Jottings From A Cluttered Mind

Listen to The Amazing Atheist. He does a great job of presenting the absurdity of the protests over Park 51. (NSFW, language)

As you ponder the following story detailing the deployment of unmanned Predator B drones along the U.S./Mexico border I just want you to keep in mind the unmanned drone that went AWOL over restricted airspace in Washington D.C. last week, flying around for an hour before ground controllers could regain control of the vehicle.

Beginning this Wednesday, the entire 2,000 miles of border between the United States and Mexico will be patrolled by unmanned aerial drones. Three drones are already patrolling portions of that border, and a fourth Predator begins operations tomorrow out of Corpus Christi, TX, completing the full stretch of la frontera.

The news came in a Department of Homeland Security announcement yesterday, along with word that 1,200 additional National Guard troops will be deployed “to provide intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance, and immediate support to counternarcotics enforcement.”

via Boing Boing.

We can always count on the Weekly World News to deliver quality, uh… journamalism.

BLACK ROCK CITY – The Obamas flew away from Martha’s Vineyard today to attend Burning Man.

Michelle and Barack Obama left the kids on Martha’s Vineyard and flew to Black Rock City, Nevada to attend the Burning Man Festival.  And why not?  You can’t swim at Martha’s Vineyard, but you can think you’re swimming at Burning Man.

Burning Man is an annual art event and temporary community based on radical self-expression and self-reliance. It is  held on an ancient lakebed in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada.  There is a gigantic expansion of temporary structures, with more than 40,000 “burners-in-residence.”  The biggest draw is the hundreds of strange activities going at any given moment.  “It’s just like the White House,”  said President Obama.

The event is described by many participants as an experiment in community, radical self-expression, and radical self-reliance, but the fact is there’s a lot of… sex and drugs.  Michelle and Barack both intend on dropping acid and doing Special K.  “People are saying that we’re not connected to the people.  Well, this will prove everybody wrong.  Now, can somebody please get me a bong!”

via Weekly World News.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to, well, anybody.

Broadband providers in the US have long hawked their wares in “up to” terms. You know—”up to” 10Mbps, where “up to” sits like a tiny pebble beside the huge font size of the raw number.

In reality, no one gets these speeds. That’s not news to the techno-literate, of course, but a new Federal Communications Commission report shines a probing flashlight on the issue and makes a sharp conclusion: broadband users get, on average, a mere 50 percent of that “up to” speed they had hoped to achieve.

After crunching the data, FCC wonks have concluded that ISPs advertised an average (mean) “up to” download speed of 6.7Mbps in 2009. That’s not what broadband users got, though.

“However, FCC analysis shows that the median actual speed consumers experienced in the first half of 2009 was roughly 3 Mbps, while the average (mean) actual speed was approximately 4 Mbps,” says the report. “Therefore actual download speeds experienced by US consumers appear to lag advertised speeds by roughly 50 percent.”

via ArsTechnica.

No, Apple isn’t building T-1000 terminators… But what are they planning?

Apple has a new toy. It’s a materials company called Liquidmetal, and everybody’s talking! Problem is, nobody seems too sure what they’re talking about. So, Liquidmetal: What is this stuff? And what does Apple want with it?

via Gizmodo.

I’ve always thought that Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently series never got the praise it deserved. (Especially the first book. It was genius.) Now comes word the the Beeb is planning a TV adaptation based on part of the first novel. Let’s hope they can do it justice.

Mentioned only in passing at last year’s Hitchcon, the first TV adaptation of Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency has now been officially announced by the BBC for their autumn/winter season. What do we know? That it’s going to screen on BBC 4 not BBC 3 as originally planned, and that the plot will see Gently try “to solve the disappearance of a cat from an old lady’s house” – ie. it will be an adaptation of Adams’ first Gently book, at least in part. The script is by Howard Overman, creator of Misfits and Vexed, and according to his agent, the runtime is 60 minutes.At the moment, the show is set to be a “one-off pilot” only, but healthy viewing figures and a good level of audience appreciation should change that quickly enough.

via Bleeding Cool Comic Book News and Rumors.

And this is just another reason why Radiohead really is the most amazing band on the planet…

Last August a grip of Radiohead fans shot the band’s concert in Prague. Since then all the footage has been aggregated and edited to produce one continuous, HD recording of the show à la Nine Inch Nails.  What’s especially awesome about this project is that upon hearing about it, Radiohead agreed to provide the original soundboard audio recordings. Check out the trailer above or head over to the project’s website to D/L the whole thing in a variety of formats.

via Mediocre Music Blog.

It was twenty years ago today (8/27) that we lost electric blues genius Stevie Ray Vaughan in that awful helicopter crash at Alpine Valley.

So this one goes out to everybody who is suffering in any way that they might find some comfort soon, if not now.

BLADE RUNNER revisited >3.6 gigapixels from françois vautier on Vimeo.

An experimental film in tribute to Ridley Scott’s legendary film “Blade Runner” (1982)
This film was made as a unique picture with a resolution of 60.000 x 60.000 pixels (3.6 gigapixels)
It was made with 167,819 frames from ‘Blade Runner’.

1>first step : the “picture” of the film
I extracted the 167,819 frames from ‘Blade Runner’ (final cut version,1h51mn52s19i)
then I assembled all these images to obtain one gigantic image of colossal dimensions : a square of approximately 60,000 pixels on one side alone, 3.5 gigapixels (3500 million pixels)

2> second step : an illusion
I placed a virtual camera above this big picture. So what you see is like an illusion, because contrary to appearances there is only one image. It is in fact the relative movement of the virtual camera flying over this massive image which creates the animated film, like a film in front of a projector.

source : Blade Runner de Ridley Scott (the final cut)
durée : 1h51mn52s19i > 167819 frames >>
one picture / format psb : 60 000  X 60 000 : 3 540 250 000 pixels >> 3,5 gigapixels
compositing> logiciel : Combustion. Mac pro 2X 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon. nombre de layers : 1!

Plans to build a state of the art library next to Republican catastrophe Sarah Palin are causing outrage across mainstream America.

Campaigners have described the project as insensitive and a deliberate act of provocation by people with brains.

The issue is forming a dividing line in advance of Novembers mid-term congressional elections with candidates being forced to declare whether they have ever been to a library or spoken to someone who has books in their home.

Meanwhile President Obama has caused unease within his own Democratic party by endorsing the library and claiming that not everyone who reads books is responsible for calling Mrs Palin a fuckwit nutjob nightmare of a human being.

But Bill McKay, a leading member of the right-wing Teapot movement, said: “Sarah Palin is a hallowed place for Americans who cant read.”

via The Daily Mash

Damn, that man was talented!

“in America, when somebody comes for your neighbor, or his bible, or his torah, or his Atheists’ Manifesto, or his Koran, you and I do what our fathers did, and our grandmothers did, and our founders did you and speak up.”

Ever wonder how some of the zombie lies get started and spread by the mighty wurlitzer known as the GOP media machine? Salon has some insight for you as they trace the origins of the so-called “ground zero mosque” meme currently foaming rabid mouthpieces on the right.

It’s a good look into how these ideas get picked up and amplified by our 24 hour news media. The dems, of course, have made a mess of handling this situation. Harry Reid’s capitulation earlier today basically threw his entire party under the bus given President Obama’s statements this weekend. Seriously Harry, you need to let somebody who is better qualified take your job. You are a mess.

A group of progressive Muslim-Americans plans to build an Islamic community center two and a half blocks from ground zero in lower Manhattan. They have had a mosque in the same neighborhood for many years. Theres another mosque two blocks away from the site. City officials support the project. Muslims have been praying at the Pentagon, the other building hit on Sept. 11, for many years.

In short, there is no good reason that the Cordoba House project should have been a major national news story, let alone controversy. And yet it has become just that, dominating the political conversation for weeks and prompting such a backlash that, according to a new poll, nearly 7 in 10 Americans now say they oppose the project. How did the Cordoba House become so toxic, so fast?

In a story last week, the New York Times, which framed the project in a largely positive, noncontroversial light last December, argued that it was cursed from the start by “public relations missteps.” But this isnt accurate. To a remarkable extent, a Salon review of the origins of the story found, the controversy was kicked up and driven by Pamela Geller, a right-wing, viciously anti-Muslim, conspiracy-mongering blogger, whose sinister portrayal of the project was embraced by Rupert Murdochs New York Post.

via Salon.com.

To most Christians, the Bible is like a software license. Nobody actually reads it. They just scroll to the bottom and click “I agree.”

Oooh. Looky here! There’s a new release candidate (RC1) for Adobe’s forthcoming Lightroom 3.2 update.

Now, what’s cool about this is that Adobe has been making beta and RC versions of Lightroom available to the general public ahead of the final releases for some time now and it has been great for them. The result has been a very quick turnaround on bugfixes, and fine tuning of features with direct feedback from the users. Really, it’s a smart move for them since the crowdsourcing of the debugging process saves them much time and money.

I’m excited about the new release because they added a bunch more lens profiles for the program’s new lens correction features. One of the new profiles is my everyday bread-and-butter 18-200. These profiles describe the characteristics of specific commercial lenses. Lightroom uses these profiles to compensate for the different lens distortions inherent within each lens. (Chromatic, luminance, Barrel/Pincushioning, etc.)

Oh yeah, they also fixed a ton of minor glitchies from LR 3.0. So that’s always nice.

If you care enough to have read this far, you’re probably wondering why the first update is 3.2 and not 3.1 and the answer is that they are trying to sync the “point” update releases of Lightroom with Camera Raw releases so they skipped to LR 3.1 to make Lightroom 3.2 that will match Camera Raw 6.2.

I discovered what a fantastic songwriter Radiohead’s Phil Selway is when I heard the tracks he wrote for Neil Finn’s two separate “Seven Worlds Collide” projects. Now comes news that Phil will be releasing a solo album of his own work at the end of the month.

Head over to Phil’s site to sign up for a free download of the first track. (Definitely worth the d/l!)