fun

What do you do with an abandoned water park in Atlanta? Skate it.

rotobobbler

Eating corn can be so much fun.

I almost wish I needed one

What a cool idea:

spare change

The estimated land value of New York's Central Park is $528,783,552,000. That's billion with a B.

how i feel

attention paid

Mother Jones presents the Iraq War Timeline (8/1/90 - 6/21/03), lie by lie.

wow

Filmmaker James Cameron is about to unleash a documentary that alleges the burial cave of Jesus and his family has been found, along with enough DNA evidence to establish that Jesus wasn’t resurrected and that he sired a son with Mary Magdelene. The tomb was found in 1980 and contained burial boxes that bear the names:

Yeshua [Jesus] bar Yosef [son of Joseph]; Maria [the Latin version of Miriam, which is the English Mary]; Matia [the Hebrew equivalent of Matthew, a name common in the lineage of both Mary and Joseph]; Yose [the Gospel of Mark refers to Yose as a brother of Jesus]; Yehuda bar Yeshua, or Judah, son of Jesus; and in Greek, Mariamne e mara, meaning ‘Mariamne, known as the master.’ According to Harvard professor François Bovon, interviewed in the film, Mariamne was Mary Magdalene’s real name.

Here's an interesting article on the expected response from the religious community.

Obama in Alabama

Folks, on Sunday Barack Obama will be at the historic Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma to commemorate the Selma-to-Montgomery Voting Rights March. He'll be speaking at the 11 a.m. service. The word is that around 30,000 people may show up!
If you would like to volunteer and help pass out stickers, signs, and whatnot you can ride with Joe Hubbard and myself. Everyone needs to be in Selma at 6:00am.
The press release is here.

The Living Symphony

The Living Symphony
Originally uploaded by | HD |.

i'm with ya

opens March 9

Frank Miller's new movie 300 tells the story of the Battle of Thermopylae (wikipedia link here), in which a small band of Spartans held off an enormous Persian Army in 480 BC in central Greece. It looks like it's gonna be good.

You can view a trailer of the film here or watch five minutes of the film here.

fyi

NYT: A look at what the presidential candidates have said thus far on Iraq.

beautiful

Pictures from the sky.

just wondering

So, what's the deal with this whole existence thing anyway?

that explains it

This guy is convinced that the food described as "manna" in the Bible was probably a type of psychedelic mushroom. "If manna is indeed the psilocybin mushroom," he concludes, "then this means that the Koran, Bible, and Torah were all inspired by psychedelically induced visions." Hmm. The following is from the Book of Exodus:

Then said the LORD unto Moses, Behold, I will vain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a certain rate every day, that I may prove them, whether they will walk in my law or no (16:4). And when the dew that lay was gone up, behold, upon the face of the wilderness there lay a small round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground (16: 14). And when the children of Israel saw if, they said one to another It is manna: for they wist not what it was. And Moses said unto them, This is the bread which the Lord hath given you to eat.

not sure i understand this

backdrop

This guy was one of the people chosen by Microsoft to take photos for the new Vista wallpapers. Only two photos in this set were chosen--be sure and check out the rest.

old foes

NPR has a great 5-part series on the history and status of the Sunni-Shiite conflict: The Partisans of Ali.
These cartoons sort of sum up the situation too:

idea market

Interesting animation of the spread of religions across Afro-Eurasia over centuries.

born to run

good point

"Making fun of the president is not ideological. Not making fun of the president, on the other hand, is."

on debunking the latest Obama fallacy

I know Barak Obama is relatively inexperienced as a politician, but lately I've come to think that there's such a thing as too much political experience. Which is why the more I read about Obama the more I like him. I hear people squawking about how he's a junior senator, 88th in seniority, a neophyte. And I hear people drawing from this fact the view that "The world is too complex and dangerous for this likeable, charismatic, African American neophyte to practice on-the-job training." (quoted in The St. Petersburg Times in Florida.) On its rhetorical face I agree with this, but I don't think that, should he win, Obama could ever really be considered a political noobie anymore. Wouldn't being elected president itself be evidence of his mastery of the American political system? But it's also naive to portray the president as solely responsible for the decisions he makes. As if Obama, like some awkward teen on his first date, is going to blurt out at a press conference "Oh shit, let's nuke Iran!" Every president surrounds himself with scores of experienced politicians who guide him, for better or worse, through the labyrinth. So I think it's misguided to criticize Obama for mere lack of experience. I'm not even convinced that political experience really distinguishes good presidents from poor ones. After all, the current president had plenty of it and look where we are now.
During his announcement speech, Obama told the crowd that "I know I haven't spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington. But I've been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change." Other reform-minded candidates have said as much in past elections, but to me it sounds pretty convincing coming from an outsider like Barak.
At any rate, the real issue now should not be how seasoned he is but how he proposes doing the job. And so far I'm on board.

quote of the day

"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change."

-- Charles Darwin

the triumph of logic

no thank you

not again

Although Alabama is my home state and I'll always have a fondness for her southern soul, at times I am downright flabbergasted. I can put up with the popular media version of Alabama, mostly wrong, of the gap-toothed NASCAR rednecks in trailer parks, etc. I can tolerate the (possibly) worst commercial ever, the hijinx and the hoopla, but what I cannot tolerate is actual bona fide official stupidity. Boing Boing has drawn my attention to the recent 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision allowing a ban on the sale of sex toys in the case Sherri Williams v. Attorney General of Alabama (pdf). The court stated with approval that "Alabama's Anti-Obscenity Enforcement Act prohibits, among other things, the commercial distribution of 'any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs for any thing of pecuniary value.'" Not that I'm a big user of sex toys or anything; what gets me is the pointlessly puritan nature of the law. After all, if people want to use sex toys, let 'em. How can their private use hurt society? What really gets me though is that the court upholds the law based on the fact that the state has the power to "restrict the sale of sex." How on earth does a ban on the sale of french ticklers restrict the sale of sex? Isn't sex an act, not a product? But the legal aspects aside, the law is just another obvious attempt to impose a strict moral code on the citizens using the state's police power, which never works. Ban prostitution and child porn, fine. But it's backwards to legislate the private, ultimately harmless decisions of normal everyday folks just because they like to use vibrators. Sheesh. Meanwhile, Alabama lawmakers are against extending the assault weapons ban? Ah, good ol' moral hypocrisy, served up southern style.

wow

I've got to have one of these

Dutchtub

alarming

Get your Afghanistan war carpets here

ways to go

Wikipedia has a very interesting list of unusual deaths here. Some of my favorites, so to speak:

212 BC: Archimedes, a Greek mathematician, was said to have been doing a math problem in the sand of his town, Syracuse, Sicily, when an army invaded. A soldier interrupted Archimedes who just replied, "Do not disturb my circles". The soldier then killed him.

1960: Baritone Leonard Warren collapsed on the stage of the New York Metropolitan Opera of a major stroke during a performance of La forza del destino. The last line he sang was "Morir? Tremenda cosa." ("To die? A tremendous thing.")

1971: Jerome Irving Rodale, an American pioneer of organic farming, died of a heart attack while being interviewed on The Dick Cavett Show. When he appeared to fall asleep, Cavett quipped "Are we boring you, Mr. Rodale?".[23] The show was never broadcast.

1975: On 24 March 1975 Alex Mitchell, a 50-year-old bricklayer from King's Lynn literally died laughing whilst watching an episode of The Goodies. According to his wife, who was a witness, Mitchell was unable to stop laughing whilst watching a sketch in the episode "Kung Fu Kapers" in which Tim Brooke-Taylor, dressed as a kilted Scotsman, used a set of Bagpipes to defend himself from a psychopathic Black Pudding in a demonstration of the Scottish martial art of "Hoots-Toot-ochaye." After twenty-five minutes of continuous laughter Mitchell finally slumped on the sofa and expired from heart failure.

Also see a list of inventors killed by their own inventions and the Darwin Awards.