This is just too good. The assorted fruit and mixed nuts of the American religious right are unhappy with Wikipedia for its bias towards a reasonable middle ground and tendency to favor evidence supported consensus over truthiness. And so was created Conservapedia, an online encyclopedia dedicated to advancing lunatic opinion in an environment unencumbered by scientific knowledge or inconvenient reality.
As John Swift points out 'Conservapedia is based on good conservative Christian values while Wikipedia, as you can tell from its name, is based on Wiccan.' Would love to see Jimbo Wales face when he reads that one.
As far as I know this is the first time there has been an online creationist encyclopeadia which you can edit. From the entry on Kangroos:
'Like all modern animals, modern kangaroos originated in the Middle East and are the descendants of the two founding members of the modern kangaroo baramin that were taken aboard Noah's Ark prior to the Great Flood. It has not yet been determined whether kangaroos form a holobaramin with the wallaby, tree-kangaroo, wallaroo, pademelon and quokka, or if all these species are in fact apobaraminic or polybaraminic.
After the Flood, kangaroos bred from the Ark passengers migrated to Australia. There is debate whether this migration happened over land - as Australia was still for a time connected to the Middle East before the supercontinent of Pangea broke apart - or if they rafted on mats of vegetation torn up by the receding flood waters.'
Since word of this broke on the blogoshpere it seems everyone and their creepy uncle have been contributing to articles. In the comments over at scienceblogs.com Steevl writes:
I'm having tremendous fun. I edited the article on Atheism to point out that it leads to pedophilia and bestiality. I checked back an hour later expecting my edit to be gone, but no: they didn't remove it, they added citations.
Round of applause for that man. Good-natured vandalism aside, here's a quote from the Google cache of an older and apparently serious article:
“Jesus said, ‘Look, I will guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of Heaven.’” (Gospel of Thomas 114) “Jesus is not suggesting a sex-change operation, but is using 'male' and 'female' metaphorically to refer to the higher and lower aspects of human nature. Mary is thus to undergo a spiritual transformation from her earthly, material, passionate nature (which the evangelist equates with the female) to a heavenly, spiritual, intellectual nature (which the evangelist equates with the male).” [link]
It had never occurred to me to consider whether Jesus would want his girlfriend to have a sex change operation so that she could be elevated from her sub-human female status, guess I never assumed Jesus thought about women that way. But apparently the fundies have pondered it at length and arrived at an important theological message for the world.
Life is so much fun.
Update: Jon Swift said...
Regrattably, it appears that some mean-spirited liberals have been committing mischief at Conservapedia and administrators have been forced to shut down new registrations for the time being. It may take them a while to sort out legitimate entries, such as the article about the Pacific Northwest Arboreal Octopus, from hoaxes perpetrated by liberals. All of the citations in my piece, however, link to versions by trusted conservative authors. You can also be certain that any version by Aschlafly, that is, the founder Andrew Schlafly, are genuinely conservative and of the highest quality. [read on...]
From the Wikipedia, on the mood-altering effect of crowd membership:
Collective effervescence (CE) is the energy formed by a gathering of people as might be experienced at a sporting event, a carnival, or a riot. This energy can cause people to act differently than in their everyday life.
Collective effervescence is the basis for Émile Durkheim's theory of religion as laid out in his 1912 volume Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. This book is largely based on studies of the aboriginal tribes.
Durkheim argues that the universal religious dichotomy of profane and sacred results from the lives of these tribe members: most of their life is spent performing menial tasks such as hunting and gathering. These tasks are profane. The rare occasions on which the entire tribe gathers together becomes sacred, and the high energy level associated with these events gets directed onto physical objects or people which then become sacred.
For Durkheim, religion is a fundamentally social phenomenon. The beliefs and practices of the sacred are a method of social organization. According to Durkheim:
'god and society are one of the same… the god of the clan… can be none other than the clan itself, but the clan transfigured and imagined in the physical form of a plant or animal that serves as a totem.'
Which goes a long way towards explaining the behavior of English football louts and the fervent, violent and downright bizarre way in which they worship football teams. The players themselves are idolized, in the way that religions hold up prophets or people of special sanctity, but the main focus is on the much vaguer concept of the team itself, removed from any particular player or manager. It's less about the football and more about the louts themselves, an 'I am' statement to define in-group and 'other'. It's almost exactly the same as a tribal identity, with blind adherence to conformity with the in-group that has members voluntarily adpoting a tribal dress, tribal chanting, ritual, assuming of 'moral' superiority and discouraging intergroup socializing and courtship.
When there is conflict between groups, often involving unprovoked violence by a mob against supporters of a different team, or between two mobs directly, both sides will assume all beliefs they have and any actions they take are moral and right, while the actions of the other are despicable and immoral. And both sides are correct, because the groups morality is based on the sacred they have created in their own image. It is a rare coincidence that behavior which is moral is also behavior that is ethical in humanist terms.
Some overpaid, coked up athlete kicks a ball into a net - a completely arbitrary action with no value or significance to the world - results in badge-wearing chavs seriously assaulting some other badge-wearing chav, or even a random kid wearing the 'wrong' clothes, and feeling completely morally justified within themselves for doing so.
This is a good model for nationalism and religion in all their forms, and highlights the dubious nature of 'morals' espoused by religious or patriotic people.
Some nifty cultural dissonance there, Donald Duck giving the Nazi salute to a framed picture of Hitler on his bedroom wall. Lyrics to the film's title song (which won a freaking Oscar!):
Nazi: Ist we not der super men?
Hirohito: Aryan pure super men?
Soldier: Ja, we ist der super men!
Röhm: [Prissy voice] Super-duper super men!
Nazi: Ist dis Nazi Land so good? Would you leave it if you could?
Singers: Ja, dis Nazi Land ist good!
Moussolini: We would leave if we could.
Röhm: We bring the world's new order.
[toots flute]
Hirohito: [waves small Japanese flag] Heil Hitler's New World Order.
This is the same song that the POWs are performing for their musical in the Movie Harts War. At the time the cartoon was made Americans did not yet know about the Holocaust, they may not have been so goofy with the Aryan Supermen bit if they had.
Alderney was occuplied by the Germans as part of Hitler's Atlantic Wall - there was a concentration camp less than a kilometer from my house - and the island is surrounded by concrete fortifications built by Russian slave labor. When they died or could no longer work, they were thrown into the wet concrete. A lot of truly horrible things happened here. Nobody is known to have escaped.
To see the Nazi ideology as a subject for childrens cartoons, and dealt with in such a whimsical way is a bit of a trip, and makes a bizarre sort of sense given US WW2 propganda. History as it was described at the time.
Animating for Disney in the 40s and 50s must have been one of the most kickass jobs of the era. 'What'd you do at work today honey?', 'Oh, I was drawing pictures of a duck throwing tomatoes at Hitler.' 'That's nice dear.'
Incan geoglyphs in Chile. When I was (more credulous) child I read most of Erich Von Danniken's books on the subject of Nazca lines, Incans and aliens, aaah memories. Pretty cool archaeological specimens too :-)
Architectures of Control is a fascinating blog about how items are designed to affect the behavior of people using them, from planned obsolescence where the desired behavior is a person to buying replacement object to the use of sideshow 'slimming mirrors' in clothing stores.
There are a lot of views one could take of these practices and techniques. (With the weasel words in brackets) mostly they are manipulative (subtle), dishonest (ingenious) and effective ways of separating people from money (helping customers decide what's best for them), or effecting (encouraging) changes in public behavior.
Such techniques raise deeper questions about society and capitalism as well, such as who gets to decide what is for the publics good (is the general public fit to decide?) and what should be expected of businesses. A common view seems to be that the responsibilities of businesses lie mostly with the supporting the interests of the shareholders, if a company can make more money through deceptive or unethical means - or even illegal means if repercussions will be negligible - then that is what it will do. The shareholders get to vote on company management, and if the organization is not generating as much money as it can management may be replaced or a competitor with fewer scruples may out compete an honest responsible organization. Thus businesses will be winnowed down in a fairly Darwinian way, tending towards large monopolies where possible.
Words like fair and honest are rather subjective, that may not matter when discussing the general case. Society benefits a great deal from big businesses (with some notable exceptions), despite their drawbacks which is why they are allowed to exist, and society's servant Government is supposed to mediate where interests of profit and public good come to loggerheads. (continues after the jump)
But... two women having a catfight over some guy isn't news, if it wasn't for the sordidly memorable bit about the diapers it would have had far less coverage. There's a marketing lesson in that. Following a similar theme of sex, conflict and a little social transgression:
It's about the cops busting a local nookie joint. Notice towards the bottom there are three websites mentioned, but only one has a full domain name. You can bet that a local interest story about illicit sex in a sexually repressed part of the US is going to stir up a fair bit of traffic to those sites, and comefiesta.com is the one they'll hit first since it has an easy to use domain.
Interestingly, there isn't a website called comefiesta.com, it's a (deliberate) misspelling of cumfiesta.com, a Bukkake getup from Miami, right the way across the continent. Someone going by 'creep276' has an affiliate agreement whereby he gets paid for sending traffic to cumfiesta-with-a-u, and visiting comefiesta-with-an-o redirects visitors to the with-a-u.
So when the plump, sweaty, newspaper reading public of Orange County put their hairy palms to the keyboard after breakfast, someone makes a sudden surge of money. I'm not sure if the 'o' was a deliberate misspelling or not, could be the OC Weekly doesn't like to say cum, but it's suspicious, and a clever way to make a quick bag of pesos for the sly journalist, source or media hacker. The affiliate ID's a bit of a giveaway though, a single large frame or a cloned front page on the decoy domain would be more opaque.
From the Personal Finance Blog, a list of the ten best places to find money while walking:
10. Sidewalks: Most people don’t look at the sidewalk when they walk. It’s surprising the number of people that walk by money simply because they never have seen it. Keep your eyes on the sidewalk when walking and you are sure to find some coins.
9. Gutters: This may apply to countries where there are a lot of people that ride scooters like in Japan, but at least for me, walking on the edge of the sidewalk so that I can also see the gutter will increase the chances of me finding money.
8. Intersections / Crosswalks: I’m always on the lookout for money when crossing the street. For some reason, it seems to gather here more than on the sidewalks and gutters along the main portion of the street.
7. Train / Subway Stations: Public transportation stations are a good place to find fallen coins. People are taking out money to buy tickets and invariable a coin drops to the ground here and there.
I've always enjoyed finding coins, I find quite a lot. Not sure how much it adds up to over the course of a year, but it's not about the value, I just like finding them. Like urban seashells. On the other hand, the national minimum wage of a farm worker in Zimbabwe (my native country) is less than one British Pound per month, I find more money than many people live on.
With that in mind, I'd like to share the very best place to look for dropped coins. Become become aware of soft chairs and sofas in public places, especially where people will be handling change. I don't think there is any better place for finding coins than a big soft sofa in a bar. Waiting rooms and bus station lounges are also good. One of these days I'm going to buy time at one of those airport 'First Class' lounges to see what's in their sofas.
You probably won't ever find much money for the time spent looking, this is not a viable way to supplement your income, but if you enjoy the hide-and-seek of it all, satisfying some ancient hunther-gatherer instinct, sofas are good to know about. There's also a quiet thrill to the subterfuge involved in searching the upholstery of a couch in a public place without anyone else being aware of it.
Finally! Someone got to writing technical documentation that does not need to be broken up with porn and pictures of beetles to make it fun to read. I'm learning Ruby - on Rails - and compared to the usual slew of boring white books, this is just plain awesome: Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby (with cartoon foxes). An excerpt:
Animal Perfect is now the future of animal enhancement. They build new animals and salvage old-style animals for parts. Of course, they’ve come a long ways. When Animal Perfect started, you’d see a full-grown bear walk into Animal Perfect and you’d see a full-grown bear with sunglasses walk out. Completely cheesy.
Stick around and you’ll see a crab with his own jet pack. That’s a new 2004 model jetcrab.
But now, the whole operation is up and running. And the cleanliness of the place is astonishing. All the equipment is so shiny. Everything is in chrome. Oh, and all the staff have concealed weapons. They’re trained to kill anyone who enters unannounced. Or, if they run out of bullets, they’re trained to pistol whip anyone who enters unannounced.
'Elf, make me a starmonkey.'
First, the star is caught.
Some imaginary Ruby for you:
pipe.catch_a_star
Variable pipe. Method catch_a_star. A lot of Rubyists like to think of methods as a message. Whatever comes before the dot is handed the message. The above code tells the pipe to catch_a_star.
This is the second half of Ruby. Putting things in motion. These things you define and create in the first half start to act in the second half.
1. Defining things.
2. Putting those things into action.
So what if the star catching code works? Where does the star go?
captive_star = pipe.catch_a_star
See, it’s up to you to collect the miserable, little star. If you don’t, it’ll simply vanish. Whenever you use a method, you’ll always be given something back. You can ignore it or use it.
If you can learn to use the answers that methods give you back, then you will dominate.
The ratchet gets an attach message. What needs to be attached? The method arguments: the captive_monkey and the captive_star. We are given back a starmonkey, which we have decided to hang on to.
This is turning out to be such a short, little proggie that I’m just going to put it all together as one statement.
See how pipe.catch_a_star is right in the arguments for the method? The caught star will get passed right to the ratchet. No need to find a place to put it. Just let it go.
Tomorrow is Boomtime, the 35th day of the Aftermath in the Discordian calendar, that is: St Pliny Dance-for-Ham Day. To celebrate, let's play a game.
SINK, A GAME by Ala Hera, E.L., N.S.; RAYVILLE APPLE PANTHERS
SINK is played by Discordians and people of much ilk. PURPOSE: To sink object or an object or a thing... in water or mud or anything you; can sink something in.
RULES: Sinking is allowed in any manner. To date, ten pound chunks of mud were used to sink a tobacco can. It is preferable to have a pit of water or a hole to drop things in. But rivers - bays - gulfs - I dare say even oceans can be used.
TURNS are taken thusly: who soever gets the junk up and in the air first.
DUTY: It shall be the duty of all persons playing 'SINK' to help find more objects to sink, once one object is sunk.
UPON SINKING: The sinked shall yell 'I sank it!' or something equally as thoughtful.
NAMING OF OBJECTS is sometimes desirable. The object is named by the finder of such object and whoever sinks it can say for instance, 'I sunk Columbus, Ohio!'
Here's a good way to boggle your mind. Think about prime numbers. Just think about them, for like 48 hours. It starts off being very strange and difficult. They're just ordinary numbers, right? Numbers that don't happen to be divisible by other natural numbers, save zero and one. The lone pines that stand at odd intervals after the firs have been toppled and chopped up with division lines. Pillars of obstinance in the mess if fickle, irresolute, factorisable integers.
But they're not random. There's a pattern, a clear and bafflingly complex one. A few hours in, you start to notice small things. Only two primes ever touch, two and three. They like to end in 9. They like to end in 3. If you black out the prime multiples one by one you see how it builds up, and where the next prime will be. I thought it was like a wave at first, because I didn't know any better, with each prime adding new curves to the waveform, new harmonics and a multiplied wavelength.
It's not like that. What it is: a developing pattern of gaps, each hole in the pattern of blacked out numbers is a new prime, which blacks out more of the holes ahead of it, making a bigger but perfectly repeating pattern up the number line. It's like a printing wheel that snowballs bigger and bigger as it rolls away from 0. When you see this, you realize why one is not treated as a prime number, I never understood that until now.
Ancient mathematicians knew this and gave it a name, it's called the Sieve of Eratosthenes. This is the same Eratosthenes fellow who devised the latitude and longitude system we use today to navigate the globe, and invented the orrery [flickr] hundreds of years before the Church declared the world flat.
But back to the primes. Once you've watched the wheel turn a few times in your head - and this takes a loooong time - you see how the primes are thinning out as the wheel gets bigger, more primes add more black so the white gaps become sparser. When real mathematicians talk about this they call it the Prime Number Theorem.
Then you realize that the blacked out bits don't much matter, the numbers they cover up are all discarded so the only information is the length of the black bits, the distance between primes. The wheel now shrinks down from a stripey black and white printing press to a small tight wheel of numbers. And still the pattern builds, but you can see it clearly
and... *BANG!* your brain shorts out. You sit in your chair, completely dazed, unable to think about anything. All the understanding, the beauty and form you saw clearly a moment ago is replaced by static.
Bodily functions resume, you suddenly realize you're hungry, thirsty and need to pee. Hours have passed, wince at the time spent when you remember all that you need to get done.
But it's not entirely wasted. If a computer program can be written to efficiently draw the wheel as it grows, up to a list of gap lengths a few gigabytes long then a list of the first x many primes can be made in short order. I fancy it can be done. Once we have the primes we can maybe make a program to create rough rules that prove a large number is not divisible by that prime, or pattern of primes, allowing the rapid elimination of huge swaths of prime factors by a logical tree. It doesn't have to prove if it is divisible, just cut down most of the numbers we might have to test.
Simple example, say 5. Compare to your number to factorize, does that number end in 5 or 0? no? Then it's not divisible by 5. Or 15, 25, 3214320985, etc. One logical rule that nixes a great many numbers we'd have to consider as factors. Thus the program imputes a decision tree for arriving at a small number of candidate primes, which are easily checked against the number we wish to factorize, and factorize but Foxtrot Oscar quickly. We allow perhaps a terabyte, or as much space as we can get, for this tree, and it can process all numbers below a limit of the largest prime squared, producing either the
factors or quickly telling us if the large number is yet another prime. We're sacrificing computational simplicity in exchange for computation time on a grand scale, and automating that.
Sooo... what? The factoring problem is one of the great, some say intractable, problems of mathematics. Being able to factorize large numbers would be a kind of comp-sci superpower, all manner of hard tasks become trivial. All the locks on public-key encrypted messages would open for you. The SSL on your bank website, the cypher on your cellphone or the new DVDs, a million hidden messages all made transparent. All kinds of people would step up to give you awards (and money, lots of money) in addition to all the prize money waiting for those who decrypt ciphers, such as offered by RSA and the EFF. Well worth thinking about a little, no matter how unlikely you are to crack it.
Needs no further explanation. Now the waiting game begins. I fire up the referrer logs, sit back, relax, and count the seconds until someone gets to this page by Googling for 'Barbera Streisand Nude'. Keywords: Naked, Nude, Sex, Dirty Sanchez. Spider me!
Update - April 2nd: FYI, about one person per day gets here by Googling 'Barbera Streisand Nude' or 'Streisand Nude' (her name is actually spelled Barbra). Hooray! Am collecting data, will one day publish a map of the world...
Playing with mash-ups of NOAA data :-) Shown here: Hurricane Sergio, sea surface temperature overlay.
As at yesterday: When its minimum central pressure dropped to 965 mbar on November 15, Sergio became the strongest hurricane to form or exist in November in the Eastern or Central North Pacific, surpassing 1991's Hurricane Nora.
The Book of Beginnings is a collection of the unfinished stories of POV-Ray artist Gilles Tran. They're fascinating, and end mid-sentence, reading them gives a strange sense of channel surfing. I'm sure he wasn't the first to say it, but Mystery said it best: 'always leave them wanting more.' Usually illustrations follow the story, with Tran it seems to be the other way round, which I suppose makes sense; if you spend hundreds of hours working on a scene in a ray-tracing modeller you must have a pretty good sense of it and the world it belongs in by the time you're finished. Highly recommended.
Did you know: there are several towns and cities across the United States called Woonsocket? It's like the City Fathers all got drunk on mead one day and had a contest for weirdest city name ever. The word is widely believed (by me) to be Nipmuc Indian for 'I will kill you and steal your horse, paleface'.
Pioneer captain Jeremiah 'Lucky' Pierre, addressing captured braves: 'You are defeated, you will now convert to Christianity and serve your new masters in the name of God, or die. Tell me, what do you savages call this place.'
Chief Ravenous Beaver: 'Wo oon sok k ket'
Which would explain Woonsocket, RI, the city whose motto is (no fooling) 'the most French place in the United Sates outside of Louisiana.' which I guess is in their favor. Apparently it's a nice place too, because the good people of Woonsocket, South Dakota named their town after it. New York was originally called New Amsterdam. There's New Orleans, New England, New Jersey, New Hampshire and so on. There's even a Paris in Arkansas. Some homesick fellow in the wild west must have had grand designs to found a new and beautiful city to rival the might and splendor of home, he would create his homeland afresh in foreign lands and it would be called: New Woonsocket (cue trumpets).
I don't really get the process behind place names in general. Consider New Mexico. Did American troops look at the battered country across the border after the Mexican-American War and think to themselves, 'Yeah, we should have one of those, the world needs another Mexico'?
For what it's worth, in case you think I'm picking unfairly on Woonsocket for having a funny name - as opposed to say Hygiene, Colorado or Santa Claus, Indiana [Google Maps] - westerners have trouble pronouncing my home town.
In 1979, the cast and crew of Rainbow made a special edition for the Thames TV staff Christmas tape. Though I grew out of this show around age ten it still has pretty colors, and a bear, and Geoffrey talking about his balls.
We've grown blase about technology, some great Moore's Law of progress has dulled us to the incredibly awesome things that science is kicking out every single day. So we crack the human genome (FUCKING HELL!) and the public yawns. We have robots on Mars, right now, but I can't remember anyone ever bringing that up in the bar. Those videophones in sci-fi movies? Free calls for everyone with Skype.
It takes something ordinary to change, something not dismissed as science stuff for geeks (the Popular Girl shudders, 'eww! geeks'), before we're reminded that - oh yes - we live in the 21st century.
Some engineers in Australia have done just that. They've invented a new kind of shower head that puts an air bubble inside each droplet of water, cutting consumption by thirty percent.
I, for one, think we should call this new type of shower droplet the Douche Bag, because douche is the French word for shower and anything French is arguably more stylish than anything Australian, and Bag because they're tiny bags of water surrounding a pocket of air.
Since human use of water has such a major impact on the natural world an obvious sales pitch is to name it The Environmentalist Douche Bag Shower. Then you can have the guy in the TV ad deliver catchy lines like 'now I'm going to get naked and cover myself in douche bags' or 'I love how douche bags feel on my skin'.
Maybe for the American version we could get Mr T to do the spot 'Hey you jibba-jabba fool! Get out yo' seat and go get some douche bags to clean yo ass!', and everyone would blindly obey because the product is endorsed by Mr T.
Douche bags everywhere will change the world for the better. Hooray! Go Aussie Scientists!
An artist by the name of Howard Hallis has made a picture of everything, like the most incredible Where's Waldo ever, and the most massive single instance of character copyright infringement I've yet seen, Howard Rules! First person (or simmilar) to find the following ten characters wins a candy bar and a lifetime supply of jumpers. Also, recognition.
(1) Token Black (South Park)
(2) Tinkerbell (Disney's Peter Pan)
(3) Marvin the Paranoid Android (HHGTTG, 2004)
(4) Cheetara (Thundercats)
(5) Emily (Tim Burton's Corpse Bride)
(6) Bam-Bam (The Flintstones)
(7) Double-D (Ed, Edd 'n Eddy)
(8) Goliath (Gargoyles, I'm dating myself here)
(9) The Cat in The Hat (Dr Seuss)
(10) Pikachu (Pokémon)
It's odd, to me, that I know the names and adventures of hundreds of cartoon characters. I know tons about them. I don't tend to know the full names of most of the acquaintances I pass on a daily basis, and next to nothing about their lives to date. So! ... mark up a copy of the picture with these ten numbers and email it in. I need to get rid of all these jumpers.
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