From Dana Milbank’s
article
about the final days of the McCain campaign:
About 2,000 had come to a high school gym in Wallingford to hear from the candidate — a good crowd for high school basketball, if not quite the size a candidate hopes for in the final hours of a campaign. The audience stirred when McCain entered to the theme from “Rocky.” “Momentum is here,” he announced. “We’re going to win,” he went on. “I feel it. I know it.”
Let’s say I’ve started collecting cards, like Magic: the Gathering, or baseball cards. Yesterday, I bought a pack of 100 random cards. Today, I bought another pack of 100 random cards. 5 of them were duplicates of cards that I already had from yesterday.
Question: how many distinct cards are there in the game? I.e., if you wanted to collect the whole set of cards published by the game company, how big an album would you need? Read More
From the Telegraph:
“Vicar went to hospital with potato stuck in bottom“.
A & E nurse Trudi Watson, of Sheffield’s Northern General Hospital, said: “He explained to me, quite sincerely, he had been hanging curtains naked in the kitchen when he fell backwards on to the kitchen table and on to a potato.
Look, if anal stimulation is your thing, at least invest in a quality
butt-plug from a reputable dealer. It might save you a trip to the
emergency room.
And while there are a lot of things that can be done in the nude, I
don’t think hanging curtains is one of them: there’s that whole
standing on a stepladder in front of an uncurtained window thing.
(No, not Tom DeLay. <rimshot>)
GovTrack has a
page
that shows congressional districts as a Google Maps layer. This means
that unlike the maps at
NationalAtlas.gov
you can easily zoom in to see the
crinkly bits
that make gerrymandered
districts to much fun to study. I could’ve used this during a
discussion on the subject with a friend today.
AZ-2
is nice, especially the part where it follows down the middle of the
Colorado river without touching the banks. But in the end, I have to
support the local team and go with
MD-3.
Floor’s open for discussion. What are your favorite congressional districts?
Have you always dreamt of redistricting a state to disenfranchise a large minority party, or prevent those pesky ethnic minorities from having an effective voice in politics, while obeying the letter of the law? Then maybe you should play the Redistricting Game (Flash warning) and find out why some districts have the shapes they do.
In his
latest post,
Ray Comfort disagrees with Dawkins’s famous quip about the god of the
Old Testament being “the most unpleasant character in all fiction”.
Specifically, he takes Dawkins to task for excluding the god of the
New Testament:
The God of the New Testament is just as offensive to the
ungodly as the God of the Old Testament, because they are One in [sic]
the same.
Look at His terrible New Testament judgments: He killed a husband and wife, simply because they told one lie (see Acts 5:1-11). His “wrath” abides on every unbeliever for their sins (see John 3:36, Ephesians 5:6). He will punish the unsaved with a fearful “indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish” (Romans 2:8-9), and warns that He is going to be “revealed from Heaven with His mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on those who do not know God, and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ” (see 2 Thessalonians 1:8).
He is so angry at this world He calls us His enemy (see James 4:4) and promises to “shake not only the earth, but also Heaven” in His wrath (Hebrews 12:26). Our God is “a consuming fire” (see Hebrews 12:29) and His justice will cause some to gnaw their tongues in pain (see Revelation 16:10). He is so serious about sin He will cast all liars into the lake of fire (see Revelation 21:8).
Okay, so the NT God is just as mean and nasty as the OT one.
Actually, no, he’s not:
If you still want to paint the Old Testament God as been mean and the New Testament God as being nice, please realize that the God of the New Testament proclaimed the death sentence on every man, on every woman and on every child of the human race. Every single human being will die because they have violated God’s Law (see Romans 5:12, 6:23).
The god of the New Testament is nastier, since he punishes people
forever in Hell. At least the OT god was polite enough to stop
torturing people once they were dead.
With opponents like Comfort, who needs allies?
(Matt D. says almost the same thing as I do. Except he said it to Ray directly.)
Shane Killians has
released
a subtitle track for Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
that aims to correct a lot of the errors and lies in the movie. So if
someone bought the DVD and wants you to watch it, you can add
subtitles so your
friend/relative/smizmar
can get a real-time rebuttal to the claims presented on screen.
The link above includes instructions for getting the subtitles to
display in some popular media players. In addition, I think MPlayer
should automatically pick up the .srt file (dunno about the
.ssa one).
You’ll also need to buy/rent/rip/bittorrent/teleport a video file of the movie, but you’re on your own for
that.
Right now, Five Thirty-Eight
gives McCain’s win percentage as 3.3%. Or, to put it in gamer terms,
he has to roll a natural 20, and then he has to roll 5 or 6
on 1d6 (or 3 on 1d3).
As for Palin, from her interview and debate performances, she reminds
me of nothing so much as a verbose
Eliza:
you ask her a question, her internal
regexp
parser picks out a few keywords, and she spits out a string of
preprogrammed phrases, with possibly a few pattern substitutions.
Of course, the original Eliza was designed to be terse so as to hide
the simplicity of the algorithm. Palin goes on for minutes, making her
more of a cross between Eliza and
Dissociated Press.
In
this episode
of the John Cleese podcast, he takes on a pet peeve of mine, and
explains with graphs and charts exactly why it’s wrong to say “I could
care less”.
Oh, and for those who didn’t know that John Cleese has a podcast:
John Cleese has a
podcast.
Since some cdesign proponentsists were getting all excited about the
release of
Expelled
on DVD, I looked it up at Box Office Mojo and found:
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed:
released Apr. 18, 2008, total lifetime domestic gross: $7,720,487.
Religulous:
released Oct. 1, 2008, total lifetime domestic gross: $10,599,000
(estimate).
