I was wandering around in the Science Blogs tonight and found this gem from Pharyngula. It’s a link and if you click it, it will cobble up five quotes for you. I played with it for quite awhile. Too cool!
The magic link is here: ➡
A few moments later I found another source of random quotes.
The 2nd link is here: ➡
If you find this blog interesting but you’re not keen on subscribing to it with an RSS news aggregator and you don’t care for the idea of having to remember to drop in periodically to see if there are new postings, then there’s good news beause there’s another option available now.
You can subscribe to this blog and receive automatic E-mail updates whenever anything new is posted here. See the ‘Subscribe for E-Mail’ option towards the right side of this web page under the Pages header.
Just click it and then enter the E-mail address you want the updates to be sent to – that’s it. The next time something new is posted here, you will receive a copy of it by E-mail.
And, in the future, if you do not want to receive further E-mail from samadhisoft.com, just go to the ‘contact me’ form (also on the right side under Pages) and drop me an E-mail saying you’d like to be removed from the list.
If you should experience any problems with this E-mail service, please drop me an E-mail and let me know about it.
They pilfer nearly $200 million from Americans annually and drive some of their victims to suicide, but Nigeria’s notorious e-mail scam artists may finally have met their match — and the results can be hilarious.
British online vigilante “Shiver Metimbers” is leading tens of thousands of “scambaiters” in a crusade to shut down advance-fee fraudsters, grifters who spam unwitting victims with elaborate, e-mailed sob stories promising a share of nonexistent fortunes in return for upfront payments.
So-called 419 scams, named after the section of Nigeria’s criminal code that covers the conduct, are the most common type of con; victims are sometimes left penniless.
But Metimbers and crew turn the tables on scammers one by one, boomeranging the tricksters’ own tactics to entice them into performing outlandish tasks in desperate pursuit of cash — then trumpeting evidence of the con artists’ naïveté for the online world’s amusement.
More… ➡
Just a reminder that if you want to follow what’s going on on this Blog or any other blogs or websites, there’s an easy way to do it with what are called News Aggregators.
The news aggregator I use is called RSS Bandit. It is easy to setup and easy to use and you can follow what’s going on with dozens of blogs and websites effortlessly. The new aggregator tracks the sites and informs you when there’s been new stuff posted and it will inform you on the schedule you want. And, the best thing is that when you want to see the new content, you don’t have to fire up a web browser and go to the site – RSS Bandit can show it all to you right there within itself. No muss – no fuss. Using a news aggregator saves me a lot of time daily.
I’ve written a short tutorial here: ➡ which tells you how to obtain (free) and setup RSS Bandit. And, if you don’t like that particular news aggregator, there are many more available for free for you to use.
I’ve been encourging some friends to carry our personal E-mail conversations into the forum format for wider dispersal but alas it is not to be, I suspect. I tried to upgrade the site’s forum software and the result is we have no forums until I can untangle the mess.
Ah well.
Famous words spoken by Alexander Graham Bell in 1875 as he tested the first telephone.
Watson made everything in Bell’s lab. Bell found him in an electrical workshop in Massachusetts. He was a handy young man, but uneducated. After his famous invention, Bell went to England and lost interest, but Watson was at the center of myriad inventions of the young telephone industry. (Starting with, “how do I let somebody know they have a phone call?”)
The following is from Exploring Life by Thomas A. Watson, 1926. A friend of mine sent me the above text as well as the quote, below. I had to laugh when I read it because it reminds me so much of what I read today about religious conservatives and their reactions to evolutionary theory.
Earlier this month, when I decided to begin a blog, I thrashed a bit and then settled on the Radio UserLand blogging software.  Then after a week or two of playing with it and setting up an inital blog, I talked to another blogger whose site I admire (Cryptogon) and asked why he chose the software he was using (eBlogger).  He said because it was cheap (read free) then but if he had it all to do over again, he’d switch to WordPress and host it on Bluehost.
Well, before I had myself too deeply into the Radio UserLand approach, I decided to make the switch.  What you are reading now is hosted on Bluehost and was generated with WordPress blogging software.
I can’t say I had problems with Radio UserLand in the short time I used it and I can’t say that I won’t have problems with WordPress in the future. I’m way too new at all of this to go out on those limbs.
Frankly, learning how to setup a blog is a bit like wading into a new computer language – very heavy on the learning curve and very short on the actual product for awhile. And, if you want to do anything other than use the plain vanilla layouts they’ve pre-setup for you, well that’ll be another deeper learning curve.
But, it does work out in the end and I’m to the point now where I think I can focus more on putting up content and less on how to put up content.
By the way, Bluehost has a plan which only costs $6.95US per month if you sign up for two years. And, they have a script which you can execute, once you are signed up, which automatically installs the WordPress blogging software on Bluehost as your default hosted website. WordPress software is free and this makes it particularly easy to get a blog up and running for those who are new to the process.
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When astronomers use a new telescope for the first time, they call the event “First Light”. This then is “First Light “for this blog. With luck, it will run for many years.
Please be patient if you are an early reader. I expect it to be uneven and sparse for a few weeks as I get the various areas up and populated.
This blog will have a central theme and the following text gives a good sense of what that theme will be:
—- begin description —-
We will focus on a gathering storm of problems confronting mankind and the planet’s other biological inhabitants. The thread common to all of these problems is humanity itself. Mankind’s evolution of higher intelligence has freed it from the checks and balances which have tended to preserve order in the natural world since biological evolution first began on Earth.
Each of the subjects discussed in this column illustrates the fact that while humanity has developed higher intelligence, it has not developed the commensurate level of wisdom to balance it.
These are stories of the overuse of natural resources without consideration of what we’re going to do when they run out.
These are stories of humanity’s destructive impact on the integrity of the physical and biological systems around us in the world – systems upon which we are deeply dependent.
These are stories of how humanity’s greed and shortsightedness, both individual and collective, repeatedly lead to severe inbalances in the distribution of essentials like food, water, shelter, education and information. And these imbalances, in turn, lead to problems like overpopulation and fundamentalism.
And, finally, it is a meta-story about how the problems mankind is causing are potentiating and empowering each other to create a ‘perfect storm’ of consequences. Consequences which are going to fundamentally alter the physical and biological systems of the planet and degrading the kind of environment we will be leaving to our children for hundreds, if not thousands, of generations.
The following are some of the subjects which we will consider:
Peak Oil, Global Warming, Falling Water Tables, Rising Ocean Levels, Biodiversity Loss, Over Population, Failing Fisheries, Pollution, Rich vs. Poor Gap, Fundamentalism, Globalism, Post-Modernism, Women’s Literacy, Food Shortages, Fresh Water Shortages, Terrorism, Pandemics, Desertification, Corporate Power, Bubble Economics, The Gulf Stream Conveyor, and the Marginalization of Science.
This is an incomplete list and other subjects will be added.
—- End description —-
In addition to the general theme of impending disasters, as described above, we will wander into a number of other areas which are of interest to me (and hopefully to you). These will include poetry, philosophy, books, spiritualism, science and history among others.
Stay tuned.
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