biking fun

I went exploring again on the way home from school...

Tuesday's miles: 3.5
Wednesday's miles: 13.3
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1137.1
Miles out of Rivendell: 672.1
Miles out of Lothlórien: 217.1
Miles to Rauros Falls: 191.9

...and discovered that 40th Avenue NE is not nearly as contiguous as 35th. (The gmap plot linked to above is only part of the trip. It's also plotted backwards, but meh, whatever. I also forget one of my side-detours too.) The elevation delta is pretty good, I think it's about 380' (116m) and I got to do it twice, plus the third (not shown) climb up the hill from the shops to my house. I thought the next ridge east from 35th Avenue NE in Seattle ran pretty straight north-south, so that 40th would be fairly flat, but clearly I was very wrong.

It really tells you how many houses we looked at when trying to buy one that I passed by four houses we'd seen in person just by accident as I was trying to find my way north while avoiding 35th and the Burke-Gilman trail. One on 40th, most of the rest on side accidents. I also came within a block and a half of a fifth, but I didn't go out of my way to look at it and besides I'd just biked by it kinda by accident on Monday.

Also, the bike repair shop at UW says I should get my chain replaced in another month and a half at my current riding rate. I've stretched this one a bit. I kind of figured I needed a new one, but I'll have to break it in.

Today's Cultural Warfare Update

Check out the starred articles for how a set of fundamentalist talking points make their way through the various theocon organisations and out to places like Human Events and National Review Online. They key is repetition, repetition, and repetition. The target this time is embryonic stem-cell research, and the intent is to discredit it on every level.

In other news, a fundamentalist attempt to shut down the only remaining clinic in Mississippi providing abortion services has failed - for now. It looks like they're back to doing blockades. Fun.

Meanwhile, here's today's news.

The Washington Post does a story on fundamentalist efforts to turn the Armed Forces into, quoting one organisation's website, "ambassadors for Christ in uniform, empowered by the Holy Spirit";

Christianity Today can't stand the religious bigotry being shown against a Wiccan soldier who died in service in Iraq - the government is still refusing to place the appropriate religious symbol, as he requested, on his plaque;

House of Representatives useless debate on a Federal anti-marriage amendment uses a lot of revealing language;

Focus on the Family to devote Thursday's show to supporting President Bush's veto of stem-cell research expansion;

Focus on the Family reports on Morality In Media's petition to President Bush for more Federal action against "obscenity"; I use quotes because their definitions tend to be awfully broad;

***** Focus on the Family ACTION ITEM to support President Bush's veto of stem-cell research expansion;

Focus on the Family ACTION ITEM to support the "Pledge Protection Act," which would attempt to declare that courts cannot hear challenges to it; this is, of course, bizarrely unconstitutional - you cannot repeal the Constitutional right of redress in the courts by legislative action - but that isn't stopping anyone;

***** FotF House and Senate voting information on HR810 (stem-cell research) and other bills;

Federal appeals court rules inmates cannot be denied abortion at their own expense and must be transported to an appropriate facility if necessary;

FotF reruns an ad/promotion for the "Values Voters Summit";

FotF: "IRS Warns Churches and Nonprofits About Endorsing Candidates" - the tone is surprisingly neutral; previous versions of this story have been all about how the IRS is going to CRUSH the FREE SPEECH of the CHURCH!!!1! and so on;

FotF story on the failure of the anti-marriage amendment in the House of Representatives, following a failure in the Senate; the vote was pointless, of course, as the Senate had already outright rejected it; includes ACTION ITEM to thank representatives who voted for it and complain to those who opposed;

FotF reports that the Democratic National Committee has a plan to combat state anti-marriage initiatives; funny, they haven't helped before, so I'd be surprised if they started now, and it'd be nice to hear it from them; includes ACTION ITEM to support a Federal anti-marriage initiative;

Anti-abortion activists are back to trying to physically blockade clinics; "Operation Save America" tried it in Mississippi last weekend, it got broken up; Focus on the Family is outraged, calls it a violation of the first amendment;

FotF, Concerned Women for America jointly demand pro-torture judicial nominiee Jim Haynes be let out of confirmation and onto the Appeals court bench;

FotF reports South Dakota Rep. Roger "no health exemption" Hunt is receiving harassing phone calls; unspecified "lawmakers" claim to have received death threats;

"Pregnancy centres" to have national promotional car washes this September; this at about the same time as stories are reappearing about their misleading and abusive tactics;

Faith and Freedom Network ACTION ITEM to support the "Pledge Protection Act," and gives a URL but the action item isn't online;

***** Concerned Women for America condemn passage of stem-cell research expansion act, calling embryonic stem-cell research supporters "snake-oil salesmen"; note the continual rhetoric: embryonic stem-cell research "has produced no results" (while they simultaneously condemn any research making progress - doublethink is a big thing in fundmentalistland), but "adult stem-cell research" is producing "miracles" every day;

***** CWA article on the "miracle of adult stem-cell research";

CWA pushes "ex-gay" ministry bullshit;

Federal appeals court reinstates Nebraska's comprehensive marriage ban; it bans marriage, civil unions, domestic partnerships, and all recognition thereof;

***** CWA condemns embryonic stem-cell research (again - see above; the repetition of the message is what's important, even more than the content); in this one, they're again saying that it's not only immoral but ineffective and Too Risky and that nobody will fund it (not true; there was an article in the UW Daily about researchers struggling to do as much work as they can within the constraints of the Federal funding ban and getting money, just for example - and even were it true, the Federal funding ban might have something to do with the funding issues); and also, just for laffs, I quote a little of one bit where they're talking about how it's a "triumph of activism over science";

***** CWA condemns "fetus farming";

CWA supports "Pledge Protection Act," which unconstitutionally bans courts from hearing Pledge of Allegiance cases;

***** CWA has yet another iteration of their latest condemnation of embryonic stem-cell research, which uses the "snake-oil salesmen" line again;

***** National Review picks up the Concerned Women for America line on embryonic stem-cell research, calling it "destructive" and "anti-life";

***** National Review picks up the CWA/theoconservative line, Part II: Science, arguably the most respected journal in scientific research, is "pseudoscience" for support of embryonic stem-cell research, asserts that people supporting embryonic stem-cell research are "scientific[ally] and moral[ly] backrupt";

Family Research Council opposes making HPV virus part of the standard set of vaccines required for school;

FRC press release on 8th Circuit Court reinstating Nebraska's anti-marriage/anti-civil-unions/anti-domestic-parnerships ban, and also on Tennessee's anti-marriage effort;

FRC demands action on pro-torture Bush appeals court nominee;

FRC condemns House of Representatives for not passing anti-marriage Federal amendment;

FRC demands immediate Senate action on the unconstitutional (to my opinion, clearly so) "Pledge Protection Act" removing Pledge cases from Judicial purview;

***** Human Events Online also picks up the Concerned Women for America line on stem-cell research, reprinting one of their attack columns on their website; repetition, repetition, repetition;

***** American Family Association outrage at Congressional passage of embryonic stem-cell research act, happiness over the veto;

AFA attacks House of Representatives for not passing anti-marriage Federal constitutional amendment;

A second AFA story about the failed Federal anti-marriage amendment includes lots of quotes from James Dobson talking about how this needs to be remembered in November, and how voters should vote based on this amendment's failure;

***** AFA article: "Curing a disease that wasn't" - on HPV;

***** AFA jumps on the anti-Science bandwagon over the recent article on stem-cell research; they follow the same general route as the other groups above; repetition, repetition, repetition;

AFA reports on the attempt to shut down the only clinic in Mississippi providing abortion services; they're for it, of course;

***** Traditional Values Coalition links to Senator Tom Coburn's summary of the fundamentalist "talking points" against embryonic stem-cell research; repetition, repetition, and co-ordination;

***** Focus on the Family Canada's story on researchers turning stem cells into sperm cells has lots of alarm in it, and, in the email version, includes an ACTION ITEM to tell HealthCanada you're against testing externally-fertilised embryos for genetic defects before implanting them in women trying to get pregnant.

( Articles and excerpts below )

this and that

Here, have some Dork Nation Funnies.

How can I be so busy and have so little to say? I guess that's school for you. The garden seems fine so far - the broccoli isn't sending up any food yet, but everything's leafy and the carrots seem to have carroty leaf-like things and such. I cleared the other raised bed, and need to fertilise and get it ready for the second winter crop of stuff. Next year, I'll swap bed purposes, and the smaller bed will be the cool-weather bed, and the larger one can be for summer.

Maybe I'll put in a few stalks of corn or something, just for the hell of it.


Merry Go Round

I installed Excel on my Powerbook, but it crashes at startup 100% of the time. Very annoying. This is the older Office X Excel. Word X loads fine, which means it's not in any of the office-wide shared code. This is particularly annoying since the post-lab reports (which is what really get graded) are all .xls files. So far, I've just been doing them at school, and I can keep doing that - I only have three more to write up - but it still peeves me.

In somewhat more geeky news, I wrote a programme for my calculator. Well, specifically, I ported a programme, but it was pretty much a complete rewrite because the languages weren't compatible. It determines the limiting chemical in a two-chemical reaction and does some math. It's not that much, but it's 73 lines of code, which is as much as I've written in one go since I left MIcrosoft. Alvin, our class's TA, saw me working on it and said I should show it to Dr. Callis, our lecturer, whose original I started with and tried to get to work and figured out I needed to rewrite since TI has multiple calculator languages and ours aren't very compatible. So I did, and he thought it was kinda neat, and I'm going to test it some more, and once it passes that, it can be put up on the class's website. OooooooOOooo.

Regardless, now he's talking to me about writing up a general equation balancer, the hardest part of which will be the string parsing, and that shouldn't be a big deal either, really. I could maybe even get a little credit for it via a Chem199 (undergraduate research) assignment if I actually did it and had it working and stuff. That might be cool.

Anyway. No updates in two days, three updates in one day. It averages out, I suppose.