The novel I'm finishing up involves a backdrop with taikonauts and a manned Chinese Moon shot. Nice to know my sci-fi is closer to sci-fact, if off by a few years.

USAA is not FDIC insured, which I just discovered. Good thing my wife and I just moved all our money there... oh well. I was tired of living under a roof anyway. Time to go find a bindle that doesn't clash with my jacket.

This would be great for academic libraries as well. We have to pay for a third party service in order to get cover images in our catalog. This would remove the need for that service as we could just set up a bit of java script on our library server to grab these images.

what was so offensive to the Xtians in the regular Guitar Hero game that created the demand for THIS version?

I'm guessing it has something to do with the fact that to win the game, you play Devil Went Down to Georgia against a (very cartoonish) Satan.

A lot of Christians are overly literal about interpretations of Satan.

But yeah, Xtian pop-culture: there's nothing it can't make suck.

My last name is Kisser and facebook wouldn't let me register. They liked my wife though, whose last name is hyphenated-Kisser.

Droo31 @37 said: There may well be a range of devotion, but 83 percent believe in Jesus Christ and his divinity—so they are all whackjobs apparently.

Reality is not democratic, nor is it malleable to a majority consensus. You don't get to pick and choose which physical properties of the universe to follow and which to ignore. People are free to believe what they want, but they are not exempt from criticism when those beliefs are not just wrong but endanger others, as do the belief in demons and exorcism.

It'd be bad enough if Bobby Jendel were just a hick preacher mumbling incantations to a clapboard shack full of yokels, but he's the Governor of Louisiana. His beliefs endanger others because they are unfounded, unverifiable and in numerous documented cases, similar beliefs have led to people being harmed or killed. Just because a large percentage of the population share his beliefs in some vague fashion (because we all know that large groups have homogeneous world views) doesn't make him right. it just makes lots of people wrong.

Hiding dangerous ideas behind group consensus is how tragedies happen.

I wish that people pretending to have perpetual motion machines would get the same treatment here.

When they run for public office, they will. Until then, pointing and laughing is good enough.

People who believe in medieval superstitions don't belong in the Governor's mansion, let alone the VPs house or the White House, and for the same reasons we don't need witchdoctors or advocates for leaching and bloodletting as Surgeon General.

People who believe things that are demonstratively false about reality should be kept out of positions of power. If that makes me intolerant, then perhaps you should go pray about it to whatever invisible ghost you believe in. Maybe you'll get lucky and His magic telepathy will be on. If you pray hard enough maybe He'll cast a spell to change my mind. Hold your breath. I hear that helps.

Look, I had just spent my last bit of cash on AIDS brownies and Hepatitis's juice. I'm not made of money!

That is truly a wonderful cover, Bravo!

We're about two election cycles away from snake handlers and fortune tellers running the country. I'm sure that will help when we're up to our eyeballs in raw sewage and crumbling bridges.

Is there some rational for making the Linux versions of the Asus machines with half the storage capacity of the Windows version? What's to stop me from buying the Windows version and then installing Ubuntu (or some other flavor of Linux)? Is it just Asus playing to the Windows crowd (subquestion: anyone have a vin diagram showing overlap between the BDSM community and voluntary Windows users?) or is there some obvious tech issue that I'm just not aware of?

What's the point of an MP# player without a headphone jack? or is this one of those "If you build it, they will come" moves, where it only works on SONY brand bluetooth ear buds? either way, silly.

Honestly, sasquatch, were they to exist, would be boring. It's just a big ape. But that is a raccoon riding a pig, people. That's interesting.

It's good to know that after seven years and billions of dollars spent, our agencies are now fully capable of catching every trainspotter, curious tourist and ferry enthusiast that crosses their path. Bravo.

Clearly the desk smashing was some time ago, as actions in this vein today would have got him a one way ticket, all expenses paid, to a room adjacent to a "hot tub" in Kazakhstan.

Blackwater also hires former death squad members form Chile and other South American countries. You know, the kind of guys who like to kill nuns for a laugh. But I'm sure they're good people, once they wash the blood and gore off their grinning faces.

I like how the second one pulls his bike aside and waits for traffic to subside.

The irony is that getting carved doesn't necessarily dismiss his claims as mentioned in the item.

Well sure, the attacker had his eyes closed. Who could have read his mind then?

Hope old Rup is doing alright.

JamesGyre, reading over your comments, I'm just floored. You have such an open mind, it's a wonder your brain hasn't leaked out your nose.

Remote Viewing is third degree hokum.

Statistically, it's as likely to produce the same results as simple guessing. The CIA spent decades trying to see if there was anythings to it. What they discovered, after thirty years and who knows how many millions of taxpayer dollars, was that people sitting in a room in Langley trying to remotely view a Russian Nuclear Power Plant were startled to discover that it contained... Russian Nuclear reactors.

Being able to guess the details of a room is not occult or mysterious. It's simple extrapolation form cultural clues. If your a spy conducting a remote viewing test and go looking for imaginary terrorists in a secret bunker, guess what you'll find? That's right, unicorns.

Your friend was able to "see" your room so well because he's your friend and knows you and your tastes. You probably told him details previously which you forgot you told him. Your remote viewing experience was nothing more occult than the sort of Cold Reading psychics have been scamming people with for ages. Only, since he's your friend, it was more of a Warm Reading. And since he's your friend, he didn't send you a bill.

Though someone who pays money to take a Shamanism class sounds like he's on the wrong end of an entirely different and far more common scam.

I realize that I'm wasting my time. But damn it, someone on the Internet is wrong!

...real occult knowledge becomes (through science) obvious truth.

Sometimes, yes. At which point, the books that detail this information are moved to religion, psychology, etc., because the information contained in them is no longer occult (hidden).

Hidden information cannot be cataloged. It's really that simple. Cataloging is not an exact science but it is based on empirical, discernible qualities. There's plenty of wiggle room in determining what those qualities are for any given item. As a Catalog librarian, I deal with the fuzziness of classification schema all the live long day.

But "Occult" is not a meaningful classifier. At best, it's a popular genre term. Libraries don't arrange books based on genre terms or tags (we can have a debate some other time as to whether they should and what the benefits of doing so would be). Book stores sometimes do but, as noted above by many, book stores are notoriously disorganized. .

The Unusual Suspect @ #5:

Niven is no Swift.

And trying to backpeddle a slur as satire is such a stinker, even Jerry Pournelle could smell it.

That's probably the worst thing to do to a book, ever. It strains the spine and can even separate it. What, bookmarks are too old fashioned now we need to use furniture to mark our place?

Sweet! The library I work at is part of a group that shares duplicate issues with one another, so we may be getting some of their overlap.

The George Washington Carver of fungi, cool!

A third of the world's population can't get potable water but we come up with something that not only tastes like you sucked it through a hose connected to a sewage main, but can make you obese, induce headaches and in large enough doses, contributes to the development of diabetes. God Bless The USA!

I love how back in the fifties everyone thought the future would eb designed by Rube Goldburg. Is there a hamster wheel running the breathing pump?

#2 posted by dbarak:

I take exception to classifying all the staff at Gitmo as criminals.

I take exception to turning my childhood home into a gulag.

I lived in GTMO for three years in the mid 1980's when it was a training base for the Navy. My father worked for DoD and took a promotion there. From the time I was 8 until just two days after my 11th birthday, I ran around with friends and played in what is now a detention center for Afghan taxi drivers who were turned in for the money, Canadian citizens with the wrong name and teenaged terrorists.

Imagine hearing nightly on the news about how someone was tortured in your childhood home and then try and defend these monsters. No one forces our soldiers to torture. They do it because our leaders have no empathy, human decency or scruples and because they can. And some of them like it.

I may go see this movie just so i can try and laugh at the sorry state my country is in. Humor and satire are weapons too, ones that don't hurt anyone.

Caslon is my favorite for display text but nothing beats Baskerville for good solid block of text. It's strong, simple, elegant and eye pleasing without being too showy. Garmond is nice as well but completely superfluous if you have Baskerville at hand. I even changed my open office preferences and set Baskerville as my default font instead of the horrible excretion that is Times New Roman.

An aside: can anyone explain to me why the publishing industry still mandates Courier as the font for manuscripts? If I were an editor, I'd rather stick needle sin my eyes, monospaced or not.

Oh I love when we receive a shipment back form the bindery! Rows of color coded books in unicolor hard bindings are so... solid. They are the bricks that the literary world is built of.

Becoming a librarian only made me love books more. Hell, I sometimes buy a McSweeney's title just for the design of it (and only ht design since it's certainly not for the limp prose inside).

The majority of people refuse to take Propaganda seriously.

Because in most people's minds, propaganda is what other, bad countries do to misinform. Ours is News, which is real, verifiable and trustworthy. Katie Curic says it, so it must be true or else she wouldn't be on the nightly news, would she? She'd get booted off like that nogoodnik, Dan Rather.