Month: February 2006

The Star Wars Valentines at Something Awful are awesome. One of my favorites is above…

The Official Google Blog reports that Google Earth has been updated with high resolution imagery of the Torino, Italy area. Turn on the Terrain layer and check out the tilt view; cool…

All together now: Awwww… ;-p

MSNBC.com has a full 2006 Winter Olympics TV schedule, including programming on NBC, MSNC, CNBC, USA, and Universal HD. I’m looking forward to hockey and curling…

Holy crap, it’s a real transformer (embedded video)!

By now you’ve probably heard that a couple of days ago Dick Cheney accidentally shot a fellow hunter while quail-hunting on a ranch in Texas, spraying 78-year-old millionaire lawyer Harry Whittington in the face and chest with shotgun pellets. I’m going to go ahead and take the low road on this one and post the inevitable satirical links that have already popped up. More as I come across them :-)…

• Dick Hunt – a takeoff on Nintendo’s Duck Hunt; wait for the music on this one…
• The Red State Update weighs in with a funny video update
• Bob Cesca has the surprising first exclusive photos of the shooting victim
• Ten Ways Cheney Can Kill You – an oldie but goodie…
• Cheney says shooting of fellow hunter was based on faulty intelligence
• Homeland Security Department unveils Cheney Alert System
• CNN rounds up the late-night talk show jokes

February 12th is Charles Darwin’s birthday, so son’t forget to celebrate Darwin Day tomorrow!

The Darwin Day Celebration was founded on the premise that science, like music, is an international language that speaks to all people in very similar ways. While music is both intellectual and entertaining, science is our most reliable knowledge system, and it has been and continues to be acquired through human curiosity and ingenuity.

Every episode of South Park is available for download in .avi format from Mr Twig’s message board. The video quality is pretty decent considering that each episode is compressed to about 150MB or so. I realize you can probably do better through BitTorrent etc., but this nicely collects them all in one place. Hopefully I can grab them before things get shut down…

Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez would have you believe that W’s authorization of domestic wiretapping by the NSA is no big deal. After all, he recently testified (WMV or QT video), “President Washington, President Lincoln, President Wilson, President Roosevelt have all authorized electronic surveillance on a far broader scale.” Um, what?! Just in case the idiocy of this statement isn’t clear, there was no electricity when George Washington was president. For further dissection of the rest of this moronic position, HuffingtonPost.com goes into more detail…

By now, you may have heard about the resignation of George C. Deutsch (New York Times link, may expire soon),

the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters’ access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word “theory” at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday.

However, this article and the mainstream media both failed to convey the depths of Deutsch’s incompetence and actions bordering on megalomania.

First of all, none of the national TV broadcasts that I watched mentioned the fact that Deutsch’s “Bachelor of Arts in journalism, Class of 2003” from Texas A&M University was in fact fraudulently included on his résumé, as he never graduated from that institution.

Secondly, most of the TV coverage centered on his decision to limit access to NASA climate scientists who might report on Global Warming facts at odds with the administration’s current stance on the subject, which a blissfully ignorant claim that it is not a “settled issue.” Far more egregious was Deutsch’s insistence last year that The Big Bang was only an “opinion” and that every mention of it in NASA publications should be prefaced with the word “theory.” Granted, the Big Bang is technically a scientific theory, but the definition of theory he was using was most definitely not the accepted scientific one. To wit, what was not widely covered was the content of the e-mails in which he made his misguided edict:

The Big Bang is “not proven fact; it is opinion. It is not NASA’s place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator.”
…
“This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most.”

I am enraged that this incompetent sycophantic peon should get such an important job simply because he briefly worked on W’s presidential campaign. However, my anger is nothing compared to the eloquently enraged rant at Bad Astronomy Blog, so I will refer you to that entry while I go seethe.

I’m glad to see that Mr. Deutsch received his just desserts, but if the previous consequences of incompetence in this administration are any indication, I’m sure he’ll land a plum job at some Conservative think tank any day now…