Archives 2009

Seems Like an Expensive Way to Stroke Someone’s Ego

Right now, for US$60, you can buy a Guitar Hero III pack that includes everything you need to play, including the game and a guitar controller. For US$100, you can buy a Rock Band set that includes the game, a guitar, a drum set, and a microphone. Two reasonably-priced options for pretending that you’re performing in front of thousands of screaming fans who just want to listen to you play a flimsy piece of plastic and proffer oral sex.

The main problem with these games, evidently, is that they feature songs about things other than God. GH3 includes The Number of the Beast, and a song about the Devil going down to Georgia. And Rock Band even includes a song about someone who explicitly “doesn’t look a thing like Jesus“. How much more explicitly blasphemous can it get?

Thankfully, Digital Praise has fixed this problem by introducing Guitar Praise. (Also the problem of having songs by artists you’ve ever heard of.)

For just $100, the price of a Rock Band setup, you can buy a Guitar Hero clone (not available for any game console platform), and pretend that you’re playing to praise a magic man who’ll send you to be tortured forever if you don’t. Yay!

From the folks who brought you Dance Praise, which achieves the same ends, but more bouncing and less plastic squeaking.

(Okay, Dance Praise gets props for two things: 1) there are a couple of Andy Hunter° songs, and 2) there’s a mode where you can play Tetris with the dance pad, so it’s a little more than just a DDR ripoff.)

Some Good News From ID-Land

Bill Dembski
reports:

Judge Jones gets multiple honorary degrees, Ben Stein has his withdrawn

That’s referring to the fact that Ben Stein, the game show host who
recently narrated a movie blaming the Holocaust on evolution, was
invited to be a commencement speaker at the University of Vermont, but
when it was brought to the president’s attention what an anti-science
twatcicle Stein is,
“Stein withdrew from the ceremony“.

(The word “withdrew” makes it sound as though it was Stein’s idea. I
imagine this withdrawal is about as voluntary as when a cabinet
secretary or Wall Street CEO is caught snorting blow off the ass of an
underage Thai hooker while dressed in latex and leather, and promptly
offers his resignation.)

Next, Barry Arrington proposes a
draft
for an FAQ question on ID:

1] ID is “not science”

Leaving aside the fact that that’s not a question, Arrington’s answer
is a marvel of empty fluff with a superficial semblance of substance
that rivals that of Twinkies. It basically boils down to “ID is too
science! Is too, is too!”, but he uses a page of text to say it.

He starts with an
argument from authority
(William Dembski says it, so it must be true), and ends with a list of
features that scientific research has that ID doesn’t.

And in the middle, he whines about how unfair it is that the mean ol’
scientific establishment has excluded supernatural explanations a
priori.

It’s been said before, but it bears repeating: the mean ol’ scientific
establishment did not reject
non-materialistic/non-naturalistic/supernatural/magic explanations a
priori. It rejected them a posteriori. For centuries now,
natural explanations have been pitted against supernatural ones in
explaining various phenomena, from rainfall to the formation of
fossils to embryonic development. And natural explanations have always
won out, in the sense of being more in line with observable reality
and making useful predictions about future observations.

Of the thousands of times they’ve been tried, supernatural
explanations have never worked. From there, it’s a small step to the
conclusion that supernatural explanations don’t work.

And that is why scientists reject explanations that involve magic. Not
because of a hard-headed pre-commitment to naturalism, but simply
because magic never works.

Jo Hovind Update

Kent Hovind’s weblog, normally devoted to imaginary conversations, now has a bit of news: Kent’s wife Jo was sentenced at the same time as her husband, to a year and a day. Her sentence was stayed pending the outcome of the appeals. Well, the appeal has gone nowhere, so she is now in prison in Marianna, FL. At the minimum-security satellite camp of FCI Marianna, to be more exact.

Science’s Rightful Place

In his inaugural address, president Obama said,

We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield
technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its
cost.

The hive overminds at Seed are
asking the obvious follow-up question,
“What is science’s rightful place?

They’re only soliciting answers from scientists, but I can still give
my reply here.

Read More

Mark Your Calendars

informs me that time_t (the number of seconds elapsed since Jan. 1, 1970, the standard measure of time under Unix) will be 1234567890 on Feb. 13 2009, at 18:31:30 EST, or 23:31:30 UTC.

Back on Sep. 8, 2001, when time_t rolled over to 10 digits, we were braced for a mini-Y2K. I don’t expect anything to happen this time, except for a bunch of Unix geeks hoisting beers.

Who Flubbed the Oath?

If you watched Obama
take the oath of office,
you probably noticed some hesitation and fumbled words. No doubt this
will become the next thing on which to attack Obama: that he flubbed
his oath.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=274_VdeckAU&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

As far as I can make out, the transcript goes like this:

John Roberts: I, Barack Hussein Obama
Obama: I, Barack
Roberts [over]: do solemnly swear
Obama: I, Barack Hussein Obama do solemnly swear
Roberts: that I will… execute the office of President to the United States faithfully
Obama: and I will execute…
Roberts: the o— faithfully the pre— office of President of the United States
Obama: [over] the office of the President of the United States faithfully
Roberts: and will, to the best of my Ability
Obama: and will, to the best of my Ability
Roberts: preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States
Obama: preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States
Roberts: so help you God?
Obama: so help me God.

Article 2, Section 1
of the US Constitution gives the president’s oath of office as:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

So it looked as though they both deviated from the script (though
Greedo shot Roberts flubbed first), moving the word
“faithfully” out of its place, and adding “so help me God” at the end.

Slow News Day

CNN just gave a list of the coldest and hottest inauguration days.

I’m so glad to hear that the fighting in Gaza has ceased, that Europe has heating gas again, that no one is blowing anyone up in Iraq or Afghanistan, and generally that it’s such a slow news day that there’s nothing to do but fill air time with inauguration trivia.

PS: Dear Mr. Obama: please don’t fuck this up.

Answering XKCD


The answer the character is looking for is

osascript -e "set volume output volume 100"

Of course, much like the character in the original strip, I first tried ssh-ing in to the laptop where I have this defined as an alias (nope; it’s asleep), ssh-ing in to the other Mac to see if I’d copied the alias to all Macs (that one’s asleep too), looking through backups (nope; laptop backs up to a directly-attached disk (see “it’s asleep”, above), and the other Mac’s backups came up empty), grepping through my home wiki and other notes to see if I had written this down anywhere (bupkis).

I had to wait until I came home and had physical access to the laptop to wake it up and read my .cshrc.

Continuity at the Onion?

Today’s Onion includes the story
“Spider Eggs Hatch In Bush’s Brain“.
This would be unremarkable, except for the fact that last week, the
Onion Radio News had the story
“Vice President Cheney Seen Dragging Egg Sac Through West Wing“.

Is the Onion introducing continuity between stories? Has this formerly
resolutely short-attention-span publication yielded to pressure to
introduce story arcs? Stay tuned. Unless this turns out to be a
coincidence, in which case just forget it and go about your business.

Google Maps and Metro: So Close, and Yet, so Far

Google Maps
now has a feature that allows you to specify whether you want driving
directions, or for public transportation.

This sounds great, but if you ask for
directions
from the College Park Metro station to the Metro Center Metro station,
it says to walk a mile and a half to the Riverdale MARC station (what?
Not the College Park MARC station?), take that train down to Union
Station, and walk another mile to Metro Station.

So all in all, just a wee bit pointless.