gregladen | August 8, 2008On this day in 1974. It was Richard Nixon. I remember it like it was yesterday.
Richard Nixon has announced he is stepping down as president of the United States - the first man ever to do so.
He has announced his departure in the face of an imminent impeachment trial - and possible removal from office - over the Watergate affair.
The president broke the news of his resignation in a television broadcast from the White House on Thursday at 2100 local time. It will take effect from noon tomorrow.
Mr Nixon, 61, said initially he had believed it was his duty to complete his term of office…
gregladen | August 8, 2008Health Wonk Review at Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review
New and Exciting in PLoS ONE at A Blog Around the Clock
The NBTS edition of carnival of homeschooling at The Homeschool Cafe
Change of Shift: Volume 3, Number 3 at Emergiblog
Carnival of Education at Pass the Torch
Tangled Bank #111 at Denialism Blog
The 62nd Carnival of Feminsts! at Rage Against the Man-Chine
Linnaeus' Legacy #10 at A DC Birding Blog
gregladen | August 7, 2008 Linux has powerful graphics tools For the average user or the professional image manipulator, there is a range of OpenSource software that will run on Linux as well as (in some cases) other platforms such as Windows. As discussed earlier, there are two basic kinds of image: Bit mapped and vector. Here we are looking at some of the bit mapped software.
There are many options in the OpenSource world, but in the end you are most likely to choose as your main graphics application Krita if you use KDE, or The Gimp if you use any other desktop (in particular Gnome). Both are slick and…
gregladen | August 7, 2008OK, let's say it all together.
Minnesota is the state.
Minneapolis is a city in Minnesota.
Saint Paul is the Capitol of Minnesota.
The Republican National Convention will be in Saint Paul. Saint Paul Minnesota. Not Minneapolis.
Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who is from a suburb of Saint Paul and who represents the sixth district to the US Congress in Minnesota (which is over on the other side of Minneapolis ... so she drives through both cities to visit her home town) should really know this.
But she does not.
U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann has joined CBS anchor Katie Couric with mixing…
gregladen | August 7, 2008Common spelling mistakes should be accepted into everyday use, not corrected, a lecturer has said.
Ken Smith of Bucks New University says the most common mistakes should be accepted as "variant spellings".
He lists the 10 most commonly misspelt words, which include "arguement" for "argument" and "twelth" for "twelfth".
Mr Smith says his proposal, outlined in an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement, follows years of correcting the same mistakes.
Mr Smith, a criminology lecturer, said: "Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes…
gregladen | August 7, 2008From NASA:
Fractures, or "tiger stripes," where icy jets erupt on Saturn's moon Enceladus will be the target of a close flyby by the Cassini spacecraft on Monday, Aug. 11.
Cassini will zoom past the tiny moon a mere 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the surface. Just after closest approach, all of the spacecraft's cameras -- covering infrared wavelengths, where temperatures are mapped, as well as visible light and ultraviolet -- will focus on the fissures running along the moon's south pole. That is where the jets of icy water vapor emanate and erupt hundreds of miles into space. Those jets…
gregladen | August 7, 2008Remember the earlier discussion of the DNS bug? If the internet is the post office, the DNS is the collection of all of the addresses on all of the envelopes traveling around the system. It is secure, inherently. But caching is used as part of the system to make it more efficient, and the caches are NOT secure. So, this would be like an evil genius making the local postal deliver person always see the Evil Genius Address whenever s/he is about to deliver a check, and NEVER seeing it when s/he is about to deliver a bill. So the checks all go to the evil genius and the bills never do. Or…
gregladen | August 7, 2008Thank you, Ana, for sending this:
It gets a bit old by the time it is over, but it is funny. At the event we went to, the bidding started at 50, got to 60 or something, and someone shouted out "500?!?!?" and that was the end.
gregladen | August 6, 2008The FBI is upping the ante in relation to recent attacks on scientists working in California, in light of two firebombings over the last few days.(See FBI increases reward in firebombings to $50,000)
I just wish they would stop calling these people "animal rights activists." They are not. They are just nutjobs.
Two University of California, Santa Cruz faculty members and their families were targeted in what local authorities are calling attacks by animal liberationists.
The first incident occurred off-campus on Saturday morning when a faculty member and his two small children were forced…
gregladen | August 6, 2008Graphics software for Linux is superior to most other software for several reasons. Since the Linux system is inherently more efficient than other systems, memory-hungry graphics operations will always run faster, better, and more reliably on a Linux box than on, say, a Windows box, all else being equal. Day to day graphic needs can be met with a wider range of software on Linux than on other systems. Most of the available applications are OpenSource, so not only are they free and easier to install, but no puppies were mutilated during the production of the software.
The purpose of this…
gregladen | August 6, 2008An employee of the Grant Memorial Church, of Winnipeg Canada, identified by the church's pastor as a quiet person who seemed perfectly normal, stabbed a fellow passenger on a Greyhound bus fifty or sixty times, beheaded the passenger, and ate parts of his body, last Wednesday, as other passengers apparently sat helpless. The church custodian carried the head of the victim, whom he did not know, up and down the aisle of the bus, taunting police and passengers. He also saved some of the body parts in a plastic bag, presumably to eat later.
He is being evaluated for psychiatric abnormality…
gregladen | August 6, 2008On this day in 1945 ...
The first atomic bomb has been dropped by a United States aircraft on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
President Harry S Truman, announcing the news from the cruiser, USS Augusta, in the mid-Atlantic, said the device was more than 2,000 times more powerful than the largest bomb used to date.
An accurate assessment of the damage caused has so far been impossible due to a huge cloud of impenetrable dust covering the target. Hiroshima is one of the chief supply depots for the Japanese army.
The bomb was dropped from an American B-29 Superfortress, known as Enola Gay, at…
gregladen | August 6, 2008This:
See Paris Hilton Responds to McCain Ad and more funny videos on FunnyOrDie.com
See more funny videos at Funny or Die
Appears to be a response to this:
So, here is the question. Who is hotter: Paris Hilton or Barack Obama?
gregladen | August 5, 2008This is Michael Shermer
Wow, that was cool. Now since you are in the mood, check this out if you have not already seen it:
gregladen | August 5, 2008
Its all about selection for flight distance. (Oh, for plants, that's dispersal distance!)
gregladen | August 5, 2008Food for thought from On the Media:
Recently there's been a bit of a backlash against the angry commenter, especially the anonymous angry commenter. Newspapers around the country have had to disband comment sections because of racist content, ad hominem attacks and vulgarity. The Mayor of Hartford, Connecticut, Eddie Perez, actually staged a protest outside of the offices of The Hartford Courant in response to what he called "hate speech" on the paper's site.
... And so on.
Anonymity is important, for very good and legitimate reasons. There are people who feel threatened by others because of…
gregladen | August 5, 2008
So if you have a CD r/w machine in your computer, there is a LOT more than you had previously imagined going on inside there. Wow!
gregladen | August 4, 2008I have a file called "email.txt" and I want to count the number of lines in it.
cat email.txt | wc -l
cat email.txt | sed -n '$='
The first example uses wc (which stands for "what's the count") with the -l (lines only) optin. The contents is pushed via cat through standard output into a pipe and thusly becomes standard input for the next command (wc).
The second example does the same thing with sed, and demonstrates a number of interesting aspects of sed. the equal sign causes the output of the current line number. Sed normally runs through all the lines of the file or input given to…