Month: November 2012

What I’d do with the money if I won powerball

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First secure our financial future. Investment and property. But then it’s time to have a little fun – perhaps schedule a few air drops of 1lb packages of bacon throughout the middle east.

This arises from a conversation over the holiday weekend. We were talking about Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, and all those countries and Islam in general. And as we all know, Islam also has a prohibition on pork products too.

So a few aircraft full of it and just drop it all over those countries. Maybe Indonesia too.

Yes, it’s the evil streak in me.

President Obama to have lunch with Mitt Romney

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This popped up on Huffington Post today.

On the one hand, I find this to be very gracious on the part of the President to even give Mitt Romney a hearing.

Do you really think Willard Mitt Romney can add anything to the political reality in the United States? I don’t. Romney offered no new ideas to move us forward as a nation. So the reality of course is that this is purely symbolic.

Though I would like to be a fly on the wall for this lunch meeting. There won’t be any press allowed which I find really interesting. Perhaps Mitt Romney will me marched out in cuffs and sent to Guantanamo? Nah, that’s just fantasy on my part.

Bacon: 1 slice subtracts 9 minutes of life – false!

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I’m sure you’ve all run across this. So lets do a little math:

Let’s say I have bacon once every two weeks, four slices.

So that’s 26 times a year times 4 = 104 total slices per year.

104 slices times 9 minutes gives us 936 minutes. Or a total of 15.6 hours off my lifespan. Even if I were to eat twice that it’s only 31.2 HOURS!

Let’s take it to the ridiculous though – 4 slices of bacon every day for a year. 365 times 4 = 1,460 slices times 9 minutes is 13,140 minutes or 219 hours, or 9.125 days.

Now consider average lifespan for a human male is 72 or so years. 9 days aren’t going to make any difference.

So in essence it’s all bunk. Just thought you might want to know that and eat as much bacon as you want.

Movies: Lincoln

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Ok before I launch just go out and see the latest movie “Lincoln”

Outstanding performances by Daniel Day Lewis as President Lincoln, Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln and even Tommy Lee Jones as Rep. Thaddeus Stevens.

Movie spoiler – it picks up in 1865, the forth year of the U.S. Civil War. By this point in time the north is taking the lead and a peace is eminent and reconstruction can begin.

It focuses on the life, as gleaned through historical record, of the decision to push the 13th Amendment and to negotiate a peace with the Confederacy.

The political push-pull is extremely interesting. Not only that back in the mid 19th century the Republicans were actually the progressive party. Imagine that. Now of course it’s the complete opposite.

The focus on one Representative, Thaddeus Stevens a supporter of ending slavery for the past 30 years of his career in the House, we find out WHY he supported it near the very end of the movie.

One other thing, the political environment back then was almost a contact sport. I love it!

We thought we’d catch the 7:05PM show on Friday evening. By the time we arrived it had been sold out. There was a 9:45PM and 10:15PM showing but even the 9:45PM was sold out. So we got in on the 10:15PM showing. It’s a fairly long movie, some 150 minutes (2 and a half hours) but well worth watching.

And it I’ve heard folks say the timing of this was delayed to counter the fact that the Republicans were actually the good guys back in the mid to later 19th century. But I think it’s perfect timing what with the threats to secede by the likes of Texas and a handful of other states. Even here in RI we got 4,550 signatures to secede and I bet I know where they all came from, the towns of East Greenwich and part of North Kingstown. They think their shit doesn’t stink.

My thoughts on the Windows Phone

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I can’t stand it. Those fucking tiles – really, who thought that would be a good idea? I like the icon view in Android much better.

So you can tell – I won’t be getting a Windows phone. Nice try Microsoft but I’m even dreading jumping to Windows 8 because of that tiled interface. It’s ugly, cluttered and not what I want.

Christianity is fighting a losing battle

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Take a look at this (You may click to enlarge):

Yes indeed – Christianity is sliding down that slippery slope. A friend of mine says that what we are witnessing is the dying gasps of organize religion.

But granted, it’s going to take a long time for it to completely fade away.

Why else would the likes of the Pope, and leaders of the Southern Baptists, and evangelicals keep saying such ridiculous things? Because they know they’re losing the battle.

Part of it is a function that traces back to the invention of the printing press. Of course we’ve taken that to an extreme, I can publish this without anything more than a swype or press of keys on my phone or computer.

So it’s really a function of education, which is why you’re seeing attacks on things like evolution because the religious know they cannot legitimately argue against it. So they came up with creation ‘science’.

And of course there’s the deliberate dumbing down of our educational system in general. I was at the forum for potential school board candidates and I said, I want every student in the Providence school system to get the education I got, and mine wasn’t in public schools.

But even with those attacks we’re still making progress. It is because we have this thing that I alluded to earlier, the internet. A multitude of search engines, Web 2.0 sites, etc. It heterodynes the message that directly disputes the claims of the religious.

A book in my Amazon Recommendations

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So my recommendations on Amazon.com are interesting. A lot of gay fiction, a lot of techie stuff so when this one popped up I had to buy it, it was less than $5:

John R. Pierce “An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise”.

Pierce is yet another Bell Labs legend among the likes of Claude Shannon, Nyquist et al who are kind of integral to my I.T. career and to my interest in communication networks, from the wired to wireless.

He is one of the fathers of satellite telecommunications. Should be an interesting read.

Audio of Romney and his “Gifts” speech

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And he supposedly lives in Belmont, MA. That’s only 54.3 miles from where I live. I’d like to organize an egging/tp’ing party. I figure 1,200 eggs would be a good start, extra points if they’re in a launcher which can overcome a gated community and can deliver payload to target with accuracy.

There it is – a project for our geek group here in RI – a UAV that does drive by eggings. How cool would that be -aerial pranksterism.

The Destruction of the Catholic Church

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So it has just been announced that the Roman Catholic Church spent $2 Million to suppress marriage equality in Maine, Maryland and Washington.

So one has to ask, I realize that in the general scheme of things $2 Million won’t go far. But you could give 2,000 families $1,000 each for a simple way of distribution.

Instead they chose to try to deny our rights to marry.

In total the Church, and the cavalcade of bigots spent $11.3 million in total. Now that is significant coin!

But as to the subject of this post, the Destruction of the Catholic Church I’ll tell you when it started.

It started with Pope John XXIII and the Vatican II accords. Vatican II tried to liberalize the church, I still remember it’s effects throughout my primary and secondary education in Catholic schools. Priests and nuns could go plain clothes, the confession and communion rituals changed – no more booth for confession, and communion was placed in the hand and not on the tongue. But it also liberalized the teaching.

But it started going really wrong when Pope John-Paul II got in. He was an evangelical mutt, and he liked stacking the hierarchy with conservative Bishops and Cardinals.

So the church will now go head first into the abyss. Because they’re losing adherents. I see it in the decreased attendance at churches near me, and in the fact that the Vatican has been running serious deficits for quite a few years now.

It’s all going to end in the church doing one or more things to to shore up failing coffers. Either they’re going to crank up the indulgence machine, or start selling bishop and cardinal seats to high bidder, or both!

If I had the cash I could dig a Cardinal position. It’d be fun since I know it’s all based on so much woo and not much else. I’d even get myself elected pope at some point. And when that happened all the artwork the Vatican holds is auctioned off and the seat of power moves to NYC.

20 U.S. States seek to Secede

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This is ridiculous but I predicted that the U.S. would cease to exist as all fifty states.

More than half are southern states. But I’m a little suprised by New York and then I remember the vast urban areas of NY are one thing, the upstate area is something else.

Here’s the RT story about  it:

[youtbe=http://www.youtube.com/w?v=Jfo8XiMO5kU]

Here’s my take – I’ll take Texas as an example.
Breaking away from the U.S. means no more postal service, no more military assets or military response in general, no more unemployment, no more adherence to the U.S. Constitution and it’s amendments. I think you get the general idea here. No federal courts. In Texas is means no more border patrols, no more federal subsidies etc.
Friend of mine thinks the rich in Texas will just try to crush the working class but I mentioned that people will still be able to leave the new Sovereign Texas.