Kent Hovind’s Theme Park Shut Down
The Pensacola News Journal is
reporting
that a judge has issued a Writ of Smackdown on
Kent Hovind,
my favorite wacky creationist.
Free Market Economics and Natural Selection
I’ve long thought that there are parallels between evolution by
natural selection and free market economics. In the first case,
mutations and recombination provide a variety of traits in a
population, and natural selection ruthlessly culls those less able to
survive and reproduce. In the second case, individuals come up with
lots and lots of ideas, are free to implement them, and the market
rewards those with successful ideas, and ruthlessly punishes the
unsuccessful ones.
Assorted Snippets From Dembski and Pals
So I was poking around at
Chez Dembski,
mainly to see whether he had anything to say about
a recent BC strip, and found a few amusing and/or stupid items:
Reverse Spam? Poisoning the Well?
George Clooney
suggests a way
to neutralize celebrity stalker websites:
“There is a simple way to render these guys useless,” Clooney advised […]
“Flood their Web site with bogus sightings. Get your clients to get 10 friends to text in fake sightings of any number of stars. A couple hundred conflicting sightings and this Web site is worthless. No need to try to create new laws to restrict free speech. Just make them useless.
(Hat tip to kkos for the link.)
While I appreciate the sentiment, and wouldn’t want to be hounded by paparazzi, this reminds me a bit too much of spam.
How to Write A Good API
A lot has been written about how to design a good user interface, but very little about how to design a good programming interface (API: Application Program Interface, or a library). This is somewhat surprising, since an API is nothing more than an UI for programmers, and programmers are normally good at writing tools for each other.
War on Everything
Remember the “War on Christmas” that John Gibson and Bill O’Reilly wag-the-dogged up out of nothing, using a mixture of three parts persecution complex, two parts paranoia, and one part batshit insanity?
And have you noticed the
War on Easter
that they’re now brewing up out of that same cauldron?
(In case you missed it, it was
started last year
by Sean Hannity.)
Clearly, this is a movement, in the “come in, sing a verse from Alice’s Restaurant, and walk out” sense of the term. So I hope you’ll all join me in declaring war on
Shrove Tuesday.
Write angry letters to politicians and media people! Boycott retailers! Death to the… um… shroves, I guess. Or something.
It’s Getting Hard to Tell the Creationists and the Onion Apart
Remember this article from The Onion?:
DESPERATE VEGETARIANS DECLARE COWS PLANTS
LAS VEGAS — At its annual national conference Saturday, the American Association of Vegans and Vegetarians released results of a detailed in-house study determining that the common beef cow is actually a plant, 100 percent fit for vegetarian consumption.
“Contrary to what was previously thought, the cow is not a higher form of animal life, capable of thinking and feeling pain,” announced AAVV spokeswoman Denise Chalmers to the large crowd. “Rather, we have found it to be a harmless, non-sentient form of plant life, utterly incapable of experiencing the slightest pain or simplest thought.”
Chalmers then passed around a large tray of dripping red meat, which the vegetarians in attendance ravenously devoured, feverishly licking the bloody juice from their fingers.
Compare that to this bit of masturbiblation (also this one), which shows that squid aren’t alive. I can only assume that future episodes will prove that up is down, black is white, and that the Babel Fish is definitive proof of the nonexistence of God.
Golden Credit
So I hear we as a country now have a brand shiny new credit limit debt ceiling. Nine trillion dollars. Or 9e12 as nerds write it.
Allow me to establish some facts before I get to my main point:
- Today, gold costs $550.80 an ounce.
- One gram of gold can be beaten into a sheet with an area of one square meter.
From these facts, and some simple unit conversions, we find that it would cost $50,316,759.87 to buy enough gold to cover a square mile (and who says you can’t get anything for fifty million bucks anymore?).
Nine trillion smackers divided by $50,316,759.87 equals 178,866,8432.
Therefore, if we maxed out our national credit card, we could gold-plate Nevada, South Carolina, Maryland, Vermont, New Jersey, and Connecticut.
Obviously, it doesn’t help that the borrow-and-spend Republicans have already spent most of that money. That’s why they had to raise the limit in the first place.
Lego FSM
Chris Doyle has enough time on his hands to build a
Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
out of Legos.
