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First of hall, happy new year to those who keep the Gregorian calendar. After a slight protest was quelled, 2007 arrived on schedule. Hopefully, 2007 will be a better year than 2006 was. (The bar, in terms of world affairs, has been set so low that it would take doing to actually get lower. We even managed to squeeze in the 3,000th death in Iraq before the new year. We’ll see whether the effort to really screw things up is put through.) I think that the only resolution I’ll set for this year is 1200 dpi. (Thanks to Thomas K. Dye for gifting Ozy and Millie with such wisdom. - and if it should receive an HTML page of its own, let me know so I can change this link.)
If you wonder what’s supposed to happen in this year (or in any other years) according to the movies that have been produced, have a look at The Movie Timeline and start the complaints about how flying cars, space travel, and alien contacts (And thus, alien sex) have not been realized yet. And if you’re wondering what some people think should be going out of the parlance for this year, check out Lake Superior State University's Banished Words List.
Football team got beaten by a team that saw their weaknesses and exploited them. All it took was a couple players... and they just kept getting burnt. Ah, well. Bowl games are apparently not our thing. (Apparently, we didn’t even win the battle for viewer interest - this particular shot of one of USC's cheerleaders (Not Really Too Safe For Work), I suspect, will be most talked about.)
The last semester begins Thursday. I still haven’t gotten my books, but they’ll be around - those that have them, that is. Tomorrow I should probably go in and order what books I actually know - they’ll get here a day late for the first class, but that should be acceptable. The light’s at the end of the tunnel, now - all I have to do is pass. The job thing may be less immediately fruitful, but it too should come to a happy end. I was actually thinking today that the profession I want to do really is a good match for my personality and my interests. And the more I think about it, the more I think it’s a good career choice. So I’m happy about that - all my stress is about getting the job (and being fantastic at it), not that I might have picked the wrong one. Baby steps of improvement, but improvement nonetheless.
I’m building my yearly montage, much like the rest of us. After all, new year, new beginnings. A time to reflect on the old, discard the things that hinder us, and look forward to new things that will help us. In the meantime, perhaps I will inflict a montage of montages on you. Lots of links, little amounts of time. Or something like that. So we’ll begin with Newscientist.com and its ten most popular stories, progress to Technoccult's self-selected list of good stuff, slip into Harper's Carlin-esque review of the year, take a peek at No Touch Monkey!'s much more lighthearted review, a significantly more sobering lists form Slate, being the top 10 most outrageous civil liberties violations of 2006, and then Media Matters contributes a list of the most outrageous comments of 2006 (significantly more than ten).![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jokermage boasts a great link collection of his own, with higlights like “Every Role Playing Game Plotline Ever” and turning your urine the same color blue as the toilet bowl cleaner. Trust me. It’s good.
Less on the montage front - a triple object thatthewayne found on Wired - three of their reporters got a month to improve one of their abilities. One chose to try and improve his brainpower, another aimed to improve his shooting ability, and the last decided it would be wise to be able to run away fast from the brainiacs and the gunners.
Keeping their promise to the end, Saddam Hussein was executed by hanging before 2007 began. Some are speculating this can turn him into a martyr for certain causes, and that the wiser course of action would have been to turn him over to the Hague and let him spend the rest of his life in a jail cell as the sentences racked up. It would likely have been the more humane option. I have no idea whether spending his life in prison would have been better or worse for Saddam. Perhaps he would have been able to obtain a book deal for his memoirs. It would have prevented young children from hanging themselves in imitation, certainly.
I’m dead certain this has been reported before - or at least, that Toxoplasma as a mind-altering parasite has been mentioned before. Anyway, it appears that Toxoplasma gondii infection makes men less intelligent and attractive, but makes women sexier. Somewhere in the twisted labyrinth of my mind, this makes sense. I’m just trying to work out how.
Another piece about the growing potential or actual influence of faith on law enforcement and military personnel, America's Holy Warriors is also a warning that contracting security to paramilitary groups may not be a great idea, but the efforts underway to convert police and military personnel to a particular kind of dogma under the guise of “supporting the troops”, if successful, will mean disaster for the American populace and way of governance. And any discussion of religion wouldn’t be complete without an assessment of whether a candidate of a non-Protestant faith could get elected to the Presidency (this Slate CW says no, at least for an LDS). DRT (not The Cabal) takes a look and says that, really, looking at someone by what they do is a better way of judging their character.
I’m not sure what sort of viability this would have, but apparently there is a molecular-level keypad locking mechanism developed in Israel. With a molecular-size lock, what sort of data or objects can it protect?
On a slightly more practical note, bacterial detection may be able to come to a piece of meat (or spinach) near you. With such an ability, it would be easier to ensure the quality of all materials at all stages of the transport and/or cooking process. (At a certain temperature, it becomes a moot point for some bacteria, but other may still be detectable if they live.)
There’s a chimp joke being made here, I think. But if it is a real project and goes up, if someone should happen to see a geostationary banana over Texas, don’t be inordinately alarmed. They were planning this, after all. If, indeed, we do have a chimp joke, so much the better.
There’s still more up my sleeve. (This is, incidentally, what being away from broadband does to you - the neat stuff piles up.) We’ll slip over to Blessed Art Thou, (piccie!) which makes Angelina Jolie much more of a goddess than some people already think she is. Then we’re going to change the image slightly and attach with it someone who wants Global Orgasms to be more about action, less about prayer, then, when nobody’s looking, we’re going to say something that’s an encouraging development in evangelical thought - one preachers ays Christians should have hot sex, with positions and toys and the like. Perhaps if this wave of thinking catches on, we’ll have less repressed energy being devoted to repressing others?
And that’s a week’s worth of material. More freeform materials, as well as a potential year-in-review synopsis, may be forthcoming later. Maybe. We’ll see how I feel. Plus, class starts Thursday, grrrrrrrr...
If you wonder what’s supposed to happen in this year (or in any other years) according to the movies that have been produced, have a look at The Movie Timeline and start the complaints about how flying cars, space travel, and alien contacts (And thus, alien sex) have not been realized yet. And if you’re wondering what some people think should be going out of the parlance for this year, check out Lake Superior State University's Banished Words List.
Football team got beaten by a team that saw their weaknesses and exploited them. All it took was a couple players... and they just kept getting burnt. Ah, well. Bowl games are apparently not our thing. (Apparently, we didn’t even win the battle for viewer interest - this particular shot of one of USC's cheerleaders (Not Really Too Safe For Work), I suspect, will be most talked about.)
The last semester begins Thursday. I still haven’t gotten my books, but they’ll be around - those that have them, that is. Tomorrow I should probably go in and order what books I actually know - they’ll get here a day late for the first class, but that should be acceptable. The light’s at the end of the tunnel, now - all I have to do is pass. The job thing may be less immediately fruitful, but it too should come to a happy end. I was actually thinking today that the profession I want to do really is a good match for my personality and my interests. And the more I think about it, the more I think it’s a good career choice. So I’m happy about that - all my stress is about getting the job (and being fantastic at it), not that I might have picked the wrong one. Baby steps of improvement, but improvement nonetheless.
I’m building my yearly montage, much like the rest of us. After all, new year, new beginnings. A time to reflect on the old, discard the things that hinder us, and look forward to new things that will help us. In the meantime, perhaps I will inflict a montage of montages on you. Lots of links, little amounts of time. Or something like that. So we’ll begin with Newscientist.com and its ten most popular stories, progress to Technoccult's self-selected list of good stuff, slip into Harper's Carlin-esque review of the year, take a peek at No Touch Monkey!'s much more lighthearted review, a significantly more sobering lists form Slate, being the top 10 most outrageous civil liberties violations of 2006, and then Media Matters contributes a list of the most outrageous comments of 2006 (significantly more than ten).
jokermage boasts a great link collection of his own, with higlights like “Every Role Playing Game Plotline Ever” and turning your urine the same color blue as the toilet bowl cleaner. Trust me. It’s good.Less on the montage front - a triple object that
thewayne found on Wired - three of their reporters got a month to improve one of their abilities. One chose to try and improve his brainpower, another aimed to improve his shooting ability, and the last decided it would be wise to be able to run away fast from the brainiacs and the gunners. Keeping their promise to the end, Saddam Hussein was executed by hanging before 2007 began. Some are speculating this can turn him into a martyr for certain causes, and that the wiser course of action would have been to turn him over to the Hague and let him spend the rest of his life in a jail cell as the sentences racked up. It would likely have been the more humane option. I have no idea whether spending his life in prison would have been better or worse for Saddam. Perhaps he would have been able to obtain a book deal for his memoirs. It would have prevented young children from hanging themselves in imitation, certainly.
I’m dead certain this has been reported before - or at least, that Toxoplasma as a mind-altering parasite has been mentioned before. Anyway, it appears that Toxoplasma gondii infection makes men less intelligent and attractive, but makes women sexier. Somewhere in the twisted labyrinth of my mind, this makes sense. I’m just trying to work out how.
Another piece about the growing potential or actual influence of faith on law enforcement and military personnel, America's Holy Warriors is also a warning that contracting security to paramilitary groups may not be a great idea, but the efforts underway to convert police and military personnel to a particular kind of dogma under the guise of “supporting the troops”, if successful, will mean disaster for the American populace and way of governance. And any discussion of religion wouldn’t be complete without an assessment of whether a candidate of a non-Protestant faith could get elected to the Presidency (this Slate CW says no, at least for an LDS). DRT (not The Cabal) takes a look and says that, really, looking at someone by what they do is a better way of judging their character.
I’m not sure what sort of viability this would have, but apparently there is a molecular-level keypad locking mechanism developed in Israel. With a molecular-size lock, what sort of data or objects can it protect?
On a slightly more practical note, bacterial detection may be able to come to a piece of meat (or spinach) near you. With such an ability, it would be easier to ensure the quality of all materials at all stages of the transport and/or cooking process. (At a certain temperature, it becomes a moot point for some bacteria, but other may still be detectable if they live.)
There’s a chimp joke being made here, I think. But if it is a real project and goes up, if someone should happen to see a geostationary banana over Texas, don’t be inordinately alarmed. They were planning this, after all. If, indeed, we do have a chimp joke, so much the better.
There’s still more up my sleeve. (This is, incidentally, what being away from broadband does to you - the neat stuff piles up.) We’ll slip over to Blessed Art Thou, (piccie!) which makes Angelina Jolie much more of a goddess than some people already think she is. Then we’re going to change the image slightly and attach with it someone who wants Global Orgasms to be more about action, less about prayer, then, when nobody’s looking, we’re going to say something that’s an encouraging development in evangelical thought - one preachers ays Christians should have hot sex, with positions and toys and the like. Perhaps if this wave of thinking catches on, we’ll have less repressed energy being devoted to repressing others?
And that’s a week’s worth of material. More freeform materials, as well as a potential year-in-review synopsis, may be forthcoming later. Maybe. We’ll see how I feel. Plus, class starts Thursday, grrrrrrrr...
