Rants: Consider This…The Stupidest Exercise Machine You’ll Ever See
Sometimes you come upon something so ridiculous, so on-its-face laughably stupid, you just want to stop everything and enjoy. That’s what we did when we first saw this investors-demo video of SpeedFit, a new concept in exercise technology:The Mobile Treadmill…a treadmill designed specially to move/walk down the street while you’re treading.
( burbia.com )
Easily the stupidest thing I think I’ve ever seen.
In the wake of the absolutely disgraceful passage of Prop 8 in California, there’s been a lot of talk around the airwaves, internet, and water coolers about how to fix the situation. A popular solution I’ve seen is to banish legal “marriage” altogether, give everyone “civil unions,” and let churches decide what to bless as a “marriage” outside the legal forum. This sounds reasonable at first glance, but something about this bothers me quite a bit. First, it feels like a word game. Second, if we’re going to play word games, I have a much more interesting game to consider.
Words can have multiple meanings based on context. In this very realm of discussion, we already have a very good example: divorce. The word is used to refer to similar concepts in the legal and religious namespaces, but each actually treats them quite differently. Legally speaking, a “divorce” is the dissolution and resolution of a union between two married people. Once complete, from a legal perspective, the two are disentwined and more or less allowed to go on their merry - or marry - ways. Of course, there may be conditions tied to custody of children or continued joint ownership of assets that cannot be cleanly divided, but the root message here is that for most intents and purposes, the two are now considered individuals again, not a couple. And that’s it. Issues of moral impairment may play a role in how the divorce proceeds, but not really whether.
In the religious sphere, divorce can have a longer lasting effect on your personhood. In some faiths, divorce is outright disallowed and, even if one is legally divorced, the church may not recognize you as such. In others, they may recognize the divorce but not afford you all of the rights and privileges due other members of their community; they may not allow you to remarry, they may require you to undergo various rites before you are allowed sacraments of the faith, or have other penalties altogether. Ultimately, these factors are simply matters between you, your church, and your god.
So there, in this very sphere of discussion, we already have one term that means one thing in a legal context, yet something far different in a religious context.
The term “marriage” should work exactly the same. Whether you believe homosexuality is a mortal sin or a small fact of life, from the law’s perspective we are talking about two people who wish to pledge their lives, burdens, and bounties to each other. The law already makes no allowance for the race, religion, or creed of the applicants, it should make no allowance for the sex or sexuality of them either. And, just like some religions enforce different meanings for the term “divorce,” they should make their distinction about “marriage” the same way - internally, among their followers.
Astros expect LF Lee to be ready for spring training
The fractured left little finger that sidelined Houston Astros left fielder Carlos Lee for the final seven weeks of the season has healed, the team announced Tuesday.
Lee has to be part of the formula for any success next year. This is great news.
Many of us can reel off a list of the 20th century presidents and maybe some of their opponents. In cases like Ronald Reagan’s stunning near-sweep of the Electoral Votes, we may even know what the margin of victory was. But other than a few choice nuggets, I wasn’t really sure what the Electoral statistics looked like during the modern age. So, without further adieu…
| Year | Winner | Loser1 | Difference | Winning % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1900 | 292 | 155 | 137 | 65.32% |
| 1904 | 336 | 140 | 196 | 70.59% |
| 1908 | 321 | 162 | 159 | 66.46% |
| 1912 | 435 | 88 | 347 | 83.17% |
| 1916 | 277 | 254 | 23 | 52.17% |
| 1920 | 404 | 127 | 277 | 76.08% |
| 1924 | 382 | 136 | 246 | 73.75% |
| 1928 | 444 | 87 | 357 | 83.62% |
| 1932 | 472 | 59 | 413 | 88.89% |
| 1936 | 523 | 8 | 515 | 98.49% |
| 1940 | 449 | 82 | 367 | 84.56% |
| 1944 | 432 | 99 | 333 | 81.36% |
| 1948 | 303 | 228 | 75 | 57.06% |
| 1952 | 442 | 89 | 353 | 83.24% |
| 1956 | 457 | 73 | 384 | 86.23% |
| 1960 | 303 | 219 | 84 | 58.05% |
| 1964 | 486 | 52 | 434 | 90.33% |
| 1968 | 301 | 237 | 64 | 55.95% |
| 1972 | 520 | 18 | 502 | 96.65% |
| 1976 | 297 | 240 | 57 | 55.31% |
| 1980 | 489 | 49 | 440 | 90.89% |
| 1984 | 525 | 13 | 512 | 97.58% |
| 1988 | 426 | 112 | 314 | 79.18% |
| 1992 | 370 | 168 | 202 | 68.77% |
| 1996 | 379 | 159 | 220 | 70.45% |
| 2000 | 271 | 266 | 5 | 50.47% |
| 2004 | 286 | 251 | 35 | 53.26% |
| 2008 | 3642 | 173 | 191 | 67.78% |
I was a little surprised that Obama’s apparent 364 wasn’t better on the hierarchy of percentages; at a “mere” 67.78%, it places him at #19 out of 28 elections since 1900, more in line with Clinton’s 1992 victory and Taft’s in 1908.
1 In elections where more than 2 candidates received electoral votes, both are tallied under the “Loser” column.
2 This assumes NC does as it appears and falls to Obama.
( via electoral-vote.com )
As polling stands now, Barack Obama holds a 364-171 lead in the Electoral College; this would qualify as a landslide. Of course, many of those EVs are questionable or simply too close to actually call at this point. As you can see, FL, GA, IN, MO, MT, NC, and ND are effectively up-for-grabs.
These states constitute 85 EVs, and currently look to favor Obama 53-29 with ND’s 3 votes deadlocked.
Should McCain somehow, miraculously, swing all 85 of these for-grabs votes, he’d still lose 311 to 227.
Sexy Robocall Flogs ‘Green Republican,’ Flouts Law
“Mike Thompson’s been a baaad boy … we all said no to the bailout, but Thompson backed Bush, just like he did for the Patriot Act. Vote Yes (!) for Zane,” says the female voice on the call in a tone more appropriate for a phone sex line than a political advertisement.
o.O
Amazingly, Zane Starkewolf has acknowledged the call on his website and posted a WAV of the call.
And no, I don’t mean our beloved Commander in Chimp.
Welcome to RAID hell. Please leave your accordions at the door.
Under the knowledge that “RAID is not backup,” I’m upgrading our office infrastructure by adding a second RAID array as a backup. After all, the correct way to back up a 6TB array is with another 6TB array.
No, not mirrored. A second, independent array. Remember, any errors introduced into a mirrored setup are automagically and instantaneously propagated to both sets. You want two arrays, with one periodically backing up to the other. Maybe even with some sort of rsync-hardlink tomfoolery.
So anyway, my favored RAID card is the rather nice Highpoint RocketRAID 2522. It’s MiniSAS, supports eSATA port multipliers, and has decent management tools and robust open source drivers for Linux. I’ve been using one for quite some time now, but my main enclosure, an EnhanceTech R8-MS had the card maxed out and we needed to grow. Logically, I bought a second card.
Unfortunately, my server would not boot with two of these cards installed. On boot, I’d get the familiar RocketRAID BIOS screen and the disk scan would begin, but then it’d say OUT OF MEMORY in the top left and hang the machine. It took a little back and forth with Highpoint support, but we got it worked out.
The cards’ BIOS is not necessary for operation; it exists solely as one of the available management tools. Since I don’t manage the RAID using this tool, I could just disable it. This is completely undocumented, however. One must boot to DOS or Windows to run the correct firmware flasher, as well.
R:\> load -e 0=0 rr2522.v11
Adding the -e 0=0 apparently informs the flasher to disable the BIOS manager. After this, the server boots perfectly, sees both cards, all attached arrays, and the Linux management utilities allowed me to initialize the new disks and build my new array just fine.
I never thought I’d live to see the day I’d personally own 12TB of data storage.
