if everything goes well, the worse days are still to come

the only way for humans to survive is to get off this planet, and onto as many other planets as possible. this is a reasonably well recognised fact, when one thinks that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, and will one day wipe most, if not all, living things from the face of the earth. but spreading ourselves has an ugly side. give it enough time, and there will be hundreds, perhaps thousands of other planets, all with their human populations counting into the billions. so let’s suppose that one day, there are 1000 planets, each with about 10 billion people each. that seems entirely feasible enough. then think of an asteroid coming and completely obliterating one of those planets. billions of people dying in an infinitessimal (comsologically speaking) amount of time. not so good.

what’s worse? suppose that we get a colony going on another planet, and wham, along comes our asteroid again. it doesn’t matter which planet it hits, half the human population dies in our cosmological second. but wait. it gets even worse.

suppose we are on one planet, and that planet is destroyed. all people disappear. that’s not a bad day. because there would be no one around to have that bad day.

but built into this is the assumption that human survival is a good thing. there are three ways this can be seen. it is either:

1. Good that humans survive,
2. Bad that humans survive,
3. there is no good or bad, there just is. call it ambivalence.

which is it? that the moose head is pondering. and you can too.

shindler

no, not the oskar kind, but a program called Shindler. it’s from the guy(s) at what is now 1802.it What exactly is Shindler? it’s a wee utility (like 260kb wee) that produces a text file listing every file in a folder, volume, CD, or whatever. it’s pretty simple, drag the icon of the thing you want to list onto the Shindler icon, and a few seconds later, voila, there is a text file, one file per line, sorted by path. and damn is it useful for keeping track of all the stuff that i have backed up on DVDs and CDs.

that’s the what, the where? you can click on the above link, or you can get it from VersionTracker if that’s your cup of tea, or Softpedia if you’d rather go there.

the pie is ready

what is in the air? olympic wise, i’m talking. despite the fact that a macbook air could probably sit in the air it’s so damn thick in beijing, what the hell is going to happen to those athletes. particularly the long distance one’s like the road cyclists and the marathon runners, who are out and about in the city. whereas there is a chance that the air in the stadium will be fine, i doubt that will be the case out on the road where the walkers, runners and cyclists will be doing their thing.

i mean, what sort of choice have the athletes got? they’ve been selected to represent their country, which is a huge honour. that makes them want to go and do everything that can for their country. but when the very air they breathe is a poisonous fume? bloody hell, the chinese may well win the abovementioned events because their athletes are probably damn used to it. and how the hell does the “china is best” thing fit into that when they get their asses handed to them (i will be proven right- how likely is it that a chinese athlete will win every event? not gonna happen)

kaboom

i wonder what it is that makes people (mostly guys i would conjecture) laugh at explosions. i frequently do so. some explosions are cool. doesn’t really seem that it’s too much of systemising things as males’ brains do (if ya don’t know what i’m on about, google S. Baron Cohen (not Sasha, Simon, who is a cousin or second cousin of his. we all asked that in philosophy) and look at his book “The Essential Difference”)

i do like a good explosion. maybe it’s just the will do destroy stuff. i think that is it. but why destroy stuff? liek

and another

no, this one is not about dingbats or nincompooporama. it’s about ye olde velocipede. and ye olde uncomfortable seat. why the hell didn’t CSC blow the race apart on the Croix de Fer? i get that but it still would have been cool to see. it now seems that the tour could well be won by someone without winning a stage. and i’m not sure that i’m for that. sure, the winner will have the fastest overall time, but without winning a stage, it seems to me that the winner, whoever it will be, will use and discard the team, and not put in too much himself. maybe not. we’ll have to wait and see Sat’s ITT. i’d also like to see a TTT next year, but that may well not happen. hoom.

but before you dismiss cycling altogether as some other sport, think of when you last sat on your bike for a few hours. your ass hurt like hell. those guys earn their money. even if they didn’t actually ride anywhere, one should be paid to sit on a seat that bloody uncomfortable.

what a group of nincompoops

ouch. i just cut my leg off. i think i’ll call the emergency number. here it’s 111, in the US, 911, in the UK 999. you get what i mean. but what about my leg? yeah, say it got cut off. that’s the sort of thing a 111 call is for. when someone is in grave danger of dying. or someone is robbing the bank next door, or a house is burning down. not like that nincompoops who rang 111 to say “there are no busses in x street”- i mean, oh my gosh, people are dying, send all the help we can possibly find to ……help this man who is complaining that there aren’t any busses. but that’s not as bad as the stupid old bat who rang 999 to say…………….
“i’ve lost my glasses, and now i can’t make my lunch” – i highly doubt that that stupid old bat will die from the simple fact that she can’t have any potatoes in her lunch today.

evidence that the Rt. Hon. J. Hacker was right when he said people should have to get breeding licenses.

history flow

i like safari. and one thing that i inadvertently found when i was clicking away in the history menu was something i found there called “History Flow.” this wee gem comes from the dude(s) at hetima.com in a friendly safari plug-in called Safari Stand. history flow may well be the thing that i like most about safaristand. it takes the idea of coverflow, and does that for your history is safari. simple and elegant. where to get this goody? you can go to hetima.com to get it from the horse’s mouth, or you can go to pimpmysafari.com where you’ll find not only safaristand but two other goodies, saft and pith helmet. i’ll leave those goodies up to you kiddiewinkles to explore.

you do need SIMBL and both pages seem to have links to where you can get your mits on. you may already have SIMBL if you’re the tinkering application sort of person.

Out for a story

grrr, this gets to me. whatever happened to innocent till proven guilty. what sort of reality i’m in where i want to believe that the cyclists in the Tour are all clean is one question, but that is not what this is about. I would like to think that team CSC are clean, all of them. and i hope that they are, not in that their being so will make me right, but in that they will be doing the right thing.

they are saying that he might be have taken EPO. of course he might have. and i might be a slobbering tri-tentacled green alien. but the proof is in the pudding.

whether this story has any consequential guts is another matter. and i have some pie in the oven and i’m perfectly ready to eat it when it’s shown that i have to. but until then i shall protest.

but whatever happened to these men being innocent until proven guilty? seems like cnn just wanted a story. cycling has had enough of doping. we don’t need more rumours of this type, we know that there are problems. rumours like these don’t help. they just make people grumpy, like me.