Nothing will dissuade the contributors to the evergrowing thread, not even another cheesy 1950s horror flick.
Yak, yak, yak.
(Current totals: 10,115 entries with 977,398 comments.)
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
PZ, you just keep the eternal thread going now to be able to post cheesy 50s SciFi flicks, admit it…:-)
Works for me…
The sweetest part of that movie is when the Giant Mantis attacks the Inuit village. But a better insect movie is “The beginning of the end.” It has eusocial meat eating grasshoppers attacking Chicago.
Pac-Devil
So why haven’t they made cheesy 1950s horror flicks about Tibetan bovines?
ambook (from the previous incarnation (which is, basically, rush hour, right? an in car nation? anyone? courtesy laugh?))
Sorry.
Ambook: I came back from a 15-day assignment at a forest fire in Idaho and brought (((Wife))) a rock.
Well, not a rock, exactly, but some crystals. Specifically, a five pound milky chunk of milky quartz.
She enjoyed it.
And (reference to the “You’re Doing It Wrong” thread), it was much better than cleaning the toilet.
And in Soviet Russia, the toilet cleans you!
Sorry, folks. It’s Monday. And I spent the weekend reinstalling everthing on my hard drive. Thank you so very much, McAfee. You are no longer my antivirus.
@ Holytape; Plus The Beginning of the End has that awesome voice-over by Peter Graves at the end (“He discovered too late that man is a thinking animal …”). Will Hopper is good in tDM but he’s no Peter Graves.
As for the Inuits;
“He’s trading in his Chevy for a Kayak-ak-ak-ak-ak!”
You must be a Windoze user.
Commiserations…:-)
Video: so bad it’s good :-D :-D :-D
That happens all the time. About once a day.
In a hundred blockquotes a day, that makes… X-D
Do take your time! :-)
:-D :-D :-D
They were served once a week at the dig last year. :-)
(With rice, and presented as a specifically Silesian specialty. A few months later, I was served the exact same thing, with -cy instead of -ki, as a Russian specialty by my supervisor’s Russian wife who comes from Moscow and has a family that comes from southeast of that. … But, yes, very good both times.)
Oh my…
But I’ve got a mantis in my pantsis!
Yak, Yak, Yak.*
*I didn’t want to find a picture for this yak.
Uh…
It’s Wednesday. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out you’ve worked 3 days and nights.
ROTFL!!!
Metamorphosis is triggered by thyroid hormones. Everything else you ever wanted to know about axolotls but never dared ask.
Rorschach: Yes, yes I am.
My name is (((Billy)) The Atheist and I am addicted to Windows.
All: Hello, (((Billy))).
It all started when I got my first computer. Well, my second (no, wait, third) computer. Which had Windows. And I got used to it.
I replaced that computer with another Windows machine. And then another. And now we have three in the house.
I don’t know how it happened, but I am a Windows user. I’m addicted. I know I deserve better. I know I shouldn’t be doing this to myself, but, somewhere, deep inside, I know that I deserve this.
I accept the freeze ups. I accept the constant updates for things they should have taken care of on release.
And I will buy another one. Why? I’m (((Billy))) They Atheist and I’m addicted to Windows.
[sob, sob, sob]
David:
Monday and Tuesday are my days off. I work Wednesday through Sunday. So Wednesday is Monday and Sunday is Friday.
See? It all makes sense.
@ Owlmirror
I stand (humbly) corrected on the tameh/toevah distinction, but it does seem that toevah is still used largely in a “let’s distinguish our tribe from that tribe over there” sense (idolatry, dietary taboos, having sex during menstruation, marrying your ex-wife) rather than a “these things are wrong in all cases” sense. Eating non-kosher animals is not one of the things that is forbidden to non-Jews – why should homosexuality be forbidden? It’s another case of the ridiculous picking and choosing nature of the literal truth of the bible crowd. Not to mention the fact that it’s absurd to base one’s behavior on the world view of the ancient Israelites or Sumerians without a lot more consideration of whether each particular tenet fits with one’s actual life experience.
I know that the spark plugs are not technically fossils and actually explained that to my sweetie last night. But it sounds funnier to say “fossilized spark plugs” than to say “spark plugs contained in an accretion.” It’s wish I could have watched the swarm of TSA agents deliberating over whether it was tameh or toevah.
Shouldn’t we at least consider that the spark plugs might have been put there as a test of our faith by a divine miscreant seeking to fool us into thinking that spark plugs were around 50 million years ago?
Why??
(I will go to bed now before SC reprimands me for being a geek of the annoying kind…again)
There is nothing wrong with Windows. I’ve never really had any problems with it at all.
Rorschach:
Because I’m addicted?
Actually, I suspect it’s because that is the system we use at work and I don’t have the tech savvy to learn a new system. And (until (((Boy))) and (((Girl))) are out of college) I just can’t afford an Apple.
Of course, it doesn’t help that everytime my work computer freezes up (with much cursing on my part), a fellow habitante says, “That wouldn’t happen if you had an Apple.”
And why would South Carolina reprimand you? Just claim you are a conservative Republican and it is okay. No matter what it is, it is okay.
I discovered yesterday that one of the naturalists at our publicly funded nature center needs to “do more research” to decide if the world is more than 6000 years old. And she does geology presentations.
Yes, I have plans to deal with this.
I concur with Walton at #16 – have used Windows essentially since DOS stopped being a viable option (dragged kicking and screaming from DOS) and have never had any problems with any of the various incarnations (other than a dislike for anything other than the classic windows look)
I get the feeling I’m doing computers wrong.
*whistles innocently on his way out*
Rorschach: There is also the part about not being tech savvy.
Actually, I really don’t have a major problem with Windows (it came across a little strong back at my #12 because I was trying to be funny and comparing it to an AA meeting (fail on my part (like I said, it’s Monday))). At work, I do a great deal of graphics work but, since it is not in my PD, I can’t get a computer optimized for graphic design. At home, my only problems (other than a recalcitrent router) involve McAfee which is no longer my antivirus (I have this weird idea that an antivirus should not muck up the system it is supposed to protect)).
Anyway, I didn’t mean to send this off into a Windows debate. I was trying to be funny and failed. I’m sorry. Take my firstborn. Please.
My third grade classroom had a bunch of book adaptations of cheesy 50’s sci-fi movies like The Blob, a bunch of Godzilla movies, and a few others. This was one of them. I read all of them so I know the plot of this movie pretty well even though I’ve never actually seen it.
Seriously. Take my firstborn. And the college expenses. He’s now majoring in both history and fine art/design. And it is expensive.
It’s all right Billy. I grew up with Macs and left them some time in 2000’s because I’m sick of overpriced computers with all the same problems of any other computer.
I’ve been intent on installing a linux os on one of my computers but I still need one for music, film ,and photo editing software to also be compatible… so without that it will just be a websurfing computer.
For all it’s ills windows has proved the most usable although of course not ideal.
Now the cost of a mac tower that would have the power I want could buy me a car. Then I’d have to buy new software for it. And for that much money I could get another grad degree and in the meantime use the school’s resources.
And then the knowledge that I will be nursing a Mac which I really haven’t found much more stable. I’ve had five Macs over the years, and two PC towers (both hand me downs)… and then the Dell laptop I bought which, admittedly, was a motherfucking lemon (so was the original iMac for me…. the “blueberry”). One difference though is that I was able to repair the laptop but the iMac just ended up being thrown away.
Dammit… let the panic and histrionics begin for the millions who clearly won’t understand what exactly CNN means when they put this headline on the front page of their website:
Huge Laser Aims to Create Star on Earth.
It’s another attempt at generating a fusion reaction, that probably won’t happen due to bureaucratic bullshit, but that won’t stop CNN from over-sensationalizing the actual science.
I’ve had problems with bad hardware that had Windows running on it, but not with Windows itself.
And Apple crashes can be horrible. I’ve seen a few. And Apple freezes are incredibly annoying…
We hosted two Serbian students on a three-week trip to the U.S. (they went home this morning), and one of them loves Lady Gag-gag.
So, since misery loves company…
Oh, and in news that should surprise no-one, the “US Supreme Court of Upholding State Sponsored Christianity” somehow came to the conclusion that putting up a giant cross on National Park land does not violate the Establishment Clause.
Seriously, why don’t they just stop pretending and just admit that they aren’t at all interested in upholding the First Amendment if it applies to christianity.
You know the problem of using anecdotes to support claims. Just because you have never encountered problems with Windows doesn’t mean they aren’t there. They most certainly are and I deal with them every day. But then, every OS sucks.
You mean apart from the laughable user security that requires users be given admin accounts on a local PC in order to be able to run a lot of software ?
Or how about the inconsistent way functions operate between various programs in Office ?
Or the lack of standards compliance in IE ?
I won’t even mention the pitiful way in which userspace programs can directly access hardware.
This is of course anecdotal, but in my last job I worked as a network architect on a college campus that had a mixed environment of Macs and PCs.
We had more overall problems with Windows machines, but let me just tell you, the gap wasn’t that large and Mac problems were generally far worse, and the equipment far more expensive to replace. Oh, and we had to scrap an entire NAC project because the Macs just wouldn’t fucking play nice with the Tipping Point NAC implementation. Anyone who tries to make the case that Macs are so much more stable, I just brush off with a gentle “mm-hmm”.
Of course, I’m not counting Windows ME in this discussion, because it never happened… you hear me? Never. Happened.
I know half these films from MST3K. Love that show!
I’m sorry. I did not intend to start a Windows debate with my stupid non-funny throw away. I’m sorry.
My favorite recent example of inconsistency between Office programs is the Save options in Office 2007. In Excel they left of the Browse buttons for the Autorecover file location and Default file location, so you have to type them in by hand or copy from Word and paste it in to Excel.
I was thinking more function calls in Excel or Access1 but UI inconsistencies will do as well.
1 Functions often share the same name between the two programs, but do not always work in exactly the same way.
Oh I’m not going to say there are no problems with windows, only that the problems tend to be ones that don’t get in my way.
For instance, I don’t use office on my personal computer.
So I don’t care how office works or doesn’t work. I don’t use IE unless I’m at work (and even then I use chrome now because due some Oracle issues I have to use IE6 and can’t really use the web that way anyway).
The admin acct thing is annoying but since I’ve never not had one either on my work pc or home, I don’t have to deal with it much.
Actually wouldn’t you just end up locking that anyway though on a work pc anyway? I mean you don’t want people installing software on a whim anyway on a PC they don’t own.
Getting macs to play on a network is hell from what I hear from the network service team here. Never encountered it before, at my former job the thought of having macs on the system at all was laughable.
Like having a Coke machine at Pepsi headquarters!
(((Billy))):
I think you know now that there are enough IT people in this crowd that even mentioning an operating system, any operating system, or hardware platform will create a huge subthread. But whatever you do, don’t say anything about video games. ;-)
That being said I’d like to have a linux system set aside specifically to separate the computers I use for graphics intense stuff and for development…
plans for my money. I have them. :P
KOPD: Oh, hell no! I’d never mention any computer gaming except to say that CivIV is fantastic. And I found a great free contract bridge game online (don’t remember the name at the moment). But I would never mention computer gaming.
I do like my Dells, though.
Ol’Greg,
I will cop to most of my complaints about Windows being about using it in a production environment, rather than for home users.
With regards getting Macs to play nicely on a network, I expect it will depend what type of servers are being used. If they are Windows servers I would not have thought the problems would be that great, since OSX uses a Unix code base, and there is a good support for Windows networking in Unix.
Oh, I know what you meant. I was just broadening the inquiry to include other inconsistencies. But those don’t bother me that much. These days my problems are not with Office, or whether somebody’s laptop crashes (heh, it’s my coworkers that have to worry about that). My problems are with the bugs, inconsistencies, and limitations of various versions of Windows Server, and getting different versions to live together peacefully. Things like installing Exchange 2007 on Server 2008 in an Exchange 2003 mixed mode environment. Real joy, that.
KOPD that gaming thread was epic. I stick by my guns, but I am now seriously considering getting back into games.
But only if I can stick to my workout and dance practice (which I have currently backslid for about a month) but in my defense it’s been a hectic month and I’m preparing for a trip.
excuses…excuses.
Kopd,
I do less Office programming that I used to. I still do some database stuff, and the differences in functions between SQL Server and Access can be a pain.
I do some server support as well, but only on a Linux based distro called Clear OS.
I hate the OS fanboy wars… hate ’em. I personally use about every OS I can get my hands on. Each one does something I need better than the other… and each one has some fucking inherent flaw or limitation that drives me nuts.
As an IT manager, I hate Windows security, and cobbed solutions like UAC just drive me nuts.
Macs on my network at work? Hell no… not with the advanced internal firewall and NAC integration I use… fucking nightmare. At home? Hell yes… and on at least one of my laptops.
Linux is my preferred OS for my web server, secure backup server and NAS. But I’d never try to put it on the desktop… not enough expertise on managing it on my tech staff, and driver support is spotty.
Love ’em all, hate ’em all. Not interested in getting into a flame war over them.
More than that, it also depends on the complexity of your network and how you may or may not be handling security and access on that network…
@iambilly, In my time around here, I have learned that the neverending thread has a life of its own. No need to apologize.
In my house we have 1 WinXP netbook, mine, 1 Ubuntu laptop, mine, 1 recently dead WinXP dell laptop, his, 1 Vista tower, his, and 1 MacBook pro, his.
I prefer the Ubuntu and Mac machines simply because I like the feel of Unix better. I will admit to Betaing Win7, and it wasn’t bad, for a Windows.
Yeah, I used to do a lot with Office at my old job but honestly it never pained me that much. Actually I used to build these ridiculously complex forms for Excel in VB which is crazy… why would you do that in Excel? I dunno… ask my former bosses.
… and I work only either with database or with testing software now.
Good points by CE.
I would add that Linux can be dammed useful for getting data from a non-booting Windows PC. Or with the right tool, hacking the password file when someone has forgotten the admin password.
Fantastico! And wasn’t that the famous L.A. private dick Paul Drake–aka William Hopper?
Since his boss, Perry Mason, got to make “Godzilla”, I guess Paul got to make “Mantis”–sweet deal…but what about Della Street? No classic 50’s sci-fi movie for her to flex her acting chops in? Tsk tsk-such Hollywood chauvinism…
20-odd% Macs on our network. They don’t play particularly well with things like AD & so on… whole thing’s a pain in the arse!
I’m with Celtic on that. It’s not about fandom. I don’t care really, but it depends.
At home I will probably stick to PC because of cost, but at work I do whatever I need to do.
I miss having a more technical job, its kind of sad that the further you get away from it the more money you make!
I was never a brilliant mind, but I enjoy problem solving in that capacity. I still actually look forward just even to writing automation because at least I get to write some functions and that’s way more fun then going to meeting after meeting after meeting and wearing, it seems, ever starchier shirts.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100428/wl_uk_afp/britainvote
Hey, English people? Can you give me more info on this?
Was she bigoted, I mean?
I guess I was sort of thinking of the insane woman McCain talked to during the elections, and how he begrudgingly had to admit that Obama wasn’t Muslim.
If that’s what went down then I almost give props to the man for saying that.
Why shouldn’t bigotry just be called out, not in secret, but right to their faces.
It would have been awesome if he had said straight to her face “Ma’am that is bigotry.”
Unless of course she wasn’t actually being a bigot.
iambilly, don’t be apologetic. I am in the same situation. I use Windows and I think that is all I deserve. I used to be a Mac denier. You know the lines. “They don’t have all the software I need.” Or, “They just cost so much. I can’t afford it.” Of course my best friend is a Mac guy and he has had his Macbook thru 3 of my laptops so there goes that pedastal.
Some people just like the pain. I think that is why there are still people using dial-up. Right not I am running Vista on a laptop best suited for Windows 98….
Rawnaeris: But I like apologizing. Its one of the few things I’m good at.
Sorry.
It is one of the few things at which I am good.
When I was in college, I lived with future (((Wife))) in Peterborough, NH. Coming into town on any of the major roads took the traveller past a sign that read, “Welcome to Peterborough. A good town to live in.” One day, as I drove by coming back from class, I noticed a small hand-lettered sign had been added at the bottom which read: “From the English Department: Sorry.”
The BBC has more info here.
What probably sparked the “bigot” comment was the woman’s complaints about immigrants from the Eastern parts of the EU. She strikes me not so much as a right-wing fanatic but a traditional old-school Labour supporter. Brown would not like meeting such people.
I was an Apple user, then a Mac user. Then my Mac sizzled at a time when I was very broke. I had some old PC hardware laying around, so I put Linux on a box and did that for a few years. Now I have a Vista box that dual-boots Linux. I was mostly using Linux, then I got into WoW and switched to primarily Vista. Now I don’t play WoW anymore, but I do play Oblivion and Fallout3 and I anticipate that trying to get them to work in Kubuntu would try my patience. Oh, I also run VirtualBox, so I have a virtual Linux box accessible from Vista, and a virtual Win2k box accessible from Linux – for those times I don’t want to reboot just to do some little thing.
Is that convoluted enough?
My wife, on the other hand, had a Win98 box until about 3 years ago, now she’s got Vista (because I could no longer keep the old one running). It does what she needs and she’s fine with it.
@ KOPD–that video was a hoot! Thanks for the link. /;-)
Ah thanks for the link. That makes sense. Labor movements, on what level the even do exist, in the US I think are often also anti-immigrant in the sense worries of displacing current workers or working for much cheaper than they can (or outsourcing).
VirtualBox is excellent software.
Very handy for tech support, as you can have all the OSs you are likely to come across on one PC.
Yay, Peterborough! I grew up in Boston, but spent every summer of my teen years at Brantwood camp, at the foot of Mt. Monadnock. Still think it’s the most picturesque mountain in NH…
VirtualBox (or something similar) is also good for having a sandbox to test upgrades. Keep your virtual environment similar to your production environment, then when a patch comes along for something you can see what it’s going to break. I’ve also seen virtual drives used for shadier things. I worked somewhere that kept a disk image with a bunch of software for which they had one license each. If you needed to use one of those programs, you grabbed the disk image and ran the app from a virtual machine. I suppose it would be fine and dandy if nobody copied the disk image to their local machine and no two people accessed it at the same time, but that’s not what happened.
Ol’ Greg says “Actually I used to build these ridiculously complex forms for Excel in VB which is crazy… why would you do that in Excel? I dunno… ask my former bosses.”
I’ve actually done Monte Carlo calculations in Excel. Efficient? No. Fast? Nope. Ideal? Hardly. But, everybody has it, and my management (at the Integrated Worldwide House of Rocket Exploration–IWHORE) is way to cheap to spring for Matlab.
Look what I just found while looking for data for my thesis! :-)
Bookmarked!
Didn’t IE8 fix that?
Heh. I hear you loud and clear!!!
Yep. Knoppix is great.
Supreme Court is brought into the debate about genetically modified crops:
@ KOPD: That is probably because you are using Kubuntu. Kubuntu sucks, it is most likely the worst KDE distribution out there right now. Never, ever, under any circumstances use it. It is slow, buggy, unstable, practically unsupported by canonical, and just all around poorly-implemented. You should use a distribution that is actually dedicated to supporting KDE, like openSUSE (or even Fedora nowadays), rather than one that considers KDE users to be third-class citizens like *ubuntu does.
I am curious what drivers you have had problems with on a recent version of Linux. I have personally not had a single piece of hardware that doesn’t work in Linux, and the only hardware that didn’t work out of the box was a USB TV tuner (and it just needed firmware). In fact I have seen far more trouble with drivers on Macs and windows (including windows 7) than on Linux. This is, of course, just my experience, but I am curious as to exactly what is causing problems for you.
This is, of course, assuming you are using a modern Linux distribution, not an old version of a distribution or a distribution using ancient software (like RHEL SLE, or one of the free clones of one of those like Centos).
Haha a_ray_in_dilbert_space!
Yeah, that’s why we used it really. We had too many problems getting people access to the forms and getting them to load, mostly in the Asia and Pacific offices.
They were all really customized too anyway so in retrospect I guess it was easier to actually have it powered through office which everyone had anyway… launch excel to run the form, and then the submitted form acts as it’s own record back in the states as well.
That was my first exposure to just how rickety and ad hoc things can be even in a fairly streamlined corporate environment.
Try python. If you install the free numpy, scipy, and matplotlib modules it is basically a free version of Matlab (although perhaps even more powerful).
@ TheBlackCat
You make good points. I originally used regular old Ubuntu, but never developed a taste for Gnome. KDE4 is kinda slick (nevermind the problems with getting keyboard shortcuts to work properly, or the horrid way it tries to organize the application menu, or the way it takes three clicks to get to an application through the menu). But it’s unlikely that I’m going to switch back to using Linux any time soon. It’s just too much trouble getting the programs I want to run adequately.
Interesting, every time today that I try to type “programs” I end up typing “problems.” I think my subconscious is frustrated about my current project.
Oh yeah, and you don’t use origin?
I guess cost is an issue there? There reaches a point with math that excel just can’t deal with though.
Really? I’ve never seen this.
That is one of the advantages of KDE4, there are 4 alternative application menus (not counting one in development) and at least 5 alternative application launchers available.
That shouldn’t be an issue if you set up your favorites, but once again there are 3 additional menus that don’t have that problem.
@ Matt Penfold #55
Do people in England get a pass for being bigots if they are old? I know in the US it is common to give little old ladies the freebie if they say something that isn’t PC. Like if my friend’s grandmother said, “I was at Dillards and this nice Negro lady helped me find the bathroom.” I mean she is insinuating that the lady helped her despite her ethnicity, which predisposes her to unkind behavior. But because it’s nana people think it’s cute.
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/8b2e5aed1f/no-strings-attached
TheBlackCat –
I should qualify my complaint a bit… and admittedly this is my own experience…
Linux, in general, has excellent driver support for existing devices, if you know where to look. It’s got the largest driver database of any OS in existence, IIRC… the problem I run into is that new peripherals rarely come out with Linux drivers written at time of release (this is due to many factors, not the least of which being the 350+ linux distros in existence)… they almost always have Windows drivers upon initial release, but generally it takes the Linux user community several weeks or months to reverse engineer the driver and get a suitable one for the various flavors of Linux. Some distros are better with this than others, I’m aware…
Additionally, at my current company we use a few pieces of fairly proprietary peripheral hardware (electronic signature pads, x-ray and handheld sonogram equipment, etc…) for which the developers have only written windows drivers and are quite reluctant to release source code.
Admittedly I have not maintained a large user group with a Linux distro in a few years (last one I used was RHEL 5.1 at the college, mostly for the science and tech building at the college), but I do know that currently I don’t have the staff here with the proper expertise to make Linux a viable alternative.
On Bigotgate – persons with access to BBC News 24 can, I am told, tune in at 8.30 GMT today to hear my son-in-law pontificate on the matter. I have already advised him that this moment should be compared to the invasion of Iraq and nothing but the invasion of Iraq. Will he take any notice? Tune in and see ……
tutone21 @ 71,
The moment someone starts giving me a pass on matters political because I’m even older than Mrs Duffy is the moment they die. OK?
So Mansanto already controls US soy production and now it is going after alfalfa. Great…Fucking goonsquads.
If by “controls” you mean has an approximate 30% share of the seed market, then yes.
I assume you also believe that a technology should be completely excluded from the market on grounds that a single company that you don’t like has IP rights around its development.
@ Celtic_Evolution: I guess it is rare that I ever get hardware very quickly after release, and really most hardware I have is either the sort where drivers are handled pretty well by the company (like graphics cards, anything made by Intel, and a lot of general-purpose scientific equipment like Daq boards), or is the sort where drivers are generic for the device type so specific support is not necessary (like most mice, keyboards, storage devices, screens, and bluetooth devices). That basically leaves printers and scanners, which as I said I usually don’t get right after release.
That generally leaves me with the issue of what I do when the drivers that are easy to get are not working properly. In that case in windows and Mac, I have found that I am pretty much out of look. On Linux, on the other hand, there is usually a workaround (like Linux tends to play well with generic postscript drivers where the same drivers for the same printers have caused a lot of trouble on Macs).
@ maureen.brian #74
In forums like the wall of blog postings it is easy to correct behavior (or at least attempt to) since people don’t generally know too much about the other people posting. I don’t think you would get a free pass in here especially.
As for nana, well, I can’t imagine trying to explain to her why it isn’t okay to say something. I was young when all of my grandparents died so I don’t have too much experience on the matter, but going to a friend’s house for dinner and hearing his grandmother say certain things is kind of eye-opening. I don’t know if it is understanding about her generation or apathy or something else, but no one seems to find it offensive. I don’t even want to think about what would happen if someone tried to correct her.
TheBlackCat –
Agreed… but even this requires some Linux savvy that my techs don’t possess. At least not at this time anyhow.
@Ewan R #76
I don’t really know too much about it and probably should hold off on commenting until I get more information than what was presented in Food Inc. But based on that I would say that Mansanto is exploiting farmers via thuggery.
We have a creationist at the Ark thread. That is all.
ambook (@18):
Did you discover this in private conversation, or in a public Q&A? Because I’m guessing the “more research” she needs to do has less to do with deciding what she believes than it does with discovering whether there are any cranky, litiginous YECs in her audience.
Not that that’s a good excuse, mind you, but I confess I have some sympathy for museum guides, park rangers, and naturalists, who are at risk of becoming cannon-fodder in the creobots’ ignorant culture war.
ARID:
WHORE is funny, but the R prompts me to wonder whether you’re actually in the rockets biz? If there’s anything about that you’re at liberty to discuss… well, Enquiring Minds Want to Know!™
tutone21 (@71):
Unless you have other reasons to know that’s what she meant, why would you presume that insinuation? If your friends grandmother is of a certain generation, Negro was the polite way of referring to African-Americans (unlike, say, darky, which is what my grandmother sometimes said). Perhaps the mention of race was superfluous… but then so would’ve been any number of physical details, such as hair color, clothing, presence of eyeglasses, etc. … and folks mention those sorts of details without any invidious intent. Maybe in this case “nice” really meant nice.
I think it’s good to be vigilant about recognizing the unconscious racism and sexism in our society… but I also think it’s good to avoid being hypervigilant.
Tutone21 – yeah, Food Inc. wasn’t exactly what I’d consider a fair or accurate portrayal of Monsanto dealings (although on a positive note they did seem to stray away from most of the completely batshit crazy theories)
The Monte Carlo calculations support that as well I think? Simulating fluid reactions?
Oh and I never thought of calling a_ray… ARID, but I just now figured out his name.
hahaha
yeah… I’m not a bright one, but maybe I’ll last twice as long then :/
The cherry bloom is mostly over, and the poplar leaves have almost reached full size. Fairly warm day, pastel purple sunset.
Any of you Linux people ever use Slackware?
Opinions?
A blockquote fail to make negentropyeater happy :-)
Both tags should have been closed after the first tag, not only one.
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I think you get the idea. :^)
I haven’t used slackware in the last 7 years, and I was using a really stripped-down version at the time. I will say, it was a damned stable machine.
Oops. I’ve been lied to.
Gyeong,
Stupid troll is stupid.
Damned stupid.
Food Inc. wasn’t exactly what I’d consider a fair or accurate portrayal of Monsanto dealings Ewan R.
IIRC, you work for Monsanto. I wonder if that might possibly in any way and to any extent influence your views on their behaviour?
Well. She looks like a bigot.
David,
I just keep <blockquote></blockquote> in my notes and doubleclick it when I need it.
Knockgoats – it’s possible I guess. I’ve been a staunch advocate for GM tech in general since before choosing an undergraduate course (Monsanto’s introduction of RR and the (in my view at the time, and now) silly European reaction to GM tech drove the decision to study molecular genetics with a view to getting into the industry, serendipity found me in St Louis a decade later looking for work…) so I at least suspect I’d still have the same viewpoint, although possibly not quite as well informed.
I don’t deny that Monsanto enforces patents, I just feel that some of the stories are overblown and the scope they cover seems a tad large – if any other company in the world treated its customers as badly as Food Inc suggests Monsanto treats their customers then they’d fast be without customers (the traits may still sell, but the Dekalb brand (and others) would be gone from the landscape – keeping in mind that maintaining and growing SEED share (not trait share – that’s tied up) is a huge financial goal for Monsanto and failure to increase in soy and corn this year has caused a few ripples in terms of financial outlook for the next few years.
Bill Dauphin said:
I work at an historic site and I sometimes have to bite my tongue.
One day I overheard a conversation between Dad and two children. He pointed at a steam locomotive and explained how it worked. To my surprise, he got it right. Then he pointed to a diesel electric locomotive and explained how it worked, again getting it right. Then he said (this is an approximate quote): “Now Darwinists claim that a wold will evolve into a bear, or a mongoose will give birth to a snake all to make animals more efficient and better. But all those missing links, every single one of them, does not exist. To a Darwinist, that would mean that there must be a missing link between a steam engine and a diesel. Tonight, your homework will be to invent a halfway point just like the Darwinists do.”
I walked away. And held my laughter until I was gone.
Ol’Greg (@85):
Well, to be fair, I made it more difficult by failing to include the S:
a_ray_in_dilbert_space
All:
I need some advice, please: My daughter will be studying in Paris this summer (for a ~6-week course) and then doing some independent travel within Europe after her class is finished. Naturally, our (Verizon) cellphones are functional only in the U.S. She’ll have her MacBook with her, so we’ll be able to communicate through Skype and chat whenever she has access to teh intertoooobz, which should be sufficient for normal “phone home” stuff… but I want her to have a phone she can use to call her friends or traveling companions within Europe, and also to call home in an emergency, if she can’t get to a computer.
Sooo… do any of you who either live or travel frequently in Europe have any suggestions for what the cheapest and easiest way might be for her to have temporary intra-European calling capability, along with the possibility to make emergency calls to the U.S.? Can she simply buy a pay-as-you-go phone after she arrives? And would that be a reasonable cost?
Any assistance would be gratefully appreciated.
iambilly (@97):
Oh.My.DOG!
However did you manage not to piss yourself laughing?
#99
It’s funny until you think of the children. Why won’t anyone think of the children!
Hah, PC, Macs, what does it matter – the truth about the intertubes has been revealed.
Made from? Then we have more things to worry about than whether this seed is a clever way for Monsanto to boost their Round-Up sales.
Speaking of crosses – yesterday, I needed to buy some get well cards. As in “more than one” for the same person, because both I and the Offspring were sending them. I had to go to two shops, because the first one only had a single card that didn’t ramble on about praying. Dear FSM, hasn’t Hallmark read those placebo v. prayer v. Prozac studies??
Oh, maaaaan. Take a break and come here to find Ewan R on The Thread. That’ll push me to get back to work! Ewan R is a Monsanto shill – I suspect some sort of Trucast drone or the like since all you have to do is mention the corporation’s name to summon him almost immediately to any thread. Even if I knew nothing about the issues, I wouldn’t believe a word he said or trust his presentation of the questions.
***
By the way,
http://agobservatory.com/agribusiness_records.cfm?dID=114
And since I haven’t linked to it for a few weeks,
http://www.greenfacts.org/en/agriculture-iaastd/
I thought Food, Inc., was decent, especially as it focused on power. There needs to be much more of that, from a much more global perspective.
I think the use of “toevah” to describe dishonest market practices refutes that: the author obviously thinks that such unfairness should be universally rejected.
(fixed)(that one is only described as being/causing “tameh”, as far as I’ve seen)
I am disinclined to think that they were sufficiently self-aware, psychologically, to think of things that were “toevah” as being something that that hey, it was A-OK for other tribes to do them, but not for Israelites.
No, I think that the authors were experiencing strong visceral revulsion, and demanding that that revulsion be made into a law for everyone because God felt the same way. Think Jerry Falwell/Pat Robertson/the Mormon backers of Prop. 8/every single religious figure who ever made an outrageous and outraged claim about something he/she didn’t like.
Remember, the Israelites were not just commanded to separate themselves from other tribes, but to exterminate the different tribes.
Because the authors of the bible claimed to know the mind of God, and that what they thought was disgusting was what God thought was disgusting.
But extremely religious people have always thought that way.
There are no biblical literalists, not one. Everyone picks and chooses, and rationalizes the choices in different ways. The writers of the bible were themselves internally inconsistent, and their later adherents do not value internal consistency either.
====
You joke, but:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/coso.html
Baugh, humbug!
====
*facepalm*
Pass it on: Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective.
David Marjanović: Look below the comment box. You can select, copy, and paste properly spelled “<blockquote>quote</blockquote>” (Just like I copied and pasted the properly accented “Marjanović”), and change “quote” to be the text you want.
Amazing technology we have, yes?
Bill: Those in the public eye, especially those who are charged with helping the public understand something, tend to compartmentalize the absurdities we see and hear. I have kept a straight face seeing a five-year-old girl wearing a home made t-shirt that read, “Mr. Obama, will you teach me about sex?” Or the times people have tried to witness me while I was in uniform. Or when I was called a ‘jack-booted fascist.’
Unfortunately, I tend to hold it in until I get home and then (((Wife))) gets hit with it.
—break—
Regarding the idea of genmod foods, I’m torn. Not about the idea of genetic modifications (if we can find ways to make a crop taste bad to bugs that means less insecticide screwing up the ecosystem (and yeah, I know it ain’t that simple and that there may be other disasters waiting)). Genmod, assuming adequate regulation and transparency (similar to the way the pharm industry is supposed to work), may end up being an excellent green tool.
Where I come down on the anti-genmod side has less to do with the modifications than it does with power. Monsanto controls 30% of the seed crop (US or world?). A 30% share of a market flirts with monopoly, especially since that is most likely a much larger share for specific crops. Power corrupts, right?
Monsanto is a corporation. The company does not exist to produce seed crop. It does not exist to help farmers. It exists to make money. And all companies exist to make money now, not in some amorphous future. If a CEO does not improve the company’s performance each quarter, investors will go somewhere else, the stock price will drop, and a new CEO will do better.
What happens if a new crop is developed which promises to increase the company’s profits by 40%. However, the internal documents also show that it is a shitty product and will, with 80% certainty, both damage the company five years from now and damage the environment forever. Does the CEO sell the shitty product and keep his job? or does the CEO tell the stockholders that he is saying no to billions in profits becuase of what will probably happen in the future?
Goldmann-Sachs is a corporation. They exist to make money. In the short term. And they did. And they, along with other banks selling the same shitty products, derailed the world economy (and the train wreck ain’t done yet).
So I view genmod crops as a possible good for the world. I view the companies that make them as a guarantee that something will go horribly wrong. Every time.
Not for a while.
I found a box of diskettes a while back that had one of the early Slackware releases on it, so if I need to install on an i486 with 8MB RAM and a 200MB HDD, I am all set.
Woohoo!
I should have added, with a 3.5 inch FDD and no CD-ROM.
May 20 Declared 1st Annual ‘Everybody Draw Mohammed Day’
Your what?
I couldn’t have. But it probably helps that I wouldn’t have laughed either.
I feel cleverer already!
And the “Downloading – CATS” part reminded me to whom all our base belong.
Yes, except that scrolling, cutting, pasting, and replacing – and thinking about it – takes longer than just writing it for this touch-typist.
iambilly (@105):
Now that would not make me laugh, though it might make me piss myself in rage! I hate hate HATE when parents use their children as billboards for their political activism. I even hate it when the ideas being promoted are ones I support. I can’t really articulate a cogent philosophical argument against this practice; it just strikes me as not fucking cricket!
*walks in with cookies*
*blinks at computer-speak everywhere*
*walks out with cookies*
SC – apparently my other postings on the thread are too lacklustre to warrant note. Not overly surprising.
I think it’s a tad over the top to not trust anything I say or any way I frame the questions just because I have
a) a personal connection to Monsanto (going on 2 years now)
b) a personal prediliction for GM technology (going on >15 years now
c) a love of debating (regardless how poorly..) topics which mean something to me
which I think in a nutshell explains my stance and my appearance on various threads where GMOs/Monsanto come up (well that and my bank of comptuers tracking the interweb for mentions of Monsanto)
Iambilly…
Monsanto “controls” 30% of the seed crop – not really, they sell ~30% of the seed used in corn/soy/cotton which while a large market share is worlds away from a monopoly (and had they played their cards differently with RR licensing they could have implemented an ironclad monopoly – although this likely would have brought the justice dept crashing down on them) – I believe the current numbers are ~30% for the main crops and possibly ~30% in vegetables etc (I don’t have a good feel for what the veg numbers are – SC’s links suggest around 30% across most veg though) particularly given that the main competition has similar share (Monsanto lost ground on Pioneer this year in Soy I believe, although it may have been corn)
Power corrupts… but what power? Monsanto sell seed to farmers, where’s the power and corruption here – if farmers don’t want to do business with Monsanto then I’m sure their friendly Pioneer rep will be more than happy to supply them with Pioneer seeds containing exactly the same traits.
Monsanto is a company yes. Does this categorically preclude existing to do something else on top of that? Case in point – Monsanto recently told investors that actually sorry, no, we won’t be doubling gross profit by 2012 over 2007 – we could do this, but we aren’t going to, it’d require making decisions that are bad for the company going forward – and categorically the promise to double GP by 2012 could have been realized, Monsanto ploughs ~$2M a day into research and development, by simply cutting R&D they could make money now rather than in some amorphous future – they have the patent landscape covered such that I’m sure they’d remain profitable for another decade before the rot set in – however not ALL business is to make money now rather than in the future, part of Monsanto’s approach is to make money now, and in the future (hence a near $1Bn R&D spend p/a) and in order to do so they need to not only ensure products they release are safe (from a purely selfish point of view – if you’re investing billions of dollars then you have an entirely selfish reason to make sure the company is still operational ten or even twenty years down the line).
Tracking Monsanto stock price holds this out – the decision to announce that profitability won’t be where it was projected in 2012 coincides rather neatly with a consistent slide in stock price – something which easily could have been avoided if not taking the longview – layoff the workforce, cut research, make profit, retire on yacht, giggle as company disappears 10 years later.
Not all corporations are equally evil, they all have the potential to be, but from the inside perspective Monsanto doesn’t fit that mold.
For what it’s worth ERV doesn’t like Food inc. either.
If Ewan works for Monsanto, it woulda been good form to declare a conflict of interest, yes, but it does not automatically make him wrong.
It’s ok, all this talking about his name made me also realize what a genius name it is!
I think ARIDS and SuckPoppet have my vote for best name.
That is disturbing, a parent using a child as a billboard to broadcast their own sexual problems and fears, and champion ignorance. You know what’s way worse than a sex ed class, mom and dad? Using your fetishistic and perverse sexual obsession with your child’s innocence via lack of basic understanding about something that is so important to you that you’d put it on her t-shirt.
Imagine that! How did they tell her what she was wearing and why I suppose? Mommy what is sex, and why does my shirt say it!? Way to fuck up parental units, way to fuck up.
Why do those specific parts of our bodies generate so much ire? I don’t understand this.
Sili – as Knockgoats alluded I have declared my conflict of interest elsewhere(possibly in another incarnation of the thread), I tend to forget to in an effort to spew out unreadable chunks of text
Just a nudge that I’ve added an entry about the “atheist regime” controversy over on Gray v. Grayling.
Yes, a_ray_in_dilbert_space is a cool name. I’m not sure what it means, other than having to do with Dilbert, but I like it.
I think it refers to Hilbert Space, making it both a math joke and a Dilbert joke in one brilliant swoop.
All:
In addition to my request (@98) for European cellphone advice, I want to tap the Pharyngula KnowledgeBase© for one more thing:
My daughter’s several-year-old digital camera is behaving unreliably, and in any case, she never really managed to take good pix with it, so I’m looking to get her something new for her travels this summer.
She’s definitely an untrained, point-and-shot photographer, so automatic modes and ease-of-use features are a plus. I’m thinking image stabilization is essential. She’s more likely to blog or Facebook her pix that make large prints, so giga- or tera-pixel resolution [g] isn’t required. I’m thinking that a fairly wide-angle lens would be useful for situations where crowds or close quarters make it hard to get far enough back from what she’s shooting. Whatever I get doesn’t need to be credit-card tiny (indeed, some of the smaller cameras out there seem like they’d be hard for full-sized hands to hold), but it should be small and light enough to be comfortably carried in a purse or bookbag. Video capability is not especially important, since her iPod shoots decent movie clips. Her old camera and several other devices we own use SD media, so it would be nice (but not showstoppingly essential) to get something compatible. And I’d like to spend not much more than US$250.00.
I don’t ask for much, do I? To the photographers in the group (or anyone with an opinion, really), two questions: What have I left out in my requirements summary? And do you have any specific buying advice regarding models and or sellers?
Thanks in advance!
The shibby feature in Opera that I also use to keep track of MollyNoms (when I remember to).
Oh, SGU from the week before last had GMO news item in their Science Or Fiction quiz. Spoiler: so far the stats say they benefit farmers and the environment.
Bill… I love the cannon powershot for an easy point and shoot that takes really good pics (really quite good) but it isn’t small. However it isn’t teeny tiny, but it’s quite robust.
Unless you want like 12 MP model that just came out it isn’t too $$ either.
Sidebar quote: Dawkins explaining Gould’s punk eek!
Oh. Opera seems to lack auto-fill-in entirely, and IE8 works just fine anyway, so…
I’m sorry, when I said “but isn’t small” I meant basically that it has some ability to zoom.
How you were supposed to understand that I don’t know.
I swear some times it seems like English is my second language.
I have a Canon A590 IS that I like a lot.
Looks like it’s been replaced by this one.
On the subject of my particular co-worker: she does not believe in macro-evolution. She believes that bacteria can evolve antibiotic resistance and that Darwin’s finches evolve different beak shapes, but not that (in her words) pandas and penguins share an ancestor. (I guess god put the proto-finch on the Galapagos or something.) We were standing in an office away from all members of the public when this came up – knowing that she was a creationist, I asked if she believe in an old earth.
If I were working at a train museum, I would not interrupt someone yammering about evolution to his kids. I’ve been at homeschool conferences where I had to do some serious tongue biting. But we are science educators – teaching programs about nature without believing in evolution is like teaching astronomy while privately believing in a flat earth and astrology. The idea that she could even get through job interviews believing that the world is 6,000 years old and that god hid the fossils to fool us is absurd. Not to mention that she graduated with a degree in wildlife conservation from an actual respectable state university.
I don’t necessarily like getting into fights with people either, but sometimes stating facts clearly is part of the damn job.
Bill,
I’m definitely a layperson, but I just bought one of these last month and I like it. It’s 14 megapixels, but that can be turned down in the settings pretty easily to take smaller pictures. I know you said zoom and video aren’t really important, but this does do both and does them nicely enough. It’s small and lightweight, but not too small to feel comfortable in the hands. Like I said, I don’t know much about cameras, but I’m pretty happy with this one so far.
Bill: Fuji makes some excellent point and shoot (with zoom and a few other features) cameras which include lots of presets — scenery, people, indoors, outdoors — all of which are easy to use (my 71-year-old mother can figure it out so it should be an absolute breeze for the young whipper snapper crowd.
Ewan R. I stand corrected, you are right. Corporations are excellent at short range R&D (by short range, I mean things that will make a profit in the 5 to 10 year span). However, the ethics of a company are based upon upper management. Some corporations have very ethical upper level management (those who aren’t bought out in a hostile takeover because the stock is undervalued because the management team is ethical) and are good corporate citizens. Others (Goldmann-Scahs, the coal company in WV, Exxon Mobile, Enron) are not; some use their power (money can create power) to pervert or divert (see big energy and the anti-AGW ‘think tanks’ out there).
I do not know where Monsanto (or ConAgra, or Pioneer) fit on the ethical scale. I view large market shares (and, even for specific crops, 30% is a large share) as antithetical to ethical behaviour. Not always, but it happens too often. I would hope that the copmanies involved in genmod foods are good corporate citizens. The fact that I have to hope that, that I do not and can not know that, scares me.
What’s wrong with the preview button? Then you can see if you fucked up the come on!! When you write something and then compile doesn’t it run you though the errors?
Well, Mr. Obama IS quite an intelligent and physically attractive man – I wonder what mom was thinking about when she made the shirt? Perhaps her husband reminds her of the toilet brush…
I met someone the other day whose taught her homeschooled kids to go up to public schooled kids at a playground and ask “Is it true that you learn all about monkeys in your school?”
I’m busily teaching my kids to reason logically, articulate scientific ideas clearly, and make sarcastic remarks about the human condition.
Monsanto sell seed to farmers, where’s the power and corruption here – if farmers don’t want to do business with Monsanto then I’m sure their friendly Pioneer rep will be more than happy to supply them with Pioneer seeds containing exactly the same traits. Ewan R.
How about suing farmers because Monsanto crops they had not planted were found on their land?
And of course two companies that together control more than half the market would never dream of colluding. The very idea… Of course, there is also Monsanto’s political influence (it spends millions on lobbying and political donations every year), and its ties to the repulsive far-right think tank the Hudson Institute (it partially funds Hudson’s anti-organic agriculture arm, the “Center for Global Food Issues”).
Whatever Monsanto’s precise degree of evil, even if they were the most beneficent company in existence, it would still be dangerous to allow them a market share of this size. However, Monsanto’s history with regard to (for example) PCBs and Agent Orange does not inspire confidence.
Ol’Greg, Sven, and KOPD, thanks for the suggestions (and the links, though I’ll wait ’til I get home to check them).
Apropos of nothing in particular (and this is the thread for that, isn’t it), I’ve just read my favorite quote of the day (actually published Friday, but I just read it moments ago):
Charlie Pierce, doing his Slacker Friday guest-hosting at Eric Alterman’s Altercation blog, said about recent events in Arizona…
8^)
That’s weird. I wonder if it backfires when the other kids say “no” and look perplexed.
This is going to become a new Pharyngula meme, isn’t it? Just like “sniny”, or “kwok me sideways with a Leica rangefinder”, or “hiking the Appalachian trail.”
I actually typed the front of a blockquote…and didn’t preview it. FAIL!!!!
tutone21 (@128):
In my experience (which may or may not be browser-specific), using preview sometimes horks up HTML coding. For instance, em-dashes get displayed in the preview window, but unless you then recode them (which sorta’ defeats the purpose of previewing them), they turn into hyphens in the final post. Also, fake HTML tags such as </snark> tend to get parsed, post-preview, as if they were real tags… and, being invalid, they disappear (and if they’re fake tag pairs, they disappear the fake-tagged text, too).
I’ve resigned myself to living with the occasional HTML FAIL (and the more-than-occasional typo or editorial error) in preference to playing with preview “fire.”
(As an aside, I figure it’s even-money I have some tagging problem or egregious error in this note, kismet being as it is… but I won’t know ’til I hit “submit”!)
Don’t forget that “you’ve let [insert ethnic minority] use your bathroom.”
Walton (@133):
I’m actually quite surprised that, having asked for camera-buying advice, I didn’t get at least one “Leica Rangefinder” recommendation!
kwok me sideways with a Leica rangefinder is still my personal favorite.
I don’t think either of our creationists in the Ark thread are capable of writing lucidly about the Congo.
Hey, I’m back! Googlefuck never let me get things the way I liked them, ‘nym-wise. Shitfuckdamn.
@135: If you select-all and copy your HTML before preview, you can re-paste it to fiddle if you still need to edit. Tedious, but it does work around the problem.
Indeed. In the context of your dozens on Monsanto, yes, they are (or it is). But I’ll acknowledge that you did post on this thread before Monsanto came up.
Yes, it’s swell that they have the opportunity to choose from among a handful of corporate overlords in a legal regime (increasingly) designed to favor large corporations and protect their ridiculous patents.
http://www.grain.org/seedling_files/seed-05-07-1.pdf
It’s a corporation. Everything it does is based on the bottom line. It’s about expansion and power. It will strongarm or roll over anyone who gets in its way. It doesn’t care about communities, human rights, democracy, farmers, sustainability, biodiversity, pollution, AGW,… It will keep people from doing independent research on its products, it will work to keep the public from getting information, it will spend millions lobbying the governments and international organizations in its interests. There is no reason anyone should believe anything that emanates from Monsanto or any of its representatives.
She has a thing for GE crops. I don’t know why. She’s completely resistant to any contrary information from anyone, and acts like it’s all some elitist attack on midwestern farmers. It’s bizarre and annoying, and I stopped reading her blog regularly after a thread about this there. (As I think I’ve mentioned before, I haven’t noticed this problem on Ben Goldacre’s blog, and had a very pleasant exchange with people at another science blog that dealt with some of these issues.)
Automatically untrustworthy.
I have enjoyed using a Cannon Powershot camera as well. I’m not sure there’s a whole lot of difference between most digital cameras, at least nothing I’ve noticed that leans me one way or another. For point and click, they all seem to be perfectly usable.
And, I’m not as familiar, but my recollection is that European cell phone frequencies are different from American, so she might require a different phone. And then, if memory serves still, different countries use different SIM cards in their phones for service. There are SIM cards for different countries, but there are SIM cards that can be purchased that can be used for multiple countries (all of Europe?).
I looked into this a year or so ago, and it surprised me that there aren’t more current phones able to be used worldwide without all of that rigamarole, but it was the case with my phone. It wasn’t worth it to me for the 3 weeks I was in Europe, but I imagine it probably would be for 6 mos. or so.
I believe there are even tri- and quad-band phones that work in the US and the EU.
Matt
Knockgoats – Monsanto sues when it is clear that the presence of the crop is clearly not accidental – I don’t recall any cases where this wasn’t the case – the rockstar of the “I’ve been sued for seeds I didn’t plant” movement falls squarely into this category.
What collusion exactly are we talking about here? Pioneer’s campaign against a non-existant Monsanto monopoly? Monsanto’s outright refusal to allow Pioneer to use their working RR trait in conjunction with Pioneer’s failed glyphosate trait to bolster their sales…. neither company gain anything from a little give or take to each other in the interest of market dominance.
Any industry leader is going to spend millions on lobbying. This is an issue with how our democracy works (or doesn’t work) – if Monsanto didn’t lobby then I’m pretty sure they’d end up shut down because of the green lobbying interest at the very least. I need to look into the CGFI and Hudson thing more as that’s the first I’ve heard of that connection – at first glance both appear particularly odious (AGW denialism and a piece on how women should shut the hell up about equal wages because they’re doing great in the current economy).
Monsanto’s history with regard to PCBs is indeed dubious, and not something I can reconcile easily – I mitigate my unease with a little bit of historical context (how many major manufacturers in that time period didnt pollute with PCBs) and the time that has passed since then. Similar with agent orange, which was manufactured at the mandate of the US govt for use in Vietnam, which in my mind shifts the responsibility away from Monsanto somewhat (particularly in light of the fact that other “agents” (I think pink?) had much higher dioxin levels than orange – dioxin contamination appears to have been part and parcel of the manufacturing process as far as I can see.
Ol’Greg wrote:
I always wished DONT RIDE THE LYING TIGER would stick, just because it was so surreal.
Matt
Oh, hey Sven! I missed your return. How was the trip?
I dunno. I didn’t add the international package for data on my iPhone, and I’m not sure I will bring it even.
It seems more trouble than it is worth and it would have been the maps and google I wanted it for, but 200 for 200 MB seems steep and I know the int’l data download rates are psychotic so I don’t want to incur them.
I did Berlin for a month with no cell and didn’t die, so I figure I can do Paris for 2 weeks and still not die. Besides, I have skype on my laptop anyway.
Bill Dauphin –
When I do professional gigs I of course always have my EOS Rebel and my Sony Alpha… but I also always, always carry my Canon Powershot A3100 (12.1 MP)… it’s a great compact point-and-shoot, takes great pictures with very little needed outside of auto-settings, and is what I use to walk around and take quick, random “action” shots of a reception, or pretty much anything else.
And it’s fairly cheap at around $150 USD retail.
Celtic_Evolution…
we have the same cameras.
lol
I also have an old film Nikon though. It takes such great images that I almost bought a Nikon slr so I could use the lenses (several good good lenses with that camera too) because I read that I should be able to use the old lenses for that camera on the digital although manual only.
But I decided I’d let that wait. I kind of miss some things about film.
As long as we (well, Bill D anyway) are asking for advice regarding purchase of electronic devices, does anyone know whether there is a rechargeable amp system for a three piece folk group out there? I’m looking for a two or three mike system with a couple of speakers which can be recharged and has a life of about 90 minutes? Does such a thing exist?
I don’t actually own a proper camera: my phone has a (cheap and bad) built-in one, but I never use it. I’ve never been any good at the whole photography thing.
Walton: this is so pathetic but I LOVE taking pictures on my iPhone’s ultra crappy camera. I got the hipstamatic app and it’s so freaking fun to use.
I’m not good at it either. I just do it for fun…
I have to observe that the sidebar ads are now advertising bogus diet programmes: “1 Rule to a Flat Stomach! Obey!”. And showing bad photographs of rather underdressed young women, captioned “Online Dating for Naughty People”.
Yay… just what our society needs: more fad diets and more objectification of women. Scienceblogs are not only brilliant at implementing efficient login systems and designing interfaces that are quick to load, they’re also unfailingly ethical in their selection of advertisers. :-(
the rice ones are cheats, and they have a much blander taste. But no one uses buckwheat groats anymore, because it’s “poor people food”, and a bit of an acquired taste. (the boyfriend panicked at first, since the stuff smells incredibly bitter… but he liked it in the end, too)
how would you know, if you’ve never used an alternative? Windows fucking sucks. The constant (losing) battle with viruses, spyware etc. makes both Macs and Linux less of a pain in the ass, and less dangerous.
neither am I. you don’t need to be, for ubuntu. At most, you need some decent google-fu.
no.
fucking liars. Not only does their shit crosspollinate easity, they sue people for patent infringement when it does. Agribusinesses are more evil than Microsoft.
right; and what they should be doing is stepping away from that, not making it worse.
that’s just adorably naive. where the fuck are these customers gonna go? to ConAgra, which are exactly the same?
It’s like saying the health insurance companies don’t fuck people over, because if they did, people would just switch. Reality doesn’t work like that.
yes and yes; it’s only American phones that don’t automatically allow calls to foreign countries.
I like it better when you’re procrastinating; it’s far more educational to me, and I’m selfish that way :-p
ditto; the science might not be bad, but the politics of it stink to high heaven.
– – – – – – –
Full disclosure: My work computer is an iMac (integrated Color Management FTW), my lapop runs ubuntu, my netbook runs EEEbuntu, and my seeds are almost all Heirloom seeds from small, independent suppliers.
Ewan R.,
Monsanto sues when it is clear that the presence of the crop is clearly not accidental
So they say. Others say different. Given Monsanto’s decades-long history of lies about PCB, why would anyone sane believe anything they say about GMOs?
As far as the collusion is concerned, I was simply pointing to the danger of such collusion, and the fact that hidden collusion between large companies is a common occurrence. Of course in such a case the colluders would want to make it appear they were competing unrestrainedly.
Monsanto’s history with regard to PCBs is indeed dubious
That’s a bit like saying Al Capone’s business activities were “indeed dubious” – see below.
how many major manufacturers in that time period didnt pollute with PCBs
Erm, none other than Monsanto, at least in the USA, because they held a monopoly. They also knew damn well that the waste they were producing in Aniston was highly toxic. The company was convicted of found guilty of “negligence, wantonness, suppression of truth, nuisance, trespass, and outrage.”
Similar with agent orange, which was manufactured at the mandate of the US govt for use in Vietnam, which in my mind shifts the responsibility away from Monsanto somewhat
I see. So the companies that manufactured chlorine, mustard gas, phosgene etc. for use in WWI were not responsible for what they did? “I was only fulfilling orders!”, perhaps?
What we have here is a company with a long record of killing people with their products and lying about it. It is insane to allow such an organisation a key role in world agriculture.
To be fair, most nation-states also have a long record of killing people and lying about it. By the same logic, maybe it is insane to “allow” such organisations a key role in world politics.
(Not that I’m defending Monsanto in any way. But I have to wonder how you propose to deprive them of their key role in world agriculture, short of expropriating the entire corporation
I just saw this on boingboing and had to drop it here:
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/28/jason-rohrers-artgam.html
haha
which is why most sane people advocate greater control of government by its citizens, so that this doesn’t happen.
But not as evil as Apple ;)
Nope. I specifically had to open my phone for calls to (and from) abroad. Quite a sensible politic in light of the risk of getting one’s phone stolen.
There are plenty of ‘pay as you go’ options in Denmark, and I believe that’s somewhat common in Europe, but I’ll cop to not knowing how it works. One thing that’s common, too, is specific services for calling abroad – you buy credit, call a specific number, put in the code on the card you’ve bough and then the number you want to call. A bit of a hassle, but often a lot cheaper than a proper contract.
Knockgoat’s comment wasn’t about all corporations, but a specific one. When we find a government killing people and lying about it, we should indeed try to stop it from governing. Remember that quite a number of people were calling for the impeachment of GWBush and some of his accolytes for having lied to the American people for starting the Iraq war. Too bad it didn’t get the support it needed. But in any case, a similar process should be undertaken when a corporation does criminal things.
not on a prepaid phone it isn’t. Anyway, I’ve never seen Polish or German phones exclude international calling, but maybe they’re the exception.
That’s is a hard target to match, yes.
Few people respond to abuse by rolling over and asking for more the way macheads do.
Sigh.
I think she needs a lesson in epistemology. Why does she think that it is impossible for common descent to be true — for any reason besides religious dogma, that is? Does she have any physical evidence that supports this idea?
And so on.
Oh, that can go both ways, I nearly think.
“Is it true that you learn that some cosmic Jewish Zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman and a man made from dirt were convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magic tree?”
=====
A lot of problems — including the one above, and some others — have been fixed with the version of preview used by Pharyngula, but not necessarily by other scienceblogs.
I think the db and blog (Moveable Type, I think) software that Pharyngula uses was moved to a seperate server, and uses an upgraded version.
=====
There was a recent post about a $20 lens for the iPhone that allows macro photography, if that sort of thing interests you:
http://scienceblogs.com/myrmecos/2010/04/adapting_the_iphone_for_insect.php
Citation? Instances of people being sued due to accidental presence only occur when that accidental presence is taken advantage of and the presence of the patented transgene is at levels which could not be accidental.
In what respect is reducing the toxic and environmental impact of your herbicide useage not stepping away from it. Completely stepping away from herbicide and pesticide use in the US isn’t really an economically viable option for many farmers (at least farmers who want to have any time at all)
To Pioneer, to Syngenta, to any number of smaller seed dealers who despite having a small market share still exist contrary to popular belief – the seed market is massively competitive (despite perhaps there not being as many players as many would like) with each company standing or falling on its germplasm performance every year – keeping in mind we’re talking seed here and not trait – at present I think it’s fair to say that farmers who want to remain as competitive as possible are pretty much locked into using RR crops (and this situation will increasingly become less monopolistic when RR patents start to expire – I believe RR1 goes off in 2012 – also keeping in mind that patents in essence are set up to give inventors a monopoly)
1st link broken…. can I get a fix please! Again, any case I’ve dug into has turned out to support my initial statement of non-accidental presence. Lets also keep in mind that of 275,000 customers we’re talking on average 11 lawsuits per year, which is a drastically small proportion (even fewer go to court, although that’s hardly surprising given the cost of mounting a defence, of all that have gone to court I don’t think anyone has to guess at the unanimous victor.
not quite – GE polluted with PCBs, westinghouse, outboard marine corp – I think however I did get my wires somewhat crossed on that one for which I apologize – I was under the impression PCBs were a little more widely used than they were – however it remains a sad fact that heavy industry from the 40’s to the 70’s was categorically shitty when it comes to pollution – not to excuse it, but to put it somewhat into context (and to reiterate I categorically accept that this is a perfectly good reason to be critical of Monsanto and any claims they make)
Going back as far as WWI to the companies that manuifactured the various chemicals I think that yes, today, in 2010, we shouldn’t hold the current company responsible, adn we should also take into account the repercussions on a company which would refuse to manufacture something on demand for the government in a time of war (given that you could still get shot in WWI for desertion I’d go so far as to say that companies manufacturing chemicals used in warfare in WWI at the behest of the government should be even less held responsible than a company that manufactured chemicals for use in Vietnam, although that’s entirely another discussion)
Aw! You flatter me!
I think that’s a really good aspect of the IAASTD report I linked to above. So often it’s presented as either pro-GE or anti-science. But the report makes clear that engineering is only one of a family of long-developing biotechnologies for improving yields, drought and pest resistance, etc. Scientifically-informed choices of approach or combination of approaches should be suited to local needs and take into account people’s political-economic power, ecological aspects, and food security.
it = monoculture.
that single phrase already defeats the entire block o text it’s embedded in.
My camera is a Nikon N4004s. It’s more than 20 years old* – my first major purchase. Needless to say, it’s not digital. But it’s very special to me. I still don’t know how to use the one on my cell…
Argh. Must get back to work.
*Have I mentioned I’m a Yankee? ;)
Ah, reading comprehension FTW.
I’m not convinced the average American farmer can move away from “monoculture” and remain viable, particularly not on a grand scale (ie the odd farmer here or there probably can do it, with a lot of work, but if they all did it the system wouldnt work)- given that farmers aren’t moving away from the model however is it not at least better to use a less harmful alternative?
that’s begging the question. GMO’s have, in real world application, never shown to be actually better, since their performance drops off significantly under non-ideal conditions(i.e. ones deviating from the specific conditions they were designed for), and conditions are becoming more and more volatile and unpredictable with the increasing influence of AGW.
“the system” is already not working, if you consider the absolutely stupendous amounts of subsidies poured into agriculture; and it doesn’t actually take “more work” to do polycultures, as long as you remember to include financial costs in “work”, not just effort and time.
SCOM,
I’m genuinely impressed that you could not only work a camera, but buy one when you were one.
Well, yeah, but see comment 135.
They don’t select them, they just get Google ads.
Accordingly, some of the ads are country-specific. In France I got a lot of one or two dating services (harmless, not “for naughty people”); here I get ads for a clairvoyant medium (!!!) and a method for losing fat and building muscle, especially a sixpack, in no time with no work for no money* (asterisk in the original, lack of explanation for the asterisk also in the original – I haven’t actually clicked on the banner). Everywhere I get lots of ads for computer games, and not the same ones.
I’ve found I can eat crêpes made from buckwheat flour… :-)
<Homer Simpson>So far!</Homer Simpson>
Now that Apple’s market share is increasing, the first Mac viruses have been spotted in the wild. At least Windows users know* to use protection… Mac and Linux users typically don’t.
I use avast!, I don’t visit pop-up hell, and I don’t fall for phishing e-mail, greeting cards from unknown people, mysterious attachments from unknown senders, Internet ads that pretend to be antivirus programs, The Gator Corporation, and so on. No infections so far.
* Unless they’re stupid. Which, of course, many are.
If Linux has really reached that point now (7 years ago it hadn’t), I should try it once Windows does fail.
Can you direct me to an example site where IE8 fails?
(…Oh, yes, the shadow under Sb post titles and “Leave a comment” still isn’t displayed. But that’s trivial.)
Seconded :-)
Of course. Evolutionary ecology 101: competition is costly, avoidance of competition is therefore selected for. The constant competition that capitalism needs to exist is artificial, and must be preserved artificially.
Personal incredulity. :-| Never misundreshtmate the power of “but it’s obvious!11!!!1!”.
Pwnd.
Oh, then why do I have a constantly scanning anti-virus program on my Mac? PARANOIA…
GMOs categorically have been shown to be actually better.
Bt cotton for instance, in non-ideal conditions, massively increases productivity.
RR corn and soy clearly do better, at least in terms of ‘for the farmer’ otherwise why would they have caught on and be as ubiquitous as they currently are. They also obviously do better in terms of the comparitive environmental impact as compared to the alternative ‘conventional’ methodologies for crop raising.
I’d be interested as to what your definition of success is in terms of the current batch of GMOs, or where there is any evidence that they fare worse under non-ideal conditions – I’d assume this would generally be because traits are generally put into elite lines designed to work in optimal conditions, therefore it is a failing of elite lines, not GMOs where conditions are sub-optimal – it particularly doesnt make sense that genes with no real overall effect on metabolism (Bt and RR) would cause significant varietal variation under stress (I’d still expect Bt to outperform non-Bt of the same variety most of the time just due to a reduction in insect pressure)
Perhaps, but that isn’t really much of an excuse.
those are hilarious when you’re not using a Windows PC… because they look like Windows programs. it makes me giggle when i see them.
actually, quite the opposite. it only works in the conditions it was designed to function, and those are expensive to maintain. it’s not a reliable crop unless you’re extremely wealthy and can assure a maintenance of its necessary conditions.
two and a half hours on the phone with an iTunes support supervisor (who didn’t treat me like I was an idiot), and iTunes is working again. My life can resume having meaning.
I’m amused how many people conflate the OS with the applications.
On the subject of problems, a great many are PEBKAC. This, as David alludes to, includes much malware.
Marc Maiffret (Q&A)
Finally, I recommend AVG Free for Windows users — it’s free! :)
and then there’s the wee problem with BtPlants being toxic: http://www.i-sis.org.uk/gmProtestsIndia.php
Walton, ads? What ads?
I never see any here (I’ve got doubleclick and other services redirected in my hosts file), only placeholders.
seeing as I don’t use it, I can’t give you a specific page. however, IE does badly at this and will have massive problems in the future because it also fails at this.
Not even remotely true. Small farmer yields and incomes in India have increased 30-100% entirely due to the introduction of Bt cotton. Yields and insecticide useage in China were positively impacted. There is categorically nothing inherent to the Bt gene which makes it only work in certain conditions, or be expensive to maintain. Logically why would there be? There may be issues with the variety used, and education around which varieties are best. But this is totally unrelated to the transgene.
Seriously? Unless you’re an insect they aren’t toxic. Wouldnt this toxicity of Bt plants have maybe come up and completely scuppered the entire endeavor, or are feedlots operating with losses to toxicity to maintain the status quo, is the government covering up Bt related deaths on a massive scale? Or, and I’m going out on a limb here, is Bt toxicity as portrayed in the article you link a complete and utter baldfaced lie – I mean shit, they’re talking about a 25% fataltity rate amongst sheep grazing on the material – is it not just off the wall completely bizarre that if this were even remotely true that someone, in the past decade of use of Bt crops, would have seen something – no coverup is good enough to hide something with a fricking 25% kill rate – studies on Bt and RR crops for feed have to show equivalence in terms of weight gain etc etc before they’re even remotely marketable as products – yet here we are, discussing the claim that somehow some genius missed the fact that 25% of animals that eat Bt crops end up dead. No wonder meat got expensive all of a sudden.
they are seeing it. they are reporting it. or where do you think this information is from? it’s not like it’s just this one website that describes this.
you have an inordinate amount of trust in business goodwill. it’s fucking disturbing.
you’ve no idea how prices for meat are created; but hey, don’t let that stop you from saying stupid shit.
this conversation is pointless. your employer can do no wrong, huh?
I’ve seen this thing about “writing about the Congo” a few times here, and have no idea what it means. It’s not some US version of “discussing Ugandan affairs”, is it?
I’m not saying that my employer can do no wrong (was highly upset last year at layoffs introduced entirely so that earnings per share targets were hit, for instance). But in the case of Bt toxicity to mammals, particularly at rates of 25%+ – no, that’s crazy ass bullshit. Something that big isn’t about trusting business goodwill, it’s about believing so fervently that GMOs are bad that absolutely batshit insane claims like a 25% kill rate are something that could remain covered up for 10 years of commercial use and multiple actual scientific studies of toxicity.
IE has been an evil plague on html from the very beginning — there are lots of really stupid things that will cause this site to crash for IE users that I have to watch for. One nuisance, for example, is the drop cap I use at the start of every article, which is done with valid CSS and mostly works for IE. If I add any additional formatting to that first character — making it part of a link, for instance — IE dies, and I get a flood of hundreds of emails from people complaining that I kill their browser.
I’d like to tell them to just kill it and get a real and stable browser, but IE users are about 15% of my readers. At least that’s down from the bad old days when they had over 50% share.
(Firefox is now the dominant browser: 56% and growing. About 25% are Mac Safari users.)
What lenses? Are they auto-focus? because if they are, you should be able to use them on most of the Nikon DSLRs with AF.
And if you don’t want them….
The adds I typically see are from B&H Photo Video taunting me with a few lenses I’m debating sinking way too much money into.
Ring-tailed Lemurian,
The “writing lucidly about the Congo” refers to a certain egomaniac tone troll who is SHOCKED! SHOCKED! by the harsh tone of comments on Pharyngula. I think SC was deploring one of his particularly egregious starfarts and said something to the effect of ~although he has written lucidly about the Congo~.
It struck many of us as the ultimate damnation by faint praise, as in: Well, he’s a serial pig rapist, but he has written lucidly on the Congo.
John Morales — Dunno if you care, but Nathan seems to have massively misconstrued your (rather terse) comment in this thread.
I suspect Nathan is very SIWOTI-enriched.
Owlmirror (@164):
Thanks for the heads up. One problem with addressing problems by simply avoiding them (as I have been with preview) is that you never know when they’ve been fixed!
By the way, I just want to say, “I LOVE MANTIDS!”
I think they are about as cool an insect as has ever existed.
To add to the camera discussion: I use an EOS Rebel.
Bringing the mormon pain (from Doctrine and Covenants 19):
a_ray_in_dilbert_space – Thanks for the explanation (which, for some reason, made me think of this).
Owlmirror @191, yeah, I caught Nathan’s response.
Couldn’t be stuffed responding before, but I suppose I’ll make a brief response, just to be polite.
In the realm of unintended consequences: as soon as folks see that Joseph Smith got away with it, every other mormon and his brother tried to get in on the revelation game. Joe tried to put a stop to it at one point, by proclaiming that there was only one living prophet at a time, but he failed to put the cat back in the bag. Revelators continue to spring up from the mormon ranks.
Richard Packham has a website page that lists a bunch of crazy mormons that have claimed the power of revelation, and have written scripture. For example, there’s Matthew Gill, who started his own church, The Latter Day Church of Jesus Christ. He claimed to have received 24 brass plates from God in 2006, which he translated as the Book of Jeraneck. Gill is accepted by his followers as a prophet, seer and revelator.
Gill has several official websites, including: http://www.bookofjeraneck.co.uk
Gill preaches that Joseph Smith was the last true prophet, but that he is Joe’s successor; Stonehenge was a Christian temple; early Britons were Christian… and blah, blah, blah.
This particular brand of crazy mormonism is based in England, and was organized in 2007.
In the thread on the Thunderfoot video, there’s a comment from PZ that indicates he may choose that video to counteract the Jeffrey Holland mormon sob fest campaign. Thumbs-up for the Thunderfoot video.
I was writing a long post in reply to Pygmy Loris’ request from the last thread:
This post was full of acronyms like EU and EMF and ECB and ESCB. I even managed to refer to the Deutsche Bundesbank as “Buba” (short for Bundesbank). Then we had a power failure and my post went to never-never land. I know, it sounds like my dog ate my homework.
negentropyeater, in #693, wrote an excellent response to Pygmy Loris’ question. Suffice to say I also disagree with Krugman. As I said yesterday there are steps being taken to make the European Central Bank more powerful and introduce a European Monetary Fund which will answer some of Krugman’s criticisms.
I have nothing to add to the discussion of the Euro and global economics, but would just like to thank ‘Tis Himself and negentropyeater for their informative comments.
‘Tis, I’m sorry to hear that the dog ate your acronyms.
OPEN THREAD SO NOT OT
W.I.T.O.
= checking your bag befor you leave the drive-thru
DO IT. Don’t worry about insulting the kid/minimum wage sadsack at the window. No one who works at a drive-thru should be insulted anyhow, you’re just making sure you got what you ordered. Especially check if the joint uses those “we double check your order” stickers to close the bag. They want you to not check. They want to protect their service time numbers. (I know I used to be in the drive-thru.) Beyond that, its just common sense anyway.
Oh well comment back as you like.
There’s about 200 posts without a song. To remedy this lack here’s North Sea Gas singing “Will Ye No Come Back Again”:
fuck right off.
‘Tis Himself, just the man I wanted to type to. I applied for a job today at IdaSailor Marine to do woodworking for sailboat parts/pieces.
I am a lifelong landlubber. Got any suggestions for a site I can peruse to cram myself full of basic nautical terminology so I don’t sound like an idiot if I do get called in for an interview?
I know wood upside out and inside down but I don’t know my keel from my mainsail. I would hate to come off sounding like a pegboy.
Personally I like my daughter’s favorite religious statement: “My Flying Spaghetti Monster tastes better than your 2000 year old dead Jew on a stick.”
And I’ve figured out why there are sparkplugs in the accretion my husband brought me from California – FSM put them there to test my faith that His Noodly Appendage brought the world into being last Wednesday. Accretions don’t happen in days, right? I am strong in the Pasta Force, though, so my chocolate rations should be fine. (I will have to find the Richard Dawkins paragraph where he makes a similar accretion-or-fossil error in describing a coke bottle lid he found encrusted in rock on a beach.)
On the GM seed question – I am profoundly suspicious that agribusiness and chemical companies are not necessarily acting in the best interests of the biosphere, but I don’t know enough to be able to argue the point effectively without attracting more slapdowns than I want to deal with. I will, however, relate an amusing story. My husband went to a meeting of a chemical and agribusiness greenwashing group about a year ago and the corporate representatives there were moaning about the rise of glyphosate-resistant weeds. Go figure – you douse large areas with a weed killer and the weeds adapt. Poor husband had to bite his cheek to keep from making a variety of snarky comments. (I think the glyphosate-resistant weed phenomenon was reported in the press within the last couple weeks.)
What Jadehawk said. Twice.
I finally changed my username to something that wasn’t as close to my IRL name – stands for middle-aged-tone-troll-in-recovery. But I’m still the same homeschooling crank nature educator who no longer wishes to try to find common ground with fools. And we are very much enjoying watching the yellow versus blue war at that weird tea-partier poll. Now back to voting…
Nothing to protect me from in Linux, it’s like sex in a world without infectious diseases.
Wrt Bill’s phone inquiry, I think I remember from my last Europe visit that I just bought a prepaid SIM somewhere and put it in my own phone, that should work.
International roaming is possible, but way too expensive.
With the amount of money and information flowing through Linux servers, I suspect that if there was a serious virus vulnerability we would have seen it.
If you actually look at the sorts of security vulnerabilities Windows and Linux has, a large chunk of the Windows vulnerabilities are remote exploits, people being able to screw with your computer over the internet without having any approved access to the computer. Linux has very few of those, the Linux vulnerabilities are mostly privelege escalation, where users who already have valid accounts on the computer and are physically sitting in front of it and logged in can do more than they are supposed to on it.
All in all, both Windows (XP, Vista, an 7) and Mac Os X have mostly “Highly” and “Moderately” criticial unpatches security vulnerabilities, with some “Extremely critical” and quite a few “Less critical”, and no “Not critical”. Linux, by comparison, has no Extremely or Highly critical security vulnerabilities, a handful “moderately critical”, and almost all “Less” or “not” critical. Mac Os X actually has it’s security vulnerabilities rated as more dangerous than Windows 7 does, although Windows 7 has not been out that long by comparison.
But in the end nothing beats the panicked email we got last week from our IT department telling us how a McAfee virus definition file has targetted a critical windows system file and rendered hundreds of thousands of computers around the world unusable. I ran all over our two offices yanking out ethernet cords until I could establish that a fixed definition file was available, the manually updated every computer.
Rev – thinking of buying a new lens for your camera? Hmmm. Check out Alex Wild’s insect photograpy site, and in particular what a professional photographer of teeny weeny things has to put up with up in terms of simply the best lens in the world…. This is the kind of thing you’ll like, if you like this kind of thing.
Beautiful site, check it out.
Religious people, I’m afraid, just don’t get to see such wonders. Not interested, I guess.
boygenius #203
You’re kidding, aren’t you? The thing that trips up the ignorati more than anything else is misuse of jargon. You can’t fake it. For instance, jib and jibe mean two completely different things but it would be easy for you to confuse the two.
I strongly recommend you admit you know little about boats and sailing but an awful lot about woodworking. A company making wooden rudders and tillers would be more interested in hiring a skilled woodworker than a skilled sailor.
Incidentally a jib is a sail flown before the mast and a jibe (often spelled gybe) is a sailing maneuver where a sailing vessel turns its stern through the wind, such that the wind direction changes from one side of the boat to the other. The “chicken gybe” mentioned in the picture is changing the side of the boat that faces the wind by turning the bow of the boat through the direction of the wind. This operation is generally called tacking and is much safer than gybing.
@AnthonyK –
If you’re interested in insect photography, also check out bugguide, a great critter identification resource and full of wonderful advice on photography. It’s astonishingly easy to take pretty impressive photographs with a point-and-shoot camera. (Mine wouldn’t pass as professional by any stretch, but they were pretty impressive for me!)
WOW, I got the html tags to work (small dance around the living room).
@ MATTIR
Well you screwed that bug guide link didn’t you :)
Next time remember to add the http://
Didn’t work for me though (“not found”) – just like religion! Well, I’m interested in beauty, small, large, or medium sized: i’ll just let the pros do it.
Which reminds me – check this out:
An interactive scale of the universe
Puts the “fuck me” in awesome.
boygenius,
Just to show you what sailing jargon can be like, here’s a couple of pictures of sails and sailing rigs.
Here’s a diagram showing the names of various parts of sails. For some reason the lug sail’s foot isn’t labeled. In both cases the luff is that part of the sail facing forward (towards the bow or pointy end of a boat*).
Here’s diagrams of various sailing rigs. Almost all boats these days use the bermuda rig (also called marconi rig). The gunter rig hasn’t been used much since before World War I.
*The blunt end of a boat is called the stern.
I actually thought as I posted it “You know, I should probably click the link to see if it works,” but I was so pleased that it looked right that I didn’t. What a maroon. This works – I did try it just now.
http://bugguide.net
MMMMMMMMM, great. In future: cp the “a href” link below. Open the window you want and cp the url. Insert this where it say “url”. Insert snappy title “my huge cock” where it says link, delete all extraneous shite and then…are you listening Rev? – press “Preview”. Adjust to suit.
Took me ages to be able to do this.
Oh…’Tis…talk naughtytical to me…you can luff me prow anytime you like…
Go on then, link to a photo of you enjoying yourself on a beautiful yacht.
YES BUT STILL FUCKING OBNOXIOUS
Possibly – glyphosate resistant weeds have been a bit of an issue for at least a few years now – which is obviously a pretty forseeable outcome from widespread adoption of a single mode of action for weed control – thankfully (at least for farmers, and agribusiness….) there are more GM modes of action upcoming soon to offer a better mix of chemicals to offer similar control with somewhat less chance of evolution of resistance (kinda like using combo anti-virals to prevent resistance to just one) – not a 100% guarantee to prevent resistance in the very long term, but should at least buy more time than a single MoA (the same applies to insect control genes, what with the relatively recent revelation that some bollworm in India have developed a bit of resistance to Cry1A (which to be frank I’m surprised there isn’t more suspicion around than there is, its generally lauded as a victory for the green movement… If I didn’t work for Monsanto I’d almost be tempted to play the ORLY card what with it coinciding with bollgard II and all)
Over 200 comments, and no bacon? Has the world gone mad?????
And so, without further ado, a haiku in praise of bacon:
Crispy, crunchy treat,
Ambrosial aroma.
Nothing can compete!
‘Tis, you’re absolutely right. I have no intention of passing myself off as a sailor. I was more interested in basic information about the anatomy of a sailboat than the actual driving of one. (One does “drive” a sailboat, no?) :) My request for “nautical” terminology was poorly phrased.
In any case, I got off (on?) my lazy ass and googled up most of the info I think will be relevant to the job description. We’ll see if I’m able to chicken gybe my way through an interview.
Since I seem to be constitutionally incapable of lying successfully, there’s no likelihood that I will misrepresent myself. I just want to have a general knowledge of the subject matter before I walk in the door.
I can’t believe it took me this long to watch Mr. Deity. Life is so much more fun now that I’m not trying to be inoffensive and reach consensus…
Shit. That’s why it always takes me so long to get to the other side of the lake.
Luckily, the job doesn’t seem to involve any sails or rigging. Just wood. Wood is good. I’m good with wood.
MATTIR:
Welcome to the dark side. Please check your soul at the door.
@boygenius
What soul?
My soul is composed primarily of memes acquired from disreputable atheists, skeptics, and miscreants. Plus the one from Richard Dawkins that confused “stuff trapped in accretions” with “fossils.” Do I still need to check it, or do I only need to check my “upon conception” imaginary soul?
‘Gay dog’ refused entry to Australian restaurant
No, this is NOT from The Onion. It’s real. Apparently, the owners heard ‘gay dog’ instead of ‘guide dog’.
You don’t need to check it, but, if you do, make sure you don’t lose your ticket or you’ll play hell getting it back after last call.
Here’s something you don’t see every day: Space balloon wipes out car.
Yeah, they wrote “space” balloon — twice!.
So, I’ve decided to
join indive in headfirst to Pharyngula by starting with The Thread. I’ve been reading a while but much prefer lurking by nature. However, I had something interesting occur to me and discovered myself with questions I thought might possibly be answered by The Thread.I am going to Europe this summer in June, more specifically Bonn, Germany, and the official schedule of events that I’ll need to be present for there was finally released. Much to my surprise, I am in fact free for the Saturday and Sunday of the Atheist Conference in Copenhagen.
I won’t be free to leave until the evening of the 18th, meaning I would probably miss most Friday events except possibly the pub hopping afterwards. But, I will be free to attend all of Saturday and Sunday.
So, that brings me to the questions:
Any one have an idea of what the travel costs between Bonn and Copenhagen (not sure the timing or costs of a train, but presume it would be cheaper and faster among the viable options) might be? I’ve tried searching online, but my google-fu appears weak.
And more importantly, would the event realistically be worth the cost of attendance if I wasn’t there for the friday session? I suppose this is especially addressed to the GAC attendees, seeing as they have the experience of meeting some of these people and hearing them talk.
Thanks, and apologies if this is a bit of a lame way to start my stay in The Thread, but I just don’t really know enough to add to the discussion of Monsanto and don’t care enough to add to the debate between Mac/Windows/Linux. :P
As I read through (well mostly skimmed, it’s late) the posts on farming it made me think of this. I should probably mention I am as addicted to TED as I am to Pharyngula. If the link doesn’t work (I’m still pretty new at this) Search the TED site for How I fell in love with a fish.
Patricia08, link works fine (you can test them in preview mode, if you want to make sure).
Patricia, that was great, thanks :-)
Dale @ 230,
not sure what exactly the difficulty is in looking up the german train timetable, but here it is, you find prices there too.
A question you would have to answer for yourself I guess, it’s a fair amount of money.
John Morales, I just dropped back here to post the same link. Check it out, folks!
Rorshach,
Apparently I completely fail at google. Thanks for the train timetable though, and sorry for the stupid question.
As for the other part, yeah, I figured as much, just curious about it before I sign up for it all, I guess. Ideally it seems great, just not sure if I’ll end up disappointed because the speakers weren’t as interesting as I envisioned or I don’t really fit in with the other attendees or some such thing. I’m not really much of a public person normally so a big conference is a bit of hard step to take.
you’d be surrounded by people who aren’t really public persons. we can all be awkward together :-)
*facepalm* … followed by *headdesk* and mewling sounds …
I’m nigh on social-phobic and I coped okay – though it helped that there were Pharyngulites there I’d made specific plans to meet up with beforehand; perhaps you should do the same.
Remembering the experience of the GAC and how empty and tired I was the Monday after, I have booked myself a nice 8-hour train trip from Copenhagen to my destination, to relax and reflect…:-)
They have some nice special offers in 1st class too, german trains tend to get pretty crowded in 2nd.
elitist, you don’t know “overcrowded” until you had people sitting on the luggage racks ;-)
Well, I don’t take trains in Nigeria….:P
They had 1st class tickets from Copenhagen to roughly where you and I are headed from 69 euros, I thought that was pretty reasonable….
neither do I silly man. I was talking about Germany.
I know….;)
Not sure if that is a good thing or not, but hey, I’m willing to try.
Okay, thanks for the advice. I don’t really know any Pharyngulites aside from reading their comments, so I’m a bit behind if I want to try that, but it seems as good an idea as any if I want to do this conference. Thanks for the suggestion.
Indian train:
http://www.delawareonline.com/blogs/uploaded_images/IndianTrain2-747018.jpg
and they have 2nd class for 39, so yeah :-p
Dale, I was too slack and anti-social for the GAC, and if I had gone, I’d’ve probably resisted wearing the cephalopod insigne designating a Pharynguloid. :)
Feynmaniac, Japanese train.
I used to rely heavily on trains/public transport when I was younger and during study years.
Since parent 1(and me)was in the Black Forest and parent 2 in Duesseldorf, there was a lot of train travel involved.
Especially Fridays and weekends used to be awful, what with weekend travellers, soldiers and soccer fans.
So yeah, I happily pay the 30 extra bucks these days for some peace…:-)
well, I’ll be traveling Monday afternoon, and it literally makes no difference to me whether I’m in 1st or 2nd (this isn’t an airplane we’re talking about, where the differences are HUGE), so I won’t spend extra money for a luxury I won’t even notice :-p
anyway, I just like teasing you for being a spoiled wealthy brat who sleeps in hotels and travels 1st class, unlike the cool kids who sleep on other people’s floors and travel 2nd class ;-)
Rorschach, euro to australian dollar.
30 × 1.42968328 = 42 bucks.
Ah, to be a doctor and wallow in money! :)
I know…:-)
When’s your train, don’t tell me you’re taking the 1150 one as well !! I might send my butler to bring you beverages in that case :P
(Spoiled brat btw could not be farther from the truth, parents were lower middle class, nurse and social worker, and I worked at Mercedes all semester holidays to keep my head over water during med school since mother had retracted any financial help for petty reasons…)
Yeah… you’d think that, given that I want to be a lawyer, I’d be able to look forward to wallowing in money too. But seeing as I want to be a local solicitor working in criminal defence and/or immigration and asylum law, which is not the best-paid corner of the legal profession, I somehow don’t imagine I’ll ever have money to burn. :-)
But who needs money, anyway? Buying stuff is overrated.
Feel free to help paying my 2 mortgages John….
The rule sounds silly, but it’s true, whatever amount of money you have, it’s never enough !
I work hard, earn ok, but just about make it every month without going into the red.
So no riches for me, sadly…The girls reading this are better off financially waiting for Walton to be a lawyer one day !
My personal experience of travelling in train in India is that this picture is not very representative of long distance train, but more of suburbian Mass Transit.
If you want to experience the “real India”, travel in second class Long Distance at least once. Remember however that using the Indian style squat toilet you will find in those cars requires a bit of courage and preparation when the train is running.
*feels all warm and fuzzy*
the moral of which is to not bother making more, in the first place :-p
Hi guys, please help pharyngulate this poll – vote against the SB 1070 Arizona immigration law http://www.kgun9.com/
Rorschach, I kid (I’m pretty sure you get that).
And btw Jadehawk, one day soon you have to explain to me(if you like) how someone as intelligent as you did end up in North Dakota chasing mice and not in some university studying …..
Yikes. My dad worked too during med school to take care of the four of us. I remember him always being tired during that period. My sympathies.
Did you pick that up well from reading those boring criminalogy texts as well? :P
I thought so. You really wouldn’t want to be on the outside of that thing when it started picking up speed.
You might end up looking like that kid did in Slumdog Millionaire.
Only true if you are certain that you’ll always be making sufficient money to get by.
I used to make much more money than I could spend, even after paying for the fancy sports car and the designer suits I felt were necessary to evacuate my frustration of having no spare time to really enjoy myself.
So I saved, and nowadays I am glad I did. No more designer suits nor fancy sports car, but I’ve got time to cultivate my garden, cook, walk in the mountains, read and browse the internets which is much more enjoyable and costs little, without having to worry too much about where I’m going to find the money to get by. Unfortunately, my savings are dissapearing faster than I expected and I’m starting to get worried about my older years.
So I’ll probably have to earn a living again and finding a decent job isn’t going to be easy at 45. I don’t need to earn much, 1500 Euros per month would be just fine, I’ve been thinking about teaching or school assistant but it seems hard to find something right now with our government trying to downsize the number of public servants and private schools also feeling the impact of the crisis.
I feel very lucky so far, but quite worried I won’t be that lucky in the future.
I do. A lot of it. So where the fuck is it?
Hey, you guys know that I hate House, but no opportunity is cheap enough to pimp the Stones, and I havent done it for at least 3 months, so there :
Season 5 final
My sole camera is a Nikon Coolpix 8700. These days, it’s a plain camera, with 8.0 MP and 8X zoom. I bought it only because I found it at a pawn shop for $100 bucks back in 2007, and I thought Nikon + SLR (familiar) look = good = that price seems very low = BUY!
It didn’t work quite right, so I took it to a camera shop where it cost another $150 to fix what was wrong with it. I understand from the repair shop’s master tech that, even with the repair costs, I’d just about stolen a (then) top-notch digital camera.
I think it’s more camera than I need, it does things I can’t begin to understand, but it takes gorgeous shots, better than I usually get from point-and-shoot. Somewhere, I have the CDs of pictures my son & I took with it during our frequent Hill Country treks. Or maybe he took all of those discs, because he loved the things he could do with the camera.
How about indistinguishable business card contests?
:P
LOL, MrFire! I hated that movie, but that scene always cracks me up.
:( Why oh why?
I hope you didn’t read the book then, which doesn’t so much cross the line as it does take a rocket-powered long jump over it.
Ugh – I can honestly say I am completely happy to be BACK to work. Driving for an hour to training for three days… is a pain… in the aaaass!
Plus, no net connection, so I can’t browse Pharyngula when I’m supposed to be working!
Hermit crabs look for housing together! Means, when one of them needs a new home and finds a snail shell that is just too big, it waits for more conspecifics to show up. Long queues form, the one with the right size enters the shell, which liberates that one’s previous shell, and so on… it’s fascinating. In this popular article in German, which is stupid enough to call the crabs “mollusks”, the authors go on to explain they’ve found similar behavior in fish that live in sea anemones, woodpeckers, and college students (nowadays improved by networks like Facebook).
(Eleven minutes…)
Better yet, for a long time all such popups had the standard layout of a WinXP window. If you used the classical layout, or another version of Windows, it looked completely foreign, too. :-D
Reminds me of the spam I once got from Blockhead J. Minolta.
What does that mean?
From there…
Scary all round.
Really? I remember it being part of a link several times, and had no problem.
<Homer Simpson>So far!</Homer Simpson>
Stupidly, flying is often cheaper these days than going by train. Try airberlin for a start.
I’m not really coming for the speakers. I’m coming to meet some fellow Pharyngulites.
“Great”? It’s so amazing I bookmarked it and intend to spam teh whole wide intarwebz with it at every occasion!!!
Exactly. I’ve never felt like too much of an outsider at scientific congresses or even digs.
More like “marginally affordable in an emergency”.
Bah. Harmless. It doesn’t get bad till you’re sitting in an overnight train from Vienna to Paris, in a bus-like wagon without compartments, with loud people getting on the train throughout Germany = throughout the night, with the police coming in and controlling passports in the middle of the night… Fortunately that’s the extreme scenario that I only had to undergo 2 or 3 times in 6 years.
You don’t read Teh Thread often enough. She will study at NDSU, which appears to mean North Dakota State University and to be in Fargo, next year.
And besides, despite the steep price, I still think she’s been having more fun in the last 10 years than I.
In the Humboldt Foundation. I’ll apply for a grant to finance my postdoc position in Berlin… it’s 2250 € per month. WTF! My monthly expenses in Paris, at the insane Parisian rents, were more like 700 € per month, so I imagine that, if I get such a grant, I’ll be swimming in money and won’t know what to do with it. Even becoming a Gold Sponsor of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology would only take care of one month, IIRC :-þ
David, I’m surprised at you being too lazy to Google it. :)
Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair.
Fixed.
I guess I was more talking about the free(well, used to be anyway, still cheaper then anything in the US) university education available to her in her home country.
Owlmirror (and possibly John Morales),
FYI, Nathan A R has responded. I might respond to it later.
@Feynmaniac:
Holy… that dude wrote an essay in response.
Yeah looks like a nice macro lens. I’m looking at a few lenses for the business right now because as much as you can do with any lens, the fast glass makes a difference in the sort of shooting I’m starting to do professionally. Plus I shoot Nikon.
But cool review none the less.
Nathan is nothing if not prolix.
He’s making Points Refuted A Thousand Times, too.
After going there only once I am certain that I would like to move to Berlin.
It’s only a matter of how much money I need to save in order to get out of here forever.
But I’m no brilliant mind so it’ll be tip jar money for me :P
And of course paying of the 20k debt I incurred trying to go to grad school here.
Which I have almost paid off now!!!!
Hello savings.
You mean OMNoms? :-)
boygenius: (regarding nautical terminology): Keep in mind that teabagging, in regards to sailing, the phrase/word ‘teabagging’ has a different meaning.
Ol’Greg: Savings? What the hell are savings?
Oh. I remember. I had that before I had kids.
My Dad always told me that, when one has children, expenses will expand to absorb 105% of income. Basic economic rule, I guess.
I have a very profound question for David Marjanović, concerning Bubble Shooter:
Have you been stuck in a round of the novice level long enough to begin seeing the colors dwindle significantly in number?
You see, I don’t know whether to congratulate myself for hanging in there, or chastise myself for lacking the skill to construct a beautiful cascade of multiple colors.
Savings are what will get me the hell out of here.
Kids are yet another thing that would trap me here, and I’ve been trying to claw my way out for way too long to put up with that.
I’m ok with the fact that most of my dreams are not going to happen, but I am NOT ok with the idea of living my entire life in Texas peddling to keep my head above water and own a home.
If that is life then life is worthless.
HA!
Oh and I suppose that would be paddling not peddling, which is what I seddling.
Ol’Greg: (((Wife))) and I decided to have kids erarly so that we would still be young when the (hopefully) leave the house.
As for dreams, I don’t know anyone who’s dreams have come true. What tends to happen is that we keep changing what our dreams are and head in that direction. Dreams are a distant goal, not a destination.
And Texas? Run. Fast. Far. North. Northeast. Or far West. Or far Northwest. I’ve lived in the Bible Belt (the Northern fringe). I still carry the scars.
Oh, and happy Tuesday!
Yep Billy, lived in Texas my whole life. Didn’t really have the option to have kids early without doing a lot of damage to myself and said kids, and frankly since I’m 28 now I figure kids just won’t be a part of the picture for me. Not the biggest deal since they were never on the top of my list anyway. Neither is marriage for that matter.
I used to want fame. I used to want academic prestige.
Now I just want money. Enough of it to spend no longer than a year or two in any one place.
I’d like to live everywhere for a little while I think.
Oh… and isn’t it Thursday O_o
Happy Thursday! I’m flying to Paris on Saturday! I can’t believe that. Wow.
Ol’Greg: Check out some of the jobs opening up in the federal government — especially the land management agencies. I know some people who have not live anywhere for more than three years since they left college. And these are jobs with benefits.
“Find something you like to do, then find someone stupid enough to pay you for doing it.” — iambilly’s Dad.
Ol’Greg: For me, it is Tuesday. See comment #13 above.
David Marjanović
Yes, fascinating. I read a similar article yesterday in Science Daily. (I love hermit crabs). When I was in (place name-dropping, sorry) the Andaman Islands (before the 2004 tsunami*) I’d never seen a place with so many, and my favourite beach activity (the snorkelling is mind-blowing, huge fish, almost pristine reefs**) was to lie in my hammock (no vibrations to disturb the crabs), throw a few biscuit crumbs down to entice them, and watch the activity. I would also supply them with empty shells and watch them go crazy trying out new homes.
However, I never saw them queue up politely as described in these recent articles. (Maybe, it’s an Indian thing, like trying to get on a bus or train there :) ).
It was a general free-for-all, with the bigger ones picking up the smaller ones and tossing them aside in a mad scramble, crabs trying to drag others out of shells they fancied, etc).
* I read that the indigenous inhabitants of the Andamans didn’t suffer any casualties. They believe that the Sea and the Land are constantly at war and that sometimes the sneaky old Sea pretends to go away in order to trick the Land, and lull it in to a false sese of security. (A bit like the Greeks at Troy). As soon as they see the sea recede, as it does before a tsunami hits, they run for the nearest hill. The only people killed were recent immigrants from India (don’t get me started on the near genocidal affect this mass immigration to the three main Islands has had on the original inhabitants) who either stood and watched, or went out to collect the stranded fish.
** I spent some time there with an Italian surfer/diver who had been almost everywhere in the world and he said he’d never seen such clean reefs, nor been anywhere with so many large reef fish. I’m shit-scared of sharks, after a childhood experience, but the snorkelling was so awesome that I decided I really didn’t care any more. Every swim was worth dying for.
A few of my photos of the Andamans are on Google Earth, but not any of the ones with hermit crabs, or underwater (no underwater camera).
I have wanted so many different things over the years I don’t remember them all. Now I just wish I had gotten where I now am sooner. But hey, 30 is not really that late for starting your career and family (and guitar lessons). I know it’s a cliche, but sometimes the things that make you the happiest are the things you never knew you wanted.
@KOPD:
My brother got married at 26 (almost 27) had a kid at 29, and has a decent job. Hope I can get to that stage soon, just need a date.
‘Tis:
Despite being neither a sailor nor a woodworker, I was going to jump in and give boygenius the same advice you did. “I know what I know, and I won’t pretend to know what I don’t know” is a powerful statement, and an employer who didn’t accept that just might not be someone you want to work for: It would mean either that the things you don’t know really are critical to the job, and getting the job without those skills would set you up for failure…or that the boss is a fool (or a jerk), and you’re better off not working forhim/her.
Re @214:
JOOC, what about boats where both ends are pointy? Isn’t the ass-end of a kayak, for instance, or a dory still called the stern? Enquiring minds want to know!
sandiseattle (@200):
Exercising due diligence to ensure you’re actually receiving what you’ve paid for is one thing — a reasonable application of caveat emptor — but the dismissive way you refer to drive-thru employees does you no credit. How you treat the people you think you don’t have to treat well — people in unskilled labor or low-end service jobs such as fast-food counter service, hotel housekeeping, etc. — says an awful lot about your character… and what you’ve said here about yours is not pretty.
There was an episode of the Simpsons where Marge is being shown up at every turn by a former classmate who is now a wealthy executive (and single). In one scene they’re sitting at a restaurant and Bart and Lisa and Maggie keep distracting Marge and asking for things, and at one point Bart says “Maggie puked in your purse again” and the friend says “Poor me… all my purse is full of is disposable income.” I lol’d.
@Kevin:
That seems to be the norm among my wife’s friends. Most are 29, several are married, some are divorced, a few have kids. Still a few single ones in the group, though. And most have decent jobs. One actually runs for a living.
Good luck with that. I sure don’t envy you. Never was any good at dating. It took me two weeks to talk my wife into dating me.
@KOPD:
Haha – well, I’m not really at the point of exactly looking. I’m talking to some girls, but actively I’m more interested in finishing my book, making sure I have a good job currently, and getting used to living alone.
I’m in bachelor mode, soon I’ll get to lonely bachelor mode and start going actively looking.
Ya’ll are making me feel bad. Marriage and kids is the one thing I know I can do.
Wouldn’t you know I just don’t give a damn?
John Morales (@229):
Yeah, in that case “space balloon” is just lazy writing: High-altitude balloons are somewhat poetically referred to as near-space missions or as going to “the edge of space,” but typical high-altitude balloons go to ~100 kft or a bit higher… which is really only about 1/3 of the way to what qualifies as space by most definitions.
OTOH, this group is actually proposing, with a straight face and at least minor financial support from the U.S. Air Force, flying to orbit using nothing but airships. I met these guys at a space conference years ago, when they were fairly new, and were focusing on rockoons and winning the Cheap Access to Space (CATS) Prize, and while they’re very methodical in their approach (which is a polite way of saying their progress is glacially slow), they seem to be dead serious, and they’ve stayed in the game all these years.
But isn’t that redundant, sort of like “the corrupt and members of congress”? ;)
Okay, so you have to remember this is coming from Cracked.com,
not exactly a reliable sourceusually a pretty crappy website. But I think it’s interesting.6 Supposedly Ancient Traditions (That Totally Aren’t)
since I’m 28 now I figure kids just won’t be a part of the picture for me
I don’t see any problem with being 28 and having kids. I had mine at 35 with a 40 year old partner. Being 28 and not wanting kids, on the other hand, would mean that kids shouldn’t be part of the picture for you. Is that perhaps what you meant?
Except books.
It isn’t possible to have enough books.
Just don’t open with that. :)
Buying stuff is actually over-rated though.
I’ve been doing it too much and all it does is waste. That being said though money is a lot more than something to buy stuff with. It’s freedom itself in some ways.
I’d like to start my own business at some point I think. It seems to me that money is the thing I should have been focused on when I was trying so hard to be a part of something better than money. If I’d focused on getting as rich as possible instead I might actually have avoided some of the sad waste of what life I’ve had and also had some capital to use to try and build something better for myself and everyone.
I have no idea what to do about though, but one thing I am sure of is that I’ve no use for middle class circumstances. The car, the house, the yard… what good is that? I mean I’m going to die anyway right?
I can’t imagine what would be put on my proverbial headstone: She paid her taxes?
lol
No one in my family, on either side, has children before their 30s, and they are often in their 40s. My grandfathers were 70 and 80 years older than me, and I’m the oldest child in my family. Luckily they usually live well into their 90s. We have trouble fitting in 3 generations per century.
Which means I’m only about 180 generations from Adam :)
Mind you, that’s partly because of unlucky timing with all the various wars in which the Britiah Empire were involved (and our World Wars last a long longer than those of you USAnians).
Plenty of time for you 28 year olds, if that’s what you want.
sletten is usually tl;dr for me. But even when I decide to really try, all the generalizations, assertions, and well, arrogance, make it really hard for me to finish reading one of his posts. I’m grateful to those of you who take the time to read them and respond so I don’t have to. I envy your fortitude.
Have you folks seen this? A couple kids on Youtube dropping what they believe are bombshells on atheism… This was one of the videos that came up under “related videos” when I watched the Thunderf00t video posted last night.
If your SIWOTI is up today (like mine always is), I recommend it.
@Ol Greg
How about “She had interesting online conversations with people all over the world, was an avid [insert numerous offbeat hobbies here] and contributed time, money, and ideas to Non-Believers Giving Aid (or other non-theistic groups that attempt to improve life for people and other critters).” Sounds pretty good to me and involves much less accumulation of stuff for stuff’s sake. Except for the hobby stuff, that is – books and tools are a great temptation.
OTOH, I think “She paid her taxes” is a great epitaph and one more people should announce with pride so as to pharyngulate the teapartiers in death as well as life.
Re age, marriage, and kids: My wife and I married right out of graduate school, when I was 24 and she 23, but with one thing and another, we didn’t have our daughter until 6+ years later, when I was 30 and my wife was just a month short of that milestone.
Our spawn is now a college sophomore (and we are well positioned to fund our share of her remaining undergraduate work), which means our primary parental obligation is nearly fully discharged… not that “the ties that bind” ever disappear, of course, but she’s purt’ near fully raised now. And my Lovely Bride™ and I are still (just barely) short of 50. I’ll be eligible for early retirement in just 5 years (though not yet, by then, able to completely do without earned income; I plan to supplement my pension with a second career… perhaps a return to teaching), and given my health and the state of medical science, I have every expectation of at least as many healthy, active, enjoyable years after that point as I will have lived from grad school up to that point.
The point of which is… even if you’re 30 (±3-3 years), it’s still not too late to “have kids early so we can enjoy life after they’re gone.” And that’s ever more true for people who are just now 30 than it was in my time.
Ol’Greg (@303):
Mebbe… but having stuff can be really cool, if you pick the right stuff.
I suppose it makes me a Bad Liberal©, but I confess I really enjoy stuff… esp. geeky, gadgety stuff. So sue me!
Urrk! @308, (±3-3 years) should, obviously, have been (±2-3 years).
<sigh>
My only concern with waiting until I’m 30 to have kids is that I may have to outlive 75% of my grandparents in order to see my kids have families of their own (assuming they don’t start way earlier than I’d prefer). I seem to come from families that live fast and die young. Except my great-grandma. She was better off in her 80’s than many much younger than her. It was an errant laproscope that got her in the end.
My only issue with having kids in my 30’s is that I doubt everything I care about getting done in my life before I’m willing to settle down and have some kids and give it all up for them will probably not be accomplished in the next 5 or even 10 years.
I kind of dread the way that you’re just supposed to drop off of the map after 30 anyway… like it’s too late to get started in anything EXCEPT maybe having kids.
Damn it… why?
KOPD (@310):
Just to clarify, I wasn’t necessarily advocating waiting: IMHO, you should have kids (if you want them) as early as you feel ready for them. I was only saying that if you’re already ~30, it’s not too late.
That said…
Do you consider that unlikely? Given the consistent advance in medical science and wellness awareness? I would guess that most people who are currently young adults can expect to outlive 3/4 of their grandparents.
3 of my own grandparents lived into their 80s (the 4th, my maternal grandfather, died when he was not much older than me, of heart disease… and if I’d inherited that condition from him, I’d already know it). I have every expectation of living at least that long, and (unlike my grandparents) I expect to be hale and active well into my 80s as well… if not much longer.
Also, is this…
…is this really the main motivation for having kids? If it is for you, that’s cool, of course… but in my case, having my daughter has been its own reward. I hope she has a family if and when she wants one… but I will never expect that part of her role is to “give me granchildren.”
My issue with having kids in my 30s is that…
Umm…
I guess I don’t. My family is pretty long-lived and youthful (really good genes) so, being 50 with a teenager won’t be a big deal.
Ol’Greg (@311):
Then just don’t buy into that bullshit! You don’t strike me as the sort of person who easily acquiesces to what you’re “just supposed to” do.
And in any case, as I approach 50 myself, I become more and more convinced that 50 is the new 30. That’s not just “whistlin’ past the graveyard” on my part: I’m genuinely looking forward to the next 20 or 30 years of my life with eagerness and gusto.
Yeah count me in that group but the older I get the more I really put to use to the tools I buy and they get more expensive because I expect more out of them. So I buy less stuff, but what I buy is nice and gets used. A lot.
I wasn’t saying that I plan to wait until I’m 30. I’m saying I just turned 30 and am about to have a kid. But to be fair, I haven’t mentioned those two things in one post before now. And I try not to bring it up very much.
My paternal grandpa was hit by a train. Medical science can’t do much about that. Looking both ways would have helped, though. Two of my grandparents had very sudden, unexpected deaths in their 50s/early 60s, the other two faded away (on in their 50s, the other nearly 80). And I recently watched an uncle (who admittedly was not taking very good care of himself at all) have a rare kind of stroke and collapse at his step-father’s wake, and get rushed to the hospital where he died. I know all those things are unlikely. It’s just that my family seems to be a constant reminder that life is short and you don’t always get notified when the expiration date is up.
No, it’s just one of the awesome features. If they choose to have families, that is. If they don’t, that’s fine. I also want my grandkids to know their grandpa.
KOPD, my parents had me after 30 and I was very close to my grandparents, just FYI. My grandfathers died in my mid 20’s but both of my grandmothers are still living. My paternal grandfather was over 30 when my dad was born though, so consider that and if I had children he might have even had grandkids.
My grandmother has dementia from complications from encephalitis, but she is still living and on a good day seems happy. My dad actually does try to take good care of her.
My other grandmother has great grandkids and just moved into another assisted living center. She also was over 30 when my mom was born. And this is families in the past, with older technology.
So I wouldn’t worry about that, but maybe just try to be careful around trains :(
KOPD (@316):
<EmilyLitella>Oh, well that’s very different, then. Nevermind….</EmilyLitella>
Ugh… great grandkids.
Yeah the point of my story was this:
30? You will still likely not only see your kid grow up and possibly start a family, but also may see your grandkid/s grow up and possibly start a family.
Absolutely!
That would be pretty damned cool. I do need to lose some weight and cholesterol to help make sure that happens, though. Right now I just want to have a healthy happy kid. But I do find myself dreaming about the future now and then. I know, I know, it’ll go by fast. Don’t worry, I’m definitely a “live in the moment” kind of guy and don’t need to be reminded to enjoy them while they’re young and all that. :-)
Well, I’m certainly talking about myself a lot here. Sheesh. Good thing it’s a subject I’m familiar with.
nothing in Germany (or all of central Europe, for that matter) would have been far enough from my family. And now I’m just sort of stuck here.
Frankly, that sounds horrible.
yeah well; my family has very forceful opinions about everything, and especially about what I should be doing with my life. So when the opportunity to GTFO offered itself, I took it.
And I still feel like if I go back before I’ve accomplished something substantial, they’re going to crush me with their “well-meant advice”
Ol’ Greg says, “I kind of dread the way that you’re just supposed to drop off of the map after 30 anyway… like it’s too late to get started in anything EXCEPT maybe having kids.
Damn it… why?”
Hmm. Well, considering that in my late 20s and early 30s, I did indeed vanish from the standard career map, it was only by my mid 30s that I was back on track and only 13 years ago that I stumbled into what wound up being my career.
After getting my PhD in physics, I was too burned out to take the usual postdoc-junior faculty-tenure route. Instead, I bummed around Asia a while, then joined the Peace Corps, and only then got married (though no kids) and really started looking for a job. My wife didn’t stumble into her career ’til she was in her mid 40s–she spent over a decade as a computer engineer before becoming an environmental scientist.
Some of us don’t necessarily bloom late, but we bloom differently.
I’m sure to most people that sounds a lot more like how life should be – the alternative looks a little too much like getting on the hamster wheel at the first available opportunity.
ARIDS I think you just described my ideal life :P
I really wish I had studied math or science though. The humanities are hard, they suck, people everywhere think you’re dumb, and basically I shouldn’t have let my own insecurities drive me into what I *thought* were appropriate things.
But the thought of starting school over from scratch and being, what, 50 when I get out seems just as pointless :(
I’ll ditto the bafflement over the “over 30” problem – I graduated from law school at 21, spent 6 years at a Wall Street law firm doing mergers and acquisitions, got married, entered a Ph.D. program in clinical psychology, worked as a therapist for a while, had went back to law to do public interest law (which established that I didn’t want to be any kind of lawyer), and then became a homeschooling mom when we found out that our son has learning problems that make him a bad fit with available schools. As a result of homeschooling, I started doing nature education as a job and some historical reenacting as a hobby. From the reenacting, I started learning about pre-industrial revolution technologies, especially natural dyes, spinning and weaving and now teach classes about those as well. We raised a guide dog pup and I discovered that I’m a good dog trainer. My son was interested in geology and I discovered that it’s pretty interesting and have done some volunteer work with an online newsletter for professional geologists (and plan to do more when time allows). My kids will go to college in 4 or 5 years and I’ll undoubtedly have discovered other things that I’m interested in or good at. The problem would be choosing which one to focus on, not whether I’m the right age for it. Figuring out how to fit all the cool stuff into just one lifetime is a bitch. There may be some fields that one can’t enter after 30, but they tend to be ones I’m not interested in, like ballerina, professional athlete, professional musician, or military officer.
My husband, on the other hand, has had one career since his early 20s and loves and excels at it. Sometimes I envy him the narrowness of his focus, but more often I am just grateful for the stability that it provides for my shifting interests. If I had to have just one career, it would feel like cutting off my legs and one arm just to be able to focus really well on that one limb.
Thinking it through, I think the main reason I personally get hung up on my age is due to the several unsuccessful attempts to get a career going after college, resulting in going back to school as a non-traditional student to finish my BS, and then getting laid off from my first job after finishing said BS degree. I know that shouldn’t be a big deal, but it’s done a number on my self esteem, which wasn’t too much before all that. I do appreciate your stories, though. They help reinforce for me the fact that I’m not that weird. :-)
Yeah, that’s the thing. It really is too late for the things I do care about.
Too old to try to get into medicine, be a professional musician, etc.
Most of the things I did care about, acting for instance, I gave up to pursue what I thought was important.
And that failed.
Not to mention there was so much crap that happened to me. I feel sort of like some one who had a bad accident some times. I still think: yeah, it’s great I did more with my life than people might have thought I could. I mean if I got hurt enough it would be amazing I could count to ten still, right.
Yeah :(
I have trouble reconciling that. I don’t make compromises well I guess. The truth is I don’t even know what success feels like in anything so it’s easy for me to idealize it.
LOL! Thanks — I simply didn’t think it was already widespread and/or old enough to be present elsewhere on teh intart00bz. Also, I was supposed to go… :-]
The former! When you shoot all bubbles of a color off, the color doesn’t come back. This way you get fewer and fewer colors till you’re left with one, and then you can’t help winning. I’ve made it 5 times now.
:-)
Great rant!
Uh oh. Mr. Irrelevant (dm*bus) is leaving comments all over my blog. I expect an onslaught here soon.
RBDC can you IP block him? I did and he hasn’t popped up on my blog since so I guess it worked.
Yeah I can, but I kind of get a warm fuzzy feeling when he tries.
Or something like that.
The flip side to the age and grandkids issue – having them too young can also mean you can’t enjoy your grandkids. My parents were teenagers when they had me, and they can’t spent much time visiting us, vacationing with the grandkids, etc. because they’re still too darned busy working and trying to save up for their own retirement. :)
haha!
I was going to leave him around but he doesn’t even try to talk to me, just leaves copypasta and since my blog is pretty quiet it’s depressing so I just blocked him.
Yeah I barely post at my blog (rather that one of my blogs) any longer so when he posts it gives me an excuse to drive by and clean up.
he never engages me.
And he still owes me MY FINSIHED
Ugh, DM had been trolling my blog, too. I put on comment moderation and he hasn’t shown up again since.
Excellent point, Carlie. The age difference between generations in my wife’s family is larger than with my family. In her family, fun family trips were a common thing (it was neat taking those VHS home videos and putting them on DVDs). So if I have grandchildren later on, I’ll be retiring about the time that they’d be forming those important childhood memories. That put a smile on my face. Thank you. :-)
DM leaves random droppings at my blog about weekly… I have my comments moderated at this point (since i get very few and just don’t post that often anymore)… so they just get plopped into the bit bucket.
He’s severely mentally disturbed and in all honesty is one of the reasons I prefer not to use my real name as my internet presence. Not for me as much as my family.
Ol’Greg (@330):
I confess I feel awkward arguing with you about this, because I’ve copped to being old enough to be your father, and I don’t want to seem like a finger-wagging parent, but…
Too old? At 28? Why on Earth? It’s not even close to “too late” for any of that stuff. I’m sure there are plenty of first-year med students your age and older, and I personally know someone close to twice your age who went back to school to become a physician’s assistant. And while it might be too late to start becoming a classical instrumentalist or an opera singer, you can become any sort of popular musician at any time of life. Nevermind that I’ve heard some of your music, and you’re already good enough to be a professional musician if you turned your life in that direction.
And what about your art, which is fantastic, and of professional quality right now?
Acting? Spend an evening watching TV sometime soon: Unless you’re watching Gossip Girl and similar, I’m quite certain you’ll see more female characters your age and older than younger ones; they’re not being played by teenagers.
Like I say, I hate to sound like I’m scolding… but it just makes me sad to hear you (or anyone, really) talk like all your dreams are already past and gone, even at such a young age.
Haha Bill, thanks. I get pretty down because while I like my job to do anything well you have to be very tenacious and I still don’t know if *this* is something I want to be tenacious about.
Rachel Maddow shows Sarah Palin being an idiot yet again when Palin makes a statement about the “racial profiling myth” associated with the new Arizona immigration law.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#36838976
Too old to try to get into medicine, be a professional musician, etc.
I can’t comment on music, but medicine? 28 is too old?! The oldest person in my medical school class was in her early 50s (admittedly she was a psychologist looking for the training that would allow her to prescribe meds in her area so was in for very specific reasons, but still she graduated.) The “standard” age for admission to medical school is 22, but the range is quite large. Go for it if that’s what you want to do.
It’s what I’m trying to do, because once you’re tenured, a lot of problems won’t come up ever again!
(…Of course that’s oversimplified. For instance, in the USA they can’t directly fire specifically you if you’re tenured, but they can, and sometimes do, dissolve the entire department, and then you’re unemployed. And if the rent is so high that you can’t afford a bigger apartment when you need one, you need to start looking for a job again, too. But still.)
@Lynna:
That’s where I got this morning before it stopped loading, thanks for reminding me I have to watch the rest of the show.
Rev. BDC:
I don’t see ads at all, but B&H ads would just about kill me. There are so many lenses I want…
Mr. Fire:
It takes a long time, but eventually you’ll go to two colours. You can run the board out, top score is 140,190. You get a bonus of 140,190, giving you a score of 280,180.
Cicely:
Yep.
so I ordered some dried fruit for the boyfriend to make granola with, but it seems the people who pack the boxes got slightly confused.
order form: 1 bag of dried mangoes, 1 bag of dried pineapples, 1 sample bag
actual contents of box: 1 bag of dried mangoes, 1 bag of dried apples, 1 sample bag
*facepalm*
Hum… apples are the same as pineapples… aren’t they?
apples are the same as pineapples… aren’t they?
Nein, Ananas sind die gleiche Ding als Bananas.
No no, apples are the same as pineapples.
And red pandas are exactly the same as regular pandas, only red.
I first read that as: 1 bag of dried maggots, …
Methinks you do not want me packing your orders.
Just as a domain and a Windows Server domain are the same thing.
Actually they can, with a small number and very specific set of circumstances. Like propositioning your students to exchange sex for grades…
Anyway – work over. Talk to you guys later.
Nope, I’ve got some in the 170s range, and other people get way higher still.
Ironically, the higher your score, the longer it must have taken you to run the board out. You’re rewarded for almost failing for as long as possible.
Funnily enough, the red pandas are the regular ones, and the “giant pandas” are slightly odd bears instead. 1, 2.
Yeah, well.
In France, the joke goes, to lose tenure, you need to kill your boss, his wife, and their children.
Bill Dauphin, OM:
A coworker had an experiment on a good-sized balloon that experienced a failure at altitude. His experimental package free-fell from 125,000 feet. Apparently it made a dent in Texas.
Typical German second class train.
First class trains are much more comfortable.
Yeah, yeah. But you forget the salient fact: GERMANS HAVE TRAINS. What I wouldn’t give for train service here in the American midwest.
I have a 3 hour drive to the airport. It’s miserable. Even getting on a crowded train would be preferable (and to Amtrak, a crowded train would be infinitely preferable).
As I said previously, the pointy end of a boat is the bow. If both ends are pointy then there’s two bows. If, on the other hand, both ends are blunt, like this sailing pram, then there’s two sterns. It can get confusing at times but that’s the price one pays for exacting terminology.
Tune in again tomorrow and you’ll learn about how to use apostrophes to turn forecastle into fo’c’s’le.
David:
*sigh* I meant to say *my* highest, even though I’ve run the board 3 times.
Yes. The first one I ran out took a long time.
*points and laughs*
Minot may be the armpit of North Dakota, but it does have both an airport and Amtrak. Traveling to Minneapolis is a piece of cake: get on train, fall asleep, wake up in Minneapolis (and the same for the trip back) :-)
A quick linkdump before running errands:
For the politically inclined, large political infographics:
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/leftvright_US.html
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/leftvright_world.html
And a fun astronomical/musical toy:
http://www.whitevinyldesign.com/solarbeat/
The Boswash (aka Northeast Corridor) Amtrak line is less than a mile from my house. There’s a station the next town over. I can go by train to New York in two and a half hours for $44.00. In a couple of weeks my wife will be going to North Carolina by train for $159 (discounted) round trip. There are passenger trains still running in the US.
PZ:
Same here. The coal trains run all the time here and I always wish the passenger train system would make a comeback.
That;s the most useful thing about Texas I’ve evaaar heard: Safety range for high-altitude balloons.
The feeling you get when you clear a near-full screen with a few well-placed shots: soooo good.
Meh. When I think about it actually, Tetris has had people feeling that way for decades.
High-five to Caine, too, for being a fellow… popper?
Passenger trains have pretty much gone away in the US for a very simple reason, money. It’s not profitable to run passenger trains with a very few exceptions. The Northeast Corridor makes money for Amtrak, as does the West Coast (San-San) run from San Francisco to San Diego. But a train going from
West BumfukMorris, MN to Minneapolis is not going to make money.A train going from Dallas to Austin would make money though. So would Dallas to Houston, Houston to Austin as well. I really think it *would* make money here.
@PZ & train commenters
Aren’t there buses from the wherever to the airports? That still beats driving…
All the train comments got me to thinking about hobos for some reason. Stumbled on this tidbit from the hobo’s code of ethics. ca 1889:
Huh. Even those considered by most to be the lowest members of society had more integrity and moral fortitude than the Catholic church. Go figure.
I don’t know about other people but I will never take a bus between cities again. Within Dallas is ok, but going from here to Austin was one of the worst travel experiences of my life.
‘Tis (@360):
That’s fascinating! All this time I thought bow and stern corresponded to fore and aft; I had no idea they related to hull shape. (And FWIW, I bet not 1 in 10 laypeople, including casual boat owners, knows that, either!)
Is it the shape at the waterline that matters, or at the deck (e.g., what would you call the front end of a ferry that was “pointy” at the waterline but squared off a the deck for loading and unloading)?
So it’s a sweaty and unwashed armpit, then.
Mr. Fire:
That works. It’s like virtual bubble wrap.
since when is it the point of public transportation to make money?
PZ mentioned a bus once. But in my area, nope, either taxis or limos. About $70 plus tip since the taxis can’t pick up return fares…
Just got back from dinner and drinks with my Catholic friend(s).
Turns out she’s a woo-woo as well. Which I shoulda expected given her antivaxxiness. At least the dad is not in favour of letting the baby have (too many) ‘natural’ illnesses. I suggested he check out Whatstheharm, but I doubt he caught the name.
Bugger.
She was upset I called her an idiot.
Does anyone know anything about flushots in Japan? She claimed they’d done them mandatorily for kids to protect the old, but – according to her – kids suffered more from the shots than they would’ve from the flu. It sounds bunk to me, but it’s not a claim I’ve come across before.
Sorry, I buzzed and haven’t read the rest of the thread. We did have fun playing dominoes, though.
Ol’Greg, I concur. Bus travel sucks. I took the Greyhound from Boise to Fargo (and back). IIRC, it took 36 hours each way, stopping at every single pissant town even though at most of the stops no one got on or off the bus.
The front half of the bus was people traveling with children *shudder*. The back half of the bus seemed to be mostly people fresh out of prison. I felt much safer at the back of the bus. Thank FSM for Xa*ax and Johnny Walker; wouldn’t have survived without them.
Exactly. Lightning is the same a lightning bug as well.
The US Scouting movement bans atheists and gays? I didn’t know that.
Now that I do this doesn’t surprise me –
Organisation accused of cover-up as it seeks to keep thousands of ‘perversion files’ secret
Yeah. A good bounce off the edge feels oddly great as well.
Yes. I have no life.
this bubble addiction is beginning to look worrisome… don’t make me stage an intervention
MATTIR:
You haven’t been to ND, right? Bismarck didn’t have regular city buses until about 6 years ago. The only way I’m getting to the airport is driving.
As for trains in ‘bumfuck’, I don’t think it’s an automatic bad idea. I think they would be used, at least in my part of ND. I’d love to be able to take a train to Bismarck; I know my husband would like taking a train to Dickinson where he’s working now. As it is, he lives there during the week and only comes home on the weekend.
A majority of people don’t live close to where they work and being able to take a train would be a popular idea.
This has got to be one of the silliest things I’ve ever read – Wildlife documentaries infringe animals’ privacy, says report
I can’t believe I’m posting again so soon but I haven’t seen a link to this yet and I thought a few of you might enjoy it, It made me laugh. BTW if you are offended by off color language, do not click on the link (but than you are probably not reading this anyway). If you haven’t encountered Tim Minchin before you can check out more of his songs here.
Patriciao8 – You and PZ posted it at exactly the same time :)
Too late …
re my post above (#387) –
Very strange!
When I looked at PZ’s link to Minchin at about “7:12 PM” there were no comments and it was timed at 7:11. Now it says “6:11” and there are lots of comments timestamped before 7:11.
I’ve also noticed that my link in #385 is not a full link, but it’s what is in the Guardian’s address line. And it works. But when I try to post it in Facebook it stays up for a minute and then disappears.
Help!
(I suppose someone will tell me “It wouldn’t happen on a Mac”).
A couple years back, amid a string animal deaths due to poor care, the National Zoo in Washington, DC tried to refuse to release the results of a necropsy on a giraffe, citing the “privacy rights” of the dead giraffe. It didn’t work and attracted even more attention to the zoo’s problems.
There are several scouting organizations in the US. Girl Scouts and Spiral Scouts don’t ban gays or atheists. BSA bans gays, at least those who are out and normal. (Naturally those are the ones who are the most dangerous, not those horrid sneaky pedophile people.) BSA also bans atheists, but then bends over into weird contortions to make it impossible to be an “real atheist” (as a BSA official once told me). Despite massively different conceptions of a deity, UUs, pagans, non-Orthodox Jews and Buddhists are ok, but people who use the A-word are out. In a 1991 memo, the say the following about what god is:
The no-atheists requirement only applies if you want it to. You have to believe in something and call it god, even if all you mean by that is something along the lines of “the word “god” is a metaphor to describe the feeling that people have about how awe-inspiring or scary the world is.” If you call that Fred or the Law of Gravity, you’re right out – it’s like a definition of religion invented by Monty Python.
So I’m a Boy Scout leader (and the scourge of our local troop, entirely Christian, who think middle aged Jewish feminist pantheists are pretty horrid), but my husband, who has no time or inclination to be a scout leader, calls himself an atheist. This also gives me the chance at every opportunity to point out how stupid their policy is and that it’s insulting to our son and to his father to say that “no member can grow into the best kind of citizen without recognizing an obligation to God.”
There’s a tremendous amount of good stuff in scouting. I am cautiously optimistic that these policies will change as American society changes, which is why I put up with the bozos while also being annoyingly vocal about my disagreements. Interestingly the boys in the troop, all Christians, seem to like me a lot and are not nearly as close-minded or ignorant as their adult leaders.
@Caine –
Actually, I have been to ND, and even out into teeny little towns in the middle of the state. I was thinking Greyhound for the Morris to Minneapolis trip in lieu of the 3-hour drive.
Eh, just put some pine cones into the granola, same difference…
My last grocery delivery demonstrated that, once again, checking the option “No substitutions” is equivalent to appending a note reading “Go wild, use your imagination, if it starts with an “A”, it must be an artichoke”.
MATTIR:
Greyhound? Ugh. No. You couldn’t pay me to ‘go greyhound’. Once was enough for a lifetime.
Ring Tailed Lemurian said.
Patriciao8 – You and PZ posted it at exactly the same time :)
Bet it took me a lot longer to compose the link, which means I started first.
Bill Dauphin #373
Just for curiosity’s sake, Bill, would you be interested in some ocean-front property in Manitoba? Would you like to sit in a cabana in February, sipping a pina colada and watching the bikini-clad sunbathers soaking up the rays in Winnipeg? Just let me know and I’m sure I can line something up for you.
Patriciao8 – see my #387
Presumably you couldn’t see PZ’s post from an hour earlier when you entered the site. According to the timestamps it would have been top of the page then. All very odd. Maybe PZ has a time machine.
Ring Tailed Lemurian said
Patriciao8 – see my #387
Presumably you couldn’t see PZ’s post from an hour earlier when you entered the site.
Or I had just caught up on this thread and hadn’t checked the home page for awhile. No that can’t be it, I check it religiously.
And then
Maybe PZ has a time machine.
Can I go for a ride? Please, please?
(I’ll work on block quotes next)
Patricia
Patricia08 #386
It certainly is a catchy tune. It’ll never replace the Narwhal Song but it’s definitely an earworm.
A question regarding pretty birds…
As you all know, I’m Australian. And one thing Australia has is a lot of vibrant and beautiful birds. I can understand how sexual selection can lead to, say, males evolving elaborate traits and behaviours in order to win females. Where I’m having trouble in my understanding is where there is little or no (discernable) sexual dimorphism and both members of the species are incredibly vibrant. For example: rainbow lorikeets, eastern rosellas, king parrots.
In terms of trying to fit these birds into my understanding of evolution, I see one potential explanation: While females may select males who are more elaborate, the phenotypic expressions of those genes expresses itself in both species in a similar manner.
Anyone know anything about this?
‘Tis Himself One of my uncles was a whaler :( in the 1930’s and had a collection of narwhal tusks :( (and swordfish bills).
When I saw them as a child I thought the narwhal tusks were the most fabulous objects I’d ever seen.
Ol’Greg:
For awhile I had to travel back and forth to DC on my own dime. Sometimes I could get cheap flights on Southwest, but otherwise I took the bus. The only return trip left DC at about 10 pm, with a stop in Pittsburgh. The people who frequent the Pittsburgh bus station at 3 am are, shall we say, interesting.
Daughter was just complaining to dad about stupid people after reading scienceblogs, and he was explaining that often “there’s no evolutionary pressure against being stupid in our society.” To which 14 year old announced “You know, we could change that…” I know that it’s not a particularly accurate conception of evolutionary time, etc., but I think she’s going to skip this whole “tone” stage of life and go straight to forceful advocacy.
Au aontraire. My brother, at about 45, took up bagpiping. It now provides him a useful second income, and a guy with a professional recording set-up is trying to talk him into doing a CD.
I take back the comment about it being hard to become a professional musician when you start playing as an adult. I was thinking about Joshua Bell and the people I know who want to play in symphony orchestras. Other types of music are different.
I wonder if I could become a professional curler (curling team member? what’s the right term?) starting at 45. That would make the professional athlete age argument wrong as well.
*waves from Australia*
(I seem to have gone through pretty much exactly the same thought process, if for different reasons)
I hear that a lot, and at my workplace lots of nurses get themselves pregnant before 25.I dont understand it tho, it just ruins your plans for travelling, living etc.,and often the guy a woman is with at 23 is not necessarily one she wants to be with at 33 or 43….
I was 39, ex 36 when we had ours, and I still thought I wasn’t ready for it !
And always, always, always use Preview. *sigh*
Bubble Shooter is indeed a fine time-waster. Even though it cheats.
‘Tis (@395):
Well, damn!! Was that really nice?
<sigh> I’m usually not quite that credulous… but you’ve established yourself around here as the Master of All Things Nautical™, and I’ve generally come to expect esoteric and counterintuitive information from this crowd.
So you got me. But rest assured, fellow Nutmegger: When we finally get together for beers, my first one is going to be poured down your pants! ;^)
Okay, going to throw this out there: I want to buy a cheap netbook and run some kind of Linux (probably Ubuntu, since that sounds vaguely familiar and there appears to be lots of help guides on the ‘net) on it.
Is this a good idea? Pros, cons, thoughts, offers to help if I screw it up royally?
I’m just now learning guitar at 30. No intention of taking it to the professional level, and since I do have prior experience with music (played trumpet for 7 years and sang second tenor in the pop choir), it’s not like I’m setting a difficult standard for myself – just changing instruments. Mostly I want to play guitar because I enjoy singing. Sounds weird to just sit around singing, but if you’ve got a guitar for accompaniment then you’re okay. But I certainly don’t think I’ll ever play this or this. Oh, how about one more just cuz I love his songs so much (and that is probably my dream guitar in that vid).
These days, yes. It’s fine. Unless you have some windows-only apps you want to run, there’s going to be little problem with doing this. Only yesterday one of my workmates was showing me his netbook running the latest version of Ubuntu Netbook Edition – it’s really impressive. Worked fine with a 3G dongle too.
Get one that has a Linux flavor preinstalled if you can, would be my tip.Saves you having to set up a dual-boot, and if it’s very new hardware, the odd driver issue, esp. with wireless or TV tuner cards.
I find dual-boot on a laptop/netbook useful, Linux for anything internet-related, and Win if I want to play simple games or something, and also need Win because I can’t get Ubuntu to play with the wireless Vodafone dongle I use( I admit I haven’t looked into it at all, maybe there is a way).
Argh !!
KOPD, thanks for those links. My son is just getting started with guitar and I’m always looking for good stuff to show him.
‘Tis, the Spring issue of American Heritage Invention and Technology has an article on the sailboat Oracle, and some of the engineering details that went into it.
I don’t think I use any windows-only apps – what’s an example?
Really, all I need the netbook to have are things that access the internet, run my tweetdeck and some kind of word processor.
Katrina,
Do a search on that guy. He has some really great stuff out there.
Games. Most chat programs.
Then you should be more than okay.
Hello Thread!
I have to hand it to all of you dog owners – it’s some bit of work. I’ve been dog-sitting my friends’ lil pals for four days and don’t need an alarm clock (grrr) because they insist on getting me up. Early. Of course, they can’t use the litter box like kitties, so I don’t blame them. But lord, they’ve got me walking them around four, five times a day!.
And what a strange world of smell they live in. . . these creatures have to find a spot that’s good enough to poop on.
Cute little buggers and good company (the cats don’t think so), but definitely more work than my lazy self is ready for full time.
Kel wrote:
Cool. Really, the main reason for getting it is to have something portable to take with me on holidays and when I’m away from home for any length of time (i.e. sitting around backstage during theatre productions), and during something like the Fringe so I can write my reviews straight away rather than having to wait until I get home.
When I built the house Mrs. BigDumbChimp and I currently reside in, we build a doggie door to the back porch which goes to our fenced in back yard.
best. thing. ever.
KOPD, I’ve been listening to him ever since you posted. That harp-guitar is an amazing thing.
White privilege in America:
What if the Tea Party were black?
I take or took city the city bus and trains all the time, and lived in one of the more “dangerous” parts of Dallas for several years. I live south of the Trinity now, which is often used as a line of demarcation although I live far enough west to render that irrelevant.
I don’t mind *interesting* people at all. But when on the Greyhound bus I was going from Denton to Austin. It took me from 5am until late that evening after dark. While I was on the bus two bad things happened. One:
A man, very thin and slight, white, and with wire framed glasses sat next to me. He sat down abruptly and seemed agitated. He took his glasses off and took out a set of tiny screwdrivers and made imperceptible changes to the screws at the corners. He put his glasses back on and then told me that he worked for the bus company and that the driver had reason to believe I did not have a valid ticket. He then told me he needed to see my ticket. My address and contact info was on that ticket! Not to mention my destination!! I have no doubt that he was hoping to get that information in order to hurt me. I’m sorry if I’m profiling here but white guy who looks like he doesn’t need to ride a bus wants not to talk to me but to see where I might be alone and vulnerable = serial killer or rapist looking for poor girls no one will miss in my mind.
I told him the bus driver could come and tell me his damned self. He got up, very nervous and looking afraid of me, and left. Another girl, black girl as it happens about my age sat down next to me soon after and said “did he try to get your ticket?” and I told her he had. She said he had done the same thing to her and she was afraid so I said when we get to the next stop we should inform.
On that very same trip when I returned I found my roommate angry and upset. It seems the whole time she had been getting irate phone calls from a man who demanded to know why she was lying and keeping “us” apart. I traced the phone number and it turns out that it was from the place where you buy the tickets. The motherfucker who I had to give my damned phone number to in order to buy a ticket was some kind of freaky stalker who had thought he had a right to call me and then got pissed with my roommate for “hiding” me.
Horrible.
I have stumbled drunk and semi-suicidal down the alleys south of fair park and felt less in mortal danger.
I like your spawn.
Steam is about to become available for Mac, and I think Linux as well. And where there’s steam, there’s unlimited gaming :-)
if you need a linux for a netbook, I’d suggest EEEbuntu. It’s specifically designed for the little fuckers :-)
more specifically, for the Asus EEEpc, and apparently also with the Acer Aspire One
Hm, to answer my own comment above, if some Vodafone wireless dongle doesnt work out of the box in Linux, here is the holy grail.
Josh:
Ugh. Mine wouldn’t even dare to think of getting me up. They wait until I’m up. No accidents, either. I’d love to do the fenced yard/dog door thing, like Rev. BDC, but that’s not so simple with the smartass cats. Elvis always tries to artful dodge with the dogs as it is; if there was a dog door…
Got a question too, if I buy a prepaid SIM in Europe, will that work at all in my locked-to-local-Telco phone ?
Jadehawk wrote:
The one I’m looking at is an Acer Aspire One – so it sounds like EEEbuntu might be the way to go.
I may get one tomorrow, assuming the place that’s selling them as cheaply as they’re advertised actually has any at the store; it seems standard, at least in Australia, to heavily advertise products you don’t seem to keep more than one or two of in stock.
negentropyeater and Tis Himself,
Thanks for the perspective. Krugman is the only economist I read regularly, and I wanted an informed second opinion. :)
Another day of over-time at the Census, so I have barely read any of the Thread. I’ll probably be caught up by next week if I actually get a weekend…
isn’t that pretty much what the Black Panthers did in 1967 to the California State Assembly?
After being up until 2.30am studying, and having about five hours’ sleep, I now have two back-to-back classes today. (Yay for being a finalist.) So I won’t be appearing around these parts much.
And in a class yesterday, a tutor (who was talking about the intersection between human rights law and tort claims against public authorities, by way of background) just happened to mention, more than somewhat disapprovingly, the Conservatives’ manifesto commitment to repeal the Human Rights Act. (I think her words were something like “If Cameron gets in, we lose the Human Rights Act. So there might be no human rights law by the time you sit your exams.”) Sometimes it feels like the whole world is trying to guilt-trip me into not voting Tory. :-(
Feynmaniac @ #273 — I wrote my own damn essay in response.
SIWOTI … !!
Since I’ve recently finished with that Aristotlean-Thomist apologist I’m starting to think that there are really only two or three arguments for God out there; they just get reshuffled and reworded:
1) First causal (First three of Aquinas’ arguments)
2) Design inference/presupposition (Aquinas’ fifth way)
And, far more rarely outside of advanced theological logic-choppers:
3) Ontological (Aquinas’ fourth way)
Anyway, Nathan keeps harping on different versions of (1) and (2), without necessarily invoking Aquinas (which is a relief). Can he understand the errors he’s making? I’m willing to find out.
Nope, I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure you’ll need to unlock the phone first.
Owlmirror,
Yeah, read it. It was a good response.
As for arguments for God, 1) and 2) are definitely popular ones for apologists. There’s also the transcendental argument (used by facilis), but I haven’t seen it used much. Oh, and there’s also argument from beauty, morality, etc. but those aren’t even worth debating over.
Obligatory link: 666 Proofs of God’s Existence
I like 624, which O’Reilly actually used in his interview with Dawkins.
I had a feeling that might be the case.
The horror !! I might have to make an emergency IPhone purchase on arrival !!
:D
Ack! I’ve woken up in the middle of the night here and was doing some last minute packing… and I glanced in the mirror…
and my eye is all bloody. Gross! WTF?
All that differs is that the colors are inversed…
Music of the spheres :-) :-) :-)
tease
That you can’t see a difference doesn’t mean there isn’t any. At least sometimes, one sex has a bright ultraviolet patch somewhere and the other doesn’t.
LOL!
Are you actually bleeding, or have the blood vessels merely enlarged so the white of your eyes is now mostly red? The latter would, AFAIK, hint at lack of sleep, pollen allergies, or the like.
Okay, but that still doesn’t answer the problem I’m having. Why would both members of the species be like that as contrasted with the birds of paradise where the females are so drab in comparison?
In the king parrot, the male has an red head that matches with the body while the female has a green head that matches with the wing colour. Another example is the gang gang cockatoo male has a redish head while the female is completely grey. So there is some visible dimorphism present at least in those species.
Likely just a spontaneous conjunctival hemorrhage.It’ll get better.
Species recognition is another textbook explanation: it is not good when the females of different species are indistinguishable.
And, of course, I don’t see why sexual selection couldn’t go both ways; it appears to do so in humans, to put it mildly…
aphids can make their own essential nutrients called carotenoids
Thank science it’s Friday. I think my sister and her friends are coming down tomorrow. I hope it’s a real nice day out so we can go walk through the Mall, will be fun, I think.
I’ve never played Bubble Shooter, but is the basic idea like Peggle? Fairly simplistic shoot and eliminate objects, with absurdly overdone pretty graphics that make you feel terrific for having succeeded even though you know it’s manipulating you into playing more? (I mean, you win Peggle boards and you get a unicorn and a rainbow. Who doesn’t like unicorns and rainbows???? :) )
That…doesn’t sound…good. Eww?
Ol’Greg, do you have insurance? I’d be taking that to the doctor if there’s actual blood involved, or at least doing a call in to see if it’s something that needs seen. Although since you said you woke up quickly and noticed it, might be as simple as a bug bite near your eye once you were able to check it out more closely?
Unicorns AND Rainbows?
Yahweh, that’s who. He killed off uniorns with the Flood and created rainbows instead.
WTF!
Solid awesome.
I don’t know Peggle. The graphics are very simple; there are bubbles, at which you shoot more bubbles; if 3 or more come together that way, they burst; and there’s gravity, so everything that hangs in the air after the bubbles around it have burst bursts, too. (Other versions have such stuff actually falling down; that looks much better.) The side walls are reflective. In unpredictable intervals, after shots that haven’t burst any bubbles, varying numbers of rows of bubbles are added at the top (like in Tetris); when the lowest row of bubbles sinks below the lower end of the window, you lose. In this version, this can cause strange rearrangements in other rows, so sometimes bubbles burst when you don’t do anything.
In other words, just try.
I’m afraid they’re only virtual cakes though.
Peggle. It’s visual crack. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. (brought to you by the same people who made Plants v. Zombies)
For oddly addictive although kind of simple, Chocolatier is also a good one.
Games?
I like Plants V Zombies, and BookwormI
I really like puzzle inlay, but I’ve never seen it anywhere besides yahoo games.
They are just trying it on with you. Dogs, and cats, are like that. They know when someone is not entirely familiar with their routine and will take advantage.
Ol’ Greg,
Is there any pain associated with it? Are your eyes just red, or is there actual bleeding internal to the eye?
I’ve had a very odd condition of an arthritic reaction in the connective tissue of the eye–gives you a red eye, light sensitivity and a pain like a nail being driven into the eye socket. (All part of the wonderful aftermath of my immune system going crazy after having Lyme’s disease.) This condition is called Uveitis. Could also be conjunctivitis–which, while a pain in the ass, is less painful and clears up with antibiotics.
Probably a good idea to get it checked. Take care of yourself.
Ol’Greg – definitely get it checked, in all likelihood an opthalmologist will send you off with some antibiotic drops – which in most cases will probably work.
Not worth waiting it out to see if it goes away – I’ve done that a couple of times with things that seemed relatively minor. After ending up in hospital for a week the first time (and then a slave to big pharma for the rest of my life until modern medicine gets more awesome), and unable to eat solids or speak for 3 days the second time(because sometimes things come back where you really wouldn’t expect em), I’m all about pestering doctors as soon as anything untoward shows up – and when it comes to eyes it categorically isn’t worth the 1/100 risk (or whatever) that something serious is going on.
Re: Bubble Shooter – Ohhh, so it’s Bust-a-Move. I hate Bust-a-Move.
Re: PvZ – I have Plants vs. Zombies on my iPod. It is ridiculously addictive, and it is ridiculously awesome.
One of our techs is going to a client whose server has been giving me grief all week and I asked him to take care of something on that for me – totally forgetting I can log in and do that from here.
<headdesk />
Where I’m having trouble in my understanding is where there is little or no (discernable) sexual dimorphism and both members of the species are incredibly vibrant. For example: rainbow lorikeets, eastern rosellas, king parrots. – Kel, OM
My guesss is that this is an illustration of the “handicap principle”, which may also, at least partly, account for the male gaudiness in many species that you mention. Bright colours, loud calls, ritual behaviours, are all expensive in terms of energy expenditure and predation risk, and confer no advantage in food-gathering etc. However, displaying them says: “I’m so hard I can waste energy and take risks!”, hence attracting both sexual and social partners. They are “honest signals of quality”. In non-polygynous species, there will be mate choice by males as well as females (have you ever noticed that some women are better-looking than others?); but in highly social species, which I would guess these to be, physical “attractiveness” will also confer high status and encourage others to cooperate in non-sexual contexts.
Ewan R.,
Sorry about the borked link. Should have been:
Jadehawk @433
Damned good point. I hadn’t made that connection, and I should have since I attended a presentation by Bobby Seale back in ’99 explaining the birth of the Black Panther Party. I’d be willing to bet, however, that most Teabaggers don’t view the Black Panthers as patriots and heroes.
Thanks Knockgoats…. apologies to anyone else for what follows
The link first covers Schmeisser – who apparently is the poster child for the anti-GM movement, although it baffles me as to why, because the facts of the case are openly available to anyone in form of the court documents where the story that plays out is somewhat different to the story that Schmeisser puts out there.
Schmeisser claims GM seed got on his property accidentally and he is being punished for this.
Partially true.
GM seed got on his property accidentally, I have no good reason to doubt that.
However, after noticing that some canola around the borders of his field were roundup resistant schmeisser proceeded to spray ~3 acres of his crop with roundup, harvested and saved seed from plants which survived – seperately from the rest of his seed – and subsequently planted this seed on 1,000 acres of land.
This is where accidental presence completely falls apart. Schmeisser was not in the wrong until he selected for the gene, saved the seed containing the gene, and then planted over a vast tract of land. This was clearly a deliberate act.
Of the other cases mentioned sadly I can’t find anything around them (and anything I did find out internally I wouldn’t be allowed to share anyway – which is a pretty crappy state of affairs) suffice to say that the contention that Roush couldn’t go back to conventional is pretty silly (Roush still rants about Monsanto, but after settling out of court still purchases Monsanto seed – odd that he wouldn’t at least use pioneer or syngenta with monsanto traits – although perhaps not, shwos he is at least an astute businessman) and that as far as I can see all that has been done concerning Runyon farms is that they’re on a list of farmers who are ineligible to purchase the technology – which seems a touch heavyhanded although given that the Runyon’s don’t use GM tech also somewhat meaningless.
Huh? I need to download it first? And it wants to install an add-on? Nah. I’m too lazy for that. Procrastination shouldn’t turn into work :-þ
A download of 21.9 MB? No, thanks.
Also, I’m eating chocolate right now ^_^
(Household chocolate with “at least” 40 % cocoa. Nigh unsurpassable if rasped with my incisors.)
Plants v Zombies is loading.
@David Marjanovic:
Prepare to be thoroughly addicted to the most awesome game ever invented (oh and a word of caution – two rows of sunflowers)
Which exhibits in humans as behaviour: “Hold my beer and watch this!”, followed by the male doing something incredibly-fucking-dumb. Perhaps the not obviously dimorphic birds also “dimorph” behaviourally?
@cicely:
Or in my case ‘Look, look! I captured 300 Pokemon!’
No – the silver balls near your launcher show you how many chances you have left, before the bubbles advance. If a given shot doesn’t pop any bubbles, you lose one of those silver balls. And within that, each ‘set’ of chances cycles down, so you first get X chances, then X-1, then X-2, etc (kind of like the Predator’s self-destruct device :D). When you get down to 0, the cycle resets back to X chances. And I think the number of ‘penalty’ rows you receive when you exhaust a ‘set’ of shots is related to the number of colors you still have left: when you have only 2 colors, each penalty seems to advance halfway down the screen.
However, I still haven’t rationalized why it scrambles the rows when you advance, and which ones pop automatically. Except a treatise on this soon, though.
It’s the variable gravitational pull of the bubbles that irritates me.
David – Chocolatier I did the old-fashioned way, buying a big cardboard box at the store with a disc in it to install. Old school ftw! :p
It is some serious fun, though. It’s world travel, strategy, a bit of steampunk, and chocolate-making games where you get to shoot ingredients at a wheel. And there are dirigibles.
Kevin – do you have the Pokewalker yet? Because that is the most awesome fusion of gaming and exercise ever.
My self-destruct device will explode when the timer is at 1:17, when the hero is just putting his plan into operation.
This explains a lot about human relationships, too. :-(
@Carlie:
Yes, yes I do. It’s actually awesome for me because I have to walk four blocks from the Metro to where I work.
I play Scramble on Facebook. My highest score is 395. Any challengers?
::waits impatiently::
Apologies if someone already posted this: Strange fish species, found off the coast of Greenland. Nice photos with the story.
Walton@472,
It’s not all bad news! The handicap principle is also one explanation for the evolution of non-kin, non-reciprocal altruism.
However, after noticing that some canola around the borders of his field were roundup resistant schmeisser proceeded to spray ~3 acres of his crop with roundup, harvested and saved seed from plants which survived – seperately from the rest of his seed – and subsequently planted this seed on 1,000 acres of land. -Ewan R.
Morally, rather than legally, why shouldn’t he? He could not have been sued for doing the same with plants from a neighbour’s crop without the patent, and if plants grow on your land, why should you not do as you wish with them?
You ignore the main point of the article in any case – the way Monsanto systematically spies on farmers, encourages them to inform on neighbours, etc. In one of your earlier posts you made the point that most of those sued settle out of court because of the costs of mounting a defence – so it is quite plausible that people who are not actually at fault pay up. You work for a corrupt, murderous (w.r.t. their pollution-dumping of PCBs, heavy metals etc.), lying, spying bully, and you seem quite happy with that.
The Washington Post covers the story of cartoonists standing up for freedom of speech.
I wonder if this report covers the despicable treatment of Native Americans by mormons. The mormon mistreatment of Indians continued into the 1990s, with white mormon families taking Native American children, supposedly as an act of charity … charity that came with indoctrination into mormonism.
Link: http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/home/content/92454329.html
@Lynna, OM:
Good! And I hope more join in. We can’t be intimidated by idiocy and by the fringe. I like what Stone and Parker said – paraphrased “it’s messed up to think, oh, we can’t make fun of them because they’ll hurt us.”
Carlie:
Well, hell; why didn’t you say that in the first place? ;^)
Lynna:
My wife went through a period of playing FB Scramble obsessively, but she’s drifted away from it, I think. I dunno what her high score was. I never played it much myself, aside from occasionally looking over her shoulder and helping her.
Whyncha’ friend me? I’ve finally woken up to the Lists function, and I’m slowly building a list of Phellow Pharyngulans.
Sorry, Sili. I’m watching heddle dance his little dance right now.
Perhaps in the meantime, you could commiserate with me on the death of my sourdough starter :(
(neglecting it for 2 months will tend to do that).
Hey all. In light of the fact I’ll be out of the country as of tomorrow I figured it would be best just to go to a dr in case there might be infection.
Nope.
Just blood. Guess I scratched my eye somehow? Maybe in my sleep…
Anyway, thanks for your concern. Luckily it’s not that hideous since most of the blood is hidden by my eyelid.
@Ol’Greg
Ew.
But have fun!
It may be too far before the fact to mention this, but… I’ll be in the Washington, DC, area (Alexandria, VA, to be precise) for some training during the second full week in June (i.e., I’ll be arriving sometime Sunday, 6 June, and leaving either the following Friday evening or Saturday morning, depending on flight availability). I’ll be busy with my training during the days, but I’ll have my evenings free, and would love to meet up with any Pharyngulans who might be in the area for dinner, drinks, conversation, whatever (Nats game?). I probably won’t rent a car, so the range of my peregrinations will be pretty much limited to the places I can reasonably get to on the Metro (sorry, Baltimore).
Let me know if you’ll be around then and feel like getting together. You can find me on Facebook under the same name as here, or e-mail me: william DOT dauphin AT comcast DOT net.
@Bill Dauphin:
I live in the DC area. Would be neat to meet with some of you crazy Pharyngulites.
Homer Simpson rummages through souvenir cupboard unopened for 30 years. “Ah, a letter from my old pen pal! Someday I’ll reply, Osama.”
I planted 2 rows of sunflowers from the start, and later 2 rows of sun mushrooms :-)
A very exhausting game!!!
Is there anything that works against the American Football zombies? The cherry bomb doesn’t seem to harm them. They can be shot in the long run, and frozen, but the stink mushrooms don’t seem to bother them…
The wallnuts are ingenious X-D
Is, uh, will the free version be worth downloading after my thesis will be submitted?
Silver balls? I must look for them next time. :-]
Those that such a scramble leaves hanging in the air pop automatically.
What do you mean? Bubbles pop when they’re not connected to the top of the window by an unbroken (however convoluted!) string of bubbles.
* * *
Back to rummaging through GenBank. It’s incredible how many amphibians have had their mitochondrial genome sequenced twice in the last 5 years, and that’s not even what I’m primarily looking for.
@Bill & Kevin
Oh-oh-oh – me too! I’m in Alexandria several times a week.
No, the antichrist within you awoke a little bit earlier than expected. A viewing of The Brady Bunch should make it go away.
Since PZ linked to that Thunderoot video I’ve been rewatching the “Why do people laugh at creationist series”. Those are a real treat. I think when I finish with that I’ll watch AronRa’s “Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism” series again. I’m sure most of you have already watched both, but if you haven’t, do it! Everybody on both sides of the issue should be required to watch these.
@DM:
Cherry bombs should work, you have to plant them right next to the guys.
Potato mines are pretty good at stopping them, too – but you have to plant them ahead of time. A bit later you’ll get the ‘Squash’ plant, which is a lot better.
Plants v. Zombies music video and theme song. No, I’m serious. It can also be downloaded as an mp3 in English or Japanese.
@Carlie:
I love the Japanese version of that song, cause she sings so cutely, hee.
Oh shoot, I just showed off my less than manliness. *manly grunt* So! How bout that football? Yeah man, tough guy sport, that one!
Kevin – I think it sounds more natural in Japanese (or dare I say “organic”?)
@Carlie:
Haha.
I’m taking Japanese right now through Rosetta Stone – though it’s about time I take a refresher review on it since I haven’t even looked at it for a month (been ultra-busy.) I actually really like the language.
Re: Heddle:
I’m reading through that post that was linked to – and I noticed. Shala referenced Pun-Pun – the most powerful being in the Dungeons and Dragons universe!
I posted a link to that “what if the tea party were black” on my Facebook. My uncle fired back with “I’m sorry, I couldn’t find any story about the Tea Party using AK-47’s.” So I replied back with three links to news articles citing tea partiers with specifically AK-47’s (not to mention other guns as well), one from CNN. Same uncle that complained at me last week for saying “fuck” because “there’s kids that read this site!” I’m thinking I’ll do him a favor and make it so he doesn’t have to see my status updates and links. I wouldn’t want to offend him or make him think too hard.
@KOPD:
What is your uncle’s political disposition?
@Kevin:
He hasn’t advertised one.