Got an mp3 in an email from a friend the other day. As you can see above, Windows Media Player made an excellent visualization for the song, which is called Red Bird & the Meatheads.
it is about my birds. he would like me to tell you that the goofy voices are his singing what the birds yak. he does a good job. i am serious when i tell you that any resemblance to a parody of bob dylan is unintentional. it is magic, this song. i really believe that. he did it in twenty minutes & i– & this is me, remember, hyper-critical & knowledgeable about every perfect thing– i have rarely heard anything this accomplished done in even twenty hours or twenty days. me, i am yakking myself too much, so i will just send the mp3.
he would like me to tell you it is called “red bird & the meatheads.”
Now you know why China frightens me…and why “I, Robot” may not be so far off…
It’s mind boggling — almost incomprehensible for me.
Hugs…
Mind-boggling? Robots? What is this fellow yammering about?
Technology isn’t the Latest Big Thing. Technology is what we have been using for millennia to enhance our senses and increase our capabilities. Technology is a fancy way of saying “tools.” Any sufficiently advanced human can distinguish technology from witchcraft. Witchcraft? Burn the Witch! (Damn, burning witches again… apologies to my Wiccan friends.)
Globalization happened already. It’s done, it’s over. We’re now in the phase where we carefully adjust Americans’ salaries to match Chinese and Indian salaries – and lifestyles. If they do it right – well, you know, like boiling a frog slowly from cold water. Maybe they’ll find new career paths for everyone whose job description is now outsourced to India. Maybe we’ll learn to downsize our lifestyles to accommodate our globalized pay rates. Maybe the U.S. economy won’t collapse. We have to get all this done before China gets into full production.
You can get off your high horse and join the rest of the world, or you can outfit your army with bibles, flags and guns and send them out to stop human evolution. I’m more afraid of one ignorant, neurologically stagnant American politician than I am of all of Asia.
The US is very backward technologically. To put new technologies in place requires the regulatory equivalent of an Act of God. The people themselves are psychologically and neurologically resistant to change, so much so that a large percentage of Americans deny that something as basic as evolution can occur. At the personal level, this means most Americans believe that self-improvement is a fallacy. Well, I don’t accept that adults can’t learn.
The recent movie “I, Robot” is an abomination, intended only to reinforce the average American’s fear of innovation. Please read the book by Isaac Asimov, a prolific writer of the 20th century. The hard-wired personalities of the robots in it started with three laws that prevented them from harming a human or even, through inaction, allowing us to be harmed. Any attempt to break those laws resulted in a mechanical breakdown. I wish humans were wired this way.
Innovation… in parts of Asia you can walk up to a vending machine and call its number on your cell phone to get a soda or an instant-heating boxed meal. I can’t even get cellphone service at my sister’s house on the Delmarva peninsula, much less dial up a soda.
China is going to need about 10 times the oil we need when they get up to speed. That’s 10 times the pollution, 10 times the greenhouse gases. No, more than 10 times the pollution, as they don’t have strict air quality standards. The cloud of pollution over China is clearly visible on NASA satellite photos. We’ve know about Global Warming since the ’50s.
As larger purchasers, India and China will shape what products are available in the entire world. An example of this economic inevitability, the state of Texas is the largest textbook purchaser in the U.S and for that reason Texas creationists influence public education by asking for textbooks promoting their point of view. Every bookseller wants Texas as a customer – you stock what your best customer wants. These are then made available to all American schools. You can find a number of links on this topic on Constitution.org. I hope y’all can use chopsticks.
Why do we ignore problems instead of dealing with them? I bet you’ve heard at least one person say, “Don’t bring that into my universe” or “ERASE ERASE ERASE” – with a cute little crossing and recrossing the arms – to avoid talking about Global issues. Like a little kid putting his hands over his ears so that he can’t hear you asking him to take out the trash.
The video mentioned new books – how many books have you read this month? Not magazines, not graphic novels, but real paper and ink books? How about this year? Were any of them non-fiction?
I’m interested in what you really thought about the video. I thought it was trite. It’s rather startling to me that any citizen of the world could respond with anything other than “tell me something I don’t already know.”
I agree that public funds shouldn’t be used to create foot baths for the Muslims to use before their five-times-a-day prayers. I’m also against the use of public funds to install sexist urinals for males who are perfectly capable of peeing in the general vicinity of the toilet. :-/ We could kill two birds with one stone by installing troughs with running water like they have in some parts of the world. =:-o And where are the bidets?
That was humor, in case any stereotypically humor-challenged schizoaffectives or lesbians are reading this. (You dykes all know I’m bi, right?)
I’m also against the policy of the colleges and universities that I personally have attended of having a small chapel on campus for the Christians. If you have to pray every day, you know where it is. If you don’t, then a) you probably don’t worship with the other Christians who stop into the chapel every day, and b) you probably think you are somehow *entitled* to use publicly-funded college facilities for the purpose.
Have I failed to offend anyone yet? Ok, then, I’ll keep going.
The ACLU hasn’t gotten involved because the university, after public hearings on the topic, decided to use the student-funded college maintenance fund to include the foot baths in new construction, NOT public funding. We’re talking about new construction that includes urinals, baby-changing stations, and other accommodations in the unisex bathrooms, I might add. The Moslems were accidentally pulling the sinks away from the wall and splashing water on the floor, so the foot baths are about safety and saving money, NOT about encouraging heresy.
The students on campus are mostly ok with this, so why are a bunch of conservative think-tanks getting all huffy about it? I don’t feel that it is my business. You don’t like it, don’t wash your feet in the sink. The other Christians have to pee in there!
This was brought to my attention by a Catholic, of all people. A good Catholic education includes a lot of reading about other religions, unlike that of the Fundamentalists. Some of these people wouldn’t read at all if they weren’t pressured by their friends and family to read the bible. Simplistic.
I don’t see the Christians being prevented from praying. What I do see is the flat-earth Fundamentalists demanding that the rest of us learn their simplistic, literal interpretation of a text that was originally intended to simplify the facts of cosmology, geology and evolution for a Semitic tribe of uneducated wandering goat-herders. Simplistic.
There were great civilizations in nearby parts of the world at that time, civilizations whose religions quickly incorporated new discoveries in the temporal world, things like the ptolemiac model of the solar system – you know, that the earth rotates around the sun? Maybe you don’t…
You’d know more about it if the Christians didn’t burn down the library at Alexandria in the 4th century A.D., *pretending* it was a pagan temple. A millennium-long Dark Ages followed. Millenia later, in the 17th century A.D., Galileo was threatened with death if he didn’t recant similar heretic theories about the motion of the earth.
They’re up to their same old tricks in the U.S., apparently trying to create another thousand-year Dark Ages. Next they’ll be burning books.
Personally I think it’s time for every world religion to start policing its extremists. Extremists balance out their hate by cashing in on the good works of the majority of their fellow worshippers, using threats of damnation or worse. Now there’s a sin for you.
I have no problem if the student body at UMich wants to fund foot baths themselves. The alternative is to ban them from washing their feet before engaging in private prayer, and that’s xenophobic nonsense.
Take a giggly cheerleader. Give her a Cinderella driver’s license, an SUV and a cell phone. Then throw four more cheerleaders in the vehicle with her. What do you get? Well, moms and dads, you get a fiery crash.
My cell phone account gives me a complete list of all calls and text messages sent and received from the three phones on the account. The girl’s parents had to have a clue. I won’t even go into the utter foolishness of putting a new driver at the wheel of an large inertial mass. “We got it for safety,” they’ll tell you. Well, the safest vehicle is one that has an attentive driver.
Look what blew into my house. His name is Mr. Breeze, AKA Breezy, AKA Lil Boi.
This little boy blew into our backyard, and when attempts to locate his owner were unsuccessful we gave him to a local rescue organization, Kitty Colony in Jenkintown, PA. He kind of stuck in my head so after a couple of weeks we went back and adopted him.
If you are using IE 5.01 Service Pack 2 (SP2) or later and the Microsoft Office 2003 Web Components, you can play with this interactively by clicking on the flower. IE may give you a security warning. Apparently IE doesn’t trust Excel.
The equation is ampl + PM * SIN(petals * theta) ^ exp
Where
Petals is the number of petals in the lemniscate,
PM is +1 or -1,
ampl is a unit to add to the SIN function
and exp is an exponent
theta is the angle – you can’t change this.
What is particularly heinous about this crime is that the parents were using psych meds as punishment instead of teaching their 4-year-old how to behave. The end came when the little girl was physically ill and the parents drugged her to shut her up.
I think they both deserve to get the needle themselves.
Bad Behavior
Member of American Mensa, Ltd.
Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
Potential Threat To The Nation
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