PaulSpoerry.com

Up til now I never really thought Mr. Bean was all that funny. This has changed my mind, I gotta check out more of his stuff:

To research his new book, Elephants on Acid, Alex Boese scoured scientific archives searching for the most bizarre experiments of all time — the kind that are mind-twistingly, jaw-droppingly strange… the kind that make you wonder, “How did anyone ever conceive of doing such a thing?”

His website lists twenty of these experiments. You’ll find all of them (and about 80 more) discussed in greater detail in his book, which will be published this November, 2007 by Harcourt. Kirkus Reviews calls it, “One of the finest science/history bathroom books of all time.”

The list contains the following (click thru the link below to read the truely bizarre details:

• Monkey-Head Transplant - yes… they transplanted a monkeys head onto another monkey
• The Remote-Controlled Bull
• The Ape and the Child - raising an ape as a human
• “My Fingernails Taste Terribly Bitter”
• The Electrification of Human Corpses
• Seeing Through Cat’s Eyes - an attempt to tap into another creature’s brain and see directly through its eyes
• Stimuli Eliciting Sexual Behavior in Turkeys - this would have been much funnier had it been a male chicken  ;O)
• “Would You Go To Bed With Me Tonight?”
• Shock the Puppy - subjects were told to shock a puppy who didn’t stand in the right spot… nearly all of the people cranked up the voltage!
• Heartbeat At Death
• Beneficial Brainwashing
• The Vomit-Drinking Doctor - that’s a dedicated doc
• Facial expressions while decapitating a rat
• The Stanford Prison Experiment - you’ve probably heard of this, but it’s still a bizarre look into the human mind
• Human-Ape Hybrid - soviet experiment create a human-ape hybrid by breeding chimpanzees and humans
• The Isolated Head of a Dog - chop a dogs head off… but keep it alive. CREEPY!
• The Initiation of Heterosexual Behavior in a Homosexual Male
• Demikhov’s Two-Headed Dogs - dogs with another dog head attached (the longest only lived a month… but still… freaky)
• Obedience - told to subject subjects to increasingly high electric shocks for answering questions wrong, nearly EVERY person continued to give shocks
• Elephants on Acid - Speaks for itself… they dosed up some elephants. Why is another story.

Click through for the full story.

Many adults in the United States are questioning the way their head of state us elected, according to a poll by Rasmussen Reports. 54 per cent of respondents think the U.S. should get rid of the Electoral College so that the winner of the popular vote becomes president.

In the United States, the president and vice-president are elected in a single ticket to a four-year term by an Electoral College, whose members represent each state of the union with a previously determined number of electoral votes, in accordance with the results of the popular vote in each state.

Florida’s 25 electoral votes decided the 2000 presidential election, after weeks of recounts and court injunctions concluded in a 537-vote victory for Republican George W. Bush over Democrat Al Gore. In the U.S. presidential elections held in 1824, 1876, 1888 and 2000, the candidate who received a plurality of the popular vote did not garner a majority in the Electoral College.

In American elections, candidates require 270 votes in the Electoral College to win the White House. In November 2004, Bush earned a second term after securing 286 electoral votes from 31 states. Democratic nominee John Kerry received 252 electoral votes from 19 states and the District of Columbia.

On Aug. 25, Democratic California senator Dianne Feinstein called for the abolition of the Electoral College, saying, “The current system enables a handful of states to become battleground states, and disenfranchises tens of millions of American voters in the most important election in the nation. By amending the Constitution to abolish the Electoral College, and replacing it with a system in which the winner is the candidate with the most votes nationwide, we will ensure that the method of electing the president and vice-president is fair and uniform.”

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“Ann Coulter is stunned. How is it, she asks, that she could go through 12 years of public school, then college and law school, and still not know that it was Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution that fueled Hitler’s ovens.

“I never knew about the link between Darwin and Hitler until after reading Richard Weikart’s book,” said Coulter, a popular conservative columnist and a featured expert on the new Coral Ridge Hour documentary, Darwin’s Deadly Legacy, which airs August 25 and 26. Hitler, she said, “was applying Darwinism. He thought the Aryans were the fittest and he was just hurrying natural selection along.”

Coulter is among those who appear on Darwin’s Deadly Legacy, a disturbing look at the historical impact of the theory of evolution and the shaky scientific ground on which it rests.”I won’t continue to quote the rest of this complete and utter moronic bullshit. Coulter once again shows she is an idiot. Hitler’s warped views were inspired by eugenics and SOCIAL Darwinism, which is NOT the same as biological Darwinism and the theory of natural selection that underlies evolutionary biology. It is a shame that Charles Darwin’s name was (and still is) used by racist people who do not understand science to warp evolutionary theory in order to support racism. Hmmm, I seem to remember that the Bible was used to support slavery and racism for several centuries. Not only that, it’s really well known that Hitler was influenced by Christianity, and stated (at least in public) that he was Christian:

Hitler wrote: “I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord..” As a boy, Hitler attended to the Catholic church and experienced the anti-Semitic attitude of his culture. In his book, Mein Kampf, Hitler reveals himself as a fanatical believer in God and country. This text presents selected quotes from the infamous anti-Semite himself.

What’s next… an attack on Newton?

Stunning documentary links Newton, Hitler: “Newton’s Deadly Legacy”

Chilling evidence proves that Hitler drew on Newton’s writings to aid his war efforts and conquer Europe. “To put it simply: no Newton, no ballistics. No ballistics, no Hitler,” said Dr. Kennedy, the host of Newton’s Deadly Legacy. “Hitler’s Blitzkrieg was the famous driving force behind Hitler’s push through Europe. His perverse use of Newton’s principles to more quickly bring death and destruction to his neighbors cannot be disputed.”
 

Tech UK is reporting a new disc storage technology that shatters the capacity of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray: the Tera-Disc.

Blu-ray and HD DVD have pushed the limits of optical storage further than anyone thought possible. But a new technology has emerged which makes Blu-ray’s 50GB capacity look tiny. Mempile in Israel says it’s able to fit an incredible 1TB of data onto one “TeraDisc” which is the same size as CDs and DVDs. That’s 20 times the capacity of a maxed-out dual-layer Blu-ray disc.

The incredible capacity achieved using this new technology is made possible by employing 200 5GB layers, each one only five microns apart. The discs are completely transparent to the red lasers which are used in the associated recorder.

That basically means you on one disk you could fit:

• 212 DVD-quality movies
• 250,000 MP3 files
• 1,000,000 large Word documents

The practical purpose of this disk isn’t really known. I’m sure they would be expensive out of the gate, and until prices dropped so much that they would be competitive with HD-DVD and Blu-Ray then they won’t be showing up in BlockBuster any time soon. Still, 1TB is a LOT of data at this point.

Undisputable Biblical proof that atheists are deluded and stupid. ;O)

Power users need power utilities, and Windows’ default system programs barely get the job done. Over time third-party developers have stepped and build superior replacements to programs like Notepad, Paint, Windows Explorer and the Command Prompt. Get the simple jobs done smarter, faster and more efficiently with these free utitlites

read more | digg story

FOX News shows an amazing clip of Ron Paul at the Iowa debate on Aug 5. Then Julie Banderas interviews Ron Paul in what may be one of the most civilized and fair interviews Ron Paul has had yet. Most major network interviews lately have ended with the “anchor” telling Paul he has no chance of winning, which seems very biased from a “news” perspective but what the hell do I know!? I’m really suprised, and happy, that a non-biased interview came from Fox news… which in my opinion does less “news” and more “commentary” than all the major networks combined.

Dr. Paul is the most articulate and truthful man in politics today (look up his voting record). It is not hard to look like you believe in what you are saying when you actually belive in what you are saying, and it comes across when he speaks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbXQ_PnUbq8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N6NstE0_8Q

I have been pretty frustrated over the past few weeks with the performance of a few of my WordPress sites. At first I was convinced that it was my web host. perhaps it was their web or DB severs; perhaps that I’m on shared hosting. After putting up with it for a while I decided I needed to get to the bottom of the issue. It had to be my host, a plugin, or some content that it just to stinking big. I found an article by Idano called Nailing Down Slow Performance in Wordpress. The approach outlined entailed reverting to the default theme, disabling all plugins, and then one by one enabling the plugins to find the culprit. Sounds like a lot of work eh? I already know my theme is relatively heavy, but I like it so it’s not going anywhere. I suspected it might be a plugin… but did I REALLY want to go thru the process or turning them all off then one by one turning them back on? Naw…

Enter FireBug. Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. If you don’t already have FireFox and FireBug, you should check them out…. particularly if you do any web development. For the record I typically use IE, I’m not anti-Microsoft or anything like that, but it’s nice to have FF and FB around for development purposes. Once installed enable FireBug by going Tools -> FireBug  and then deselecting the Disable FireBug check. Then go to Tools -> FireBug -> Open FireBug. At the bottom of the screen you’ll now see a console window for FireBug. Hit the NET tab and point your browser to your website.

What you’re seeing is the total number of requests made by the browser and how long each one took. With my standard plugins enabled, my homepage took a crazy 12.65 seconds to render! TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE.

I began scrolling through the results and immediately saw that the lightbox plugin, as well as an Amazon Context Links plugin were the cuplript (image below shows the lightbox stats).

I then went to my plugins page and disabled each of the plugins. Removing those two plugins took my page render time down to 7.79 seconds. Better… but still not GOOD. I repeated the process above until I found another performance culprit… a call the the MyBlogLog tracker is taking 2.44 seconds. This is not a plugin, but a script code I added to the header of my website… 2.44 seconds, gone. I like MyBlogLog… but not that much.

So how much time did I shave off by removing the Lightbox, Amazon Context Links plugins and the MyBlogLog link tracker?

Yup… 9.06 seconds shaved off my front page load time. 3.59 seconds still isn’t excellent performance, but my front page usually has YouTub videos, linked images, etc. I then noticed the time to render a sidebar widget I put in place to show where else I can be found on the net was making a bunch of requests. I move it to my About Me page… nobody really click it anyway.

In total my average front page load time is now down to about 3.2 seconds. I could probably do even better, but I’m happy with the performance increase so far. The average page on my site, when it’s mostly text, is down to around 1.5 seconds. w00t! Feel much more snappy!

FYI… if you CANNOT live without the lightbox effect, there’s a new Slimbox plugin, which claims to be a 7kb clone of the previous Lightbox plugins. I haven’t tried it yet… it’s a cool effect, but I’m not sure if it’s worth it.

Rollins drops a rant on politics on The Henry Rollins Show. It’s awesome, in typical Rollins fashion he drops cuss words left and right and comes across completely angry. I’ve always loved this guy, he’s a great Angry-Anti-Authority-Rocker!

“To question authority is somehow unpatriotic and in league with terrorists worldwide - fuck you.”

“On the left side, you see democrats, crying over freedoms lost and war on democracy. On the right side, you have republicans, shouting national security and war on terror. ”