Since I posted This is really pissing me off, I have noticed an inordinate number of searches for a single word: pissing.

All but one from European branches of Google, and even that one was reporting in Italian.

Radar has this article, Pray for Coal, The 10 most dangerous play things of all time. This one stopped me cold: I remember this ad; they must have sold them into the mid 60s.

I had a Daisy air rifle but I wanted a cannon too.

I'd name it Ouroboros.

I'm listening to Washington Journal this morning...the 1/3 of the country that believed Dubya is the Celestially Ordained Savor of the American People and Through Them, The World (quite coincidentally, the same position to be claimed by the Antichrist) are even more delusional.

I'm considering the Iraq Study Group's 79 suggestions and wonder why they get lauded when they've produced a grab bag much like Rumsfeld's parting shot.

I read some  responses to Heather Mac Donald's anti-Black screed over at City Journal...the National Review bragged on it AFTER linking it on its home page. Responses by police officers on NYPD Rant (a bulletin board for police supporters) were interesting too.

And the Class Wars continue. I linked that beause it's easier than typing shit out.

A automatic weapon with fully automated targeting system! And since it's by Samsung, I can get warranty service at Best Buy!

That's fine...I have a book to finish.

That's outrageous. Only 57%? Were these kids lying on the survey? As it turns out, 27% admitted doing exactly that, which probably means that the rest were lying about lying about their lying...

We can bemoan the misdeeds of teens, and indeed they're troubling. But before we disdain adolescents too fast, we should remember that, luckily for us, Josephson doesn't do a similar survey of adults.

Teens Even Lie About Lying
A survey from the Josephson Institute shows that teens lie a lot, even on surveys.
October 14, 2006

MICHAEL JOSEPHSON, that "Character Counts" character with those ubiquitous radio commentaries and that eponymous institute of ethics, has polled teenagers and once again found them to be liars, cheats and thieves. In other words, they're horribly … well, just like the rest of us.

This was lifted from The Progess Report. I thought it was amusing.

TERRORISM -- 9/11 COMMISSION NOT TOLD OF RICE-TENET MEETING WARNING OF AL QAEDA ATTACK: Administration officials did not inform the 9/11 Commission of a July 2001 meeting between CIA Director George Tenet, CIA counterterrorism chief J. Cofer Black, and then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, during which, Rice was warned of an imminent attack and urged to take action against al Qaeda. According to reports in Bob Woodward's new book, "State of Denial," Tenet wanted to "shake Rice" into action, but left the July 11 meeting "frustrated because they were not getting through." Black recalls, "The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head." Despite the importance of the meeting, the 9/11 Commission never heard about the encounter. 9/11 Commissioner Tim Roemer notes, "None of this was shared with us in hours of private interviews, including interviews under oath, nor do we have any paper on this. ... I'm furious." Jamie S. Gorelick, a fellow commission member added, "I can assure you it would have been in our report if we had known to ask about it." Peter Rundlet, counsel to the 9/11 Commission, wrote, "At a minimum, the withholding of information about this meeting is an outrage. Very possibly, someone committed a crime. And worst of all, they failed to stop the plot."

It is very likely that for the next seven days I won't be outdoors for more than 20 minutes at a time. So I'm gone for a while...charging the solar capacitors as it were.

When she looked into the Falcons squad, she was pleased to learn many professional women participate. The roster in recent years has included an epidemiologist, a civil engineer, a high school biology teacher and a registered nurse.

Lawyer's other life: Falcons cheerleader
Her sideline is on the sidelines
By DAVID SIMPSON
Published on: 08/22/06

Nicole Marchand's day job is serious business.

As an assistant district attorney in DeKalb County, she specializes in crimes against children.

So her co-workers were surprised to learn that she will spend some fall weekends dancing in the uniform of an Atlanta Falcons cheerleader before huge audiences in the Georgia Dome.

Chinese ambassador says U.S. should 'shut up' over Beijing's arms spending
Updated 8/17/2006 9:58 PM ET

LONDON (AP) — The United States should "shut up" with its concerns about China's growing military spending because the increase is no threat, a Chinese ambassador said Thursday.

Sha Zukang, China's ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, told British Broadcasting Corp. radio that American concerns about his country's growing military might were misguided.

"It's better for the U.S. to shut up," Sha said. "Keep quiet. It's much, much better."

Sha said the world need not worry about China's growing economic and military might because "China basically is a peace-loving nation."

You know what? Shannon reminds me of my daughter.

On blackfolk, we learn that Harry Potter fandom has a lot of annoying plagiarists. I have this to say to them: DON'T DO FANFIC IF YOU'RE NOT GOING TO WRITE YOUR OWN CRAP. If you need to copy and paste from someone else, you don't need to have your story on the internet. Borrow a copy of Writing Down the Bones from the library so you can learn how to write your own stuff(learning to write ideas from your own head into your computer helps, people!). Try the famous Strunk and White and the dictionary as well because everyone likes correctly spelled and grammatically correct stories better than stories typed like this: sAILOR cUTEY WAS like OMG, WTF!!3!1

Welcome to the Tenth Dimension

In string theory, physicists tell us that the subatomic particles that make up our universe are created within ten spatial dimensions (plus an eleventh dimension of "time") by the vibrations of exquisitely small "superstrings". The average person has barely gotten used to the idea of there being four dimensions: how can we possibly imagine the tenth?

If you are a new visitor, start out by clicking on "Imagining the Ten Dimensions" in the Navigation section: you will see a set of animations, with narration and sound effects, which take you from the first to the tenth dimension. We would suggest watching them in order from zero to ten the first time... but hey, you're a creature with free will, so do whatever you'd like. The ideas in this animation come from chapter one of a new science/philosophy book called "Imagining the Tenth Dimension: a new way of thinking about time, space, and string theory".

Not the most useful model but amusing.

You have to check out the Shockwave presentation at the top of the linked article page. It gives you the six simple steps by which the next AIDS-like epidemic will be constructed. Or smallpox-like. Or ebola-like.

So many possibilities...

You know, this weapons of mass destruction thing is interesting. At this point creating them is like starting a fire with flint, steel and inder. Soon it will be like striking a match. Soon everyone everywhere will be under equal threat.

Curiously, the arrival of that point in time may be the be our best hope for universal peace. You saw how the Bushies responded to being drafted. His ilk will only be honorable and circumspect when they think their own ass in on the line.

Custom-Built Pathogens Raise Bioterror Fears
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 31, 2006; A01
STONY BROOK, N.Y.

Eckard Wimmer knows of a shortcut terrorists could someday use to get their hands on the lethal viruses that cause Ebola and smallpox. He knows it exceptionally well, because he discovered it himself.

Killing time...

This is a fragment from my days of experimenting with the mythic mode of expression.

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As Griot initiates, you know better than most that the many paths through any condition all lead to different destination. The Griot’s path, understanding the laws of becoming and learning to move freely in all dimensions, makes temporal frustration particularly acute, and the lessons learned from it particularly powerful and useful.

Temporal frustration is one of the major negative repercussion of living in the timestream. Things happen sequentially. As a result, often an event comes rushing at you, and in your rush to get out of its way you stumble into the path of another, equally painful, collision because the current event tends to obstruct one’s view of following events it. This can be…frustrating. Learning to cope with that frustration forces awareness of the temporal dimension of existence, but that alone doesn’t relieve the frustration.

While you play with the open thread, which do you think would be a better avatar? (the newspaper thing worked out well...)

Gotta go for a while.

Note the open thread tag.

Once there was a guy who was absolutely dedicated to logic. Any problem, any issue, any discussion was analyzed, syllogized, deduced and double-checked. People liked trying to catch him...it was something of a game to his friends.

Once after carrying that foolish consistency that is the bugbear of small minds to "the correct conclusion" once more, his friend and challenger asked him why he was so dedicated to logic and rationality. He replied, "Oh, you've got me all wrong. I hate logic. Irrationality is more dynamic and a lot more fun."

"What? Then why..."

"See, I realized the world runs by physical rather than logical rules. So it would be irrational to be totally driven by logic...right?"

"Ohhhhh..."

"The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro"

Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men, too ‹ great enough to give frame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory....

...Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

I feel compelled to state I'm not feeling the whole "intellectual construct" thing.

At all.

Physical reality first, that's my filter. Intellectual contructs are after the fact explanations, as far as I see it. I rarely need go there to reach an understanding of things with considerable predictive power in my personal case.

I don't feel compelled to challenge every view that's dissimilar to mine but I DO feel compelled to make crystal clear what is and is not my view. So I'm setting this out there and may link back to it on occasion. 

Where the hell is Denny Hastert? Every day it's another random person as Speaker Pro Tem..it's like Speaker of the House is the best no-show patronage job ever.

I'll be walking past the keyboard and even using it occasionally, but don't expect much posting activity today. I'm not feeling clever. I can keep up with comments until early afternoon, though.

I saw a Google query in my referral log looking for "reactions to John Mcwhorter." The search found a post here, of course, and that brought me to another MrWhorterism...a cold-bloodedly constructed falsehood.

And I think I'd like to know if he and his ilk really have any intent beyond getting paid for that particular article.

I find reading acknowledgements of American Idol contestants into the Congressional record to be as great a sign of decadence as any hip-hop lyrics you'd like to cite.

Lou Dobb will achieve the world's first 24 hour orgasm.

Some time afterward a third party will gain instant (as these things are considered in politics) credibility by running on a nationalist platform by capturing several Senate seats in midwestern states.

 

I find it interesting that at roughly the same time I stopped showing up in Memeorandum's links I started showing up in Real Clear Politics' Buzztracker .

ALMOST MOTHER'S DAY
All about Mitochondrial Eve
A 140,000-year-old African may have been the mother of all mothers.
May 13, 2006

IF YOU'RE AMONG THE DOZEN or so Americans who still haven't read or heard about "The Da Vinci Code," stop here. The mega-bestseller by Dan Brown, the movie version of which is coming soon to a cineplex near you, asserts that Mary Magdalene married Jesus of Nazareth and that their offspring survive today. It's a blasphemous thesis for a lot of Christians, but if it were true, Mary Magdalene would rank right up there with the other New Testament Mary — Jesus' mother — in a Mother's Day Hall of Fame.

But rather than canonize either of those Marys as Founding Mother, we suggest bestowing that honor on a more ancient ancestress: Eve. No, not the archetypal woman fashioned out of Adam's rib in Genesis but her scientific namesake, Mitochondrial Eve.

Mito-what? Mitochondria are structures in the human cell that have their own DNA, which is passed intact (with occasional mutations) from mother to child. Studies of mitochondria taken from people around the world have led many scientists to conclude that everyone alive today has among his or her ancestors a woman who lived in Africa about 140,000 years ago.

Not really a toy, but a collection of really interesting short videos at Neural Surfer.

Also I have finally taken possession of

Dynamics: The Geometry of Behavior
by Ralph H. Abraham and Christopher D. Shaw
4th edition of 2005, an eBook

Dynamics is a field emerging somewhere between mathematics and the sciences. In our view, it is the most exciting event on the concept horizon for many years. The new concepts appearing in dynamics extend the conceptual power of our civilization and provide new understanding in many fields.

We discovered, while working together on the illustrations for a book in 1978 that we could explain mathematical ideas visually, within an easy and pleasant working partnership. In 1980, we wrote an expository article on dynamics and bifurcations, using hand-animation to emulate the dynamic picture technique universally used by mathematicians in talking among themselves: a picture is drawn slowly, line by line, along with a spoken narrative - the dynamic picture and the narrative tightly coordinated. [P6: emphasis added]

I updated the site to Drupal version 4.7 last night. Keep an eye out for weirdnesses.

In honor of Ronn Taylor's Poem on your Blog Weekend.

(The image is on Flikr, so I can steal it)

The Immortal
by Earl Dunovant
Copyright © 2002

standing before the mountain
watching wind and rain, storm and fury
grind my barriers to dust
and proceeding on my chosen path

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Secret
Earl Dunovant
Copyright © 2003

a stone falls into a pool
and waves traverse the surface

the water level rises
the stone, in time, dissolves

and all the waves will settle
the surface becomes calm

and none will know these changes
but hand, and water and stone

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