We haven’t heard an official explanation as to *why*, of course, but I can guess — a fake DMCA takedown request from the religious right or some practitioner of “woo” offended by Randi’s straight talk and overwhelming correctness compared to their vapid and ridiculous beliefs.
Copyright laws are out of control and here’s more proof. I’m sure he hasn’t even broken any, but with the MPAA and RIAA freaking out because the Internet is taking away their stranglehold on content publication they’re getting political pressure to make companies like Youtube respond to each and every takedown notice immediately and seriously.
Their actions to protect their bottom line are hurting our free speech. To hell with them. LET THEM DIE. Music and movies will survive. Differently, but they’ll survive.
Saturday was the second ever Vancouver Skepticamp – an “unconference” where the content is provided by the attendees themselves.
Mel & I not only attended Vancouver Skepticamp on Saturday, but presented! Mel started everything off with an icebreaker game using M&Ms that got everyone to introduce themselves.
I wasn’t sure what to expect and was skeptical (of course) of what it could accomplish but the presentations were almost all excellent!
A few that stuck out to me were
Wynde’s presentations about materialism and consciousness. Her talk was a pretty straightforward introction to the subject but the discussion afterwards was very interesting. We got into determinism and free-will and a Doctoral physics candidate summed up my thoughts on it much better than I could.
Glowing electrocuted pickle!
Rick first gave a short talk about the upcoming BC-STV referendum, and to me this is a no-brainer. It’s obvious that our current voting methods aren’t as good as they can be, and the STV method, while not perfect, seems far better at representing the population in government. Everyone please go vote Yes to Single Transferrable Voting on May 12th!
After that, Rick talked about the obesity epidemnic in North America. This is the one that blew my mind. As you all know, I lost a lot of weight a few years ago, and have been trying to keep it off by eating healthy. It hasn’t been working, and I’ve been craving carbs and it’s been difficult.
The overall point of Rick’s presentation was that the obesity epidemic started at the exact time everyone started selling “low-fat diets”. The more food was offered in “low-fat” formats, the more and more people in the population were obese. He then explained an experiment where the people in it were fed traditional native diets, high in fat and low in carbs, and they lost an average of 15 pounds each!
He also described that low-fat and high-carb diets can trick your body into thinking you’re starving and make you desire more carbs to feed that!
This all makes tremendous sense to me, explains a lot of my problems with weight lately, and I’m switching off of all my low-fat food. Bacon, here I come!
Gary did a presentation on the Shroud of Turin from an artist’s perspective. It was a brilliant angle to debunk the subject and I encouraged him to get it online, possibly as a youtube video!
There were others, but those were the ones that resonated the most with me.
I did my presentation last and it was about my area of expertise — the Internet and blogging. I’ve posted my presentation about blogging skeptically online, along with more information on specifically how to set up a blog of your own. I’ve decided I’m going to expand that information with more posts on the same site.
After Skepticamp most of us went out to All India for some excellent vegetarian Indian food and then I offered to host the afterparty at our place. We had about a dozen people show up for that, played some Scene-It on the 360 (which Blogosaurus and her hubby won!) and then simply talked and drank until the wee hours. Thanks to everyone who came, it was really fun and we should do it again some time!
Not sure if the gameplay is all that great, but the world creation, destructible environments and gorgeous and creative monsters (I love the ones made from books and the “graveyard” one) look amazing.
Was listening to the Adam Carolla podcast while doing some work and the whole display corrupted, sound got stuck in a loop and the computer froze up.
Even after turning it off, removing and reseating the video card (Geforce 9800 GTX) and memory I still get corruption:
There’s a photo of the boot screen showing the corruption (there’s some reflection on it too — ignore the white square in the middle which is a ceiling light). I’m pretty sure this is caused by the video card, but if someone else recognizes it as another problem let me know.
This is my main work machine and I can’t really have it down for an extended period of time so I’m packing up the card and bringing it back to NCIX Burnaby which is only a few blocks away.
Posting this from Mel’s computer, for those wondering how I got online. Mine’s better though, and has all my software and data. And it’s MINE.
Update: It’s covered under manufacturer warranty, not NCIX’s since it’s not OEM and is past 30 days. I’ve contacted Galaxy and they’ve sent me a form to fill out and estimate it could take 7 days to get a replacement.
Update 2: I’ve got another card in there now to use and it works fine, so it’s definitely the card. I agree with Rog, the memory on the video card fried. Whatever it is, I should be getting it replaced under warranty.
Since Jim has his kids on alternate weekends we can only play every second weekend. Our last scheduled Sunday we had multiple people out with the flu so it was cancelled. After a month of waiting, our intrepid adventurers are back at it!
Jess (Kava) bailed on us at the last minute, Steve (Grabthar) told me well in advance he had to move so we were down two players to only three — Dave, Pat and my lovely wife Mel. As both players out were the party Paladins and fulfilled both the “healer” and “tank” roles, I let Pat play Kava in addition to Gallindann.
As noted, this contains spoilers for the Keep on the Shadowfell module. Don’t continue reading after the break if you plan to play it in the future.
Mel and I caught the midnight show of Watchmen last night. I bought our tickets online — cineplex.com lets you do this with no processing fee and you can print your own ticket to directly bypass the line — and we got there a few hours early, filled iPod ready for the wait time. There was already about a hundred people in front of us at that point. The wait was annoying because sitting crosslegged on the floor sucked, and standing sucked. You’d think they’d figure out some sort of “take a number” thing so people could do other things (like buy concession and play their video games, making them money?) while waiting for a show.
Anyway, we ended up getting great seats anyway, right in the middle, a bit closer than I’d like but not too bad.
Short review: I loved it.
Longer review:
Director Zack Snyder has made a movie for fans of the original graphic novel. He’s crafted it probably as well as it possibly could be, and as true to the source material as can be, sacrificing very little from the standard big-budget action hero requirements. The changes and cuts were all — with one possible exception I’ll note in the spoilers section — needed to fit such a dense narrative into a movie, even one that’s nearly three hours long.
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