6:55 AM — Random Acts of Verbiage shoutout Just thought I'd post a link to Matt's Random Acts of Verbiage. You wouldn't know he was an astro/phys major from his occasional Christian posts, but you wouldn't know he's Christian from the great discussion on evolution and quantum physics we've been having. :-P (I never said I wasn't biased...)

And just another little reminder (to those couple of readers who don't know me in person) that I'll be on hiatus (perhaps with intermittant posts and rare replies) until mid-August, and then on school schedule starting Labor Day.  ¶ permalink | 2 musings | add your musing

  9:45 PM — God Hates Fags Oh man, as if I haven't found enough hatred on the net, I found a link to God Hates Fags. This site even has a WARNING PAGE, for fuck's sake, telling just how horrid the contents are! People like this make me glad to be atheist.

Some choice words:

The Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) of Topeka, Kansas, is an Old School (or, Primitive) Baptist Church. In short, we adhere to the teachings of the Bible, preach against all form of sin (e.g., fornication, adultery, sodomy), and insist that the doctrines of grace be taught publicly to all men. These doctrines of grace were well summed up by John Calvin in his 5 points of Calvinism: Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and Perseverance of the Saints. Although these doctrines are almost universally hated today, they were once loved and believed. ...

Please see The Doctrine of Absolute Predestination by Jerom Zanchius. Most of the major Confessions of Faith throughout the history of the New Testament Church have also advanced these ideas. So, even though the Arminian lies that "God loves everyone" and "Jesus died for everyone" are being taught from nearly every pulpit in this generation, this hasn't always been the case. In fact, if you are in a Church that supposedly believes the Bible, and you are hearing these lies, then your church has apostatized.
(FAQs)

This page is a CHURCH website, and they still believe in predestination! omfg...

(Reprinted from <meta content="blog">)  ¶ permalink | 6 musings | add your musing

  8:42 PM — BBC says Quantum is "beyond most human understanding." No wonder there's such a strong social stigma against learning science, when even the BBC says the average person is too stupid to understand one of the most profound discoveries in modern science. Quantum is to physics what evolution is to biology. I'm trying to picture what it would be like if the common person couldn't understand the concept of evolution. People DO understand evolution; there wouldn't be such controversy without it.

Evolution is a simple concept really: small changes happen, some are perpetuated, and species change over time. Quantum physics isn't all that much harder: when you look at really tiny things, you can't predict exactly what they'll do, you can only suggest possibilities. (The concept of genetic drift can be thought to even bridge the two.)

Quantum is like saying if you throw a basketball on rough pavement, you know it's going to bounce pretty close to how it would if on the court. But if you throw an eentsy high-bounce ball on the same surface, who knows where it'll go. What's so hard about that?


  ¶ permalink | 9 musings | add your musing

  11:43 AM — Cygnet Colors When I was a kid I was told that the color (gray or white) of mute swan cygnets (chicks) depended upon their sex. Recently I asked another blogger who'd taken a picture of some cygnets if he knew about this, and he said he didn't think there was any relationship. So I did some Google digging to see what I could find.

• A 1968 paper of indeterminate origin states that color is not strictly tied to sex, but that white is a recessive trait linked to female chromosomes, meaning it is more likely that females will be white and males be gray, but it is not always the case. According to this artcile, with swans, males have XX and females have XO (instead of our XY and XX respectively). This is a pretty darned old article though, so I find it doubtful.


• However, on the other hand a 2004 New York State Department of Environmental Conservation page says there is no linkage between gender and color, but cites no source, which I'd really like to see.

Wikipedia said they were all gray, which is patently not true, so I fixed it and included the two above links. I'm not really finding anything else good and concrete...  ¶ permalink | 1 musings | add your musing

  11:05 AM — Places and Things I've got Places to Go and Things to Do!  ¶ permalink | 0 musings | add your musing

  10:34 AM — Comfort Zone I worry about my little Peeper for the next month. She's taken a liking to my new futon, and sits on the left arm rest, contentedly preening herself, as I play on my laptop or eat at the coffee table which is really an old cedar chest my Nga Boo brought from China. I've been working on her comfort level with me moving around the house: like babies, she doesn't understand the concept of object permanence and freaks out when I leave her line of sight. Well, I think she knows I'll be back, but prefers to complain about it. I've been training her to sit somewhere in the living room where she can see the whole living room, kitchen, and foyer, so that she'll hopefully only yell if I go into my bedroom or bathroom. And it seems to be working too, she's been more sedate about it lately. (It's T$'s fault really, my trying this: he gets tired of her yelling everytime we do something, and said I shouldn't jump at her every whim, and he's right.)

But now I'm worried about the move. It really takes her three months to get used to a new place, and we'll be in Lancaster for only three weeks, and then she'll even be without me for a whole 'nother week, but Jethereal will be taking care of her then, so she'll be ok. She likes him a lot too, but he's no me. ;)  ¶ permalink | 2 musings | add your musing

  9:27 AM — More T-shirts! Threadless is a T-shirt site with 3 phases.

1. People submit their T-shirt designs.


2. Other people vote on the designs.


3. The best designs are made into T-shirts and sold ($15).


4. Refer your friends for credit towards buying shirts.

Oh wait, that's 4 phases. Well, I don't think referring friends counts. Anyways, the pictures are really well designed, and price is reasonable, and I have fun rating the T-shirts. Better than rating hot asses in my opinion.  ¶ permalink | 0 musings | add your musing

  3:52 PM — Grade 10 I know I said I wasn't gonna post any more before I left, but I couldn't resist. This handy dandy tool analyzes the reading level of your LiveJournal blog. Since I'm on Blogger, I used the username of the RSS that Mere set up for me; hope it doesn't make a difference!

zandperl2's Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 10
Average number of words per sentence:	20.58
Average number of syllables per word:	1.48
Total words in sample:	247
Analyze your journal! Username:
Another fun meme brought to you by rfreebern

  ¶ permalink | 0 musings | add your musing

  8:30 PM — File restoration Restoring my files to my laptop goes slowly. Just now I wanted to practice guitar and remembered that I don't have the songs I'm working on on the laptop. Thankfully I'd copied them over to the desktop, so I am in the process of copying them back now, along with a dozen other things.  ¶ permalink | 0 musings | add your musing

  6:34 PM — To Do Just when I was starting to like my newly futon-ed livingroom, it's amazing how many things there are to do before one leaves for a month (3 weeks teaching in PA, 1 week vacationing in London).

• Clean the fridge


• Take out trash/recyclables


• Pack clothes, junk, teaching stuff, etc.


• Stop/forward mail


• Map drive


• Remind landlord I'll be out


• Call doctor AGAIN for July 6 echocardiogram results


• Give mailing addy to parents


• Set work email out-of-office-reply


• Instal OS 10.3, MS Word, etc. on Gir (iBook)


• Make sure all files are on Gir


• Restore iPod playlists, or else build new ones


• Charge electronics


• Take plants to Tony


• Wash dishes


• Change bedsheets


• Practice guitar


• Shove all the junk in the car

Meanwhile, today I've traded superfluous honks for a left turn signal that doesn't self cancel.

Blog 4-Week Forecast: Severe drought punctuated by occasional blog showers, not to exceed once a week.

Extended Forecast: A cool front should enter the scene by mid-August, bringing hope for increased blogfall through the end of August. Expect dry conditions to return after Labor Day as a el Schoolo approaches from off the shores of Fall Semester.  ¶ permalink | 0 musings | add your musing

  11:43 PM — 2008 Election When Republican Massachusetts Governor and Mormon Mitt Romney runs against Democrat New York Senator and former First Lady Hilary Clinton as seems inevitable in 2008, I don't know about you but I'm voting for a Springer/Stewart ticket.  ¶ permalink | 3 musings | add your musing

  11:19 PM — Chocolate Chip Ice Cream!

You Are Chocolate Chip Ice Cream

You are kind, popular, and generous. You tend to be successful at anything you try. A social butterfly, you are great at entertaining a crowd. You are most compatible with strawberry ice cream.

Which's actually close to my real favorite: Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, followed by Mint Chocolate Chip. I'm curious what other choices there are, but not enough to take it a few times to find out.  ¶ permalink | 1 musings | add your musing

  9:40 PM — to do list (retroposted on 8/31/05 5:45pm since I'd written it and saved but not posted)

Just when I was starting to like my newly futon-ed livingroom, it's amazing how many things there are to do before one leaves for a month (3 weeks teaching in PA, 1 week vacationing in London).

• Clean the fridge


• Take out trash/recyclables


• Pack clothes, junk, teaching stuff, etc.


• Stop/forward mail


• Map drive


• Remind landlord I'll be out


• Call doctor AGAIN for July 6 echocardiogram results


• Give mailing addy to parents


• Set work email out-of-office-reply


• Instal OS 10.3, MS Word, etc. on Gir (iBook)


• Make sure all files are on Gir


• Restore iPod playlists, or else build new ones


• Charge electronics


• Shove all the junk in the car

Meanwhile, today I've traded superfluous honks for a left turn signal that doesn't self cancel.

Blog 4-Week Forecast: Severe drought punctuated by occasional blog showers, not to exceed once a week.

Extended Forecast: A cool front should enter the scene by mid-August, bringing hope for increased blogfall through the end of August. Expect dry conditions to return after Labor Day as a el Schoolo approaches from off the shores of Fall Semester.  ¶ permalink | 0 musings | add your musing

  3:45 PM — Gir 3.0 -or- My iBook's Back Good News:

• Video card replaced


• Combo drive (DVD reader / CD burner) replaced

Bad News:

• Combo drive is silver colored (iBook is white)


• Mac OS 10.3 downgraded to 10.2


• the bill is in the mail


• the HD is wiped or replaced

Saving Graces:

• Recent work content is backed up with triple redundancy.


• Music is on iPod and can theoretically be pulled back off it.


• Friends should have CDs of Paris and Arizona photos.

If you've got one of those CDs, please let me know!  ¶ permalink | 0 musings | add your musing

  11:43 AM — Straight No, not another gay marriage posting, but another math one. (Go ahead and groan anyway.)

Mathematically, what constitutes a straight line? People always say "the shortest distance between two points." I've got an alternative definition, maybe better for a line segment on a curved function. Yes, I was thinking about this after fireworks last night.

• First derivative, f', is geographically a slope, or laymen can think of it as going uphill or downhill. Positive is uphill, negative is downhill, zero is flat. But it might not be "straight," like if it's the top of a hill.


• Second derivative, f", is curvature, or concavity. Positive is concave up (like a valley), negative is concave down (like top of a hill), zero is often called an inflection point.


• Third derivative, f⁽³⁾, I'm not too sure what it means. Maybe positive is the curve is tightening (spiral in), negative is spiraling out, zero is a circle?


• Fourth derivative, f⁽⁴⁾, seriously grasping at straws here, how much the spiral is changing its tightness?

Point is, f'=0 is flat, but it's not straight. f"=0 is a point with no curvature for an instant, but the curvature is changing from one way to the other, so it's not straight. Maybe straight would be a point/segment where f⁽ⁿ⁾=0 for n>1 ? Why in the world am I thinking about this?  ¶ permalink | 0 musings | add your musing

  12:51 AM — Pie Flavor Quiz


I'm a peach pie, what're you? Interestingly, I'd never considered myself particlarly a fan of peach, but then my last birthday a coworker ordered me a slice of peach cheesecake pie at 99. YUM! Too bad the others at the table didn't take his hint that I needn't pay for my share of the bill. ;) Super too bad that I got in at 11am for my noon class despite the foot of snow on the ground and then at 12noon they closed the campus. But hey, that's the way the cake crust crumbles!  ¶ permalink | 1 musings | add your musing

  11:13 AM — Happy Birthday America!

I may not agree with everything this country is doing, but having the right to disagree is priceless. Sure other countries have that now, but as far as I know, we were the first!  ¶ permalink | 0 musings | add your musing

  10:24 AM — Crayon Rejects Along the same lines as Jethereal, J, and my coming up with new names for Yankee Candles, this page even has photos of their rejected crayon names!  ¶ permalink | 0 musings | add your musing

  9:55 AM — Deep Impact's done it! NASA's Deep Impact probe has collided with comet Tempel 1 right on time. Everyone was watching, even Hubble. What most civilians don't realize though, is that it's the spectral data (that is, the precise colors) that will give us the most information. They've confirmed the presence of the molecule CN, and are currently working in determining the isotopes present, which can tell us about the comet's age and more detailed origins.  ¶ permalink | 0 musings | add your musing

  2:58 PM — Moodtracker Well, this one's supposed to be a tool for people with mood disorders, but it seems like another interesting way to kill time. You input your mood and hours of sleep and track it over time. Interesting.  ¶ permalink | 0 musings | add your musing

  2:08 PM — Status Report My car horn honks in right turns. It's pretty amusing - every time I tell someone they start laughing, so this one's not just me. It only does it around 50% of the time, and it's pretty soft, so at least I'm not a public nuisance. I had it in the shop Friday to try and get that fixed, but driving to Amherst this weekend I was honking my way through Belchertown on Rt 9 (road curves to the right a lot). I'll try again Tuesday.

Check out the following dialogue carried out in the Apple Care repair status webpage:

06/24/2005 Repair Requested
06/24/2005 Request Acknowledged
07/01/2005 Unit Received
07/01/2005 Begin Repair
07/01/2005 Begin Testing
07/02/2005 Ready to Ship
07/02/2005 Unit Shippped/Completed
07/02/2005 Closed

So the videocard died the night of Thurs June 23, I called up Fri June 24, the shipping box arrived Tues June 28, it was picked back up Wed June 29, arrived there, got repaired, and was tested Fri July 1, shipped back out Sat July 2, and I'll probably pick it up from campus Tues July 5. This rocks! I'm excited. :)

T$ says they may send a receipt with the price of the fixing and an Apple Care credit for the same amount. If they do, I'll post how much it was for your viewing pleaseure.  ¶ permalink | 0 musings | add your musing

  11:41 AM — The Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow Oh man, this is a guy after my own heart! I think he really does resarch on bird flight.

Estimating the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow  ¶ permalink | 1 musings | add your musing

  11:10 AM — Five Favorite Free Funs! Meme: What's your 5 favorite things to do that're cheap or free? (Painter's Blog)

1. Go swimming at a local pond. Ice skate instead if it's winter.


2. Bike ride. Much more interesting sights to see than jogging.


3. Watch fireworks (only available certain times of the year).


4. Take a nap in the sun.


5. Design a webpage (presuming you already have a computer and server space).

  ¶ permalink | 1 musings | add your musing