Category: Uncategorized

The EPA just released this least of the top 25 “renewable energy” users. Unsurprisingly, the list is dominated by government agencies and enviro-nut oriented companies – that is, organizations that either feed off  enviro-hysteria, or can simply steal more of your money to make up for their waste. If you are looking to avoid investing in companies that waste your money, this is a list to watch.

Just a few days after Google agreed to censor its results to appease China, the results are already evident.  Here is a gallery of the websites and words it hides from Chinese surfers.

The Justice Department is suing Google after it refused to turn over “all Google queries for a week and for 1 million Internet addresses.” No warrant or reasonable cause was needed – this is for the state’s “research” needs. MSN, Yahoo, and AOL already capitulated without a fight. If there was ever a cause for a fight over due process, it’s this, not the anti-terrorism BS.

Incidentaly, Google permanently records all my search queries as part of my Google account, which includes a year of Gmail emails, my address book, and credit card info for my ad accounts. To hell with phone calls and letters – if there are any secrets about me, my Google accounts hold them. If this is up for grabs without a warrant, what isn’t?

While surfing TV, I came across an episode of “Everybody loves Raymond” where a character who goes to sleep in a car so as not to drive home drunk is arrested.  I looked it up, and it’s true –you can get convited for drunk driving for sleeping in a car, with the keys in your pocket.

Just out: Google Pack, a suite of software from Google and other vendors that every casual and serious computer user should get. I highly recommend everything in the pack except for Norton Antivirus – I prefer the free avast! 4 Home Edition.

 

During my trip to see the family this weekend, I scanned over 100 family photos from Soviet Ukraine, some of them dating back to the 1930s. The photos are in various states of decay, and require touch-ups before they can be enlarged for printing. Fortunately, I have a copy of Photoshop CS2 handy, and started with this 30’s era glamour shot of grandma and her sis:

My other grandmother:

I got an Amazon.com Visa credit card last month, and ran up a huge balance, nearly a thousand dollars over the credit limit. I paid the full balance the day it was due, but it cleared two days later. Yesterday, I saw a $35 overlimit fee, and a $39 late fee on my account. The fees were totally my fault, but I decided to do my best to wriggle out of them. I thought of potential arguments and pleas for leniency and mercy all day before calling visa. The conversion went something like this:
“I have these fees on my statement…”
“I can definitely remove those fees for you sir.”
And that’s all it took. Can you imagine trying this with the IRS?

Two months ago, when I moved to Dallas, decided to I start biking to get in shape. I got my first road bike, and started with short 14-mile rides in the park. From that modest start, I moved up to over 100km in the Tour de Peppermint this Sunday. It took me a little over five hours of intense riding. Next on the list: competing in the 100 mile Hotter’N Hell race next August. Any corporate sponsors interested?

This post brought to you by my participation in the local atheist group, and my recent lack of interest in blogging:

Time and space are concepts that describe the relationship between particular entities. It is meaningless to speak of time or space outside of the entities they relate. In particular, in is meaningless to speak of something being “outside” or “prior to” the universe.

The universe is the set of all entities. To say that “something” is outside the universe means that there is “something” – an entity – that is outside the set of all entities. This a contradiction, of course, since that “something” must be part of the universe, and therefore cannot be outside it. Rather, the universe is an expanding balloon of relativity (with a radius of ~13 billion light years) within which time and space are meaningful concepts.

Time is a measure of the rate of change between entities in relation to a frame of reference. There is no “absolute” time independent of a frame of reference. (For example, we usually measure time as a relation to the rate of earth’s rate of rotation and revolution around the sun..) Time is therefore only applicable to a universe with multiple entities and changing relationships between those entities. It’s therefore impossible to attribute time or space to a singularity (the pre-big bang state) or say that something existed “prior” to the singularity.

For similar reasons, it is contradictory to speak of “multiple” universes. A universe is the set of all existents which are causally related to each other. If entities are not causally related, then they cannot be “aware” of each other, and therefore cannot engage in any relationships, including those of time and space. If we cannot be aware of such entities, then any such proposition must by definition be arbitrary. Thus, if there are dimensions other than those we are currently familiar with, they must be merely conceptually differentiated causal chains, not “separate universes.”