All you need to know about Heartbleed, Randall Munroe style:
xkcd is one of the few unequivocal demonstrations that the web is (can be) a force for good.
Over to y’all.
This post is in: Open Threads
All you need to know about Heartbleed, Randall Munroe style:
xkcd is one of the few unequivocal demonstrations that the web is (can be) a force for good.
Over to y’all.
Comments are closed.
low-tech cyclist
Nitpick: I think you meant Randall Munroe.
Belafon
The attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion is probably the worst fate we’ll ever suffer.
ETA: You should add a link.
Tom Levenson
@low-tech cyclist: Yup. Fix’t. Thanks.
Now hunting down the next caffeine dose.
Tom Levenson
@Belafon: too bloody right. Fix’t as well.
More coffee…
Villago Delenda Est
Noisemax strikes again, in an exclusive interview with Bellatrix Lestrange:
Mary Matalin: Feinstein Report Goes ‘Beyond Hypocrisy’
Also, too more fun from Noisemax:
O’Reilly Slams Colbert: A Progressive Fanatic
VDE slams O’Reilly: A fascist dipshit
Amir Khalid
@Villago Delenda Est:
To me, being a fanatic for progress is actually a good thing.
bemused
Rep Vance McAllister is one (out of many) completely idiotic elected legislators out there. Who texts back without a clue to a random stranger about the cheating mess one is in.
Xecky Gilchrist
There’s something offputtingly winky and too-clever-by-half about xkcd for me. I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s always just annoyed me, however insightful it may be.
Belafon
@Xecky Gilchrist: Because he succeeded by drawing stick figures and the rest of us haven’t.
Xecky Gilchrist
@Belafon: I do applaud xkcd for being strong enough on content to get away with that.
srv
xkcd is just for the digital elite, a new form of snobs
schrodinger's cat
I have a new review of the latest Cosmos here. I think this episode was the best so far. Also a good counter point to Andrew Sullivan’s stupid assertion that Christianity was responsible for the scientific revolution.
ETA: BTW are my Cosmos reviews getting too physicsy? and unintelligible? As a physics kitteh I have no way to judge. Any feedback is appreciated. Kthx.
schrodinger's cat
@Xecky Gilchrist: I sometimes find xkcd funny, sometimes the humor sails right over my head. I also don’t get the fuss over Allie Brosch’s illustrations. I find her writing funny but her illustrations scary.
Villago Delenda Est
@schrodinger’s cat: Hmmm. Andrew Sullivan isn’t terribly learned on Galileo and Copernicus, is he?
I’m shocked, shocked at this.
schrodinger's cat
@Villago Delenda Est: Cosmos hurt his devout Catholic fee-fees.
Librarian
“Paper and clay tablets are safe.” Har de har har.
WereBear
And people should take him seriously… why?
Mnemosyne
@schrodinger’s cat:
As I said over at your place, you only have to read Galileo’s Daughter to see what an uninformed idiot Sullivan is when it comes to the history of science and the Catholic church.
ETA: Also, it’s a very good and entertaining book that humanizes Galileo through the letters he exchanged with his daughter, who was a Poor Clare nun.
Amir Khalid
@schrodinger’s cat:
As you know, for centuries, many of the scholars and scientists in Europe were of the clergy, e.g. Giordano Bruno and Galileo, because they had the education and the time to pursue such things. But these scientist-clergymen still had to fight Catholic dogma when it conflicted with their scientific findings; and in a fight between the Church in its medieval pomp and one monk with a telescope, you would fear for the latter. I wouldn’t call Sullivan’s assertion stupid, not exactly; but it is far from the whole truth.
schrodinger's cat
@WereBear: I think it is his posh accent.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mnemosyne: Well, Sullivan, being Tory scum, is pretty much uninformed about everything, in the great tradition of John Stuart Mill.
Villago Delenda Est
@Amir Khalid: One can make an even more compelling argument that Islam is responsible for a lot of scientific advancement.
Which of course is even more entertaining as we watch wingtards’ haids kerplode.
Roger Moore
@WereBear:
He is in the “Blogs We Monitor And Mock As Needed” category rather than the blogroll.
dmsilev
@schrodinger’s cat:
They look fine to me. While I’m in the same boat as you re: personal knowledge of physics, I have done a fair amount of teaching-to-freshmen and broad community outreach stuff (going all the way down to 2nd or 3rd grade level), and based on that experience, I’d say you’ve written to a level that’s pretty accessible to an interested layperson.
MomSense
Thank FSM for xkcd and existential comics.
? Martin
Guaranteed the NSA has been exploiting this bug for 2 years now.
Roger Moore
@Villago Delenda Est:
What did the Muslims ever do for us, other than Arabic numerals, algebra, large amounts of astronomy, and preserving far more of the classical Greek and Latin texts than Europeans managed?
Mnemosyne
@Amir Khalid:
Slight correction: Galileo was not a priest. He came from a family of musicians and studied medicine at the University of Pisa. He did have to hustle his whole life to find patrons to support his studies.
schrodinger's cat
@Amir Khalid: I made a similar point in an earlier review. But Sullivan’s point was that there was something about Christianity in particular that lead to the scientific revolution.
This is what Sullivan highlighted and had me seeing red. In addition to being complete BS it is extremely Christian and Eurocentric.
ETA: I have no idea who this Percy is, but the book was written in the 30s. So Percy was probably the Charles Murray of his era.
schrodinger's cat
@dmsilev: Thanks, I appreciate your perspective.
Mnemosyne
@schrodinger’s cat:
Yeah — it was the fact that the Christian nations were wealthy after robbing the Americas and had money and leisure to explore those ideas.
Plus that episode of “Cosmos” pointed out another reason: fundamentalism (of several stripes) halted scientific progress in China and the Islamic nations. The one argument you could make that “Christianity” helped advance science was the ginormous split in Christianity between the Roman Catholic Church and the various Protestants, which made it much harder for the RCC to chase down heretics and suppress their findings.
Sorry, Andy, but it was Protestantism that plowed the ground, not Catholicism.
dmsilev
@schrodinger’s cat: Color me completely unsurprised that Sullivan (or the guy he’s approvingly quoting) either doesn’t know about or is willfully ignoring the scientific advances in the Islamic world which predates Galileo.
Amir Khalid
@Mnemosyne:
I stand corrected.
Anoniminous
@schrodinger’s cat:
Reads fine to me.
E.
Some day everyone in America will wake up to discover their bank accounts have been fully emptied. Whether that arises from formally legal activities by the Koch brother brigade or illegal action of teenage computer geniuses in Vladivostok, only time will tell.
schrodinger's cat
WP eated my comment because I tried to go in and fix the messed up block quotes. So I am trying once again.
@Amir Khalid: I made a similar point in an earlier review. But Sullivan’s point was that there was something about Christianity in particular that lead to the scientific revolution.
This is what Sullivan highlighted and had me seeing red. In addition to being complete BS it is extremely Christian and Eurocentric.
ETA: I have no idea who this Percy is, but the book was written in the 30s. So Percy was probably the Charles Murray of his era.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mnemosyne: Protestantism also freed up thought on economics and finance that the Princes of the Church had been retarding for centuries.
The Enlightenment probably would not have happened without the Reformation, which was bloody enough already, thank you very much. The American “founding fathers” were much closer to the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries than we are, which greatly influenced their views on separating church and state.
schrodinger's cat
@Mnemosyne: Exactly, the English and the Germans were at the forefront of the scientific revolution.
Apart from the various Bernoulli brothers I can’t seem to come up with Italian scientists after Galileo.
Anoniminous
@Villago Delenda Est:
The capture of the public library at Toledo caused an intellectual revolution in Christian Europe, laying the basis for Abelard, et. al., to spread and Aquinas to systematize Aristotelian Logic. The Toledo library and further contact with Islam laid the foundations of mathematics: Algebra for the first, Fibonacci for the second.
And that’s the basis for Modern Science.
schrodinger's cat
@schrodinger’s cat: Correction: The block quote is from a book by Alfred Whitehead
Villago Delenda Est
@Anoniminous: See! I told you all that one could make a compelling argument that Islam is responsible, and here we have it!
Ben Cisco
@Roger Moore:
I propose a new category: “Blogs We Ignore b/c The Blogger Is A Racist, Fascist Douchebag”
Anoniminous
@Villago Delenda Est:
I live to serve.
:-)
Roger Moore
@Villago Delenda Est:
They were closer in time to the 30 Years War than we are to them, and closer to the English Civil War than we are to the American Civil War.
Roger Moore
@schrodinger’s cat:
There have been some, even if they aren’t the top of the heap. Some names you might recognize: Torricelli, Avogadro, Volta, Marconi, and Fermi. Fermi is the only one I saw who came to Galileo’s level, and I don’t see anyone at the level of Newton, Darwin, or Einstein; I don’t know if any of them come to the level of Dalton, Pasteur, or Mendel.
Alex
Jim DeMint explaining that slavery was ended due to something something. Definitely not a massive expansion of the federal government.
Alex
And in more open threadness — George W. Bush’s paintings were all sourced to Google Image Search. http://animalnewyork.com/2014/george-w-bush-took-paintings-google-images/
It’s the combination of a lack of a personal touch and just not caring that makes it great. Especially since they’re being displayed as a gallery of how much of a personal connection he had with the world leaders.
“I place a high priority on personal diplomacy. Getting to know a fellow world leader’s personality, character, and concerns made it easier to find common ground and deal with contentious issues. That was a lesson I had picked up from Dad, who was one of the great practitioners of personal diplomacy.” -George W. Bush — http://www.bushcenter.org/special-exhibits/art-of-leadership
schrodinger's cat
@Roger Moore: I remembered Fermi too, several hundred years separate him from Galileo.
I was kinda thinking more about Newton’s contemporaries and was hard pressed to come up many Italian scientists. Galileo’s persecution must have sent a lot of the science in Italy underground.
Robert Sneddon
@schrodinger’s cat: Strongly Catholic communities had an escape route for smart young men, the seminary and the Church and especially the Jesuits. More Protestant communities still had churches and a need for educated young entrants but fewer of them. This might have made a difference.
peggy
Offhand, I can name two Italian Nobel prize winners in biology- Salvatore Luria and Rita Levi-Montalcini. Physical science might provide others- can’t say, not my field.
peggy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Italian_Nobel_laureates lists several other Italian Nobelists, including Rubbia of CERN.
Origuy
There’s Cassini, but he became director of the Paris Observatory in 1669 and stayed there the rest of his life.
Eric U.
@Villago Delenda Est: the Spanish Inquisition was ongoing while the Founding Fathers were writing the Constitution. I have to imagine that it was on their mind
Gene108
@schrodinger’s cat:
Percy can go back to using Roman numerals, if he thinks the East has contributed nothing to the sciences.
A good argument can be made that Vedic astrology is the basis of all mathematics.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_mathematics#Vedic_period
Calouste
@Mnemosyne:
Christianity was made the state religion of the Roman Empire in 391 AD. Pretty much f’ all happened scientifically in Europe from that point onwards for the next 1000 years.
schrodinger's cat
@Gene108: No culture has the monopoly either on the stupid or the genius. There have been times when certain cultures have been more dominant than others. The past few centuries it has been mummy (Britain) and daughter (US) among others, but I am not sanguine about the current tide of stupid, aided and abetted by the Republicans.
ETA: Although what Christianity had to do with the English and US dominance is something I fail to see.