the pod bay door

I think it’s the “Feels like -53°C” graphic that makes me feel a bit chilly.

:: A note to advise everyone that my site, http://www.podbaydoor.com, will be offline shortly, for a period of 24-28 hours. It might happen later this week. This will include my e-mail address, randy at podbaydoor dot com. I will be transferring my domain name to a new name server, and when I initiate that procedure, the site will be non-functional until the name is resolved on the new server. Kind of like an Apollo spacecraft orbiting the far side of the moon – no contact until it emerges on the other side.

Anyway, stay tuned, I’ll probably put up another warning just before I make the switch. Thank you.

:: Some interesting NYC bits from the recent Blackout of 2003.

Amy Langfield describes being “On the last car of the Q Train between DeKalb and Atlantic” when the power went down last Thursday. Read as people fuss over a seven-month pregnant woman, who is eventually helped off the car by the NYPD as a couple of men yell, “I’m pregnant”, and “Me, too!”, in hopes of being helped off the subway car in advance of the other passengers.

Farai Chideya, founder of Pop and Politics, initially thought she was responsible for bringing down the power grid in NYC by turning on her AC, and describes the “Top Ten Things to Do in a Blackout”

NYC bloggers Jenny and Fiona describe their lives at 4:11 pm on Thursday, Aug 14, in NYC, and what happened to them later that day.

:: Astrology has been debunked, according to a study published in the v10, n6-7, June-July 2003 issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies, a peer-reviewed journal published by Imprint Academic in the UK. The authors of “Is Astrology Relevant to Consciousness and Psi? “, Geoffrey Dean and Ivan W Kelly, concluded the following:

Our concern in this article has been to measure the performance of astrology and astrologers. A large-scale test of time twins involving more than one hundred cognitive, behavioural, physical and other variables found no hint of support for the claims of astrology. Consequently, if astrologers could perform better than chance, this might support their claim that reading specifics from birth charts depends on psychic ability and a transcendent reality related to consciousness. But tests incomparably more powerful than those available to the ancients have failed to find effect sizes beyond those due to non-astrological factors such as statistical artifacts and inferential biases. The possibility that astrology might be relevant to consciousness and psi is not denied, but if psychic or spirit influences exist in astrology, they would seem to be very weak or very rare. Support for psychic claims seems unlikely.

Well, duh. The only astrologer who knows what he’s talking about is Lloyd Schumner Sr., anyway. Right? I would, however, like to experience some transcendent reality from time to time.

It seems headlines from The Onion are being taken seriously, once again. (You might have heard about the Beijing Evening News in China reporting an Onion headline as real?)

Now the Branch County Michigan sherrif’s department has advised its residents that Al-Qaeda in involved in telemarketing schemes. Apparently they were responding to recent complaints of telemarketing scams in the area, especially targeting the elderly. During the course of their investigations they found the link to the Onion article which described members of Al-Qaeda involved in telemarketing to raise money, thought magazine subscriptions, vacation home rentals, etc.

The detective involved said he wasn’t aware that The Onion was a humor publication, but that he believes a link to the Onion’s web site was available on the Michigan Attorney General’s web site, which of course, was denied by that office.

This certainly increases my confidence in local law enforcement.

One of my (many) annoyances is the trend that began, oh, who knows, in the early 80s perhaps, of parents naming their kids last names that are less than conventional. (Meaning names that are traditionally last names only, unlike my own, Randall, or my brother, Christopher, etc – names that function as first or last names). Or just strange and bizarre names. Or changing one letter to make the name look “cool” (usually means replacing an “i” with a “y”, like Madyson or something equally childish.) Contractions of two names. Whatever. Have you even been shopping somewhere, and you hear a yuppie mom yell something like, “Tyler, Tyson, Mckenzie, we’re leaving now!”. When that happens, I want to slap the parent upside the head and ask them why they decided to inflict such cruelty on their children. (If your name is Tyler, Tyson or Mckenzie, no offense!) I was in Costco once, and the woman behind me had two beautiful little girls – their names were Kennedy and McKinley, after dead presidents or something.

From Rebecca‘s site I found “Baby’s Named a Bad, Bad Thing – A Primer on Parent Cruelty” (Bow towards Chris Issak.) Here you will find not lists of names, but “naming questions and suggestions posted on two different baby naming bulletin boards going back as far as early 2001” Read it, and you will cringe. Would you name your child Denver Kade Lional, Xev Chiana Louise, Vashara Rashea, Kakinston? Speaking of contractions, one woman wants to name her girl Thazel, which is a contraction of Thelma and Hazel. AAGHHHHH! But wait, there’s more.
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Just finished lunch at work, and am busy compiling a table of research topics of mechanical engineering professors. Anyway, it appears the blurring has been solved. A kind soul in the Moveable Type forums suggested that it might have something to do with the line height vs font size. So I increased the line height by 1 pixel, and it worked.