Month: August 2008

About those “clean” biofuels

Via NextBigFuture[*1] :

Using corn to make ethanol is really, really, really stupid.  The only reason to do it is to allow corn farmers and ethanol producers to push their snouts even more deeply into the Federal money trough and continue gobbling up tax money.

Corn-Ethanol subsidies need to end.  Now.

Posting will be light

I’ve got a few things going on, from family visits, to catching up on various tasks, to some software upgrades various places that need to be made.  I’ll try to post at least once a day, but this is by no means guaranteed.  Light posting might last through the rest of the month–it all depends on how everything shakes out.

Meat is . . . intelligence

So says this article from LiveScience[*1] :

About 2 million years ago, the human brain rapidly increased its mass until it was double the size[*2] of other primate brains.

“This happened because we started to eat better food, like eating more meat,” said researcher Philipp Khaitovich of the Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai.

Stay smart.  Eat meat.

Russia is not our friend

I think that much is certain, watching Russian forces move into the (breakaway) Georgian province of South Ossetia, and watching Russian air strikes hit in and around Georgian cities that are not South Ossetia.

These two paragraphs from the New York Times[*1] , no warmongering rag, should give everybody pause right now:

In Washington, American officials reacted with deepening alarm to Russia’s military activities on Sunday. Georgian troops had tried to disengage, but the Russians had not allowed them.

“The Georgians told them, ‘We’re done. Let us withdraw,” one American military official said. “But the Russians are not letting them withdraw. They are pursuing them, and people are seeing this.”

This is not anything like the American adventure in Iraq.  It’s eerily similar to the Sudetenland, 1938[*2] .

The free world will stand up to aggression now, or we will fight a bigger war, later.  I am not hopeful tonight that we will make the correct, difficult choice.  We shall see.

I’m 100% male

Or rather, my web browsing history is.

This site[*1] has a neat little button, hit it and it’ll tell you what percent male vs. female it thinks you are, by reading your web browser’s history file.  Go on, try it.  It won’t hurt.

(Although you poor sorry misguided Internet Explorer users might experience a delay.  Get with the program and use Firefox[*2] , already, like all the cool dudes and dudettes do.)

Another reason to hate those accursed Freecreditreport.com ads

New York Times, via Yahoo Finance[*1] and Instapundit[*2] :

But a couple of months later, Mr. Steele noticed the site had been charging his credit card. While he believed he had signed up for a free report, he had actually enrolled in a credit-monitoring service that cost $14.95 a month. He says he never expected that it would cost anything.

“It’s called FreeCreditReport.com,” he said. “It’s kind of easy to make that assumption. I didn’t see anything in the process of signing up that said, ‘Hey, if you don’t cancel in 30 days or whatever, you’re going to get charged.'”

BigRipOff.com is more like it, in my opinion.

As the article points out, if you want your annual free credit report mandated by Federal law, go to Annualcreditreport.com[*3] .  That one is The Real Thing.  Accept no substitutes.  Believe no ads, especially ones with guys singing insipidly insidiously catchy ditties.

Oh, and we also need to send the Starving Evil Whippet Dog Devil Ravening Pack the way of those responsible for the entire GEICO and Progressive Insurance ad campaigns, while we’re at it.

Over the Water and Back Again: A trip to Europe

Here is the tale of our trip to Europe, featuring two Transatlantic cruises (eastbound, then westbound).
I’m doing the syndication-trick of posting all ten parts of our tale, one post per day, through the magic of modern web site technology.  All ten parts have been posted, so this here post is more or less a table of contents.

So, here’s our travel tale of how we sailed across the Atlantic to Europe, spent a few days there, and sailed back:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10

Ship images from Wikipedia:

Royal Caribbean’s Voyager of the Seas[*1]
Cunard’s Queen Mary 2 [*2]

In case you’re wondering why I split it up like this . . . it’s to reduce the load-time.  I try to limit the pictures to ten or fewer per posting, to allow those with slow Internet connections (such as, for instance, those on cruise ships at sea, don’t cha know) to read the story without waiting forever and a day for the darn thing to load.