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Week of 4 October 2010


Latest Update: Sunday, 10 October 2010 11:14 -0400

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Monday, 4 October 2010
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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.


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Tuesday, 5 October 2010
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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.


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Wednesday, 6 October 2010
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00:00 - No post.




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Thursday, 7 October 2010
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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.


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Friday, 8 October 2010
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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.


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Saturday, 9 October 2010
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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.


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Sunday, 10 October 2010
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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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