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silveradeptThat’s it! No more! Class is officially out of session! There are no more lectures! (unless I go back for something, which isn’t likely right now) There’s only one more thing to do, and that’s turn in the project. Which means in one week at most, I’ll have done it! One of the great achievements of my life to this point will have happened for real. College will be finished. Future anxiety, go.
Shooter on Virginia Tech's campus this morning kills at least 30, and wounds more. School shootings of any type worry me. Actually, shootings of any type worry me. I’m worried about what generally seems to happen when people, guns, and emotions mix. I can see where people want gun controls because of these things.
A quick blurb in Pacific Views takes a look at how fundamentalists tend to have problems keeping children in the faith. Outside influences like science, inconsistencies in the text, and the upbringing of the children themselves make it difficult for them to stay. Hrm. So where do the new people come from if many children are deserting the family religion?
Fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible also can figure in reconstructions of the history of the southern United States. Souther Slavery As it Wasn't takes a look at a scholarly-looking piece of reconstructionism that claims that Slavery wasn’t all that bad, slaves were happy people, and other rewritings of history more in line with the Klan than civics class.
With the advances of technology, new, faster, cheaper, better is the driving force behind things. But there are some people who appreciate the old and work to preserve it. Collectors of older computer models have fun and profit with obsolete machines. Those people looking to transfer over old programs or read old files may soon have a great appreciation for these collectors.
According to an article in the Independent, technology, like mobile phones, might be responsible for the sudden bee deaths. It’s a hypothesis that probably rivals the “cell phones kill brain cells” one. But how would the radiation from mobile devices cause colony collapse? Unless the passive radiation is like someone getting a full-on burst of a nuclear reactor or something.
In Nigeria, child-friendly (and bright green) OLPC laptops have been distributed to a school outside the capital. So now we get to see how technology impacts their lives.
Now that computer-assisted bionic eyes are becoming more popular, technology is being developed to fine-tune and customize the picture to the users that have the implant installed. User-friendly bionic eyes. Question is now whether they’re going to start running some form of Windows. In other biotech the genetic code of the rhesus macaque has been mapped. This could help out research in figuring out how things might react in humans, or figure out what changed from them to create us (or the other way around.)
The U.S. Department of Defense, along with Cisco, are planning on putting up an IP router... iiiiiiiin spaaaaaaaaaaace. That way, satellites can communicate with each other and not have to bounce between the ground and the satellites quite so much. That could make for higher-speed high-speed.
Last in technology is something from The Register about new laws of robotics being drafter for combat droids which qould require them to have human permission to fire on humans, while being able to blast away other droids without qualms. Some droids might be equipped with non-lethal weaponry that could fire on humans as well as machines, getting the humans to flee before the machines get roasted by the machine-killers.There may be kinks in the system, though, if the humans aren’t visible or are connected to machines that are targets.
The city of Sao Paulo has banned outdoor advertising, starting January 1 of 2008. This has provoked a rather angry response from those doing the advertising, going even so far as to call it “injurious to society”. I think it’s an interesting experiment, and I hope that it succeeds or is at least informative. I could certainly enjoy seeing more natural wonders and less artificial advertisements. Perhaps later on, there might be strictly regulated advertising, but it might turn out to be better without ads. Some flickr photos of the ad-less city.
Other, more domestic political things have Liberal Eagle discussing the significant effect the media has on U.S. presidential elections, by constructing and then forcing the facts to conform to “stories” that the media outlets create for the candidates. Liberal Eagle looks into the past to see how this helped people see the younger Bush as a down-home guy and Mr. Gore as a boring nerd. He also links to Eric Alterman's story about what the "stories" are going to be for 2008’s current leaders. See how well the media and the candidates stick to their scripts, and whether that helps or hurts them.
Other politics involve the watch lists, many of which are secret, but all of which cause hassles for people who aren't on the list. After all, there’s nothing quite like being Unaccountably Randomly Searched in a consistent manner.
Next to last is a piece on AlterNet where the writer of The Feminine Mistake, a book about what women sacrifice and gain by stopping being working Moms and going to stay-at-home moms, suggests that many stay-at-home moms are in active denial about whether their choices were/are good, based on the reactions to the book (without having read it). So, should dads start being the stay-at-home parent, if we can get back into the workforce and such easier?
The last thing for tonight is something that shows the versatility of programming for the Firefox browser. The Pacman extension for Firefox adds the retro game to the browser. With this installed, one doesn’t even have to go out to a potentially blocked site to play. Hehe. I wonder how many people have this installed to help their work boredom.
Anyway, I’m going to bed. I just realized that I’ll be missing the wiffleball game tomorrow night... which would have been my last wiffleball game ever. I warned them they’d have to find another pitcher. So I was a semester early. Now, I’m going to bed, since my Internet connection is waffling.
Shooter on Virginia Tech's campus this morning kills at least 30, and wounds more. School shootings of any type worry me. Actually, shootings of any type worry me. I’m worried about what generally seems to happen when people, guns, and emotions mix. I can see where people want gun controls because of these things.
A quick blurb in Pacific Views takes a look at how fundamentalists tend to have problems keeping children in the faith. Outside influences like science, inconsistencies in the text, and the upbringing of the children themselves make it difficult for them to stay. Hrm. So where do the new people come from if many children are deserting the family religion?
Fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible also can figure in reconstructions of the history of the southern United States. Souther Slavery As it Wasn't takes a look at a scholarly-looking piece of reconstructionism that claims that Slavery wasn’t all that bad, slaves were happy people, and other rewritings of history more in line with the Klan than civics class.
With the advances of technology, new, faster, cheaper, better is the driving force behind things. But there are some people who appreciate the old and work to preserve it. Collectors of older computer models have fun and profit with obsolete machines. Those people looking to transfer over old programs or read old files may soon have a great appreciation for these collectors.
According to an article in the Independent, technology, like mobile phones, might be responsible for the sudden bee deaths. It’s a hypothesis that probably rivals the “cell phones kill brain cells” one. But how would the radiation from mobile devices cause colony collapse? Unless the passive radiation is like someone getting a full-on burst of a nuclear reactor or something.
In Nigeria, child-friendly (and bright green) OLPC laptops have been distributed to a school outside the capital. So now we get to see how technology impacts their lives.
Now that computer-assisted bionic eyes are becoming more popular, technology is being developed to fine-tune and customize the picture to the users that have the implant installed. User-friendly bionic eyes. Question is now whether they’re going to start running some form of Windows. In other biotech the genetic code of the rhesus macaque has been mapped. This could help out research in figuring out how things might react in humans, or figure out what changed from them to create us (or the other way around.)
The U.S. Department of Defense, along with Cisco, are planning on putting up an IP router... iiiiiiiin spaaaaaaaaaaace. That way, satellites can communicate with each other and not have to bounce between the ground and the satellites quite so much. That could make for higher-speed high-speed.
Last in technology is something from The Register about new laws of robotics being drafter for combat droids which qould require them to have human permission to fire on humans, while being able to blast away other droids without qualms. Some droids might be equipped with non-lethal weaponry that could fire on humans as well as machines, getting the humans to flee before the machines get roasted by the machine-killers.There may be kinks in the system, though, if the humans aren’t visible or are connected to machines that are targets.
The city of Sao Paulo has banned outdoor advertising, starting January 1 of 2008. This has provoked a rather angry response from those doing the advertising, going even so far as to call it “injurious to society”. I think it’s an interesting experiment, and I hope that it succeeds or is at least informative. I could certainly enjoy seeing more natural wonders and less artificial advertisements. Perhaps later on, there might be strictly regulated advertising, but it might turn out to be better without ads. Some flickr photos of the ad-less city.
Other, more domestic political things have Liberal Eagle discussing the significant effect the media has on U.S. presidential elections, by constructing and then forcing the facts to conform to “stories” that the media outlets create for the candidates. Liberal Eagle looks into the past to see how this helped people see the younger Bush as a down-home guy and Mr. Gore as a boring nerd. He also links to Eric Alterman's story about what the "stories" are going to be for 2008’s current leaders. See how well the media and the candidates stick to their scripts, and whether that helps or hurts them.
Other politics involve the watch lists, many of which are secret, but all of which cause hassles for people who aren't on the list. After all, there’s nothing quite like being Unaccountably Randomly Searched in a consistent manner.
Next to last is a piece on AlterNet where the writer of The Feminine Mistake, a book about what women sacrifice and gain by stopping being working Moms and going to stay-at-home moms, suggests that many stay-at-home moms are in active denial about whether their choices were/are good, based on the reactions to the book (without having read it). So, should dads start being the stay-at-home parent, if we can get back into the workforce and such easier?
The last thing for tonight is something that shows the versatility of programming for the Firefox browser. The Pacman extension for Firefox adds the retro game to the browser. With this installed, one doesn’t even have to go out to a potentially blocked site to play. Hehe. I wonder how many people have this installed to help their work boredom.
Anyway, I’m going to bed. I just realized that I’ll be missing the wiffleball game tomorrow night... which would have been my last wiffleball game ever. I warned them they’d have to find another pitcher. So I was a semester early. Now, I’m going to bed, since my Internet connection is waffling.
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RE: Virginia Tech
Date: 2007-04-17 05:09 am (UTC)~M~
no subject
Date: 2007-04-17 06:07 am (UTC)this weekend is gonna be fun!
Re: Virginia Tech
Date: 2007-04-17 10:15 am (UTC)bullet-proof vest
Date: 2007-04-17 10:30 am (UTC)As this case clearly demonstrates, the police et al, cannot save your life in most situations, and here, their actions actually killed people. The disarmed citizen is a victim waiting to happen.
~M~
..and I'm a 'left wing' Pagan in case you were wondering..
Re: Virginia Tech
Date: 2007-04-17 02:09 pm (UTC)Re: Virginia Tech
Date: 2007-04-17 02:12 pm (UTC)~M~
Re: bullet-proof vest
Date: 2007-04-17 06:58 pm (UTC)Re: bullet-proof vest
Date: 2007-04-18 05:28 am (UTC)If only 10% of those students were armed, that would have been 3 shooters versus one. But of course, the opposite lesson will be blared by the media.
~M~
Re: bullet-proof vest
Date: 2007-04-18 10:09 am (UTC)Two words: suicidal maniac.
Re: bullet-proof vest
Date: 2007-04-18 10:59 am (UTC)Sure, he was all ramped up, but a round clipping him in the arm, or even thudding into his vest...dude, I can guarantee you if would have at least distracted him. And if one of the theoretical shooters was a half way decent shot, he or she might have popped a round into Cho's neck or face.
There's an old maxim: Better to have gun and not need it than need it and not have one. And if you say you would rather have not had one if you were at Virginia Tech then I'd you're either a fool or a liar.
~M~
Re: bullet-proof vest
Date: 2007-04-18 11:50 am (UTC)bloodshed
Date: 2007-04-18 12:36 pm (UTC)Be well...
~M~
Fool's Paradise
Date: 2007-04-18 01:33 pm (UTC)So much for relying on Authority to protect you.
~M~
The Heart of The Matter
Date: 2007-04-19 04:41 am (UTC)~M~
Re: The Heart of The Matter
Date: 2007-04-22 04:55 pm (UTC)Re: The Heart of The Matter
Date: 2007-04-22 05:02 pm (UTC)~M~