April 2005 Archives

Some people just have too much free time, and I’m so glad they do because then the rest of us get to enjoy stuff like this. Essentially, one guy has calculated the weight and blood volume of the Lord Jesus based on the principle of transubstantiation.

Jesus once weighed at least 2.4 billion pounds and had 138 billion gallons of blood. At the rate Catholics and other who believe in transubstantiation are consuming him, there might not be anything left very soon. I guess it’s a good thing the world is going to end soon or we’d run out of Jesus.

From a book:

Imagine an alternate world identical to ours save one techno-historical change: videogames were invented and popularized before books. In this parallel universe, kids have been playing games for centuries預nd then these page-bound texts come along and suddenly they池e all the rage. What would the teachers, and the parents, and the cultural authorities have to say about this frenzy of reading? I suspect it would sound something like this:

Reading books chronically under-stimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying謡hich engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements傭ooks are simply a barren string of words on the page. Only a small portion of the brain devoted to processing written language is activated during reading, while games engage the full range of the sensory and motor cortices.

Isn’t that an interesting idea? the author, Steven Berlin Johnson, doesn’t actually believe that books are under-stimulating or that games are necessarily that good for you. It’s just something ge says in his new to get you thinking about “realize how selective and short-sighted most of the criticism about gaming is.”

At first glance it seems absurd to think that books could be terrible isolating while video games are so engaging, but after a few seconds it almost starts to make sense. I still think books are better than video games myself, but I like gaming too, once in a while. I think I will have to read this book of his.

Johnson also has a piece about TV in this week’s NY Times Magazine.

President John F. Kennedy on the separation of church and state.

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute — where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote — where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference … I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish — where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source — where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials.

I concur.

One more choice quote from Ann Coulter

I think we ought to nuke North Korea right now just to give the rest of the world a warning. Boom!… They’re amjor threat. I just think it would be fun to nuke them and have it be a warning to … the world.

… explain to me how this happens? My ice cubes have growths. Why?

Didn’t know they were different than non-Mormon ones? Well they’re not — that is other than being more interesting. Here’s the deal, Amazon has created a concordance for many of the books they sell and I thought it would be interesting to find out what Amazon had to say about the Book of Mormon. Here’s a brief summary:

• The most frequently used word: unto (3648)
• The second most frequently used word: shall (2483)
• Number of times the word God appears: 1702 (Lord? 1622)
• Word per ounce of text: 10,415

Amazon also calculates the Fog and Flesch-Kincaid indexes of texts. Both of these are basically difficulty measures. For the BOM the Fog index was 16.8, meaning that to read and understand the book one needs approximately 16.8 years of formal education; the Flesch-Kincaid index is 14, meaning by that metric is it suitable for someone in 14th grade.

Nope, not a dolphin, that’s, Kekaimalu, the wholphin!

The bloom in on the boom out west. The energy crisis seems to be spurring domestic production of natural gas, if not crude oil. Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico are all at the beginning of up to 40 years of a gas extortion bonanza.

Something I have never considered before: the man date. This is what you call it when two straight men get together for a date-like activity, e.g. dinner, trip to the museum, etc. The Times makes a more thorough effort at a definition:

Simply defined a man date is two heterosexual men socializing without the crutch of business or sports. It is two guys meeting for the kind of outing a straight man might reasonably arrange with a woman. Dining together across a table without the aid of a television is a man date; eating at a bar is not. Taking a walk in the park together is a man date; going for a jog is not. Attending the movie “Friday Night Lights” is a man date, but going to see the Jets play is definitely not.

[via the NY Times]

Why other airports don’t emulate the design of the DFW airport, I have never understood. It makes so much sense and seems to make a good use of space. Maybe I am wrong, but I know that the symmetry is really beautiful.

Don’t laugh, I know I am a geek.

[image via Google Maps]

Being a Republican is hard sometimes, especially living where I do. But it’s people like the PunditGuy that go out of their way to make Republicans so sound myopic and small minded. For instance, we all know Bill Nye, “The Science Guy,” from PBS. He makes great science programming for kids and now he has a new show targeted at adults as well as children called, “The Eyes of Nye.” The show deals with subjects ranging from astrobiology to to pseudoscience to nuclear energy.

PunditGuy is under the impression that Nye is actually a shill for those cooky super-liberals at PBS (probably the cousins and close friends of the out-there bleeding hearts over at NPR). He says:

Anytime I see a PBS produced program [sic] with the word “policy” in its description, I know what I’m in for. The telecast (or radio broadcast from NPR) will (99.99% of the time) permeate with a liberal slant, and any educational content will have to be filtered out from that perspective. […] The slipping in of biased liberal thinking is an art perfected by those who run PBS,especially if one isn’t concentrating on the words that are used. Adults can miss this stuff, and kids are defenseless from it.

We’re in serious danger here folks, we are smart enough to see the bias going on here and our children are going to be brainwashed into liberal oblivion. You have got to be kidding me!

Clearly PunditGuy is the one being myopic. He considers the following subjects safe:

• space exploration
• how electricity works
• the interoperability of molecules

However, these subjects are not safe, especially when “paired with a covert leftist agenda.”

• addiction (!)
• sex (!!)
• cloning (!!!)

I’m sorry, but this is too absurd. But, consider the source and his history. PG is the same guy that denounced PBS for making a cartoon with lesbian characters. Of course, only some liberal would attempt to show diversity, regardless of political and personal feelings.

As promised, the buprenorphine article.

Addicted to Heroin? Crack? OxyContin? As for about ever of malady these days, they now make a pill for that too. It’s called buprenorphine, bupe for short. It works a lot like methadone except with virtually no side effects of any kind. It is habit forming, but virtually impossible to become an addiction, it affects you like heroin, but can’t be overdosed on, instead you get a horrible case of nausea and vomit a lot.

It sounds like a miracle and it’s made by the friendly folks who disinfect your countertops and protect your wooly delicates. Reckitt Benckiser is the maker of bupe along with the purveyor of Lysol and Woolite.

I will link to the Wired article tomorrow, when it goes online. It’s fascinating to see how something so potentially wonderful can be so thoroughly ignored and underused. All thanks to a mixture of government incompetence, medical ill-caution, and ignorance.

So, I’m officially mad. Not in the oh my god I’m being consumed by water bugs but not really kind of mad. But the CompUSA has had my camera in for repair for two months now and it’s still not fixed yet kind of mad. Yeah, you read that — two months. Two months is long enough for me to be visibly pregnant (if that were biologically possible at this stage in the human experience, and thank the Lord it’s not). Enough time for a presidential recount to go from the voters, through the Florida state courts and on to the Supreme Court of the United States (and that’s government work, people).

WHERE IS MY CAMERA COMPUSA? They don’t know. They hate me for taking advantage of the extended warranty my Dad bought when he got me the camera a year ago. My theory is that my camera is sitting on a shelf in the bowels of CompUSA on 57th Street, tagged with a sign saying, “Ignore me.”

My life is an empty shell of picture-less depression because of you, CompUSA. I hope you are happy!