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At some point in my youth in the ‘70’s, I got Susan Anton and Susan Sontag confused.
Ever since, when I heard about Sontag’s essays and books, I was amazed that a prominent model had managed such a successful second career.
In lieu of actual anesthesia, JetBlue provides little LCD TVs in their planes’ seat backs. On my recent flight, I watched more TV than I had in the previous year.
I saw a couple of episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. Pocahontas happened to mention that a character on it had originally appeared on another show. I was curious about this, and did a web search, little suspecting what was in store.
Once upon a time, I watched a lot of TV. I could have told you that Mork & Mindy and Joanie Loves Chachi co-existed in the same fictional universe . I could have told you that Maude co-existed with the Jeffersons.
But then I visited the Crossovers and Spin-offs Master Page, and I learned of co-existences man was never meant to know.
Maude and the Jeffersons also share a world with Silver Spoons, the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and E/R. Kung Fu with Maverick. Touched by an Angel with Mission: Impossible. Quantum Leap with Hawaii 50. Knight Rider with Star Trek. The horror, the horror!
My mind reeling, I desperately grasped at the tenuous threads anchoring my sanity. And then I saw that not only does Law and Order: SVU co-exist with Homicide, but also with M*A*S*H. Seinfeld. I Dream of Jeanie. Oz. The White Shadow. Friends. Hill Street Blues. Home Improvement. The X-Files. And dozens more!
And all of those ocurred only in the mind of an autistic child.
R’lyeh phtagn! Shub-Niggurath, Ia!
Doh the humanity! specializes in website typos, errors and assorted gaffes, like this woman in Yahoo personals seeking rear love, marriage, Amazon offering a song sample of Shostakovich’s I Don’t Need Yo’ Kiss, or, my favorite, this film site’s warning that Polar Express contains mild perl.
(Just imagine what they’d make of extreme Perl.)
You’ve probably heard something in the news about a tsunami. Well, just in case you were sleeping well, there’s a volcano in the Canary Islands that has a big crack in it from an eruption in 1949. A chunk of rock the size of a small island has been slowly slipping into the Atlantic ever since. It’s predicted that another eruption could send it falling in all at once, with dramatic effects.
What will happen when the volcano on La Palma collapses? Scientists predict that it will generate a wave that will be almost inconceivably destructive, far bigger than anything ever witnessed in modern times. It will surge across the entire Atlantic in a matter of hours, engulfing the whole US east coast, sweeping away everything in its path up to 20km inland. Boston would be hit first, followed by New York, then all the way down the coast to Miami and the Caribbean.
We’d have around 7-10 hours warning, if anyone were paying attention.
The U.S. government must be aware of the threat. I am sure they are not taking it seriously,” McGuire of the Benfield Grieg Hazard Research Centre told reporters. “They certainly should be worried, as should the island states of the Caribbean.” […] McGuire urged the governments of Spain and the United States to fund monitoring of the volcanically active La Palma — a project he said could be achieved relatively cheaply.
It last erupted in 1971. Its normal schedule is to erupt every 25 to 200 years. So it could happen pretty much at any time, and we should expect it to happen within the next couple of centuries.
But, hey, there’s no guarantee an eruption would collapse the volcano.
Have a nice day.
The Templars speak! But other than demanding an apology from the Vatican, they don’t say much.
Acheson claims to trace his ancestry to a renowned Scottish Templar family of the same name, though he won’t confirm his own role in the group. Might he just be a practical joker who managed to fool the Vatican? “That could well be, couldn’t it?” he says, as we order coffee in a Hertford establishment closely modelled on All Bar One. “I can’t tell you anything to prove that I’m not. I think that would be a perfectly reasonable theory.”
(Via Boing Boing)
1. 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S.
2. There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry.3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers
4. The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”
5. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of ES&S. He became Senator based on votes counted by ES&S machines.
6. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, long-connected with the Bush family, was recently caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee.
7. Senator Chuck Hagel was on a short list of George W. Bush’s vice-presidential candidates.
8. ES&S is the largest voting machine manufacturer in the U.S. and counts almost 60% of all U.S. votes.
9. Diebold’s new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters.
10. Diebold also makes ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket machines, all of which log each transaction and can generate a paper trail.
11. Diebold is based in Ohio.
12. Diebold employed 5 convicted felons as consultants and developers to help write the central compiler computer code that counted 50% of the votes in 30 states.13. Jeff Dean was Senior Vice-President of General Election Systems when it was bought by Diebold. Even though he had been convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree, Jeff Dean was retained as a consultant by Diebold and was largely responsible for programming the optical scanning software now used in most of the United States.
14. Diebold consultant Jeff Dean was convicted of planting back doors in his software and using a “high degree of sophistication” to evade detection over a period of 2 years.15. None of the international election observers were allowed in the polls in Ohio.
16. California banned the use of Diebold machines because the security was so bad. Despite Diebold’s claims that the audit logs could not be hacked, a chimpanzee was able to do it!
17. 30% of all U.S. votes are carried out on unverifiable touch screen voting machines with no paper trail.
18. All — not some — but all the voting machine errors detected and reported in Florida went in favor of Bush or Republican candidates.19. The governor of the state of Florida, Jeb Bush, is the President’s brother.
20. Serious voting anomalies in Florida — again always favoring Bush — have been mathematically demonstrated and experts are recommending further investigation.
Follow the link for references.
(Via Ethel the Blog)
My fellow born-again moral Americans:
=v= In our ongoing efforts to make this a more Scriptural nation, we invite everyone to Turn The Other Cheek this Thursday. I know we're all upset that crosses have been banned from the Inaugural Charade route, but at least we can abide by the words of Jesus (W's "favorite philosopher").
Bicycles have also been banned, so while Critical Mass must keep its distance, Critical Ass can take the front row.
(Artwork by Mighty Jim Swanson)
Circadiana is a kick-ass new weblog about sleep, by a sleep researcher. See, for instance, Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep.
I’m a morning person. I first learned this at grad school, thinking I’d only failed to realize it because I’d never really tried it as an undergrad. The above article alerted me to the likelihood that I wasn’t a morning person yet as an undergrad.
Good K5 article on procrastination:
There’s a TV show on that my girlfriend and I love. Nanny 911. These classic British nannies choose a family in trouble and work their magic on them. They spend a day or so observing the family and learning all their poor behaviors and triggers, and then set about fixing the family.
A lot of the show is tough love. Just as easy as it is to reinforce positive behavior, you can reinforce negative ones too, and they’re easier to reinforce. Ask any behaviorist and they’ll tell you that randomly reinforcing a behavior works better than reinforcing it every time. Every time you put a dollar in the soda machine you get a soda. There’s no need to check that. But putting a quarter in a slot machine doesn’t always get you a prize. People get obsessed waiting for the chance that they’ll get some prize money, even once they’ve put way more quarters into one of these things than they could ever hope to get out. Gambling is addictive because while it operates within a set of rules, it’s unpredictable.
And that’s what happens all too often in these families. When the baby cries you say to yourself, “no, I have to stick this one out and not give in,” but after a while, you break down and give in. All this teaches the child is that crying more and louder works.
Where in your life are you randomly reinforcing negative behaviors? Where do you need tough love?
So what do these nannies do to turn around all this negative behavior? They take away all the rewards. When the rewards are always available, there’s no need to do the work. They take away television privileges, and make the kids and parents go cold turkey with any negative habits they may have (like pacifiers).
Procrastination is the reward for not doing work.
If you work hard all year, what can you look forward to? Your vacation. Procrastination is like taking that vacation right now. If you can’t take a vacation at the end of a year of hard work, you might as well take it now because there is no reward for finishing your work. […] If I work 9 to 5, I don’t work when I get home, yet much of my day at work is wasted too. Why? Because there is no reward for completing the work. If I complete the work, I’m still at my job, so what incentive do I have?
Well, what would Nanny 911 do? She would take away everything you use to procrastinate, and not give it back until you finished your work. No exceptions, because an exception is a random reinforcer.
Ebert’s Glossary of Movie Terms is sort of like a Turkey City Lexicon for movies.
Mid-Wife Crisis
Any character whose wife and/or kids are introduced more than an hour into the movie and who hugs and kisses any or all of them will be dead within the next 20 minutes. e.g., “Goose” in TOP GUN.
this morning, while joking around with my girlfriend, i referred to my “male implement” as a “wand of fucking +2,” and proceeded to request that she make a saving throw against orgasm. she immediately lashed out at me, stating that if i ever attempted to mix our sex life and dungeons and dragons ever again, there’d be hell to pay - and not the kind of hell that you get to ever have sex with ever again. this all got me to thinking - maybe her reaction to d+d-themed sex was simply caused by inexperience in the field?
A Linux user rates Windows viruses for Linux compatibility.
Linux just isn’t user-friendly when it comes to viruses. You have to work to find and run them. It doesn’t happen automatically as it does with Windows. The GNU/Linux folks really should improve this glaring discrepancy.
I saw part of Dogdeball when I flew home on JetBlue last month, more than enough to make me glad I’d never paid to see it.
But there was one genuinely funny bit. Our hero, Peter La Fleur is having his dark night of the soul. He’s sitting drinking in a hotel bar, about to let the scrappy, underdog dodgeball team he captains default the championship game for lack of players. Enter Lance Armstrong.
Lance Armstrong: Hey, aren’t you Peter La Fleur?
Peter La Fleur: Lance Armstrong!
Lance Armstrong: Ya, that’s me. But I’m a big fan of yours.
Peter La Fleur: Really?
Lance Armstrong: Ya, I’ve been watching the dodgeball tournament on the Ocho. ESPN 8. I just can’t get enough of it. Good luck in the tournament. I’m really pulling for you against those jerks from Globo Gym. I think you better hurry up or you’re gonna be late.
Peter La Fleur: Uh, actually I decided to quit… Lance.
Lance Armstrong: Quit? You know, once I was thinking of quitting when I was diagnosed with brain, lung and testicular cancer all at the same time. But with the love and support of my friends and family, I got back on the bike and won the Tour de France five times in a row. But I’m sure you have a good reason to quit.
In a Metafilter thread about another case of government payola to pundits, and the President not knowing about it, one poster writes.
They didn’t know about the WMDs.
They didn’t know about the torture at Abu Ghraib.
Now they didn’t know about this.Wow, I wish I was the President — life would be so full of surprises.
Respectful of Otters is covering the story of drafting ex-soldiers.
This backdoor draft removes the military objection to the draft; while Pistorius and Miyasato may be rusty and out-of-shape, they have the skills, training, and experience needed to be soldiers. And calling them up for active duty doesn’t sound like a draft to the average reporter or citizen on the street. They’re soldiers being called back to active duty. Surely that’s different from Joe College getting a letter from his draft board, right?
Wrong.
Pistorius and Miyasato are civilians. They owe the military no further service. The military has precisely as much right to call them up for active duty as it has the right to call up pregnant, disabled, thoroughly civilian me. These stories are not about a “recall to active duty,” they are about a draft.
I just learned that the PostgreSQL timestamp data type supports dates in the range of 4713 BC to 5874897 AD.
The former is literally prehistoric. Prehistoric doesn’t have a fixed definition — it means predating written history and is defined differently for different cultures. The oldest known calendar (in Egypt) was established in 4241 BC, so anything prior to that is prehistoric by any measure.
The latter is almost certainly post-historic.