Closing some tabs

[undyingking]

A few things that have caught my eye just lately:

• PMOG, The Passively Multiplayer Online Game -- mentioned by killalla, basically a way of making ar$ing around on the Web more fun. Needs Firefox. See also pmog.
  
• What does atheism mean to you? Interesting finding from the Pew Foundation that an impressive 15% of US atheists are either absolutely or fairly certain that there is a God. (As are a mighty 40% of agnostics.)
• Nice little film of a mechanical escalator device. I just think this is a really ingenious design.
• Labrador have released their free 2008 Summer Sampler, to which I can't find a link on their site, but here's a direct link to the zip itself. "A summerish mix of recent favourites from The Sound of Arrows, The Radio Dept. and Club 8, lost classics from Acid House Kings, Caroline Soul and Chasing Dorotea and sun packed songs by [ingenting] and lots more." Many of the 30 songs will already be familiar if you know Labrador stuff, but if not then you really should.
• Typetester is a neat little online utility that allows you easily to compare your chosen sample text in a variety of fonts, spacings, colours, weights etc. I anticipate using this a lot.
• Relatedly, see your chosen text as smoke, droplets, lovehearts, fireworks etc, here. Pretty!
  
• This looks like a good recipe for elderflower cordial, which now is the time to make. Anyone tried doing so?
• Does reading Stephen R Donaldson's Thomas Covenant books make you feel as gelidly preterite as a carious scoria? It does me, but this useful page helps make sense of it all.
• Conservapedia has posted this email exchange with evolutionary microbiologist Professor Robert Lenski (longish, but worth reading). Good example of how a scientist can comprehensively demolish an idiotic opponent. I can only guess that one of the other Conservapedia editors hates Schlafly.

That'll probably do for now!

Comments

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

conservatives live in a much better world than the rest of us

Strange, I think of them as living in a grim dystopian world of the struggle of each against each, with vicious hoodies prowling the street corners, the EU stealing your hard-earned money, and so on.

[jackfirecat.livejournal.com]

There was some psychology study that asked people to answer factually-verifibale questions about the state of the world, including, like, how many people live in poverty, what's the average wage in the USA, how many people die of AIDS each day, and so on and also aksed political persuasion, and ended up with significance that conservative-voters had answered the questions on the less-bad side more often than not. But not just different, wrong.' Liberals' got the answers right more often. NB Not that 'liberals ' were more pessimistic than 'conservatives' but that 'liberals' were more accurate. A hugh citation-needed hanging, I know, but I can't remember where I saw it.

The idea of Conservatives as viewing the world through rose-tinted spectacles fitted my pre-concieved ideas, as in that conservatives basically like the status quo. Left-wingers are the critics/doubters, who want to change the way things are.

Interesting that conservatives, in order to like the current set-up, have to see it wrongly. Which (sort of) brings us back to Conservapaedia.