News I Find Interesting

Google may launch iPhone rival with Dell

Scientists discover memory reversal mechanism

10 Amphibians you may not have known about


Hat Tip to Brian Hollar at Thinking on the Margin

Educational Duties to the Future

Video clip of Richard Dreyfus on liberal education.



Any Questions?

Hat Tip to Brian Holler at Thinking on the Margin.

Immigration Regulations

On the other side of this argument are the well reasoned arguments of Samuel Huntington in Who We Are. My personal perspective is more along the lines of how immigration restriction restricts freedom, here explained by Don Boudreaux.

Huntington's point about culture is true, immigrants will change a culture, and ideal characteristics that attracted the immigrants are likely to be watered down or eliminated. But immigration is the very freedom that allowed those settlers to create this nation in the first place and removing that freedom seems very wrong to me. A wall on the border, for it's own sake seems like a perfectly reasonable project to me, but not for the purposes of keeping immigrants out. The great wall of china was built for real security reasons, I have no problem with that. I'd support the wall, if open immigration were in place on a very permanent basis.

Hat tip to Ampersand at Alas, a blog.

Robot vs Puppy

Anon vs. Scientology

A hacker group called Anonymous, has declared war on the 'church' of Scientology. So far they seem to have successfully executed a DoS attack on the Scientology website, and a prank on the church's hotline.



Various Media outlets have picked up on this.
Australia Wired The Register National Post

Anon has responded to media coverage of the 'war.'

I fight the urge to support Anon in this solely because of the quality of their videos. But really I don't see what they're going to do. They can't cause any real harm by pulling pranks like a DoS or phone line redirects. They'd really have to cause financial messes, like stealing money from the 'church' and sending it to the FBI, then send an email politely asking them to spend the money investigating the 'church.' That would be impressive, because it's really hard to do. So until they show themselves to actually be serious in this, I have to write them off as a bunch of kids playing important on YouTube.

Head Tracking using the Wii-mote

It's important to note, that Johnny is not actually using the Wii to run this program. But I haven't seen anything to indicate that the capacity to run this type of operation isn't there.

The one thing holding Nintendo back from destroying the M$FT and Sony empires is the perpetual Wii shortage. The Wii has been completely sold out of stores ever since the system launched 14 months ago. The ticker symbol is NTDOY.


Another hat tip to my roommate, Ryan Lea. He's the guy on the left.

Masseffect Madness

Fox News did their best to ream Masseffect. EA, who bought Bioware after release of this game, sent Fox a livid letter saying they should clear up the many false claims they made in the piece. A partial list of the lies Fox let out about this game is below.

• The game includes 'full digital nudity'

Nothing in the game is anything that can't be seen regularly on prime-time broadcast TV.

• The player chooses what happens 'between the two people, you know what I mean.'

The 13 minutes of game play that is in the game is a cut scene that probably won't even happen for most players, due to the decisions you have to make to activate the cut scene.

• That 'Princess Enchanted Brides' is an actual game that exists.

Google searches only turned up comments on blogs and Digg about how nobody know what this game is. So far, there's no evidence that the game exists except for that panelist's comment.

• Adolescent males are mostly who play video games.

According to ESA, the average gamer age is 33.

• Adult Only is a viable rating for a game.

AO rated games DO NOT GET SOLD IN STORES. It's essentially an X rating that is only used to ban a game from the market. The M rating includes some sexual content and is similar to an R movie rating. Here's a link to Gamestop's ratings explanation.

The commenter on the left that flamed the game (without even playing it) has had her book on Amazon torn to shreds by the gaming community in response to her comments on the show. Her rating is down to 1 star.

Hat tip to my roommate Ryan.

Branson's Spaceship

Virgin Galactic Unveils Spaceships That'll Take Passengers to Space in 2009

More reasons why I intend to be a millionaire by age 30.

Also, check out the Spaceport in New Mexico that the amazing Richard Branson is building to launch.

Libertarian Solution to a Political Conflict

A Libertarian Solution to Evolution Controversy: No More Public Schools

When you force people to teach a subject in a way they don't want it taught, and the school system is a political beast, which our public schools are, you're going to see the curriculum you have in mind corrupted by the political process. People campaigning for strong teaching of evolutionary biology in public schools are ignoring that this is what's purportedly been going for the last 50 years. There are no states with a theistic presentation in their classrooms. Real science is what's supposed to be taught; yet when you look at polling data, the ones who see a non-theistic, purely naturalist explanation are in the minority.

The particular libertarian speaking there is strongly pro-evolution, and is trying to resolve the debate about whether to allow the intelligent design curriculum to be taught in public schools.
A lot of people feel very strongly that EVERYONE should be well educated. I rather agree with that, education expands the human experience and gives them the tools to provide high quality services to the people around them throughout their lives. It preserves the knowledge base for a growing economy.
Many people assume however, that the ONLY way to do this is through a ubiquitous government run public education system. The argument for 'school choice' is that you could use the same tax dollars used to fund the public education system to provide limited credits that can be used to pay tuition at all sorts of educational institutions. This would make the market for education more competitive, raising quality, lowering price, and vastly simplifying the content debate.

I am in favor of school choice from kindergarden through the fourth year of college.

Tasty Chocolate Grubs

I had dismissed this yesterday as only marginally interesting. My opinion quickly changed when my boss saw this on my screen and asked me what it was.
So, would you offer a tray of these at your company picnic?

Hat tip to Pink Tentacle.