Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Rants and Raves on Craigslist. WTF?!?

Ok, so I found this post on craigslist, and couldn't help but reply. It is amazing what people make up. (And am I being hypocritical, yes. Is it fun? yes) Enjoy:


I love how people love to make up research on the spot to support cracked out theories, or here is MY uneducated unsupported argument AGAINST your uneducated unsupported argument.

---

You want facts? Here are ten.
Reply to: pers-241200145@craigslist.org
Date: 2006-11-28, 12:32PM PST


HERE ARE 10 PHYSICAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN CARNIVORES (MEAT EATERS) AND HERBIVORES (PLANT EATERS).

IS THE HUMAN BODY DESIGNED TO EAT ANIMAL PRODUCTS?

1.A carnivore's teeth are long, sharp and pointed. These are tools that are useful for the task of piercing into flesh. Omnivore's (meat and plant eaters) teeth are similar to that of carnivores. Man's, as well as other herbivore's teeth are not pointed, but flat edged. These are useful tools for biting, crushing and grinding.

--Uh... I don't know about you, but the teeth in the front of my mouth, like the incisors and CANINES are sharp. if Yours are flat, maybe you should consider seeing a dentists rather than an herbalist.

2.A carnivore's jaws move up and down with minimal sideways motion. The jaw motion of an omnivore is similar. These are tools that are useful for the tasks of shearing, ripping and tearing flesh and swallowing it whole. Omnivores swallow their food whole and/or with simple crushing. Man's, as well as other herbivore's jaws cannot shear, but have good side to side and back to front motion. These are tools that are useful for extensive chewing, crushing and grinding of grains and other high fiber foods. Animal flesh cannot be crushed, ground and chewed without some degenerating process such as cooking or frying.

--More proof maybe your hippy friends could benefit from a trip to the dentist. I have no problem ripping, grinding, or sheering flesh from a bone. Gotta love those baby back ribs! Also, I have no problem eating or digesting raw meat. The reason to cook meat is to kill bacteria that can begin to grow when it becomes stale. Do you know how long it takes for food to get to the grocery store or how many people handle it before it gets to your kitchen? Cooking, like refrigeration, is an extra precautionary step when food is going to be kept for a long time. Refrigerators and cooking are unnatural, sure, not eating meat. Are you really going to tell me you don't cook those beans, potatoes, corn, or other such things? That tofu junk doesn't last long without refrigeration the last I look. Additionally, the digestive system of the human body is adaptive, and mostly processed by bacteria. Much of the bacteria comes from the foods we eat, and the more we eat them, the stronger and more prevelant they are in the body to continue eating them. Any kind if food type the body goes without for a long period of time will be difficult for the body to handle. Give a liter of prune juice to a carnivore and you will get a similar result as giving bacon to a vegan.

3.A carnivore or omnivore's saliva does not contain digestive enzymes. Man's, as well as other herbivore's saliva is alkaline, containing carbohydrate digestive enzymes.

--Umm... I think you just proved that carnivores shouldn't eat plants. Hurray for the versatility and evolution of man kind.

4.A carnivore's stomach secretes powerful digestive enzymes with about 10 times the amount of hydrochloric acid than a human or herbivore. The pH is less than or equal to "1" with food in the stomach, for a carnivore or omnivore. For humans or other herbivores, the pH ranges from 4 to 5 with food in the stomach. Hence, man must prepare his meats with laborious cooking or frying methods. E. Coli bacteria, salmonella, campylobacter, trichina worms [parasites] or other pathogens would not survive in the stomach of a lion.

--This must be why lions outlive and outnumber humans... uhh... nevermind. E. Coli bacteria, salmonella, campylobacter, trichina worms should be avoided. There are certain precautions that can be taken to kill such things if they are in your food. Not to mention you can get E. Coli bacteria from plant matter gone bad. They are not very common. Have you actually looked at how many people are actually affected by these diseased every year? Raw meat is usually not bad for you, but why take the risk? Btw, I'd really like to see your data showing that lions don't suffer from diarrhea.


5.A carnivore's or omnivore's small intestine is three to six times the length of its trunk. This is a tool designed for rapid elimination of food that rots quickly. Man's, as well as other herbivore's small intestines are 10 to 12 times the length of their body, and winds itself back and forth in random directions. This is a tool designed for keeping food in it for long enough periods of time so that all the valuable nutrients and minerals can be extracted from it before it enters the large intestine.

--Hurray for versatility of man. Not only are we at the top of the food chain cause we are smart, but because we are meant to eat everything we can fit in our mouth.

6.A carnivore's or omnivore's large intestine is relatively short and simple, like a pipe. This passage is also relatively smooth and runs fairly straight so that fatty wastes high in cholesterol can easily slide out before they start to putrefy. Man's, as well as other herbivore's large intestines, or colons, are puckered and pouched, an apparatus that runs in three directions (ascending, traversing and descending), designed to hold wastes that originally were foods high in water content. This is so that the fluids can be extracted from these wastes, now that all the useful nutrients and minerals have been extracted and the long journey through the small intestine is over. Substances high in fat and cholesterol that have been putrefying for hours during their long stay in the small intestine tend to get stuck in the pockets that line the large intestine.

--Water absorbtion = true, stuff getting stuck = false, except maybe your neighbors pet gerbil, but that's only cause you started at the wrong end of the system, weirdo. Plastic toys or crayons sometimes get stuck, but not meat, or even bubble gun (despite what your mother says). Colon washes were a popular hippy thing in the 70's, but proved to have NO medical benefit.

7.Animal flesh, composed of the most highly complex type of protein that exists, requires vast amounts of uric acid to process. Uric acid is released into the system in amounts necessary to break proteins down into amino acids. Uric acid is a toxic substance responsible for the aging process and must be flushed out and dealt with. That is one of the jobs of the liver. In relative terms, a carnivore's liver is a tool designed with the capacity to eliminate ten times as much uric acid as the liver of man or other plant eater.

--So were efficient too? Sweet!

8.A predator has a gait, large paws and claws, which enable him to hunt, chase and trap his prey. These are tools meant to kill. Man's gait, as well as other herbivore's is designed only for mobility. Examine your hand, fingers and fingernails. Is this an apparatus properly designed for catching, trapping, killing and ripping apart cattle, hogs, chicken and fish? How does this work for picking fruit from trees or harvesting vegetables? The foods your hands were meant to gather are typically, high in water content, high also in fiber to sweep the wastes out of those intestines, and collectively contain every vitamin and mineral necessary to sustain human life.

--Think we discovered the problem. If you can't use your brain and your hands at the same time... you are probably better off picking fruit. Humans are designed for travel and using tools. Humans are the fastest animal in 25 miles allowing them to track herds, not chasing trees. Our hands are great for holding rocks to smash in the brains of the animal we want to eat, or hold the sharp stick to stab them with. Many animals are easy to tear apart and prepare without the use of tools... though some people choose to be more civilized... my self not being one of them.

9.A carnivore's frame of mind is totally geared for hunting and killing. Man's frame of mind is compassionate, friendly and reveres life. When the lion spots another furry animal, something might instinctively click in his head that tells him to hurry up and get dinner. When man spots a furry animal, rather than show his children how to take its life and eat it, a more likely instinct is to pull over, get the camera out and take a picture. Put a young baby chick and an apple in a crib with a six-month-old baby. What will he instinctively attempt to eat and play with?

--I thought humans were omnivores... but whatever. And I think people who work on ranches do teach their families how to tear apart animals. It isn't a vicious thing, it is a work thing. Do you pick the apple because you are thinking about killing the future children of that tree, or because you are hungry? Lion's are also sweet and loving creatures that are very protective of its family. Hippos are much more violent and like to kill things for fun that it doesn't even eat. Why? Because it is a vegetarian! Also, I think a six month old baby is going to drool on both the apple and the chick. Its hands, mouth and motor skills are perfectly capable of killing a chick, and probably would. I don't think a baby, with no teeth mind you, is going to do much harm to an apple.

10. Man is not a natural hunter. Every predator, in order to go hunting, MUST be hungry. Man cannot go hunting if he IS hungry! He must have a meal first. Hunger must precede a predator to go hunting. Hunger must follow man's desire to go hunting, it cannot precede it.

--Gosh, you make it so easy, it is hard to even decide where to start. Hmm... no creature will hunt if it is starving to death. There are also many problems various animals have if they haven't eaten in a long time, more so for carnivores, but that is because as you have stated repeatedly, vegetarians are lazy and make little effort to acquire food. Animals eat when there is food. Many animals will kill themselves over eating in the presence of too much food. Also, every time the some group of people gets stranded without food and turns to cannibalism, last I checked, it was AFTER they got hungry.

--If you have ever studied biology, which you obviously haven't, you'd know that plants take natural resources and turn them into life through photosynthesis and reproduction. Animals on the other hand destroy life by breaking down lifeforms back into their natural resources while sucking away the life energy to move and go kill something else, plant or animal. Would this world be better off without humans? certainly! But as long as we are going to continue to live we should do our part and try to destroy as many of those other nature killing creatures such as cows, pigs, chickens, rabbits, dogs, cats, baby seals, etc as possible to sustain our own life rather than raping and pillaging the natural producers of life force on this planet, the vegetation. Remember, green plants produce oxygen for us, and when you eat them, or rip their bodies from the earth, they can do that any more, you sick twisted individual.

You are just comfortable eating plants because you can sympathize with things that aren't like you. The same argument is used every day to support racism and genocide all over the world. "Ooh, we love things with central nervous systems" or "Ooh, they don't even have centrioles and practice meiosis. Let's kill it and eat it!". Sounds like fascism to me.

More proof that vegetarians, and especially vegans, are Nazis!

Friday, November 17, 2006

LSD Experiment

Very strange / interesting report on an artists 9 self portrait over several hours while on acid. Nothing more to say about it than an interesting insight.

Enjoy

Thursday, November 16, 2006

CANs

Ok, so I guess they are never going to add my name to the Mastre Players list for CANs. Oh well. So instead of waiitng forever on that, I have decided to publish a spoiler. While I do not understand how all the numbers relate to each other, or an emperical equation that gives you the next move to make, but I am sure there is one. I am certain I have just not hunted well enough to uncover web pages giving the source code to the game / strategy. If anyone does know, let me know. :)

Btw, as with any spoiler, give the game a shot first, and get an idea for the challenge. I am certain with a little practice anybody can repeatedly get to lvl 6 without needing to take any notes or make calculations for a solution, but if you get tired at plugging away going back and forth between 5 and 6, give this a shot.

Anyway, here it is. CANs Spoiler!

Most Stolen Grocery Item in Italy!*

*Among Dairy and Produce products in grocery stores

On Live 105.3 they had their usual morning "dumbass contest". This morning they were asking listeners to call in and answer, "What is the most stolen retail item in Italy?". With a number of people calling in trying to guess, I thought I'd be clever and look it up as quick as I could. I quickly found crime statistics on retail items, statistics recorded by the FBI that listed items by units stolen in petty theft crimes (discluding crime organizations / "rings", or items by total value stolen). I laughed looking at the list thinking about reasons why headache medications was at the top of the list. But this was for the United States, so I figured while there is most likely a strong correlation between the United States and Italy, there had to be a reason for the contest; there must have been something special.

I did not find the answer until somebody managed to guess the "correct answer" on the radio. Parmesan Cheese. I found this interesting... but peculiar. Italy is famous for cheese, but considering that on the FBI list for the United States, in the top 50 items there wasn't any food, I became skeptical and started looking for the data source for the radio / news. I found two reports, the better of which is the link above. In skimming through the report, I couldn't help notice where the report came from:

"Lumps of the hard, granular cheese, which Italians love to sprinkle on their pasta, are stolen from the shelves of Italy's stores more often than any other item, according to a survey by the Italian Farmers' Union, Coldiretti."
(1)

Umm... Farmers Union? This seems similar to the Nutrition chart published in schools around the country by the American Dairy Council telling everybody they weren't drinking enough milk. Heaven forbid such a report be, or at least nutrition recommendations be made for something other than milk, or by a group such as, maybe, the American Medical Association?

So like the FBI notes in their statistics, unorganized retail petty theft for specific years, I noted at the top what I think the domain of their survey was: #1 stolen produce or dairy product in grocery stores, which of course would have to be the most coveted and expensive of those items, the Parmesan Cheese.

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Was there really a Dark Age? How many historical documents are counterfeit?



Interesting proposition. This was not an opinion I really ever knew existed... or one I am going to dwell on too much. Just struck me as so weird that I had to share.

Think Saw III was scary? Wait till you see this.

I think this is about the scariest think I have seen in a long time. Follow the above link if you have a strong stomach. You have been warned...

Education Reform

Been looking for sites addressing issues regarding education reform. Thing from different types of schools, school size, how teachers are taught, homework (as mention recently), and found there is a lot of scattered opinions addressing single issues or advocating specific programs. What I want to find is a site with a collection of issues and either links or data that support each side. Not always easy. I finally found one sight that manages to sort them out to make broad research a bit easier. Check the above link.

If anybody knows of any sites like described, and better than the one mentioned, would love to hear about it.

Less dramatic then the election

I look forward to seeing the rest of the California election results, but till then wanted to mention something on a lighter note. SIM CITY 4! Great game, but one I struggled with to get very far. I loved the original as well as the second. Never played 3000, but the flashy box of 4 I couldn't resist. I bought the game not too long after it came out, but soon got frustrated... and was much more attracted to World of Warcraft.

But as WoW has become a dull grind, and finally seeing most all of the end game encounters... not too interested in sitting dedicating the necessary time my guild, or any other high performing guild. Anyway, part of the motivation for getting back into Sim City 4.

So I started looking for some direction to improve my game play. I found a lot of bad advice on all kinds of hint web sites with little blurbs. I then came by this guide by Sim City Freak. Amazing. only reading the first half of it, I was able to build a large city with fantastic income very quickly. So for anyone that wanted to enjoy the game but never got very far, I highly recommend this guide.

What next? map out a local city! That could be fun, and see how much tweaking it requires to run well.

Anyway, happy gaming!

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Wikipedia and Wikibooks

Wikipedia! Great idea and an experimentation on the theoretical limits of Open Source technology and collaboration.

Open source gives would be scam artist (including large corporations) some accountability in terms of the quality of their products by actually allowing their users to see the guts. Much security software has come under criticism for their design when "hackers" reverse engineer the products to discover the entire system is built on obscurity of obvious methods for network penetration, without really reducing threat.

Open source products such as OpenOffice have been the works of brilliant people working together for free to produce something the same smart people need that they are tired of paying for. If you are anti-Microsoft, or even a little computer savoy, grab some flexibility with OpenOffice, a full office package available for more OS environments than I even knew existed.

So anyway, that is one great example... so what happened to wikipedia?

I love wikipedia for... what it could be. It often has very obscure information, particularly cultural references... but what about wiki for reference. Too much what I hear from teachers is it just isn't reliable when the information needs to be reliable.

Wiki definitely has places where it is... lacking. But unfortunately there are many places where the information is absolutely wrong, even on very elaborate and beautiful pages with lots of reference. My first encounter with this was in looking up some info on astronomy. LOTS of information and all kinds of numbers describing planets, moons, and all kinds of technical specs on size, movement, rotation, and temperature or what not. But as I was looking thought the data, some of it seemed odd. I had some problems locating other data to support or deny what was being presented, so made some quick calculations and discovered that in many places numbers and units were horribly disarranged.

So now I stick for wikipedia for vocabulary, pop culture, and inspiration. If I want to look something up, I will often start with wiki, then follow some of the links to references, or find names and investigate them elsewhere.

So the problem today, wikibooks.org. The link above is to a textbook entitled "High School Physics". The first thing I noticed was that with a page introducing potential and kinetic energy that for every instance of there/their/they're, there was only "their", and never used appropriately. I started editing the article immediately after seeing the first mistake and continued to read the article from "edit this page". It went from bad examples that poorly demonstrated concepts to equations that were absolutely wrong "showing" how easy physics is. These weren't just "Ideal" "Newtonian" physics equations that don't account for high speed particular situations... the stuff was just wrong if not taken HORRIBLY out of context.

Anyway, my thought was that this page, if not this book, needs to be deleted. I would fear any student that reads it and goes "I get it now". Unlikely, but I wonder what compelled someone to write such an article in the first place. Oh well.

So... Is open source better it is automatically discrimination by limiting it to the complex language of geeks, as well as being so fragmented that Darwinism causes bad packages and updates and features to be lost over time, while a place like wiki is more susceptible to being messed with by anybody. Open Source projects are managed and seek a particular objective. Users have direct control over quality control by being the designers... but wiki has nothing of the sort. Bad articles happen when people start by posting a small amount of bad data. Are people discouraged from deleting or replacing pages that suck, or might it be encouraging to replace such pages with something better.

I would be curious what others think.

Homework Myth first impressions and a new site!

So I got the book on the way home last night. Was a little disappointed at the price for the size of the book, but whatever. I also ended up ordering "The Case Against Homework" for when it comes into stock.

It is an interesting read so far. I haven't gotten so far to really comment on the contents too much so far, but taking it with a grain of salt I do think it is valid for teachers to challenge themselves and their schools policies over how much homework is necessary and whether or not assignments are meeting their intended objectives.

The author seems to be addressing his opinion from the perspective of what would happen if we completely did away with homework, but his own is a bit more conservative. There are certain subjects where students should have homework, but with greater latitude as to how they learn what they need to learn.

Main thing I have thought so far from having read reviews to getting the book for myself is teachers and students need more support from administration to find latitude in the way that students can be successful for themselves.

In other news, something I had wanted to do was keep this blog to a max of a post a day, and no more than three to four per week to allow time for each subject to be investigated, however, I have been encouraged to begin publishing my experiments in cooking as I have needed a place to keep track of recipes and general kitchen experiments. There is more info on the accompanying page, particularly in its first accompanying story on the weekend barbecue. So follow along with Chef's Special with the link @ Other Pages next to the search engine. Enjoy!

Monday, November 06, 2006

The Homework Myth

"Why our kids are getting too much of a bad thing."

I am going to run out and get this book.

When I was in high school, I never did more homework then I thought was necessary or fun. while this helped me learn a lot, it didn't get me the best grades in the class when homework was heavily weighted. In college, there was no homework, per say, just assignments, and discussion.

Practice isn't a bad thing, just mandatory practice, hence the term "busy work" many students become fond of.

Will students make up their own "homework" if they do not feel like they have fully grasped a subject?

Until I have read this book and compare it to my own experiences, food for thought comparing some of the discussion from "Socialism: Illegitimate, not just inefficient" and what I can imagine is contained within "The Homework Myth", let me pose this question for anyone reading:

Food for Thought:
There has been a scientific break-through! Doctors can now determine from shortly after birth what your ideal career path is. Relatively ideal income, optimal job satisfaction, lowest stress, all because this chosen career is perfect for you. Thankfully, it was also shown there is an even distribution of labor to proliferate a thriving economy, and cultural diversity is a natural system. Ignoring potential for corruption or manipulation, and no legal enforcement or coercion to follow the advise, what do you do with the given information? Is there any reason to make challenge so long as evidence continues to prove the theory flawless. What if it was only 99% accurate?

In other news, I may soon be adding a recipes page after a fantastic barbecue success this weekend. Link to be added soon.