Kermit off his meds

Oh dear...poor kermit.

(I do so love the corruption of wholesome childhood figures...*wistful sigh*)

Creation museum sneak peek

You definitely need to take some kind of drug before taking this virtual tour of the Creationism museum.

Women: Keep Your Virtue!

Holy Bacon Bonanza Batman!

Mother of god that's a big pig!

Birth control is a "pesticide"

Ladies and gentlement, Ms. Unruh has left the reality the rest of us inhabit and gone to her happy place...

Christian science

Wow. Nothing like a good old fashioned public display of ignorance.

Jack Thompson: is he really that dumb?

Oh, if only Jack Thompson were worth Bill Gates' time to flatten. Do you have any idea how many lawyers they have on retainer? If it's possible to literally sue someone to death, they would be the ones to figure out how...

Symbolic breastfeeding?

If there were ever a perfect example of just how stupid religious doctrine can be...

As seen on a t-shirt in the department

Haikus are easy
But sometimes they don't make sense
Refridgerator

Blizzard wants me never to graduate

Bastards.

A good summary of my distaste for musicals

Anything too stupid to be said is sung.

-- Voltaire

Hitchens on Hannity and Colmes

You know, I gotta say, much as I dislike Falwell and Hannity, Hitchens is being a dick in his interview. Why is it so unreasonable to say, "Look, I don't take pleasure in the loss Falwell's family feels, and I don't wish suffering on anyone, but this guy does leave a legacy of suffering and intolerance"? You don't have to say you like him, you don't even have to say you're sorry he's dead...but you can still give your condolences to his family because he was a human being (no matter how awful a human being he was), and there were other human beings that cared about him.

Low on my list of things to steal

"You want to steal what?"
"No, no, Hans...hear me out. Every schmuck tries to steal diamonds, cash...whatever. They'll _never_ see it coming!"
"Rail lines. You want to steal rail lines. The things trains run on..."
"I'm telling you, they'll never expect it!"
"No, no, I don't imagine they would..."

The great god debate on Nightline

Most has been posted on YouTube.

Can somone explain to me why anybody is talking to Kirk Cameron about evolution? Did he even finish college? High school?

I am kind of disappointed in the atheistic defense, although I grant you that any self-respecting atheist debater wouldn't stoop to debating Kirk Cameron in a public setting. They did a really crappy job of defending evolution, for instance. Among other things, they needed to at least mention that no one on the stage was a biologist and was not an expert (and Cameron probably never even finished high school biology), and trying to argue piecemeal about a discipline you have no training in is a very bad idea no matter what the topic is.

I also thought their defense of an atheistic moral framework was rather weak. They touched on it by talking about the evolution of societies, but they never made the point clearly: morality evolves socially. Social forces drive what kinds of behavior a society values, and those values are imbued in children. You aren't making conscious, rational decisions every time you decide to do something (like lend your roommate some money) by weighing its moral merits. You've been conditioned to recognize certain kinds of right and wrong, and you have a very gutteral reaction most of the time.

Their response to Pascal's wager was also terrible. "I don't want to be in heaven with a megalomaniacal god" is perhaps the worst response you can give. It's logically flawed and just reflects anger and frustration. The right answer, and the one that people like Hitchins gives, is that with respect to every other religion, Christians are also atheists. They risk the wrath of Allah every day, and it doesn't seem to bother them.

The one thing I think they handled somewhat well is the question of the historical figure of Jesus. Or, actually, as I reflect, I think it's more that the Christians' arguments are laughable in and of themselves. They actually said that you can't pay attention to the historical records because people lie, and the Bible is axiomatically true. So, basically, the Bible is true because it's true no matter what all the other evidence says.

Great. Awesome. I'm convinced.

Tell me how you really feel, Christopher Hitchens

I'm thinking he didn't like Jerry Falwell...

His fear of velociraptors was justified

MIT kids are giant nerds. Occasionally they're kind of amusing, however.

(velociraptors: funny; playpen balls: funny; AACS key pasted on playpen balls: stupid)

Sex toys and soccer players

The prospect of sex toys named after prominent soccer players raises a host of questions that should probably never be answered.

Yay bon-kyu-bon!

Bon-kyu-bon? Hai! Domo arigato!

Safari

Firefox has been crashing on me lately a lot. Not so much crashing as hanging. I think if I waited long enough, I would eventually emerge from the pinwheel of death, but I'm impatient. So, I tried switching to Safari for a day.

It did a bunch of things that annoyed me. One was the seeming lack of a "home" button. I probably could have gotten used to just having it as a bookmark, but I use iGoogle as a portal, so I go back there frequently. Having a big button that takes me there is useful.

Second thing was that every time I loaded iGoogle, it gave me a pinwheel for about 5 seconds at the end of loading. Every time. I have no idea why it did this, but it was annoying.

The nail in the coffin, though, was the "Find" function. Using a modal dialog box for find was stupid when IE did it, and it hasn't gotten more intelligent since there. It's just so obvious at this point that a built-in search function that highlights the phrase you're typing in _in_ the document is vastly superior.

So, score 1 for Firefox.

Relately, I finally installed Quicksilver last night after resisting the hype. Okay, I admit it...it's awesome. In a nerdy kinda mac way, of course.

iPhone parody: the oPhone

Oh!

!!!

Fuck. Me.

If there were a just and benevolent god, it would not allow things like a World of Warcraft credit card to exist. It wouldn't even allow anybody to conceive of such a thing. It would be _that much_ of an abomination.

*shudder*

The Legend of...Neil?

Terminal technophilia

I feel the need to comment on Lee Gutkind's interview with Jon Stewart, partly because people obsessed with visions of technological utopias annoy me. Gutkind and his kind have been watching way too many Jetsons reruns.

Basically, here's what happened: Gutkind spent some time with the guys (and gals) at CMU who work on the RoboCup team. RoboCup is cool. Don't get me wrong. But he concluded from his experience that by 2050 we'll all have robot helpers, robot athletes, robot...well, everything. We will no longer have any reason to move.

Now, here's the thing, and Jon Stewart kind of touched on it: we don't need those robots. We just don't. The things we could use a robot for, we have much more efficient machines already doing the work, and they're called people. They are energy-efficient, self-sustaining, self-repairing, learning, and adaptive. And since the human race is incapable of collectively buying into the notion of and using birth control, babies are popping out left and right. So, there's a vast supply of these workers. A hell of a lot more of them than robots.

We have the technology to build all kind of space-age shit. We could build cars that drive themselves. We could. The problem is:

1. people would rather drive themselves,
2. it would be incredibly expensive to build the technology, and
3. it's inefficient, in terms of energy as well as money

...and, indeed, this turns out to be true of all kinds of shit. Have you noticed that Intel stopped running ads for processors with higher and higher frequencies? No more "750 Mhz! 900 Mhz! 1 GIGAhertz!!!..." Ever wonder why? Well, it turns out that people who run giant data centers (like Google) that are running hundreds upon thousands of machines were running into a problem. They wanted their software to run faster, which you would think would mean they would want processors with the highest clock speed (frequency) possible. But they found themselves in an interesting predicament: all of a sudden, when they looked at their bills at the end of the year, the cost of cooling their data centers was starting to outstrip the cost of the computers themselves. That's right: they were spending more on _air conditioning_ than they were on computers. Why? Well, roughly, more hertz means more heat. Put enough of those little buggers in the same room and it gets real hot, real fast.

So, people like Google said, "You know what? We don't care about performance per cost any more. Our energy bills are too goddamn big. Now we care about performance per watt." At which point, AMD and Intel said, "Fuck. We'll get back to you in about 6 months." And thus was the birth of the dual core processor.

What's my point? Efficiency always wins. If you can do what you want to do with a low-tech solution in a way that's cheaper than a high-tech solution, the low-tech solution will always win. That's why we don't have self-driving cars. It's why we don't have conveyor belts to take us everywhere. And it's why you're not going to have a robot serving you fucking tea in 2050.

What we're telling the aliens

Ever wonder what they put on those two spacecraft (Voyager 1 and 2) that are now floating out into the cosmos? Here you go.

Michael the Turtle

Hot on the heels of the Crazy Frog, I give you...Michael!!

A boom-boom beeb, a boom-boom-beeb, rakadakadoom baby doom doom cheeb!...

Toothbrush porn

It's okay to feel a little dirty.

Stupid gripe

I realize how ridiculous this is, but nonetheless I have to get it off my chest: I hate the video for Stefy's Chelsea. Not because I don't like the song; in fact, I really like the song. What bugs me about it is that it's completely the wrong vision for the video.

If you listen to the song, the character of Chelsea is a cunning seductress. And yet, in the video, she's portrayed as a blond, gum-chewing bimbo. She's not! The character in the song is clever and devious. She's Sarah Michelle Gellar's character in Cruel Intentions, not Alicia Silverstone's character in fucking Clueless!

I don't know why this pisses me off so much. I just had this great vision of a badass, raven-haired, slitty-eyed minx of a woman when I listened to the song, and then I saw the video and wanted to throttle the director.

Hmmph.

Hell.

What I've learned from this list of 13 games not to miss in 2007:

If I want to do anything useful with my life, I'm going to need to do it before this fall. Starting about September, I'm not going to be doing anything useful ever again.

NASA toys!

Soon, we will be able to explore space with cow farts!

My body parts are not ok

First you have to watch this:




Then you have to watch this:




and then, just for good measure, you have to watch this:




Wow.

Daylight savings as a liberal plot

Wow. Hard to argue with this logic:



...and in case you're wondering, yes, it's true.

(Some) Republicans are ignorant

Want to be depressed? Looky here.

You know, whatever other problems the Democrats may have, I guarantee not a single one would have raised their hand. And I'm pretty sure not a single Democrat in all of Congress would have raised their hand.

Just to be sure to be "fair and balanced," however, I should point out Mr. Paul. It's actually strangely refreshing to see a traditional conservative saying, essentially, "Today's Republicans are retarded and not actually conservative."

Oooh...shiny!

Literally!

Happiness as a Venn diagram

Well, I guess he failed

It was, after all, a test of his limits, right?

I have so little sympathy for the testosterone-laden, macho assholes who do that kind of shit. You know what? Modern civilization and its technology was created for a reason, and that reason is that the wilderness sucks, and it will kill you if it possibly can. We created roofs and air conditioning precisely so that dumbfucks like you wouldn't have to suffer the mind-bending desert heat like your ancestors had to you.

In fact, I'm pretty sure if I told your nomad ancestors about air conditioning, tents, and bottled water, and then I told them that you'd voluntarily not used them, gone out into the desert, and died, they'd wonder, rightly, what the fuck was wrong with you.

Coherence rant

I'm up, and I'm pissed. I'm going to sleep yet again on a night where I have a homework due, and I'm not finished with it. I'm not finished with it for a lot of reasons. One is that I'm constantly tired because my body is stupid, defective, and refuses to a) fall asleep, and b) actually sleep through the night once it does fall asleep. Another is that I have to do scads of menial grading for the class I'm TAing.

But the third is because I don't (completely) understand the homework. And after years of learning stuff, I've come to realize (and had the self-confidence to realize) that it's not because I'm stupid. It's because there are a lot of people out there who are fundamentally fucking incapable of expressing an idea coherently.

Theoreticians are the worst offenders. The problem is that theoreticians, in order to be good at theory, have to have brains that don't function like other people's brains. Consequently, they are fundamentally incapable of thinking like other people, and thus they can't even conceive of the kinds of confusion that us normal mortals experience. Some of them know this. Others don't and operate under the infuriating illusion that they are competent presenters. They aren't. Trust me. (Donald Knuth comes to mind as a canonical example. I remember hearing a story about Knuth along the lines of the fact that he locks himself away in a mountain cabin periodically so that he can "digest complicated mathematical concepts into pieces suitable for general consumption," or something along those lines. [Actually, I just dug up the reference] If you've ever tried to read anything the man has written, you know that is arrogant, unmitigated horse shit. Everything he produces is still dense, impenetrable crap.)

But it's not even limited to theoreticians. I don't know what it is. Maybe to become a figure of sufficient authority to be given the opportunity to teach complicated concepts, you have to have a certain level of ego that precludes the empathy necessary to relate to the problems your students experience. Or maybe it's just that such people are, again, fundamentally incapable of constructing a pedagogical narrative out of such complicated concepts. And, that really is the key: in order to teach something, you really have to construct a story out of it, and you have to create a mental image of what you're talking about in your students' minds. For instance, compare:

"There was a lamp. It had a lightbulb.
There was wood. Wood made up the floors. And the beams.
And there was a closet.
The people had clothes.
Sometimes the clothes were on the floor, which you'll remember was made of wood.
You had to have light to see the clothes.
Ideally...remember the closet?...the clothes should go in the closet.
But underneath all that was a kitchen, which had plumbing. But, you couldn't see the plumbing."

...to:

"Imagine you have a family. To protect your family from the weather (rain, snow, heat, etc.), you have a house. When you walk into the house, you'll notice there is a kitchen to your left, a living room in front of you, and a bedroom upstairs. You need something to stand on in all of these rooms, so each has a floor made of wood. Similarly, you'll want something to keep the ceiling up, so you have pillars, which are also made of wood. If you continue upstairs to the bedroom and spend some time there, you'll quickly realize that you need some kind of light to be able to see things. Thus, on the bed table, you'll find a light. As soon as you have light in the room, you'll notice that you have a lot of possessions, and ideally, you'd want a place to put them. This is where the closet comes in."

The first one leave you confused. You have no idea why you're learning the facts, how they fit together, what's important, etc. The second one strings all of those facts together into a coherent story, and, to some degree, one fact leads logically to the next.

Sadly, the vast majority of teachers I've had employ the first model of teach: throw scattered facts at you and hope you absorb them. No structure. No conceptual glue. No progression. Just a brain dump. And it's a truly infuriating experience.

Best teacher I've ever had: Jonathan Zittrain at Harvard Law School.

Worst teacher I've ever had: H.T. Kung in the Harvard CS department. That man should never be allowed to teach anything. Ever.

Qualified sympathy

Dude, I feel bad for you and all, but how fucking retarded do you have to be to decide to go backpacking alone through Syria...Syria!!!...as a twenty-something Western woman? Was her next trip going to be a sampling of the fine restaurants in Darfur, for fuck's sake?