It was so abrupt that MSNBC ads and promotions still include his show. It is being said by MSNBC officials that this has nothing to do with the Comcast takeover.

“There were many occasions, particularly in the last 2 1/2 years, where all that surrounded the show — but never the show itself — was just too much for me,” Olbermann said in his exit statement. “But your support and loyalty and, if I may use the word, insistence, ultimately required that I keep going. My gratitude to you is boundless.”

source

Check this out:

Days before this talk, journalist Naomi Klein was on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico, looking at the catastrophic results of BP’s risky pursuit of oil. Our societies have become addicted to extreme risk in finding new energy, new financial instruments and more … and too often, we’re left to clean up a mess afterward. Klein’s question: What’s the backup plan?

Continue reading Naomi Klein: Addicted to risk →

Surprise!

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Wednesday, Jan. 19 at 11:30 a.m. EST, engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., confirmed that the NanoSail-D nanosatellite ejected from Fast Affordable Scientific and Technology Satellite, FASTSAT. The ejection event occurred spontaneously and was identified this morning when engineers at the center analyzed onboard FASTSAT telemetry. The ejection of NanoSail-D also has been confirmed by ground-based satellite tracking assets

Now, NASA is asking HAMs to help:

Amateur ham operators are asked to listen for the signal to verify NanoSail-D is operating. This information should be sent to the NanoSail-D dashboard at: http://nanosaild.engr.scu.edu/dashboard.htm. The NanoSail-D beacon signal can be found at 437.270 MHz.

More details here.

Fountain Lady, Imma let you be upset and all in a minute, but right now I’ve got to say that there is not a single one of the 37 million people who watched you fall in the water ‘cuz you were texting and not watching where you were going who has not at some time or another in their life ran into a light pole or stepped off a curb they didn’t see or something similar. The only difference between you and the rest of us is that your misstep matched a modern meme … misadventure due to texting … and it got totally YouTubed. Rather than being upset, you should do what that homeless guy did and get a job as a TV game show host or whatever.

Oh, and it could have been worse. You could have been driving a school bus down by the river or something.

Van Jones lays out a case against plastic pollution from the perspective of social justice. Because plastic trash, he shows us, hits poor people and poor countries “first and worst,” with consequences we all share no matter where we live and what we earn. At TEDxGPGP, he offers a few powerful ideas to help us reclaim our throwaway planet.

Continue reading Van Jones: The economic injustice of plastic →

I don’t know about this …

There’s an angry divisive tension in the air that threatens to make modern politics impossible. Elizabeth Lesser explores the two sides of human nature within us (call them “the mystic” and “the warrior”) that can be harnessed to elevate the way we treat each other. She shares a simple way to begin real dialogue — by going to lunch with someone who doesn’t agree with you, and asking them three questions to find out what’s really in their hearts.

Continue reading Elizabeth Lesser: Take “the Other” to lunch →

Just because, I mean, wouldn’t you want to know who she’d appoint to the supreme court?
Continue reading 80% of Democrats Can’t Help Themselves And Would Support Palin →

Of these three items, two will be of interest to you. Can’t tell which two, though:

“My roomate lives like a horseradish” … check out this web site that accumulates funny auto-correct mishaps.

Bill Gates beats Pope, Dali Lama in Popularity Contest (see this) just as Windows stops being THE operating system (see this).

Did you know that Joan Rivers got tossed off of Fox for criticizing Sarah Palin? See this.

At the expense of Mel Gibson:
Continue reading Gervais on Last Year’s Rejected Godwinning →

Firefox Four is nearing readiness for your use. There are a massive 661 bug fixes, a number people are very excited about, but you’ve got to ask: How do you get that many unfixed bugs to begin with??? One of the features I’m looking forward is tabs in the title bar. I’m tired of giving up vertical screen real estate to the title bar, a few tool bars, a menu bar, a tab bar, and then within the web site, a banner add, a fancy decorative banner I don’t need to see, etc. etc. When I look at my own blog on my lap top, I have to scroll down to see the title of the post! Tabs in the otherwise useless title bar will be nice start.

It is said by those who have tested it that Firefox 4 will start up very quickly and run very snappily.

Unless you use Linux. Check out this and links therein. Blaming the victim. There is nothing wrong with X in Linux. It’s the oldest most stable GUI’s in use. Linux desktop effects and bells and whistles are copied by other OS’s. This is Firefox not caring about Linux or the Open Source community. Time to switch browsers.

A blog carnival is a moving periodic blog posting collecting current entries in a particular topic, designed to give blog readers a list of things to do that they really do want to do. Current carnivals of which I’m aware are Berry Go Round, which is about plants; Carnival of the Blue, which is about stuff in the ocean; I and the bird, which is about birds, Festival of the Trees, which is about, you guessed it, trees; and Circus of the Spineless, which is about invertebrates such as insects and slugs and so on.

Visit these carnivals, click on the links therein, and enjoy.

Tom W. Clark, director of the Center for Naturalism and author of Encountering Naturalism: A Worldview and Its Uses, will appear on Atheist Talk radio Sunday Morning.

Free will, as you know, does not really exist, and this has important implications for thinking about morality and so called “world views.” Naturalism is a philosophy that addresses this seeming difficulty. The interview will be conducted by Atheist Talk Radio producer and host, Mike Huabrich. With Miked in the interview seat, Scott Lohman will host the show. Details are here.

King was born in 1929, and assassinated in 1968, on April 4th at the age of 39.

When he was killed, someone asked “what kind of nation are we?”
Continue reading Happy Birthday Martin Luther King Jr. →