Live forever or die trying
Ron Paul is looking for students who would like to spend 9-10 days campaigning in Iowa for him. The campaign will provide food, lodging, gas, and of course campaign materials…
http://community.livejournal.com/ronpaul2008/212106.html?style=mine#cutid1
$383,500.00 has been pledged to the Ron Paul Blimp project so far. So if everyone who pledged follows through, there is enough to rent the blimp for a month. Any extra money raised will likely go toward keeping the blimp in the air even longer.
The organizers are currently setting up a legal vehicle to accept donations for the blimp. They’ve hired an attorney, and artwork is also being prepared.
They currently need someone trustworthy, with experience managing large event budgets, to act as treasurer. This will be a paid position, and you’ll probably get to ride in the blimp. If you know anyone who has such experience, and would like the position, please ask them to contact Jerry Collette at http://www.ronpaulmax.com/i_will_help.html.
Via radiantsun
http://www.psychologytoday.com/rss/index.php?term=pto-20070830-000004&page=1
Studies worldwide have found that with each passing decade of their lives and with each insult they inflict on their bodies, men’s fertility decreases, while genetic risk to offspring slowly mounts. The range of findings is staggering: Several studies have shown that the older the man, the more fragmented the DNA in his ejaculated sperm, resulting in greater risk for infertility, miscarriage or birth defects. Investigations out of Israel, Europe, and the United States have shown that non-verbal (performance) intelligence may decline exclusively due to greater paternal age; that up to a third of all cases of schizophrenia are linked to increasing paternal age; and that men 40 and older are nearly six times more likely to have offspring with autism than men under age 30. Other research shows that the risk of breast and prostate cancer in offspring increases with paternal age.
and
The biggest news—the father’s role in brain disorders—has come to light largely because of research from Israel, where birth records routinely include the age of the male parent. The first unsettling finding linked paternal age and schizophrenia.
“In our first study, looking at every pregnancy in Jerusalem from 1964 to 1976, we found that increased age in the father predicted increased cases of schizophrenia in the children,” explains Malaspina, who was on the team doing the work. “In our second study we found that when the cases arose from new mutations—not familial inheritance—it almost always could be traced to the genetics of the father. Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the cases could be explained only by the age of the father—a threefold risk linked to fathers older than 50 compared with those in their 20s.” Studies in Sweden and California produced almost identical results.
For lightling:
So, I’m thinking about buying a Smart car. I like the cars because they get good gas mileage (40+ mpg), they’ve been on sale in Europe for over a decade (so many of the bugs have been worked out), and they’re tiny. I mean, really tiny. A Smart car (106 in) is over 3 ft shorter than a Mini Cooper (145 in).
Thus, they can be parked almost anywhere. Which is a really big feature for someone like me. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I hate looking for parking.
Plus, they’re really cute:
The main disadvantage for me is their lack of cargo capacity. However, I think I’ve found a solution for that:
Also, with a stock engine, they also don’t have a whole lot of pick up and go. The stock engine only has 60 HP, after all. However, if you swap in a 180hp Suzuki GSX-R1000 engine, the car can go 0-60 in 4.2 sec. and 12.4 in the quarter mile.
They’re due to begin sales in the U.S. in the first quarter of next year.
Anyone drive one of these? What are your thoughts?
Via shanmonster
As long time readers of my blog know, I have a fetish healthy fascination for airships.
And, as is apparent by my frequent pimping, I’m a fanatic supporter of the Ron Paul presidential campaign.
Thus, you can imagine how happy I am by the most recent brainchild of Trevor Lyman:
Lyman, as some of you may know, orchestrated the November 5th “money bomb”, which raised $4.2 million dollars for Ron Paul on a single day. That event put Paul on the political map, and was instrumental in improving Paul’s odds from 200:1 to the beginning of his campaign, to 6:1 now. (According to sportsbook.com.)
Lyman is trying to raise $350,000 to rent a Skyship 600 airship for the month leading up to the New Hampshire primary. The plan is to fly the airship over major cities up and down the east coast. The airship could make an appearance at football bowl games, New Years Eve in New York City, and The Boston Tea Party fund raiser on December 16th.
So far, supporters have signed up to donate $272,000. A $25.00 or more donation buys you tickets in a raffle for flight time on the blimp. If you donate $5000, you’re guaranteed at least 18 hours of flight time.
So, if you’re a Ron Paul supporter, and you think this idea is as cool as I do, please donate.
If you want to use a newly installed rubygems, and you don’t want to require ‘rubygems’ for every program that uses a gem, you need to set the RUBYOPT environment variable. For example, if you’re using tcsh, you should put the following in your .tcshrc file:
setenv RUBYOPT rubygems
This will cause the rubygems module to be loaded every time your run a ruby script.
——
If you call an external python script from within ruby, make sure you have any pdb.set_trace() lines commented out. When the ruby script tries to run the program, it will just hang at the point you set the trace, without giving you any output. For example, if test.py script has a pdb.set_trace() set, and you run the following command from within irb, the line will never finish executing. You’ll have to interrupt it with a CTRL-C command.
dfi_result = `/Users/build/crasch/PythonScripts/test.py -positions -total -infile /MData/Data/vyslf.csv -MStderrLoggingThreshold 3`
Via evillinn:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,,2217067,00.html
‘Cultural guerrillas’ cleared of lawbreaking over secret workshop in Pantheon
Emilie Boyer King in Paris
Monday November 26, 2007
The Guardian
It is one of Paris’s most celebrated monuments, a neoclassical masterpiece that has cast its shadow across the city for more than two centuries.
But it is unlikely that the Panthéon, or any other building in France’s capital, will have played host to a more bizarre sequence of events than those revealed in a court last week.
Four members of an underground “cultural guerrilla” movement known as the Untergunther, whose purpose is to restore France’s cultural heritage, were cleared on Friday of breaking into the 18th-century monument in a plot worthy of Dan Brown or Umberto Eco.