“By the way, Pooh, how do you spell Tuesday?”
“Spell what?” asked Pooh.
“Tuesday. You know—Monday, Tuesday…”
“My dear Pooh,” said Owl “everybody knows that it’s spelled with a Two.”
“Is it?” asked Pooh.
“Of course”, said Owl. “After all, it’s the second day of the week.”
“Oh, is that the way it works?” asked Pooh.
“All right, Owl,” I said. “Then what comes after Twosday?”
“Thirdsday.” said Owl.
“Owl, you’re just confusing things,” I said. “This is the day after Tuesday, and it’s not Thirds – I mean Thursday.”
“Then what is it?” asked Owl.
“It’s Today!” squeaked Piglet.
“My favorite day,” said Pooh.

– Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh

Rand is just a boring Nietzsche.  They both preached the same self-centered, amoral, end-justifies-the-means, power-is-everything kind of irresponsible bullshit. I honestly have no idea why anyone would read Rand when they could be reading Nietzsche instead.  His philosophy may have been every bit as reprehensible, but at least he had a gift for vivid language and powerful imagery; Rand is just painfully dull.

- my friend Sean

It’s beautiful!

A little background

Pretty much every show that Mrs. Chickenbutt and I like, I torrent. I also use bittorrent to check out earlier episodes of shows I might like, but haven’t had a chance to watch yet. If the shows are good, I buy the DVDs and spread the word to friends.

We have a pretty decent home theater set up:

• Samsung 46″ 720p DLP HDTV
• Sony 7.1 receiver with DTS decoding
• 5.1 surround speakers

Not top of the line, but certainly nice enough to enjoy most of what modern movies and TV have to offer. I should note that we also have a nice iPod dock for when we want to play music through the home stereo.

I’m always interested in using my entertainment technology to its fullest potential. We have a hi-def DVR cable box with a full gamut of HD channels from our cable provider. The HD content always looks awesome, even on our 720p TV.

I think the jury’s still out on how successful downloaded movies will be. (I’m personally against the idea, because I know that they’ll just be infested with DRM.) In the meantime, Blu-ray has my attention. I looked at several standalone Blu-ray players but couldn’t find one that could legitimately replace the functionality of my existing DVD player, particularly DivX playback. No Blu-ray player that I know of plays DivX-encoded video, which has become the de facto standard for the bittorrent community.

Until recently, we were using a Phillips DVD player with DivX capability and a front-mounted USB port for playing media off a thumb drive. This was how we watched most of the torrented stuff. It’s often a hassle to transfer my recently-torrented shows to a 4gb thumb drive, then wait for it to load on the DVD player. And if there was a lot of intense action, or too many fast edits, the playback would become choppy due to the slow data transfer rate of the thumb drive.

I decided I wanted a solution that could play Blu-ray and DVD, as well as torrented content over our (gigabit/wireless-n) home network. After a little more deliberation, I figured such a system should also perform media-server duties and become the entertainment/media center of our home.

Read the rest…

A 24-year-old ski lift operator who fatally shot the general manager of the Eldora ski area was determined to kill co-workers who weren’t Christian, according to court records obtained Thursday.

…witnesses told authorities that Derik Bonestroo walked into a building at work, fired a gun into the ceiling and said: “If you’re not Christian, you’re going to die.”

KMGH Denver

I hear you say ‘Why?’ Always ‘Why?’
You see things; and you say ‘Why?’
But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’
- George Bernard Shaw, 1921

If a kid lights a few SUVs on fire in a dealer’s lot, he’s charged under an anti-terrorism statute. Why then is something like this not considered terrorism?

“There’s probably no God” is an accurate summary of the atheist position. There’s no virtue to be found in iron-clad certainty, and it is no sign of weakness that a statement might allow for acceptance of evidence in contradiction. [Theists], however, think that certainty is a necessity. It is unassailable certainty in their positions that allowed good Christians to march people of another religion into ovens at bayonet point; that allowed good Christians to hang widowed old women for witchcraft; that led to wars and genocide over trivial matters of theology, like the degree of god-nature in Jesus’ existence; that allows racists and homophobes to declare a significant portion of our population to be second-class citizens; that encouraged priests to appease imaginary beings by burning babies; that led to monsters cutting the living hearts out of their neighbors so that the sun might rise. Let’s leave certainty to the oleaginous evangelists, the jingoistic war mongers, and the other con artists selling us bogus solutions to imaginary problems. A little uncertainty, a little willingness to accept that deeper knowledge might change our minds, is a good thing.

Pharyngula

There is no virtue in politeness when confronted with ignorance, dishonesty, and delusion. Charge into the heart of the issue and shred the frauds, without hesitation and without faltering over manners. Demands for a false front of civility are one of the strategies used by charlatans who want to mask their lack of substance — oh, yes, it would be so goddamned rude to point out that a huckster is lying to you! I am quite happy to promote a culture of being rude to frauds.

Paraphrased from PZ Myers on his blog, Pharyngula.