Tales Of Brave Ulysses

I’ve always thought I was a secular humanist. Guess I was reasonably correct in my viewpoint. Guess I need to look into this further.

You fit in with: Humanism Your ideals mostly resemble that of a Humanist. Although you do not have a lot of faith, you are devoted to making this world better, in the short time that you have to live. Humanists do not generally believe in an afterlife, and therefore, are committed to making the world a better place for themselves and future generations. 0% scientific. 60% reason-oriented.

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

Well, here’s another story running on WorldChanging: Fabulous Prefab, yes it’s all about prefab architecture and the hope for sustainable housing in the future.

The whole thing seems to be a boutique luxury item for the upper class if you ask me. These things are not designed to house people cheaply. Still a boy can dream right?

I wanted to post this amazing picture of frozen Dione hanging against a backdrop of Saturn’s rings a couple weeks ago, and I forgot. Here it is now.

So I think it’s fair to say Roger Ebert was a little enamored of Bai Ling during a recent encounter at the Honolulu International Film Festival. And it’s easy to see why, she appears to be allergic to clothes.

You know, I was going to post up a picture of her naked, from a Playboy spread she did a few months ago – a Playboy spread that supposedly got her cut from her bit part in the latest Star Wars movie. Just so y’all don’t think I’m a prude of anything, here’s that photo of Bai Ling naked that was one of many plastered all over Google. I just thought I wouldn’t make life rough for anybody reading this page at the office. That’s the kind of considerate guy I am.

I mentioned it a couple months ago, now it is hitting the news:
Segways may soon be zipping down Tumon’s roads & sidewalks if a bill before the Legislature passes. The local distributor is confident that the bill will pass and allow the electric thinga-ma-bob start rolling around on the island’s streets and sidewalks.

Read a couple very good articles on intelligent design this morning, one a strident call to arms, the other a lucid exposure of the intellectual vacuity of intelligent design.

• American Scientist Online – Being Stalked by Intelligent Design
  
• Intelligent Design 101: Short on science, long on snake oil

My college football coach is retiring after the 2005 season, marking the end of a 29 year career with the Beloit College Buccaneers. Looks like the Bucs are not doing so great this year, struggling through a so so season. They’re currently a middling 3-5, though they shut out Knox last week 38-0, their first shut out in 10 years.

Boy I still remember that game at St. Norbert’s in 1990. That was a hell of an effort, probably the best game I’ve ever played. It was a come from behind, overtime win against the perennial powerhouse in the Midwest Conference. Our victory won Beloit the North Division title and the right to host the conference championship. It was definitely the apex of my football career, especially since we were routed two weeks later in the championship game. At least we have that great battle against St. Norbert’s to cherish.

Congratulations Coach DeGeorge, on a long and fruitful career.

Hey look! My post on Twikes has been cited by a web magazine. Eric Shackle found my brief story about Twikes interesting.

And now it is official: The Marines are coming to Guam. The Pacific Sunday News reported this morning that up to 7,000 Marines will relocate from Okinawa to Guam over the next 2 to 8 years, a move designed to appease the restive Okinawan population. The Guam business community and government have lobbied for this shift for several years, especially during the lean years following 2001. The presence of 7,000 Marines and their families will boost the island’s economy dramatically.

Now if only the island could garner a carrier task force...

After work this evening, I stopped off at the Guam Megaplex at GPO to watch A History of Violence. It is directed by David Cronenberg, the vision behind a series of surreal and vaguely erotic films like Dead Ringers, The Naked Lunch, Scanners, eXistenZ, Crash and The Dead Zone. And A History of Violence certainly fits right in with the rest of his ouvre. Flashes of chilling violence, and vague unease that makes a person squirm in his seat.

But if this film really resembles anything, it is Clint Eastwood’s paean to blood lust and revenge, Unforgiven. A man of violence, reformed in his ways and living a small, quiet family life, returns to violence with irrevocable results. I left the theater appreciating A History of Violence, a good film with a difficult path to tread. A man remaking his troubled past into a picture perfect vision of respectability, only to succumb to violence in the end. A good movie, but I doubt I’ll watch it again. It’s just too damn violent.

I returned home and discovered Doctor Zhivago on TCM. Which of course got me thinking about a character from Pasternak’s novel who does the reverse, a moral and high minded man remade into an avatar of violence under the assumed name of Strelnikov. Tom Stall and Pavel Pavlovich Antipov, inverse mirrors of each other. One abandons a life of senseless violence for a simple life, the other abandons a simple life to bath the world in blood. Curious.

The Fantasy Novelist’s Exam: This made me laugh, mostly because I remember a time in my life when I spent far too many hours crafting the framework of a fantasy world that I spun intricate tales of high fantasy around. And it was all hackneyed crap, that hits dozens of these no-no’s on the exam. But hey, I was a pimply 13 year old at the time.

As an added bonus, the exam contains an interesting link to this essay about the weight of medieval and renaissance swords. Contrary to what is commonly portrayed in movies and popular culture, these historical swords were actually light and nimble killing machines, with many weighing around 3 to 4 pounds. A far cry from the massive cudgels of pig iron with sharp sides that folks today seem to think they were. Hell, the iBook I’m writing this on right now weighs 5.9 pounds.

Well, I’m off to hit the movie theater after a Saturday at the office. More on that when I get home tonight…

This is surprisingly fun. I really enjoy playing The Set Game every day for the past week. Sort of like those old Sesame Street jingles, “One of these things is not like the other…”

If Fox News Had Been Around Throughout History

Gosh, you mean the movie is going belly up and will never see the light of day? What an amazing development, nobody saw this coming…

Before I head into the office, here’s a smattering of links that I would like to share:

• Will Humanity Be Left Home Alone – A sobering essay by John Gray, author of Straw Dogs. Gray paints a bleak future for humanity living in a stripped environment, suffering from wars and famine. He points to the single, ultimate source of this havoc, human overpopulation.
  
• A Review of Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science – Boy, Cosma Shalizi sure doesn’t like Stephen Wolfram, or his 2002 monograph, A New Kind of Science. He really doesn’t like him.
  
• Antikythera Mechanism – Looks like the ancient Greeks were more advanced than we thought. Archimedes was tantalizingly close to the Calculus, and the ancients also wrought sophisticated mechanical devices to compute astronomical positions. So close, yet everything they created was lost to the sands of time. It took millennia for humanity to regain the heights achieved by the ancient Greeks. I wonder what our descendants will think of us in 2,500 years?

• The Future of Evolution – as told by MSNBC.
  
• Tomacco For Real – D’oh!
  
• Nicotine Beer – for those too lazy to smoke and drink beer.
  
• Coelacanth anatomy – Who doesn’t like freaky living fossil fish?

It’s Wednesday in a very busy week. Looks like the weekend will be non-existent for me this week, and probably next weekend too. Bummer.

I was going to comment about this idiot dropping a quarter of a million at a strip club and then contesting the charges, but it seems kind of pointless. However, I will point out out the creepy neo-Nazi children of the corn that are apparently the fascist version of the Olsen twins. Wow, that’s just really creepy. I’d rather not think about how screwed up that is. Instead, let’s look at this kick-ass dual processor laptop. That’s pretty damn cool.

Finally, a use for my 250 gigabyte Firewire hard drive besides storage for backups.

Here’s another really cool astronomy video: The European Southern Observatory, the same guys that put out those cool images of the cosmic drainpipe in NGC 1097 have a cool video of stars in the very center of the Milky Way, massive stars swinging wildly around the supermassive black hole that pulses at the heart of our own galaxy.