Mind Control Made Easy

Boing Boing has pointed to Carey Burtt's "Mind Control Made Easy or How to Become a Cult Leader".

It is an excellent summary of the types of techniques that cults (Scientology in particular) make use of when recruiting gullible people.

Highly recommended!

Ken

WALL-E described in one word: Perfection!

Saw Pixar's WALL-E today: awesome!

There are scenes that look so realistic that you would swear you're looking at video, not computer generated graphics. But, more importantly, the story is excellent and superbly told.

Do yourself a favor and go see it!

Ken

Great George Carlin Quote

Here's a great quote from George Carlin... the world grew a little darker with his passing.

The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A Death! What’s that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you’re too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating …and you finish off as an orgasm.

Enjoy,

Ken

Time Machine to the Rescue!

Yesterday (Thursday), at roughly 9 AM, the hard drive in my laptop crashed hard. To the point that the disk was no longer able to boot the machine! :-(

Fortunately, at 4:15 PM on Wednesday, I had made a back up of my machine using Apple's Time Machine that is found in Mac OS X Leopard.

I had only ever STORED data using Time Machine, I had never RESTORED data with it, so I was a bit anxious as I prepared to create a new copy of my working environment using the Time Machine back-up.

I had to connect a new FireWire disk to my iMac as well as the Time Machine disk and then boot the iMac using the Leopard install disk. Then I invoked the "Restore Time Machine back up to System" command which after 2.5 hours managed to create a new bootable copy of my working environment.

As of 12:52 AM today, I'm back in action!

Ken

P.S. My laptop is at the Apple Store waiting for a new hard drive!

A Wave of Lights

A Wave of Lights

As orange as a fox's soft fur in the forest,

As blue as the deep sea water,

As red as a hidden ruby in a cave.

As green as wet grass in a field.

Streaming, Glowing.

Flying, Blowing

Amazing!

I would really like to see the Northern Lights.

[Poem by M., written in 2nd Grade. Note: punctuation above matches original.]

Soccer

Soccer

Kicking the big ball.
Our team works together well.
I score seven goals!


[Note: Poem by M., written in 2nd Grade.]

How high is the highest highway in America?

If you have ever wondered how high the highest highway in America is, I drove to the top of Mt. Evans with my Dad and my nephew this past Tuesday to find out. The answer is included in the first picture below. I've included a few additional photos to show you the views you can enjoy from the top of Mt. Evans. It was, as you can see below, very beautiful and I highly recommend visiting Mt. Evans the next time you're in Colorado.

Enjoy!

Ken

Excellent Debunking of Creationist Nonsense

Tiny Frog has an excellent article debunking the creationist attack on evolution that says that genetic mutations can never create new information in the genome.

For those of you who don't monitor the sort of drivel that creationists and other evangelicals launch at evolution, you may be in for a surprise... for those of you who have heard of this attack but didn't have the information to respond to it, read the article and you'll be prepared to swat this argument down where it belongs.

Enjoy!

Ken

Sorry for No Posts

Sorry for the break in posts to this blog... I successfully managed to pull off about 2.5 weeks of vacation this June: a week in Glenwood Springs with the family and a week of hosting my parents and nephew from California here in Boulder. Then I disappeared to the 2008 ACM Hypertext conference getting back this afternoon.

What's Next? WORK WORK WORK! :-)