Dinny the roadside dinosaur has found religion.

The 45-foot-high concrete apatosaurus has towered over Interstate 10 near Palm Springs for nearly three decades as a kitschy prehistoric pit stop for tourists.

Now he is the star of a renovated attraction that disputes the fact that dinosaurs died off millions of years before humans first walked the planet.

Dinny's new owners, pointing to the Book of Genesis, contend that most dinosaurs arrived on Earth the same day as Adam and Eve, some 6,000 years ago, and later marched two by two onto Noah's Ark. The gift shop at the attraction, called the Cabazon Dinosaurs, sells toy dinosaurs whose labels warn, "Don't swallow it! The fossil record does not support evolution."

"We're putting evolutionists on notice: We're taking the dinosaurs back," said Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis, a Christian group building a $25-million creationist museum in Petersburg, Ky., that's already overrun with model sauropods and velociraptors.

OMFG Noooooo! The fundamentalists have purchased the Cabazon Dinosaurs from PeeWee's Big Adventure and The Wizard. I predict they'll destroy them when they loose interest in this rather then turn them over to the corrupt moderate intellectuals. These dinosaurs will be the Bamiyan Buddhas of American Culture!

Best Quote:

There's something in their DNA that knows man walked with these creatures on Earth.

If this was true it would disprove his point!!!!

Here is the official homepage for the Cabazon Dinosaur's new management. Chock full of mind bending self contradicting rationalizations like the one above, and it REALLY puts the FUN back in FUNdamentalism! I can't wait until their online store opens up! I want a TRex Creationism Tshirt!

Adam, Eve and T. Rex - Los Angeles Times

...by his noodly appendage!

Apparently (and predictibly) a Yak was seen near the crimescene.

cola_fan: Today, Georgia Tech was touched...

You get your own online music profile that you can fill up with the music you like. This information is used to create a personal radio station and to find users who are similar to you. Last.fm can even play you new artists and songs you might like. It's addictive, it's growing, it's free, it's music.

Last.fm

The Alter Ego display shows what kind of virtual characters people choose to be in online games and 3D worlds.

This is an article about an exhibit which juxtaposed pictures of "real-life" people, next to images of the characters that they played in MMORPGs. Click on the picture in the article, to be taken to more side-by-side images. I found it very interesting to observe how some people were very different from their avatars, and others were very similar. Though of course the editors seemed to concentrate on the images that provided the most dramatic differences.

BBC NEWS : Virtual gamers reveal themselves

Where anti-skateboard architecture and anti-pigeon spiking combine to create aggressive anti-loitering architecture. People suck...

Transfer: The Anti-Sit Archives

Several graphs depicting a network of FOAF (Friend of a Friend) documents available from the O'Reilly connection network. the visual connections in this network resemble air traffic patterns, as specific social network nodes act as critical communication channels that bridge the gap between disconnected clusters of individuals.

These are similar to Rattle's social network graphs. Much bigger though...

information aesthetics: foaf network

Pat Robertson wrote:

"There are a number of ways of taking out a dictator from power besides killing him. I was misinterpreted by the AP, but that happens all the time."

Why is this acceptable in our society? Robertson clearly said assasinate him. He is on the spot. This happens with public figures all the time. If you have political enemies they will take any unreasonable thing that you say and nail you to the wall on it in an attempt to discredit you wholesale. Its part of how politics works.

The appropriate thing to do, it seems, would be to take responsibility for what was said, acknowledge that it was wrong, and apologize. People need to understand the humanity and fallibility of other people. If they did, these kinds of political attacks would be less effective. Yeah, he fucked up, he was wrong, so what?

Instead, Robertson says "I didn't mean what I clearly meant, I meant something different." This is the standard response. To Spin. And people buy it. This sort of spin war happens because its effective. All of the people on Robertson's side of the isle who want to beleive that Robertson is infallible will grab this hook and hold onto it. Apparently this kind of spin is more effective then simple honesty even in a cut and dry case such as this. Its perspective jousting in the public sphere, similar to what goes on in a courtroom.

Why is this acceptable? Are people really so stupid that they cannot see through this despite having heard it over and over again from so many different political figures? Why won't people think critically about their favorite leaders? Why can't they separate their beleifs from the people who represent them?

U: It gets better: Aparrently after going on his TV show and saying he didn't call for assasination and its all the AP's fault, he issued a statement to the press saying that he did call for assasination and apologizing. There is absolutely no need for consistency at all, apparently. On TV, his viewers can't rewind and see what he really said, so unless they actually read the news, they won't know what happened.

Pat Robertson Says He Was Misinterpreted - Yahoo! News

They say talk is cheap. Google thinks it should be free. Google Talk enables you to call or send instant messages to your friends for free–anytime, anywhere in the world.

Google reinvents another wheel. They seem to be doing a lot of that. This particular wheel, however, is rather plumbed. If anyone actually tries this thing and can tell me what, if anything, is new about it, I'm curious.

The only point I've heard so far is that it uses Jabber. Hrm... See, the reality is that due to a number of decisions that various players have made, the actual standard for IM is, in fact, AIM. This is not the best outcome in the world, as AIM is not an open standard, but it is a standard. I would prefer that Jabber were the standard, but I'm not going to switch to using something that can't communicate with a number of my friends simply because I've got a chip on my sholder about standards, or because I think Google is cool.

Google Talk

The schedule for the D*C space and science track, headed up by our own jonnyx, is available for your perusal.

Wow, Ralph Merkle is speaking! You'll also find at least 4 MemeStreams regulars presenting both here and in the Electronic Frontiers Forum.

Dragon*Con Space and Science Track Schedule

In Canada there are snow festivals in the winter in which people make elaborate scupltures out of ice and snow. Nothing I recall seeing up there in the early 80s came remotely close to this. It might be that technology has improved in the past 20 years. It might be that the Chinese are simply taking this a lot more seriously. In any event, the results are simply amazing. Massive functional buildings made entirely of ice and filled with lights!

R Todd King: China Photos 2005 - Harbin Winter