Wow: 7-7-7 already. Seems like just a year ago it was 6-6-6.
Of course, 07-07-07 is really 2007-07-07, so there's no actual significance to it, but at least all the people who don't know the real way to write dates will have one day when they won't confuse each other by writing them different ways.
In conjunction with my Slashdot comment feeds, now I have a feed for CmdrTaco's comments:
The idea that people "need" to be taught evolutionary origins is nothing but petty bigotry.
The rationale for this mind-control and enslavement is the idea that people who believe in creationism are irrational and therefore incapable of making a positive contribution to the great "we" -- society. I note that this assumes two things: that creationism is irrational (I'll grant that many folks think this is proved, not assumed), and that there is some objective standard of how human lives should be spent contributing to society, some standard which says that a life spent one way is "right" while another way is "wrong," measuring according to some metric that I can't fathom about what's "best" for "all" (for sufficient values of "all" that actually, as far as I can see, actually translate to "some").
So let me give you those two points for the moment. I'm going to tentatively agree that creationism is irrational and that it is important to make sure that everyone is rational so that they can "contribute" to "society" or whatever the heck it is you hope to achieve out of having everyone aware of evolution.
Here's what you're missing: nobody is 100% rational, 100% of the time, on 100% of issues. It's not necessary for everybody to understand every piece of truth in order to function productively.
A lot of smoke is blown about how if kids aren't taught evolution they won't be able to be scientifically productive. Horse manure. It ain't so. You can have wrong ideas about what happened 7000 years ago, or 4.5 billion years ago, and still think quite rationally and scientifically about other things.
There's not a lick of evidence provided for the idea that kids need to be taught evolution in order to grow up capable of making a positive contribution to their society or their country. It's something we're just supposed to accept because men of bigoted faith like Richard Dawkins say so. And I'm not willing to see people enslaved (have their freedom taken away in the form of being forced to submit to compulsory reeducation of ideas their parents quite legally believed) just because Richard Dawkins is a bigot.
When I was in first grade my teachers encouraged other students to make fun of me and shame me because I couldn't crayon within the lines of coloring pages. This was cruel abuse, but I realize now it's symptomatic. School is systematically teaching the values we vote on, and today it's created a society that ridicules and shames people of faith, with the bigoted idea that they are 100% irrational.
Speaking of which, this is why I think a school system that is run by democracy is bound to failure. We could vote to teach everyone evolution, but we could just as well vote to teach them the Flying Spaghetti Monster. We could vote to teach everyone that homosexuality is acceptable, or we could vote to teach that such people should be stoned. If you really want your kids to be educated according to the consensus of scientists, then the absolute last thing that you should want is to have them in an educational institution run by a democracy.
(This is also a large part of why I won't vote. Remember when you're casting your vote next year in November about who is going to be my tyrant and king for the next four years and overrule the free choices of me and my children -- that I will not be making any such choice for you. I would never treat you that way.)
They may have me on the marketing, there. Probably would've appealed to me a little more back when I was in college, but I didn't drink energy drinks, then.
I wonder what it tastes like.
I have had zero interest in Digg until this. That's sweet. They are beating Wikipedia all to pieces on this type of thing, too.
Just had my birthday, and Sarah got me something I've been wanting for a long time: the professor cube. The professor cube is the Rubik's cube, only 5x5x5 instead of the original 3x3x3. Only Sarah didn't buy me the Rubik's brand cube. She got the deluxe tiled version manufactured by Meffert's puzzles.
Older Rubik's cubes had labels that decayed over time (I'm sitting at my desk looking at my Revenge cube (4x4x4) from the 80's and can testify to that. Overall, they held up well, but the glue allowed them to slide, and the labels eventually protruded over joints, and therefore edges of the labels broke off. The situation is far worse if you ever remove one of the labels; they won't go back on permanently. Labels on the newer cubes are far, far worse. They are basically pieces of paper with a thin bit of plastic laminating them. It doesn't take much use at all before the plastic peels off, exposing the paper, which then begins to be destroyed through normal use.
The Meffert's tiled cubes use colored plastic tiles instead of labels. The good news is these tiles ought to be indestructible relative to the labels. The bad news is the glue used to put them on doesn't seem to be very good and some fell off immediately, but that's good news because I can find a better glue and put them back on, and in the process I can make the colors on this cube match my preferred color alignment. (The six colors on the cube can be arranged differently. Most of my favorite cubes from the 80's had blue opposite white. But there were also many with blue opposite green, and today I think 100% of Rubik-brand cubes are blue opposite green, which annoys me. This will be the first time I can really rearrange a cube to suit myself. It's also the first time I've seen a cube which did not have red opposite orange.)
I'm also going to try to actually solve this cube. I learned to solve the original Rubik's cube at age 6-7 from a book my parents got me with the cube. Have solved it millions of times since; repeating the process is enjoyable. My grandparents bought me the Revenge in the 80's. I tried and tried but could not figure it out on my own. Around 2000 I looked up various Revenge solutions online and ended up selecting a handful of extra moves from them to add to my 3x3x3 solution and making solving the Revenge possible. But with the Professor, I'm going to actually fight it out until I'm most or all of the way there, I think. There's a big difference between trying at 29 and trying at 11. Plus, learning the Revenge gave me a lot of thinking tools I need.
I'm taking the approach of joining all 9 center tiles of each side together, followed by joining all three subcubes of each edge. This will give me the equivalent of a very solvable 3x3x3. In fact it should be easier than the 4x4x4 is at the corresponding state, because even-numbered cubes can exhibit parity errors in the process of rejoining the middle pieces, reaching states a 3x3x3 cube cannot reach.
I like Ron Paul for many reasons. He's always made sense to me. But today he says something that's just completely wrong and out of touch:
though everyone now accepts that the original justifications for invading Iraq were not legitimate
Regardless of what I think about the war, it's clear that not everybody believes this, as he asserted.
For those who don't know, Slashdot subscribers have been able to peek into the Slashdot submission queue for awhile in a neat feature known as the Firehose. I don't use the Firehose very often, but it's nice to have it there, and it's one reason I'm still a Slashdot subscriber.
So I peeked in today, and noticed that there's now a Firehose feed. Not sure if I'd ever want to subscribe, but that's pretty cool.
Attention, media. Get a clue. This is not the "worst mass killing" in US history. Try cracking a history book. Or reading a newspaper that's more than five years old.
This Virginia school shooting is being billed as the worst episode of gun violence in our nation's history. That's only because the people writing the headlines can't read, can't think, and can't remember anything that occurred before the last five years.
Take, for example, the Mountain Meadows massacre. Somehow 100 to 140 deaths sounds a little more serious than 33. I could also mention Indian wars, rebellions, and who knows how many other incidents.
I'm with pudge: it was a terrible tragedy, but to be honest, it doesn't affect me near as much as the media says it should. Pretending it has more historical significance than it does doesn't help that.
A political party trumps up evidence to support its own agenda and draw the United States into a perpetual conflict which can never be won, all the while expanding the police state and increasing its own power over the daily lives of its citizens? You don't say!
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." - Voltaire
