Stastically Meaningful Brains.

You have a peanut, and a dose of Ecstasy. You must give one to a complete stranger. Which do you give?

( Political and social stupidity kills. )

Similar math haunts the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

( Nobody wants to hear the good news. )

Crazy guy says crazy things

( He's not just a former presidential candidate! )

Rush: Democrats ought to defend "that Muslim" guy who cut off his wife's head.

( He was only doing what his culture demanded of him. )

Can I just say that, once again, the eliminationist rhetoric coming out of right wing radio is way, way scarier now than it was even a few years ago? Rush is positively unhinged, and I worry that the people listening to him are much more likely to be convinced that both God and guns are on their side. I hope the Secret Service has beefed up its routine.

On the other hand, I stumbled across Fred Thompson's radio show the other night. Now that's scintillating radio, let me tell you. Boy howdy. Why that man isn't president, I'll never understand.

Letter to the editor complains that neither Katie Couric nor Hudson river plane crash survivors thanked God.

( Who should they thank? )

Anti-gay madness in Utah

( Link goes to a hateful website. I rate it a '6' on the crazy website scale. )

More Utah: Chris Buttars paints all gay men with the "pig sex" label

( Buttars obviously reads 'Americans for Truth' )

Ok. State Rep asks that opening prayer be stricken from the record because pastor mentioned "my dear partner and fiance, Michael."

( Don't remind us that gay people exist. )

The Washington State Initiative process can be so entertaining!

Washington State has a lively public initiative process. Below is the list of state intiatives, as worded on the Secretary of State's website, filed in the current electoral season. Look at it closely and tell me if you see something amiss:

• Initiative 1032 concerns state, county and city revenue.
• Initiative 1033 concerns state, county and city revenue.
• Initiative 1035 concerns state, county and city revenue.
• Initiative 1040 concerns a supreme ruler of the universe.
• Initiative 1041 concerns driver instruction permit requirements.
• Initiative 1042 concerns charges relating to motor vehicles.
• Initiative 1044 concerns taxes on business receipts.
• Initiative 1045 concerns a state-run health insurance program.
• Initiative 1046 concerns safety equipment.

Yeah, okay, I bolded it for you. You have to read it all, though, 'cause initiative author Kimberlie Struiksma has written quite a hoot! Here's a taste:

Our government has been instituted among us, with our consent, for the purpose of protecting and maintaining our liberties. According to the founding documents of our democratic society, our liberties are true and valid because they are endowed by a higher power. By contending that a higher power does not exist, our government removes the source of, invalidates, and consequently denies the people of the United States our liberty. Thus, by denying the existence of a higher power our government defeats its purpose. It is therefore unconstitutional for the government, as opposed to individual citizens, of the state of washing to deny or attempt to refute the existence of a Creator, the one responsible for Blessing us with liberty, the Supreme Ruler of the Universe.
...
Respecting no establishment of religion, yet with respect to the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, whose existence has been declared in the preamble to the Constitution of the state of Washington, the state shall make no appropriation for nor apply any public moneys or property in support of anything, specifically including but not limited to, any display, exercise, instruction, textbook, scientific endeavor, circulated document, or research project which denies or attempts to refute the existence of the Supreme Ruler of the Universe.

Yeah, this one would never survive judicial review. I'm really surprised that the Discovery Institute isn't all over this like blowflies in a cowfield. I mean, one of her targets is evolutionary biology. See that entry above about "scientific endeavors?":

"Scientific endeavor" means any act, idea, theory, intervention, conference, organization having to do with science.

It's like Intelligent Design gold!

Apparently, though, her attempt to ban evolution, which is one of her explicit goals, is at odds with her mentor, Tom Hoyle of the "Bible and Science Ministries," a well-known creation science outlet. He said in an interview on the topic: "You don't have to mention God, you can simply emphasize the fact that wow, nature is awesome, it's very well designed and that macroevolution is an insufficient mechanism to explain all this stuff." Every time someone says "macroevolution," you have to ask him what that means: it's not a term that biologists use very often, because there's no working definition that draws a clear distinction. As for "very well designed," I have to wonder if Hoyle has ever had tendonitis, hemorrhoids, or allergies.

Unexpected statistic.

We had a department meeting at work yesterday, and obviously while I can't talk about any specific internal details, we did get a fascinating insight into how our product is being used by a spin-off project between various libraries and the Google Books people.

One of the things the manager of the project said, though, was that "Prior to 1965, the largest interlibrary catalogs in the world were tracking at less than 500,000 published works. Right new we estimate the number of published works that a world-spanning library catalog has to track at approximately 20 million."

That's a huge, huge jump. But really, less than half a million published works between the introduction of writing and 1965? That sounded really low to me.

Bad joke du jour

Work bought lunch yesterday. It was okay, in that way that work-bought lunches are frequently only "okay." You'll know who catered because I was reminded of this joke: A man and a woman meet at a party. She says, "What do you do?"

He says, "I work with the kernel all day."

What he meant: "I am a programming God."

What she heard: "I work at Kentucky Fried Chicken."