Back Soon
Sorry for the, well, non-existant attention to this blog. But, I have been spending my energy just getting better and healing, both mentally and physically.
Soon, I should be back…… (ta da)
Woo round’ the world…
So,
My buddy Richard Saunders from Australia is now on a big TV show, which airs in his homeland, the show named; ‘The One’. Supposedly the whole idea is that the show is going to find the worlds, or at least Australia’s best psychic, just think American Idol/Pop Idol for the woo-woo set. Richard is one of the judges in this show, obviously the ‘Skeptic’ judge; there is a lady who claims to some form of witch or other super-woo of that sort as well. You know you just can’t have only logic and reality cloud your REALITY show, so it is required to have someone who believes in strange stuff judging others who believe THEY have the power to do strange and illogical stuff…. It only makes sense, right?
So, I’ve seen a couple clips, which were pretty much exactly what I thought the show was going to be. It wasn’t totally bad for Richard, but since it is filmed, it can be edited and on at least one occasion I kind of noticed a couple places where it could have been easily made to look much different that might have really happened. Then, Richard posted another, new, clip that I saw and had to share. In this clip, you can witness the epic failure of these ‘psychics’ on more than one level. Obviously they decided to NOT edit this time, and then ran with it. I hope the rest of what I see sticks to the reality of this clip.
Enjoy:
Nothing must be held sacred
“Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanities’ knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind.”
- P.Z. Myers
A quote clipping from my friend P.Z. Myers on a recent entry.
If you don’t follow P.Z., or his blog, he has been the target of many nut-job people who believe some very crazy stuff, all centered on their turbo-Catholic belief that the Eucharist cracker from mass is ACTUALLY the physical being of Christ once it is blessed. Most of the people who I know, who are smart enough to remember to breathe in and out to stay alive, should know that I just can’t deal with something that stupid.
These crazy people have been attempting to get P.Z. FIRED from his job, have harassed him in e-mail with threats of every sort. His latest blog entry was one where he finally did a few VERY sacrilegious things to many religious items, and commented on how crazy people can be about mythos. Good for P.Z. and I find it funny that he pointed out that some people called him a ‘Freemason’ for his lack of belief and he writes in his blog. Well, at least they might have a point. MOST of our founding fathers were Freemasons, and they were not much of the devout type. Heck, President Lincoln was most likely Atheist, and even gave a speech to the fact to a group of Jews, telling them that America has room for them, BECAUSE we in America should not endorse or, as a nation, be tied to any supernatural forces of any religion. So, maybe he does sound like a Freemason… I am actually wearing my grandfathers ring he received when he became one of the high levels in the Freemasons himself, I inherited it after he died, he willed it to me. My grandfather sounded much like P.Z. in his posts as well.
Enjoy… follow the link below to meet P.Z. and read the post he made that I ripped that quote from.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/07/the_great_desecration.php
Back from TAM and Vacation
Ok, so we got home almost 2 weeks ago, but I have been recovering from the impressive amount of fun and go-go-go we did for many days out in Vegas, and then tripping around the Southwest of the USA.
First stop was out in Vegas for The Amazing Meeting 6 at the Fabulous Flamingo on the strip. The event was, as advertised, ‘Amazing’. Sadly, both me and Swoopy were SO busy we only made it to about 2.5 or less events in the main room. But, what we DID see was really cool. We did get to see many of the presentations on the last day, which are the call for papers.
After TAM, we drove down to the Grand Canyon, and then onto to Sedona for some sight seeing and shopping and other hiking like stuff. Lots of very cool pictures were taken during that leg of the vacation.
Now, we are back at home, you can check out our latest episode of Skepticality to hear a couple cool interviews we did with Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Adam from the Mythbusters. Many more cool interviews to follow in the next couple weeks. 
So, what is next? Well, the debut year of Skeptrack at Dragon*Con! If you didn’t make it to TAM, definitely come for Skeptrack 2008! You should just look at the schedule and the big guests who are coming to entertain and enlighten the crowd this year! http://www.skeptrack.org/current_schedule_2008.html
Ok, more later, and I’ll try not to only post a blog entry every 4 months from now on!
Funny Post Holiday Cartoon
This is pretty much my take on life, cartoon form.
The Books That Screwed Up The World
Someone on the Skepticality Message Board posted this, and I had to post it here. Why? Look at the #1 book on the list, I couldn’t agree more!
http://listverse.com/literature/10-books-that-screwed-up-the-world/
Three Links For A Friday
Here are three odd links that somehow have been stuck in my brain for the past 4 days. If you like all three of them, you might have some odd brain situation like myself.
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/05/liefstyle-or-ge.html#more
Common Myths About Evolution
If you know me at all, you know that I am passionate about science and reality. With some of the push by the religious right and other deniers of science recently, and the release of the anti-science propaganda movie ‘Expelled’, by of all people Ben Stein, this past week. I thought I would just blog up this link everyone should read and understand.
Because, if you don’t think Evolution is how we all came to be, you are either uneducated, or… you suffer from a bit too much fuzzy thinking. The Earth wasn’t created 4,000 years ago, and we didn’t spring up from dust and an extra rib bone, sorry to burst your bubble.
Derek Searches For Lost Socks!
Sometimes I get a bit rabid about dumb things… like socks which lose each other. I mean, I don’t throw them away! And yesterday I cleaned out the entire house of clothes to find a pile of socks I haven’t been able to find since before Christmas. Well, these videos show you just how well THAT worked.
Lost Socks Video 1
Archived Away For Space
Lost Socks Video 2
Archived Away For Space
What Happened To My Internet?
So, My blog has lingered in what could only be called a vat of slimy uselessness for going on 3 years or so.
Heck, I did more ‘blogging’ long before it was called blogging.
Back in 1995 I used to just update my old website using the little crap-tastic text editor built into Windows, (back then it was windows 95), then used a simple FTP application and just did updates that way. We didn’t have Wordpress, or any of these other cool fancy blogging tools. And, it worked! I could do it all by hand, and even format everything EXACTLY the way I liked.
Today… fast forward about 13 years.
We now have Wordpress, Movable Type, etc. Now EVERYONE has a blog, heck even the corporate CEO at the big company I work for does his own blog for all of us who work for him. I believe that proves that Blogging is now as common as any other activity I can think of.
What bothers me?
It isn’t that blogging is now so popular, that I think is a GREAT thing. What I hate is that someone out there thought performing layout using the HTML standard was all too damn complicated and had to change it all to this new fangled CSS, or now even CSS2 method in website creation. I blame people who aren’t creative for this. I could do pretty much ANYTHING with the old standard HTML that I wanted to. Sure, some of it took some math and a bit of patience, but is was all possible.
Don’t get me totally wrong, I did like the first hint of it with the introduction of the CSS just for type face styles, that made a ton of sense to me. I could define my fonts, sizes and font decor to make it all jive across my site pages. I loved that. But… Who in freaks sake decided that this CSS 2 stuff was anything to be called ‘good’? For the life of me, and I have read EVERYTHING about it, why in all that is good take way any way to ‘center’ text or elements in a page?! That is something that is REQUIRED. Sure, some ass-hat will tell you there are ways to do it, but you shouldn’t HAVE to learn some esoteric method to perform a simple and REQUIRED task in a LAYOUT system such as ‘center this for me’. Don’t even get me started on the whole, “Let us require you to put extra back slashes in everything for no good reason.” Bull-Poop either, that is insane. If you don’t think so, YOU are part of the problem. What happened to my digital world? Sure I went to sleep for about 40 days back in 2005, but when I woke up and re-learned to think and talk, it seemed as if a group of insane people have become the ‘leaders’ who have turned the easy to access, simple to use tools that made the web what it is today into an overly complicated set of tools that most people will never have the time or will to re-learn. Heck, it is even fairly difficult to find a basic tutorial on CSS2 that makes any common sense on the web!
This is the website and blog for the thoughts and ideas of Derek Colanduno. The host, and producer of Skepticality, the Official Audio Program for Skeptic Magazine and the Skeptics Society.