The Church of Global Warming

I've had these pages open in FireFox forever

• Average temperature of water near top of Earth's oceans has significantly cooled - Global warming 'speed bump'? see also
  Dramatic climate changes during dinosaur-dominated Mesozoic Era - Relevant to current climate change discussion
• Money and Environmental problems
• Nature Does Not Exist by Mathew Parris

The Parris essay is superb, and summarizes my feelings on everything perfectly. I've held off doing anything with the links until I can come up a more detailed ranting of my thoughts, but Parris says it much better than I could. Plus it doubles as my general thoughts on community based views of religion.

I'm sweating blood!

Or it feels like that anyway. I think I'm about to enter my busiest work period ever.

Anyway, for your amusement, check out this time-lapse map of the Middle East imperialism.

More on the Beltline scam

From today's AJC

Mason owns 5 miles of the proposed Beltline in northeast Atlanta. He had offered about half of his land to Atlanta for the Beltline network of transit, trails and parks. Atlanta planners rejected his offer and instead offered him a deal in which he would have donated his land to Atlanta in exchange for the right to develop about 2,000 residences anywhere in the city.

What is amazing is that this is going on in public. He sells the land in exchange for permits? How is that not every definition of graft?

Live She Is!

After a ton of work, the Earth and Vine web site is finally live. Foodies rejoice!

Nick was right!

The FoxNews.com website really did take a turn for the ugly and unusable. CNN.com sadly is blighted by the beligerant economic illiteracy of Lou Dobbs, which mars otherwise fine website.

In FoxNews.com defense, they do have periodic columns by Wendy McElroy and Radley Balko. CNN.com has no interesting columns I know of.

The weekend in pictures

I like the shadowman the best. The angle makes it the figure more exagerated as the image gets higher.


Sunday - Full Street


Sunday - Empty Street

Outside my chamber door....

My fondness for black and white extend to the insect world, or at least to the Praying Manti.

Very well put

From Matt Yglesias

It's not as if the opposition party has nothing to work with here. One might note the fiasco in Iraq, for example. Or OBL's still-at-large status. Our bizarre herky-jerky stumbling into wider regional conflicts that will further take the focus off of al-Qaeda and others directly trying to kill Americans. This isn't brain surgery.

On the other hand, it's not so easy that voters are going to believe it if Democrats don't even try to make the case. What's more, ducking security fights looks weak. It looks weak because it is weak. It demonstrates a lack of confidence in the party's own ideas and people. It re-enforces everything the GOP is trying to say. Democrats need to knock this off and engage with what's pretty clearly the central issue of our time.

I think this is a good example of the Dems being more centralized (having a smaller collective brain if you will) than the Reps. Rather than picking on any of the weak points in the Republican platform, they charge groin first into the capable fists of the Republican party.

I've said this before, the Democrats have situated themselves so that they don't have to win elections to make money.

Two things that have surprised me

• The Israel-Hezbollah war hasn't restarted yet.
• For all the conflict in Iraq, the government hasn't fallen, nor are there several competing governments.
  

Classic movies everyone should see

• Ivan the Terrible Part II - Quite good, interesting insight into the Russian character and the central role autocracy has always played in Russian history. Visually it's quite stunning too.
• The Seventh Seal - Man's struggle with God and Death come across much more believably in subtitles.
• I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang - Life on the chain gang comes across as more believable than realistic, an excellent piece. The final few minutes are particularly jarring.
  

The three funniest things I've read today

Both arise from this post by Althouse, entitled Wisconsin, the necrophiliac's playground.

Surprisingly necrophilia is not illegal in Wisconsin. One of the comments is

You're just jealous because you're not dead.

I read the two articles linked, the first of which yielded this gem

Authorities said the three were not acquainted with the woman but had seen an obituary with her photo.

which makes me think they were holding out for a hot corpse.

The other was

Radke said Grunke asked him to help because he wanted to dig up Tennessen's body for sex, the court documents said, and the three had stopped at a store on the way to the cemetery to buy condoms.

Condoms? One would think the necrophiliac crowd would be a bit more devil may care about such matters.

Weekend photos

Lake boats, super-gluing my fingers together, who knows what else could have happened this weekend.

My index finger and thumb have been soaking in warm soapy water for about an hour at this point.


The lake at Stone Mountain

Quick Monday rapid fire

• HomeSite meets C#
• Warlords of Afghanistan - not quite a fansite, but I think it's safe to say the internet is complete.
• Windmills on Amazon
• Google invests in Plug-in Hybrids - Cal Cars curiously unmentioned.
• Martial arts and motion capture
• The quest for 100 mpg cars - doable but not pretty
• A really cool bike steady-cam I'll probably be building soon.
• I wound up building (so to speak) this camera mount this weekend.
  

Getting a dark monitor tan

I've been working for a week solid, and here I am still sitting in front of a screen. On a gorgeous day when I should be riding. Humbug.

Catch up

While I'm uploading massive files, I think I'll post some photos I took last week.

This lovely little praying mantis was outside my door reflecting on life when I came back from the fun filled Armchair Media 5th birthday party. He was kind enough to stay still long enough for me to test the macro feature on the new Canon.


Speaking of Armchair, their party was a blast, here is an interestingly dressed bartender. She called it her "Space Look".

Pecked to death by ducks again

Sorry for the lack of updates, I've actually got a backlog of things to write about, as well as pictures to post, but the workload lately has been absolutely crushing, and all-nighters aren't as easy as they used to be.

No end in sight actually.

Family photos

Photos all posted. They're in the family account on Flickr.

Uploading the photos finally

To the great delight of the massed family I have processed the photos from the family reunion and am currently uploading them.

Quick Sunday rapid fire

• An hourly motel in the sky, more info here.
• The funniest quote I read yesterday is from this blog, to wit

  Every adult must at some point have paused during some slapstick piece of debauchery and thought, "Christ, this is ridiculous". Having testicles is like being chained to the village idiot. Sad, but there it is.

• The famous "What year is it?" essay. What year you compare our modern times to determines your current outlook, pretty interesting. Personally I think it's 1905, and Radical Islam is best compared to the Bolshevism of that period, but all comparisons are, by definition, imperfect.
• The Seventh Seal was an incredible movie
• This is an incredibly cool time lapse movie, regrettably, in QuickTime, but still good.
  

Quick rapid fire

• A company that makes secret passageways
• Electoral-Vote.com is back!
• Slate has an interesting article on survival in emergencies
• This is a very cool OSX simulator
• The American Scene is quite interesting sometimes
• Ultramarathoners
  

Wow

Police: Nurse, 51, kills intruder with bare hands

Pale Rider in the dark shadows

My new habit of carrying the small camera everywhere with me is a good one I think. We are also entering prime cycling weather. A certain amount of wind chill is an incredible feeling.

Open Mic Night once again

I did the open mic night at Limerick for the first time in quite a while last night. The songs I played were Blackjack County Chain, Red Clay Halo, Will You Miss Me, and
Waitin' Around to Die. I played breaks on Blackjack County Chain and Will You Miss Me. It's hard to tell how it all sounded with the PA the way it is. I'm bringing my pre-amp next time.

The A-Sides are in the photo above.

Tuesday rapid fire

I'm back from Kentucky, I'll have a recap of that soon, in the meantime, here are some interesting links

• Harry Anderson and New Orleans
• An underappreciated man of all time
• Ranking Blogs as newspapers
• Radio Shack fires 400 people by email
• Offshore wind mills - seems pretty cool
• Man Lives to 112 Despite Junk-Food Diet
• This was the funniest SNL skit of all time, surprisingly it's not on YouTube
• Another good skit is, specifically, Seinfeld meets Oz.
• A seemingly major oil discovery. Probably not as big a deal as everyone thinks it is, but then again, maybe not.
  

Initial reunion photos

Night time

Random photo