romunov’s blog et al

Kevin from The other 95% has out-done himself and produced this video. I’m reproducing the lyrics, in shame, here:

Thats Why the Spineless Are Atheist

Now listen here my good ole friends
And let me tell me you how this all ends
There ain’t no afterlife out there
Just a dead carcass with worms out the ears

For you it may come as a surprise
A great big scam, years of lies
But even more surprising to me
All we had to do was listen you see

It may have started fore the Precambrian
A little spark in earth’s great ocean
With a little time you’ll plainly see
Differential reproduction is the key

The critters have known since the end of time
Death and decay is all you’ll find
An endless cycle land, air and sea
But that don’t make some folk happy

Our spineless buddies have been trying to scream
There ain’t no God, its all dream
But we shunned them good and spit on their face
Now the jokes on us to our disgrace

If you ever sit and listen at the beach
You might just hear the crabs start preach
We’ve been changing for millions of years
Our diversity is high so listen here

If I were such an intelligent design
Why can’t I walk forward in a straight line
And perhaps if you take a close look you’ll see
Some crustaceans have asymmetry

If you ever walk through a tall forest
You might here spiders sing out in chorus
We’ve had millions of years to adapt
To cover this here entire map!

If I were but a special creation
Why should I die when I’m matin’
And if in our form there was no match
Why do some of us look like ants

Invertebrates as you can plainly see
Have tried to tell us for centuries
There can’t be no god you creationist
That’s why the spineless are atheist

My needs finally caught up to my setup. I had to crash my hard drives and redistribute free space and reinstall. This time, I went with Kubuntu (7.10) instead of Ubuntu. For some reason, it works faster for me. And even some programs work now (for example mp3 player Amarok). I’m still in the process of kicking out packages that I really have no use for, and perhaps install some useful ones.

The installation process was as easy as it gets. I burned kubuntu iso image to a CD, rebootet my pc and clicked “install” on the desktop that booted. I had to choose my location and language. The most “labor intensive” thing was setting the partitions - whole 60 seconds worth of clicking.

I would recommend this to any beginner, especially if you’re not that familiar in Windows environment (even if you are ). The community is currently strong and prone to solving problems, the stuff is free - you almost can’t ask for more. The only problem is some issues with migrating documents. You might experience cumbersome errors in saving to Microsoft formats (like .doc) and probably with .pps too. This is the horror that awaits me in the future weeks when I’ll have to prepare my presentation for the talk I’ll be giving at the Student’s conference in Ljubljana.

By installing some program (Wine) you can always run Windows applications with minor kerning. Have a whack at it.

Tired of looking out for weather? I’ve build a simple page for checking weather in Slovenia. Be patient, some images may take time to load. Now I need to get this page to display on my desktop background. For some reason, latter 8 images won’t show (they won’t show up in Konqueror, but work fine in Firefox).

Click here.

If you’re publishing something, you might find this FAQ of Fair use interesting. Hat tip to Geoff Read [via Annelida mailing list].

I have to excuse myself to the reader or two who might have stopped by to check for any updates that are far in-between. Due to heavy school schedule and work load, I’ve been forced to reduce my blogging to almost zero. I do check a few blogs every now and then, but I still miss 99% of the action.

I also haven’t found anything interesting to write. A few papers are coming up, which might turn up interesting, but that depends on the writer (me) and how well he does his job.

A few things are worth updating. Hopefully I’ll be laying down final stones for my graduation thesis - soon. Maybe this Friday. I’ll probably be doing something with ichthyofauna (fishes), which will involve some diving. I hope a lot of diving.

And I’ve been in a bad mood for the past two days. Started thinking again, my low self-esteem started bubbling to the surface, and got pissed at myself. Almost enough to put a bullet through my head and end it already, once and for all. Damn hormones.

Just ordered four more books for my collection. I’ve been working all week to earn the privilege that comes with this line of work.

I’ll be digging into Ecology (Krebs), Das leben im Wassertropfen (Streble), Oceanography (Gross & Gross) and Fishes of the sea (Lythgoe & Lythgoe). And now to find the time to read them all. :/

Many people has probably heard of the two lobed Ginkgo (Ginkgo bioloba, the famous living fossil and how hard it is to pronounce it. Supposedly someone messed up y and wrote g, as the name was suppose to be, long long time ago, Ginkyo. I was just reading something about dugongs (Dugong dugon) (I’m preparing a seminar on sea grasses) and came upon this flower.

The word “dugong” derives from the Malay “duyung” meaning “lady of the sea”.

Notice that the y got turned into g as well. Perhaps the work of the same dyslexic transcriber?

Have you encysted today?

Krege’s team used an $80,000 Ground Penetration Radar (GPR) device, which sends out vertical radar signals that are visible on a computer monitor. GPR detects any large-scale disturbances in the soil structure to a normal effective depth of four or five meters, and sometimes up to ten meters. (GPR devices are routinely used around the world by geologists, archeologists, and police.) In its Treblinka investigation, Krege’s team also carried out visual soil inspections, and used an auger to take numerous soil core samples.

The team carefully examined the entire Treblinka II site, especially the alleged “mass graves” portion, and carried out control examinations of the surrounding area. They found no soil disturbance consistent with the burial of hundreds of thousands of bodies, or even evidence that the ground had ever been disturbed. In addition, Krege and his team found no evidence of individual graves, bone remains, human ashes, or wood ashes.

“From these scans we could clearly identify the largely undisturbed horizontal stratigraphic layering, better known as horizons, of the soil under the camp site,” says the 30-year old Krege, who lives in Canberra. “We know from scans of grave sites, and other sites with known soil disturbances, such as quarries, when this natural layering is massively disrupted or missing altogether.” Because normal geological processes are very slow acting, disruption of the soil structure would have been detectable even after 60 years, Krege noted.

Over the years, I’ve learned that there are two kinds of “facts”, if you will. One is hearsay and various (history) books, the other is scientific method and it’s offspring - scientific work.
The former push the “Holocaust” to its limits, asserting it, often squelching anyone who disagrees with the version of events. The latter uses a scientific method and, this is important, questions the scale of the “Holocaust”, as facts don’t amount enough (any) evidence supporting the current official version.

I guess this one will go into the mass grave of forgotten information regarding the “Holocaust”, as many before it. Link.

Easy as pie! Remove packages in your favorite package manager and install OOo 2.3. Here are the instructions on how to do it in KDE that I followed.