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!

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.

WTF.

Texas crowd kills passenger in vehicle that struck child

AUSTIN, Texas – A crowd attacked and killed a passenger in a vehicle that had struck and injured a child, police said Wednesday.

Police believe 2,000 to 3,000 people were in the area for a Juneteenth celebration when the attack occurred Tuesday night. The man who was killed had been trying to stop the group from attacking the vehicle’s driver when the crowd turned on him, authorities said.

The Austin Police Department identified the victim as David Rivas Morales, 40. The child was taken to a hospital with non-life threatening injuries.

A 17-year old boy has consensual oral sex with a 15-year old girl and is charged with aggravated child molestation and given a 10 year prison sentence, of which he has served 2 already.

A judge “threw out Wilson’s 10-year sentence and amended it to misdemeanor aggravated child molestation with a 12-month term, plus credit for time served, and he would not be required to register as a sex offender.”

But the Attorney General doesn’t like it:

Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker said Monday afternoon that he had filed notice of appeal, arguing that Georgia law does not give a judge authority to reduce or modify the sentence imposed by the trial court. He said he would seek an expedited ruling from the Georgia Supreme Court.

Maybe Mr. Thurbert needs some consensual oral sex.

The 7th edition of the Carnival of Mathematics is upon us, once again including an entry by yours truly on the Curve of the Earth.

…totally cracks me up. Here is her essay On Being Asian, from which I quote:

Another issue I have is that I forget that I AM ASIAN. Seriously. I forget that I don’t look like you other white people. Maybe that’s why I hate dealing with immigrant Asians because they always ask the same questions: “Are you Chinese? You’re not? Because you look Chinese!” I never know what to say. Is there a blood test that I can take to find out? The other question is always: “Are you married to a white man?” (Yes.) I don’t know why the questions are always the same. Is there some kind of Asian Adoptee survey going on that I don’t know about? Because if there is? I’VE ALREADY TAKEN IT.

Teresa over at Making Light has a long post and now a certificate (notably posted over at PZ’s site just now) about how we should all feel free to moderate whoever the hell we want whenever the hell we want.

Now she certainly sounds like a reasonable person and the analogy of a host at a party maintaining some sort of enjoyable environment for the guests and the responsibility of the guests to defer, somewhat, to the host is a good one. I get it.

But something in me still is uncomfortable with it. It is a big, fat license for people to “moderate out” those things that make them uncomfortable. The all-powerful blogger can pick and choose who has a voice and who does not.

You see, I don’t trust people to handle severe criticism well. We all tend to take things personally. We are all convinced of our own good intentions but suspicious of the intentions of our adversaries. This is human nature.

We are all capable of ignoring the assholes. I skip far more blog comments than I read. I’m not convinced I need help choosing which comments to read. While there are obviously trolls and assholes out there, there are also a lot of thin-skinned people, both bloggers and commenters, who get way too emotionally connected to these debates.

I’d personally rather wade through comment noise than miss perhaps provocative posts that made someone uncomfortable. We’re grownups.

I’m not saying that moderation is always bad, but I think our guiding principles should be first about commenting respectfully and secondarily, if at all, encouraging bloggers to delete comments.

We gotta fight back against monsters like the loser who killed the people at Virginia Tech. We have to do this in a few ways:

1. Take them out physically. We don’t need guns to hog pile on these guys. Disarm the mother fucker. 10 guys could have rushed this dude and 8 of them would probably have lived. You can die cowering or you can die fighting. (NOTE: Lord knows, I may die cowering. We can’t predict how we would behave in these situations.)

2. Take out the celebrity. I don’t give a fuck who this asshole was. I don’t need to see him psychoanalyzed on TV all day. I can imagine crazies out there preparing the documents we’ll all pore over after the next crazy mass murder.

3. Have them kill themselves first. I know it is callous and bizarre to say it, but this guy should have committed suicide prior to killing those 32 people, not after. Yes, it would be better to reach him and save him well before that. But when we get to this stage, suicide is better than mass murder. In terms of public policy, I’d rather encourage a few more suicides than a few more mass murders.

#1 above is what I can’t get out of my mind, though. Just like airplane hijackers get mobbed by passengers now, when someone starts shooting like this we have to instantly mob them. The goal of everyone nearby should be to take him out as soon as possible by any means possible.

Some friends of mine started a pretty cool site. It’s what they call a donate button on steroids. It’s a great site for online fundraising, tip jars or other donations. It’s called FundingPix.

I don’t care what Dennis Miller’s politics are. I don’t care what any comedian’s politics are. I can laugh at the Left just as much as I can laugh at the Right. Dennis Miller was on the Daily Show tonight and I just don’t think the guy is funny. He tried way too hard and…did I say yet?…he’s just not funny.

Can anyone name a single funny person on the Right?