Yep

"To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin."
[Cardinal Bellarmino 1615, during the trial of Galileo]

"It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved."
[Galileo Galilei, "The Authority of Scripture in Philosophical Controversies"]

Extra Flaky

I did some laundry this morning only to discover that there must have been kleenex in a pocket somewhere in the load that included all the black socks and dark stuff. So I guess I'll be a little extra flaky for the duration of this cycle because I'm not going to wash it all again. How interesting. (So you didn't have to say it.)

Reinventing the Sacred

This is well worth the read. I wonder what ever happened to my copy of Daniel J. Boorstin's The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination. But I just don't get all the emoting everyone seems to think is so hot. I think it will pass like hoola-hoops but leave a bloody mess.

Loon Camps

On "Christian" camps and the dangerous people who give up the capacity for independent thought by never listening to or reading anything but filtered and single topic information. They swallow whole everything wrapped in religion. More>>>

PHS Mega-Reunion - The Movie

Thanks to all my sponsors, I got out of town this past week end and went to my high school reunion. It is amazing to see well over 300 folks show up from our little home town of Pecos, Texas. We had a good time!

Astrology Sucks

I've always wondered why astrologers couldn't pick winning lotto numbers. Then, I remembered that, like preachers, they don't have to, even more so than pastors.

Some of the most popular figures in the field, such as Russell Grant, Mystic Meg and Shelley von Strunckel, can earn £600,000 or more a year.

A single profitable astrology website can be worth as much as £50 million.

When the Daily Mail discovered that its expert on the zodiac, Jonathan Cainer, was about to leave the newspaper in 1999, it reportedly offered him a £1 million salary and a £1 million bonus to stay. He still preferred the offer at the Daily Express: no salary but all the money from his telephone lines.

From a paying the bills perspective, I sometimes wish I was crooked enough to do one or the other of those "professions." It looks like a sweet life if you don't mind having no integrity at all, that is. It is very sad that so many people would rather imagine there to be spirits and spiritual supernature rather than to actually think and demand it of others.

Moving on up is just like chocolate.

Just thinking that one is moving up or down in status or worth and such has implications for actual health and happiness. But social status means more to some than to others. If moving up makes you extremely excited, just thinking that you are sliding can be devastating to you. Some chill is good. Moreaboutit>>here.

I want French health care.

One of the killers of American productivity is lack of health care and the stress of knowing it. When someone is lucky enough to find insurance, for example, the cost is high, coverage is restricted to things you are not sick with, and co-pays can be devastating. "Insurance" companies want to collect premiums and it is in their best interest not to pay the bills. Insurance companies will not insure pre-existing conditions even if you don't know you have them when you sign up. The sickest people get the least insurance. In France, the sickest people get the most coverage. We should remove the word "insurance" from health care system. When you get my age, "supplemental insurance" is all you get in addition to medi-care, if you live that long and are rich enough, that is. France has the best health care in the world and we should go for it to lower the stress level and up productivity of Americans. It would pay for itself. Readaboutit>>

Now I've done it.

My pile of computers have been languishing away with little attention lately. Recently, I attended a Microsoft get-together and received a bunch of new software and some junk email in exchange for my time. It has been a couple of years since I attended one of those events and I never got around to installing the software I got that time. Ben had the need to upgrade his computer to Vista in order to run new software his job uses and that gave me the bug to get my stuff up to date. It looked like he had little trouble with his upgrade.

So, yesterday I got busy and sorted out everything. I started with computer number two which was running Ubuntu Linux from a 320 G drive. I wanted that drive to be in computer number 1. So I removed that drive and reconnected the original drive and fired up computer number 2. It has Windows XP plus Office 2003 Pro on that drive (80 G) and was about a year behind in updates. So, I got it going on updates while I installed Office 2007 (from the meeting 2 yrs. ago) on computer number one. Then I did a complete backup of computer number one. After the backup of computer number one finished, I connected drive number two in it's belly and disconnected drive number one. Then I restored the entire backup to that drive so I would have two disks with configured and running copies of the XP Pro install that was running on computer number one.

By now, computer number two is finished with updates. I downloaded MS Virtual PC and installed it on computer number two. I started up Virtual PC and fed it the install disk for Ubuntu and switched my attention back to computer number one.

Now the restore is finished and all I had to do for the new image was to start it up and reactivate it with MotherShip's permission. Then I installed the 320 G drive into the belly of computer number one and proceeded to ghost the OS to the new drive. I checked on the virtual pc Ubuntu install on computer number 2 - it wasn't pretty. So back to c 1; I disconnected the 160 G drive and started the computer up running from the 320 G drive and reactivated that image again with MS' blessing. I'll bet back to virtual pc another day.

Now it's time to install Vista Ultimate on c 1. I got the activation key online and started the install. Everything seemed to go pretty smoothly. After the autopilot was engaged I watched SNL long enough to figure out it was a re-run then hit the sack. When I got up this morning, Vista was mostly installed and took only a couple of minutes and one restart for it to be running.

All the apps seem to be okay and the only mysteries I've encountered, so far, are that some strange application get's shut down because it won't run at start up and I had to go get the latest video driver. Then I opened the event logs and they are full of crap. Maybe I'll get around to figuring out what that's all about in a few days but for now everything is working pretty well and I like the layout.

So I guess it went pretty smoothly. But I'm not sure it was worth the trip to the show if it had not been for the other goodies I picked up. At least I got my hardware pretty well sorted out the way I want it.

In case anyone was were wondering.

Not many stocks go up 20% a year.

Google did that in ONE DAY today!

Notes On Virginia

I love Google books.

Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth. Let us reflect that it is inhabited by a thousand millions of people. That these profess probably a thousand different systems of religion. That ours is hut one of that thousand. That if there be but one right, and ours that one, we should wish to see the 999 wandering sects gathered into the fold of truth. But against such a majority we cannot effect this by force. Reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free enquiry must be indulged ; and how can we wish others to endulge it while we refuse it ourselves.

Thomas Jefferson

9550 years old

The world's oldest recorded tree is a 9,550 year old spruce in the Dalarna province of Sweden.

On playing the hand life deals you and deathbed conversions.

Via Randy Paucsh

Great Speech!

Tim Robbins

We could have done better.

Via Posters

Even a bad job is better than goofing off.

It is pretty well established that people, generally, aren't very good at knowing what will make them happy. Almost all the the happiest moments in our lives occur by accident. But there are people working on the problem of upping your chances. Here are 12 tips to making your life happier at least during the interval between those happiest of accidents. And about that job.

Me Need More School

There used to be a way to check the readability of prose from within Word. I can't find it now. I didn't look very hard but the abc tool didn't work or I'm too dumb to use it. It is too easy to find that kind of thing on the web. So, I paste stuff in here or run my blog through something like this from time to time. I'm still in the 6th-7th (Flesch–Kincaid) grade. I think that is about the same or a little less than my writing used to rank. Most of my reads and most of the people that I correspond with, on any scale at all, come in way out there in the 12th - 15th grade. I need more syllables.

Expelled Exposed!

Expelled

From Time To Time

Evolved Minds

What do irrationality, superstition and math have to do with each other? Suppose you take a test for a certain uncommon form of cancer. One that affects one person in ten thousand and you get a positive result for the cancer using a test that is 98 percent reliable. What are the chances that you have that cancer? Well if you figured you are doomed instead of knowing statistically that your chances of having the disease is less than half a percent, You could use a bush up on your arithmetic and Ronald de Sousa can help.

The sky was angry around here this morning.

Can we legislate a good education?

Before a church is allowed to open it's doors, it should be required that the Constitution be posted prominently throughout the building and that every member has passed a test demonstrating that they have at least a working knowledge of it's concepts.

"A 2006 survey found that Americans know more about 'The Simpsons' and 'American Idol' than the rights included in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Recent actions by state legislators in Missouri suggest that such ignorance about the First Amendment exists even among elected officials. Missouri legislators want voters to consider a constitutional amendment explaining that children have the right to pray in school or read the Bible on the school bus."

--Brian Kaylor, a Baptist minister and columnist, pointing out that conservative lawmakers in the Missouri Legislature who want to legislate a "right to pray" ignore the fact that students already have that right.

Full story

Expelled; The Stench of Ben Stein

So far, all the reviews I seen say Expelled sucks and Ben Stein is getting hammered pretty badly from just about every direction. Picture Ben Stein as Jack Nicholson, shouting, "You can't handle the truth!"

If you go see it, buy some stupid offset credits. They work like carbon offsets but help reduce the total stupidity in the world.

Wilkins Gets It Right

....next time you hear someone say that religion and science do not conflict, the key question to ask is: which religion?

!#!!&@$%%^

The idea of holding a presidential candidate debate on the role of science in national policy has been trumped by faith. The pandering sluts.

Doing God's Work

I've been following the unraveling of the Mormon mission in Eldorado, TX. Over 500 women and children have been removed from the property so far according to this report. It has long been known that the place was another stink hole of religion but no one has had the guts to challenge them. There are lots of reasons these places land in sparsely populated areas usually surrounded by communities full of god fearin' folk. They know there is a psychological barrier to challenging anything with holy in it's pr already strongly in place. They are places where there might be a public challenge to something at a city council meeting if it looked like it was going to cost anything but no one will ever stand in the pews and challenge anyone in a pulpit. So this kind of stuff goes on until the stench is so great that law enforcement starts seeing it as a huge liability and even then nothing much happens until something like a child gets on record. The record then becomes a time-bomb for law enforcement and we get some action. Often so late that thousands have been hurt.

This cesspool is near San Angelo. The newspaper in San Angelo has a website with most of the articles and letters and such from the print editions online. They allow comments online where people respond with their opinions on just about everything imaginable. There are a few regular characters that post there who make everything god's business. The paper has been running stories on this since it started last Thursday. But strangely almost none of the most vocal religious zealots have made one peep on this. There are many comments on the articles but except for one or two, they are not the same kind or by the same nicknames as the regular god thugs that jump on just about everything else. Another thing I noticed right away was that comments on these stories did not appear as quickly as they usually do after a story is published on their web site. The problem and conduct of that bunch of Mormons with their polygyny and incest has long been known but of course not one preacher or one of the now silent zealots ever tried to visit that place or to otherwise challenge them in any meaningful way. Even to protect the children. So when they pat themselves on the back for being a more religious and more moral and more loving part of the world than some other places, that cloud of dust they stir up off the back of their shirts, stinks to high heaven.

This is a hard one.

DDear Abby,

I have never written to you before, but I really need your advice. I have suspected for some time now that my wife has been cheating on me. The usual signs; phone rings but if I answer, the caller hangs up. My wife has been going out with 'the girls' a lot recently although when I ask their names she always says, just some friends from work, you don't know them.' I try to stay awake and look out for her when she comes home, but I usually fall asleep. Anyway, I have never broached the subject with my wife. I think deep down I just did not want to know the truth, but last night she went out again and I decided to finally check on her. Around midnight, I hid in the garage behind my golf clubs so I could get a good view of the whole street when she arrived home from a night out with 'the girls.' When she got out of the car she was buttoning up her blouse, which was open, and she took her panties out of her purse and slipped them on. It was at that moment, crouching behind my golf clubs, that I noticed a hairline crack where the grip meets the graphite shaft on my 3-wood. Is this something I can fix myself or should I take it back to the pro-shop where I bought it?

Junk Mail Cars

I've long wished for a car that would run on junk mail. Now they are getting somewhere! Maybe we can haz a fill-up from our shredders. I wonder how many miles per page my truck will get.

Self Service

I saw a Kia commercial that showed a bunch of people going to the gas station and doing all the things people do when they forget which side of the car the gas cap is on. That reminded me of all kinds of car widget ideas I had over the years. Back in the late sixties, and though the seventies I built and raced boulder bashers in some off-road racing. There was no rule as to which side of the road the pit stops would be on or for than matter how the pits are arranged. Gas cans don't have enough capacity to fill the tank with just one can. So to speed things up, I built our cars with two filler couplings, one on each side of the car. So why don't car makers do that so we don't have to remember where the filler is or wait for a spot to open up so we can get the cap and the pump on the same side? A couple of associated problems are leaving the engine running while gassing the car or driving off without removing the hose or putting the cap back on. It would be easy enough to make the engine shut off when the fuel door is open or the cap is removed or even when the fuel nozzle is inserted. The filler could even be designed to eliminate the door/cap and still retain all the other capabilities like shutting off the engine when fueling and preventing gas theft and other safety features.

While we are on the subject of thing for cars, tire inflation drives me nuts. Tire should self inflate with clean dry air that has most of the oxygen and moisture and other undesirables removed. Tire pressure monitors and warning systems are good and needed but don't go far enough for the money. I dreamed up a peristaltic pump gizmo for one of our off-road cars and it worked fine. But tire failures on off-road racers and pre-run cars tend to be sudden, catastrophic and of the stuff you tell your grand-kids about. So, low tire buzzers weren't much needed.

As for that on-board trash compactor, our garage robot is supposed to take care of that stuff while it is washing and greasing and airfreshening our ride every night while we are sleeping. They'll have them at filling stations too so we can get the trash taken out when we're on those long road trips and have to stop for 'lecticity and to by more stuff to unwrap in the car. Or maybe when cars start running on farts and sunshine, they'll just smile and wave at us as we drive by.

Before The Big Bang

T-1 second didn't make much sense to the history of the universe, until now. Phil Platt has a nice round up of where physics may be headed in the near future. Relatively speaking, that is. Bwahahahaha!

Some creationist emails PZ

I was reading along in the comments to this. Then I got to #56 and saw the conundrum about the holy fish. Then I saw the thread for the conundrum pop out in #69 and #84 and by then I was laughing so hard I couldn't see through the tears. I love me some creationists who are dumb enough to tangle with PZ.

Presidential Honors

The President G. W. Bush ..... wait for it..... Sewage Plant.

With Creationist, It's 4.1 Every Day

Wired has the Top 10 Creationist Discoveries of All Time. It's hilarious to read through the comments.