MST3K Take Two

Mike Nelson and the gang are at it again!
I saw their version of Star Trek VI last night, they've still got it.

Two of My Favorite Geniuses

Enjoyed these articles on two tremendous influences on our kind - Milton Friedman at Reason and Carl Sagan at Skeptical Inquirer. Found them both at a great source - Arts & Letters Daily.

Eugenius calls it Lob-star®

I didn't know there was a controversy about this suspect crustacean until I looked up the Captain D's site to make sure that senile dementia hadn't made me read LOBSTER on a local marquee.

Langostino @ Wikipedia
Seafood Fraud Allegations Hit Fast Food Business @ Restaurant News Resource
Lobstah Impostah @ The Grinder @ CHOW.com

The Father of the Constitution

A student left this comment on my myspace: "after you implying that James Madison is superior to jesus, you became my hero. Kudos."
Just doing what I can.

No golden statue, but Golden Army to come

I'm going to see Pan's Labyrinth tomorrow night. Not only did it provide Guillermo del Toro a HUGE amount of face time at the Oscars (not to mention emphatic praises for his genius), but it gets huge kudos from our favorite horror-homo Buzz at Camp Blood. I'm not about to argue with that queen; she'll cut ya'...hair.

Plus, it's Guillermo. He made Hell Boy. He made The Devil's Backbone. He's making Hell Boy 2, with a script he and Mike Mignola wrote pretty much wrote from the ground up. He's our people. As though Blade 2 left any doubt...

Tough questions, great answers

Ed Brayton, long-time evolution defender and libertarian (but, sadly, Duke fan), answers serious questions concerning free speech in ways I wish I could. Check it out.

Hate crime and hate speech laws disturb me to no end. Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is not the same as yelling "flamer." And if someone causes me to physically suffer because I am gay, punishing that person for premeditatedly causing me to suffer will suffice. Like premeditated murder, the reason is irrelevant beyond the trial: you thought about it before you did it.

Into the Mind of Darkness

I'm having an absolutely hilarious debate with a christer fundamentalist on alt.talk.creationism. He states that he's a "Cyber Knight for Christ," whatever the hell that is. It's a must read. This is what happens when you don't make kids debate in school.

My high school never had a debate team, but I had the luck of being intellectually curious enough to read and learn debate tactics on my own. And I did have high school teachers who were brave enough to allow debates in their class. Then there was Mallet, of course.

Frederick Douglas pointed a finger...

...and it wasn't at atheists. It was at that old time religion, and rightly so. Excellent read. Ailes counterpoints a total hogwash WSJ opinion piece with a speech by Frederick Douglas.

Once again, christers revisionate to maintain they were always the good guys. Right.

I came across this quotation in my wanderings today. TR : a prescient badass.

The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.

Theodore Roosevelt

Oh, so THAT'S why you separate church and state...

Lonnie Latham is another odious christer preacher who railed against homos...until he was caught soliciting sex from an undercover cop of, shall we say, a male persuasion. Anti-gay bigot preachers actually being homos is standard news now, but this isn't.

It turns out that Latham's lawyers are actually arguing that Lawrence vs. Texas, the Supreme Court ruling that overturned sodomy laws, also protects him from being arrested for asking a policeman to go to his hotel room for oral sex. Now I don't think he did anything legally wrong here, but he would have if his Southern Baptists had their christer theocracy in place. And the SoB's railed against that Supreme Court decision. It's just too rich!!!

Oh, and the ACLU filed a brief for Lonnie's side. The "Anti-Christian Liberal Union" as they call it. Ha! You just can't make this shit up...

Yeah, we're going to need some of these....

King Leonidas
Queen Gorgo
Ephialtes
Immortal
Spartan Helmet Prop Replica
Spartan Shield Prop Replica
Immortal Mask Prop Replica

My Review of "The God Delusion"

Overall, I really enjoyed Dawkins' latest book. While I felt some parts dragged a bit, it is a great read for any rational human being. I imagine it's a difficult read for the rest.

The book does have some empowering value, and Dawkins makes some very great points that I will take with me in all my dealings with the religious among us. My favorite point comes from the standard science fall back, "We can only explain how things happen, not why. For why, ask a theologian." Dawkins rightly points out that there is no reason to believe that a theologian would have a good answer to why, and that science is more likely to come up with the real answer eventually. So why point people to currently accepted nonsense? Why not instead ask them why no answer is worse than an unfounded (wrong) one, however convenient and satisfying having any answer may be? Why put any value in religious propositions when you could instead maintain that not knowing, and therefore investigating, is a much better path?

The take-home message is that religion, in any form, is delusional and dangerous. Why not accept reality and relish our ability to investigate it, rather than running scared from the unknown into the arms of nonexistent super-beings, subjecting you and others to all the ignorance, pain, and suffering faith in such phantoms cause.

No chimpy, that's a bad chimpy!

Chimpanzees are now on everyone's shit list. They're on the creationists' shit list, because they are capable of doing something all too human: make spears. They're on conservatives' shit list, because it's the females making the spears, and chicks shouldn't be in combat. They're on feminists' shit list for the same reason: women aren't aggressive, men are. They're on environmentalists' shit list because they're hunting--get this--cute little bush babies (insert obvious Democrat/Bush babies/Bush twins joke here; I don't do the easy ones)!

On a related note, I saw a great documentary about chimpanzee's cousins (and ours), bonobos. Christers should beware of letting their children see these things on TV and in zoos; they are immoral devil beasts. Not only do Evil-lutionists maintain that we are distantly related to these wonderful primates, but they regularly engage in promiscuous sex, including homo sex. And females are dominant. Clearly, the christer gods fucked up on that design.

The most touching moment of the documentary is when you learn that around 50 wildlife preserve rangers were murdered protecting the bonobos during the Second Congo War. People were so desparate, they were hunting the apes for food and accusing the rangers of being spies.

Blue Mars

The latest photos from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reveal more evidence for liquid water on ancient Mars. The blue in the photo is not presumed water, but sand dunes. The halos are the interesting parts.

This orbiter is another great success for NASA, and it will be critical for future exploration.

And the rovers are still going, four YEARS past their scheduled lifetime!

In related news, christians are still waiting to get their good glimpse of Mars during the rapture, when they are pulled up through the universe to heaven by Jesus. Glad we didn't have to wait for their reports...

[Oops, the Orbiter is having some problems. So please ask any rapture-ready christer engineer you know to kindly fix them on their way out.]

Still harassing creationists

I'm still countering the rantings of the religious lunatics who believe that men came from mud and women from a human male rib. You can monitor my posts here.

I told you there were bigger squid in the sea, and stranger ones too!

Fishermen off the coast of New Zealand caught a colossal squid. It's quite a site, isn't it. Best blurb about it is that if one were to make fried squid rings out of it, they would be the size of tractor tires. Unfortunately, they would likely taste strongly of ammonia, so I wouldn't order any.

In other squid news, a rather large squid was caught on video. This one has light-up tentacles and exhibits some rather odd hunting behavior. Check it out here.

[ I forgot to note: Kudos to the fishermen, who went above and beyond the call of duty to capture this beautiful animal intact and preserve it so well. Science owes them a round of applause and several rounds of beer.]

More Io

After reading Tobermory's post this showed up - link. Cool and creepy.

This just keeps getting better every year.....

I ran across this again today. I still believe every word.

Defensetech = Danger Room

For our defenseophiles, the founding guys at defensetech have basically moved to Wired - Danger Room. That's an F-22 over there, just to get your blood up.

Yes, that's Io

PIA02550: Ongoing Volcanic Eruption at Tvashtar Catena, Io

Original Caption Released with Image:

An active volcanic eruption on Jupiter's moon Io was captured in this image taken on February 22, 2000 by NASA's Galileo spacecraft. Tvashtar Catena, a chain of giant volcanic calderas centered at 60 degrees north, 120 degrees west, was the location of an energetic eruption caught in action in November 1999. A dark, "L"-shaped lava flow to the left of the center in this more recent image marks the location of the November eruption. White and orange areas on the left side of the picture show newly erupted hot lava, seen in this false color image because of infrared emission. The two small bright spots are sites where molten rock is exposed to the surface at the toes of lava flows. The larger orange and yellow ribbon is a cooling lava flow that is more than more than 60 kilometers (37 miles) long. Dark, diffuse deposits surrounding the active lava flows were not there during the November 1999 flyby of Io.

This color mosaic was created by combining images taken in the near-infrared, clear, and violet filters from Galileo's camera. The range of wavelengths is slightly more than that of the human eye. The mosaic has been processed to enhance subtle color variations. The bright orange, yellow, and white areas at the left of the mosaic use images in two more infrared filters to show temperature variations, orange being the coolest and white the hottest material. This picture is about 250 kilometers (about 155 miles) across. North is toward the top and illumination from the Sun is from the west (left).

From the Planetary Photojournal - Go There

"Splat Pack"- I love the term & the sub-genre

I discovered this term while reading about Neil Marshall on IMDb.

This team of helmers is called "The Splat Pack," a term recently coined by critic Alan Jones in Total Film, for their dedication to the genre, which they say has been hijacked by watered down PG-13 fare. Two of the most successful of these raw horror franchises, Lionsgate's "Saw" and "Hostel," revolve around people doing unspeakable things to themselves and others, like burning a face off with a blowtorch and then clipping off the dangling eye with a scissors. (Screen Gems is partner on the "Hostel" pics.)

The other filmmakers in the group are Alexandre Aja ("The Hills Have Eyes"), Darren Lynn Bousman ("Saw II" and "Saw III") Neil Marshall ("The Descent") and James Wan ("Saw"). There's also scribe Leigh Whannell, who came up with the idea for "Saw" with Wan and penned all three of those pics. Serving as something of mentors are subversive looking rocker-director Rob Zombie ("The Devil's Rejects"), Quentin Tarantino and Guillermo del Toro.

Read it all

My favorite new word of the year:

Celebutard.

Making Reservations

Anthony Bourdain in on all day today (President's Day) on the Travel Channel.

Sunday nights are right for fighting.

I know we all love it, but it's worth saying again - HBO's Rome and Battlestar Galactica on Sunday night rules.

More TV to look out for

The ever-hilarious Eddie Izzard, goateed and out of drag, will be in a new show on FX called "The Riches." It starts in March I think, but keep checking your digital cable prophesier to be sure.

Faith vs. Science

How Not to Talk to Your Kids - The Inverse Power of Praise

Great article about how praising hard work is more effective than praising innate intelligence.

Museum shop-a-rama

From David ornaments made from The British Museum’s own molds of Michaelangelo's statue, to Augustus Chocolate Coins, I cannot resist browsing an online museum shop.


Here are some others I've found:

The American Museum of Natural History
Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust
MoMA
Smithsonian Institution
The Art Institute of Chicago
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
SFMOMA
Yale Peabody Museum

For Bromide & GateTree

The Vanished Battalion

"It was the hot August of 1914 and groups of friends or ‘buddies’ across Britain, team-mates and work colleagues eagerly enlisted to fight the Bosch.

But what the soldiers of E Company had in common was something rather unusual: they all belonged to the staff of the Royal Estate at Sandringham.

...

What happened to the Sandringhams during the disastrous Dardanelles campaign in the middle of their very first battle, on the afternoon of August 12, 1915? One minute the men, led by their commanding officer, Sir Horace Proctor-Beauchamp, were charging bravely against the Turkish enemy. The next they had disappeared. Their bodies were never found. There were no survivors. They did not turn up as prisoners of war.

They simply vanished."

READ IT ALL

Doomsday Machine Remastered

THE reason for doing TOS remastered was on Sunday. It kicked total ass. Now, I can't wait for the Ultimate Computer and the Enterprise Incident. Link


Kirk: Where's you crew?
Decker: On the third planet........
Kirk: There is no third planet!
Decler: Don't you think I know that? There WAS but NOT ANYMORE!!!!!!

Europa Universalis III

Don't have it yet but it has the endorsement of the CS doctoral group.

More on Sounds

Can't anyone put up a nice new ballpark without a lot of BS?? Oh, wait, I guess the Giants did.

I think I'll go dig out some more MARINE fossils from my North Alabama backyard.

The politics of global warming
Bill Steigerwald, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Timothy Ball is no wishy-washy skeptic of global warming. The Canadian climatologist, who has a Ph.D. in climatology from the University of London and taught at the University of Winnipeg for 28 years, says that the widely propagated “fact” that humans are contributing to global warming is the “greatest deception in the history of science.”

Ball has made no friends among global warming alarmists by saying that global warming is caused by the sun, that global warming will be good for us and that the Kyoto Protocol “is a political solution to a nonexistent problem without scientific justification."

Needless to say, Ball strongly disagrees with the findings of the latest report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which on Feb. 2 concluded that it is “very likely” that global warming is the result of human activity.

I talked to Ball by phone on Feb. 6 from his home on Victoria Island, British Columbia, which the good-humored scientist likes to point out was connected to the mainland 8,000 years ago when the sea level was 500 feet lower.

READ IT ALL

Go Big Red!

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

I smell graft.

Yup.

The green fervour: Is environmentalism the new religion?
Joseph Brean, National Post

In his new book Apollo’s Arrow, ambitiously subtitled The Science of Prediction and the Future of Everything, Vancouver-based author and mathematician David Orrell set out to explain why the mathematical models scientists use to predict the weather, the climate and the economy are not getting any better, just more refined in their uncertainty.

...

“The track record of any kind of long-distance prediction is really bad, but everyone’s still really interested in it. It’s sort of a way of picturing the future. But we can’t make long-term predictions of the economy, and we can’t make long-term predictions of the climate,” Dr. Orrell said in an interview. After all, he said, scientists cannot even write the equation of a cloud, let alone make a workable model of the climate.

READ IT ALL

The Truth will piss them off

Bruce Bawer, one of Tobermory's favorites, is simultaneously nominated for awards and called a racist for telling the truth about Islam.

Must read

The Sunday Times:
An experiment that hints we are wrong on climate change-
Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, says the orthodoxy must be challenged

When politicians and journalists declare that the science of global warming is settled, they show a regrettable ignorance about how science works. We were treated to another dose of it recently when the experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued the Summary for Policymakers that puts the political spin on an unfinished scientific dossier on climate change due for publication in a few months’ time. They declared that most of the rise in temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to man-made greenhouse gases.

The small print explains “very likely” as meaning that the experts who made the judgment felt 90% sure about it. Older readers may recall a press conference at Harwell in 1958 when Sir John Cockcroft, Britain’s top nuclear physicist, said he was 90% certain that his lads had achieved controlled nuclear fusion. It turned out that he was wrong. More positively, a 10% uncertainty in any theory is a wide open breach for any latterday Galileo or Einstein to storm through with a better idea. That is how science really works.

Twenty years ago, climate research became politicised in favour of one particular hypothesis, which redefined the subject as the study of the effect of greenhouse gases. As a result, the rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers. And while the media usually find mavericks at least entertaining, in this case they often imagine that anyone who doubts the hypothesis of man-made global warming must be in the pay of the oil companies. As a result, some key discoveries in climate research go almost unreported.

READ IT ALL

LONG LIVE POP MUSIC!!!!!!!!!!!

LONG LIVE POP MUSIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!
LONG LIVE THE SOVIET UNION!!!!!!!!!!!!

Internet Speculative Fiction Database kicks ass.

The ISFDB is like the IMDB for Speculative Fiction. My favorite spot for finding a title, a bibliography, or author or pub. date.
A different part of the overall site - Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Collection was linked on boingboing today.

A Bourdain Throwdown

Tony Bourdain guestblogs at an author's website and comments on the popular FoodTV's personalities. It is just what you'd expect.

Gatetree.com is alive!

I've finally made the arrangements and Gatetree.com actually exists. Nothing to speak of yet, but I will try to migrate my blog and make it into a useful space. It also makes me feel better about so much stuff being blocked at school. The next thing will be an internet connection at work that 'the man' can't regulate.

The Law sir, is an ass.

As most of you know by now I've been on jury duty. In fact I was on the Grand Jury, which was pretty damn cool - more later.

Mass Games

If you really want to see something to make your stomach turn, check this out. It's on Nexflix.

Occasionally Quotable

"We are old and infirm, but we are wicked people. - GateTree inviting Clyde up for the Super Bowl

Re: the MSSM's current frenzy

Wow, it's 3 days until Super Bowl XLI, & the mainstream sports media is apoplectic over Coach Saban's use of the term coonass. Some are even predicting that our recruiting will be harmed. Ho hum, stupidity is always on the march.

Having heard the term at Mallet a looong time ago, I decided to do a quick search. Here are a few representative examples of what I found:

History of the term:
coonass.com
cajunculture.com

Recipes:
Coonass Filet Mignon
Coonass Stuffing
Coonass Chili

Apparel:
"RCA 'Registered CoonAss' has been a Registered Trademark since September 1986. All rights reserved. Several products are available with the registered trademark."

Personal blog:
coonassinvestmentguy.blogspot.com

For Bromide....

From The Big Pharaoh:

FDR confers with Middle East Chiefs

I just found this 1945 news telecast about FDR's meeting with Egypt's King Farouk and King Ibn Saud of Saudi aboard a US destroyer in the Suez channel. Then the telecast shows interviews with US soldiers who were liberated from Japanese prison camps. Watch the clip, pretty interesting stuff.