Citizens!

Take the test. (my score: 90%)

Harriet: 1830 - 2006. R. I. P.

Darwin's tortise has died.

My Neighborhood

"The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance," John Philpot Curran, 1790.

This was the opening sentence of an email I just received from one of my neighbors. I signed up to a mailing list, adminstered by said neighbor, which intends to keep the neighborhood informed of the efforts of a neighborhood action comittee. The comittee was recently formed to block a proposal by a local developer to build 50 some-odd townhouses and a nursing home on the edge of our all-single-family-homes neighborhood. Needless to say, people are pissed off enough to evoke revolutionary slogans from the Irish rebellion. I find that particularly hyberbolic, and by hyperbolic I mean awesome. I can't wait till the parent-teachers association starts urging us residents to arm ourselves.

Busy Weekend

Last weekend blew by for me as Chris and I were much more active than usual (correction, I was much more active than usual). A couple of weeks ago, we broke down and decided to pay for a membership to the Columbia Association pools. The town has several indoor and outdoor community pools scattered around, but access to them comes with a relatively steep price tag (I think each of us has to make some 15 visits before the membership seems worth the money). Anyway, we bought our passes and last Friday decided to try them out for the first time. We walked over to our local outdoor pool and were happy to learn that that night was to be the first of the summer with an extended hours schedule (open till 8 pm). On the downside, the place was friggin' mobbed with kids, upwards of 50 of them. We were a little intimidated but regardless, we slipped into one corner of the pool and marinated for a little while. Just as we were getting comfortable with the whole spastic scene. All the kids started getting out of the pool. Within five minutes the pool was empty but for Chris and I and one other adult. The kids were congregating behind the diving board in a tight cluster but not really doing anything yet, just screaming and laughing and wating... for something. Chris and I began to get fairly nervous at this spontaneous behavior. Kids are pretty normal when they are acting like a wild mob, but when the runts start organizing it is way creepier. We weren't too far away from the other dude in the pool so Chris asked him what all the organization was about. He told us that all the local swim teams were having a pep rally tonight, and almost on cue, the runts started chanting thier fight songs.

"Here We Go Light-ning, HERE WE GO!"

Chris and I's attitude suddenly turned a 180 from being totally freaked out to being highly amused.

Genetically Engineered, Hypoallergenic Pets

I stumbled across this spoof site today which claims to be hawking bioengineered pets which are, "Allergen Free, Child Safe, Low Maintainence, Life Perfected". It seems to me that the authors of this site think the idea of a hypoallergenic, bioengineered pet is so crazy as to be absurdly humorous. The last laugh is on them of course, as a real company came up with the idea in 1995 and is actively working on developing such a thing. They plan to start with dander-free cats.

Global Warming

I just read an article covering some of the anti-Kyoto protocol scientists out there. Thier leader seems to be this guy called Tim Patterson who claims that "over [the past 135 million years], the geologic record shows essentially no correlation between carbon dioxide levels and temperature." He instead believes that it's "galactic cosmic ray intensity [which] correlates quite well with the Earth's temperature variations." (Veizer and Shaviv)

While the comsic ray correlation might be real (I haven't read the paper), I doubt it's mutally exclusive with a carbon dioxide correlation. Most importantly though, I'm having serious trouble corroborating Tim Patterson's belief that global temperature and carbon dioxide levels have not been correlated over the last 135 million years with this data from NOAA:



For the past 650 thousand years, that seems like a pretty strong correlation to me, but I'm no climatologist. I'd like to see the carbon dioxide data for the same time frame Tim Patterson discusses. I just read the wikipedia article.

Ah, here we go, here's someone who has critiqued the Veizer study far better than I could.

The Beard is Dead; Long Live the Beard!

I shaved it. I couldn't just let it go without a little fanfare however, so I tried some alternate facial hairstyles along the way. Click the image to see a Flickr slideshow.

Happy Endings Everyone

Today is Mark of the Beast Day!

666

Here's some links to other sites on the topic:

Wikipedia thinks it has something to do with Nero Ceasar.

Pharyngula needs a half million more hits today to cause armegeddon.

Technorati has a list of more than 666 sites tagged with the sum of the squares of the first seven prime numbers.

Lastly, USA Today has noticed that 30 year mortgage rates have risen to 6.66%, softening demand for new mortgage applications.