Gneu.org

Penn & Teller on The First Amendment

Give this a once over, you may find some interesting topics brought up.

What is god?

Addressing the god of the gaps issue, TheAmazingAtheist (TAA) has posted a question video as bait for the faith having to see if they have anything valid to explain the purpose of god. True to form, VenomFangX has bitten down, almost as a dog does a chew toy, but unfortunately… he has totally missed the boat.

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Children and the morality of teaching them about racism

A couple updates have come.

Firstly, i completed my piece on racial education being taught to children, which is available like all of the rest of the pieces i have written - in the writings/ramblings section of the site. It was a tough piece to flesh out but im pretty confident i covered the argument in a fair format.

And secondly, certainly not the least amazing, I have updated my WP Plugin - Video Bracket Tags - to be able to be configured site wide. Things are much better explained on the page itself, so please dont take my brief message here as the only information. Consult the release page itself and let me know what you guys think. Regular expressions are gone and i have added the option page.

Phoenix has landed…

Sure its amazing to believe that we have such control and fine tuned science to be able to achieve such things, but … did you know that the probes were watching too?

Millions of miles away from the reach of our human arms we have probes and robotics that are interacting in order to better provide us with information about foreign worlds.

Although not entirely autonomous, it is certainly amazing.

Code Example #3 - PHP SQL Connection Strings

This is one of those topics that has so much bad coverage that beginners are often getting it wrong. However, it is more important to just acknowledge this and move on. Below is a sample of how SQL connection strings should be held, providing ease of reading, use as well as a familiar format.

< ?php
 
    $ConnectionString = "mysql://username:password@url_to_sql_server_here/databasename";
 
    print "ConnectionString";
    print $ConnectionString;
 
    print "ConnectionString Parsed";
    print_r(parse_url($ConnectionString));
 
?>

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More on fallacies

A very well laid out display of the more popular choices of fallacies that are used by creationists (although not specifically only from them. the truth is that it can come from a number of locations.) The 25 fallacies are easily found in many different chasms of thought. I Introduce you to Answers in Genesis…

Responding to fools

Kent Hovind’s Age of the Earth seminar is a prime example of faulty reasoning and misunderstood science. This man is a prime example of a fool in sheep’s clothing. I am currently stepping through his absurd series, in an attempt to better understand and respond to a couple of letters I have received in the past month and a half. Creation Science is quite simply a fraud. It is based on ignorance and continued refutation of accepted facts and conclusions based on an ego driven view of the world.

Magic Man Done It!

A UK Comedian - Robin Ince - Sheds some light on our understanding of the way ID evolved! Its actually quite a nice story and i invite you to take some time to look at it. While its quite funny you may find it a very easy to follow train of thought.

I also submit that this route makes a lot of sense. Look at the last 60 years of discourse on the topic.

You will probably find something funny occuring around 1987.

Two Search boxes?!?!

Adding Google Search to my site was more of a bother than previously expected. Quite unfortunately it added further complication to my site, and while some of its features are amazing, I have become increasingly frustrated with the results of the searches. In particular, trying to track down older posts creates a bit of a twilight zone situation in that Google has indexed my site countless times over the past 2 years. The search results include web pages that not only don’t exist, but were on sites that have long gone the way of the trash can, so it becomes quite complicated to actually track down what was said back in the day.

In other news I wanted to let you all in on some interesting time capsule type information. I have been able to track down my previous website (www.swallowbush.com) through the wayback machine. it’s really quite interesting to look back at how I used to write and the language I used. I have found it quite fun to read my previous blog posts and have moved a couple over here just for posterities sake. Specifically, give the haikus a glimpse.

[UPDATE]

I have done some testing and while WP still has some performance hits i have taken to disabling the HTML Purified plugin which has helped with the performance considerably. Im still not satisfied completely, but its a start. Id like to get page loads down around 2s on the high side, but im still getting 4-7s loads, even with Super-Cache.

With time, the Google search will, undoubtedly, be the better choice. I just need to find out how to influence them. =)

[/UPDATE]

Super Delegates Power

As the controversy continues, around Obama’s electability, I find myself getting more irritated than in previous elections. The continued battering of Obama is just another example of how our electoral system has corrupted to the point that it is no longer useful. I am still a bit confused about what qualifications would make any candidate who had not previously served in the presidency electable. Just as no one in the IT industry can really know how to manage an entire company without managing an entire company, running a country is unique. With our two term limits, the only candidates that are capable of running the country are those that are no longer electable.

If George W. Bush can do it, anyone fucking can.