With a Name Like Conservapedia...

... it's got to be fair and balanced, right? Mucho gusto! (here)

Conservapedia is a much-needed alternative to Wikipedia, which is increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American. On Wikipedia, many of the dates are provided in the anti-Christian "C.E." instead of "A.D.", which Conservapedia uses. Christianity receives no credit for the great advances and discoveries it inspired, such as those of the Renaissance. Read a list of many Examples of Bias in Wikipedia

Bias?? In Wiki? Like what?

For example, even though most Americans (and probably most of the world) reject the theory of evolution, Wikipedia editors commenting on the topic are nearly 100% pro-evolution.

Wikipedia often uses foreign spelling of words, even though most English speaking users are American.

Wikipedia claims about 1.5 million articles, but what it does not say is that a large number of those articles have zero educational value.

Wikipedia has many entries on mathematical concepts, but lacks any entry on the basic concept of an elementary proof. Elementary proofs require a rigor lacking in many mathematical claims promoted on Wikipedia.

So it's un-American, un-educational and contains math.

Egad!

(via)

"You Could Shoot Things From Orbit WIth This Thing!"

In defeat, I am making good on my promise to buy my son a gun. Given the nature of the transaction, he can kind of get any gun he wants. Today, he showed me his choice.

Misread

I thought it said "It's me and Jay Pinkerton on Bloggingheads.TV! "

cool!

but it's really "It's me and Jim Pinkerton on Bloggingheads.TV! "

FTL. I think my version would have been more interesting.

The Circle of Life is Complete

Red Hat Linux has finally completed the slow transformation into Windows 98.
Here


After thirteen years as a loyal Red Hat and Fedora user, I reached my limit today, when an attempt to upgrade one (1) package pitched me into a four-hour marathon of dependency chasing, at the end of which an attempt to get around a trivial file conflict rendered my system unusable.

The proximate causes of this failure were (1) incompetent repository maintenance, making any nontrivial upgrade certain to founder on a failed dependency, and (2) the fact that rpm is not statically linked -- so it's possible to inadvertently remove a shared library it depends on and be unrecoverably screwed. But the underlying problems run much deeper.

Over the last five years, I've watched Red Hat/Fedora throw away what was at one time a near-unassailable lead in technical prowess, market share and community prestige. The blunders have been legion on both technical and political levels. They have included, but were not limited to:
Chronic governance problems.
Persistent failure to maintain key repositories in a sane, consistent state from which upgrades might actually be possible.
A murky, poorly-documented, over-complex submission process.
Allowing RPM development to drift and stagnate -- then adding another layer of complexity, bugs, and wretched performance with yum.
Effectively abandoning the struggle for desktop market share.
Failure to address the problem of proprietary multimedia formats with any attitude other than blank denial.

There are all the problems that linux adherents criticize about Windows (and they are, for the most part, true when they say them). All complex projects eventually grind to stagnation unless interjected with competition and market forces (space shuttle anyone?) Linux has been in this phase for awhile. I expect the ad hominem attacks on Eric to begin forthwith.

The Vanguard League Poster

My SG had our avatars done up in Alex Ross comic book style. We're pretty thrilled with the whole thing.

Larger version here (although this is only the first draft). Close up here.

This is mostly done in Bryce and Poser, btw, with a great deal of Photoshop post rendering skill. The artist, Doug Shuler, is fantastic and a player on our server.

An Excellent Poem

And the physics works!
here