Thanks but No Thanks, Coca-Cola

Consider this a product warningreview.

So Coca-Cola decided to make a bottled iced tea, Gold Peak Tea. It's slickly packaged (although their website has sounds playing, argggh), but the tea itself ... well, I couldn't actually tell, because the artificial sweeteners or the preservatives (or some Mystery Ingredient) make it have an incredibly nasty aftertaste. I found it undrinkable.

If I'm still drinking caffeinated beverages (I'm trying to get back off the caffeine) the next time I buy bottled iced tea, I'll stick with Nantucket Nectars or Honest Tea. They actually use sugar, not high fructose corn syrup, and it tastes like, well, tea.

Feh!

Does a Bear — in the Woods?

If — is "play with wolves", then the answer is yes.

In Case You Had any Respect Left for Cokie Roberts

Cokie Roberts is supposed to be one of our Serious Pundits, and yet she somes up with this steaming load of crap on ABC's This Week (Crooks and Liars has has the video):

ROBERTS: Yeah, that he has certainly come nowhere near closing the deal. As we've talked about before, in this year that should be such a Democratic year given all the other indices, he is tied in the polls and stage-sided in the polls and going off this week to a vacation in Hawaii ... this does not make any sense whatsoever. I know his grandmother lives in Hawaii and I know Hawaii is a state, but it has the look of him going off to some sort of foreign, exotic place. He should be in Myrtle Beach, and, you know, if he's going to take a vacation at this time.

Not that I've had a lot of respect for her in many years, but this really got rid of any remnant. "I know Hawaii is a state." Ye gods.

(Via a good snarky take-down by Hunter at Daily Kos.)

Scalzi Beats Me To It Again

Scalzi posits a Zombie Rhyming Contest.

This is a followup to this post, which links to this image. I've been meaning to do this:

egrep 'r(ain|ane)s?$' /usr/share/dict/words

and come up with my own version, but Scalzi beat me to it.

My favorite is favorite poem format: "QUATRAIIIINS!"

Kathy Griffin = Alice from Dilbert???

Wait. What? Kathy Griffin did the voice of Alice on the short-lived 1999 attempt at an animated Dilbert series?

I blamecredit raven for hooking us on Kathy Griffin.

Does this mean I can't snark about Paris Hilton any more?

Paris Hilton mocks the McCain ad comparing Obama to Paris Hilton.

Mental Whiplash

Thinking one is starting to play Evanescence's Fallen, and missing by one slot on the iPod, and accidentally playing Enya's Watermark.

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(Yes, I have some Enya on my iPod, and not just on the Lord of the Rings soundtrack. Want to make something of it?)

Bad Actor, Smart Parent

Via Salon.com's "Broadsheet" blog: Amanda Peet isn't as annoying as I thought. I may have to start categorizing her as "smart person, bad actor".

The issue? She smacked down Jenny McCarthy (okay, perhaps an instance of using an elephant gun on a mosquito) over the issue of childhood immunizations (McCarthy blames them for her son's autism). Peet apparently said that people who don't immunize their children are "parasites" because they're taking advantage of the fact that nearly everyone else has immunized their children. She has since apologized for the use of the "parasites" word, but hasn't backed off her basic point.

I believe that people who do not immunize their children are freeloaders (my choice of word is a little less nasty than "parasite" but perhaps meaner in terms of judging intentions) — they can only get away with this because the nasty diseases are kept at bay by everyone else being immunized. Yes, there are risks associated with immunizations (autism, though, has been shown again and again to not be one of them); but those risks are very small in absolute terms, and they're even smaller when compared to the alternative: if enough people don't vaccinate their kids (and "enough" may be as small a number as 15%), then we could easily see epidemics of diseases that we thought were conquered in the US during the 1950s.

I predict that within the next ten years, some hyper-crunchy (Waldorf or similar) no-one-here-is-immunized school will be laid low (or worse, wiped out) in a viral outbreak that would have been prevented by simple immunization. I just hope that that event will end this anti-immunization fad once and for all.

Oral History of the Internet

Vanity Fair has a big article with interview snippets from Internet luminaries from the 1950s through the 2000s: "How the Web Was Won".

They talk to a lot of the obvious (to geeks) people like Vint Cerf and Paul Baran, so they clearly did their homework. I just wish someone had mentioned Jon Postel and W. Richard Stevens.

My favorite quote from the article:

Marc Andreessen:When Al Gore says that he created the Internet, he means that he funded these four national supercomputing centers. Federal funding was critical. I tease my libertarian friends—they all think the Internet is the greatest thing. And I’m like, Yeah, thanks to government funding.

I Always Wondered About Jesse's Collection of Little Shoes...

Jesse Helms is finally dead. And good riddance.

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For those of you who don't know the reference in the title, please go listen to Bill Hicks — the good stuff is about 01:50 to 02:50.

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.)

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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.

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"?

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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.

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.

"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!)

Friday Cat Post, with Bonus Bear

Cat and bear, best friends.

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.)

Assume a Spherical Congress....

The New York Times interviews the three physicists in Congress.

Can't ... Resist ... Funniest ...Video ... Ever

Snowball the cockatoo dancing to Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust".

The Spouse and I have been watching this several times a day for several days now. It just gets funnier. The first time watching it, I had to ration it to ten seconds or so every 20 minutes to keep from gasping to death.

Make sure to watch the last 25-30 seconds, even if you skip to it.