PZ Myers over at Pharyngula has posted this link to Lewis Black explaining judaeo-christianity. Dunno who this bloke Lewis Black is, but he hits the nail on the head a number of times for me…
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Religion Explained
One response to “Religion Explained”
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Outstanding American comedian – did a stint as a reporter on The Daily Show for quite a while. I think you’d really appreciate a lot of his humor. That said, I can’t lay hands on any of it at the moment, making this a rather useless comment – ah, well.
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The Blind Watchmaker
And sticking with the theme of 1980s TV, here’s a link that will lead you to a TV special from that time starring a younger Richard Dawkins, talking about the Blind Watchmaker… Terrific stuff!And I can’t help but note that this programme was made by the BBC’s Horizon team. That was then, when programme makers were not afraid to have experts, such as Dawkins, address the camera directly to put across complex ideas without the need for flashy graphics, bizarre camera angles and loud music. Today’s Horizon, by comparison, seems to embody the very worst of bad ideas from generations of meeja-studies graduates. Damn them all to hell.Leave a comment
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Max Headroom
Thanks to Alun, over at Archaeoastronomy, I’ve just seen the backstory to the 1980s TV character known as Max Headroom. The pilot episode actually holds up pretty well, even today.Leave a comment
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Plus Ça Change…
Tim Adams has an interesting article in today’s Observer about Second Life – the online virtual world where a million people have gone to escape from their real lives – and ended up doing exactly the same things as people do in the real world. Wetware or software – it’s all the same, it seems to me. The attraction of Second Life continues to baffle me.Leave a comment
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Lipstick on the Pig
Steven Poole, over at Unspeak, draws our attention to some of the wilder shores of Dubya’s rhetoric. As if we needed to be reminded that there is a buffoon in the White House.Leave a comment
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The Power Of Divs
Stewart Lee has a good video exploring the inanity of religion-driven prejudice. What’s wrong with blasphemy? Absolutely nothing, Stewart. But where’s the rest of your polemic? I’d like to see it…Update: oh, here are the various parts, chopped up to fit on YouTube. Well done, Mr. Lee. what you said was worth saying.Leave a comment
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I’m Not A Victim
While this is something that’s playing out in America’s backyard, and hence something that I probably shouldn’t comment on directly… still, I thought this response from Michael J. Fox to the vomit known as Rush Limbaugh was worth noting.Leave a comment
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Whose Brain Is Missing?
While it doesn’t come as a complete surprise to me that Cheney doesn’t believe that waterboarding is not torture, and is a technique that is a "no-brainer" to use, I still have to draw a breath at the fact that people such as he hold power in the current administration of the US. How are the mighty fallen…Leave a comment
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Before And After…
Last month, I mentioned that work had begun on the new kitchen. While there are still a few finishing touches to be done, the bulk of the work is over, and we have a new working kitchen that both of us are very pleased with.Before:
After (with the new, raised ceiling!):
4 responses to “Before And After…”
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Bravo. For the record, I am completely in love with the cooktop and oven. Followed shortly by the deep sinks. Congratulations on surviving a remodel!
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Yup, I wanted a decent-sized oven, and that was the excuse to have the five gas rings on the top. They’ve become quite popular since we last chose a kitchen, so there’s plenty of choice these days. Unfortunately, most of them are total ergonomic disasters. Most of them either have the wok burner in the middle – which means that then you can’t fit any pans on the other burners, or the pan supports are so streamlined and dinky that you can’t slide a pan to the side while you’re working. This ATAG unit, thankfully, doesn’t suffer from either of those problems.
The sinks were an indulgence. Probably stainless steel would have been more practical, but we liked the traditional look of white ceramic. And that’s reinforced by the choice of the granito worktops. -
Lovely, let me in! I’ll be your sous-chef.
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Coboró, if you ever find yourself in the Achterhoek, then let us know!
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Time Lapse Art Revisited
You may recall I blogged about the strangely haunting video of Noah Kalina – the man who has been taking a picture of himself every day, and then making the series into a video.It was only a matter of time, I suppose, before the idea was spoofed. Here’s Ben takes a photo of himself every day. It raises a smile or two.Leave a comment
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Comet Swan
There’s a new comet in the night skies. Comet Swan. I’m hoping for a clear night in order to try and glimpse it. It looks as though it will be passing between the constellations of Boötes and Hercules at the moment.Leave a comment
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Toto…
…I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore… Thus quoth Dorothy on finding herself in the land of Oz. But, here we are in Kansas, at the University of Kansas, no less, and – unlikely as it may seem – able to watch a video of Richard Dawkins talking about his book: The God Delusion. Wonderful stuff.Other videos from Kansas University’s Hall Center for the Humanities are here.Leave a comment
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Mars In Stereo
To commemorate the fact that NASA’a Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has been traipsing about the Martian landscape for 1000 days, Nasa has released a photographic panorama of the landscape in stereo anaglyph format. Dig out your red/blue spectacles to see the image in glorious 3D. Luckily I still had a pair tucked away in The Illustrated Harlan Ellison – long since out of print…(hat tip to the Bad Astronomer for the link)Leave a comment
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Homomonument In Madurodam
Madurodam is a Dutch institution. It’s a recreation, in miniature, of architecture and landscapes found in The Netherlands. Scale models of famous buildings and landmarks can be found there.Yesterday, there was the ceremonial unveiling of the latest landmark to be added: a scaled-down reproduction of Amsterdam’s Homomonument. The unveiling was done by the Dutch Rapper, Lange Frans, Job Cohen, Amsterdam’s Mayor, Maurits van der Donk, the "Mayor" of Madurodam, and Frank van Dalen, the chair of the Dutch gay organisation, the COC.Good to see that that landmark has become a landmark in Madurodam. But what few visitors will probably realise is that a few hundred metres away from outside the entrance to Madurodam is The Hague’s own Homomonument…
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Only As Old As You Feel
Andy Sennitt has a nice article about the fact that media advertisers in The Netherlands seem to think that life ends at 50. I don’t think that it’s just here in the Netherlands; advertisers (it’s those damned marketing people again!) seem to spend a disproportionate amount of their budget chasing the yoof market. While shallow youth may be more easily swayed, they probably don’t have the disposable income that us oldies have…
One response to “Only As Old As You Feel”
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Paste your head onto a ghoulish body and join the Halloween Fancy dress compo at the Space Café
Bob
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How Many Others?
I discover that at the moment at least, I share my name with not a single citizen of the US. I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing…
HowManyOfMe.com 
There are:
0
people with my name
in the U.S.A.Leave a comment
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Not Sensible
So there I was, making a backup of some data, when my eye happened to fall on the box containing the CD blanks. Pleomax, it proudly proclaimed, along with the tagline underneath: "a sensible bit of SAMSUNG".And that got me thinking. What on earth does that actually mean? Does it mean:Congratulations, you’ve bought these CD blanks from a sensible bit of our corporation, when you could, just as easily, have bought something from us that was not sensible. It could have been downright stupid, for example, or actively evil. For example, you could have bought this from this SAMSUNG division and you would have been exposing yourself to invisible sperm-destroying rays. So count yourself bloody lucky that you have purchased merely a sensible CD blank from a sensible SAMSUNG division. Phew, what a relief, eh?What is it about marketing people? They get paid to sit around to dream up this stuff? Ridiculous blue cartoon figures? I thought Belgium had the monopoly on that shite. Life is too short.Leave a comment
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Fingerpointing Again
Here we go again, the fun of trying to deal with organisations that just blame each other instead of resolving issues.I ordered a DVD recently from Bol.com ("the biggest mediashop in the Netherlands"). My purchases from them are charged to my American Express card.I noticed when the charge came through on the last statement that it had been charged, not in Euros, but in Singapore dollars. Odd, thought I. Particularly since the original invoice from Bol.com was in Euros. And it meant that I ended up paying more than the amount shown on the original invoice.So I rang American Express… "Oh yes, sir, Bol submitted the charge in Singapore dollars – we suggest that you contact them to find out why they did that".So I rang Bol.com… "But sir, our Finance department records show that we have only received the original Euro amount from your credit card company. We don’t know why you have been charged extra, perhaps it is commission costs from your credit card company. We suggest that you contact them to find out why they did that".Aaaarrrggghhh!!!Still, this particular cloud does seem to have a silver lining. I sent an email back to Bol.com expressing my frustration at the situation(!) and they have just sent me a coupon that covers the cost difference. No word of an explanation though. My nasty suspicious mind is thinking that perhaps someone inside Bol has got a nice little scam going on. It may be only a few cents on each transaction, but spread over enough customers and enough purchases, and it could add up to a tidy sum. On the other hand, it might have been just a single mistake at the keyboard. I guess I’ll never know.Leave a comment
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The Telepresence Spectrum
By coincidence, two major players have announced telepresence products this week. Microsoft announced their RoundTable products (due next year) and Cisco has announced their TelePresence range.The Cisco products are interesting in a number of ways. They’ve taken the approach of making the experience of holding a virtual meeting as realistic as possible, using big HD screens and compression technology to make latency as low as possible (a minimum of 150 msec end-to-end). Their top end product (the TelePresence 3000) gives a strong illusion that twelve people are sitting around a single table – but in fact half of the table and six participants are in one location and six are in another location, with the other half of the table. The approach doesn’t come cheap – each end costs $300,000.Microsoft, on the other hand are tackling the low end of the telepresence market, with products predicted to come in at around the $3,000 mark for setting up one end of a teleconference.I think there’s room for both, particularly if they can interoperate, so that, for example, the CEO, seated in her Telepresence meeting room, can address employees gathered in meeting rooms, or seated at their own PCs.In my time in Shell, I had experience of both ends of teleconferencing, with various degrees of success. Even with the high-end systems, though, the experience was far from realistic and too often not trouble-free. Cisco do seem to have pushed the envelope, and it will be interesting to see how well they do in the market against the established players. Cisco themselves are rolling out 110 TelePresence rooms inside their own company.To get an impression of what the Cisco product is like, download or watch Robert Scoble’s video Podcast. It has Guido Jouret, Cisco’s CTO explaining to a group of people what the technology is behind the illusion. For techno-nerds, like me, this was a very interesting video, with Jouret giving a lucid explanation of how the products came about and what the plans are. Fast forward a few years, and this technology will have come down in price to probably a tenth of the cost, and be much more widely available to small companies, and not just the Fortune 100.Leave a comment
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