Head swapping fun over at Manbabies

Lionel want a half dozen of these to go, with a selection of dipping sauces.

I logged into a server that I haven’t done work on in a while, but gets weekly use:

bash-2.05b# uptime
 6:17AM  up 1645 days,  2:05, 2 users, load averages: 1.13, 0.50, 0.24

Over 4.5 years without a reboot. That’s some good software.

This story is sad, but very poignant. I wish I had posted a link to it on Mothers Day.

My first thought at looking at this screen was that if you click anything other than the yellow “Accept” button, you may end up being proselytized to.

(Apologies to Christopher, whose name facilitiated this unfortunate truncation)

“This year’s White House greeting card extends ‘best wishes for a holiday season of hope and happiness.’ No mention of ‘Merry Christmas’ from the First Family.”

Oh, and what’s on the commander and chief’s iPod?

Gmail on your cell phone

Here’s a spreasheet of operational satellites currently in orbit around the Earth.

First, the technical part. I think it’s obvious that our brain are lossy storage.

I mean, who remembers and can photographically recall every second of when they were taking out the trash, or driving to work, etc? What did you eat for lunch last tuesday? Hypnosis may reveal things which we may have forgotten, but the lines of questioning could easily be manipulated to lead the subject, and is most likely vague – you can probably say you had carrots, but not that you had 47 sliced pieces of carrot, and not one more.

Also, as for the comparison between a camera sense element and your eye – the actual focused part of your eye is very small in comparison to your entire field of vision. There are quite a few studies out there that prove that reading speed is increased by putting text in a narrow vertical column, so your eye just has to move straight down the page, instead of side to side and down with a wider column. Thus, why newspapers created narrow columns in their stories, and how Outlook 2003 defaults to having the preview pane as a column to the right of instead of below the message list.

Thus, I think the 47GB figure is off by at least a few orders of magnitude.

For the idiot-savant example, when they say he “knew a book”, was he able to generate it verbatim from memory? I highly doubt that.

But back to the whole spirituality issue. One of the aspects of God that is made so clear to me as I mature is that His presence is plausibly deniable, but also self evident. Faith is defined by the fact that we don’t and can’t have proof that is undeniable when presented to a third party. He want’s our faith to be freely given, and by giving too much evidence of Himself, is that truly what He gets? On some level God designed his relationship with us to depend on these facts.

Looking for this kind of proof of God is a dead end. God gave us minds, and we use those to discover his world – if indeed our heads can hold more than they are physically capable of storing, I don’t think that suggesting that “God is the answer to that gap” is a valid solution, as it then sets up a nice way for people to “disprove God”, when in fact both parties would be utterly inaccurate in their statements.

Make your own Vintage Red Cross Calendar.

Dick Cheney or Voice of God?

Promiscuity makes brains small and gonads large.

Steve “MonkeyBoy” Ballmer has to get an Xbox 360 like the rest of us!

“Hey, why don’t we put the driving wheel in the trunk? No one’s tried that before.” – one of my customers who was commenting about annoying and seemingly pointless changes to a program after an upgrade

If you have a Canon Pixma printer (the iPxxxx series), you can buy or make parts for it to print on CD or DVD media.

How much is your Blog worth? ($0.00 for me!)

Hippies and Evangelical Christians, together at last! (Registration required – use BugMeNot or the Firefox BugMeNot Plugin to get by it)

So, the whole point of all of this…. Many of the Xchangers have blogs (to write about aforementioned interesting lives, among other things). As a result, and to prod people to get all 21st century by having RSS readers, I made an OPML file of people in the Xchange who have blogs, because I tend to read many of them daily. Enjoy! It’s an eclectic bunch of posters, and quite an interesting read.

Feel free to bug me if you want to be added to the list, and have an RSS feed.