Stale Thoughts and Broken Links

Old posts from my weblog.

(Click here for posts on geophysics and the energy industry.)


2007.08.31

Bathroom humor --

Raw Story: Puppet video of Craig denial hits YouTube.

... and --

Daily Kos: My Uncomfortable Experience in a Public Mens Room.


Houston Chronicle: A day in the life of Lucy -- 3.2 million years ago.

"Lucy's toes and fingers were more curved than ours, which helped her arboreal endeavors. Trees are poor shelter, but that may have been about all she could call home. Her ‘people’ were not cave dwellers. If it rained, it rained."


2007.08.29

UPI: Sun sounds cause the Earth to shake.

"The researchers ... have determined distinct, isolated tones, predicted to be generated by pressure and gravity waves in the sun, manage to reach Earth and are detectable in our environment. The scientists discovered the tones in seismic data and have found them in voltages induced on ocean cables, along with a wide variety of terrestrial systems."


2007.08.27

The $100,000 Bank Transfer Note.

> When I see Woodrow Wilson's face on that bill, I feel a strong compulsion to point out, again, that less than 100 years ago Wilson lead and championed an openly racist presidential administration.


2007.08.21

NYT: Is There Anything Good About Men?

"While it's true that about half of all the people who ever lived were men, the typical male was much more likely than the typical woman to die without reproducing. Citing recent DNA research, Dr. Baumeister explained that today's human population is descended from twice as many women as men. Maybe 80 percent of women reproduced, whereas only 40 percent of men did."


2007.08.11

Powells.com: A Review of Misquoting Jesus by Bart D. Ehrman.

"The earliest surviving versions of the gospels are handwritten copies dating from centuries after the original texts were written. Also, we don't just have a single version of each gospel; we have many versions, and even more fragments. The trouble is, none of the versions agree with each other. As Ehrman puts it, there are more points of disagreement between manuscripts than there are words in the Gospels."


Microsoft's most unforgivable crime --

Roughly Drafted: How Apple Keyboards Lost a Logo and Windows PCs Gained One.

"When Microsoft delivered Windows as its copycat, competing version of the Mac desktop for DOS users, it simply mapped the standard key commands Apple had originated -- including the familiar Command S, Z, X, C, V for save, undo, cut, copy, paste -- to control key combinations on the PC. This was another shortsighted PC mistake that would become an unsolvable annoyance for users."


2007.08.01

Jack Shafer, Slate: The Murdoch Journal Watch.

"Today's Wall Street Journal moves financial markets with its news accounts because readers believe -- rightly -- that the paper serves no master but the reader. Even the slightest tinkering by Murdoch will shatter the trust relationship the paper has with its readers, who are a thousand times more discerning and a thousand times less forgiving than the tabloid readers and viewers Murdoch has made his money on."


Walter Kessinger

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