While popping around Flickr, I came across a forum thread. It concerns the process of “blocking” another user of Flickr from viewing your photos or emailing you. It’s really quite simple. You click “Block” and voila! No bothering anymore by whatever user it happened to be.
This guy doesn’t seem to get it. The thread is quite amusing.
These short rules will arm you in your fight against woo-woo mysticism, anti-second-law patents, and fantastic claims. It is good education for anyone.
I am a huge fan of Escape Pod, a Science Fiction podcast published by Steve Eley. Its intent is to deliver an audio version of a science fiction short story every week. It is one of my favorite podcasts, and I listen religiously.
Give it a try, and if you like it well enough, donate to it!
This is me taking pictures of Psyche while she’s trying to sleep. I like this one best:
Although quite a few people seem to like this one better:
The Armageddon will destroy The Internet. At least, that’s my thought on the topic.
This random thought came out of a random websearch using the terms “Bicycle” and “Armageddon”, the story behind which is really too involved to cover here. Anyhow, I came across this site, which asked, “Would the Internet survive Armageddon?” This question was asked in the context of “during a post-apocalyptic world, what services could reasonably be expected to survive?”
My opinion arises from the term “Armageddon” which has one very specific connotation: The End of the Biblical World. I think if the final battle is fought between God and Satan, the internet is going to be a casualty.
Outside my pedantic stance on the term “Armageddon” the question posed at the link has some good answers. If you’re interested in writing post apocalyptic fiction, I recommend you read it.
Thanks be that Barry Bonds didn’t go through a drought like last week. If he had, he might not have hit his 756th home run untill next week when San Francisco would have been here, in Atlanta, home of Hank Aaron, and previous holder of the Career Home Run record. That would have depressed me. Especially because Hank Aaron beat the previous record here, at Fulton County Stadium. The stadium is gone, but the wall section where his ball went over exists, still.
Do I care that Barry Bonds probably did steroids? Yes. Do I think it matters? No. The culture in baseball has allowed it to happen, so it boils down to an institutional fault. What this means is that the next time the record is broken, it will be much more exciting.
This deserves a Holy Crap! Check out the MRI of a 55 year old woman who has had a pencil lodged in her brain since age four.
routed through pharyngula
I learned about Twitter last spring, when it was mentioned during Podcamp Atlanta (which was a rockin’ good time). Twitter is an social networking protocol that lets you post a 140 character update about what you’re doing right now. For example, I posted this morning that I was “Developing traffic volume growth projections for a project” which is the first thing I’m doing today. You can see it there, over in the sidebar, under my picture. Perhaps later, I’ll post that I’m “eating lunch” or “becoming addicted to social networking.” The point is, that people who care can follow what you’re up to, as you choose to post it.
At the moment, I’m unsure of the utility. I don’t know if any of my other friends are on Twitter (and Twitter doesn’t seem to have a search facility, but I haven’t thoroughly examined it yet), which would seriously reduce my dedication. I’ll keep you informed.
Today is the anniversary of the first combat use of a nuclear weapon. Hiroshima, Japan was destroyed by “Little Boy”, a gun-method uranium weapon with an approximate yield of 12 kilotons of TNT (for comparison, the largest weapon ever detonated was a 50 megaton hydrogen fusion weapon, 4,000 times greater). As an event to remember, it’s definitely of mixed emotion. On the one hand, it helped to end World War II quicker, and with fewer casualties; on the other hand, it was a horrific incident that caused humongous suffering amongst the population. It can be (and has been) argued that although the use of two atomic weapons on Japan was devastating in their individual explosive yields and lasting after-effects, the suffering and devastation caused by all of the conventional bombing and fire-bombing during the war was much higher. I’m not going to choose a side on this one. I’d have to study it a lot more.
One of the things I regret not doing while I lived in Texas was to visit the Trinity Site, the location of the first test of an atomic weapon. It is located on the grounds of White Sands Missile Range, and is therefore not open to the public except for two days a year: the first Saturdays of October and April. Whatever your opinions regarding nuclear weapons, the location is significant historically, militarily, and from an engineering standpoint.
A while back, a person from League City, Texas, chronicled his radioactive vacation. It’s worth the read.
I clicked through to Is This Your Name to find out what was going on with “Bill Ruhsam”. Amusingly, I found out that I don’t exist…
3. According to the US Census Bureau°, 0.112% of US residents have the first name ‘Bill’ and fewer than 0.001% have the surname ‘Ruhsam’. The US has around 300 million residents, so we guesstimate there are 0 ‘Bill Ruhsam’s.
Yay! There are zero of me!
What’s neat with that site was I found some people who were citing my flickr photos without my previous knowledge. Cool.
There is no knowing the Evil Eyebrow
Twenty Twenty-Five
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