then Kaloogian (a US Senator) has written a very effective campaign speech. Not that one word of it appears to be true …

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Read more about it here.

If you want a more truthful picture, click here.

Ooh! Crop circles on Google Maps!

Jared Diamond has written an very interesting essay about what he calls humanity’s worst mistake, the Agricultural revolution. Jared Diamond is a very interesting psychologist. In his book “Guns, Germs, and Steel” he argues that environmental factors account for the differences in evolution of human societies. In particular that the widespread availability of plants suitable for domestication allowed Europe to support a larger population that led to “crowd” diseases (smallpox, typhus, measles) which they then developed resistances to. Technology advanced in civilizations with higher population densities because they could support the specialists necessary to develop technology. And so on.

In this most recent essay of his, he talks about how humanity was given a choice to stay limited in size or grow. We decided to grow, and thus greated social and gender inequalities and warfare. It is a good read. Check it out.

Nintendo is definitely going the right direction. Sega and Hudson have agreed to release their legacy games — developed for the classic sega and the turbografx 16 (developed by NEC & Hudson) — for use with the Revolution. This joins the already extensive list of games developed by Nintendo for the NES, SNES, and N64. This is amazing news. Viva la Revolution!

You rock it Penguin!

Mirror

Remember, remember the fifth of November
The gunpowder treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

Guy Fawkes, twas his intent
To blow up king and parliament.
Three score barrels were laid below
To prove old England’s overthrow.

By God’s mercy he was catched
With a dark lantern and lighted match.
Holler boys, holler boys, let the bells ring
Holler boys, holler boys, God save the King.

Read the rest of this entry »

Roma Victor, a new MMORPG, may still be in beta, but one of its beta testers has been found guilty of being a griefer.   In addition to a 7 day ban, WarCry is reporting that Cynewulf is being crucified as well … albeit only virtually and only during the time he is banned from Roma Victor.  Still, very cool.  There are screenshots of the event if anyone is interested.

Coke has begun a limited release of their new Coca-Cola Blāk drink, which they claim combines the best of Coke & Coffee.

Coca-Cola Blāk is an invigorating and stimulating blend that has a perfect balance of the effervescent taste sensation of Coca-Cola and natural flavors, with real coffee. The lightly carbonated, mid-calorie beverage, which is designed to appeal to adult consumers, is yet another example how The Coca-Cola Company reaches out to new audiences and addresses new beverage occasions.

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Check it out, an automated Bush Adminstration.

To those of you running wordpress blogs, if you haven’t already, upgrade to Wordpress 2.0.2. Upgrade now. This was a security release, but I didn’t forsee any major hurry. Mostly ’cause I’m an idiot and didn’t realized it dealt with one or more XSS exploits. While I am not 100% certain what happened to me today was related, but in case it was, upgrade anyway.

So what happened this morning that has me panicing all the sudden? Well I decided to respond to Jin597’s post, and wordpress obliterated my entire comments table. Deleted every last record. It spewed things about the table being marked unclean, and then proceeded to spew mysql errors. The entire table was empty. I don’t know if it occured when I posted or not, but I suspect it happened between the midnight last night and when I posted this morning (I could be wrong). I was able to restore all the data from the nightly backups, but if you commented between midnight last night and now, please repost your comment.

As you can tell, I highly recommend moving to Wordpress 2.0.2, even if what I encountered was simply a bug.