gregladen | December 20, 2007Or, even, one of these...
It does require a prescription (rats!) but all you need is a special barcode and out comes your meds.
[source]
gregladen | December 20, 2007Red Hat Profitable; Solar-powered laptop for Tanzania; Happy Birthday Perl; NetBSD 4.0 released
Red Hat 3Q Profit Up 12 Percent from PhysOrg.com
(AP) -- Open-source software provider Red Hat Inc. said Thursday that its third quarter profit rose 12 percent as a surge in subscriptions helped offset increased spending on marketing and research.
[...]
Penn State student team develops solar-powered laptop for Tanzanian students
University Park, Pa. -- For a team of Penn State engineering students, the challenge wasn't getting laptops to Tanzanian students, but how to power those machines.…
gregladen | December 20, 2007Reminder: NY to pick between ODF and OOXML:
"In August of 2007, the State of New York passed legislation requiring its CIO, Melodie Mayberry-Stewart, to gather information on the advantages and disadvantages of adopting either ODF or OOXML as a document standard, and to report her findings by 15 January 2008. As part of her duties under that legislation, the CIO issued a Request For Public Comment to get feedback on the topic. The deadline for that public comment is 28 December 2007
New Creative Commons License
CC+ is a protocol providing a simple way for users to get rights beyond the…
gregladen | December 20, 2007Comedian Ricky Gervais has engaged in a debate about theology with the Archbishop of Canterbury - confessing at the end that he might have "blown his image" by taking life seriously.
Gervais is more concerned that religious indoctrination is a form of brainwashing, and he has an interesting reason for thinking this.
"Because I believe in evolution, I believe that a child's brain is a sponge, and it is meant to be because it believes everything it is taught because it has to to survive ... "I think if the first thing you are exposed to is that there is a God and you should do these things, I…
gregladen | December 20, 2007The uneasy alliance between Atheists and Wiccans in the War on Christmas paid off this week as a skirmish unfolded in Green Pay, Wisconsin.
A Wiccan symbol now stands alongside the Christmas manger scene above Green Bay City Hall's northwest entrance.
The new display is an evergreen wreath, about 3 feet in diameter, around a five-pointed star. It's called a pentacle, and it is a symbol in the Wiccan religion, which is associated with witchcraft. Wicca is a nature-based religion based on respect for the earth, nature and the cycle of the seasons.
The wreath and star are mounted on an easel…
gregladen | December 20, 2007He's no Bing Crosby. No, he's better.
...noted atheist Richard Dawkins is taking his first foray into the world of entertainment with "Merry Nothing," a decidedly dour holiday special scheduled to air on PBS this Friday night.
For Dawkins, the program represents quite a radical shift. In his attempt to rid the world of what he calls the "Christmas delusion," the man who has made a name for himself as a writer and formidable debater will have to play the role of enthusiastic host: "Next up, our friends from the ACLU are here to tell us how we can help spread cheer this year by filing suit…
gregladen | December 20, 2007THE front-running candidates in the 2008 US presidential election have released Christmas ads to voters, following the lead of one Republican hopeful who copped heavy criticism for his TV spot.
Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher and state governor running for the Republican nomination, was the first candidate to release a holiday message to voters in state holding early primaries.
His offering drew criticism for having a bookcase in the background that formed a Christian Cross as the camera panned across. Mr Huckabee laughed off the criticism.
Now other candidates have followed suit.…
gregladen | December 20, 2007The AH Trust intends to spend seven million dollars to build a theme park and studio to "promote the account of the creation recorded in the biblical book of Genesis and to combat what it sees as the malign influence on society of Darwin's theory of evolution" and to produce Christians films and TV shows.
"Evolution has falsely become the foundation of our society," the report said. "We need the studio to advocate Genesis across this land in order to remove this falsehood which presently is destroying the church foundation."
In a short statement released on Tuesday, the charity said it had…
gregladen | December 20, 2007Little battles are forming everywhere on the internet. Some wacko nutbag who just noticed the War on Christmas for the first time gets all spitty and spatty on the blog. This is picked up by our intelligence services and passed on to a ration, thoughtful atheist blogger, who humiliates the self righteous moron. It is a little like the early days of the Evo-Creo debate.
Here's an example.
Nutbag Christian:
The war against Christmas began a few years ago. By last year the movement had intensified and become threatening. This year, it will be warfare. Merchants have begun to remove the word…
gregladen | December 19, 2007Yet another missing link has been found! This new find links whales to quadrupedal land mammals.
Thewissen et al. report in Nature new fossil material from the Middle Eocene of Kashmir, India. This species (in the genus Indohyus is represented by a remarkable set of remains, including cranial and post cranial material. Previous studies using DNA had linked whales to the artiodactyls (even-toed ungulates such as deer, antelope, and bison). However, there is a great deal of uncertainty, and some contradictory evidence, as to where exactly in this group the whales arose.
Thewissen et al.…
gregladen | December 19, 2007
Aepyceros melampus. This is one of the more widespread antelopes. Impala can be either grazers or browsers. They are pretty and they taste good.
This herd is located at De Wildt's Reserve very near Johannesburg
gregladen | December 19, 2007A SiCortex SC648 supercomputer and a Linux cluster of 648 CPU's and a TB of main memory woudl draw about 1,200 watts. That's gotta widen your Carbon Footprint!
Unless, of course, you are a bunch of crazy MIT students withe bicycles, and you've got generators attached to the bikes.
A team of ten MIT students powered a supercomputer for twenty minutes by pedalling bicycles. They duly claimed the world record for human-powered computing (HPC).
...
An SC648 chip, with six processors on it, draws around 8 watts of power, which compares to a typical notebook computer CPU needing 100 watts,…
gregladen | December 19, 2007"After going premium and suffering some community fragmentation, the OpenOffice.org open source office suite is being taken in a new direction by a company named Ulteo. A brainchild of Gael Duval, founder of Mandriva Linux, Ulteo's mission is to serve as a platform for putting applications onto the web. Using this approach, Ulteo has released a public beta of Online OpenOffice.org, which quite literally puts OpenOffice.org inside a browser."
[source]
The community fragmentation referred to here is a bit disturbing but not too surprising. You have to figure that Sun is in the OpenSource…
gregladen | December 19, 2007African American children may have reduced verbal ability compared to other children to a degree that is roughly equivalent to missing a year in school, according to a recently published paper. Is this evidence of a racial difference?
The study by Sampson et.al., published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences included more than 200 children aged 6-12 living in Chicago, and followed these children over seven years. The study controlled for poverty, and interestingly, poverty was not found to be a good predictor of differences in verbal ability.
The researchers consider…
gregladen | December 19, 2007A conservative commentator recently editorialized:
For centuries, atheism has been the rake lurking around the edges of the Christmas party, but now it's slurping from the punch bowl in the middle of the room.
Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are selling atheist manifestos by the bin, and teens are soaking up blasphemous bits on Comedy Central and HBO. The movie version of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass is peddling a villainous Catholic Church to kids. And the Christmas concert at public schools has long since morphed into the Winter concert.
In terms of cultural…