Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Judge bans teaching dumbass design

"We find that the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board's real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom," he wrote in his 139-page opinion.


More at Pharyngula - servers probably working hard today

    Their criticism has two predictable prongs: it was an activist judge, and this is censorship. Both objections have already been preempted by Judge Jones.
    He was not an "activist judge", but was responding to reckless activism by "ill-informed" creationist activists. Judge Jones, by the way, was appointed by GW Bush.
    It was also not censorship. The judge goes out of his way to say that the creationists should be free to continue to study their ideas…they are just so poorly formed and without foundation that they do not meet the standards required to justify teaching it in a public school.



Meanwhile, in reality:
Tobacco brand Camel has today (Tuesday) released a statement which appears to signal the end of Max Biaggi's MotoGP career, since it officially confirms that they have been unable to find a ride for him in the 2006 world championship.

Thursday, December 15, 2005

Animated knots

Man, how useful would this have been back when I was in the scouts. The kids today have it made.

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Shadow Divers

DO NOT begin to read Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson unless you are certain that you can get away with checking out from the world for a few days.
Jinky over at theresnoplacelikehomebirth.com gave me a copy at the Christmas/Ruby's Birthday party held at our joint over this last weekend. Started on Sunday, done by Tuesday night.

There are a number of links to different sites regarding the German U-boat that is the cause of the story - or rather that brings out the events and changes in the story, but I'm not going to link to them and I'd recommend not searching too hard for extra info on the book so as to keep the element of suprise intact.

Essentially:
Ocean wreck divers discover German U-boat off of New Jersey.
No official records exist explaining which U-boat it is.
Difficulties arise during exploration - in divers personal lives, in their dogged on land research and mostly in the SUPER dangerous world of ocean wreck diving. (Deep diving: you will either a) die, b) almost die or c) see someone die.
Men are tested, and learn much of who they are through the testing.

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Biking in the UK

The Brits have, in addition to a number of good moto-mags (including a great weekly one), motorcycle reviews in their papes. The TimesOnline has (a woman) Janie Omorogbe, and the Telegraph has Keven Ash.

We do have Dan Neil (here in LA 'natch), who in fairness has reviewed a Ducati 999R, but mostly we get words about cars.

Keeping Busy

Since Thanksgiving the days have either been busy and productive or time-wasters. The moto shop is in full swing as the shopping season continues and the fund-raiser site listed below - theresnoplacelikehomebirth.com - is another computer starring at based project.

In other events:

Secret sites

A post and comments up over at Kottke - people have time to keep SECRET blogs in addition to their super popular (in a few cases) sites?

Who has all this time?
There is a fund-raiser just firing up to help one of our friends have a homebirth - check it out over at theresnoplacelikehomebirth.com.

Santa accused of dropping his pants at shopping mall.

Several riders under two minutes in testing at Qatar - Bayliss seems back for Ducati.