Hmmmmmm

Sorry, I've been trying to think of stuff to put here.
http://xkcd.com/621/ Sphere: Related Content

Is the Bible always literally true?

1 Kings 7:23, KJV:

"And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about."

Seems to indicate that the circumference of a circle is *exactly* 3 times the diameter, rather than pi times. Judging from the reactions of some Christians to science, that means that 3 is the correct answer, and pi is just a *theory*.

Teach the controversy, people! Sphere: Related Content

Boondock Saints II

Just got back from seeing this movie, and it is quite enjoyable. As good as the first? No chance. This is not a movie that I'll be watching 35 more times. However, it is a good movie on its own merits.

I have to say that the undertone of homosexuality that was strong in the first one is *much* stronger in the second. This fortunately clears up about halfway through the movie and lies dormant after that. I think it'd be interesting to see if anyone tried to do a psychoanalysis on the first one, and compare their thoughts to the second.

I also think that the comment I heard before seeing this movie, that it was a movie with a lot of fan-service, is fairly accurate. There are things clearly done just because they want to give fans a thrill. Some of the scenes and characters are the same, even when you might not expect that to be possible.

The rest of this post I'll put in a different color, so that you don't have to read it if you don't want to - it's all spoiler.

There were a few disappointments in the film:

First, the opening feels extremely contrived. The Saints are in Ireland living with their dad, and have let their hair and beards grow out. They're farming sheep. Supposedly, this is the life they've had for eight years, but for some MYSTERIOUS reason, now that's not enough for them. Now, had they simply taken out this reason, perhaps the part where the priest walks in and tells them a priest in Boston was executed in their style would've been enough on its own.

It's also way too convenient that they happen to meet a Mexican fighter in some underground fighting ring that they go to for *absolutely no reason* at least that's apparent at the time. Later, it appears that this is either on the docks where they find a boat to take them to the US, or that it was somehow onboard the boat (though that seems a tad unlikely). A bit more exposition would've helped here, but the scene was only to help set up this Mexican guy who would be their new Rocco. Unfortunately, the part of Rocco was written for Rocco, and new guy can't fill it terribly well.

The rest of the movie up until Detective Greenly walks in and gets killed was pretty good and flowed together well, a few uncomfortable moments aside (Why, for instance, would an FBI agent resort to such physical violence when confronting someone who had shown no sign of intent of malice?). However, Greenly's death seems sudden and forced - perhaps as a way of showing that they're not kidding around, and he's the most comic character, so he has to die - but it was very abrupt. You never know why he showed up there and the others in their group didn't, for instance.

I also really liked the movie right up through when the Saints get arrested, and I think that's where the movie should've ended. The rest is obvious fan service, and I wonder if they are planning a third movie now. Sphere: Related Content

The Left's Secret Weapon: A Fake Right

In American society, we have a political spectrum from left to right, where Democrats fall somewhere around the middle and Republicans fall somewhere around the right side. In between and all around are Independents - some are members of recognized political parties, such as the Green, Socialist, Reform, and Libertarian, but the majority of Independents are completely unaffiliated with any political party (often because parties are not recognized in certain states). There are, in fact, more Independents than there are Republicans; and, while there are more Democrats than either, neither the Republicans or Democrats have enough votes to win a majority without courting the Independent vote.

One possible method of convincing Independents of your party's cause is to convince them that the other side is full of complete lunatics. Destroy the ethos of your opponent and you destroy your opponent. But we've long grown tired of mudslinging politics - so how can you accomplish such destruction without obvious mudslinging?

The obvious answer is to insert paid actors into the other side, pretending to be for their cause, but to have such horribly over-the-top self-righteousness toward the cause that moderates are driven away from it. It creates a belief in the minds of moderates that these actors (and, by extension all members of their cause) are full of wharrgarbl.

Now, I'm not saying that Democrats created Fox News as a Straw Man for the opposite side (see what I did there?), but whether or not Fox News exists for that purpose, it is accomplishing that purpose. Case in point - the Birther Movement. It is not conceivable, at least to me, that all Republicans are such utter morons as to believe the Birthers might be right when every single time their argument has been put forward in a new way, it's been completely and undeniably refuted. The latest example of this being the supposed birth certificate from Kenya that is so full of mistakes even George Jr. wouldn't fall for it. Yet Fox News keeps loudly putting it forward as gospel, both through their own talking heads and the poor dumb saps who fall for it and take copies of the birth certificate with them to town hall meetings. Sanity arrives only in the form of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, who mercilessly ridicule the Fox News folks for espousing such views. By so doing, the Independents (and even left-leaning Republicans) are left examining the supposed views of the Right and finding them to be bat#!$@-crazy. Sphere: Related Content

Changing definition of beauty

I find as I grow older that some of the women on my top 20 list from 2005, I would no longer rank as highly as I did then. Just for fun, I decided to pull up that list and see how my opinions have changed.


#1. Keira Knightley - Off the list
#2. Anna Paquin - Off the list
#3. Natalie Portman - Off the list
#4. Ashley Judd - Off the list
#5. Monica Potter
#6. Elizabeth Hurley - Off the list
#7. Kristin Kreuk
#8. Michelle Trachtenberg
#9. Jennifer Garner
#10. Claire Forlani - Off the list
#11. Jennifer Love Hewitt
#12. Jessica Alba - Off the list
#13. Thora Birch
#14. Alexis Bledel
#15. Heather Graham - Off the list
#16. Monica Bellucci - Off the list
#17. Lindsay Lohan - Off the list
#18. Ashley Olsen - Off the list
#19. Angelina Jolie - Off the list
#20. Gwyneth Paltrow




Perhaps a more telling question would be - who would I list now? I don't know... Sphere: Related Content

Wasteful Spending in the Bailout Package

CNN provides the GOP list of wasteful spending from the Bailout Package today.

In it, Republicans provide a total of 32 items they've deemed wasteful, for a total of $19 billion (19,090,500,000, to be exact).

It's good to know that in the roughly $800-900 billion bailout, only $19 billion - 2.4% by the most conservative estimate - is enough to make the GOP try to vote it down, despite the remaining 97.6% being perfectly fine, not wasteful in the slightest. Sphere: Related Content

Why LCDs suck

I'm rather fed up with the difficulty of finding a decent LCD monitors. Here's the problem: with an LCD screen, you need approximately 3" of distance for every 1" of diagonal screen size in order to see everything you need to see and to not see the individual pixels of your image. This size was based on a 720P television, so 1080P screens can actually be a bit larger.

When it comes to desktop LCD monitors, you can still use the same measurement. Problem is that we tend to sit much closer to our monitors. I measured, and I sit almost exactly 2 feet from my monitor. Translated, this means that if my monitor was 720P, it should be only 8 diagonal inches in size.

My monitor is not 8 inches. It is, in fact, 19.

An 8 inch diagonal monitor, widescreen, would be approximately 7 inches wide by 4 inches tall. In this space, there are 27.35 square inches, and there are 921,600 pixels in this space, or 33,700 pixels per square inch.

Now, scale this up for a 19" monitor. A 19" widescreen monitor is approx 16.5" wide by 9.3" tall, for a total of 154.25 square inches. To see the pixels the same effective size, you would need a total of 5,198,400 pixels on your screen, or a resolution of 3040x1710

And the vast majority of 19" monitors are only 1440x900. A few are as high as 1680x1050.

Now, Dell offers LCD screens on some of their laptops that reach as high as 1920x1080 on a 15.4" diagonal screen. This tells me that the technology to reach higher is out there. But LCD manufacturers continue to offer LCD monitors with horrible resolutions as their flagship lines. To reach higher resolutions, 2560x1600 (the highest I could find on a computer monitor), you also have to choose a screen with a 24" screen size, and as we've seen from my example above, this is still too low a resolution to see graphics without pixels, unless you sit 3 feet from your screen rather than 2.

The next problem, though, is that the response times on monitors are still too high. Consider this: If you have 60 frames displayed in a single second, each frame is displayed for 16.67ms. If you have a 5ms response time, that means that 30% of the frame's life is taken up by changing pixels. That's much, much too slow for me. A 2ms response time, however, means only 12% of the time the frame is up on the screen it's going through a change, and that's a whole lot better.

Just try finding a 2560x1600, 24" screen with 2ms response time. If I could find one, I'd buy it and just deal with having to sit 3 feet away from it. Sphere: Related Content