Archives January 2008

D’Good Idea, Actually

Back in November, Dinesh D’Souza asked, “Are Atheists the New Gays?”

Dawkins has also suggested that atheists, like gays, should come out of the closet. Well, what if they don’t want to? I don’t know if Dawkins would support “outing” atheists. Can an atheist “rights” group be far behind? Hate crimes laws to protect atheists? Affirmative action for unbelievers? An Atheist Annual Parade, complete with dancers and floats? Atheist History Month?

To answer D’Souza’s first question, no, he doesn’t. And as far as I know, hate-crime laws should protect atheists as much as anyone else.

As for the parade and Atheist History Month, those sound great! (Or should I say “fabulous”?) Where do I sign up?

Sunday Playlist
  • Money, Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon
  • Money, KMFDM, Money
  • Money (That’s What I Want), The Beatles, With the Beatles
  • Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money), Pet Shop Boys, Discography
  • Things I Do for Money, The Northern Pikes, Big Blue Sky
  • Love, Sex & Money, Gravity Kills, Superstarved
  • You Never Give Me Your Money, The Beatles, Abbey Road
  • Where’s the Money?, Holger Czukay, Jah Wobble, Jaki Liebezeit, Full Circle
  • Gimme Some Money, Spinal Tap, This Is Spinal Tap
  • Money Changes Everything, The Smiths, Bigmouth Strikes Again (EP)
  • Burn Your Money, Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper, Root Hog or Die
Lyra’s Snacks

In case you haven’t read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, or seen the movie The Golden Compass, or even seen the trailer, a quick recap:

In the world where Lyra, the protagonist, lives, everyone has a dæmon, a sort of external soul, which takes the form of an animal. Children’s dæmons can change shape at will (they take a permanent form at puberty). Dæmons are also intelligent (since they’re really a part of the human they’re attached to).

So as I’m rereading His Dark Materials, a question started nagging at me: what would vending machines in Lyra’s world look like?

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No Duh: Bush Lied About Iraq

The AP reports:

A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The study concluded that the statements “were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”

The article doesn’t say, but presumably the study was funded by the Center for Confirming the Obvious.

Bush led with 259 false statements, 231 about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 28 about Iraq’s links to al-Qaida, the study found. That was second only to Powell’s 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq and al-Qaida.

This bit’s a bit surprising: I didn’t think Bush would be in first place, seeing as how he let others do most of the lying.

“The cumulative effect of these false statements _ amplified by thousands of news stories and broadcasts _ was massive, with the media coverage creating an almost impenetrable din for several critical months in the run-up to war,” the study concluded.

Okay, now can we impeach the bastards?

Everyone’s a Critic

The LA Times reports

Friday’s violence occurred as hundreds of thousands of worshipers across Iraq took part in Ashura rites commemorating the death of Imam Hussein, a grandson of Muhammad who was killed by the army of the Caliph Yazid on the plains of Karbala. Hussein’s death in 680 made permanent the schism between Shiites and Sunnis over the succession after Muhammad.
[…]

During a reenactment of Hussein’s slaying in Basra, the crowd turned on the actor who was performing the part of his killer and beat the man so badly that he returned with an assault rifle to exact revenge. At least one onlooker was killed in the crossfire when soldiers tried to subdue the man and his relatives, security officials said.

Why am I not surprised that religious nuts can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction? This would be Pythonesque if it weren’t tragic.

(Via FSTDT)

Mammoth Older than Earth

The Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum, a young-earth creationist outfit, is a mastodon skull to raise money.

As mentioned above, Mt. Blanco is a young-earth creationist organization:

We believe that evolution is an old-fashioned theory not substantiated by facts, and that what the Bible says is more scientifically accurate. Our museum shows that there was a worldwide flood only a few thousand years ago.

They also talk about work they’ve done in collaboration with Don Patton and Carl Baugh.

Oddly enough, Mt. Blanco’s about the auction has nothing to say about the age of the skull. The auction gallery

Distinct also from its European cousin, the Mammut borsoni, the American mastodon lived throughout North America, from Alaska to Central Mexico, in the Pleistocene epoch, and is generally believed to have become extinct about 10,000 years ago.

and CNN writes

Heritage Auction Galleries says the skull is estimated to be 40,000 years old, and projects it will fetch upward of $160,000.

You’d think that a skull three or four times older than the universe would sell for a lot more than $160,000.

Unless, of course, they know that their Biblical dating is horseshit, and were deliberately downplaying the fact that they’re YECs to avoid driving away serious buyers. Does money trump dogma?

I Get Email

Apparently, having my name in CPAN is a sign that I know everything about Perl, SOAP, XML, and security.

Unless someone can come up with a legitimate reason to send 5000 authentication requests to a web server (including an explanation of why that’s not a brain-damaged way to solve the problem at hand), I’m going to assume that this guy is a wannabe script kiddie.

This isn’t the first time someone’s asked me to , but this time around, I don’t feel like toying with him. Script kiddies are people too.

Then again, so’s Soylent Green (as put it).

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Déjà entendu

From today’s news:

In an interview broadcast Friday, Bush said there could well be a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq, but it would be on the invitation of the Iraqi government.

Now, where have I heard that before? Oh, right. I think it was August 20, 1968:

Although on the night of the invasion, the Czechoslovak Presidium declared that Warsaw Pact troops had crossed the border without knowledge of the ÄŒSSR Government, the Soviet Press printed an unsigned request, allegedly by Czechoslovak party and state leaders, for “immediate assistance, including assistance with armed forces.”

Looks like the USSR won the Cold War after all.

Old Media

Things I Miss About LPs

  • Big cover art. You could spend hours looking at the details in the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, or feel overwhelmed by the lips on The Cure’s Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me. They really have to be seen at 12″×12″ for full effect.
  • Double albums. If 12″×12″ cover art was good, then opening up a record for a 24″×12″ inner image was even better.
  • Innovative packaging. I know, the important part is the music, but still, I liked things like the zipper on the Stones’ Sticky Fingers, or Styx’s Cornerstone, which opened up like a book, or textured covers, and the like.
  • Occasionally seeing a note or the recording engineer’s initials scratched in the master disk, by the label.

Things I Don’t Miss About LPs

  • Skipping.
  • Scratches, pops.
  • Quality loss after repeated playing.
  • Having to stop in the middle of the album to turn the record over.
  • Damn cheap paper sleeves that tear if you’re not oh-so-careful when putting the record back.
  • Plastic sleeves that stick closed with static cling, making it impossible to get the record back in.
  • Having to clean the record surface and/or needle before playing.
  • Having to be careful not to dance too hard next to the record player, or bump the furniture, especially while recording.
  • Size: can’t just bring a dozen LPs to listen to while on vacation.
  • Wondering why the music sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks, then realizing that I forgot to switch the record player from 45 to 33 RPM (or alternately, wondering when Chrissie Hynde started singing baritone.)

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Airport Security: Annoying or Pointless?

First, here’s an opinion piece by Patrick Smith at the NYT’s “Jet Lagged” weblog, pointing out a lot of the problems with airport security procedures.

At every concourse checkpoint you’ll see a bin or barrel brimming with contraband containers taken from passengers for having exceeded the volume limit. Now, the assumption has to be that the materials in those containers are potentially hazardous. If not, why were they seized in the first place? But if so, why are they dumped unceremoniously into the trash? They are not quarantined or handed over to the bomb squad; they are simply thrown away.

We are not fighting materials, we are fighting the imagination and cleverness of the would-be saboteur.

If you’ve read that and gotten your blood pressure up, you won’t be doing your cardiovascular system any favors by reading this article by the always-excellent Bruce Schneier about a study (well, a meta-study, really) by the Harvard School of Public Health that went looking for evidence of the effectiveness of TSA screening procedures.

I’m going to disagree with Schneier on one point: he summarizes the study as

Surprising nobody, a new study concludes that airport security isn’t helping

From the articles he links to, I’d say it’d be more fair to say “Airport security procedures are costing us a lot, and we don’t even know whether they’re doing any good.”

But he’s right when he says:

The goal isn’t to confiscate prohibited items. The goal is to prevent terrorism on airplanes. When the TSA confiscates millions of lighters from innocent people, that’s a security failure. The TSA is reacting to non-threats. The TSA is reacting to false alarms. Now you can argue that this level of failures is necessary to make people safer, but it’s certainly not evidence that people are safer.

(Update: Punkwalrus imagines the future of air travel, in grainy black and white, with cheesy upbeat music.)

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