it right way, and calls the owner to tell her that a new mother board is needed. In the mean time, he's looking through private photos on the hard drive.
That was one of several documented events chronicled in this piece from PC Pro.
gregladen | July 24, 2009From the NCSE:
Three historians of science are unhappy about their treatment in a creationist movie about Darwin, as they explain in a note in the July 2009 Newsletter of the History of Science Society. Peter Bowler, Janet Browne, and Sandra Herbert write, "We have recently been featured in a documentary film, 'The Voyage that Shook the World,' produced by Fathom Media of Australia and directed by Stephen Murray of Synergy Films, New Zealand. We were led to believe that the movie was being made to be shown as an educational film on Australian broadcast television and possibly elsewhere.…
gregladen | July 23, 2009According to the BBC, 17,000 mile cable has just been completed connecting South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Mozambique to Europe and Asia. I'm not quite sure how an undersea cable, which this is, connects landlocked Uganda to anything, but well, that's BBC African Geography for you.
gregladen | July 23, 2009Our desktop support folks couldn't do anything with it. When I told them my story about what happened (at least I'm honest) they realized it would be easier to re-install the machine with a fresh image of Windows Vista.
Read this sad but unsurprising tale of woe at Linux in Exile. And find out how Windows Update and system management in Linux are different. Also, you Linux users, please do visit Exile and check out the comments. It appears to me that numerous Microsoft Symps are trying to take over. Go kick some ass.
gregladen | July 23, 2009Reports are now surfacing that the son of Osama Bin Laden was killed by a US Hellfire missile fired from a Predator Drone in Pakistan at an undisclosed date earlier in the year.
BBC
gregladen | July 23, 2009Unfortunately, NASA is calling it a "wild creature of the dark" with an "eye-like object at its center." Actually, it is a galaxy, which is plenty cool so they could do without the fancy-talk. Here's the picture:
This is Galaxy NGC 1097, and it is about 50 million light years away/ago. The bright Eye Of Sauron thing in the middle is a black hole surrounded by stars. If you look close, you'll see a blue are where the black hole is. That is the invisible part of the black hole (enhanced, obviously) and the white zone are the stars crowded up to it.
Stuff gets pulled in towards the black…