This is ridiculous: American Red Cross sued over its emblem by Johnson & Johnson.
Take ’em out, boys!
Month: August 2007
Arise!
Cool, I’m finally in the top half million blogs! Look out Boing Boing, I’m taking you out.
Seriously, how someone who is obviously smarter than PZ and prettier than Phil can not be a complete Internet superstar, I’ll never know.
Rise up, people, rise up and link to me! They may take us off their blogroll but they’ll never take…OUR FREEDOM!
The Earth Is Not Moving
Courtesy of Good Math, Bad Math, our attention is directed to these completely deluded, insane, Biblical freaks, from which I quote:
The Earth is not rotating…nor is it going around the sun. The universe is not one ten trillionth the size we are told. Today’s cosmology fulfills an anti-Bible religious plan disguised as “science”. The whole scheme from Copernicanism to Big Bangism is a factless lie. Those lies have planted the Truth-killing virus of evolutionism in every aspect of man’s “knowledge” about the Universe, the Earth, and Himself.
I apologize for pointing out this low-hanging fruit. This, people, is what you get when you demonize science. All crazy theories become equal. Religion sows the seeds of relativism, not the other way around. If science is in conflict with your religion, your religion is wrong.
Macs run Ubuntu
Was just fooling around with a trial version of Parallels so I installed Ubuntu (a distro of Linux) on my Mac. I think Linux is great and Ubuntu in particular is great. But the Mac-bashers have to learn to live with the fact that these Intel MacBooks can run freaking everything. I can run Adobe and Micro$oft, native in OS X, run some astronomy software in Windows and have 9 desktops of developer tools in Unbuntu, all at the same time, without reboots or any monkey business.
You can also run Ubuntu on directly on a mac, without virtualization, if you want to dual boot.
I know virtualization is not unique to Macs, but I think it is pretty cool that I can run every other operating system on my mac. No other operating system can do that.
Parallels is pretty cool.
Not an act of God
The bridge collapse in Minneapolis was not an act of God. It was the inaction of Man.
From the Star Tribune:
More than a year before the Interstate 35W bridge collapsed, a consulting firm advised the state of Minnesota that the aging bridge should be reinforced with steel plating.
Instead of following that advice, state officials asked the firm to come up with other options.
Six months later, the URS Corp. did just that.
It repeated its recommendation for steel plates, but offered an alternative described as “most cost efficient”…
I just heard Tim Pawlenty on the radio talking about how he will do whatever it takes. Does that include raising taxes, Tim? Do you think we would have fixed that bridge if money wasn’t an issue? Do you think you can whittle away government funding year after year, always drive every decision by the bottom line and complain, complain, complain about how the worst possible place for a dollar to go is the government and still look us in the eye and say you did whatever it took to prevent this?
It’s not as easy as blaming the governor. I know that. Still, the Republican notion that taxes are bad and that Democrats are picking people’s pockets when they raise spending leads to institutionalized failure. Under the Conservative philosophy, resources will always be a problem.
We put Pawlenty in charge of the system and the system allowed this to happen. We need the opposite philosophy from our governor. We’ll do the right thing first and worry about cash, check or charge later.
Don’t tell me I’m “politicizing” the issue. This is politics. Who makes decisions that affect public safety is a political issue. How they do it and with what funding is a political issue.
Yes, I know, you can’t ignore financial realities. But you can put your pocket book where you mouth is. You want good things? Reliable things? Pay for them.
Queen star hands in science PhD
I’m proud that Brian May did this. So many people seem to think that education is a means to an end. Like once you have a livelihood you no longer need education. Wrong! Education should be a quest that never ends for everyone. Brian May has all the money he would ever need yet here he is, getting data and writing a thesis.
I’m surprised we don’t see other successful people pursue formal education more. We have all these actors and athletes who “retire” in their 20’s and 30’s who don’t do shit but try to make more money as entrepreneurs and live lives of luxury and hedonism. WTF. Learn more, people. Learn a lot more. It’s not work, it’s fun.
Bottled Water: Not necessarily evil
Amy Goodman, whom I love and respect, is reporting on this meme going around lately that bottled water is evil and stupid. Evil, because it consumes resources and creates waste and stupid because it is economically silly to pay 7000 times more for something than you have to.
I think this is mostly true but I also think it misses some very important points:
1. It’s better that people are buying water than buying soda. A bottle of water is healthy and a soda is unhealthy. We don’t seem to have a problem with people paying $1.29 for a Coke, but for some reason we see it as a waste of resources to provide a healthy alternative. The expensive part of getting me a cold bottle of water out of a vending machine is the bottle, putting it in the bottle, getting it nearby and keeping it cold and readily available. Getting a drink of water, for free, in downtown Minneapolis is not convenient nor probably sanitary. It’s my decision if I want to pay for the convenience of nearby, cold, purified water.
2. Aquafina, and most bottled water, is processed with reverse osmosis. This is a very cool process that make for very pure water. It is no big deal at all if they use tap water as the input into the reverse osmosis machine. The water produced by reverse osmosis is vastly more pure than the tap water going in.
I drink filtered tap water at home. I drink filtered tap water at work. I don’t mind buying a bottle of filtered tap water every now and then for $1.29. I think there are downsides of the water boom and we should put pressure on governments and companies to provide pure water ubiquitously for free. We should make all distribution processes, whether for water or Coke, as environmentally efficient as possible. That’s obvious.
There are problems but they are solvable. We should not necessarily be upset that people are willing to spend money on convenient, purified drinking water instead of just buying another Coke.
lolife 