Posts by GrimJack

Actually, I did not google because I used it as an excuse to come back for a visit. So, now I googled it and it is fixed - ''check aps and files'' off.

It seems to me that would get pretty messy right off the bat. My cell could only hold a stack of about 10 wings before they started falling off; plus how do you use the phone with all that food stacked on it? and your greasy fingers from the wings?/s

PLBKACAND MY FAVORITE lmgtfy

People still forget about the Blackberry; still so secure that is the only cell phone the President can use. Still uncrackable after all these years.

You need a lot of money, a lot of hardware that emmulates a super-computer, the software, and plenty of time. all the easy bitcoins have been mined; you now need at least a couple quatrillion (10^15th) cycles; you need to be able to know where to start looking (we are talking pretty damned deep into at least aleph 1 infinities - which is considered the cardinal # all the aleph null infinities.) Well, actually you don't need to know any of that crap - all you really have to do is buy/lease the software that does the math for you. The fact that you ask the question at all means you should probably find something easier to do.

could you please produce several other examples of such language "distortion"?

How about the entire English language is a distortion of Middle English which was a distortion of - well, you get the idea the distortion goes back Sumerian/Hindi. Even East Coast (USAIAN)language distortions (dialects) can be traced to the century that those areas were colonized by the British; from New England to Florida.

It is amazing how much of your thought processes are built right into your question and scare quotes - OMG, what were you thinking when you wrote "distortion"

Time is not a dimension it is a coordinate; there is a 4th dimension and it is the space occupied by a hypercube,hypersphere, and so on. The mathematics of lower dimension space has some interesting 'tiling' properties - I especially like Kellor's Conjecture that state that tiling an N-dimensional space with N-dimensional hypercubes of equal sides yield an arangement in which at least 2 hypercubes have an entire (N-1)-dimensional "side" in common.

It has been proven true in dimensions 6 or less and false in dimensions 8, 10, and 12.

2014: The usual evening, an inconvenient day off, and now I have to remember to write 2014 instead of 2013.

What he said! I bought some cheap Italian sparkling wine and watched TV; called mom early in the evening (phone calls are hard for me - I used to love to chat on the phone with friend, now I think I have called 11 people in the last 15 years, sigh.) and did not even finish the bottle. Watched all my shows (darned things were all reruns). I start back to work (presidential order - all seasonals to report on Jan. 6) next Monday. Just another day. It is just an arbitrary moment whose only purpose is to keep order in your life.

My Jewish leathersmith friend put up a sign in his shop each year saying "Keep the X in Xmas" but then he is still awaiting the savior (or he would be if he wasn't an atheist). A lot of people are outraged at the commercialization of the day (Christ should be in your heart, X should be in your wallet). I by force of habit and reciprocity, buy chocolate for each of my family members just so I have something to exchange. This year is the first year that I am single for Xmas (last year she had not moved out yet but we were breaking up). My poor kitty has a serious ear infection - it appears to be fungal and may permanently damage her balance but she is such a love. Her name is Freya but I call her Golden Goddess because she is black with gold tourtousshell markings.

Happy New Year to all

GrimJack/Grumpy old Man

I am packing for my trip to Montana (leaving tomorrow), worrying about my cat (fungal ear infection), worrying about myself (ADD, depression, unemployed), and cleaning my apt. (well, I plan on cleaning my apt but...). I got my hot glass workbench set up, I have ordered some sheet metal to cover it and I am going over all the supplies I will need. Since I had to disassemble my bench when I moved, I have to make sure I have everything I need. The basics are: O2, propane, torlch, mandrels, and glass rods - these I have. I need something to pre-heat the glass rods (so they don't shattered from temperture shock) and I need something slow down the heat loss (tempering) after the bead/piece has been produced. Mostly these items can be purchased at a place like Value Village - a hot plate.

We all are mandelasWe all are mandelas Fortuneatly, very few of us are jwenting

Stultusk: You have 4900 posts; I assume you have read some of jwenting's posts before. Jwnting is a right wing trolll; he can be counted on to appear whenever something comes up that appears to him to be left-ish attracting his very predictable trolling. Free speech means that we can speechify against trolls. Jwenting does not care, he seldom responds to responses to his trolling - if it is your task to defend trolls, good for you but do not expect sympathy.

It is bright and sunny here in Seattle but it is about 32 F - which is what we consider cold (it does get colder than that but seldom for long). I grew up in Montana where it was so cold, your ears could freeze in a coupld minutes and when the wind blows, it is like being cut with a knife.

Today is a sad day for South Africa, Africa, and the world; with the passing of Mandela there is an emptiness in the world that will be hard to fill.

Language changes; usage changes; words are added to the lixicon but are seldom removed, they just get down-graded. Often the changes can be seen in thier opposites like the words 'disengenuous' 'ruthless' 'reckles' - if you ever get a chance to wander through the Oxford English Dictionary, you will discover the first time the word was recorded and trace the change in usage over time. Words are created, borrowed from other languages, sometimes dragged out of past for a new use.

When I trained to be a radio announcer/DJ the word 'long-lived' was pronounced with a long i (as the word 'jive' not as the word 'give'). There are theories around that suggest that the reason modern English has not changed as much over time as usual so that Shakespeare's plays will stay in our language. Once of my favorites is because it is series of puns across 2 languages:
Hoist by his own petard - which effectively translates as blown up by his own bomb, but means caught in his own trap. The pun comes from those crazy French, when they heard a bomb it sounded to them like a fart; petard is French for fart.

Suggesting that once an organism is no longer able to reproduce it no longer affects the evolutionary process is ignoring the importance of family. Colony species like ants, hive species like bees immediately come to mind - reproduction is limited to a single entity and yet they survive. In the same manner uncles, aunts, grandparents all contribute to the survival of the species by helping keep the offspring alive. The longer a grandparent lives productively, the more likely the offspring will survive. Unmated, relatives contribute to keeping offspring alive.

Durian - this is my love/hate fruit. It is not explainable what it is like; eating it from the shell is like eating pudding as long as you do not breath through your nose. Seriously, when eating durian plug your nose. It is banned in most cities and towns in Asia so you will see crowds of people (mostly men) at the city limits waiting for the durian truck. The durian fruit comes from a tree very much like palm trees but even taller; in order for the seeds to be spread it needs an animal that can carry a 4-10 pound seed so it evolved to attract tigers (the only animal big and strong enough to carry it) but how does it attract the tiger - it smells like rotting flesh! This is why you can't breath through your nose when you eat it and why most cities and towns ban it. It stinks - we wrapped one in 5 plastic bags (one inside the then next) and it sill stank. We buried it and it still stank so we took it about 20 miles north and dumped it in the woods. We were on the porch eating it (very carefully) when my boss showed up for the party, he tried a bite got a whiff and I swear he spit that about 40 yards across the road and onto a neighbor's yard. The party was themed with one of the themes was the strangest fruit - guess what …

Daniel1977 - if you want to start a religious discussion don't be stupid about it. If you want to start a relifious discussion you had better be ready with some intelligence and some interesting ideas. Jesus saves, Moses invests is pretty old hat. Do you have any interesting comments on the Eusebius controversies? Keep in mind that Gibbom was not quoting from the original Eusebius Histories but quoting from someone who had 'mistranslated' (I use the scare quotes because most authorities that it was an actual lie and not a translation error).

Also make sure that you are discussing Eusebius of Caesarea not Eusebius of Nicomedia as the former was the actual historian in Constantine's employ and the latter was the one who babtized Constantine.

in order to restore the tranquility Tibetans are incidentally presently enjoying.

I am not sure what you mean with this particular phrase. The Chinese government just completed a rail line to Tibet and are now giving land to Han Chinese to lure them to Tibet. Rather than 'conquering' the Tibetans the plan is to overwhelm them with numbers. At the end of the current phase, the Han Chinese will outnumber the Tibetans and there will no longer be a 'Tibetan' culture; there will be another Chinese province. In 1953 there were about 100k Han in Tibet. Since that time it has been Chinese policy to settle retired military in Tibet allowing a more pro-Chinese civilian population. It is pretty hard to get 'solid' information from the area so population figures are not particularly trustworthy since each 'side(?)' releases data supporting thier particular agenda.

War profiteering sort of falls under 'the Broken Window' fallacy - whereas something like the government works projects not only get money to the people who spend it immediately for necessities but there is the long term result that can be seen to this day; dams, bridges, park trails, art, et cetera. Ninety per cent of this type of economic support is trickle up - families get fed, local businesses are supported, goods and services are transported to where they are needed on roads produced by the work of the people. Larger businesses are supported by the increased demand for trucks, resources, and so on.
On the other hand, giving the same amount of money (either in tax breaks or whatever) does not get down to the local, human level except as 'keeping a job you already have'. Notice that the current market forces are not producing more jobs, they are producing more effecient use of jobs already in existence. There are job ads that specifically request applicants already have a job; they are not for people who are unemployed.

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

Samuel Johnsom

Has anyone (other than me) seen THX1138; it was George Lucas' directorial debut - it show a pretty dystopian world that is 1984/Brave New World-ish. The 'illegal drug crime' scene that opens the movie is someone not taking their drugs. All the actors have shaved heads and wear white onesies; essentially, the entire population are freckled except for one character (who is not the main character) and it is extremely difficult to tell people apart - lots of fun things happen. Also masturbation is obligatory and screwing is illegal.

Check out EULAlyzer at brightfort.com I am not sure if it will help you but the program will search any EULA for 'interesting' wording.

On May 29, 1913, one hundred years ago, Igor stravinski premiered The Rite of Spring. This was supposed to be the ballet concert of the year and all of the best of Paris society was in attendence; the music was so new and raw that after a couple minutes the audience began make catcalls and whistles but then they rioted. Yes, the audience rioted in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, smashed up the place, beat each other bloody and actually moved out into the streets - the riots continued for 3 days.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NikolaiRoerichRite1.jpg

One year later, the production was greated with great acclaim and Stravinski was carried victoriously through the streets of Paris. In 1940, The Rites of Spring was included in Fantasia as part of a children's musical piece.

This is an exageration (the riots were not that bad) but the musical concepts were new and, for the time, very disturbing. But even the Disney version is disturbing and brings to mind the much later animation for Ravel's Bolero - which is what the animator Bruno Bozzetto meant for us to see but is not as apparent until you view The Rite of Spring after seeing Bolero - with the 'monkey-man' appearing. Ravel's Bolero was commissioned to be a part of a ballet called Fandango - the scene was a smokey cantina with the basoon danced by the 'prima balerina' and the other instruments would emerge from fog/smoke for their part …

I would not trust the evergy drinks some of them are pure sugar and that will just cause a deeper crash.

Let's see... profound difference in the world - was losing politically so she started a war with Argentina over some island they took back in 1812 after Argentina kicked their asses out - check. Killed off the milk program for school lunches, she abolished the minimum national nutrition standards then passed regulations that required schools to accept the cheapest food available meaning fried everything, nothing fresh and then she cut thousands of children off the free school lunch program. She sold off all the school fields (ie playgrounds) - it wasn't until 1999 that there was semblance of nutritional balance put back into the school lunch programs

She probably ruined the health of 2 generations of poor children so that she could cut government spending.

but I digress - I think I might hate her what she did to the UK as much as I hate Reagan and what he did to the US.

I just found the coolest new BOINC project (BOINC projects are distributed projects that use your spare computer cycles to solve HUGE computational questions from SETI to Malaria to climate research) - it is called Quake-Catcher out of Stanford University. They send you a sensor that you screw to your floor and connect to your computer. The screen-saver is a 10-second delayed view of all the quakes being recorded all over the world - it ab-fab. I live in Seattle which is a subduction zone so they were particularly interested getting a sensor here. I am on the ground floor and leave my computer on 24/7. They have sensors for laptop and desktop; they prefer desktops because of the stability factor.

My current, active projects are World Community, Malariacontrol, and Rpsetta (inactive are UFluids, Lattice, and SpinHenge) on my laptop; on my desktop are climateNet, Einstein, SETI, QuakeCatcher, and a couple others I am too lazy to look up. My group (whick is just me) is Patosi and I am, of course, GrimJack. I know that DaniWeb has its own team.

I have ADD, a short attention span, poor memory but an incredible focus. My work habits are terrible because if it is not 'right now and in my face' I forget about it. Sadly, this is even true for relationships, I actually forget people if I have not seen them for a week or 2 (this can really piss off a girlfriend to no end). The only reason Mrs. Grimjack and I lasted for 25 years is we lived together for that time. She finally wised up and left me a couple months ago.

I started making glass beads again - I play hardcore industrial turned up really loud and i shout invective against the world while working with glass at 2200 F. For safety's sake, I don't drink or take medication until after I have made some beads (I lose interest after about doing 8 beads, anyway - my lastest venture is trying to make a glass pinky-ring, it is just a bead with a larger hole, it is tempering now so I won't see it until tomorrow)

Other than that, I am a pretty nice guy

ooh look shiny thing

Sometimes, it is like axe-murder to walk into the dressing room and be overwhelmed by the cloud of Axe clinging to everything. Do those guys actually believe that pouring that stuff all over their bodies will lead to gorgeous models pawing them?

There are certain word pairs that have very specific rules for their usage and my nerves rage when they are misused:
farther/futher
fewer/less
There are others but these seem to show up more often.

There are more separate, living creatures in your body the you have cells in your body - by count.

I went into Walgren's to buy my meds and their system asked if I wanted to donate to the RC - of course, I did.

Wolfram is not a forum but it is a site that specializes in the maths and a little bit of searching might give you some answers

Jim, since you asked me to do my research

A false dilemma (also called false dichotomy, the either-or fallacy, etc.)

I will change the parenthetical 'stupid' and say that argument from moral idignation does not really have a place in an exchange of ideas for many reasons including it allows for no introduction of contrary evidence. But if this is just chatting about how you feel about stuff, it is acceptable.

Your description of addiction vs choice does seem a little simplistic; studies on smokers who quit seem to imply that there is something a little more complex going on. Studies seem to imply that 40% of smokers who have quit are smoking again 2 years later (but such longitudinal studies are few and far between - other studies show 2-10% depending on age). One of really important lines from the end of the study is

More important, we were unable to identify a duration of abstinence after which former smokers had no risk of relapse. Thus, no definition of successful cessation can be absolute.
Once an addict always an addict, I guess - just like AA says.

I understand that anecdotal evidence is highly suspect but after being a smoker for 20 years, I have been a non-smoker for 22 years (with a short interval about 5 years ago when I realized I was inhaling my Cuban cigars so I had to cut them out). I could easily become a smoker again but I …

EEK! My old avatar mysteriously reappeared - cool, I guess.

Anyway, isaac asimov (mosel tov) offerred the best idea for god proving his/her existence - put a message in PI somewhere around the 4 billionth place. By the time we get to it, we will be ready for it. This is not to say that I believe it will happen but if god has/had a sense of humor, that is the place to hide it.

Audacity will do what you want and it is free - you will need a line out from your player to the line in on your computer.

Without line out/in you can use earphone out and microphone in but watch your levels.

Wow! What a year, from worse to great! Excellent to hear, GrimJack :)
What sort of work do you do?

I work for the IRS as a seasonal which means I usually work from January to June. This year (well actually Dec last year) I was called in early and went into the first team for the 4 weeks of the early call-up. January 3rd was the beginning of my actual ToD (tour of duty) and I went to the team that I was assigned to. If it seems convoluted to you, you don't know the half of it.

Are you saying your a victim of the 'ball cutter' or you know people that are?

No, fortunately I do not know of anyone who has met one - it is just a weird bit of news that I wanted to pass along so that, no matter how bad things get, a fish did not bite your balls off while you were swimming.

I guess I bottle of bear after every line of code I program might make me happier because I think being drunk makes you happy and believe in almost anything. Better buy 500 bottles of bear for this next small script I'm going to do :). I wonder what I will be like by the end of the 500 lines of code.

So who bottles bears? Sounds pretty disgusting; is this a sample of how well you code on bottles of bear?

I worked for an on-line, after-market auto supply store - what we sold was mostly add-on glitz like head units, speakers, lights and so on. This is an extremely high fraud market place so we had verify every card and over a certain amount, we had to call and speak with the cardholder. On one call, I contacted the cardholder about a $12,000 order; she had no idea about the order so I went over the fraud steps. I was fired for this call because a co-worker overheard the call and reported me as having called the cardholder to tell her about the fraud rather than calling to verify the order.

Now take a look at what happens when you blend spider silk and skin. Silk was often used as an under-liner beneath armor because projectiles like bullets did not pierce the silk, it pulled the silk into the wound - keeping it 'hygienic'.

Why do you think we are heading towards a 'Weimar Republic'?
I assume there are clues you can share with me so I can follow your thinking; I would be especially interested in the correlations you draw between specific events from that time period with some more current events.

I would bet that your local library would have it in electronic form.

Jeez - Ron Paul is right up there with Palin, bachman and santorum for crazy:

• he also thinks the "War on Christmas" is real, and that the separation of church and state is a myth. He believes the founding fathers wanted to discriminate on behalf of certain religions, and that morality cannot be accomplished absent Christianity.
• he believes the "collective Left" hates religion and that our national heritage is under attack by "secularists".
• During Paul’s rally, he proposed getting rid of the Internal Revenue Service, Selective Service, income tax and the Federal Reserve, and withdrawing from the United Nations
• Ron Paul is the strongest opponent of "Hate Crime" Laws.

"When batshit crazy people have passed up an entire basket of admirably batshit crazy politicians in order to lend their batshit crazy support to him, I think what you can take from that is that Ron Paul is the chosen King of the Batshit Crazy.

Once again, the most solid proof of God's existence is right under your feet, and before your eyes daily. The earth, sun, moon, and stars, along with plants, animals, and people, all prove God is alive. Science has not disproven anything about God, only caused confusion about what it cannot explain. Another solid proof, and there are many, is Israel becoming a nation again, which God said through the prophets thousands of years ago. You can use your logic and reasoning to deceive you if you want, but in the end it will all be clear. The danger will be if you are an unbeliever when you die. Heaven or hell, your choice, but after death you won't be able to change your mind.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof - there is no need to prove there is no god and, using the 'double negative' rule, there is a need to prove there is a god.

Using Occam's Razor we end up with no need to posit a god to explain the universe. Threatening non-believers with damnation is not a very good argument for the existence of god.

Well then I'm asking a mod to close his thread now.

We are having fun - go away if you don't like it.

>> children held in the left arm, nearest the heart would be quieted/soothed by the mother's heartbeat vs. a child held in the right arm would tend to be fussier and thus the mother would be less successful at bringing down 'food'.

If there's a Darwinian advantage to being right-handed, even a slight one, then the left-handed folks should have all died off by now. Every generation should have a lower percentage of lefties than the prior one till with enough generations there are none left.

Not true! Darwinism is not survival of the fittest. What Darwinism says is that traits that offer more chances for success will tend towards more reproductive opportunities. This would lead to, in this case, more right handed people than left handed people. This is not the same as saying left handedness is anti-survival and left handed people will all die.

Everyone jokes about the 'Darwin Awards' but they are just that - a joke. Risk takers die so you would think that risk takers would weed themselves out but they don't because sometimes it is the risk takers that survive and everyone else dies.

Darwinism is small, statistically insignificant effects over huge periods of time - it is not the idiot that jumps out of a plane without his parachute.

Fact: there is more proof that Jesus existed than Alexander the Great - yet people believe in Alexander more.

Actually there is no proof that jesus christ was a historical figure. The only stories we have about him were written 50 or more years after his death. Only one of 'magic' 4 writers of the gospels actually met him.

Some of the stories from the new testament do not match historical events. Very specifically, the whole slaughter of all new born male children by king Herod. Herod's life was pretty well documented; he was an all-around nasty person who eventually started a rebellion against the Roman Empire and died suddenly (of what some say was congestive heart failure, or something - the symptoms up to his death are pretty well documented also). No one liked him, everyone wrote about all the really nasty things he did but no one mentions him killing all the male children under the age of 2. That would have been really big news but is nowhere to be found in the historical record. In fact there is no (zero, none, nada) mention of jc in any historical document (other than the new testament).

Back to the actual thread - there is no need to find proof of a belief, in fact reason and faith are yin and yang - they may circle each other but it is not really necessary that one offer support or proof of the other. I would go so …

Henrieta Lacks, though dead, is immortal and lives on (so to speak). Before she died at age 31 the doctors at Johns Hopkins took a cell sample from her cervical cancer. These cells were so successful at living in petri dishes that almost every cancer research in the world use clones of the HeLa cells. If all the HeLa cells in the world were gathered in one place, they estimate it would weigh approximately 600 metric tons. These cells are so well adapted to living in the lab that very rigorous protocols have to be used because if the HeLa cells infect other cell lines, they usually completely take over the cell line.

Michael Moore tweets:

Beloved character actor Osama bin Laden, star of TV's "Fox News", dies age 54

Heh,heh -

This just in - they found Osama's body

Ding
Dong
the witch is dead