jeffmcbride.net

People, are, really, really, stupid.

USA Today: Space junk could hinder Hubble repair mission

One of every 300 shuttle missions to the space station could expect to be destroyed by space debris, Shannon said. By contrast, Atlantis faces a 1-in-185 risk of fatal damage, he said.

Wow. That’s scary odds, if you ask me.

 I accidentally ended up on MSN today:

Good names? Experts weigh in on Brangelina’s picks for twins.

This was one of today’s “Top Picks” news items. It went along with “Michigan city investigates manhole cover caper”, and “Family sitcoms in sad state”. Woohoo!

See, Asian casino’s are trying to lure gamblers away from the table games to more profitable slots (physorg.com)! They may be simple to play and flashy, but they are not as fun and have a smaller payback (a payback, which by they way, you can’t even know because it is programmed rather than following from the rules of the game!).

Note to Asian Gamblers: Stick to those tables!

The trouble with weather forecasting is that it’s right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it.

-Patrick Young  

You actually purchase a Hummer H2.

My brother and I were recently discussing the H2 after arguing the manliness of our Toyota’s not-so-great 0 to 60 times. Turns out his corolla will do 0 to 60 in 8-9 seconds (depending on who you ask), and my Prius is more like 10 seconds. Ok. He wins, though neither is a speed demon. But back to the H2:

First of all, don’t get me wrong, the original hummer is quite possibly the toughest go anywhere vehicle ever produced (at least at that size). I’m not sure it is something I’d recommend for cruising around town in, but it has its place. The H2 on the other hand is a GMC Yukon frame, with a new shell slapped on to give it the look and name of a Hummer. At a base price of ~$56k and a fuel economy of about 10MPG, I think you pretty much have to be an idiot to buy this car. In particular, the kind of idiot that buys a flashy car with the name Hummer on it, so you can say “look at me, I have money to burn, and I’m an idiot!”. There are a lot of them around LA, I might add. Dustin pointed me to this great video illustrating the awesome off-road performance of the H2:

I was a latecomer to the whole facebook thing. I finally got in in grad school, when it seemed I was the only one without an account. And ya know, it was pretty cool. Was a pretty clean, intelligent interface, with some useful features. Then the applications came. Now, the usefulness is clouded by idiots fighting with vampires and slayers, sending stupid icons back and forth, etc. It is obnoxious, but not as bad as MySpace, and mostly ignorable. Now this whole Beacon thing though is about enough to make me give it up forever.

Tonight I logged into my blockbuster.com account to add some movies to my queue. After adding the movie, I got a little pop-up from facebook about it. I never signed up for anything. Blockbuster never told me it was sending information to facebook. But, apparantly facebook is sticking a cookie in my browser for blockbuster, which then reads it to get a tag to my facebook account, and proceeds to forward information about my movie selections on to facebook to post to the world. Now, facebook quickly wised up and gave users the general opt-out option so that “information from external websites won’t be displayed on your profile”. Well that’s just great. But, first problem: I had to actively opt OUT.  Second problem: I don’t care if it is in my profile or not, facebook has no business with the information at all.

But I thought about that a bit more, and realized facebook wasn’t the real culprit. Blockbuster (as well as all the other sites partnering with facebook) is the one betraying my trust by forwarding my purchase information to facebook, without providing me any ability to stop it, and without even notifying me that is was going to do it! Blockbuster has a FAQ page that says I should just go to facebook and disable it from appearing in my profile. That’s not good enough as far as I’m concerned.

I think a switch to Netflix may be in order, and it may be time to give up the facebook thing altogether.

PBS recently aired a NOVA episode, called “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” documenting the trial of a group of parents vs. the Dover, Pennsylvania school board over “intelligent design” (e.g. creationism) in science education. I just learned that NOVA makes all of its shows available online, including Judgment Day. I watched it last night, and it was pretty well done. They did have some excessively dramatized courtroom reenactments, but I believe they adhered to the actual court transcripts, at least, and it did a good job of explaining the story, and build-up to the events. The dover story almost make me believe there is hope for reason in America after all. But then I watched the republican “Youtube” debates tonight, and that hope was diminished a bit.