Get Cynical

From AstroBiology Magazine:

The Earth has a large moon, making it unique in the inner solar system. Mercury and Venus have no moons, and Mars has only two small asteroid-sized objects orbiting it. In this essay, the father of the SMART-1 lunar mission, Bernard Foing of the European Space Agency, looks at the effect the Moon has had on the Earth, and explores how different our world would be if we had no planetary companion. Would life have evolved differently, or even appeared on Earth without the Moon?

(via Science Fiction Brewed Fresh Daily)

From Rawstory which has vid from Fox News about the latest movement toward the eventual, if not already, police state.

News Corp. is reporting that firefighters are being asked by the Department of Homeland Security to spy inside people’s homes and businesses while in the line of duty of putting out fires.

From AutoBlog:

The Lamborghini Murcielago LP640 is a pretty incredible piece of machinery. A road car capable of speeds one would normally associate with an open-wheel racer will always be impressive, especially when you consider it’s laden with government-mandated safety equipment, plus niceties like a stereo and air conditioning. Only a fool would explore the car’s outer performance limits on public roadways, however. That’s best saved for a closed course, and if you can afford an LP640, you should be able to buy yourself some track time to see what it can really do.

The driver (and owner?) of the car in the video above was apparently too foolish to do that, and embarked on a quest to set the “world speed record” for an LP640 on Arizona public highways. Sure, the sound the car makes as it flies past static camera points at some 200 mph is nothing short of incredible, but the act itself is disturbing, because no matter how late at night this film was taken, there are other drivers out, and at 200 miles per hour, the margin for error is exactly zero. Make a mistake, and people are going to die.

My sister and her husband had to have their cat, Mr. Dixie, put to sleep last Friday. It seems that he had kidney failure although nobody is really positive on how that could have happened since it is unlikely that he got into anything poisonous and he was never fed any of the recalled cat food. He was an extremely sweet and friendly cat and I’m sorry that he died so young.

Only 7 crucifixes out of 100:

Offense to God (O)

An unholy demon, a witch/dragon, [Eph. 4:27] praising and praying to the false god Odin [Ex. 20:3], faith in false gods [Jer. 13:25] and evil power saturate the film as well. At one point, the king’s advisor, I think it was Unferth (John Malkovich), suggested they seek the assistance of the “Christian God, Jesus Christ” which the king dismissed as tripe. Unferth, the only “Christian”, was attacked by a flying demon and his family incinerated as a Cross and church were destroyed, the optics suggesting that Christians are useless puppet weaklings and God no more than one among many. My how “entertainment” mocks [Gal. 6:7]. And these are not to mention Beowulf (Ray Winstone) exchanging his soul for power and riches.

Murder/Suicide (M)

In one case Grendel murders one of Beowulf’s men by biting off and chewing the man’s head. Chewing, crunching and slurping are heard as the demon eats the man’s head. Grendel murders another man by crushing the man’s head between his hands. All in all, all of Beowulf’s men except one, as much as I could tell, are murdered by Grendel.

And there is a suicide. A fine element of content for the middle school age stratum. The king decides to murder himself by jumping off a high wall after passing on the kingdom … and the curse … to Beowulf.

Mamihlapinatapai:

Mamihlapinatapai (sometimes misspelled mamihlapinatapei) is a word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the “most succinct word”, and is considered one of the hardest words to translate. It describes a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start. This could perhaps be translated more succinctly as “eye-contact implying ‘after you…’”. A more literal approximation is “ending up mutually at a loss as to what to do about each other”.

Weird.

SUMMARY
During normal operation or in Safe mode, your computer may play “Fur Elise” or “It’s a Small, Small World” seemingly at random. This is an indication sent to the PC speaker from the computer’s BIOS that the CPU fan is failing or has failed, or that the power supply voltages have drifted out of tolerance. This is a design feature of a detection circuit and system BIOSes developed by Award/Unicore from 1997 on.

If this was a design feature, couldn’t they just just play a recording of Gates telling you that your CPU fan may have failed? And since when is “It’s a Small, Small World” considered classical music?

From The Independent:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was stabbed into the world’s consciousness three years ago. One wet afternoon in November 2004, her friend Theo van Gogh – a film-maker, and descendant of Vincent – left his house and was about to cycle off through Amsterdam. But a young Dutch-born Muslim called Mohammed Bouyeri was waiting for him – with a handgun and two sharpened butcher’s knives.

Wordlessly, he shot Van Gogh twice in the chest. Van Gogh howled: “Can’t we talk about this?” Bouyeri ignored his pleas and fired four more times. Then he pulled out a knife and slit Van Gogh’s throat with such strength that his head was almost severed from his body. He used the other knife to stab a five-page letter on to Van Gogh’s haemorrhaging corpse.

Ayaan explains: “The letter was addressed to me.” It said that Van Gogh had been “executed” for making a film with her that exposed the widespread abuse of Muslim women. Now, she would be “executed” too – for being an apostate.

She says that, even now, “every time I close my eyes, I see the murder, and I hear Theo pleading for his life. ‘Can’t we talk about this?’ he asked his killer. It was so Dutch, so sweet and innocent.” At the trial, Bouyeri spat at Van Gogh’s mother: “I don’t feel your pain. I don’t have any sympathy for you. I can’t feel for you because I think you’re a non-believer.”

This is the story of how a 25-year-old bogus asylum-seeker from Africa came to Europe in search of freedom – only to be nearly murdered here by a Dutchman, on the streets of Amsterdam, for speaking out against religion. The story opens in the blood-strewn streets of Somalia, and it closes amid the shiny white marble of Washington, DC – yet it also ends where it began: with Ayaan’s life in danger. This is the story of the refugee who rocked Islam.

(via Arbroath)