In which we discover some amusing bits about Google Satellite Maps

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We pointed out earlier the cool and somewhat creepy fact that satellite imagery of Heathen Central is available online. Turns out, we’re not the only ones who think this is at least slightly creepy; some images have been obscured to frustrate terrorists or attackers who might target somewhere like this or this; what’s odd is that a certain 5-sided DoD structure southwest of these two didn’t get similar treatment.

NOTICE

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Just because we here at Miscellaneous Heathen are, paradoxically, Christian in nature does NOT mean we cannot be amused at Rude Pundit’s use of the phrase “batshit insane Jesus babblers,” especially when used to describe folks like Roy Moore and the Family Research Council.

He’s talking about the, well, batshit crazy Jesus babblers who are now all up in arms about the “out of control” judiciary who refused to keep the Florida state vegetable drawing breath. It is difficult to overstate how wrong these goons are when they start this crap. Ol’ Mr Pundit puts it this way:

See, the difference is that the legislature and the executive branches are elected, by majorities (allegedly), and thus the majority of the nation has a voice through those branches. The judiciary exists, ideally outside the realm of elections, to give the minority a voice. The logic’s simple: the majority will always have a voice through elections. But there’s others, up to 49.9% of the population, who’d like to be considered as part of the nation. And, sure, sometimes the judiciary will piss off the other branches, but, fuck ’em, welcome to the Republic, you know? Isn’t this basic civics class? Didn’t we all learn this back in middle school? Admittedly, the Rude Pundit was taught the Constitution without a Bible present to coordinate the articles with, but, still, and shit, this ain’t brain surgery. Hell, it ain’t even temperature taking.

Dept. of In-No-Way Surprising Developments

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Back in the boom, serious web application development more or less began and ended with some kind of application server and lots and lots of Java. Now that many simpler technologies are growing more and more capable, though, plenty of folks are reconsidering this assumption, and with good reason. While Java is great for some things, when it comes to complex or demanding automated web applications, there’s almost no reason at all to touch Java. The LAMP architecture (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/Python/PHP) replaces it very, very well and much lower development costs and much greater flexibility. Don’t like MySQL? Use Postgres. Don’t like PHP? Use Perl and a framework like Mason. There are even whole new frameworks (with real-world examples) coming up behind LAMP, too, that will further push Java aside in this market.

(Obvious in the above is that there’s also no reason for most people to consider paying good money for a database server. This is why Microsoft is glad it has other products, and why Oracle has been busily finding other database-based businesses to move into as the database server itself becomes a commodity item.)

April 8, 1915

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Today is my grandmother’s 90th birthday. I spoke with her on the phone just now, and she sounds better than she has in months. It was a rough year for her, and we weren’t sure she’d make it this far, but we’re damned glad she did.

Happy Birthday, Mom.

Why We Love Living in the Future

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Our friend Rob just moved from Austin, where he lived for many years, to Chile to write code for a telescope. This is exciting for him, but sort of sad for those of us left in Texas. Or it would be, but for the whole “living in the future” thing. See, we here at Heathen Central won’t really notice Rob’s absence except under some very specific circumstances. He and his wife have an Austin-based VOIP telephone number that rings in his house in South America, and he still surfaces on iChat just like he did when he was in Austin, complete with the voice chat option.

When would we notice? If we went to Austin, in which case they would be unable to meet us for dinner without substantial notice and cost, or if we decided to visit Chile, in which case their location would be very, very convenient indeed.

Dept. of Terrible Ideas That Nevertheless Make Us Giggle

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Rack-mounted wine rack How about a 3U 19″ Rack-mounted Wine Rack? Hold four of your favorite bottles in the cool confines of your server room. Excepting, of course, that while the room itself may be cool enough, the space in your racks likely is NOT. (As of this writing, the internal temp of one of the boxes Chief Heathen is responsible for is a cool 95 degrees, or about 25 degrees higher than ideal cellar temp. Actually, that’s the ambient temp around CPU 1; its internal is 107. And this is with fans running at better than 4,000 RPM, so there you go. (How much do we love Apple’s Server Monitor? [HDANCN?]))

Hunter gets his wish

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Fist logo As requested, his remains will be shot out of a cannon. Said cannon will be atop a 53-foot Gonzo-fist sculpture, according to his widow. From the AP:

“It’s expensive, but worth every penny,” Anita Thompson said. “I’d like to have several explosions. He loved explosions.” She said planning for the fist has been guided by a video of Thompson and longtime illustrator-collaborator Ralph Steadman, recorded in the late 1970s when they visited a Hollywood funeral home and began mapping out the cannon scheme.

Godspeed, Hunter.

(Via BoingBoing, which is running pretty much exactly the same entry, graphic and all.)

Dept. of Selective Luddism

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Them what know us know we’re gadget-happy here at Heathen Central. We get a new phone every year. We have a Tivo, and we’ll run on at length about it at cocktail parties. We live out of our Powerbook. We had three Newtons, for the love of Mike.

That said, there are certainly places where we prefer the old to the new; most all of our watches (and all of them that matter) have springs, not batteries. Our pens have nibs and are filled from bottles. Our cars have clutches, and one of them doesn’t even have a radiator. We like them this way.

Ergo, it comes as a bit of a surprise to us that we’ve not yet heard of or adopted this trend, but we have spent part of the afternoon window-shopping here, and considering if perhaps this isn’t all that and a bag of chips after all, especially if we replace it with one of these.

“It’s like yoga, but for Christians!”

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Why this is necessary may not be clear to you, but fortunately she lays it out for us:

Your yoga teacher may bow to her class saying, “Namaste” (“I bow to the divine in you.”). Postures have names such as Savasana (the Corpse Pose) and Bhujangasana (the Cobra or Snake Pose). References are made to chakras or “power centers” in the body, such as the “third eye.” The relaxation and visualization session at the end of yoga classes is skillfully designed to “empty the mind” and can open one up to unwholesome spiritual influences. As Christians, we are instructed to “be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). Yoga’s breathing techniques (pranayama) may seem stress-relieving, yet they can be an open door to psychic influences, as is the customary relaxation period at the end of a yoga session. Before becoming a Christian, I remember numerous instances of “traveling outside my body” during yoga relaxation periods. I wonder who – or what – checked in when I checked out? (Note: While Christians cannot be “possessed” since the Holy Spirit resides in your re-created human spirit, one may be “oppressed” by demonic influences.)

Um, right.

Of course, this isn’t just quasireligious frippery; it’s quasireligious frippery from someone with an agenda. The author is the founder of PraiseMoves, and will happily sell you books, tapes, etc., so you can free yourself from the spiritual dangers of Yoga. And put money in her pocket.

Dept. of Shit We Couldn’t Make Up

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Classy move:

WASHINGTON, March 28 – The parents of Terri Schiavo have authorized a conservative direct-mailing firm to sell a list of their financial supporters, making it likely that thousands of strangers moved by her plight will receive a steady stream of solicitations from anti-abortion and conservative groups. New York Times, 3/29/05

NYT link; standard “we’re idiots who just don’t get it” disclaimer applies in re: their rotting links. Use nogators/nogators for access until then.

How to Suppress Free Speech, by George W. Bush

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A rumpus afoot in Colorado; Kos has the scoop, and there’s also AP coverage.

So to emphasize — the White House uses taxpayer dollars to finance these propaganda events. THEN, in order to keep out anyone who might be critical, they “outsource” ticketing and security. That way they can label the events “private” and kick out anyone they want in violation of the First Amendment.

“We are all children in the arms of Chivas”

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Laura K. Pahl is a plagarist.

Foolish Lewis University student randomly IMs someone on AOL seeking to buy a short paper on Hinduism. Said someone decides to fuck with Ms Pahl. Madcap hilarity — and almost certain dismissal for academic misconduct — ensue. This is virtually certain to become the meme du jour; enjoy. And do NOT miss the paper itself; sample graf follows:

The highest class is the Brahmans, the priestly class. Their dharma is to study and understand the Vedas, Hindu’s holy texts, and bring this knowledge to others. The second class is the Kshatriya, the warrior class, who acted as the protectors of the peace. I made a doody. Vaishya, the producing class, work as business people providing economic stability to the society. The Shudahelupta class, are servants to the higher three classes.

Emphasis added, obviously.

Fafblog on Florida

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We were going to cover the latest news from Florida in all its ignorant fuckwit glory, but why bother when Fafblog does the job for us?

Freedom from Reality
Freedom is ever-marching, and its latest target for emancipation is none other than the Gulag Academia, where millions of students are held hostage by totalitarian educators whose cruel practice of teaching them things they don’t already believe could soon be put to an end. Florida Republicans are considering passing an “Academic Freedom Bill of Rights” which will give college students the power to sue “dictator professors” who offend their beliefs by teaching material which contradicts them. The Medium Lobster hails this as a measure long overdue. For far too long, higher education has been concerned with “education” and “instruction,” mere euphemisms for harsh indoctrination into the totalitarian ideology of Fact. But now students will be given the tools to fight back, to free themselves of their oppressive enslavement to a world in which life evolved over millions of years through natural selection, dinosaurs weren’t wiped out six thousand years ago by the flood of Noah, and the evil Xemu was not responsible for the existence of body thetans. Fafblog

Dept. of Truth-Telling, or Why Your PC Sucks

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This BBC bit is, well, set in the UK, but in my experience his summary on the state of PC support is spot on here as well (though a good chunk of the failures he finds are at their root problems of what should be viewed as criminally poor design, the germ is still true):

It seems incredible, but millions of families and thousands of businesses have no-one to turn to but a bunch of unqualified amateurs to fix the most complicated pieces of equipment that have probably ever existed. It’s a scary thought.

There is no standard, no Bar Association, no AMA, no APA. There is no way for my clients to know that my experience actually qualifies me to do what I say I can do, or that J. Jackass Fucktard with a 15-year-old CNE knows precisely nada of modern use.

Why we LOVE the Scientific American

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We’re not certain this is real — we got it here — but we hope it is:

from their editorial
Okay, We Give Up There’s no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don’t mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there’s no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong. In retrospect, this magazine’s coverage of socalled evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it. Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence. Moreover, we shamefully mistreated the Intelligent Design (ID) theorists by lumping them in with creationists. Creationists believe that God designed all life, and that’s a somewhat religious idea. But ID theorists think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells. That’s what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn’t get bogged down in details. Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers to present everybody’s ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or facts. Nor should we succumb to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do. Indeed, if politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong. In that spirit, we will end the practice of expressing our own views in this space: an editorial page is no place for opinions. Get ready for a new Scientific American. No more discussions of how science should inform policy. If the government commits blindly to building an anti-ICBM defense system that can’t work as promised, that will waste tens of billions of taxpayers’ dollars and imperil national security, you won’t hear about it from us. If studies suggest that the administration’s antipollution measures would actually increase the dangerous particulates that people breathe during the next two decades, that’s not our concern. No more discussions of how policies affect science either — so what if the budget for the National Science Foundation is slashed? This magazine will be dedicated purely to science, fair and balanced science, and not just the science that scientists say is science. And it will start on April Fools’ Day. Okay, We Give Up MATT COLLINS
THE EDITORS editors@sciam.com
COPYRIGHT 2005 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC.