❮❮prevnext❯❯

Random (possibly sophomoric) one man philosophical bullsessioning here:
I was listening to a podcast about the philosopher Derek Parfit and the Repugnant Conclusion. Now in its original form it's "For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living" but in the discussion I was listening to (and in most of the links I can google) folks freely replace "quality of life" and "worth living" with "happiness" - that seems to be common in the "definition" of philosophical utilitarianism

(I've heard of other similar "cranked up to 11" thought experiment paradoxes on maximizing happiness, like this smbc comic about how one in theory one INSANELY happy person could justify the misery of everyone else...)

But - like so many other things that try to operate in a reductionist way - considering "happiness" in an abstract, context free way strips it of meaning. "Happiness" should only be a goal if it's a metric of other worthy things going on! It is a byproduct of emergent properties of value, not an end unto itself. And there's a very simple (and ammenable to most folks intuitions) thought experiment to show that: it could be you could maximize your own happiness by staying coked to the gills on various drugs -- but few people would say that is a more worthy time of life than one filled with a more organic set of ups and downs.

Now, this is potentially a morally dangerous stance - you should be wary when anyone starts talking about "the worthy things of life", especially in the context of thought experiments about large populations. Like, I do believe in a universal measure of worth, a kind of absolute moral truth, but it has two important qualities: it's emergent (a property that comes out of interacting groups, not one handed down from outside our system) and it's uncertain - no one has a definite claim on the accuracy of any model of what is "True", and so any thought experiment that runs counter to common sense morality is deeply suspect.

---

---

---

as anyone who has investigated the Windows control panels can tell you, there's a lot of decades-old code in our systems. If people evolved like technology, you'd be 6,000 lizards, 30 chimps, and a couple Neanderthals all glued together with an anguished human face stretched across it as a "visual refresh."

In an experiment revealing the importance of having friendships, social psychologists have found that perceptions of task difficulty are significantly shaped by the proximity of a friend. In their experimental design, the researchers asked college students to stand at the base of a hill while carrying a weighted backpack and to estimate the steepness of a hill. Some participants stood next to close friends whom they had known a long time, some stood next to friends they had not known for long, and the rest stood alone during the exercise. The students who stood with friends gave significantly lower estimates of the steepness of the hill than those who stood alone. Furthermore, the longer the close friends had known each other, the less steep the hill appeared to the participants involved in the study. In other words, the world looks less difficult when standing next to a close friend.

One could criticize no-code for not offering the flexibility and nuance you can get by writing your own code, line by line. But the truth is, for all the hoopla about Silicon Valley's innovative genius, a huge number of apps don't do much more than awfully simple things. Seriously: Silicon Valley's main trick is just shoving things into a database and pulling them out again. I'm exaggerating, but only a bit.

Thompson is so right about the "trick". There's lots of details to get right - making sure people shove in the right stuff (UI) making sure the wrong people can't then pull out other people's stuff (security) ensuring lots of people can shove (scalability) and coaxing people to put the stuff in (UX) but 80-90% of everything is this database shoving.

That's also adjacent to a model I had to make to describe the priorities of some new-fangled systems for UI - there's been a strong tend towards "declarative" programming for making web apps - with an assumption that the best thing a UI toolkit could do is make it super easy to have the webpage instantly update itself to reflect the content of the data in the browser's memory - that way the programmer doesn't have to manipulate the page, just massage the data. It took me a while to realize that one reason I was slow to see the appeal is that I never thought the "in browser memory" mattered much - the stuff in your server's database is what really matters, and the presentation of it on the webpage to the user matters, but anything in between (like the data in the browser's memory) is just an artifact. RIP Dr. John - got to see him live in 2015 w/ Liz...

---

I was at a fight when a hockey game broke out. In the stands.

Don't ever change, Boston.

No, wait, I mean: please change, Boston. Hmm. Quiet. Maybe TOO quiet.

*SCREAMS*

Ahh, that's better.

---

Josh followed up with
Female gladiators were often topless and not in fancy armor, from Quora: Has there ever been truths removed from movies for being too unrealistic?

---

I'm currently re-reading "Consciousness Explained" by Daniel Dennett... it was a big influence when I first read it 15 years ago, and I cite it in So You're Going to Die. Anyway, here is a pretty good New Yorker piece about him and his point of view. Educational!

heh YKK makes the best zippers in the world. Seriously, there's at least even odds the zipper on your fly right now is YKK (it'll say right on the zipper pull) and the way when I do have trouble with a zipper, it's NEVER a YKK, is remarkable.

The company also has its own philosophy and assorted weirdness, almost like a little cult, and the opposite of Ayn Rand-ism...

Given the way capitalism has progressed, with the emphasis away from investment in value propositions to speculation and high frequency trading (with 'too big to fail' at the highest levels to bail the gamblers out), I find this idea hopeful. I find the end of life decisions of Chester Minitz Jr and Joan Nimitz very admirable and brave.

---

Amazing article on some intriguing interpretations of the long term economic climate. Life of compelled leisure might be kind of sort of ok, but getting their is going to be painful. It seems like there would be potential for all kinds of art and beauty, but there's reasonable suspicion that the unwashed masses aren't up for it.

---

That article linked to other thoughtful articles on Higher Education as a Bubble and the concept of Peak Capitalism. Hopefully I'm not too pollyanna in liking articles that say big disruptive changes are going to be happening, but it's not the gloom and doom for everyone some other pundits always are banging on about.

---

Actually, a fiction major was probably the best EVER preparation for marketing.

---

I was trying to quantify what seemed off about the masses Zoosk shows me, like vs OKCupid, and I realized: none of them are in glasses. It's like Zoosk doesn't know me at all.
--via Cracked's 5 Light-Hearted Movies With Dark Moral Implications. I just thought it was a pretty cool, cross-iconic image...

---

Life is like riding a bicycle - in order to keep your balance, you must keep moving.

---

http://yourbrainonecon.wordpress.com/2012/06/06/am-i-a-horrible-and-repulsive-person/ Interesting musing on political leanings and cosmopolitanism. I think most folk's political leanings are instinctive, and not as well thought out as this guy's... but also that the gut feelings of lefties tend to come for a more compassionate and empathetic place.

---

http://runningastartup.tumblr.com livin' the vida startup. Good use of reaction GIFs.

---

Man. Tank! Tank! Tank! -- I have been looking for a tank game for a long while. So I'm taking up Miller's 30 Day Drawing Challenge: Superheroes... the first week is setting up the basic team, here's mine.

I'd encourage anyone who ever doodles to give this a try! If nothing else, admire some of the cool work that's being put on the tumblr!

---

Hate the device lock-in implied by iMessage. The goal is Apple's world, we just live in it. Hope it's the next "Ping".

---

Realize that I have two non-overlapping camps of followees tweeting keynotes: E3 games and Apple. Mixed feelings not being in former group.

---

Every time I copy and paste an HTML attribute in Eclipse, it hourglasses for about 20 seconds. Rage building.

---

Ain't no party like a Turing party, 'cause a Turing party may or may not stop.

DALMATIONS:
"Hey look, the truck's stopping."
"Did they take us to the park this time?"
"No--it's a fire. Another horrible fire."

(from the New Yorker collection "Disquiet, Please") I laughed - the other ones in the link are worth reading too.

---

http://www.slate.com/id/2256074/ - on the best Soccer Ad ever - maybe the best sports ad ever?

---

Note to self: Mickey Rourke and Mickey Rooney are two different people. But it's (amazingly) the same guy in "9 1/2 weeks" and "Iron Man 2"

---

The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.

---

http://www.jimspancakes.com - one of the sweetest sites on the web, even before the syrup is added.

---

US Military Airfcraft that Never Quite Made It - some really nifty craft there, love the tiny jets.

---

I believe we can build a better world! Of course, it'll take a whole lot of rock, water & dirt. Also, not sure where to put it.

Stephen Fry says this is the most beautiful tweet

---

Random WWDC thoughts: "curated platform"? Gah, iFarmville? And wait- Farmville is this annoying after only being around for one year?

---

I may be drinking the kool-aid, but Apples "intersection of Liberal Arts and Technology" resonates with me (the old comp sci/english major)

---

So my biggest excitement re:iPhone 4 is the camera: hugely refreshing that Jobs says megapixels are great, but less important than photons-- wonder if I can finally retire Canon from pocket to bag.

---

Last iThought, now iPhone and iPad have appscreen wallpaper - interestingly (err, to me) the default Apple uses to show odd the iPhone is the same one I use on the iPad, that water droplet thing. Weird how there's a bit less homogeneity now, when you see a shot of an iDevice showing its app screen, say, it doesn't necessarily look quite like yours.

--From e-merl.com, my new favorite webcomic of the week. Other cool ones: Luna Lies, Who?, and While Falling

You know, now that I'm doing twitter updates, kisrael.com doesn't have quite as much as the importance/urgency as it once did.

It's still pretty important to me, but the daily ritual aspect doesn't loom as large.

That said, being a creature of habit (lest I make my old self look misguided... this kind of outlook sometimes makes growth and personal change difficult) I'll be keeping up my daily humanist practice here for the foreseeable future. There's a small chance I'll make it a decade and then knock it off, but only a small one.

---

Quote of the Moment

For more than ten years now, I've been tangled up with the problem of plastic bags stuck in trees. If I've learned anything from the experience, it's "Be careful what you notice." I was living in Brooklyn; I noticed the many plastic bags flapping by their handles from the high branches of trees, cheerful and confident and out of reach. Noticing led to pondering, pondering led to an invention: the bag snagger, a prong-and-hook device that, when attached to a long pole, removes bags and other debris from trees with satisfying efficiency. My friend Tim McClelland made the first working model in his jewelry studio on Broome Street, downtown. Possessing the tool, we of course had to use it; we immediately set off on a sort of harvest festival of bag snagging.

I saw this passage quoted in Charles Tilly's "Why?", a thing I read for my Science and Spirituality group; it's a longwinded categorical division of "reasons" in society: conventions (casual, prescriptive, general), codes (formal, prescriptive, general), stories (casual, descriptive, specific), and technical accounts (formal, descriptive, specific)... And that there is a new category of "super stories" that is essentially a technical account given in layman's terms and that's what we should all strive for. Or... something.

---

Link of the Moment
Sensible Units converts things. For example, I am 1.3 Alaskan moose antler spans tall and weight 12 or 13 men's shotputs.

---

I guess it's a mistake to be constantly assuming that Twitter stability must be "right around the corner"

---

dow down 400! jimminy frickin' crickets!

---

kirkjerk seems to be my main online identity at least for gaming sites. Should I even cling to "alien bill productions" for games I make?

---

1 877 kars 4 kids... long on catchy jingles, short on what they actually do with said kars.

---

nothing brings this gas thing home like driving an 18 mpg van to rockport with 3.99 gas way up, 4.09 down...

---

big brown is the 07-08 patriots of horses! I love how typing "*crickets*" or "*crickets chirping*" in a chat program or e-mail is an indicator of silence, usually awkward science, most often after a failed joke. It's like a Looney-Tunes driven mini-haiku.

---

Quote of the Moment

Love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance.

After reading "The Fountainhead", I think I see some echo of my theory that for a successful relationship both people need to quietly think that the other person is just a little out of their league.

---

Link of the Moment
The blog passive-aggressive notes from roommates, neighbors, coworkers and strangers offers photos of tangible slices of interpersonal conflict. Compelling!

---

Optical Illusion of the Moment

--Let your eye follow the missing dot around. (I've seen this frame-by-frame, and that's the "honest" view... one dot missing each frame.) Now focus your eye on the middle cross... Weird! Then hold it for a bit more... slightly weirder! This is one of the most effective illusions I've seen. (via 4chan.org)

EBaby is pending, finally!

Watched the movie "Drumline" last night. For the most part it's by the numbers young man from the streets triumphing over adversity stuff, but the drumline duel at the end is worth the price of admission, and the Deleted Scenes had an additional cadence round for each of the two lines.

I don't miss marching band so much, because it was a lot of work and a lot of pressure not to screw up. Still, it was a lot of camaraderie. My high school band had a bit of the same "play cool popular music vs educate the students and the masses" tension... or rather, it was cool the years I was there, but then, just like in the movie, when the previous second-in-command gets the helm, it's all classical and other pretentious stuff. Terrible, terrible move, save that for the damn Wind Ensemble and let the Marching Band jam.

Youtube.com has some drumline videos. I'd love to get a CD with the coolest, most bassdrum heavy cadences.

---

Diet of the Moment
One guy is trying to eat Nuthin' but Monkey Chow. A work in progress, with videos! The first one when he finds out what the stuff actually tastes like, and how bad the week is going to be is pretty funny. (thanks FoSO)

In other dieting news, I was starting to read this BoingBoing entry about a guy who lost 50 pounds and thought... huh, sounds like the Hacker's Diet... and sure enough it was. It looks like over the next week or so he'll be posting more and more simplified explanation of the diet (admittedly the Hacker's Diet webpage goes on and on about some topics, like computing weighted averages, when all most people really need is to use the provided tools.)

I've hit my first plateau the past few days, with (what I think is) weight loss less than the plus/minus error of my scale. Also last night with my UU Covenant Group, for the most part I ate pretty well (couscous, a few small drumsticks, green salad, and strawberries) but the calories are more guesswork than I like.

Now that I have some quantified estimates of calorie intake and strict daily weight measurement, I should be able to test if my theory that a day's eating's impact is felt a few days later is true.

The one thing about calorie monitoring is for the first time some conventional wisdom makes sense to me. If, on average (and I think that was the sticking point, because I think people's intake varies widely) you're eating 500 more calories than you burn, you're going to gain a pound a week. And while 2000-2200 seems like a lot of wiggle room to eat with, the day is long with a lot of opportunities to snack, and you're probably not noticing how often you're grabbing just a little something...

#1 side effect of early dieting: I can't stop thinking about, and sometimes boring others with, being on a diet. Video of the Moment
Huh...I guess this has already made the rounds, especially in Europe, but somehow I completely missed it...the Crazy Frog Axel F video (WARNING: contains tiny little froggy dingle.)...the core is that old Insanity Test sound of a guy imitating a 2-stroke engine, but this video takes it into all sorts of really strange and compelling places. Insanely entertaining.

I guess this is that ringtone that's a huge hit in Europe, though I'm not sure if the ringtone is just the guy or the guy plus the tune. Of course, using the same ringtone that everyone else is is a bit counter productive in the "is that my phone or yours?" sense.

---

Stuff on Kirk's Camera, Day 2
Here comes the bride...

Still coming...

But wait there's more!

Yeesh! Nothing succeeds like excess, I guess...sometimes it's really odd living across from a church.

---

Rant of the Moment
I was thinking about including a profanity-laced rant about the recent Supreme Court ruling against Medical Marijuana but I decided to try to keep down the cussing. So...jeez, what is up with this? This from the court who has bent over backwards three ways from Sunday to keep up states rights over that of the federal government? I mean heaven forfend some seriously ill people might have a little FUN along with managing their illness. Thank heavens we can keep our jails filled to the brim with bajillions of marijuana offenders. Such a good plan. I am filled with delight at my tax dollars, LOTS of them, being used to keep these guys where they belong...I'd hate to think of someone having a joint without the risk of the man laying the legal smackdown right on their head.

The Supreme Court. Idiots. Prudes. Puritanical megalomaniacs who will put their own twisted and bent sense of dour morality ahead of the good of the people, outright, unabashed two face hypocrites who will trumpet states rights right up to the point people might do something that might make them frown.

The feds. "Oh, jeez, if these AIDS and brain cancer patients start having a little weed....that's a slippery slope! There's no way we can enforce any drug law then!Anrachy! Dope fiends on every corner! Opium dens next to every McDonalds! Dogs and cats, living together!"

Astounding.

UPDATE: the move went well. And I'd say my back is..err...back to 85% or so. Many thanks to Nina, Ivan, Kayla, Lena and Bjorn who all helped me out this weekend.

So I'm moving...given that for a while my best bet for networking might be a trip down to the local starbucks, I thought I'd prepublish a day or two. Clear out my backlog a bit...technically my frontlog, but that's getting into nitty gritty techie details that nobody but me cares about. And barely even that.

• Hulver's site has some GREAT stuff, a lot of in-depth articles. Not super-frequently updated, but what's there is terrific (I think I posted the English Pubs thing I got from there.)
• Seeing videos of this flying model of the Enterprise (bottom of page) soar over the landscape awakened something from my childhood...
• This is a very mean video: grapes 1, woman 0. Seriously, I mean it; don't watch it unless you need a jolt of schadenfreude. But it is kind of funny.
• This key remapping utility for Windows didn't quite meet my hopes for my laptop (can't do that oddball "FN" key) but I was able to remap some function keys so that home/end/pgup/pgdn had their own keys rather than doubling up on the arrows.
• Indiana to start grading essays by computer. I find the high level of correlation between the human and machine graders a bit alarming.
• Rumsfeld, Hussein. Hussein, Rumsefeld. Photo from 1983, right when word on the Iraq's use of chemical wesapons was coming out.
• The Baltimore Kinetic Sculpture Race looks like a lot of fun.
• 300 Images from 1800 sites, fine small pixel work. Also, Pixelpalooza is an annual icon contest, though a lot of it is more cartoonish than iconic. I'm kind of proud of my sidebar icons myself, the most recent one being my little résumé:
• Great Onion Headline: "Bush To Iraqi Militants: 'Please Stop Bringing It On'"
• A Grand Unified Theory of Filesharing seemed right-on to me.
• I didn't end up reading "Houseselling for Dummies" much, but I did takes its advice of taking all the magnets off of my fridge...it had a nice clean look. I took down a crappy magnetic poetry kit Mo had left behind...you know, I really don't have a lot of respect for magnetic poetry. It never comes out well. Sometimes I make pictures out of the pieces, which is cool when you get the words reflecting whats being portrayed.
  
  However, the somewhat similar looking poem photos on this page are great.

Travel Photo of the Moment

Me, Mo, and wacky giant Lego thing, at Legoland Windsor, 2003.06.02.

---

Travel Wrapup of the Moment
So, just for my own future reference and to make some of you green with envy, here is what we did on our Summer Vacation:

---

Thursday
Fly into Frankfurt Airport, rip a Euro 50 clean in half. Figure out how to get a train to the city of Cochem. Take a skilift thing to top of a very tall hill, hike back down.

---

Friday
Take a ferry up the Mosel river (passing through a lock which explains why all the boats on that river were skinny) to Beilstein, where a ruined castle sits on top of a hill. Get a bit sunburned. Return to Cochem, climb up to its castle (These days were marked by lots of climbing up and down things, including the 5 or six floors to our hotel room) and manage to catch the last tour.

---

Saturday
Take the train to Aschaffenburg. Get met by Veronika's future brother-in-law-in-law Mark, though because of a later planning mixup we get a cab to hightail it at the last moment to Veronika's wedding. A terrific reception, where I have a bit much to drink. I only had one glass of wine, but it kept seeming to get refilled...

---

Sunday
Go to Veronika and Volker's for cakes and coffee with the family. Hang out with Anja and Jan and their two lively sons Tjark and Jorin. We eat pizza and once the other family is gone we play Pictionary.

---

Monday
Veronika and Volker have to pack for Mexico, plus we help them count and organize some of the money they received as wedding gifts. (The Germans are less shy about cash wedding gifts: sending cards, attaching them to plants as money trees I guess you'd say, and in V+V's case, embedding them in cinder blocks, symbolic of their plans to buy or build a home.) Then we drive into Frankfurt, eat at an African restaurant, and have desert and cocktails elsewhere.

---

Tuesday
Fly to London (after seeing V+V on their way to their Mexico honeymoon) via Ryanair, an incredibly inexpensive airline... $36 for both of us, including taxes and what not.

---

Wednesday
Wander London. Happen to catch some of the changing of the guard at Buckingham--amused to hear the band play "One Moment In Time", the song that dare not speak its name in high school (after an assembly where we had to repeat it about 5 times longer than we had planned.) We see Hamley's toystore and a number of other shops around Piccadilly Circus and Trocadero.

---

Thursday
Take the "Big Bus" tour (open roofed double decker) around London. Go to the Tower of London, take the tour by a "beefeater" yeoman guard, see the crown jewels. Then we take a ferry ride down the Thames.

---

Friday
Back to Westminster. Ride the London Eye, a giant "observation wheel" (ferris wheel, but more amazing than that, I'll do more on that later.) Saw some modern art at the Saatchi Gallery, including Damien Hirst's (in-?)famous stuff, and Richard Wilson's amazing waist-high perfectly reflective room of sump oil, "20:50".

---

Saturday
Go with my mom over the Millennium (or "Wobbly", based on what happened opening day) Bridge to the Tate Modern, a terrific collection of all types of modern art. Then to Covent Garden, I rode one of those odd "put your self in a gyroscope" contraptions.

---

Sunday
After a leisurely morning we take the train to IKEA. Man, Boston really needs one of these, it would totally kick Jordan Furniture's butt. Great inexpenive couches and chairs and everything, that we could only look and drool over. Fun time figuring out detours around Tram station, since there's a fire blocking the road and the line in East Croydon. In the evening we head out for a surprisingly dull Jack the Ripper tour. (We probably should have gone with the main writer guy, not be woo'd by the prospect of a smaller group with the other lady.)

---

Monday
My mom's anniversary gift to us is a trip to Legoland Windsor. Obviously geared a bit young, there was still cool stuff there. Mo and I did the Mindstorms workshop, made our ping pong ball carrier bots race.

---

Tuesday
Visit my mom at the Salvation Army's International HQ (temporarily housed at William Booth college while its building is being rebuilt near the Millennium Bridge.) We even get to shake hands with the General, the Salvation Army's equivalent of the Pope... (well, roughly speaking.) After lunch there we head to Parliament, wait in line to see the House of Commons (reasonably interesting talk about the National Health Service got more interesting when the opposition did a "Point of Order" asking "when is Blair going to explain this whole WMD coverup?" to which the unflappable answer from the Speaker of the House was "tomorrow, as scheduled") and the House of Lords (quite a bit drier.) Had a fancy dinner at The International restaurant by Trafalger Square.

---

Wednesday
Took the Evan Evans tour to Stonehenge and Bath. Saw the ancient Roman Baths and sampled the (rather blood tasting, thanks to the Iron) water there. Most people took it as a day trip but we were on the overnight tour, spent the evening at the very fine and amusingly named "Pratt's Hotel". That's where we also had a very good three course dinner.

---

Thursday
Explored Bath a bit more, and took the excellent free walking tour, run by volunteers. Lunched at a great Vegetarian restaurant. Took the bus back to London.

---

Friday
Actually, I'm writing this now. We're a bit weary and Mo has come down with a cold, so we'll probably have a very leisurely day, maybe I'll just get some "Take Away" (their term for "to go"/"take out") here in Beckenhem. Plans for dinner tonight, Italian chain called "Ask". Fly home tomorrow via Frankfurt.

---

Saturday Pre-Update
Grr, Lufthansa sucks...they rearranged our flight from Frankfurt so it leaves many hours earlier than our one from London arrives. We called them to get a new flight, so now instead of a reasonably relaxed midmorning bus ride to Heathrow, we have to have a cab pick us up at 3:15am. Grrrrrr. Oy. Feeling kind of woogy writing this, Bush's speech in the background (it's not the speech, I think the single agency idea is a good idea). The stuff that sets it off seems so detached from real life: the stock market sputtering, India getting ready to move in. Oh, and worried my project at work is biting off more than it can chew...

---

Link of the Moment
On a brighter note, there was an amazing interview on Salon with an author who thinks that the to a successful urban center is a core creative class. He says (and has done the research to get to this conclusion) a city needs 3 Ts: technology (a big technological base, associated with universities and tech investment), talent (have general aspects that appeal to that group) and tolerance (of diversity in general). It's why places like Austin have suceeded while Pittsburgh and Detroit are having more and more problems. Funny, and very true, excerpt:

"How do you choose a place to live and work?" and the answers just came out: Diversity, we want a place that's diverse, where there's different kinds of people on the street. Of course a job is important, but it isn't just "a" job: We need lots of jobs because we know now that "a" job isn't going to last long. We want a city to be creative, we want it to be exciting, we want it to have all kinds of amenities, we want it to have outdoor sports, extreme sports, rollerblading, cycling, art scene, music scene. Then we asked, "Do you do all that stuff?" and the answer was "No, we just want to know it's there."

Also, interestingly, he believes gay communties are kind of the "canary in the coalmine" for the creative economy.

---

Japanese Pop Culture of the Moment

Beer-chan loves beer so much!!! She looks young, but she is 20 years old. So, boys and girls! Don't drink it like her! You hear beer-chan saying "It's sooo good!" anywhere, anytime.

...I'm not making this up. Young boys and girls should take their cue from Beer Chan's younger relation, Chibi Beer Chan who is too young to drink, and can merely dance about with a beer glass on his (her?) head. Link of the Moment
How the United States Marine Corps Differs from Cults. Ok, ok, it makes some reasonable points, but the humor is in why this page needs to be up in the first place. (Admittedly not as funny as if it was hosted on the USMC site itself). It's like, if I made a webpage "Why Kirk Doesn't Have A Weird Fetish for Meter Maids Covered in Hershey's Syrup", it would get you wondering, wouldn't it?

---

Bible Quote of the Moment

If a bird's nest chance to be before thee in the way in any tree, or on the ground, whether they be young ones, or eggs, and the dam sitting upon the young, or upon the eggs, thou shalt not take the dam with the young: But thou shalt in any wise let the dam go, and take the young to thee; that it may be well with thee, and that thou mayest prolong thy days.

That just seems weird to me, instructions for how to deal with a bird's nest. And your supposed to take the kids? Doesn't seem very nice. Of course, the rest of this hymen-centric, anti-mixed-fabric chapter doesn't make much more sense even in a more modern translation.