McCain

Some actual email with some friends (I've reverse the order to make it readable):


From: Yacov Smirnoff Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2008 11:14 PM
To: (friends of a like mind)
Subject: McCain in WSJ opinion pages

I read this in the airport today. The words that came readily to mind included: duty, honor, valor, selfless acts of courage, selfless acts of compassion. This is the guy we should have had 8 years ago.https://mail.microsoft.com/OWA/redir.aspx?C=624b758540264cdab48d9031dbf92461&URL=http%3a%2f%2fonline.wsj.com%2farticle%2fSB120951606847454685.html If only the article hadn't been written by the sith lord.



me
Sent:Thursday, May 01, 2008 6:15 AM
To: (friends of a like mind)


Normally, I just dismiss anything by Karl Rove as lies and this smacks of dog-whistle religious politics. In this case though I suspect the facts are largely true, or at least as true as Karl Rove can deal with without bursting into fire.

And I agree that in 2000 McCain certainly would have made a better president than Bush and maybe Gore.

But, as I agrue with my son who is a strident McCain supporter, while it's a terrible thing that McCain was tortured, if that's all that's require to be president, Gitmo would be a future president factory. McCain has yet to close the deal with me,although I still think he can. I'm still not sure who he is today. If the man he was in 2000 is still in there, ready to break free, he could very well get my vote. OTOH, if the dems nominate Hillary and McCain continues doing things like skirting his own campaign finance law, or mixing up the Sunni and the Shia, then I might very well sit this one out.

Top 10 Astronomy Images of 2006

I'm a little late to the party, but these are amazing.

New! From the People that Brought You Shoeless Lines at the Airport

Pretty much the last humiliation before they just go for body cavity searches.

How Far Away is the Moon?

To put that into perspective, if you were to line up hamburgers end to end from the Earth to the moon, and then you were to eat those hamburgers, you would be fucking sick of hamburgers.

here

Satan Lurks in Seafood Restaurants!

It seems that god hates crustaceans.

God also hates Brats, Barbers, Vaginas, and Mixed Fibers

So, pretty much, god is a gay man in his late 30s.

Security Theatre

llyImaginary protection from threats you don't have: The Quantum Sleeper.

My first thought: It's made of wood! I could just set it on fire and be done with it.

My second thought: This is a joke of engineering! That thing would never protect your head from lasers.

I showed this to a co-worker who pointed out that the point of safety was to keep one *out* of a coffin.

Star Formation in M83

The outlying regions around the Southern Pinwheel galaxy, or M83, are highlighted in this composite image from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer and the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array in New Mexico. The blue and pink pinwheel in the center is the galaxy's main stellar disk, while the flapping, ribbon-like structures are its extended arms. The Galaxy Evolution Explorer is an ultraviolet survey telescope. Its observations, shown here in blue and green, highlight the galaxy's farthest-flung clusters of young stars up to 140,000 light-years from its center. The Very Large Array observations show the radio emission in red. They highlight gaseous hydrogen atoms, or raw ingredients for stars, which make up the lengthy, extended arms. Astronomers are excited that the clusters of baby stars match up with the extended arms, because this helps them better understand how stars can be created out in the "backwoods" of a galaxy.

(Via Galex)

Contrary to what the text might suggest, many of these stars have no discernable hillbilly accent, and several have indicated they'd vote for John McCain.

UPDATE: Brain suggests, "that galaxy looks like the FSM. More proof of our faith"

Making History

A Delicious Fate

I am going to make this, and if it kills me, I'll die happy.

"I can’t believe the internet allows people like you publish this"

A great opening line and the rest doesn't dissapoint in the flavor department (unlike so many others):

your whole Flying Spaghetti Monster is going to get punctured like a big balloon and come floating down on your heads and completely crush you… and I’ll be there with plenty of spaghetti sauce to eat it up and rid the world of this Satanic idea, except that I wouldn’t do that because then your monster would be inside of me which I totally don’t want. LOSERS!!!! Don’t you get it? You made it all up! YOu are the total opposite of a real religion where God makes it all up, not you.

"where God makes it all up"
So much truth in so much cluelessness...

Nearer My God Than Thee

Priest Vanishes on Party Balloon Flight

SAO PAULO, Brazil (April 21) - A Roman Catholic priest who floated off under hundreds of helium party balloons was missing Monday off the southern coast of Brazil.

Maybe Oral Roberts University should open a flight school...

Some New Art

I have finished 2 pieces, both stylized Art Deco Bridges. The first, Works Progress Administration, is based on an idea had in 1998, when I first started with Bryce 4.0. I did a "draft", but my skillz were weak and I never really got the hang of it. This is much, much closer to the idea I have in my head. The lighthouse-statue in the lower right is actually from my remake of Science.

The other, The Silver Zephyr, was an accident. I had a train in mind for the WPA bridge and spent quite a bit of time building a deco-style model. Unfortunately when I put it in the image, it looked very wrong. It blocked a lot of the detail and added very little. While puzzling out how to fix it, I conceived the second bridge. His hat was going to be an Indian War Bonnet, but it got away from me and is now a kind of comet-thingy.

Enjoy!

'premature AJAXulation'

Awesome talk at RSA last week. The title alone was worth 50 minutes of my time.

Motivational

Why Superman Sucks

pretty good really.

In the movie Superman Returns, Lois Lane writes an article explaining why mankind doesn't need Superman because we should be able to take care of ourselves, and the presence of an omnipotent superhero basically takes all responsibility off the human race and turns us into a bunch of helpless sheep, powerless to do anything but scream for help from our savior in times of crisis. She eventually decides this viewpoint is incorrect if only because she wants to bone Superman so badly, but the argument remains relevant no matter what.

Of course, to beleive this you have to have the opinion that people buy comic books for moral instruction or that they are a post-modern critique of the collective gestalt or some crazy-ass stuff like that.

Most of us read them because, you know, heat vision!

Elite

In a discussion with fellow elitists, a reference was made to the following article in The Nation which talks about the term's origin as an epitaph.

Served up on the same page was this ad:

You just can't write comedy like that.

Amazing Innovation

This is a pretty awesome set of innovations based on existing technology. I'm very impressed.

Not Helping As Much As They Think

HP accidently sent out a USB stick with a virus on it. Not good but, you know, things happen.
So what do they suggest to their customers?

To find out whether a drive is infected, HP recommends inserting it into a system with up-to-date antivirus software. Systems with up-to-date antivirus should be protected from the threat, according to HP.

Sweet Zombie Jesus!

"should be"

So if you are protected, it will clean it. If not? meh! You needed to update your anti-virus anyway!

This was one response from the security folks:

Tony puts hand on hot burner
Tony: OUCH! That’s hot.. Hey Steve
Steve looks up at Tony
Steve: Yeah?
Tony: Come here, put your hand on this and tell me if this is hot
Steve: Okay!
Steve puts hand on the same hot burner
Steve: OUCH! Yeah that’s hot.. Hey Carol!

Yeah, thats about right.

Dumbasses.

Works Progress Administration

Some new art. I;ve been working on this for a while and finally got a long enough break to put in a few hours. Consider it a late draft.

Best Summary of Iraq Hearings

here.

okay, I may have taken liberties with the definition of the word "best"

BTW, I am coming out from under a huge amount of work, so regular blog updates should resume shortly.