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Daynotes
Journal
Week of 4 October 2010
Latest
Update: Sunday, 10 October 2010 11:14 -0400 |
08:45
-
Well, the AGW alarmist nutters have revealed themselves for what they
are, and now they're backpedaling as fast as they can. They're
apparently shocked that normal people don't think it's funny to murder
AGW skeptics. If you haven't seen the video, it's worth spending four
minutes to watch it. I can't post a link to the video, because the
10:10 campaign is doing its best to disappear it. They removed it from
their web site and stomp on it every time it shows up on YouTube. Of
course, that's not going to work. As quickly as they stomp one copy,
two more show up. Just search YouTube for 10:10 campaign and you'll
soon turn up a copy.
The fact that these AGW nutters actually
believed this video was funny tells you all you need to know about
them. The video begins with a teacher standing in front of her class
talking to the children about the "no pressure" campaign to reduce
carbon dioxide emissions. She asks the class what they plan to do to
contribute to the cause. Most of the class jumps on board, but two
children are not convinced. The teacher pushes a button that blows
those children apart in a shower of blood and guts. Just in case you
miss the point the first time, they do it again and again, each time
echoing their "no pressure" tagline.
The video concludes with
Gillian Anderson in a sound booth. The technician asks her what she's
doing to contribute to the cause. She tells him that she thought her
work on the video was her contribution. He pushes the red button and
blows her apart in a shower of blood and guts.
So, there you
have it. The AGW alarmist nutters have revealed their true colors.
Murdering children who refuse to swallow the party line. They disgust
even many of their former supporters.
13:27
-
Autumn has definitely arrived here. The lows have been in the mid- to
upper 40's (high single digits Celsius), and the highs in the mid- to
upper 60's (upper teens Celsius). I just fired up the Braun and made my
first pot of tea this season. (Earl Grey, in case you're wondering.)
The temperature in the house is 68F (20C) right now. I'm wearing a
long-sleeve shirt and a heavy flannel shirt over it. Barbara is most
comfortable at the low/mid-60's and I'm most comfortable at the
low/mid-70's, so we compromise at 66F during the winter and 74F
during the summer. She's warm all summer and I'm cool all winter, but I
guess it evens out.
I also just issued the first of several
purchase orders for the lab gear I'll need to make up the
microchemistry kits. I'm ordering enough to make up a few dozen kits
initially, some of which I'll need for magazine reviewers and so on,
and the rest of which will go to inventory. I'm not incorporating until
1 January 2011, and I won't start selling kits before I incorporate.
11:03
-
The 10:10 Campaign is now trying to re-spin their horrible little video
as satire, believe it or not. Yeah, right. They rounded up all those
celebrities and spent about a million dollars to make a video that
ridicules themselves. Pull the other one.
In fact, No Pressure
is nothing more or less than a radical Green wet dream. It shows
exactly what the Greens would like to do, and would do if only they
could get away with it. Disagree with them, even support them less
enthusiastically than they think appropriate--as did Gillian
Anderson--and they'll kill you. Or at least they'd really, really like
to kill you.
This is no exaggeration. The radical Greens--some
would say the "radical" part is redundant--actually advocate
large-scale genocide. Seriously. They recognize that Earth cannot
support seven billion humans using the primitive technology that they
find acceptable. That's true enough. But their solution is simply to
kill enough people to get the population down to the level that Green
technology can support. Of course, they exempt themselves and their
families and friends from this proposed culling.
More
specifically, they'd like to kill those of us who are first-world
residents. They'd leave the teeming third-world masses untouched. Those
masses, after all, are already miserable and on the edge of starvation,
which is exactly where the Greens would like to see all humans. Except,
of course, themselves.
I commented on the forums yesterday that
if I spotted an environmentalist with a little black box that had a red
button, I'd shoot first and ask questions later. I wasn't kidding. Lest
you think me anti-environment, I should mention that I would compost the Green's corpse. After urinating on it.
Wednesday, 6 October 2010
00:00
- No post.
08:36
- No post yesterday because O'Reilly sent me the QC1 galley proof PDF of the new edition of Building the Perfect PC.
I got through nearly half of the 350-page PDF yesterday. I should
finish my review and comments today, although it may run into tomorrow.
Once I've finished, I'll post the PDF to the subscriber page.
My comments will be visible in the PDF. If you do download the PDF, the
usual conditions apply. Please keep it private (only for your own
personal use) and if you do happen to notice any errors, please email
them to me with the page number.
Here's a sea change. A new Pew poll reports that less than half of Americans are opposed to gay marriage.
The main opposition comes from fundamental christians, republicans, and
blacks. The first two groups don't surprise me. The third does. How can
blacks, a minority who have historically suffered from discrimination,
oppose the civil rights of another minority group? The obvious answer
is that blacks are disproportionately religious, yet more evidence that
religion poisons everything it touches.
I started laughing while we were watching Brothers and Sisters the other night. The scene featured Emily VanCamp,
an actress whom I adore, wearing an extremely low-cut and revealing
dress. Ordinarily, I look at her face, but this time my attention was
riveted on that portion of her anterior anatomy between her axillae. I
started laughing because I realized that I wouldn't have been able to
testify in court that Emily VanCamp actually appeared in that scene,
and because I remembered the scene in Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Anya, the former vengeance demon, is trying to get Xander to ask her out.
Anya: Look, I know you find me attractive. I've seen you looking at my breasts.
Xander: Nothing personal, but when a guy does that it just means his eyes are open.
And it's true. I've sometimes wondered what it must be like to be a
woman, routinely having conversations with men, looking into their eyes
while they're looking down at your chest. I know I do it to all my
women friends. Fortunately, women seem to have a sense of humor about
it.
Which
reminds me of an article I read a year or so ago about a study of how
men and women look at pornography differently. They wired up a bunch of
men and women test subjects and showed them pornographic images. They
were surprised to find that the men subjects focused mainly on the
women's faces in the images, while the women subjects focused mainly on
the men's naughty bits in the images. Their proposed explanation seemed
reasonable to me. Women focus on the men's genitals because those
provide the best visual evidence of male sexual arousal. Men focus on
the women's faces because those provide the best visual evidence of
female sexual arousal.
08:11
-
The QC1 galley proof PDF of the new edition of Building the Perfect PC is now posted to the subscriber page.
As usual, if you download the book, please keep it to yourself. If you
spot any errors I haven't already flagged, please email the details to
me at thompson at ttgnet dot com.
I've been thinking more about what I wrote yesterday, and it seems to
me that the fact that heterosexual men stare at women's boobs
explains a lot. Doing so is not a conscious decision; in fact, for most men it takes
considerable mental effort to avoid doing
so, at least if the woman is sexually attractive (AKA of child-bearing
age, and therefore a potential mother for his children). Nor do I think
it's a fascination with seeing something that's usually hidden. I don't
know for certain, but my guess is that hetero men stare at women's
boobs even in societies where women go topless. I think boob-staring is
a function of the autonomic nervous system, much like breathing or
digesting food or perspiring. It just happens, without any conscious
direction or oversight.
That explains GAYDAR, which in many
women is nearly infallible. For example, Mary and Kim and Jasmine must
know I'm heterosexual because I stare at their boobs, at least when
they put them on display. Ipso facto, they recognize any man who
does not stare at their boobs as homosexual, or possibly asexual. The
same mechanism may operate for identifying lesbians, although I'm
less certain of that. If a woman doesn't look at another woman's boobs,
she shows herself as hetero; if she does, she's a lesbian. I think I'll
ask a few of my lesbian friends if they find themselves compelled to
look at other women's boobs. If so, that means GAYDAR is universal
among women, gay or straight. Both can tell, either way, male or female.
Further
evidence of female GAYDAR is that GAYDAR works only for
face-to-face contacts, or so many women have told me. A woman is no
better than a man at identifying a gay person on a TV program, for
example. That's because the woman has to fall back to the only option
available to men: does the person "act" gay, in terms of mannerisms and
speech patterns? That's unreliable, of course, because some gay men do not "act gay" and some straight men do.
It's also a strong argument against the
religious nutters who claim that homosexuality
is voluntary and can therefore be "cured". Sexual preference is
hardwired so far down in the nervous system that it must
be determined irrevocably before birth.
09:54
-
Regarding "BoobDAR", Paul Jones says I have "one hell of a theory" and
proposes a study. I told him I'd write the grant request if he'd agree
to be PI. We'd take turns observing and gathering data. No comments yet
from Mary or Barbara.
12:25
- For those of you who wonder why I and the rest of the "Gnu Atheists" are so vocal in our criticism of all aspects of religion, PZ Myers has written an excellent summary
that I'll allow to speak for me. Not that I'd allow PZ to speak for me
generally. As far as I'm concerned, his politics are lunatic-fringe
liberal; as far as he's concerned, mine are lunatic-fringe libertarian.
PZ and I are not even in complete agreement about science issues. He
considers "climate change" to be "settled science", whatever that
means; I consider AGW to be a left-wing political agenda with
pseudo-scientific trappings. But with regard to evolution and atheism,
I'm perfectly content for anyone to consider his positions on these
topics to be mine as well.
11:14
-
Interesting. I very seldom check my web site statistics, but I just did
so. Given the orientation of this site, I know it's not representative,
but, other than spiders, nearly one third of my traffic comes from
systems running Linux and about two thirds from systems running
Firefox. Safari, Chrome, and Opera account for a fair percentage of the
remainder, leaving Internet Explorer users as a minority. And I
suspect most of those IE users are visitors arriving from corporate
systems, such as when Barbara visits my page from work.
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by
Robert
Bruce
Thompson. All
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