The amazing Jeopardy phenom, Ken Jennings, has finally lost. Ken Jennings lost today to Nancy Zerg from California. I never watched him work, but I heard he was simply amazing. Here are a few stats for your amusement.
Holy crap.
Almost half of Americans believe God created humans 10,000 years ago [via]. My favorite quote from this little survey is the following.
Forty-five percent of Americans also believe that God created human beings pretty much in their present form about 10,000 years ago. A third of Americans are biblical literalists who believe that the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word.
Hey, all you “biblical literalists” I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
Looks like I’m going to have to change the photo in my header. After much prodding from Lauren and the thought of wearing glasses in my wedding photos, I decided to break down and start wearing contact lenses.
There are a few things that I like about contacts over regular glasses.
And of course there are a few things I hate about contacts.
At any rate, I’m slowly getting used to them. Though I think my vision could be clearer at this point. And, one last point, Desperate Housewives kicks ass.
After spending two weeks limping around on a gimp foot I finally broke down and went into the emergency room. This is no small feat considering I don’t have health insurance. Lauren was making fun of me the entire time. I’m a big wuss, etc.
Well, guess what? I have a stress fracture in my foot. SO THERE LAUREN! As a result I’m walking around in this amazingly NOT COOL booty. It is supposed to keep my foot from bending and putting stress on the broken bone. I get to walk around in this thing for a full 6 weeks.
What amazed me so much was how technically advanced the hospital was. I got a few x-rays and before I was wheeled back into the waiting room I saw the doctor treating me looking at my x-rays on a monitor. The most amazing part was that I was in and out of the emergency room in less than two hours. Of course, they told me the bill was in the mail. Scary.
I’m finally back from my trip to OSU. The PHP training went well, though I do think some of the more advanced topics went over some of the students heads. However, all of them said they came away with some things though could use to instantly improve their applications, so it wasn’t all in vain.
While I was down there I was able to visit with an old fraternity brother and roommate of mine as well as my soon-to-be best man for my wedding. Many beers were drank and more than a few chicken wings met their doom.
Before I wrap things up here I’d like to point out a few things that I hate about flying and being in airports. Below is a small list of things that annoyed the hell out of me on this recent trip.
Ahhh. I feel better now.
Jesus speaks through the Republicans
I hope the election of George W. Bush is seen as a wake-up call to all the liberal Democrats who oppose God’s will.
It is His doing that George W. Bush is still our president. Millions of born-again Christians helped win this election through our prayers and votes. Jesus speaks through the Republicans.
The Democrats will not be able to win elections until they renounce their sinful ways and stop encouraging abortions, gayness, and trying to take away our guns.
Earl Balboa
I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried.
I just read what is quickly becoming an Internet sensation, fuckthesouth.com. It’s got some strong language (ie. lots of use of “fuck”), but the message is clear and VERY funny. Below I’ve listed some of the points the site makes, which are great.
I found the numbers really funny. It looks like some people in red states need to do some real soul searching. I think the tax dollars are really interesting. Republicans get all nazi about taxes, but when it comes to handouts from “high” taxes they’re all for it. The “moral values” argument is pretty funny too, since the south’s and other red states have much higher divorce rates than their hippy counterparts.
In other words, if you don’t like our high taxes then don’t use them and if you think marriage is something you should protect then start with your own home before you start telling everyone else how marriage should be.
Anyone who has ever had a political science class knows that the United States not a Democracy, but really a Republic. In a true Democracy when a law is proposed everyone in the country would vote on it, instead of representatives.
I think that, as technology progresses, the ability to have a true Democracy could be possible. You could log in daily to “My Democracy” and view proposed bills/laws and then vote on them from the comfort of your home. Would everyone participate? No, but if only a few thousand from around the country participated it would have to be more representative than the current system.
We’d still have a leader and a judicial branch, but the legisliative branch would be the entire US public. It would be interesting, to say the least. For now, I’d take the ability to simply vote on federal laws directly (which many states do in the form of “propositions”).
I’ve created a new piece of code that allows people to grep through their database tables and fields. I regularily work on databases with more than 50 tables in the database. Each table has anywhere from two to twenty fields in them. To make things even more of a pain in the ass sometimes the fields are mispelled or do not match up.
As a result I created mysql_grep.php. You can download it from my newly created source directory. Check back often for more code/utilities created by me. Below is an example use of mysql_grep.php
jstump@zebulon:~$ php -q bin/mysql_grep.php -d joestump_net -e photo
The following fields match "photo"
+-> photos_favorites
+-> photoID
+-> photos_images
+-> photoID
The following tables match "photo"
+-> photos_albums
+-> photos_favorites
+-> photos_images
The code does not support connecting to hosts other than localhost nor does it support changing sockets/ports. Furthermore, the code requires PEAR’s DB. And, finally, the expressions are passed directly to PHP’s ereg(). This means you should be able to pass "^[A-Z]" as an expression (remember to quote your complex expressions).
Well, I just got back from voting. I think everyone probably knows who I voted for and if you’re thinking I wasted my vote I think you wasted yours on Kerry (or Bush). At any rate, I have a few observations on the whole voting process.
The next problem I see with the entire voting process is that lawyers are becoming more and more involved in the process. If we have a repeat of last year’s debacle where the man with the majority of the votes loses the election in the courts, we’re going to have a serious problem on our hands. Voters will become disenfranchised with the process (why vote if the courts decide in the end?). Other countries will begin to question the stability of our election process (the UN, by the way, is overseeing our election this year – something usually reserved for third world countries experiencing their first elections). In other words, it’ll be a huge clusterfuck. I, of course, have an opinion on how things could be fixed.
I think we need to get away from the thought that our “Democracy” (it’s, by definition, actually a Republic) is perfect. It has known flaws and, luckily, our framers have given us avenues to fix those flaws. In time, I hope they are fixed. If not we could be in for some major problems in the very near future.