Computer Museum

Today I went to the Mountain View Computer Museum and saw the Babbage Engine. It is a mechanical computer that computes successive values of polynomials. Not a big exhibit, but was fairly cool to see it work.

Happy Mother's Day!

Something worth talking about

Relief workers and survivors described scenes of horror as people huddled on spits of dry ground surrounded by bodies and animal carcasses floating in the murky water or lodged in mangrove trees. That is what I'd like to hear presidential candidates talk about...

Here's a chance for Bill to actually do some good for Hillary - grab George Sr and do your thing (yes I realize this is complicated by the resistance of the government, but seems like that's exactly the kind of situation where you'd want the help of ex-presidents).

Wright bleeping

I have two comments on the whole Rev Wright thing.

First - I think it is great that the Daily Show is consistently pointing out the absurdity of how this is handled in the media (yes I'm about a week behind on Daily Show episodes).

Second - I just realized this - when the video is shown on TV you hear "bleep damn America". Um... really? God is the word that gets bleeped? So while I have my own thoughts on bad words only being bad because they have been declared such - for this post I will grant that some people don't want bad words on TV. I'll also temporarily grant that some words that are not bad by themselves can be combined to create bad words. But if God and damn are acceptable separately and are only bad in combination then fine only one has to be bleeped to make things ok again. But, but, but, really God is the one they pick? I guess that if you hear "God bleep America" you might not know what he's saying, but they wouldn't bleep God bless America - so this way any adult could figure it out, but it might actually hide the "bad word combo" from children. And really, how much worse is God damn America than Damn America? Based on this system you can't say "God damn painful shoes" on TV but you can say "Damn America". Heck, apparently it is ok to say "Damn America", but not "God damn the Sept 11 hijackers". I wonder if you can say "God should use his powers to move all Americans from Earth to a painful afterlife where they will burn forever"? Or how about "Omnipotent power, whose name cannot be said before the word damn on TV, damn America"? Don't get me wrong - I would not want censorship based on ideas, but it does seem to point out the absurdity of having censorship rules at all. I have heard this style of "bleep damn" before on the radio so it is not just this one incident (I think I also ranted about it then). Alright I guess any adult could have figured out where this is going after the first sentence or two so I'll stop now.

Learning

I think this is interesting.

Film Festival and Dilbert

First, thought some people might find this global film festival interesting.

Second, for those that regularly read Dilbert, in the thread that has been playing out over the last week are the green people eating aliens microsoft? Not that I wouldn't see the same thing after reading slashdot for five minutes, but I was a bit surprised to see it from Dilbert.