When the Texas Board of Education votes, the whole US listens, as due to its size, Texas dominates the textbook market. And, sadly, the Texas Board of Education appears to be dominated by ignorant yahoos who are no better, only less violent (so far!) than their ignorant yahoo Taliban friends who blow up thousand-year-old statues and schools full of young girls just because the facts happen to disagree with their religion.
Get it through your incredibly thick, incredibly tiny heads, you incredibly stupid morons (and yes, I do mean it: show me a person from the Texas Board of Education who voted against the proper teaching of science, and I don’t care if she is a hard working mother of five who never meant any harm to anyone, I am willing to use the same words in her face, with the intend to offend, in the hope that I might get through): the Universe is 13.7 billion years old (at least; as a minimum, we know that there was a surface of last scattering 13.7 billion years ago.) Humans and apes descended from the same primitive life forms that have been on this Earth for at least about 3 billion years. The climate is changing, even if there may be legitimate debate about the extent to which this is caused by man, CO2 in particular, and whether or not a warming is indeed bad for us. If you want to hide from hard science, go and crawl back to your stupid little church and leave the Board of Education. Unless your true intent is to take Texas (and America) back to the Middle Ages, just like your little Taliban friends over there in Afghanistan.
Folks working on quantum computers are busy trying to make sure that entangled states remain entangled, because decoherence is death for a quantum computation. But now, Gross et al. showed that too much entanglement may not be a good thing: it can result in quantum computers that offer no improvements in efficiency over conventional computers.
Ever since I became the unfortunate owner of a new laptop (rather nice in most respects, actually) that requires Vista, I’ve been cursing the programmers in Redmond.
One prevailing mystery was this: if my laptop is in Sleep/Hibernation for more than a few hours, why does it take literally forever for it to wake up? And why is there is constant disk activity while I wait for it to respond?
It seems that I may have found the answer. It’s the blasted Superfetch service in Vista, ostensibly designed to help speed up the launching of applications. Perhaps it does that… but on a laptop, it also does many other things, none of them pleasant. It seems that the best thing to do is to disable the Superfetch service once and for all, and call it a bad memory.
A new study, showing a strong correlation between circumcision and decreased rates of AIDS and genital herpes in males, is now touted as an argument in favor of circumcision here in North America.
There’s only one problem. The study was conducted in Uganda. I mean no disrespect towards the personal habits of Ugandan men, but Uganda is a third world country where most people do not necessarily have easy access to hot showers (or indeed, running water.) Before such a controversial recommendation is made, should a study not be conducted that properly takes into account the standards of personal hygiene here in North America?
If only I had known about it earlier… I am not a theater person, but The Gladstone’s The Radio Show definitely sounds like my cup of tea. Too bad it’s on for only three more days, and these will be three very busy days for me.
Republican lawmakers in America are concerned: they think that the request of the Obama administration and its treasury secretary for additional powers represents an unprecedented power grab. Being a libertarian at heart, I share their concerns even as I recognize the necessity for unprecedented government intervention at a time of unprecedented crisis.
But, it is difficult not to notice of the hipocrisy. The same lawmakers did not appear to be nearly as upset when the Bush administration grabbed unprecedented powers… not in the economic arena, mind you, but in the area of safety and security, directly impacting the personal freedoms and liberties of not just Americans, but also foreign nationals on American soil, such as Canadian Maher Arar who was deported to Syria for torture and unlawful imprisonment. If only Republican lawmakers were as eager to guard constitutional freedoms back then!
My god. Is this really what the “fair and balanced” network thinks of Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan, and the 117 Canadians (including a civilian diplomat) who died there?
I wonder why Canada even went there to fight. After all, it wasn’t Canada that was attacked on 9/11. Fortunately, I know that not all Americans are as dumb as these clowns… what is troubling is that way too many Americans DO watch FOX and believe that it presents an unbiased view of the world.
The video responses to this clip are interesting, too. One is an “adults only” propaganda piece warning us about Islam’s plans to take over the world. Oh my, I am so afraid, there are Muslims everywhere!
Yes, they do teach this in flight school. But even professionals make mistakes… and when those professionals happen to be pilots, they often pay with their lives:
Fortunately (?) in this case only the pilots had to pay, as the airplane in question was a FedEx cargo plane.
BBC World is available here on basic analog cable, which is the only kind of cable I am interested in having in the house. (Mainly, I am put off digital cable because of the need for separate set-top boxes, but DRM also doesn’t help, not to mention the nasty habit of the box to wake up in the middle of the night to perform an OS upgrade, clearly demonstrating that I am not in control of equipment that is in my house.)
However, BBC World is, it appears, a high definition (HD) broadcast, so on analog cable it appears with a black stripe on the top and the bottom of the picture.
This particular documentary, however, was apparently shot in standard definition. So BBC World chose one of three options, each less than perfect: instead of cropping the picture at the top and the bottom, or introducing black stripes on the left and right, they decided to stretch the picture horizontally. Why so many people prefer a distorted picture over black stripes, I have no idea.
But this means that on my standard analog cable, I get a standard definition show that appears at less than standard resolution, vertically compressed, distorted, with unnecessary black stripes at the top and the bottom. Isn’t HD just glorious?
HD madness
Fortunately, as I tend to watch TV on my computer, I always have the option of stretching the video window vertically and get a picture with the correct aspect ratio. This option is not necessarily available on ordinary televisions.
Behind this ridiculousness is the insane decision to change not just the resolution but the aspect ratio of HD broadcasts. Why, you might ask? Very simple. If the aspect ratios were the same, most people could not tell the difference between standard definition and HD even when the broadcast was true HD, which often is not the case (older shows, and even some newer shows, are shot in standard definition.) So how do you convince people to buy HD anyway? By making it apparent that they have a “better” television set because it is wider.
And this has been done before. Back in the 1950s, when movie studios were seriously worried about the competition of television, they changed the aspect ratio of Hollywood movies, intentionally making them incompatible with the standard 4:3 aspect ratio of NTSC/PAL television. What is amazing is how well they managed to convince the public that a wider picture is better, providing yet another example of just how easy it is to manipulate people.
