Archive for October, 2009

Unbiased News

Sunday, October 25th, 2009

What is your favorite unbiased news source?

If anyone says Fox, I’m going to un-friend you on Facebook. (Just kidding!)

Update October 29, 2009: I haven’t found a single reliable news source. CNN, NBC, FOX, etc., are all Republocrat shills. FOX supporters shout about how most of the other major news outlets are too slanted toward the Democrats. They’re right, but so what? There is no appreciable difference between them and the Republicans. Most other news sites are alarmist in one direction or another. Communist world-dictatorship is imminent with every new regulation or every CEO wants to sterilize and enslave the working stiff. It would be nice to find a source for more-or-less accurate news without having to sift through an ubiquitous ulterior agenda. There are a few good news sites, but they are usually narrowly focused. That’s not bad, it just means you have to use a news aggregator to get it all in one place. Here’s my current list:

A news site with Fred as the editor-in-chief: there’s some potential there.

Posted in Theology | 4 Comments »

Reality Check

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

The University of Montreal tells us that women are better at identifying emotional responses than men. My first reaction was, “And someone thought we needed a study to figure that out?” But then I remembered that this is a university. Yes, they needed a study to remind them girls and boys really are different even on the inside.

Side note: Evolutionary psychology is almost as big a waste of time and money as xenobiology. Almost.

Posted in History, Marriage, Politics, Science | No Comments »

World’s Largest Golden Orb Weaver Spider

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

A researcher says that he has identified the largest known golden orb weaver spider in the world. It’s an impressive looking beast with a body length over 1.5″ and leg-span over 5″.

Nephila komaci

I have read several articles claiming it’s orb can be more than a meter wide and that it is also the largest web-making spider in the world. I think what they actually mean is that it is the largest web-making species of Nephila in the world. I have seen much bigger orb webs made by much bigger spiders, such as Japan’s onigumo (Araneus). Their leg-spans might be shorter than Nephila komaci, but I have seen them with bodies well over 2″ long (I’d say over 3″ long, but that could be a case of inflated memory!) and orbs more than 5′ across. I saw one eating a dragon fly while suspended midway between two electric poles more than 40′ apart.

Onigumo

Once, an onigumo almost landed on my head when I opened my back door. It gives me the willies just thinking about it. I think that onigumo means demon spider in Japanese. It’s an appropriate name.

Update July 18, 2010: I saw several golden orb weavers in Nail’s Creek State Park in Texas that had bodies over 2″ long, but the leg-span still wasn’t as wide as Nephila komaci’s.

Also, check out the photos of enormous communal webs in the same park.

See Wired and Spiegel Online.

[Update: Disabling comments on this article because of the number of spam-bots it attracts.]

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Posted in Personal, Science | 1 Comment »

Parents Know

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

They might get some of the details wrong, but when it comes to your essential character, your parents will always know you better than you will ever know yourself.

Posted in History, Homeschooling, Marriage, Personal | 1 Comment »

Prayer Request

Monday, October 12th, 2009

Life after the big move has been tough. I gave up a well-paying job to follow God’s leading and have been scrambling for survival since January. If it were not for some good friends I would not have made it past February. Even so, I have been spinning my wheels in several directions and getting nowhere. In the words of one of those good friends, “[It is] time to clarify values, assign priorities, and let go of subordinate desires.”

Posted in Personal | No Comments »

Sukkot 5770 – Now I Understand

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

Tents, food, drink, singing, dancing…what’s not to love? Poverty, homelessness, fire ants, mosquitoes, damp, humidity, and the potential for scorpions and poisonous snakes. If one week is this much fun, I can only imagine forty years, and I don’t even have to deal with a latrine! I completely understand the Israelites’ grumpiness in the wilderness.

Posted in Keeping Torah, Parsha Sukkot, Personal, Theology, Torah | No Comments »

Google Has Become Almost Useless

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

Google is so bogged down with bogus search results that it has become almost useless. It was great when every search was hyper-literal. If you knew how to use a boolean search string, you could find anything. Now, you tell Google that you only want such and such four words, and it returns pages of links that don’t contain one or more of your terms. Suggesting alternate spellings is helpful, but it shouldn’t assume you typed your search wrong. Returning hits for “finding” when you typed in “find” is also helpful, but returning hits with no form of the word “find” at all is worse than unhelpful. Bing and Yahoo are no better. The same thing happened to Infoseek once upon a time. Go.com bought it, and it became completely useless almost overnight, just another Internet commercial. Surely someone can find a way to make a search engine financially profitable without turning it into a corporate wasteland.

Posted in Computers | No Comments »