gregladen | March 3, 2009Kim Hannula is a 40-ish geology professor at a public liberal arts college in the Rockies. Her New Year's resolution is to reduce stress by changing her rheology, or maybe by walking to work and looking at the pretty mountains.
Go visit and say hey. If you can get the comments on Kim's blog to work (there may be a glitch).
"All My Faults..."
gregladen | March 3, 2009Start beating your children now. It is god's will.
H/T: Pharyngula
I love the way they link Bill Clinton's failed attempt at getting a blow job to teenage suicide.
gregladen | March 3, 2009...Here's the main point of our disagreement. Alden is a strong Christian who thinks that modernism has had a disastrous effect on our culture and our individual abilities to determine the answers to important questions. As an atheist, I am unable to see where religious belief and faith yield any sort of objective understanding of the nature of life and origins. ...
Posted at Quiche Moraine Dot Com
gregladen | March 3, 2009Emacs is exactly like a religion. A western religion, at least, operates by testing the faith of its participants. The god coldly allows babies to die of unexplained illnesses, violence to affect the innocent, wars to break out, natural disasters to ruin everything. That we mortals have faith that this is a loving and intelligent, all knowing god causes us to question reality itself, our selves, our church or temple, and our religious leaders. But this questioning followed by resolve, strengthens character. Or, ruins character. It could really go either way, which is why so many object…
gregladen | March 3, 2009 ... hiding in a Ring of Saturn.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found within Saturn's G ring an embedded moonlet that appears as a faint, moving pinprick of light. Scientists believe it is a main source of the G ring and its single ring arc.
Cassini imaging scientists analyzing images acquired over the course of about 600 days found the tiny moonlet, half a kilometer (about a third of a mile) across, embedded within a partial ring, or ring arc, previously found by Cassini in Saturn's tenuous G ring.
The finding is being announced today in an International Astronomical Union circular.
You…
gregladen | March 3, 2009Seriously! The Franken team is now entering the 'defense' phase of the absurd Election Challenge launched by Norman Coleman, who lost the election for Senate to Al Franken but who refuses to give up his seat.
If everybody who reads this blog sends five dollars to Al, they'll have enough to ... well, to make some photocopies or something. But every little bit helps!!!!!!!
Rumors are, as you know, that the Coleman Campaign is out fund raising. We've got to help Al.
gregladen | March 3, 2009The Vatican is sponsoring a five day conference to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species.
The subject is the compatibility of evolution and creation.
More at the BBC
gregladen | March 3, 2009Norm Coleman had to pay a $7,500 fine yesterday for failure to disclose important evidence in the 26 day long Franken-Coleman Senatorial Election Challenge Trial. The plaintiff, Coleman, also claimed in a written statement to the court that since the number of illegal votes cast in this election exceeds the narrow margin of difference between the two candidates (which has Franken as the winner), the election needs to be set aside. However, Coleman has failed to show that any votes were actually cast illegally, or to make any compelling legal argument that this extraordinary request be…
gregladen | March 2, 2009Apparently, there has been some significant movement in Florida, as a major shift has occurred in public opinion regarding evolution vs. creationism. Nearly 100 percent of readers of the Orlando Sentinel, it would seem at least on the surface, to support the teaching of evolution, and not creationism, in public schools. See?
Incredible.
gregladen | March 2, 2009Only one person on the crew spoke English, and this was the same person, a young woman named Akiko, who called herself a "production assistant," with whom I'd been in communication to arrange this whole thing, over the last many months.
The crew was from Japan and they were filming a documentary on evolution. Someone who knew someone who knew someone had attended a talk I had given a couple of years earlier at the University in Tokyo, and the producers of this documentary thought it would be interesting to include me in their documentary. The initial contact had been by phone from Akiko…
gregladen | March 2, 2009The Lenovo ThinkPad W700ds is a rather unique product, targeted squarely at mobile professionals who require the power, features, and performance of workstation-class machine on the go. We previously evaluated the standard ThinkPad W700 and praised the system for its performance and stand-out integrated features, like a Wacom Digitizer Tablet and X-Rite Color Calibrator. The ThinkPad W700ds takes all of the features offered by the W700 and ads a secondary, slide-out display, which increases monitor real-estate by 39%.
Gigs of everything too. Linux plays well with Lenovo laptops, even if…
gregladen | March 2, 2009Late word out of the IAU's Minor Planet Center: a small asteroid will pass close to Earth [on] ...March 2nd ... at 13:44 Universal Time. How close? The MPC's Timothy Spahr calculates that it'll be 0.00047 astronomical unit from Earth's center. That's only about 40,000 miles (63,500 km) up -- well inside the Moon's orbit and roughly twice the altitude of most communications satellites!
This object is about 30 meters across. If it struck a dinosaur, it would probably kill it. But, unlike this object that struck the earth recently, this asteroid is going to fly by.
Apparently, people in…
gregladen | March 1, 2009... explained.
I heard the first 50 minutes or so of a one hour edition of This American Life dedicated to explaining the banking crisis in terms that can be understood by any reasonable smart (or even not so smart) person. The bottom line: Nationalize the banks, then re-privatize them as soon as possible. One expert said it this way: If you covered up the name of the country involved and showed the numbers to any World Bank operative, they would all say the same thing. Nationalize the banks right now, then re-privatize them as soon as you can. And round up the head bankers and put them…
gregladen | March 1, 2009This morning, interviewed by Yours Truly. Massimo was brilliant! You will not want to miss this. The podcast is up now at this location on the intertubes. You should also visit Dr. Dr. Dr. Pigliucci's web site, Rationally Speaking, here.
gregladen | March 1, 2009Should OpenOffice.org (OOo) writer (the text editor unit of the OpenSource office suite) have the horizontal ruler, on the top of the page, visible by default, or should it be hidden by default? This is the argument that it should be hidden by default. If you become a registered user of the OOo web site, you can actually vote on this. Let me know how that goes.
Xfce 4.6 is released (yesterday). Xfce is a gnome-ish desktop for Linux that uses very few resources (and has very few bells and whistles). "Xfce 4.6 features a new configuration backend, a new settings manager, a brand new sound…
gregladen | February 28, 2009Since someone is posting love songs, I figured I could do that too.
Peace Monday!
OK OK so that was not a love song. But the love song is not a video, just a still with the music in the background, and that just isn't commercial. Well, maybe with a couple of Margaritas in the right company, but not here not now. So the love song is below the fold.
LeRoy Bell on CD:
A Change Is Coming
Spending Time
Two Sides To Every Story