Baumblog EST 1968 - A blog for the Baumbachs who originated in Syracuse, NY

Texas Board of Education Math Standard
posted by GJ on May 27, 2010 @ 5:19PM

As you may have heard, the Texas Board of Education is busy rewriting history to better reflect the illusion that the Religious Right (TM) try to maintain. Did you also realize they've taken to rewriting math standards? Check out this example below!

Hat tip to Bad Astronomy.

1 comment | Tags: video, funny

Worried about a link between autism and vaccines?
posted by GJ on May 24, 2010 @ 8:21AM

Don't be. However, check out this great resource that runs down the scam behind this scare. It's done in comic form, so it's an easy read--well, easy, until you realize the depth of this scam, that is.

And yes, if you want, I can provide fact-checks for each and every item raised in that document. :)

No comments | Tags: science, fraud

Freaking LOVE This Game!
posted by GJ on May 20, 2010 @ 11:42AM

Monster Hunter Tri showed up in the USA earlier this month on the Wii. Um, hunting monsters? Sign me up!

Here's the intro. Yes, I've played it--this is the in-game graphic engine.

Looks good. How about the first boss fight? This was from the demo--when I had to take this guy down, suffice to say my weapon was nowhere near as nice, and this fight took a good 20 minutes. Oh, and he had a lot more reinforcements.

Best of all, you can play online together, and even chat live with Wii Speak. AWESOME.

2 comments | Tags: games

Is there a future for our beloved Ron Paul...perhaps.
posted by Geoff on May 20, 2010 @ 8:07AM

Ron Paul will never lead this country out of the mess we are in, but with any luck, another Paul might be fit for the job. What is this you say?

8 comments | Tags: political

Red Bull Crashed Ice
posted by Marc on May 16, 2010 @ 1:49PM

This is the coolest sport I've never heard of:

3 comments | Tags: sports, hockey, video

Sarah Palin should do a GIS on the founding fathers
posted by GJ on May 13, 2010 @ 11:13AM

Sarah's not the only GOP right winger guilty of this in the past few years. A bunch of them would like nothing better than to turn the USA into some sort of Christian theocracy, and claim that's precisely what the founding fathers had in mind.

Spend a few minutes trolling around the web, and you'll find that many of the core architects of the Constitution and early goverment efforts were anything but theocrats:

'Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.'

-- James Madison, 1774

'How has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?'

-- John Adams, 1816

'Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced an inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth... I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology.'

-- Thomas Jefferson (whose original words in the Declaration of Independence read 'All men are created equal and independent. From that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable,' which Congress later changed to include a reference to a creator).

'Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by the difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be depreciated.'

--George Washington, 1792

'I wish [Christianity] were more productive of good works ... I mean real good works, not holy-day keeping, sermon-hearing, or making long prayers, filled with flatteries and compliments despised by wise men, and much less capable of pleasing the Deity.'

-- Benjamin Franklin

'Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half of the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.'

--Thomas Paine

It would seem that perhaps they ought to read up more on why we have a separation of church and state in this grand democracy experiment we have in this country. I think they'll find Christianity (or any other religion, for that matter) will do just fine on its own without getting entwined with the government. At the end of the day, you simply cannot legislate belief, ya know?

OK, ok, no more political posts for a week or two. :) I'll go find some sciency things to post about!

7 comments | Tags: politics

GJ said about 1 hour later

Yup, no more posts, but maybe a comment or two. Check out the Emergency Prayer Response Team. Good thing they were on the scene--their town was missed by the tornado-spawning storm cells, but five people in Wakita OK apparently weren't God-fearing enough...or something. You fill in the blanks.
Steve said about 9 hours later

How do you know Ben Franklin's post was about [Christianity]?

How do we know any of these quotes are real?
GJ said about 11 hours later

Ok, fine, I'll go get you the bibliography. That's something you won't see Ms. Palin (or Mr. Beck) ever do. :)
GJ said about 11 hours later

See how long this took me using google (check out how long this was from the comment above)

Ben Franklin quote: http://books.google.com/books?id=lDJKAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA235&dq=ben+franklin+I+mean+real+good+works,+not+holy-day+keeping,+sermon-hearing,+or+making+long+prayers,+filled+with+flatteries+and+compliments+despised+by+wise+men,+and+much+less+capable+of+pleasing+the+Deity&ei=PbvsS6nzJ46CygTMy9iYCA&cd=1#v=onepage&q&f=false

James Madison quote: http://books.google.com/books?id=6xzVAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA14&dq=madison+Religious+bondage+shackles+and+debilitates+the+mind+and+unfits+it+for+every+noble+enterprise&ei=ArzsS-TlDofoygTk7p3ACA&cd=2#v=onepage&q&f=false

Shall I continue? Or do you insist I'm making this up?

GJ said 1 day later

Also, I'm not saying these folks were out and out atheists or agnostics. A few were, but for the most part, they were very wary of seeing politics and religion mix, since that's precisely what they saw as the problem with England's monarchy at the time. Religious oppression was the order of the day in England, and was also a problem here in the original colonies. To be sure, it wasn't the only problem we had (we weren't big on the taxes used to fund Mother England's foreign wars and home coffers), but it was big enough that they were determined to keep religion out of the charter documents of the USA.

Over the years, the religious folks have chipped away at this--adding "Creator" to the Declaration, adding "In God We Trust" to the money...the list goes on and on. They continually believe that this government was generated to be favorable to Christians.

The big question is why. Why? It's a battle of morality. Just like the Islamic theocracies, American Christians want their religions beliefs legislated. Abortion? Wrong, God says so. Gay marriage? Wrong, God says so. Stem cell research? Wrong, God says so. Teaching evolution? Wrong, God says so. Pretty soon, most of the rules get tied back to what God wants. God wants the aliens out of Arizona. God wants this, God wants that. God according to the Christians, of course.

The God according to the Muslims has other priorities...equally bogus, but still different. Lots of rules about what women can't do, for instance. Rules about interest on loans. Rules about who can be educated and to what level. All good stuff.

The problem is, all these rules are based on religious beliefs--or at least, justified by them. This is the problem with any form of intrusion of religion into government--it allows for abuse, simply because things can be attributed to God's wishes--which, any astute observer will tell you is simply a human interpretation of what they think God is saying. It tends to vary quite a bit. Instead, rules should be based solely on their merits. That's fine if God wants or doesn't want something, but justify it in terms of the human experience. What a concept, you know?

That's what the founders were trying to do. It's a shame that most people don't see the beauty in this, and instead wish to replace it with something that panders well to their interests but is subject to far more misuse and abuse.
GJ said 4 days later

Another comment that could have been a post, but I'm lazy right now. Check out this asshole Texas lawmaker. Nice move, dude. No way scientists can use this money to spread their propaganda about things like global warming now! They certainly wouldn't use it for anything valuable, now would they?

Geoff said 5 days later

Good read on a variety of levels in that link. Scary to see where our country is heading. Glad my daughter is learning Chinese! We may have to move there eventually to get a halfway decent education at this rate!
;)

Six Degrees of ... Hitler!
posted by GJ on May 13, 2010 @ 7:43AM

1 comment | Tags: video, funny

Volvo auto-break test
posted by Marc on May 11, 2010 @ 12:24AM

10 comments | Tags: video, funny, cars

Marc said less than a minute later

To be fair, it did stop. But I think my car has this same feature.
GJ said about 10 hours later

You have to wonder about this kind of feature. Not so much that it can work or even that it can work reliably, but how it might change us as drivers. Am I going to take more chances in my car if I know that I have stability control, avoidance control, etc., to the point that I can do things like text my friends while driving and generally get away with it?

Wonder how such a system tries to deal with far faster closing speeds, like those you'd see in a head-on collision. I'm guessing this one is primarily for highway driving. That's kind of silly--there are almost no fatalities on highways, compared to local roads with intersections and two-way traffic.
Marc said about 13 hours later

I was thinking of this today again and wondered how well it would handle differing weather conditions as well. Combined with many other features of luxury cars, it's probably fine, but if the auto-brake determined it needed to break hard, but it's icy, you may end up flipping your car versus just rear ending the guy in front of you.

I give it a couple years before we see a lawsuit because features like this have made a bad decision and made an accident worse than it could have been if the human was in control.
GJ said about 14 hours later

While I think they'll take into account the status of the stability control system, I do think you're right about the lawsuit angle. It's not a question of if a problem like this will occur, but when. As an automaker, you have to assume that risk and be willing to eat the costs. It may not be a bad thing for them so long as the costs don't outstrip sales gains.
Steve said 1 day later

Hey, don't blame us. At first, customer's wanted stability control, now the government is mandating it (all 2012 cars will have it standard).

Adaptive cruise control, accident avoidance, stuff like that - I hate it all. In production it is all very overprotective, and does not work well in moderate to heavy traffic.

Stability control, when well executed, is helpful to 99.99999% of the drivers. Even yours truly has been saved from two spins in the Crossfire due to stability control.

You'll never win a lawsuit by saying that someone "could" have out performed the stability control. It would have to be the system causing an accident, not a system that did not prevent an accident.
GJ said 2 days later

I'm not blaming the automakers by any stretch. I'm blaming this culture that believes we need to protect ourselves from everything.

I don't have a probably with stability control. But this autopilot crap is downright scary.
Marc said 2 days later

I'm definitely not blaming the engineers. I know how it works; this comes down from the higher ups who think this will be cool! But I imagine many of these features are very hard to engineer and implement and probably don't function very well unless conditions are perfect, which makes them pretty useless in the end other than another sales point for people who would fall for it. So I guess those higher ups are getting what they want. They always do, don't they?

And I agree, nobody will win that lawsuit, but I'm sure we'll SEE one. :)
GJ said 2 days later

Actually, I think you definitely will see those kind of lawsuits, and it's even possible that a suit like that could succeed. Court laws vary wildly from state to state. Some are pretty open this kind of crappy lawsuit.
Steve said 2 days later

Stability control is not THAT difficult to implement. "Autopilot" is. What the industry is working on now is avoidance systems, not so much "drive it for you" systems. I mean, I'm sure there are a few guys working on a car that you can hop into and it will drive for you, but much more of our resources is going into developing nearer terms stuff - things that will interact if it sees you making a mistake - like hitting the brakes if a collision is imminent, or helping you maintain control of the car in an emergency maneuver.

A perfect stability control system is capable of doing things that humans just cannot. Stability control controls the brakes on each wheel individually, and applies the brakes on certain wheels to help turn the car one way or another. We cannot accomplish that - we have but one brake pedal. Not that any car has a perfect stability control system, but they are getting better and better.
Steve said 2 days later

oh, and some of the new controls systems are kinda cool - like controlling torque to each wheel when accellerating - it can put more torque to the outside tire to help turn the car better. Honda's SHAWD cars have that (super handling all wheel drive....).

I'm a p-p-p-p-platypus
posted by Abby on May 9, 2010 @ 5:37PM

because I had to. :]

3 comments | Tags: video, funny

Not aliens this time, but Ninjas. HIYA!
posted by Geoff on May 3, 2010 @ 9:36AM

So I was bedazzled, amazed, and surprised at the movie I watched last night, Ninja Assassin. I had small expectations for this movie which looked to be just an action-packed ninja movie. It is, as stated, an action-packed ninja movie, but a good one.

I can't think of too many ninja movies that were very entertaining. Batman begins had some ninjas in the beginning, which was cool, but not this cool. If you're looking for some entertaining martial arts, wizardry special effects, some serious gore (cool gore, better than Kill Bill), go rent it.

Check your realty hat at the door and delve into the world of the Ninja. If you don't think Ninja's are super cool by the end of this movie, well then you probably don't think aliens are cool either. Regardless of either's existence.

4 comments | Tags: None

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