way to go.

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann won the Best Writing award for his tribute to his mother Marie. "A Baseball Fan Named Marie" aired two days after his mother's death.

wonderful....

WASHINGTON (AP) -- BP took measures to cut costs in the weeks before the catastrophic blowout in the Gulf of Mexico as it dealt with one problem after another, prompting a BP engineer to describe the doomed rig as a "nightmare well," according to internal documents released Monday.

The comment by BP engineer Brian Morel came in an e-mail April 14, six days before the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion that killed 11 people and has sent tens of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf in the nation's worst environmental disaster

This could save you life! (really it could.)

HOWTO remove a stripped screw with a rubber band

Cory Doctorow at 11:08 AM Sun

In theory, this looks like a pretty good way to cope with a stripped screw: use a bigger screwdriver and insert a rubber band between the tip of it and the screw-head to give you some traction. Never tried it, but it looks sound

In response to a posting on 'Everything in the medicine cabinet has expired."

Two famous quotes attributed to Lady Astor as said to Winston Churchill.

Winston once asked what he should come as to a masquerade party?
    "Sober." Lady Astor replied.
Once at a state function Lady Astor remarked.
    "Winston, If you were my husband I would put poison in your cup."
Winston replied. " I would drink it."

I always suspected....

The error: Abraham Lincoln was not a Republican when he won the 1864 election.



By changing the name of his party to “National Union Party”, Lincoln was able to court Copperhead (War Democrat) voters who would never vote Republican. More than just a name change, he selected the only southern Democrat senator not to resign his seat , Andrew Johnson, to run as vice-president. Despite a convention to raise support for mid-term elections, the Republicans in the party joined the ranks of the radicals. By March of 1867, Johnson was the only Unionist in office that had not defected and it became a splinter group of the Democratic Party although ironically the Republicans kept the name of National Union Republicans for a while and consider it part of their lineage.

Well worth the viewing.

Who would have thought that gangster rap would make the perfect soundtrack to presuppositional apologetics? This teaser showcases the documentary, Collision, to be released on DVD next month. Directed by Darren Doane, the film follows the debate tour of New Atheist author Christopher Hitchens and pastor Douglas Wilson. Both are sharp commentators. Both wield their humour with acerbic edge (say what you will about Hitchen’s bluster and lack of philosophical roots, he is still a witty and often entertaining writer). So an exchange between them is likely to be a fascinating subject for a documentary.



Debates are already a spectacle in and of themselves, with enormous drama and emotional investment (some may even argue that that is all they are). But this kind of film has the ability to take us even further into the drama. With slick cuts and its unique visual style, the film brings a whole new dimension to the event and to the argument that was the focus for the tour (“Is religion good for the world?”). Our culture has a clear obsession with the visual over the abstract and it will be interesting to see whether the film can successfully communicate some of the ideas that inspired the exchange in the first place, or whether the medium will swallow the message and engulf those ideas in the foreground of personalities.



The DVD comes out on the 27th (you can preorder now on amazon). You can also pick up the book there that Wilson and Hitchens both co-authored on the same topic. Also worth reading is their email exchange at Christianity Today.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The more I know. The more I don't want to know.

Deepwater Horizon survivors: "Are you fckng happy? The rig's on fire! I told you this was gonna happen!"

Xeni Jardin at 9:58 AM Tue

Mother Jones continues its excellent coverage of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and its aftermath with a piece by Josh Harkinson about eyewitness accounts from workers who were there when the rig blew up:
A prominent Houston attorney with a long record of winning settlements from oil companies says he has new evidence suggesting that the Deepwater Horizon's top managers knew of problems with the rig before it exploded last month, causing the worst oil spill in US history. Tony Buzbee, a lawyer representing 15 rig workers and dozens of shrimpers, seafood restaurants, and dock workers, says he has obtained a three-page signed statement from a crew member on the boat that rescued the burning rig's workers. The sailor, who Buzbee refuses to name for fear of costing him his job, was on the ship's bridge when Deepwater Horizon installation manager Jimmy Harrell, a top employee of rig owner Transocean, was speaking with someone in Houston via satellite phone. Buzbee told Mother Jones that, according to this witness account, Harrell was screaming, "Are you fucking happy? Are you fucking happy? The rig's on fire! I told you this was gonna happen."
Whoever was on the other end of the line was apparently trying to calm Harrell down. "I am fucking calm," he went on, according to Buzbee. "You realize the rig is burning?"
At that point, the boat's captain asked Harrell to leave the bridge. It wasn't clear whether Harrell had been talking to Transocean, BP, or someone else

Great....

BP's spill plan: they knew where it would go, that ecology would never recover, "No toxicity studies" on dispersants

Karen Dalton Beninato at neworleans.com writes,

I have obtained a copy of the almost-600-page BP Regional Oil Spill Response Plan for the Gulf of Mexico as of June, 2009, thanks to an insider. Some material has been redacted, but these are the three main takeaways from an initial read. The name of the well has been redacted, but if it's not Deepwater Horizon, then there's another rig still out there pumping oil and aimed at Plaquemines Parish.The three big takeaways, excerpted from Beninato's blog post: 1) In the worst case discharge scenario (on chart below), an oil leak was expected to come ashore with highest probability in Plaquemines Parish within 30 days

2) Spokespersons were advised never to assure the public that an ecosystem would be back to normal after the worst case scenario, which we are now living through.

3) Corexit oil dispersant toxicity has not been tested on ecosystems, according to the Oil Spill Response Plan. "Ecotoxilogical effects: No toxicity studies have been conducted on this product."

This is why I want to sell everything, buy kruggerrands and flee north.

It now costs two cents to make a penny, and nine cents to make a nickel. The administration suggested making the coins out of cheaper metals but was blocked buy the coin operated vending machine lobby who did not want to update their machines.

understated genius

The beautiful rubber band-powered artificial butterfly is helping researchers understand the flight of swallowtails. Hiroto Tanaka of Harvard University and Isao Shimoyama of the University of Tokyo built the balsa-wood machine, which boasts thin polymer film wings with "veins" made with a silicon-etching technique. The artificial butterfly enables them to control the flight mechanisms in ways they couldn't do with live butterflies. From Science News:

“We can't ask insects, like ‘Hey, please just flap your wings at 10 hertz,’” Tanaka says... To mimic the way the butterflies might use their front and rear wings together, the researchers created one big wing for each side of the body...

With high-speed cameras, the researchers got enough images of the model’s few seconds of flight for motion analysis. They conclude that by simply flapping its wings straight up and down, the machine recreated the bobbing flight of real butterflies. And by comparing fully veined with veinless wings, the researchers found that veins stiffened the wings and helped them achieve greater lift. The bobbing motion of the body also increased lift to help keep the flier aloft

Evil...

Below is video of Ardi Rizal, 2, who smokes two packs of cigarettes a day.

The Sumatran toddler was first given a cigarette when he was just 18 months old.

I'm not worried about his health, he looks healthy,' shrugged the boy's father Mohammad Rizal.
'He cries and throws tantrums when we don't let him smoke. He's addicted

Amazing

The Curta was conceived of by Curt Herzstark (1902-1988) in the 1930s in Vienna. By 1938, he had filed a key patent, covering his complemented stepped drum, Deutsches Reichspatent (German Empire Patent) No. 747073. This single drum replaced the multiple drums, typically around 10 or so, of contemporary calculators, and it enabled not only addition, but subtraction through nines' complement math, essentially subtracting by adding. The nines' complement math breakthrough eliminated the significant mechanical complexity created when "borrowing" during subtraction. This drum would prove to be the key to the small, hand-held mechanical calculator the Curta would become.


His work on the pocket calculator stopped in 1938 when the Nazis forced him and his company to concentrate on manufacturing measuring instruments and distance gauges for the German army.

Herzstark, the son of a Catholic mother but Jewish father, was taken into custody in 1943, eventually finding himself at the Buchenwald concentration camp. Ironically, it was in the concentration camp that he was encouraged to continue his earlier research: "While I was imprisoned inside [Buchenwald] I had, after a few days, told the [people] in the work production scheduling department of my ideas. The head of the department, Mr. Munich said, 'See, Herzstark, I understand you've been working on a new thing, a small calculating machine. Do you know, I can give you a tip. We will allow you to make and draw everything. If it is really worth something, then we will give it to the Führer as a present after we win the war. Then, surely, you will be made an Aryan.' For me, that was the first time I thought to myself, my God, if you do this, you can extend your life. And then and there I started to draw the CURTA, the way I had imagined it

A is for Away Team, where you should never wear red (mild mannered photographer)


B is for Binary, 1s and 0s in your head (jpstanley)

C is for Cosplay, making cons an awesome place

D is for Doctor, who keeps changing face (great beyond)

E is for Emoticons, that tell you what we’re feeling (neal gillis)

F is for Flickr, whose photos we are “stealing” (tricky)

G is for Gadgets, the way to our heart (slipstreamjc)

H is for Hardware, I took it apart! (jurvetson)

I is for iEverything, love it or hate it (dan dickinson)

J is for Japan, we’re glad Nintendo invaded (oscar mota)

K is for Keyboard, we love every letter (andrew*)

L is for Leias, the more the better! (koadmunkee)

M is for MMORPGs, it’s a magical place (i eated a cookie)

N is for NASA, and the beauty of space (nasa1fan)

O is for Occipital Lobe, we love using our brains (illuminaut)

P is for Programming, ((though lisp is a pain)) (phil_jackson)

Q is for Quilting, and other geeky crafts (athenamat)

R is for Reading, no matter what the path (timonoko)

S is for Science, though the cake is a lie (don solo)

T is for Tabletop, and a 20-sided die (nengard)

U is for Uncertainty, you just never know (neil crosby)

V is for Voltage, oh the places we’ll go! (oskay)

W is for the World Wide Web, it’s more than just porn (shimown)

X is for Xerox, where so much geekiness was born (marc smith)

Y is for Youth, since kids are geeks too (benmcleod)

Z is for Zork, watch out for the grue! (the_tml)

From Chop Shop comes this fantastic "Gundam Calling" t-shirt playing on the Clash's London Calling album cover which itself was a tribute to the design of Elvis's self-titled first album. Available in men's and women's sizes from the Boing Boing Bazaar! "robotRock (or Gundam Calling) Tshirt"

After nearly a month of failed efforts to stop the oil gushing into the Gulf, BP needs to get serious about destroying its well. Nuclear policy scholar Christopher Brownfield on the benefits of a nuclear explosion.

On Day 1 of the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, my gut instinct was to nuke the well shut. This was not simply an aggressive urge to brandish the most beastly of weapons in our mighty American arsenal, but a serious way to snuff out an enormous problem that grows worse by the day.
For more than 100 years, explosives have been used to break the necks of runaway oil wells, snapping the long, narrow columns and sealing them shut with tons and tons of rock. Over the last several days, our 24-hour news cycle has pumped us full of excruciating details about the failed efforts to siphon, cap off, and ultimately recover the oil that is gushing into the Gulf. The latest nonsense and false hope, a mile-long pipe designed to divert some of the oil flow, is like putting a 4-inch straw into a 22-inch-diameter fire hose. It's a sordid attempt by BP at drinking its own milkshake. But the problem with this disaster response is that the ideas BP has brought to the table all seem to ignore the simplest solution: permanently destroying the well.

Ahh...yeah

Last week, Noah's Ark Ministries, including evangelical explorers and filmmakers, announced that they had found the remnants of Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat in Turkey. (Read all about the claim in National Geographic.) Of course, this isn't the first group that's "found" Noah's Ark. No, it's at least the sixth in the last 50 years. Over at Discovery News, the Skeptical Inquirer's Benjamin Radford provides "A Short History of Noah's Ark Discoveries." From Discovery:

Interest in the Ark spiked in the 1970s after a man named Georgie Hagopian said he located and climbed on the remains of the Ark at least twice--though he claimed it occurred some 60 years earlier (in the early 1900s) and could offer no evidence to back it up. One of the first people to claim to have found the Ark on Mt. Ararat was a woman named Violet Cummings, who in the early 1970s wrote a book titled Noah's Ark: Fable or Fact? Despite its intriguing title, the claim turned out to be fable, not fact. A few years later, in 1976, yet another man claimed to have discovered the Ark on Ararat, and offered ambiguous photos as proof but nothing more came of it.
Interest waned until the 1990s, when CBS television aired a primetime special titled The Incredible Discovery of Noah's Ark, which finally offered seemingly definitive proof in the form of an eyewitness who owned a piece of wood he claimed was from the ark. The whole thing turned out to be a huge hoax; CBS and its viewers had been duped

Natali explains how he'll adapt NEUROMANCER and HIGH RISE
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Posted on Monday, May 10th, 2010 20:35:28 GMT by: io9

Posted under: movie news cyberpunk interview scifi horror
Splice director Natali has two huge movie adaptations in the pipeline: William Gibson's Neuromancer, and J.G. Ballard's High Rise. In an exclusive interview, Natali explains to us how he updated and changed High Rise, and his hopes for Neuromancer.
While explaining to us the ideas behind Splice's graphic horror, Natali took some time to update us on how he's transforming High Rise, Ballard's story of class warfare in an isolated building the size of a city, into a movie. And he explained what he hopes audience will experience in his recently announced adaptation of Neuromancer

In 1901, Massachusetts surgeon Dr. Duncan MacDougall attempted to prove the existence of the soul by weighing a person before, and right after, death. He hacked an industrial beam scale so that it could be attached to a hospital bed. Then, he began to seek out a subject in the terminally ill patients at the hospital. First up was a man dying of tuberculosis. According to MacDougall, “The instant life ceased, the opposite scale pan fell with a suddenness that was astonishing – as if something had been lifted from the body.” Apparently, 21 grams was missing from his body. MacDougall reproduced the experiment several more times. The physician's work has become a classic tale that, of course, is still widely cited by philosophers, skeptics, and "believers." And yes, it's MacDougall's experiments that inspired the film 21 Grams too. Fortean Times weighs the truths, half-truths, and unknowns of "the strange deathbed experiment of Dr. MacDougall." From FT:




Deducing exactly what went on in MacDougall’s laboratory after more than a century has passed is no easy task, but a possible insight comes from some written correspondence between MacDougall and Richard Hodgson. These letters (which were later published by the American Society of Psychical Research) start in November 1901, after MacDougall’s first experiment, and continue until May 1902, when the entire project was halted. They contain a full description of MacDougall’s methods, results and the circumstances of all six patients which, when compared with his American Medicine paper, offer some clues to the solution of this mystery.

MacDougall’s letters make it plain that, with the exception of the first patient, all the experiments were beset with problems that may be broadly divided into one of two categories. The first problem was in ascert­aining the exact time of death, an issue that appears to affect patients two, three and six. MacDougall acknowledged this with the second patient, where the period of uncertainty lasted for 15 minutes, but with patient three it is only in his letters that we learn of “a jarring of the scales” made while trying to determine “whether or not the heart had ceased to beat”. Patient six was excluded for other reasons (see below), but in his letters MacDougall remarks that “I am inclined to believe that he passed away while I was adjusting the beam”, which again suggests uncertainty as to the exact moment of death.



The second issue was a problem relating to the measuring equipment itself, which MacDougall himself cited as a reason for voiding the results of patients four and six. However, with the fifth patient the measured drop in weight at death was later followed by an evident malfunction, as the scales could not afterwards be made to re-balance themselves correctly. In any object­ive experiment this uncertainty would have voided the result, but at no point does MacDougall question the reliability of his set-up. Thus, of the six patients, just one (the first) appears to have been measured without mishap, but repeated troubles with the equipment and with determining the moment of death perhaps casts doubt on even these results. Thus, rather than trying to find a physical cause for the loss of weight at death, it is conceivable that there was no loss of weight at all, or that it might not have coincided with the moment of death. Only a complete retrial with human patients will answer these questions, and that has so far not been forthcoming

Space cowboy

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal independently confirmed that they heard Reagan  tell a moving story about having filmed the death camps. Even though he never left the United States during wartime. According to Reagan aide Michael Deaver, just because Reagan may have viewed "footage shipped home by the Signal Corps" and "saw the nightmare on film not in person," that "did not mean he saw it less." Yikes

Have you ever noticed how incompetent people are often incredibly confident? Meanwhile, highly-skilled folks underestimate their ability to perform. That's called the Dunning-Kruger Effect named for Justin Kruger and David Dunning of Cornell University who published their study of the cognitive bias in a 1999 scientific paper. ABC Radio National's The Science Show recently explored the Dunning-Kruger Effect. According to the scientists, "Overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it." ABC Radio National's The Science Show recently explored the Dunning-Kruger Effect:



Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1995. A local man, McArthur Wheeler, walks into two banks in the middle of the day and robs them both at gunpoint. Making away with the cash, he is arrested later that evening. Back at the station police sit him down and show him footage from the banks' security cameras. Wheeler can't believe it, the cameras had somehow seen through his disguise. He was seen mumbling to himself, 'But I wore the juice.' His was no ordinary disguise; no balaclava, mask or elaborate makeup, just lemon juice, liberally applied to the face. He was certain that the squirt of citrus would render him invisible to security cameras.

Charles Darwin once said, 'Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than knowledge,' and Dunning and Kruger seem to have proven this point. In light of this, it suddenly becomes clear why public debate can be so excruciating. Debates on climate change, the age of the Earth or intelligent design are perfect real-life examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect. It beautifully explains the utter confidence of those who, with no expertise, remain stubborn in their views regardless of overwhelming evidence. It makes you want to shake them by the collar and scream about how stupid they are. But evidence shows that's not the best strategy.