Month: October 2006

10/17/2006

Hoo boy, here we go.

Secretary Chertoff of the Department of Homeland Insecurity said this today:

We now have a capability of someone to radicalize themselves over the internet. They can train themselves over the internet. They never have to necessarily go to the training camp or speak with anybody else and that diffusion of a combination of hatred and technical skills in things like bomb-making is a dangerous combination. Those are the kind of terrorists that we may not be able to detect with spies and satellites.

While I don’t think “radicalize” is a word, this ominous statement definitely spells the beginning of the end of the internet. If people can really go online and learn about how to make a bomb (seriously? you can do that?) we absolutely must shut down the single greatest communications device in history. We can’t risk it.

Robert Mueller, Director of the FBI, chimed in today with his own frightening rhetoric:

Terrorists coordinate their plans cloaked in the anonymity of the Internet, as do violent sexual predators prowling chat rooms.

Whoa. So the internet is basically a place where terrorists and pedophiles hang out? I’m so dumb. I thought it was used for all kinds of good stuff. But gee, if it’s possible to use it for something bad, like Terrorism, it’s got to be eliminated. That’s the only solution.

With the elections coming up in a few weeks, I envision desperate Republicans jumping on the Internet Terrorist Bandwagon and screaming about how unacceptable this is, and how the new laws just enacted are simply insufficient to combat such a serious menace. They’ll have the internet shut down by Christmas.

I guess I’ll have to quit my job then, and become a shepherd.

10/17/2006

“People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.”

— George Bernard Shaw

10/17/2006

On February 14, 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft turned and snapped a picture of the Earth from four billion miles away. Circled in blue here, you can see the tiny pale blue dot suspended in a beam of sunlight.

Of the photo, Carl Sagan said:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there– on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

It’s both humbling and awe-inspiring to recognize how tiny we are in the cosmos.

10/16/2006

Ahh, ’tis the season. The Congressional elections are in a few weeks, and that means every few days I get another phone call where some recorded voice tells me how horrible such-and-such candidate is.

A few days ago it was actually a live person– some guy who wanted to know whether I’d vote for Representative Musgrave (the incumbent) or her opponent. I told him that I wasn’t going to vote for either of them, since I’m generally a Libertarian and vote for the candidate who I feel best represents me, rather than blindly following a party line.

Whee, politics!

10/14/2006

Halloween is almost here, which means it’s time to start shopping for costumes. And if you’re walking down the aisle looking at the various monster masks and fairy princess costumes, I’m sure you’d stop dead when you saw the toilet costume!

Wow. Words fail me.

And not only is the costume itself beyond words, the kid modeling it definitely has some special needs too.

What’s that you say? Little Billy doesn’t want to be a toilet Tuesday night? Well, never fear, because he could always slip into the whoopee cushion costume!

Same kid– and time for his medication, I think.

Also, I can’t help but wonder what would happen if you gave him a big hug. Would you release some kind of deafening, ear-shattering, Armageddon-class fart noise?

10/13/2006

I’ve got a dual-monitor setup in my office– two 17″ LCD panels that are super sweet. Having two screens is so much more productive than a single one, and in the year or so I’ve had them I’ve loved using them.

Yesterday I found a killer deal on some new 20″ widescreen LCD displays, and started thinking that if a pair of 17″ers could make me so much more productive, imagine what another three or four inches would do! (Funny, that sounds like those spammy e-mail messages I get daily.)

Anyway, I was looking at the specs and pondering whether it’s worth the expense and whether it would really make things that much better when Laralee walked into the office. I told her what I was thinking, and why I was hesitating, and she immediately said I should buy them.

A bit surprised, I asked why. She said because then I could give my existing LCDs to the kids (each of them have a computer in their room) and lose the hundred-pound CRTs that are on their desks. I thought that was sort of a strange reason, but who am I to argue with a mom who’s looking out for her kids?

So I ordered them, and should have forty inches of computer display sometime next week. Woo hoo!

10/12/2006

Although the solar system is down one planet, there are still some pretty spectacular things to be found out there. Here’s a photo of Saturn, taken by Cassini, with the sun backlighting the rings. It even clearly shows a previously unknown distant ring. Amazing!