gonewest

I finally got around to trying out the new “social” web browser Flock yesterday. Wow. If you own a Mac and haven’t given it a try yet, you really should.
If you want to have Flock’s lighting quick page loads but don’t want to run beta software, then you should try Camino; or, you could just use Firefox, which is where Camino and Flock got thier render technology.

Blogged with Flock

2006-07-04 UPDATE: I just noticed that they have downloads for Windows and Linux as well as Mac OS X, so now you have no excuse to not try this browser out.

Incompetence obscures the real issue. Bush’s conservative philosophy is what has damaged this country and it is his philosophy of conservatism that must be rejected, whoever endorses it.

I try not to inject too much politics into this blog since that is not the reason for its existence, but I just had to link to this article because it makes a fundamental point about the folly of believing that the failing of this administration is primarily due to incompetence — a trap which I have at least partially fallen into myself on many occasions.

If you think this administration has been a benefit to the country… Well, I just don’t know how to respond to that. But if you think it has been bad for the country like the rest of us do, then it is critical to realize that the damage has been done not from incompetence (though that certainly hasn’t helped), but from the political philosophy that has driven this administration to make the disastrous decisions that it has.

Anyway, read the article, as the importance of the point it makes cannot be understated.

What would the Bellagio water show look like if it was done using Diet Coke and Mentos?

Glad you asked.

Being lucky enough to live in one of the largest metropolitan areas in the US (Seattle is #15 of 361) I get access to quite a few movies that are not in general release across the country. Sunday afternoon I went to see one of those, An Inconvenient Truth.

This movie lives up to the hype and I recommend that you see it whether you think that you’ll like the politics (of which I can assure you there is relatively little) of it or not. Even if you think global climate change is BS (are there any of you that still exist?), seeing the movie will help illustrate what the concern is about and what the scientific consensus on the issue really is.

And if you are a conservative tempted to see the movie but holding back because you don’t want to help make some “liberal movie” successful, then you can be certain that you won’t make any difference there. Here are the box office rankings for the movie’s first weekend where it ranked 22nd, and this second weekend where it ranks 9th. When you view those links, take special note of the theater counts and the average sales per theater — that figure of $91,000 for the first week is apparently an all time record for any movie in any genre, and the second week ranking of #9 (which is based on gross sales for the weekend, not the per theater average) is a movie breaking into the top ten while still showing in only 77 theaters. The lowest theater count for any movie ranking better than #9 is 1270 which is 16 times greater. If the ranking was based of per theater sales instead, then An Inconvenient Truth would not only rank #1 but would be beating the pants off every other movie on the list except The Break-Up which is currently in its opening weekend high. There has been fair amount of rather dismissive commentary about the movie from the pundits of mainstream media, and I am sure that conservative blogs are trying to minimize it as much as they can, but box office numbers like these will prove to be very inconvenient for that effort.

Oh, and this was my first time visiting the AMC Pacific Place mall and cinema in downtown Seattle; I must say that I am impressed with both and will be back. Now if they would just finish fixing the monorail which has a stop two blocks away.

UPDATE: Further research reveals that the comment about the per theater sales for this movie setting an all time record is incorrect; it appears that it is only number 24 on that list so far. It does appear to be the record breaker for non-fiction, however.

Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes is, as the title suggests, about the new science of information theory and how it is providing a deeper understanding of quantum physics, relativity, thermodynamics, biology, and just about every other area of science imaginable. This book was a real page turner for me and I would also recommend another book by Charles Seife, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea. Both books cover topics in mathematics and physics without requiring more than a passing familiarity with either by the reader.

Steam: The Untold Story of America’s First Great Invention is a history of the invention of the steam boat. This book was slower going for me as I found that the narrative style chosen by the author interrupted the reading flow at regular intervals (the story would be tooling along in third person narrative and then suddenly, there would be a statement that such and such may have happened but no records exist to document the event), but it is a very good story about the three people primarily responsible for the steam boat, John Fitch, James Rumsey, and Robert Fulton, and the intrigue and conflicts that they endured while pursuing their dreams.