Naturally, the first place I thought to post this undirected thought process was on the /b/ (random) board of 4chan about 7 minutes ago, albeit with a significantly more obscene trailer.

Because I know when I think 4chan, I think intellectual clarity.

According to string theory, our entire universe is compromised of subatomic 1-dimensional strings vibrating at specific frequencies.

In addition, there's an idea out there that our Universe is just one of many floating on 'branes'.

Well, I was thinking... what if the ways in which gravity "distorts" our universe (e.g. massive objects like black holes and enormous stars have a huge distorting effect and smaller planets and planetoids and molecules have smaller and minute effects) is just the way in which the brane we're floating on is told how to "vibrate".

That would mean that, potentially, our entire universe appears as a 1-dimensional "string" to outside observers, and as only a limitlessly tiny portion of a whole other, much larger (from our perspective) universe.

That would also mean that the 1-dimensional strings WE percieve might be entire universes.

Alright, folks, try and stay with me here as we think through this and try to figure out why the United States public is getting fed up with the Bush administration and our current political "leaders"...

September 2001 you get these psychobastards who slam some planes into a couple of buildings and a field. This pisses a lot of people off, it's a uniting thing, symbolism, rally point, etc. Everyone says "GO GET 'EM BUSH" and Bush does. By golly, he says "this guy did it!" and he goes over there and this guy's a real bad guy so everyone is like "SEND A MOAB UP HIS HAIRLESS CORNHOLE!" and Bush is like 'no wait, guys, let's see if fuck fail Taliban will turn him over and save us some time, money, and lives'.

Fuck fail Taliban fuck fails and doesn't, so we're all like DIE MOFO and we kick their asses and send 'em packing and everyone is like "OH BOY, YAY!".

But Bumholeman goes running into some caves and hides and he's all like "OH SHI-!". So for awhile we're looking for him and then Bush is all like "ummmm I don't think about him much anymore" and American Public is sort of like "he say whut guy?". But they don't think so much of it because airplane bombs were years ago, so Bush is all like "SADDAM IS A BAD GUY, LET'S GO GET HIM!"

Then there's schism and smart people are like "asshole is he, threat he is not" and everyone else is like "shawt up or I'll punch ya'lls necks".

So then there's like 49% of people who are like "no wait, Bush is fuck fail now" and then 51% votes and he wins election this time and John Kerry cries and he's like "but I got shrapnels" but nobody cares so he goes back to the Senate and votes for some more stuff before he votes against it. Or maybe it was the other way around.

So anyway, people are like "hey man, whut with checking account? Savings account is fuck fail too!" and Bush is like "uuh" and then people are like "oh man too much debt no money, gotta bankrupt" and Bush is like "NO YOU PAY CORPORATIONS BECAUSE THEY'RE BETTER THAN YOU" and peolpe are like "whoa what?".

So then Katrina comes and is like WHOOOOSH BOOM! And bush is like 'lol nigers' and then people are like "man FEMA fuck fails too now". And Brown is like "lol horses are great" and Bush is like "good job!" and then people go "no, you fail".

Then Tom DeLay is like "YOA HERE'S SOME MONEY" and badass guy with a paper clip is like "YUO FREEZE!". Tom DeLay is like "Whoa whut, no I did nothing!" and then people are like "man you fuck fail corrupted n00b". And then Frist is like "OH SHI-" and then they notice him and are like "Yuo next n00b lol".

Then anyway, Bush is like "lol Miers" and people go "umm, whut" and then he has to withdraw her because she's illiterate. Then Lewis Libby gets indicted and Karl Rove is like "woo that close" and Bush is all :I "OH SHI-!"

And that's where we are today.

Questions?

Fiztgerald will be asking the grand jury to indict Lewis Libby in relation to the Plame fiasco. Nothing about Rove... yet.

I'm giving 3:1 odds that Bush does not fire any high-level White House official indicted in relation to the Plame investigation even though Scott McClellan orignally stated that Bush had said "anyone in this administration ... involved in it [the Plame identity leak] ... would no longer be in this [the Bush] administration".

You can place your bets at the open window in the lower half of the 9th circle of Hell. Mr Libby will be on display so you can look him over prior to the shootout (we regret to inform you that Mr. Rove will NOT be available for review as his lack of ethical standards has resulted in a permanent ban from heaven, hell, and most locales outside of Las Vegas and Washington D.C.).

BUSHCHENEY4LIFE: We're just like Elliot Ness's gang, except we wear the black hats!

It appears that Bush has "reluctantly" accepted the withdraw of Harriet Miers' nomination. No complete sources just yet. (Update: NPR News just reported the withdraw).

Last I had heard on NPR, Miers' questionaire had not been resubmitted by the close of the day yesterday, and it was unclear if the White House had met the midnight deadline at all.

Apparently not.

lol How do I exhausted political capital?

More bad news: Rove and/or Libby are probably going to get indicted. Is this out of touch America?

Update 2:
Heh, of the withdraw, Bush said:

It is clear that senators would not be satisfied until they gained access to internal documents concerning advice provided during her tenure at the White House -- disclosures that would undermine a president's ability to receive candid counsel

Yea, right. I guess the fact that she couldn't even fill in the preliminary take-home, open-book test without screwing it up had nothing to do with their reservations, right Cmdr. Assmonkey?

Witness firsthand the inability of a religionist to accept something as simple as the real definition of a common English word.

If whacko religionists can't even use a dictionary, what exactly is my motivation for thinking that they're capable of understanding something as complicate as evolutionary biology or concepts born of general relativity?

Sorry, folks. I think that a necessary part of being religous, especially being christian and ESPECIALLY being a christian in America, is preponderance of ignorance. I don't think it's unfair of me to complain about that, and I don't think it's unfair of me to look down on religion as a disease of the mind as a result.

Ok, maybe not quite, but that they're still being asses.

I'm always fascinated by how certain people always seem to think they're on the right side in a moral fight, but they never actually are. How, exactly, does one make a case for absolute morality forbidding this practice, even though it clearly is meant to harm and hold back individual workers to the benefit of people in a thriving company that are already obnoxiously rich?

Absolute morality == failure.
Wal-Mart Supporters == failure.

The last thing I bought there was one of their loss-leader products, a $73 air conditioning unit that they tried to hide so you'd buy one of the more expensive models. I've always wondered how long it would be until my refusal to shop at Wal-Mart resulted in an "Anti-Economic Terrorism" bill that required that at least x% of my income be used at Wal-Mart and related megastores on a yearly basis. I should start up a pool so people can wager on it.

Or, Current Shunts, Zirnike! Help!!!

Yes/no - does the capacitor wedged between the AGP slot and the PCI slot look blown to you too (cmp to the cappy next to the southbridge chip, they're the same cap)?

Update: I found two more of the same kind of cap on the board with bulges. One is sitting crooked, the other one also has a small brown patch at the top. I'm almost certain this is the problem now, and if it's not, it doesn't matter because it would be a matter of time until it was a problem. The bad board is the Albatron Anniversary Edition: PX845PEV - 800.

Sure does to me. Can anyone reccomend a good, reliable mobo to replace this thing with? I have P4 2.6C and some high quality XMS RAM running at DDR400, so I'm looking for an 800 FSB on the board. I guess I'll also use this as an excuse to upgrade to a PCI Express card since the Radeon 9000 is no longer performing to any type of reasonable level considering the ridiculous heat problem it's causing in my case.

In case you think that cappy isn't blown, the symptoms are:

+ No POST
+ Video feedback, but no signal (monitor light just blinks)
+ HDD LED is permanently lit unless I remove and IDE connector
+ No Power On LED
+ HDD sounds like it spins up
+ CD-RW just sits and blinks, DVD does nothing (can be opened)

I haven't tried pulling everything, but it won't POST when only vid card, RAM, and CPU are connected. I'll yank everything tonight and see if I at least get a no CPU error code.

I think I've been infected with BadCaps :( I guess I can't complain too much though. I got this mobo about two years ago for $65 and it's performed pretty well for a value model.

I want to live here, but everything is "contact us for a price".

"If you have to ask, you can't afford it" is just a euphemism for "we're targetting really stupid people with a lot of money". See, there are three types of rich people:

1) the ones who are rich, know it, and make sound decisions in order to remain rich.

2) the ones who are rich, know it, and flaunt it because they're brainless idiots trying to become poor through bad decision-making

3) the ones who are so offensively rich that it doesn't matter which path they take, nothing short of the collapse of society is going to change their wealth status.

There aren't many of any of these three, but #3 is by far the least common of the lot. I'm none of these three, so I will forgo this particular set of apartments - regardless of whether I can afford them or not - in favor of something a little more frugal.

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Over the last five years, I've regularly gone to a little pizza parlor around the corner for lunch. I can't afford it so much anymore now that I've become part of the disappearing middle class, but when I did go regularly I took joy in evaluating the people around me.

A number of folks who came in over the years were all quite obviously "leaders" of one caliber or another at their place of business. It has confounded me, however, to note the common qualities in many of these leaders over the years:

+ They tend to be less intelligent in some respects than you might expect. I regularly see prim and proper business people confounded by the simplest of technology, unable to make a decision between pushing a big red NO button and a big green YES button on a pinpad.

+ They have a tendency to be less suggestive/coercive than they are just plain bossy. Don't get me wrong, this usually works, but I'm always somewhat taken aback by their demanding nature and, even more so, by other people's willingness to jump when they demand it.

+ They are bad drivers. Many times it's not the frazzled mom with six kids in the car that blows the stop sign while she's westling with them. It's the suited silk-tie-wearing businessman who's just plain not paying attention or just apparently doesn't care.

I have no idea if this extends to other quarters such as the military or government, or if it even extends beyond my geographic boundaries, but it's interesting none-the-less.

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Nobody who ever had to make something from nothing says you can make something from nothing, but a lot of people who had something to start with and just don't recognize it do.

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The only difference between lying and making a mistake due to willful ignorance is that it makes it easier for your friends to make excuses for you after the fact if you do the latter.

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The people who are most willing to disrespect other people's beliefs are the ones who complain the most that other people disrespect their's.

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I think Wal-Mart is a perfect example of how easy it is to manipulate the gullible American public into doing things that are bad for it.

Everytime you buy something at Wal-Mart, odds are pretty good you're sending money to two places:

      1) Wal-Mart management
      2) China

The biggest price cuts for Wal-Mart don't come from innovative supply chains, they come from strong-arming suppliers so that demand is cut and churning out high volumes of low quality, low price product to compete. That means that every purchase at Wal-Mart either serves to solidify the damaged supply chain process (thus permanently undercutting the profits of American companies) or pump money away from America into the Chinese economy.

Since the U.S. is already desperately short on cash and stretching its credit with the world painfully thin - credit that is currently being used to support crucial government expenditures like the war in Iraq - the only thing you're doing by buying at Wal-Mart is bringing the looming credit crunch ever closer and making it that much more severe in the process.

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I think the media is at least partly to blame for the problems we have today with kids, but I also think that it's the parent's fault the media had that much power over their children in the first place.

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I think holocaust deniers have the same basic defect as anti-evolutionists, the holocaust deniers just apply their defect in a more socially destructive way.

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I think that the metric system is superior.

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There's a certain sick irony in venerating yourself as a democratic republic while you mock the will of the majority of the world.

glissade /glisaad, -sayd/ n. 1. a slide down a steep slope of snow or ice, typically on the feet with the support of an ice axe. 2. Ballet a gliding movement.

v. perform or move by means of a glissade.

-ORIGIN French, from glisser 'to slip, slide'

Your word for the day is brought to you by my new copy of the Compact Oxford English Dictionary.

lol capitalism

Not only that, while I was playing rebate russian roulette I wound up getting a thumb drive for the same price with twice the storage, so nyah.

Hey, that's capitalism. If you don't want people taking advantage of dickhead pricing schemes, don't use dickhead pricing schemes.

This is an accurate depiction of the back of the average LGFer's truck.

America: FUCK YEAH!

I'm mailing this groundbreaking scientific research to Scientific American as we speak!

I had forgotten that Geocities and FortuneCity were the appropriate places to post scientific materials for peer review.

Sometimes I think anti-evolutionists so vehemently deny the fact of evolution because they're mad that it apparently left them behind... idiots.

Just some random, general points that were encouraged by Eth's JE this morning. Feel free to discuss the more specific topics at hand over there.

Evolution Might Be Wrong
True. I might also be wrong when I say that clouds can float in the sky. But the odds that I'm wrong are so astonishingly poor that there's no common sense reason for anybody to pursue the possibility.

Evolution is like that. All evidence so far points to the current theories of evolution. It's not like a bunch of scientists just got together one day and decided to perpetrate this huge hoax and they've managed to get all members of people from the various related fields to play along. They looked at the evidence, made some predictions and some hypotheses, tested, found some more evidence and here we are. Everything we've found so far has pointed to the current evolutionary theories. Yes, we might be wrong on the whole, but the odds are so astonishingly small that this is the case that it's not worth actively pursuing. If some new, earth-shattering bit of evidence comes up that throws the whole thing into a tailspin, then new ideas will be formed. Until then, however, the evidence points to X, so X it is.

This is why evolution is a fact, just like it's a fact that clouds float in the sky. Fact does not imply 100% airproof, uncontestable truth, otherwise there would be no facts. Fact simply implies that it's so unlikely that the statement is false as to not be worth even thinking about the possibility.

There is no meaningful debate on Evolution
When it comes right down to it, the only place evolution is debated is in the popular and legal realms, and neither of those are science. It's like arguing the speed of light from a legal perspective. It really doesn't matter what the judge or the population thinks, the speed of light doesn't really change based on public and legal opinions. It's not like if the majority of the population believes that the speed of light is half what it really is then the light from the sun is going to slow down and take twice as long to reach earth. Just like evolution, the speed of light doesn't care what you think. It just is, and nothing you can do will ever change that.

Random list of discredit anti-evolutionist arguments
Post your favorite anti-evolution argument and I'll explain why it's invalid. In the meantime, here's a common list:

1) Carbon dating is not accurate
This is a partial statement. Carbon dating is inaccurate in some respects. For example, you can't pull a fossil out of deep ocean water and carbon date it because the ocean retains a great deal of carbon and you'll get an inaccurate result. Fortunately, there are many different types of dating methods that are used for different situations depending on what was found where.

2) The sun is shrinking
The sun is not shrinking. The argument alone is fallacious, but that doesn't even matter because the information is just plain fiction.

The "argument" stems from a "finding" more than a quarter of a century old by John Eddy and Aram Boornazian at the American Astronomical Society meeting in 1979. The findings were immediately disputed and have since been determined to be the results of flawed instrumentation. Studies attempting to corroborate the findings found, respectively, 1/4 and 1/7 of the expected amount of shrinkage predicted by Eddy and Boornazian's results. It did, however, lead to the finding that the sun's diameter does shrink and expand on a regular cycle of about a 1/4 of a millenium.

Even if the findings had been inaccurate, it would still be a fallacy since it automatically assumes that because the sun was shrinking at the point in time of the discovery, it must have always been shrinking. There is, of course, no reason to believe this to be true.

3) Various "hoax" or "inaccurate" fossil records
For every one hoax there are hundreds if not thousands of validated fossil records. A handful of mistakes/hoaxes - all eventually discredited by science, ironically - does not invalidate the evidence provided by all the valid records.

4) The Watchmaker Analogy
This is perhaps one of the more maddening "arguments" presented, because it is clearly a false analogy. It was originally put forward by Cicero using a sundial and the shadow as an example (the movement of time is driven by intelligence) and then updated by William Paley using a watch. The argument goes:

a) A watch is complex
b) A watch has a watchmaker
c) Life is complex
d) Life must have a creator

You cannot, of course, logically infer that because two objects share one trait, they must naturally share another as a matter of course. This is easily illustrated by "proving" that money grows on trees:

a) Leaves have complex cellulite structures.
b) Leaves grow on trees
c) Money has complex cellulite structures.
d) Money must grow on trees

Meh. Abrupt journal entry end here.

Naturally.

I have been photo-shopping Jack Thompson pictures over at 4chan for much of the evening. It is surprisingly fun and good for unwinding. So far I have Emo-Jack and Potato-Head-Jack. Gonna go for goth Jack next, or maybe try to slip him into one of the skins from a GTA game just for the irony.