Category: General

General rambling, ranting, raving etc.

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Happy Darwin Day

Today, February 12th, we celebrate Charles Darwin‘s birthday. Take a moment to read this short biography or view his life in pictures. If you’re more ambitious you can read some of his great works at Project Gutenberg or the University of Cambridge Darwin website.

Over the past year and a half I’ve looked at the intelligent design hypothesis debate. I’ve read everything I could find written by the proponents and I can’t find anything useful in this hypothesis. It very simply boils down to a hypothesis that when you see something in biology that you can’t explain, stop looking for an explanation and simply say, it’s that way because some intelligent designer made it that way.

So, as far as I can tell, proponents of the intelligent design hypothesis are either trying to avoid doing the hard work (lazy) or are simply pushing to substitute a philosophy/religion for science. I firmly believe we should not teach laziness or philosophy/religion in science classes lest we stop all the wonderful advancements that humanity can make in coming centuries.

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Karen Hunter, Debbie Schlussel are hate mongering bigots

I’m shocked at CNN giving air time to the hate speech from these bigoted intolerant women (they are certainly not ladies, transcript here). What ever happened to the belief in religious freedom that is in the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights. Check out the video and read this article for yourself and also the excellent commentary by PZ Myers. Please voice your opinion on this to CNN via the CNN feedback link.
Here’s what I sent to CNN:

Re: Paula Zahn Now: Karen Hunter, Debbie Schlussel, Stephen A. Smith on Atheism.

This was the most disgustingly one sided bashing of a minority I have ever seen on CNN. I’m shocked that you did not make any effort to have an atheist on the panel. What’s next a whole panel full of White Hooded Clansmen discussing non-white people and saying we’re a white nation.

If the subject of discussion had been any other minority group you would never get away with espousing such hatred and mis-information.

You should be ashamed of yourselves. I’m sure Roger Williams (1603-1684) is rolling over in his grave at the state of religious intolerance in this country.

I’m slowly beginning to feel that religion IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL in this world. These two woman should be made to live in one of the many repressive Islamic countries for a while and then see if they still think that religion should be forced on people by the state. Perhaps being forced to wear a burka and be a slave to men will wake them up to where their religious intolerance leads.

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Yahoo mail followup

Since it was after 18:00EST and the problem from my last post had not been corrected or even acknowledged, I decided to send a third message to Yahoo mail support.

Here’s what I sent:

THIRD REPORT OF THIS PROBLEM!

All day your server is showing my inbox as having ZERO messages but using 4 gigabytes! (screenshots at http://www.paulhutch.com/wordpress)

Please fix immediately or at least acknowledge the problem.

I’m a paying Mail Plus customer and I am beginning to think I had better change to another provider.

Of course, as soon as I returned to my Yahoo mail page after sending the message it was fixed. Thanks Yahoo for fixing it but, it would have been nice if you at least acknowledged receipt of the error reports.

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Yahoo Mail problem

This morning Yahoo’s mail servers are screwed up. If you’re trying to e-mail me at my paid for Yahoo Mail Plus account it probably is bouncing. My other email accounts are working OK so use those if you’re getting a bounce.

As of 14:00 EST, I’ve contacted Yahoo support twice and have not received a response.

This is what I see when I login to the web page (click to see full size):

When I click the “More Info” link I see this(click to see full size):

So my inbox has no messages but uses 4 gigabytes of space, hmm sure looks like a Yahoo server error to me.

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How to's for Uri Geller's tricks coming soon

In this weeks Swift newsletter James Randi says:

For the information of the public, within the next few weeks I will be publishing here the complete routines for a series of common magic tricks. These will include:
1. Compass-moving
2. Spoon-bending/breaking
3. Reading sealed drawings
4. Projecting “telepathic” images of ESP symbols, numbers, etc.
5. Key-bending
6. Watch-changing

I’ve wanted to learn the full details of these tricks for a long time so for me this is very exciting news. If I can learn the tricks well enough, I can entertain my friends and family while educating them about alleged psychics.

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Hoax? I don't think so

According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, the verb form of hoax is defined as “to trick into believing or accepting as genuine something false and often preposterous”. The noun form has two definitions “1 : an act intended to trick or dupe 2 : something accepted or established by fraud or fabrication”.

In Boston yesterday some advertising signs were finally noticed by officials after having been around town for weeks and the fools thought they were bombs. The media and public officials have been calling it a hoax but this is clearly incorrect. They were advertising signs not fake bombs designed to hoax the Boston city and Massachusetts state officials.

Frankly I’m amazed at the stupidity of the media and public officials. The first moment I saw one of the alleged bombs on TV (picture below) I recognized it as a lighted advertising sign. Since I happen to be an Adult Swim viewer (Moral Orel is fantastic!), I also noticed right away that it was an Aqua Teen Hunger Force character.

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Per Ardua Ad Astra

Thanks to Dr. Phil Plait for reminding me of the anniversary of this tragic event.

Apollo 1 fire: 40 years ago today

I was only seven years old when this happened but, I still remember how sad I was at the loss of some of my heroes. Growing up in the sixties, the NASA Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts inspired my lifelong love of science. They risked their lives on every mission to expand the boundaries of science. His blog post talks about it better than I can.

FYI – Per ardua ad astra means, Through difficulty to the stars.