Must be on the Left Coast. Sex bias? Nope. Race bias? Nope. Age bias? Check.
Yep. Left Coast, all right. The cop was definitely no Boy Scout.
Linked to Adam’s “New Skin”
Computer Gives Correct Answers When Switched “Off”
(Hmmm, that sounds like some computers I know. You know what I mean: they work better when not even turned on.)
That’s what this computer experiment demonstrated: a quantum computer that delivered correct answers 1/3 of the time… when no data was input. What sounds like a trip to Madam Woowoo’s Voodoo Parlor and Seance Emporiumis really quite something else.
Physicists have long known that quantum computers have the potential to race through calculations trillions of times as fast as ordinary computers do. Now, it seems that those machines may not have to calculate at all to deliver answers.
While it might appear to be intuitive that the seemingly random nature of quantum mechanics would be able to return accurate calculations only half the time, at best, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign have built a simple quantum computer that performs simple database searches. The intriguing thing is that,
… about a third of the time that, with no photon going into the computer, and thus no search, the computer had yielded the correct answer to the question: Was there a mismatch between the incoming photon and the chosen database location?
Hmmm. That’s better than I used to do with “always bet the leading apprentice jockey to show”…
“Dear John… ” /Open Post
Tuesday’s Open post. Link to this post and track back. More info below the Dear John Letter.
Dear John,
I haven’t heard from you recently. I’ve been wondering where we are—or even if there is a “we” any more. I don’t think this relationship has a chance—if it ever did. It’s not because yuou like “long walks on the beach,” metrosexual men and butch sugar mommies. Nor is it because you like a double-grande-cashew-chicken-ice-cream-mocha-decaf-latte-with-a twist (THAT’S perverted, John!) instead of coffee, Foosball and fake an interest in Samurai Champloo. No, John, it’s because I just can’t take another Christmas in Cambodia, you lying rat bastard.
Where’re the records, Jean Fraud?
As I said in the beginning, link to this post and track back, and note the other fine blogs featuring linkfests at Linkfest Haven.
Posting to Dear John via The Conservative Cat (does Ferdy have a “thing” for mailmen? Only if they’re delivering cheese, probably), Blue Star Chronicles and The Liberal Wrong Wing
The Perfect Blogpost
I can recall a time when—especially back during college days—I would dream a great chess game, some calculus equations or the answer to a particular melodic or harmonic challenge. I’d awaken and sometimes a bit of it would stick with me, sometimes not.
The perfect blogpost, dreamed, didn’t stay with me on waking this morning.
*sigh*
So, I guess you’ll just have to read it in my dreams.
(If you wanna hear something not quite halfway between Louis Armstrong and the typical barbershop quartet rendition of “I’ll See You in My Dreams” here’s a sample clip of Kit Stewart on the song. Not bad, but not Satchmo. Like the sax, though. CLICK the link in the previous sentence to hear more material by this performer.)
Submitting my dreams for analysis to Dr. Basil.
Monday: Guard the Borders/Open Post
This is both a Guard the Borders Blogburst post and Monday’s Open Post. Link here and track back—and seriously consider sending the fax suggested in the post below!
From Heidi, of Euphoric Reality:
Monday, April 10, has been dubbed by pro-illegal activists as the National Day of Action for Immigrant Justice. After two weeks of both large-scale and ad hoc protests, they are trying to bring it all together before their big Walk Out on May 1st.
There are more protests scheduled around the nation – more than 100 have been registered at www.april10.org. Find out what’s going on in your town or city – you’d be surprised by some of the locales of the organized protests.
While the rest of America goes on with making a living and having a life, these rallies could very easily be fizzling out or, on the other hand, gaining momentum and proliferating. (Personally, I’m wondering just how many days of work and school these people can skip before it starts to hurt.) Either way, Americans want to know what is being said and done by these interlopers at the rallies. We must keep an eye on things, because our faint-of-heart senators won’t. They are on an ill-deserved two week vacation, after all.
Several members of the Guard the Borders Blogburst are planning to observe the rallies in their areas and report back with photos, quotes, and/or more. So this edition of the Blogburst will be presented in two parts; today’s notice and a follow-up on Tuesday with what we glean from various rallies across the nation. Stay tuned for that.
In the meantime, let’s make sure that our senators have a stack of NO AMNESTY faxes and phone messages when they get back from vacation. They still have a lot of debating to do, and we need to be sure that they are absolutely clear on where we, as Americans, stand on the issue.
To send in a free FAX, go to NumbersUSA. Or click here for all the contact information for your congressional representatives.
This has been a production of the Guard the Borders Blogburst. It was started by Euphoric Reality, and serves to keep immigration issues in the forefront of our minds as we’re going about our daily lives and continuing to fight the war on terror. If you are concerned with the trend of illegal immigration facing our country, join our blogburst! Just send an email with your blog name and url to euphoricrealitynet at gmail dot com.
This is an open trackbacks post. Link here and track back. Also note the other fine blogs featuring linkfests at Linkfest Haven.
About that “latest” Gnostic “gospel”…
UPDATE: The best fisking of the breathless presentation of The G of J by those who want to radically deconstruct Christianity as “important” can be found here. Do NOT miss this one! 😉
I hate to rain on the parade of (historically, culturally, literarily) subliterate and/or disingenuous, but The Gospel of Judas is not news. OK, I lied. I don’t hate to rain on that parade.
For the past 65 years or so, every now and then another obscure “gospel” of somebody or other written in the heyday of Gnosticism surfaces. Some are more interesting or better-written fiction than others. Fiction? Well, yes. Each of them purport to be written by people who knew the Nazarene face-to-face. And each of them reveal themselves, through both external physical and historical evidence/provenance and through internal textual evidence, to have been manufactured two to three centuries after the Carpenter walked the earth.
The Gospels of the Canon, however, were all accepted as first, or in the case of Luke’s Gospel, second-hand (as in testimony taken from first-hand witnesses and recorded by Luke) direct eyewitness testimony recordings. There were other criteria, but none of the later fictitious works of the gnostics passed even this simple first-order test.
And the texts of the Gnostic “gospels” all reveal another thing: they are different to the gnostic writings of earlier centuries—long before the time of Christ—only in their appropriation of Christian trappings to clothe their tired old mysticism, which had been around (though not all that successfully) since post-Cyrus Babylonian syncretism.
Read the so-called “Gospel of Judas” for yourself(pdf file linked). If you have even the foggiest grasp of the middle eastern cultures/history of 500 B.C. to 500 A.D. and of the history of the Christian church during its first few centuries, the thing reverals itself as pure fiction—and not particularly well-written fiction at that. The first thing that sprang to mind when I read the thing was, “If ‘the original’ of which this is imagined to be a copy was written in the second century, why wasn’t this in wide circulation during the broadest gnostic movements of the second century? Why didn’t Marcion and others of his ilk quote the thing? Surely it would have provided great support for their gnostic teachings!”
But it was not quoted by other gnostics (as far as I can recall). Not in the second century when “the original” is supposed to have been written and not since. This “copy” is unique, sui generis, as it were (apart from its tiresome spouting of the same old, same old gnostic line).
The thing first surfaced in the 1970s and has been alternately circulating and “moldering in a bank box”¹; for the past thirty years or so. The NYT and other Mass Media Podpeople’s outlets decided to make a big splash during Lent/Easter season for reasons known only to the editors of these rags, but the media hype and distortions follow the same old Mass Media Podpeople’s antipathy to the Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John…
Do read the thing, if you have the background in the history and culture the thing was written in. Otherwise, you could be easily misled by the breathless cries of the idiots (or deliberate liars who forsake all intellectual honesty to pursue whatever agenda they value other than truth) who view (or proclaim) this as an important discovery… Yeh: important on the order of Dan Brown’s insipid lil conspiracy tale, “The DaVinci Code.”
Well, I certainly have better things to occupy myself with on Palm Sunday.
For example, here’s an excerpt of the lyrics to Twila Paris’ “Lamb of God”—something no gnostic could honestly sing. The mp3 file below is a lower quality sample from the streamed audio freely available from Jennifer Ramsey’s Still Waters CD. Do visit her site and consider purchasing a copy. All the cuts are good. (Heard any good Gnostic music recently? I didn’t think so… )
Your only Son No sin to hide
But You have sent Him from Your side
To walk upon this guilty sod
And to become the Lamb of GodYour gift of Love They crucified
They laughed and scorned him as he died
The humble King They named a fraud
And sacrificed the Lamb of GodChorus:
Oh Lamb of God, Sweet lamb of God
I love the Holy Lamb of God
Oh wash me in His precious Blood
My Jesus Christ the Lamb of God
OK, so this wasn’t an April Fools joke
I heard about this but didn’t want to comment. Still…
Has me flabbergasted. No way in the world—no matter how much makeup and “appliances” they add—can anyone make Paris Hilton as good-looking as Mother Theresa…
I wanna know if Ferdy can puzzle that one out… It’d give the cat a break from breaking spammers, at least.
Once again, with feeling
Trying out a “new” coffee this a.m. Gave my Wonder Woman a sip from my cup. She got this strange moue on her face and in a gruff voice, “Manly-man coffee!”
*heh*
Yeh, well, it has body.
Midi File:
Mp3 File (Courtesy of the Morning Coffee and Afternoon Tea Singers):
Go ahead; sing along. 🙂
(This mp3 is a lower-sampling-rate version of trhe one at the Morning Coffee and Afternoon Tea link above.)
Oh, and here’s another verse, not included in the verses above:
O Blessed Holy Caffeine Tree,
In gratitude I sing of thee,
For all the ways you give life zest,
O Caffeine Tree, you are the best!
N.B.–The graphic above has a word-switch in the second verse that I need to get around to editing. First one to spot it gets two brownie points, redeemable for absolutely nothing but a pat on the back and a hearty “Attaboy/girl!”
🙂
Brewing up a storm at The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns (where y’all can wish Sam a belated “Happy Birthday”) and at Blue Star Chronicles, where Beth reminds us: Never Forget!
Punch it up
Here’s a punch recipe my Wonder Woman glommed onto at a teacher luncheon, slightly edited with a third world county “flavor”:
Ingredients:
3oz package Jello (sugared or artificially sweetened, your choice)
One or two 2-litre bottle of Sprite (the pop, not some fairy, OK?)
[N.B. the recipe I was handed had no amounts for the pop]Method:
Dissolve the Jello (strawberry-banana or your choice) in 2C boiling water as per package directions.
Add 1 can (size not given–assume large) Dole Pineapple juice (or better if you have a fav)
1 can water equal to pineapple juice
[N.B.–I’d have a can of crushed or chunk pineapple handy for later if it were me]
Stir. Freeze for 48 hrs. Thaw three hours and chunk it up with a large fork.
Serve in punch bowl with Sprite. [Add pineapple chunks or slices if you want–I would.]
I imagine this would work as well served from a pitcher on a hot summer’s evening as an accompaniment to a barbeque meal on the deck.
Sure it’s funny, but sad… and frightening, too
Woody (Woody’s News & Views) has a video posted that is another nail in the coffin of Prisons for Kids.