Adobe Photoshop CS2 on Ubuntu from justmoon on Vimeo.
Monthly Archives: September 2009
Happy Birthday Rebecca, and Giles: Sorry about the rocks and stuff. Arrrg…
Which is better at pool: Cats or dogs?
Cats:
Dogs:
The Night I Was Almost Abducted by Aliens in Boston
Nineteen former pilots and government officials … told reporters their questions can no longer be dismissed …”We want the US government to stop perpetuating the myth that all UFOs can be explained away in down-to-earth, conventional terms,” said Fife Symington, former governor of Arizona… “Instead our country needs to reopen its official investigation that it shut down in 1969,” Symington told a news conference. [source]
I saw an UFO (pronounced “ooofo,” I think) once too. It was a sight I can never forget. Let me tell you about it.
Continue reading The Night I Was Almost Abducted by Aliens in Boston
Purity and Outreach
When something goes wrong we fix it, sometimes making a new rule so it does not happen again. After a while we may get a bunch of related rules and they can be, and often are, organized into a system, perhaps a paradigm, maybe a dogma, or even an -ism. Once you’ve got one of those, it is easy to fall into the pattern of making your ism more ism than hism. In other words, the isms may start to compete with each other for purity, or internally, the practitioners of an ism strive for purity for their own Freudo-Junkian reasons. Purity becomes an objective.
Does this sound unfamiliar to you, like something you would not encounter in every day life? Well, that surprises me. You ae probably involved in a number of discourses in which this is happening right now.
Click here to find out how bad the situation really is. Also, learn about Shakerism, Accommodationism, and what may be the greatest threat we’ll ever see to Skepticism….
…. ITSELF ….
The Sun Never Sets on the I and the Bird Web Carnival
I KNOW it was a UFO. I know it! I know it!
… and I blogged about it here. But then I saw this video:
Continue reading I KNOW it was a UFO. I know it! I know it!
After the Warming (James Burke 1989)
The Japanese run everything (does that scare you or delight you?). iTechnology is controlled with eyeMice. Everything he says about human evolution is VERY VERY wrong, just so you know. (E.g. “Mammoths” probably evolved after language. Native Americans do not descend from people who lived in caves in Siberia. Language did not emerge during the last ice age. And so on and so forth.)
For the iHolidays
Do it for your mother…
“Hey! Where’s Juno?” … “I think it’s near Uranus!”
Juno is an asteroid that will be coming into view shortly. To find it, go out into the night in a relatively unpolluted sky and look near Uranus.
You can often see Juno with a descent telescope, but if conditions are good, you should be able to see it with the naked eye.
Juno is the tenth largest known asteroid and is about the size of Maryland.
How to find it:
Continue reading “Hey! Where’s Juno?” … “I think it’s near Uranus!”
Abducted by Aliens … and dropped off at the Grand Canyon
I’m pretty sure Amanda and I were abducted by aliens this morning. This is not the first time, for me. I was abducted with two others about 20 years ago in Southern Maine while looking for antiques, back when you could still get them cheap even in antique stores (inexpensive antiques, not aliens). You can tell about the abduction because one moment it is a certain time and the next moment is it much later in time and you have no memory whatsoever of he ensuing time. Since that is essentially impossible, alien abduction is pretty much the best possible explanation. Back in Maine, it caused us to miss a critical turn just by the Big Red Barn antique store. This morning, it caused Amanda to go rushing out of the house only half-ready for a day of teaching Life Science, and me to sit here wondering, why did I just spend 20 minutes reading pages in the creationist web site “Answers in Genesis.”
Well, I’m not sure how Amanda’s day is going to go, but I’m going to make use of this abduction and talk about the Grand Canyon.
Continue reading Abducted by Aliens … and dropped off at the Grand Canyon
Mischief Managed
Scienceblogs.com appears to be back in working order again…
Continue reading Mischief Managed
Poll: Should educators be fined or jailed for offering prayer in public schools?
WPTV.COM has a poll asking “Should educators be fined or jailed for offering prayer in public schools?” and the possible answers are “yes” and “no.” Which I guess means they are not really asking an “either/or” question although it is worded that way. Anyway, this relates to THIS STORY about people who work for a school system who are currently in trouble for contempt of court. Contempt of court is a jail-able offense, and it is NOT “offering prayer in public schools.”
Of course, it is true that these individuals were originally in trouble for violating the First Amendment Rights of the children and others in the school system they work for, and for mixing church/state business. They were ordered by a judge to stop doing that, they defied the order, and that is what got them in trouble.
Anyway this is a poll you might want to visit, but don’t just vote; Comment also. Let the poll-maker know that they are not really asking the right question.
The Poll is Here. It is currently at 10.6 percent yest, 89.4 percent no.
Autism Survey Results
A while ago I pointed you to Ginny Hughes blog where she was conducting an informal survey as prep for a conference she is attending. She has some comments on the results here.
The most interesting result to me is that people in the “autism community” seem to have higher fertility than scientists.
The next Dolly Llama has been Borned.
A baby weighing 9 lps, 9 oz, a 9 minutes after 0 on 9/9/09 was born … in LaCrosse Wisconsin.
Clearly, this is the Dolly Llama.
Or, maybe it’s the Beatles’s Baby. Number 9, Number 9, Number 9 ….
Or maybe … No, wait, wait, if this baby had been weighed using the Metric System, it would be 4.337 kilograms.
…
Never mind…