gregladen | September 23, 2008If we replace every standard light bulb with an energy efficient light bulb, we'll save enough electricity to go to the moon and back 11 times. Everybody knows that, of course. But what you may not realize is that if you use the commonly available shortcut keys that were designed into your computer, you would save enough keystrokes that all the computer keyboards in the world would last an extra 11 years. Honest.
So, we are going to start learning some shortcut keys.
Here I am ready to use the short cut keys to go back and fix a few typoes. Typos.
The way to learn shortcut keys is to…
gregladen | September 23, 2008We're talking about the Minnesota Science Standards and we're talking about nothing less than the Pope Mobile.
Consider the following statement currently part of the proposed Minnesota Science Standards:
The student will be able to explain how scientific and technological innovations as well as new evidence can challenge portions of or entire accepted theories and models including but not limited to cell theory, atomic theory, theory of evolution, plate tectonic theory, germ theory of disease and big bang theory.
Think about this for a moment. The standard is asking that the basic, minimal…
gregladen | September 23, 2008A vocational college student in Finland, named Matti Juhani Saari, has murdered nine people at the college he attends in Kauhajoki. He nearly botched his own suicide but is not dead in hospital. He was a licensed gun owner, who recently posted video of himself firing his gun on the internet. Police actually looked at him but decided they could nto revoke his permit. Ooops. Details.
gregladen | September 23, 2008Good morning! I have important news, and COOKIES!
First, the cookies:
These are serious cookies. These are Ana cookies. If you want one, you better hurry, because they are NOT going to last long.
Now on to the important news: Melanie Reap has dropped something in my inbox indicating that the Rochester meeting to discuss the science standards went pretty well, and that this bit about biology being part of Middle School and not High School is not real. We are to read the standards thusly: If you see a "9" read it as "9-12." The coding system they used requires a single number in that…
gregladen | September 22, 2008At 1st Ave. (Twin Cities Area)
On September 23, First Avenue/7th Street Entry nightclub in Minneapolis will be the venue for a star-studded musical and dance benefit for Cuban hurricane relief.
In the past weeks, Cuba has suffered tremendous damage from Hurricanes Gustav and Ike. Close to one million people were evacuated and more than 300,000 houses and other structures have been destroyed or damaged, and the United Nations estimates losses of between $3 and $4 billion. The U.S. government's offer of $100,000 in aid to Cuba is cruel and insulting; because of the U.S. embargo, ordinary…
gregladen | September 22, 2008
Check it out:
I attended the Welcome Home rally for Sarah Palin this morning. ... about a thousand (maybe) hard-core Palin supporters showed up ...
After shaking it off with a good double shot of espresso, and a brisk walk back to my car, it was time to head to the Alaska Women Reject Palin rally.
...
[in Anchorage, if you can get 25 people to show up at an event, it's a success. So, I thought to myself, if we can actually get 100 people there ..., we'll be doing good. A real statement will have been made. ]
...
It's a good thing I wasn't tailgating when I saw the crowd in front of…
gregladen | September 22, 2008Codeweavers has got a Linux 'version' of Chrome!!! (And a Mac version too.)
Chromium is the new Google browser. It is good because it is open source. (Yes, Virginia, that is one criterion for being 'good'). Also, it might be good for other reasons. My friend Gayle really likes it, for instance. I might especially like the fact that it is multi-threaded, so when some moron produces a web site that crashes my browser over there (pointing to left side of monitor) I don't lose the thing I'm working on over here (pointing to right side of monitor) like I did the other day (angry, frustrated…
gregladen | September 22, 2008I'm calling in from the Saint Paul Campus of the University of Minnesota, and we're goin' down. Mayday Mayday Mayday.
We are having some kind of "meet the student group" day and it is not going well. Booths are set up in front of the Student Center. The biggest single category of student group represented is religious. Jesus this, Jesus that. Graduate students for Jesus. The Campus Jesus BeJesus club. Of the political groups, there is one Obama, one Conservative Students of America and one Take Away Reproductive Rights from Women group. That's it.
What. Is. Going. On. Here. People…
gregladen | September 22, 2008This is from Jeff Rosenberg:
Norm Coleman has run a nasty campaign, full of personal attacks, half-truths, and ridiculous claims about Al Franken. Why would he do that? you may ask. The answer is simple: he knows that if this campaign comes down to issues, he'll lose. He was never elected for sharing Minnesotans' views on the issues, and his record in Congress has not been one most Minnesotans would approve of.
Over the past few months, I've compiled Coleman's floor votes on a number of different subjects. Now I bring you a summary of his worst votes. He wants to run from his record, but…
gregladen | September 22, 2008Inspired by this, I thought we would try this:
You know the Chuck Norris Facts meme, right? With items such as:
Jesus walked on water, but Chuck Norris swam through land
or
The chief export of Chuck Norris is pain.
Well, an (all too quick, possibly) Google search has revealed that the Chuck Norris (oh, you do know that Chuck is a creationist, right?) has not been translated into a PZ Myers meme. And if it has, we're gonna do it again.
So, ferinstance:
So, what does PZ Myers have behind his beard?
A chin? No! He has another argument against religion behind his beard! Ha!
But…
gregladen | September 22, 2008Members of the Public: Now is your only chance to comment on Minnesota's new Science Standards. My suggestions: Take out the woo, dampen down the special interests, and please, consider NOT removing biology from the High School standrds!!!!!
To comment, go to this web site and read the context, the standards, and use the resources available there. And/or visit one of the public meetings listed on that site.
Overall the standards are probably an improvement on prior standards. A few questions to consider:
Looking at these standards, it seems as though High School Biology has been removed…
gregladen | September 22, 2008The following is an ad from the Democratic Congressional Cmpaing Committee talking about Erik Paulsen. Paulsen is Democrat Ashwin Madia's opposition in the race to fill Republican Jim Ramsted's seat in the Third US Congressional District in Minnesota.
It is also about golfing.
gregladen | September 21, 2008In July, citing a budget shortfall, the Governor of California ordered the salaries of 170,000 State employees to be cut to the Federal minimum wage.
Not so fast, said the State Controller. Because California's payroll systems are written in antiquated Cobol code, it would take six months to implement the change and nine months to restore salaries later. That's if we had the Cobol programmers to do the job, which we don't, because you fired them last week, Governor. And we can't hire them back because nobody's going to take a pay cut from Social Security to program Cobol for minimum wage.…
gregladen | September 21, 2008WTF is Microsoft trying to do here???
Can't wait for the satires of this ad....
After you watch that, you may need to watch these to make you feel better.
First, a word from Linux:
Now, to get the taste of this whole thing out of your brain, here's a kitten falling asleep in a box:
gregladen | September 20, 2008Eventually, enough rich and powerful people/companies will become sufficiently inconvenienced or annoyed at the archaic intellectual property laws under which we now live that change will happen. Or am I being totally naive?
A few current stories relevant to this issue:
From Slashdot:
"As Chicago wages its battle to host the 2016 Olympics, it also finds itself scrapping over a valuable piece of cyberspace: the domain name of Chicago2016.com. The bid team along with the U.S. Olympic Committee are trying to wrest that online address from Stephen Frayne Jr., a 29-year-old MBA student. Frayne…
gregladen | September 20, 2008Sarah Palin thinks that the Pledge of Allegiance was written by the founding fathers, according to the Daily Kos.
See also: IT Failures Nudge Out Democracy
gregladen | September 20, 2008According to a widely disseminated story (see this) the Large Hadron Collider broke only hours after it started operations last week. This is an atrocity and an example of something seriously, endemically wrong with science more generally.
Why is the fact that the LHC broke right away an atrocity? Well, actually, that it broke is not the atrocity. The atrocity is that you are only hearing about it now, a week after the fanfare linked to the startup. There are only three possible explanations for this:
1) They forgot to mention it . Slipped their minds. Oops, sorry, I guess I didn't think…
gregladen | September 20, 2008It does not matter what the candidates think or what the voters think if voter database management and voting technology problems determine the outcome of the next election.
...a new study by Common Cause and the Century Foundation finds that 10 very vital swing states have significant voting problems that have not been addressed since the last election.
Those 10 states, according to Common Cause, are Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Missouri, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.
And, an important agency charged with keeping election officials informed of voting…
gregladen | September 19, 2008 Gustavus The Nobel Conference at Gustavus Adolphus College, naturally.
Gustavus Adolphus was the king of Sweden and founder of the Swedish Empire from the age of seventeen until he his death at the age of 37, in 1632. He looked, as a testosterone-ridden teenager, at vast unconquered lands, at his large and experienced army, and noticing that he was in charge of everything, made a run at taking over the world. He left Sweden with his army and never looked back.
Meanwhile, well, a couple of centuries later, Alfred Nobel was busy inventing TNT and establishing the Nobel Prizes for…