Tonya and PQBON's WebLog
The
genius asshats of the christian right have decided that eradicating disease
isn't a good idea. They think it is fine for a disease that is directly
linked to cancer, is the most common STD, and has no symptoms in 90% of those
infected to go on. Their brilliant reason, the inoculation MIGHT give
teens the idea that premarital sex is OK. So lets deconstruct this specious
argument.
The religious right teaches premarital sex is wrong for moral reasons. It
isn't supposed to have ANYTHING to do with health. It is supposedly in
the bible that premarital sex is wrong. Condoms which make sex safer, dental
dams which make sex safer all don't change their position on sex. When you take
a moral stance how can you say that it is weakened for health reasons? Now the
only way to be worried is if they admit the research is correct and that teens
are already engaging in risky behavior even with their virginity pledges.
The one good thing that will come out of this, their teens that don't get
the immunization, who are more likely to have risky sex, will all have their uteruses
removed because that is how they deal with cervical cancer. It will be a self
limiting problem.
Quote from SNL: "66% of American’s think
president bush is doing a poor job in
to church."
Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? Ruminations on the Psychology and Aesthetics of Coding
As a software developer I have had some cause to use Visual Studio to produce windows apps. For me it isn't all that often as I work well bellow the application level and always have but still once in a while an app is needed. Always I marvel at the things that are simple with VS and MFC foundation libraries and what is hard. This is the transcript of a talk that goes through exactly what is good and bad in VS development from the view of Charles Petzold who has written MANY books on Windows programming.
Meta posted this last week. I liked it. It reminds me a bit of the ethos created by Neil Gaiman in the Sandman stories and continued in the Lucifer stories (both great comic books published by DC's Vertigo imprint).
The story is really a mockery of Intelligent Design. As much as I hate the polluting of our schools science curriculums I think this story stands on it's own as fun read.
New Yorker - Shouts & Murmurs
Republicans Testing Ways to Blunt Leak Charges
On Sunday, Republicans appeared to be preparing to blunt the impact of any charges. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, speaking on the NBC news program "Meet the Press," compared the leak investigation with the case of Martha Stewart
and her stock sale, "where they couldn't find a crime and they indict
on something that she said about something that wasn't a crime."
Ms. Hutchison said she hoped "that if there is going to be an
indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a
crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on
the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years
of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars."
This is nothing like impeaching a president who lied about a blowjob.
Apple's new pro-level photo editing software looks GREAT. It has 90% of the features I use from Photoshop and some cool new features on top of them. Unfortunately, it requires a 2Ghz dual G5 or better to use it recommends a 2Ghz dual G5 or better, it requires Power Mac G5 with a 1.8 gigahertz (GHz) or faster PowerPC G5 processor, 17- or 20-inch iMac G5 with a 1.8 GHz or faster PowerPC G5 processor, 15- or 17-inch PowerBook G4 with a 1.25 GHz or faster PowerPC G4 processor. This means it wll be at least a year until I touch it. I won't be able to touch it until Apple ships a highend Intel desktop system and ports Apature to run Native. This just won't run on my Minimac in a usefull way. Apple may infact check which machine you run it on (they do things like this with bundled software, if you upgrade to a new system you can't reinstall your old bundled software.)
The flash demos look great. Apple has a history of producing really good highend software for video and audio. I assume their Image products will be as good. It isn't entirely clear if you will still need Photoshop for somethings or if Apature will do it all.
For me, most of what I do is image processing but I do on occasion do some image editing. For the price I would really like to see some image editing abilities. I would like at a minimum, a patern clone tool, a anti-alias paint tool, a pixel level paint tool, and blending tool.
Chris' jump off the cliff at shipwreck beach - a photoset on Flickr
Yesterday was my brother's birthday. Being the sucky brother I am I didn't call him. I was going to call him, but after dinner I got busy working and trying to get through a 4 month long backlog of photos that need to be processed.
Well, happy birthday 1 day late!
Here are the pictures of you jumping of a cliff.
It's time to kick baby's diet up a notch - Scientists Rethink Bland Guidelines
It's time to discard everything you think you know about feeding babies. It turns out most advice parents get about weaning infants onto solid foods - even from pediatricians - is more myth than science.
This has been more or less my inline with my theory. As a science oriented person with an impeding state change from husband to husband/father, I'm kind of amazed at the things people, even the experts, "know" about raising babies and kids in general. After reading a few of Tonya's books it is pretty clear that until recently nobody studied things that didn't seem broken. Its kind of strange to see how much of this is "if it aint broke don't fix it..."
The article brings up interesting points about how much of the way babies are raised is cultural and not truely scientific.