Noteworthy Morsels

The hole makes it go faster!

2010-01-21T12:51:00.000-07:00

Picture by: dunno source Submitted by: fizzatbeyond via Fail Uploader

I was given a webcam and when I went to install the drivers I noticed something funny about the CD.

"

How do you get it on your Kindle 2? ---> Kindleboards.com Screensaver Instructions

Requests?

Kyle likes Inglourious Basterds

2009-08-13T18:35:00.002-07:00

I have just seen for a second time “Inglourious Basterds.” It’s a mammoth, exciting, surprising, suspenseful, hilarious, moving and devilish piece of entertainment, by far Quentin Tarantino’s finest film since “Pulp Fiction,” my favorite film of the 1990s.

Overrated Movies Club Gets New Member

On This Day in Ancient History A Slave's Day Off

2009-08-12T21:48:00.000-07:00

On This Day in Ancient History A Slave's Day Off: "We call it August 13, but the Romans knew it as the ides of the sixth month until the period of the early Empire when August was re-named in honor of Augustus. The ides of the sixth month (August) was a special one for the goddess Diana (Greek Artemis). Part of this day's festivities was the washing of women's hair. Among its other odd properties, this day 'involved a general day's holiday for all slaves,' according to H.H.Scullard in Festivals and Ceremonies of the Roman Republic.

Why would the hunter and virgin goddess Diana be associated with slaves?

The connection comes from the fact that her temple was used as a sanctuary for runaway slaves.

How to sort feeds in Google Reader in alphabetical order

2008-08-11T12:22:00.003-07:00

I had a bunch of feeds in a folder/tag that I called 'A'. Until recently whenever I added a tag it would show up in Google reader in alphabetical order. Now all new feeds I add end up at the bottom of the list.

1. Go to 'manage my subscriptions' or 'settings'.
2. Click 'Folders and Tags'.
3. Delete the tag. (Warning: if you have many different folders/tags, this might not be a fast fix for you. I only have a couple of tags.)
4. Go to 'Subscriptions' and check the boxes of all the feeds you want back in the folder in alphabetical order.
5. Profit!

I tried messing with the XML file after I exported it but I couldn't figure it out and this works for me until they fix it.

Google Street View in Google Earth Google Van spotted.

2008-04-17T12:00:00.003-07:00

Caught a glimpse of the google car (appears to be a non-descript google van) in Scottsdale. This picture was taken from Google Earth. They added the street view functionality to it this week. Very nice addition.

Phil Hendrie badmouths Mormons.

2008-02-01T10:11:00.000-07:00

Make no mistake, Phil Hendrie is usually funny. But the other day he was commenting on Romney in the Republican debates and started in on a religion he apparently knows very little about. Hendrie also often claims to be a student of history but apparently this has not immunized him from a severe overdose of presentism. He thinks all mormons are weird because Joseph Smith once used stones to see into the ground. Well I think Phil's family tree is just as loopy based on the fact that EVERYBODY DID IT back then and even recently:

“Not surprisingly, many of New England's practicing alchemists [a chemist who attempts to turn baser metals into gold] were Yale and Harvard graduates (including Massachusetts's chief justice), and the last of these men continued their experiments into the 1820s....”

In Joseph Smith’s own day other Christian leaders were involved in practices which today’s critics would call “occultic.” Quinn, for instance, observes that in “1825, a Massachusetts magazine noted with approval that a local clergyman used a forked divining rod.... Similarly, a Methodist minister wrote twenty-three years later that a fellow clergymen in New Jersey had used a divining rod up to the 1830s to locate buried treasure and the ‘spirits [that] keep guard over buried coin’....”

One of Joseph’s early treasure-digging companions was Willard Chase, Methodist leader.

Many devout Christians believed in what has been termed the “magic world view.” This view included the prospect of finding water, lost objects, or buried treasure through the means of divination, either with rods, sticks, or seer-stones. R. Walker notes:

Benjamin Franklin reported that not only were such ideas [as buried treasure] “mighty prevalent,” but money digging itself was widespread: “You can hardly walk half a Mile out of Town on any Side,” he wrote, “without observing several Pits dug with that Design, and perhaps some lately opened. Men, otherwise of very good Sense, have been drawn into this Practice....”(Walker, 437-438.)

Franklin was a skeptic of such practices, himself being “enlightened.” For many people in frontier America, however, digging for treasure was a popular venture.

...money digging, with its fascination with ancient races, mysterious Spaniards and pirates, seers, magical rods and stones, and of course enchanted treasure, was clearly more than a passing or isolated phenomenon. In some areas the practice especially prospered. Philadelphia, for instance, earned the reputation as a money-digging center early in the eighteenth century.

[Christopher] Bird has chronicled the success of dozens of dowsers. ...Bird-- who holds a Harvard biology degree...-- ...cited the pharmaceutical firm, Hoffmann-La Roche, which in the Sixties and Seventies [1960s - 1970s] sent one of its executives, Peter Treadwell, Ph.D., around the world to dowse for water at proposed factory sites. “Roche uses methods that are profitable, whether or not they are scientifically explainable,” Treadwell remarked in 1972, “The dowsing methods pays off. It's one hundred percent reliable.”
Other companies, including oil and utility companies, have occasionally resorted to dowsing, though most are loath to admit it. But in 1980 Pacific Bell revealed that one of its Monterey, California repairmen, Tom Harmon, had used two lengths of cable to find buried conduits. Harmon who learned the art from “an old rancher” continues to dowse when looking for hidden phone lines.
Even U.S. marines in Vietnam dowsed for Vietcong tunnels and traps. In the mid-Sixties, soldiers at a simulated Vietnamese jungle at Camp Pendleton, California, were taught to dowse for land mines, communication wires, and concealed chambers before being sent into combat. (Wolkomir, 42.)
For centuries dowsers, or diviners, have searched for various lost, or hidden articles. One noted dowser even located the body of a drowning victim, which police had been unable to find. I note the prevalence of divining not to support the practice, but rather to demonstrate that many other sincere and honest people do believe in it. Most scientists are skeptical of the practice, while other scientists, however, have reasonably sound explanations why divining does work.

~ Source

Long story short, when Hendrie points a finger at Mormons for things like this, he's got 3 big fat ones pointing back at pretty much the whole human race, Trinitarians included. The irony is that Phil probably believes a lot of bull crap but dusts off this old story just to have something ignorant to say.

He even stoops low enough to compare Mormons to Jones Town because of that ridiculous movie that came out last year that also happened to bomb at the box office. But does Phil Hendrie need a shred of proof? No. Using Hendrie's logic, all Catholics are weird because of the inquisition, all Buddhists are weird because of their militarism (see how easy it is to just toss grenades made of bull fertilizer?), all Protestants are weird because some of them fondle kids, and on and on and on.

Why do people attack Mormons? Follow the money. Most anti-mormons have personal problems and want to make a buck off of it or they are from other Christian sects who derive revenue from their clergy. Mormon donations & tithing goe to church building and disaster areas like hurricane katrina, victims of the tsunami in southeast asia, and the starving all over the globe. Christians clergymen give alot of their donations to the needy, don't get me wrong, but it is also their INCOME. Mormon 'clergymen' do not make a single penny. Do the math, if you are able. It is also a hell of a lot easier to mock Mormons than, say... Muslims? Go ahead and chase a Mormon out of the country, fine. He'll just set up a new one for awhile. Smile wrong at a the wrong Muslim and watch all life as you know it suddenly stop and every molecule in your body explode into pizza toppings at the speed of light.

All I'm saying, Phil, is maybe you shouldn't believe all of the hype about something you know very little of. Hell, Mormons invented TV so how bad could they be (granted, most TV blows chimponzee)?

----------------
Now playing: Phil Hendrie - 2008-01-30 New Phil Hendrie Show
via FoxyTunes

Mosquitoes suck.

2008-01-23T15:03:00.000-07:00

Engineered Mosquitoes Could Wipe Out Dengue Fever:

Scientists at a British biotech company said they have evidence that their genetically modified mosquitoes, which are programmed for sudden, early death, can control the spread of dengue fever.

How about programming pests to find humans distasteful rather than programming them to die?

I'll take 2 pools.

2008-01-22T12:57:00.000-07:00

Make a splash in the world's largest swimming pool

Measuring almost 3,500 ft in length, even the strongest swimmers may baulk at the idea of doing laps in this pool.

With a surface area of around 20 acres, the pool is equivalent in size to nearly 6,000 backyward swimming pools and is filled with 250,000 cubic metres of salt water.

Give me WiTricity now!

2008-01-09T10:15:00.000-07:00

Nanotechnology Now - Press Release: "Goodbye wires...": "Imagine a future in which wireless power transfer is feasible: cell phones, household robots, mp3 players, laptop computers, and other portable electronics capable of charging themselves without ever being plugged in, freeing us from that final, ubiquitous power wire."

Lets face it. Wires suck.

Fly, jailbird, fly.

2008-01-08T12:39:00.000-07:00

I just laughed.

ATLANTA - An unusual question is before the Georgia Supreme Court: Should banishment of criminals be banned?

Though Georgia's judges are technically outlawed from banishing offenders, some have skirted the rule by restricting them from all but one of the state's 159 counties. Now, one convict is challenging the practice, claiming it is unconstitutional.

During arguments Monday, justices peppered attorneys with questions about how the policy works logistically.

For example, they asked, how would an offender even get to the county where he was supposed to live without passing through counties he was banned from?

"You could fly," Justice Robert Benham quipped.