If there is anyone out there reading this who hasn’t signed up for Netflicks yet you really should. We have been getting new movies about every other day (as long as we watch them as soon as we get them) and it has been a lot of fun. My favorite is to get DVDs of my favorite TV shows. We just finished the first season of Law and Order…it was excellent. We are almost finished with the first season of CSI. We don’t watch a lot of TV (if you don’t call an hour a day a lot) but when we do we get to watch it without commercial interruptions!!!
Check out this story in the New York Times (free registration required but it is worth the time because the story is really cool).
Excerpt:
Dr. Bavelier is an expert on how experience changes the brain, particularly the effects of congenital deafness on visual skills and attention. A few years ago, a Rochester student, Shawn Green, asked to work on a senior project in her laboratory. They agreed that he would help design visual attention tasks for the deaf.
But when Mr. Green tried out the tests, he found they were ridiculously easy, Dr. Bavelier said. So did his friends, who were all devoted to video games.
The professor and her student decided to study the connection between video game playing and visual attention. They carried out four experiments on undergraduates, all of them male because no female shooter game fans could be found on campus.
Excellent. The article goes on to describe how the only games that brought this benefit about were the first person shooter games like Unreal, Half Life, and the upcoming DOOM3 which will be excellent. All of these games are extremely violent and require players to track multiple targets at once in unfamiliar environments.
I like to hear that I haven’t totally been wasting the hours and hours I have spent on this stuff. Now if my wife would only let me get a better computer so I could play the newer games like DOOM3 I’d be able to really improve my visual skills!!!
Check out this story about the Clausen family and the University of Tennessee. It looks like Tennessee is going to be well stocked with Quarterbacks for quite a while. I haven’t stated enough in this web log about my love of Tennessee football. Well…here it is…I LOVE THE VOLS!!!
I love this story.
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I linked to a really cool site earlier that has information on how easy it is to modify diesel engines to run on vegetable oil. Now I’ve found this story on Wired.Com that says there will finally be a real technological advance in energy storage (batteries). Awesome. I’ll be able to buy a mini-bottle and keep my cell phone, laptop and PDA running for months!
We live in a really cool time.
Some Democrats are waking up to why their party is having problems appealing to most Americans. Even if I never vote for one of the socialists the Democrats put up to run for national office I agree with Donna Brazile and Timothy Bergreen that for Democrats to be successful they can’t be seen as weak on defense. More important, they definitely can’t be seen as sympathetic to evil regimes as many Democrats sounded throughout the early part of the Iraq invasion (and throughout the cold war). It would be a good thing for the Democrats to exorcise their hippy element, the group in their party against military defense of the United States by the United States for any reason. (There are questions now about whether the Iraqi invasion was justifiable on the national security grounds that Iraq was a direct threat to the United States. That is a subject for another post…and regardless…the hippies would have been against it even if the dangers of Iraq had been absolutely apparent. Blasted hippies.)
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In yesterday’s Opinion Journal (the online opinion page from the Wall Street Journal) one of my favorite bloggers wrote a column about “Digital Warriors”. This was basically just a publication of a post he put on his blog a couple weeks ago but it is a well researched and thought out column about how the way wars are fought is changing. He compares war in pre-industrial times to war after the American Civil war and then compares Gulf War 2 to late-industrial wars like World War 2 and Gulf War 1. It really is worth a read.
Dan sent me a link to another excellent story from Wired magazine’s web page. It describes war in the Information Age from the point of view of the soldiers who have to fight it (and the soldiers who set up all the networks and do the computer nerd stuff). The writer is pretty critical of Rumsfeld and his push towards new ways of fighting war but he also expresses well how effective this new way of fighting a war is even though there are many wrinkles to be worked out.
It will be interesting to see how history judges Donald Rumsfeld. While most of the new ideas about how to fight aren’t directly attributable to him he is the chief proponent for aggressively implementing the new procedures. He isn’t very popular with much of the military Establishment (especially the Army brass) but this latest fight does seem to have vindicated his views to a great degree. I think he’s cool but I’m not an expert on any of this. We’ll see…
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I hate the advertisements from “Truth” the anti-smoking people. I don’t smoke because active members of my church don’t smoke. If not for this prohibition I don’t doubt that these commercials on TV and Radio would make me angry enough that I’d want to go to the nearest Convenience store for a pack of Marlboros just to spite the smug, self-righteous, punks who make those ads. I’d be willing to bet that these commercials have done more to drive young people to start smoking than any advertisements the tobacco companies could ever come up with. Next time you are watching TV or listening to the radio and one of these commercials comes on turn it up and listen closely. You’ll see what I mean…and you may even catch yourself asking some stranger nearby for a light.
Read this article in the NY Post about the failure of the United States to effectivly repair Iraqi Infrastructure. It isn’t that there aren’t skilled Americans who can do the work…It is that the morons running things there now insist for reasons of political correctness that Iraqi engineers be the ones to get things running again.
The article goes on to explain that the Iraqis don’t care who gets the power on as long as they can again have light when the sun goes down and power to run their fans in the summer heat.
People had electricity under Saddam. Now they have American excuses and feel good policies but no real effort to supply basic human comforts. That doesn’t bode well for our country’s prospects in Iraq.
The next to last paragraph is the kicker:
Third Infantry Division soldiers like Sgts. Perdue and Peters are due to be replaced by troops from the 1st Armored Division. They worked their butts off during the war and its aftermath, and they don’t want to see their labors go for nothing. Says Peters, “We did our job. Now it feels like we’re gonna leave hear feeling like we did it in vain.”
They did do their job in vain if we run the rebuilding of Iraq like we run every other government agency. I know…I see first hand how the federal government works every single day, and its not pretty.
(Link Courtesy Instapundit)
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OK…I don’t normally do advertising on this site but I really like cool ads and I post ‘em when I find ‘em. I posted this awesome commercial a few weeks ago. Here is a great online ad for the Mannings’ favorite store.
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One of the cool things my cell phone is that it came with a really small camera. After I take pictures with the camera I can plug it into my phone and upload the pictures to the internet so I can access the pictures on any computer that has an internet connection. Here are a couple I have taken over the past few months. Click here for a picture of Corryn. Click here for another picture of Corryn. (I guess you know who I take the most pictures of!!!)
The coolest thing about this is that I have a camera small enough to take with me everywhere I go that allows me to put a picture up on this page for your enjoyment almost immediately! Just think of how common place technologies like this are changing the world. Any Joe Blow who happens to be where big news is taking place can take pictures and post them for the world to see faster than major news organizations can get the story out.
Patrick Buchanan is wrong about many things, but he is an excellent writer. As much as I don’t like the guy I have to admit that it is really fun to read his columns. Here is one of my favorite on Joseph McCarthy.
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(Warning…inappropriate language is used in this post. Read at your own peril)
I was visiting Instapundit when I decided to follow the link on this post:
May 08, 2003
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE INTERNET. Now close those pop-up ads, you asshats!
Excellent. Not only do I get to read a pretty accurate history of the Internet but I get to see the word “Asshat” used correctly in a sentence. I love it.
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I know that everyone who checks this site works way too hard to ever have time for something like this but I decided to post it anyway. This excellent flash application will effectively assist any wouldbe time wasters.
