Monday, June 30, 2008

Right Wingers: Computers Are Hard

People For the American Way's "Right Wing Watch" caught the American Family Association search-and-replacing things. (I won't spoil the surprise.)


I found this via salon.com's "War Room" blog, but it's now showing up everywhere.

PZ Myers' take on it is funny — the footnote is quite incisive.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Unclear on the Concept

So the Pew Research Center has released their Religious Beliefs & Practices / Social & Political Views: Report 2, titled

Religion in America: Non-Dogmatic, Diverse and Politically Relevant

The thing that's getting headlines is that 57% of Evangelical Christians say that their denomination isn't the One True Path To Heaven.

But the real head-scratching "Hunh?" moment is in the third table, where it lists who believes in a Personal God, an Impersonal Force, and "Other/Don't Know", for a bunch of different groups. These three sets of believers are combined into the "NET Believe in God" column.

The "Atheist" row has 21% "NET Believe in God": 6% believe in a Personal God, 12% in "Impersonal Force", and 3% "Other/Don't Know".

Um. Uh.... People? Just what do you think "atheist" means, anyway? Maybe they thought it meant "eighth-iest"?


Credit goes to my boss for pointing me at this.

(My) Stupidity of the Day

In a case that reminds me of Clever Passwords Consider Harmful, I have discovered once again that I am an idiot.

I managed to forget my home PC password, so I had to go fetch my laptop, log into my server, and look in my encrypted password file. This is stupid enough, but when I looked up the password, I discovered that this particular password had been generated from a song.

THE SONG I WAS LISTENING TO.

Sigh.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Addendum to Clarke's First Law

Clarke's Laws are famous; the first one is

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Today, after a discussion about what could have caused a network outage in one of our various offices (I suggested a localized power problem in the building but my boss thought that couldn't possibly be it — and he was wrong), I propose a new addendum based on Clarke's First Law:

When someone suggests a way something could go wrong with a complex system, they're almost certainly right; when someone responds that that could never happen, they're almost certainly wrong.

Monday, June 16, 2008

"Straight Talking" John McCain Called His Wife a C***

Possibly the best political video so far this season.

(I knew he'd done this, but this is far more effective than reading about it. And it's funny! NSFW, but funny!)

(Even funnier, YouTube put a John McCain 2008 ad on the page!)

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Why Are You Voting Republican?

Here are some reasons why some people are voting Republican.

(Via Dan Savage.)

More Physics References

XKCD does some funning with physicists and other scientists. (Make sure you read the image "alt" tag that you see when you put your cursor over the image.)