Raithe

Well if we're going to round out the Friday...

Well, to wander into something that kind of amused me.. io9 - How Long Would Batman Last in the Real World? From a response after that question was asked on Redditor

The oven stopped working, so spent a chunk of the afternoon getting that out and looking at it. The control board is fried, and replacing it would cost about half the price of a totally new oven....

To slide into that end of week curve..

Although if we're going to keep parodies in here rather then on the music thread... http://youtu.be/Ek4Op89V2_Q

Also, just for the weirdness factor of all these news articles doing the "it's a fake, it's true, what happened? wtf knows?" Telegraph - Scientists baffled by appearance of giant crater in Siberia

Just for the joys of science.. Here's what happens when you actually have snakes on a plane... that's inducing microgravity

One thing I'd imagine would be quite fun would be to mix Black Crusade in with Rogue Trader and have the crew turned to Chaos and carry on playing through just to see how it would develop...

Just for the expressions.. http://youtu.be/R30BLZKRX6g

To be fair, Black Crusade is pretty much geared for fairly short campaigns where players will burn out rapidly and devolve into chaos spawn if they aren't careful...

Scientists are beginning to figure out why Conservatives...are Conservative Back in 2003, Jost and his team were blasted by Ann Coulter, George Will, and National Review for saying this; congressional Republicans began probing into their research grants; and they got lots of hate mail. But what's clear is that today, they've more or less triumphed. They won a field of converts to their view and sparked a wave of new research, including the work of Hibbing and his team. Granted, there are still many issues yet to be worked out in the science of ideology. Most of the commentaries on the new Hibbing paper are focused on important but not-paradigm-shifting side issues, such as the question of how conservatives can have a higher negativity bias, and yet not have neurotic personalities. (Actually, if anything, the research suggests that liberals may be the more neurotic bunch.) Indeed, conservatives tend to have a high degree of happiness and life satisfaction. But Hibbing and colleagues find no contradiction here. Instead, they paraphrase two other scholarly commentators (Matt Motyl of the University of Virginia and Ravi Iyer of the University of Southern California), who note that "successfully monitoring and attending negative features of the environment, as conservatives tend to do, may be just the sort of tractable task…that is more likely to lead to a fulfilling and happy life than is a constant search for new experience after new experience." All of this matters, of course, because we still operate in politics and in media as if minds can be changed by the best honed arguments, the most compelling facts. And yet if our political opponents are simply perceiving the world differently, that idea starts to crumble. Out of the rubble just might arise a better way of acting in politics that leads to less dysfunction and less gridlock…thanks to science.

The question becomes, when the opening of a statement is "I only drank 4 beers..." does that slide into the nature of starting every anecdote with "I was at the pub" or "I was slightly drunk".. ? The cat has taken to meowing in a very plaintive way today.. but I've managed to ignore him to get various laundry sorted and some of those household chores out of the way.

And they've now released the Tome of Decay for Black Crusade. Rounding out all four of the Chaos aspects, only with this they've included the rules for taking a Chaos player and actually becoming an Ascended Daemon Prince, along with how to run and lead a Black Crusade. I have to say, I'm curious as to how that will all balance out...

http://youtu.be/8Gv0H-vPoDc

I kind of felt bleh all day with the lack of sleep the past few days and the headache I awoke to. Couldn't focus well on any work stuff all scattered and couldn't figure out where to start things properly. Mom's been having a bad day with things, so she doped herself to half-sleep with her pain meds, the dog and cat have both been snoozing through all the day... which generally meant I ended up doing very little and marathoning the 12 episodes of 24: live another day. I was curious and amused to see just how far they'd push the boat this time with it.

Well, that trailer was moody, atmospheric, kind of pretty in a very disjointed way, and told me pretty much nothing about the game...

Staggering into Tuesday in general. This seems to be the third day in a row I managed about 3 hours of sleep and then woke up, although this time was to discover the joys of a raging headache. Still, managed to doze in and out for a bit longer, but not quite proper sleep. Now I'm trying to figure out what I actually need to do with the day....

To slowly wind into the Tuesday... How about the female cast of the new Hercules?

Since we're trying to get the week started in some order.. And to leave it on a certain note..

After an uncomfortable night with a lower back that's stiff and throbbing dullly I think I'll take some ibuprofen and skip the planned morning attempt on the local police assault course. I think the core work on Thursday might have pushed it.

For the amusement value.. io9 - Creationists help Climate Change Deniers attack US Science Education And, Luskin characterizes this as "propagandizing kids," comparing the new education standards to racist beliefs: And, he explains, the National Center for Science Education is part of an elitist, scientific cabal: Indeed, NCSE has been collaboratively envisioned, created, and supported financially by elite establishment groups, including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Association of Biology Teachers, the National Science Teachers Association, the National Science Foundation, and many other national educational and scientific (or scientist-activist) organizations. All of this is in keeping with the long-term strategy of the Heartland Institute. Two years ago, leaked documents revealed its plans to promote a science curriculum for schools that would raise doubts about human-caused climate change. They even discussed strategies for "dissuading teachers from teaching science." I'll be looking forward to seeing what Luskin has to say in the second part of his column.

Printed out a whole batch of documents and related matter, which are now spread around on my desk , attempting to organise and figure out what I need to do and where I have to go with it all.. and trying to avoid going "Bibble!?!?"

Oh, or you could go with things like.. What lessons did he take away from Alpha Protocol when all was said and done?