The Arizona Republic ran a great interview with George Carlin recently. Carlin snuck in a couple of great rants during the interview. His main point was that we as a country have sold out and are letting business interests screw up the world. “The most interesting thing to me is that the things that people would seem to have the most right to have - that is to say health, food, shelter and a job are the things that are last on the list. To me, that is fundamental. Those are the things humans most need to function, and we have placed them at the bottom of the list. So I think that says a lot about national character and priorities.”
You know it’s time to get a new job when the store you work in is robbed two times in the same weekend! A Blockbuster Video store (the store I used to rent from when we lived in Englewood) was robbed Saturday afternoon by two men, then Monday night by a single man. In both cases, the robbers showed the clerk a handgun and said, “Give me your money.” If I were the clerk, I’d give the robber the money, watch them leave, then sit down and write a resignation letter.
Local pro wrestler Alan Carnill (better known around the Denver indie pro wrestling scene as Beetlejuice) was killed Sunday in an auto accident in Kansas. This is personally very sad news. I have met Alan a couple of times, and chatted with him via email many times. He went through a lot in his life, including losing his daughter to cancer. He was a great performer in the ring, and was fun to talk to outside the ring. Alan was a great guy, and will be missed.
More on the Colorado legislature’s attempt to ban liberal college professors from discussing politics in the classroom: The Denver Post has written an editorial calling this bill “just plain silly.” The Post editorial states that this is purely a political bill, and should not be passed. It’ll end up costing the state of Colorado thousands of dollars in futile attempts to defend the bill. “The issues Mitchell raises are worth discussing, but they’re best debated on campus, not in the legislature.”
Colorado is a very conservative state, and we have a very conservative legislature to represent this. It is not unusual to hear about bills in Colorado that would mandate, for example, increased executions for death row prisoners. So I was very surprised to find out that the Colorado legislature is passing a bill that requires hospitals inform rape victims about emergency contraception. The bill sounds very level-headed: if a hospital worker is morally against emergency contraception, that work can ask a fellow employee to give this information to the rape victim.
Even more surprising than this decidedly-not-conservative bill is that a couple of Republican legislators are supporting the bill. The Republican legislators in this state tend to stick together stronger than magnets. But this bill is seeing bi-partisan support.
Personally, I think this bill should be law. If a woman has just been raped, she should know that there’s another option besides abortion or having a baby conceived via rape.
The problems with Mars rover Spirit appear to be caused by a lack of memory on the rover. Proving once again that a computer can never have too much RAM! It is amusing that such a simple factor could have caused so many problems with Spirit. But I am also guessing that the contractors who built Spirit didn’t just use off-the-shelf DDR DIMMs in Spirit.
If they did, however, then someone needs to be slapped! How could you not throw a few extra gigs in Spirit? Why go cheap on the RAM?
Now that NASA engineers know what caused the problem, they are already working to make sure Opportunity doesn’t have the same problem. Engineers are deleting unnecessary files in Opportunity’s flash memory.
