Houston Police Chief Wants Surveillance Cameras In Private Homes
“I know a lot of people are concerned about Big Brother, but my response to that is, if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?” Chief Harold Hurtt told reporters Wednesday at a regular briefing.
Courtesy of Bill Gurstelle’s Technology Underground, check out the U.S. Navy’s collection of paintings of nuclear tests on the Bikini atoll. Very cool stuff.
[tags]Nuclear Explosion, Art, Navy, Bikini Atoll[/tags]
Addendum: I bet I would have gotten more traffic to my website if I used the tag Bikini instead of Bikini Atoll.
Well, “gem” is perhaps not the right term. Perhaps I should start a new category: Gutenberg Coal.
I’ve been interested in (and have from time to time posted here about) the seemingly never ending conflict between science and creationism. I found this book to be an interesting glimpse 80 years into the past, to see how people argued against evolution even before the famous Scopes trial.
The Evolution of Man Scientifically Disproved by William A. Williams – Project Gutenberg
It contains gems like this exchange:
The population of the world, based upon the Berlin census reports of 1922, was found to be 1,804,187,000. The human race must double itself 30.75 times to make this number. This result may be approximately ascertained by the following computations:
At the beginning of the first period of doubling there would just be two human beings; the second, 4; the third, 8; the fourth, 16; the tenth, 1024; the twentieth 1,048,576, the thirtieth, 1,073,741,824; and the thirty-first, 2,147,483,648. In other words, if we raise two to the thirtieth power, we have 1,073,741,824; or to the thirty-first power, 2,147,483,648 Therefore, it is evident even to the school boy, that, to have the present population of the globe, the net population must be doubled more than thirty times and less than thirty-one times. By logarithms, we find it to be 30.75 times. After all allowances are made for natural deaths, wars, catastrophes, and losses of all kinds, if the human race would double its numbers 30.75 times, we would have the present population of the globe.
Now, according to the chronology of Hales, based on the Septuagint text, 5077 years have elapsed since the flood, and 5177 years since the ancestors of mankind numbered only two, Noah and his wife. By dividing 5177 by 30.75, we find it requires an average of 168.3 years for the human race to double its numbers, in order to make the present population. This is a reasonable average length of time.
Can you spot the problem? Let’s imagine that he’s right. 5077 years ago, there was only Noah and his wife. It takes them 168.3 years to produce two children, and double there numbers. If we allow for 3000 years to pass, bringing us roughly up to 2000 years ago, around the time of Christ, the world population would have almost 18 doublings, bringing the total world population to about 260,000. Worldwide.
Inappropriate extrapolation is one of the silly errors that creationists use to argue using mathematics. But as they say, creationists use mathematics like a drunk uses a lamp post: for support, rather than illumination.
Read the entire thing, it’s really quite astounding.
Either pick what you want from Wikipedia’s free list, or be lazy and greedy like me, and…
wget -r -A.ogg -l1 -H -np -nd -erobots=off http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sound/list
[tags]Wikipedia,Music,Wget[/tags]
I must admit, my experimentation with VOIP phones using my new Sipura SPA-3000 is going a bit slower than I like. Still, I hope to document some cool VOIP stuff over the next couple of months. To whet your whistle about what is possible check out this link on the SipBroker Wiki. They outline an interesting plan where you use NuFone to supply you your own 800 number, and then anyone can call you for no charge to them, and only 2 cents to you. Also, if you set them up with VOIP hardware, you can easily eliminate that 2 cent charge for you. This means even though you are paying for incoming calls, it’s likely that your overall charges could drop.
[tags]VOIP, Sipura, NuFone[/tags]
