Month: February 2007

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/02/cyborg_flying_r.html

Yep. This brings a whole new meaning to ‘radio control’. How jealous would the boys be when I show up with one of THESE at the flying field!

So… anybody have connections in China which could hook me up?

It’s official – Star Trek XI gets greenlit. Release date: December 25, 2008. That’s just one year, nine months, 26 days and counting.

Here’s the release.

Discuss.

Accused murderer asserts killing of prostitutes was “God’s Will”. This fellow killed 13 women and claims he’s not guilty because God told him to do it.

I’ll refrain from much direct comment on this story, other than to say that I’ve covered similar territory before, and that I think that mental innoculation is largely responsible for the lack of a sense of responsibility for one’s actions.

Obligatory quote:

Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things—that takes religion. –Stephen Weinberg

So here’s the question: If you are — or were — religious, where do you draw the line? If ongoing communication with God is part of your daily routine, when do you decide that still, small voice is off his rocker and should be disregarded? Or is that even an option?

When I was firmly entrenched in my religion five years ago, had I received an answer to a prayer, I did my earnest best to follow it. I doubt my conscience would ever have allowed me to go on a killing spree in the name of God, though! However, I certainly made my fair share of bad decisions based on bad information from the quiet whisperings in my head.

Of course, some faithful would tell me that those whisperings were from Satan. Some would say I wasn’t actually inspired and it was just me making deals in my head. Some would say I’m lying now to get attention. Some would say my sole charade is a lonely masquerade.

Regardless of what some would say, if you are living your life according to God’s will, how the heck do you tell the difference between the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit and the still, small voice of psychosis?

These days, I usually just tell that little voice to get stuffed. Contrary to the dire warnings I received as a child, I have not yet met an untimely end or horribly bad luck due to disregarding those “promptings”.

Unfortunately, 13 women came to a tragic end because someone listened uncritically.

Several years ago, my wife and I made the decision to replace all of the light bulbs in our house with Compact Fluorescent bulbs. We had two principal reasons for doing so:

1. Incandescent bulbs were burning out far too quickly due to “dirty power” at our house. I hated changing light bulbs constantly.
2. We wanted to save money on our electric bill.

At the time, this was a fairly expensive decision, with bulbs going for about $5.00 each. We expected significant cost savings in electricity, and that initial $200 investment (or so) has continued to pay off for us over the years. Our electric bill — despite multiple computers and a laser printer — is about 20%-30% lower than that of similar households. And our kids forget to turn the light off ALL THE TIME!

(Ack! I’m turning into my father, walking around after my children and shutting off lights!)

In the past two years, Wal-Mart began a push to aggressively discount and market CF bulbs, much to the dismay of manufacturers who make far more money on old-fashioned tungsten bulbs (due to higher margins and shorter life) than on CF. This has driven the price down to around $1.00 each, and with an expected $36.00 savings per bulb over its lifetime compared to incandescent bulbs, this represents a much lower cost to homeowners today than the start of our experiment years ago.

In an effort to conserve electricity for its large and growing population, California — the third-largest economy in the world if it were its own country — is considering a bill which would outlaw further sales of traditional tungsten-based bulbs and mandate CF. In response to this legislation, GE has announced a newer, more energy-efficient tungsten bulb, which promises 1/2 the efficiency of CF today, and equal efficiency within the next few years.

Now, there are downsides to Compact Fluorescent. Chief among them is the fact that even though the light is a more pleasing shade than old-fashioned fluorescent, it’s still running at a base of 3600 cycles per minute. Literally, it’s flashing on and off 60 times per second, matching the frequency of the Alternating Current thrumming a constant rhythm throughout your whole city. Despite reassurances by manufacturers that new electronic ballasts cycle 30,000 times per second and eliminate the “flicker headaches” suffered by many people due to fluorescent lighting, my tachometer (a device to measure RPM, generally for propellers and rotors on my model aircraft) still sees a strong 3600RPM flicker even from CF bulbs.

Additionally, quality control in CF — particularly in the newer, cheaper Wal-Mart brands — is quite spotty. I’ve observed a steady degradation in the quality of bulbs as the price has dropped. With a new price point of only $0.50-$1.00 over competing tungsten bulbs, I’m finding newer CF bulbs aren’t lasting as long as their $5.00 ancestors. Many of them end up slow starting or burning out quickly. Of course, those more expensive bulbs are still on the shelf, but who’s buying?

CF bulbs also take a moment longer than incandescents to “turn on”. This is a minor nitpick; it’s a fraction of a second, but noticeable.

Lastly, CF bulbs do not handle cold weather nearly as well as tungsten bulbs. The bulb in my garage is quite dim in the winter, and much brighter in the summer.

So here’s the question: Who’s buying? Do you use compact fluorescents in your home, or do you stick with incandescent bulbs? Why or why not?

I am finding that I might need to augment my meager HTML skills in this new job – I want things to look and feel the way I want, and the staff in place to support the Web is competent but overwhelmed (to say the least). Does anyone have any tips on places (online or offline) to get a crash course? Thanks in advance.

And, is anyone else here using Twitter http://twitter.com/? I’m interested since I keep hearing about it in the PR blog community, but I am not sold on its utility.

“Lets have a moment of silence to rememebr the 2000 victims of Titanic – (pause) – okay, now let’s go out and PARTY TILL DAWN”

Yes, that Oscar Speech faboo is the thing most people hate James Cameron for. Until tomorrow.

James Cameron, Director of t2 and Titanic claims to have found the bodies of Jesus, Mary, Mary Magdelene, and young Judah, the son of Jesus.

See the article HERE

Now, to be clear, I am outraged, but I cannot allow, in this forum, that to be my sole impetus. The unwritten rules state that I must follow the dictates of logic and philisophical argument, which is to say that I must respond as unemotionally as I can.

This does seem to be circumspect at best. DNA cannot prove anything, because we have no definitive DNA of Christ or his family. There’s nothing to compare it to. The article also seems to note that it would be like finding a grave that said “James, John, son of James, Mary, Mary, and Michael son of John” in the middle of Ireland. Not hard to do.

To be clear, I don’t think any one will ever be able to find the bodyof Christ, much less his son, because the fact of his crucifixion is almost unquestioned, even in non-religious circles. Additionally, there was no mention of his having a son – and especially in the Gospel of Matthew, which is directed to 1st century jewish audience, having a son would be JUST the kind of thing the early Church would want.

Further, it is unlikely that the early Church would have tried to keep the existence of the Grave a secret while ALSO allowing this family to be buried together.

It seems too far fetched (“says the man who believes in rising from the dead”.. yes, I know). But even if you reject that idea of resurrection.. it seems unlikely that these could be what Cameron (Mr. ALIENS) claims.

Ask me in 1999, and I would tell you I don’t care for TV. that excluding Star Trek, it is contrived, vapid, or too dramatic to be neatly resolved in 46 minutes.. which it still usually is.

THEN – Enter Ds9, then Buffy, then Angel, then Firefly, 24, and Lost – I have migrated to TV, and finally there is an article about why.

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/02/24/120812.php

So, is TV better than Movies now.. Well.. I’d tell you.. but I have to see What Kete, Sawyer, and Jack are up to.

“I watched a show on the Discovery Channel,” Paul intoned around a mouthful of fish & chips, “and it was actually really well done. It’s a series that focuses on our energy needs and what we need to do to manage them.”

Thus began an hour-long discussion at Squatters over lunch about renewable energy sources, and more specifically, how we are going to store energy from it. We disagreed a lot on how things should be done, touched on a few technologies like GM’s “Skateboard” concept for fuel-cell-powered vehicles, but in the end reached the conclusion that solar and nuclear are the two solutions to the energy crisis we are facing as fossil fuel diminishes.

Yeah, even those Russian scientists who say that oil is a renewable resource produced abiogenically in the earth admit it takes millions of years to do the job. Unless they’re these guys, who claim so-called “fossil fuels” are created in just a decade or so. Crazy thing, though… the chemical reactions involved in abiogenic oil seem to be valid, but I think would result in very small quantities of oil through a much more indirect chain than fossil-fuel theory.

Anyway, energy startup Citizenrē claims that for as little as $500, you can have solar power for your home. Their plan is basically a multi-level marketing scheme where you get the solar panels installed and buy power from them over time in order to finance the panels. Given that most solar panels last for 20-25 years, and that it takes about two-thirds of that time for a solar power system to pay for itself, do you think this has a chance of actually working?

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,253602,00.html

I have nothing further to say except: OMGWTFBBQLOLROFLMAO! Now I want to buy a sword.

Last week, my boss and I were talking about strange coincidences in life. This past week, a young girl walking her dog after a snowstorm was struck by a tree branch and killed. Back in my boss’s home country of Nigeria, an ancient tree fell over on a bus — the only vehicle on the road at the time — during a windstorm, crushing the entire bus and killing all the passengers, including his uncle. He related the tale of, when he was in the UK, a skydiver who’s parachute failed to open landing on a chain-link fence just right to be able to survive the fall from 7,000 feet.

Of course, there are the serendipitous coincidences as well. For instance, my wife, Christy, took a picture of me two years before we ever met each other. We had apparently attended the same summer camp, and she took a picture of the winning square-dance team, which I was on. I often wonder how my life would be different had we met two years earlier… I kept in touch with a lot of girls I’d met at that camp 🙂

The coincidental thing about coincidences is that if they did not happen, that would be the biggest coincidence of all. So what are the strangest coincidences you have experienced in your lifetime?