For Jimmy
Wednesday, December 20th, 2006I’ve gotten entangled in a discussion in the comments on another thread. It has drifted far off-topic, so I’m giving it its own thread.
Archive for December, 2006
Eine Kleine Weihnachtsmusik
Tuesday, December 19th, 2006I ran across this video of a Helsinki choir, and thought y’all might like some holiday music, something we can all enjoy, regardless of religion, social status, etc:
var so = new SWFObject(“/media/flash/player.swf”, “glumbert.com”, “496″, “372″, “7″, “#FFFFFF”, true);so.addVariable(‘file’,'helsinkichoir’);so.write(“mediacontent”);
(HT UF LOTD.)
Transcript below the fold.
Sell Your Soul, Get A Free DVD
Saturday, December 16th, 2006Brian Flemming and the Rational Response Squad have announced the Blasphemy Challenge.
The offer is simple: deny the Holy Spirit in a video (thus committing the one unforgivable sin and condemning your soul to eternal torment), post it to YouTube, and if you’re one of the first 1001 people, you get a free copy of the [...]
77.1 µHz…
Thursday, December 14th, 2006The frequency at which PZ Myers has been posting to Pharyngula, on average.
Me, I’m in the 4.4 µHz range.
How Do You Spell the Names of the Months?
Monday, December 11th, 2006One construct that I’ve seen (and used) a lot in Perl is a hash that maps month abbreviations to numeric values that can be fed to POSIX::strftime:
our %months = (
“jan” => 0, “feb” => 1, “mar” => 3, …
);
This is useful for parsing log files and such. It works, it’s quick [...]
Soapboxes of Morality
Friday, December 8th, 2006Americans United
reports
that Jerry Falwell’s
Liberty Council
has nothing better to do than to go around checking which retailers have the word “Christmas” on their websites. (HT
UTI
and
mcoletti.)
curvemudgeon
said it best, a long time ago:
Why don’t all the people with too much time on their hands get off their soapboxes of morality and start sending me envelopes stuffed with money?
In [...]
Unexpected Science Song
Friday, December 8th, 2006We all knew that They Might Be Giants
know stuff,
but even so, I was pleasantly surprised, while listening to
this month’s episode
of their podcast, to hear
Cut the Strings:
Color Me Converted
Friday, December 1st, 2006I’ve just picked up Ellis Weiner’s book, Santa Lives!: Five Conclusive Arguments for the Existence of Santa Claus. The arguments are:
The Ontological Argument
We can imagine a perfect Santa Claus. A Santa Claus who exists is obviously more perfect than an otherwise identical one who doesn’t exist. Therefore existence is a necessary perfection. Therefore Santa Claus [...]