Oh hai:

1st lolcats in your browser, makin u lolz.

2nd - LOLcritters got a website.

3. lolbrarians in ur cattylog, makin up subj3kt hedinz.

4. LOLgays can has marrige?

5. LOLlinguist sez: pidgin or cweeole? Do want LOLchart:

6. LOLmedievalist:

And yet in this derke tyme of sorwe and tene, ich haue foond much deliit in the merveillous japeries of the internet. No thyng hath plesed me moore, or moore esed myn wery brayne than thes joili and gentil peyntures ycleped “Cat Macroes” or “LOL Cattes .” Thes wondirful peintures aren depicciouns of animals, many of them of gret weight and girth, the which proclayme humorous messages in sum queynte dialect of Englysshe (peraventure from the North?). Many of thes cattes (and squirreles) do desiren to haue a “cheezburger,” or sum tyme thei are in yower sum thinge doinge sum thinge to yt.

7. LOLtrekkies has tribbles and also troubles.

8. LOLgeeks loop until KTHXBYE

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
GIMMEH VAR
IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10?
YARLY
BTW this is true
VISIBLE "BIG NUMBER!"
NOWAI
BTW this is false
VISIBLE "LITTLE NUMBER!"
KTHX
KTHXBYE

9. LOLphilosophers srs, K?
10. Shakespeare cat is shakespearean:

11. Pls is it can be LOLsingularity now?

Dive in at Enchgallery.  You could spend quite a while at this site taking in the fractal sites.   Those fractals are common in nature, there is something other-worldly about these works of art.

Just wanted to pass along this link to an article by one of favorite columnists.  He goes over the edge some days, but most of the time he is spot on in his rantings!

Enjoy -

Here’s a good question:  why can’t a woman go topless wherever a man can? 

Sorry . . . I’m not buying answers like “Because that is the way it has always been” or “Because they are women.” 

Talk about equal rights!  The prevalent dress code inequity is motivated by the same mindset that leads some people to kick breastfeeding women off of airplanes.  Or am I missing something?  Here’s a relevant article on cross-cultural attitudes toward nudity.

I didn’t realize that New York state is one of the very few places in the US where women can legally be top free anywhere that a man can be top free.  Photographer Jordan Matter used New York City as the backdrop to a collection of photos he has named “Uncovered.”  Here’s how he explains the collection on “The Thinking Blog.” 

Challenging this inequity between the sexes is the purpose of my work. There has been a recent shift in America towards a socially conservative philosophy, so right after Janet Jackson’s breast was exposed at the Super Bowl, I started asking women to appear topless in New York City. [Uncovered: Busting Out in the Big Apple] is a collection of photographs featuring bare-breasted women in public around NYC, often presented with interviews exploring the issues of body image and sexuality in America today. The informal and humorous nature of these images celebrates women without sexualizing or objectifying them, while creating the illusion of a tolerant world in which shirtless women go casually about their lives. Uncovered represents just one aspect of what America could look like if we were free of shame and liberated from moral judgment.

“The Thinking Blog” contains various links to “Uncovered.”  Here’s Matter’s official site. [Warning to those who are offended or mortified by images of human breasts, including all of you who pummeled the FCC with emails complaining about Janet Jackson: "Uncovered" contains non-sexualized images of human breasts. If you're looking for sexual images, you'll be disappointed and you'll have to surf on over to one of the tens of millions of Internet sites that offer those sorts of images].

I’m sharing this information because I found the Matter’s photos to be both humorous and intellectually challenging.

You don’t know the word “palter”?  I didn’t either, until I read a recent paper by Frederick Schauer and Richard J. Zeckhauser of Harvard.  The paper’s abstract defines this incredibly useful term, palter:

Abstract:     
A lie involves three elements: deceptive intent, an inaccurate message, and a harmful effect. When only one or two of these elements is present we do not call the activity lying, even when the practice is no less morally questionable or socially detrimental. This essay explores this area of “less-than-lying,” in particular intentionally deceptive practices such as fudging, twisting, shading, bending, stretching, slanting, exaggerating, distorting, whitewashing, and selective reporting. Such deceptive practices are occasionally called “paltering,” which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as acting insincerely or misleadingly.

The authors suggest that paltering “has received little systematic study.” They also suggest that when harmful paltering is established, “the sanctions against it should be at least as stiff as those against lying.”

At this page you can find the link to the entire article.   I’m definitely going to incorporate “palter” into my vocabulary. 

“Paltering” is going to be an extremely useful word, unfortunately.

If you’ve been following this blog for the past few weeks, you know that I attended the National Conference for Media Reform in Memphis Tennessee (Jan 12-14).  The conference, sponsored by Free Press, drew more than 3,500 participants.

Free Press offered a reduced admission fee to those who agreed to blog the conference.  I took them up on that offer and ended up posting repeatedly from (and about) the conference.  For anyone who would like to know about cutting edge issues in media reform, I did my best to report them. 

Now that my flurry of media reform posts is slowing, I decided to place the links to those posts in one spot—here—for anyone wanting to vicariously attend the conference: 

Nation Conference for Media Reform - Opening Shots

Dennis Kucinich on A) Media Reform and B) How Bush is Scaring the Republicans

Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control Media - Day 2 of the National Conference for Media Reform

Nation Conference for Media Reform - Plenary Speech by Bill Moyers

How to save the Internet: net neutrality (equal access)

National Conference for Media Reform - The Press at War and the War on the Press

Children and media policy

Media Reform Speech by FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein

Emerging research issues in media

Ed Markey: A good friend for each of us who believes in a vigorous First Amendment

Assembling democracy

Bloggers: Welcome to the downside of journalism!

Journalism quotes

Reporting on Iraq - from afar

Bill Moyers: “Big Media is Ravenous. It Never Gets Enough. Always Wants More. And it Will Stop at Nothing to Get It.”

Meet the exhibitors at the National Conference for Media Reform

Why we won’t solve any other major problem confronting the U.S. without media reform.

What is the future of newspapers?

Patriotism and asking good hard questions 

Today’s biggest story: Somebody won the Powerball jackpot! 

Really, I did.  You, too, can create a surreally attractive male or female by using the Face Laboratory run by two experimental psychologists working at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.

Your hyper-attractive face will actually be made by a computer. You’ll help by choosing the “ingredients” (a few or many faces), and the program averages them into a final product.  This averaging process downplays imperfections and results in exquisite symmetry.  

What’s amazing to me is that strikingly attractive averaged faces result even when (maybe especially when) you choose some of the faces that might initially appear relatively unattractive. 

As explained in the site’s FAQ’s:

Symmetry is one aspect of faces that has been extensively studied by many researchers in relation to attractiveness. The most common method used to investigate the effect symmetry has on the attractiveness of faces involves manipulating the symmetry of face images using sophisticated computer graphic methods and assessing the effect that this manipulation has on perceptions of the attractiveness of the faces.

But why should we be attracted to symmetry.  Evolutionary psychologists suggest an answer:  symmetry is a token for health, and therefore fitness to reproduce:

But why would cognitive averaging have evolved? Evolutionary biology holds that in any given population, extreme characteristics tend to fall away in favor of average ones. Birds with unusually long or short wings die more often in storms. Human babies who are born larger or smaller than average are less likely to survive. The ability to form an average-mate template would have conveyed a singular survival advantage.

Inclination toward the average is called koinophilia, from the Greek words koinos, meaning “usual,” and philos, meaning “love.” To Langlois, humans are clearly koinophiles. The remaining question is whether our good-mate template is acquired or innate. To help solve the mystery, Langlois’s doctoral student Lisa Kalakanis has presented babies who are just 15 minutes old with paired images of attractive and homely faces. “We’re just starting to evaluate that data,” says Langlois.

But koinophilia isn’t the only-or even supreme-criterion for beauty that evolution has promoted, other scientists argue. An innate yearning for symmetry is a major boon, contend biologists Anders Moller and Randy Thornhill, as asymmetry can signal malnutrition, disease, or bad genes. The two have found that asymmetrical animals, ranging from barn swallows to lions, have fewer offspring and shorter lives.

So get going, now!  Go create somebody.

No!  Wait!  First, a thought.  Is it possible that one’s life would look more attractive if a bunch of our lives were averaged together?  Any one person’s life is often disjointed, with moments of stumbling, error and bad judgment (that is certainly and often the story of my life).  But what if we could somehow average together a particular life with the lives of 20 other people picked at random, then run some sort of “averaged” video of the result?   Would there result be graceful, confident, sublime?  Or would we miss the edges and the pimples?

And what if the whole world were full of people that looked like the super-averaged computer results from this site, but then along came some regular people with their lack of perfect symmetry?  Would they be seen as ugly or as distinctively attractive?  Who would that society choose to be its models and movie stars, the non-symmetrical or the symmetrical?

I’m not addicted to web videos . . . Really.  I don’t think I am.  Am I?   Oh, come on!   Watch this skate-boarding doggie and tell me it didn’t make you smile.  

This video really makes me want to know how to train a dog to do these tricks. 

Up to a few years ago, internet map programs offered map views that were too small to be easily used to plan trips.  That’s all changed not.   Google Maps and Microsoft’s Live Search offer full screen maps that you can slide around (your cursor turns into a small hand.   Lots of other features, too, for getting around and finding businesses.  Satellite views are included as well.   Not to say that any of these graphics compares (yet) with Google Earth.

Even Mapquest is now offering a larger map view (though is not full screen).  No more cartological claustrophobia.

If you like music and animations, you’ll love this music animation.   The linked site doesn’t indicate the creator, but, I learned from the first commenter that this is the work of Animusic.

Here’s a great site for all of you who enjoy optical illusions. Lots and lots of links are provided.

Yes, here is a place that can be enjoyed by Believers and Atheists alike. Gays and homophobes, set aside your differences and enjoy these impressive illusions! Republicans, Democrats and even Green Party members can come together to enjoy the hundreds of optical illusions that are featured by this site.

My favorites: These scary/funny “fish”, these sideswalk chalk drawings, this quaint table top of impossible objects and these disappearing effects.

Every couple of weeks a reader asks me (through email) whether it is OK to link to one of our posts.  Absolutely!   Linking makes us more available to more readers.   Further, linking to our posts makes our site more visible on Google and other search engines.  

Therefore, if you see a Dangerous Intersection post you’d like to share on your own site, link away!  There’s no need to ask permission.  Just be sure to give credit to our site and our writers.

You’ll never find anyone who writes more clearly about mathematics than John Paulos.  Exhibit A is Innumeracy:  Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences (1990). 

Paulos doesn’t limit his inquiries and writings to pure mathematics, however.  Mathematics permeates numerous social issues, and Paulos is happy to jump into the fray whereever that is the case.  In this article, he points out how odd it is:  

that some of the most ardent opponents of Darwinian evolution - for example, many fundamentalist Christians - are among the most ardent supporters of the free market.

I’ve certainly seen fundamentalists repeatedly and proudly announced that all aspects of an economy “just happen,” without an omniscient and omnipotent Planner.  I’ve heard this so often, that I’ve sardonically termed the free market as “The Fourth Person in God.”  Paulos has heard these claims too:

[Those who reject biological evolution] would reject the idea that there is or should be central planning in the economy. They would point out that simple economic exchanges which are beneficial to people become entrenched and then gradually modified as they become part of larger systems of exchange, while those that are not beneficial die out. Yet some of these same people refuse to believe natural selection and “blind processes” can lead to biological order arising spontaneously.

Paulos thus raises the question of why those who reject evolution don’t require an “all-powerful, detail-obsessed economic law-giver” to make certain that the vast and complex economies of cities and nations continue to run with the apparent precision with which they appear to run. 

Good question.

Check out the many other offerings on the web site of John Paulos. 

We recently received this comment from Scholar:

Erich or Grumpy,

May I please have some more links to the discussions here at dangerous intersections which you have found to be most interesting, *must read*, or highlights in general.

Thanks,
Scholar

–

I took Scholar’s request seriously and went back to review many of our posts.  I still can’t get over how many topics we’ve addressed in nine months, covering 592 posts! 

Rather than call these posts the “best of,” I would merely call them the more memorable posts to me, keeping in mind the triple asterisk that comes with the assembly of this list:  1) I simply didn’t have the time to review each of the posts again.  Therefore, this list is only representative, not complete.  2) It is difficult to determine any meaningful criteria on which to base such a list, other than (as I’ve already suggested) the idea that this list includes many of the posts I found memorable.  Other people will certainly have different ideas of what posts are worthy 3) Scholar’s request puts me in an awkward spot, given that I write for the blog. 

To the extent that I’ve included my own posts, then, it should be with the understanding that I am not trying to judge the writing so much as considering whether the ideas addressed are memorable to me, whether the ideas expressed therein seemed important or whether they moved me.  Here’s another way of looking at it:  if you want to know what this site is all about, here are some good places to start.

It is so very hard to choose.  It’s like asking a parent to choose his or her favorite child.  Without further ado, here are my selections:
Reflections on Hotel Rwanda  

Why Do They Hate Us?  

Why Does a Recently Created World Seem So Old? 

My limited vision. 

Banking laws for sale  

semantics, schemantics

A new age of immaturity 

The greatest sin–and virtue–of human memory 

God’s attractive nuisance: the Tree of Knowledge 

Playing to the terrorists’ strength 

SEX 

Alien Rapture

Wither Thou Goest…

Consumptious Conspicuosity  

Sticks, Stones, and Prayer Mats (more…)

I have been accused of being a curmudgeon by more than a few people who know me well. Perhaps I deserve it, based upon the intensity with which I approach writing.  Also, I too often fall into the trap of seeing the world as a set of problems needing to be solved rather than an experience to be enjoyed.  Though it is likely true that I am not a prototypical “happy” person, it would be horribly inaccurate to assume that I am unhappy.  I hope that the “not unhappy” side of me also occasionally shows through in my posts.

I truly appreciate the many opportunities and challenges life has thrown my way.  I am lucky to have found so many people who have influenced me in so many good and important ways, not the least of which are my wonderful wife and daughters. I am also extremely lucky that I have met so many people who have taken the time to challenge my ideas and thereby teach me important lessons.  Many of these people who have made me a better thinker and writer are those of you who have taken the time to contribute comments to this blog or send me notes via e-mail.  Truly, thank you.

About a year ago, “Grumpypilgrim” and I had a well-established routine: we traded ideas and book recommendations by email on almost a daily basis.   I suggested to Grumpy that we should start a blog to see if anybody else might show some interest in the sorts of topics that interested us.  Grumpy was a wee bit tentative.  With the incredibly generous help of Nick Smith (of www.nicksmithdesign.com), however, this blog made its first appearance on the Internet back in February 2006.  We didn’t begin posting with any regularity until March, 2006.  In those early days, someone we didn’t know personally sometimes actually posted a comment.  Grumpy and I celebrated many of those early comments with commemorative phone calls (grumpy lives in Madison and I live in St. Louis).

One by one, we invited other people to join us as authors, people who shared our passion for writing and who shared our interest in the sorts of topics and ideas we feature on this blog.  Currently, fourteen different authors have appeared on the blog.  What they bring to this blog (as you can see from the “About” page) is a wide variety of perspectives and backgrounds that are manifested in their writings.  The authors write because they love to write.  As you can see from the site, we don’t advertise.  Therefore, this blog does not make any revenue with which to compensate the authors for their dedication.  What you see at this blog, then, is a labor of love by all concerned.  For some additional background on why this blog exists, check out one of my earlier posts, “Why I Blog.”

It occurred to me that some of the readers might be interested in knowing how much this blogging community has grown since March, when we had 53 visits for the entire month.  Through the month of November, 2006, this blog is receiving a daily average of 1,500 visits.  More than 5,000 pages are downloaded daily from the site.  This surprises and delights me, of course.  I am pleased that the topics that have long interested me have been presented here in a way that so many others find worthwhile.

Through the history of this blog, the authors have written more than 500 posts, which have received in excess of 2000 comments.  During that same time period (March, 2006 through the present), the blog has also received more than 6000 comment-spams.  This ever-increasing amount of spam might require us to take some steps to combat the spam.  I certainly hope that whatever steps we are forced to take (we are considering several possibilities) will not in any way discourage anyone from joining us with their comments. 

In closing, I wanted to use this Thanksgiving holiday to thank each of those people who have taken the time to contribute posts and comments to this blog, as well as those who have visited this blog or recommended this site to others. I have been overwhelmed by this little success story, and I truly appreciate that this writing community exists. 

We’re just getting warmed up here at Dangerous Intersection.  There’s a lot more to come. 

Thank you once again for being part of this endeavor.

Erich

Spamalot is all the rage these days, but perhaps you’d rather just go do a silly walk.   Or perhaps you’d rather just go invent your own silly walk in the privacy of your own home, using this Silly Walks Generator.

I know this is offbeat, but some of these photos are compelling.   I hope the photographers are OK.

OMG! I just installed the FireFox 2 browser and noticed something. It spell checks form entries as you type! Just as Word and its ilk do in their documents.

Since its inception, I’d been using FireFox just because of speed, safety and security advantages. I added the Google toolbar only a month ago for spell checking in form entry fields. Then MSIE 7.0 came out, and had almost all the features of FireFox 1, and was nearly as secure. So this week FireFox riposted with its version 2, to stay a step ahead in both features and security.

As I was typing a response this morning, I noticed the Word-like squiggly red underline. Puzzled (because I hadn’t manually started the Google spell check) I rt-clicked, and it suggested the word I meant to type.

Yay! FireFox 2 is the Bloggers’ bee’s knees. No, I’m not actually that old.

I’m not sure if version 2 requires separate installation of the Google toolbar because I already had it. Maybe all you need is FireFox 2. Someone try it and let me know.

I was reading the back page of the October Smithsonian, and I was inspired to do some further reading about the Moon Landing Hoax.

One can guess my position, as a son of an astrophysicist who worked summers for NASA.

Here are a bunch of simple and clear rebuttals to a couple of dozen Hoax points, written and illustrated for non-scientists: http://www.redzero.demon.co.uk/moonhoax/index.html

But the Smithsonian gave me the best answer:

We were in the midst of the Cold War. The Soviets would have given anything to somehow embarrass the U.S. as they were racing us to the moon.

Once we got there, the Soviets never once cried, “Hoax!” Their scientists knew the state of the art as well as ours, and how to test the supposed evidence we returned.

So, why didn’t the Russians ever attempt to expose this hoax in the decades between the moon landing and the end of the cold war?

Relevance? Apparently, some 10% of Americans believe that NASA faked the 6 moon landings, and (presumably) the failure of Apollo 13. I wonder how many of them think that Saddam planned 9/11 in cahoots with Clinton?

I noticed this quote at Freedom from Religion Foundation:

“The God of the Christians is a father who is a great deal more concerned about his apples than he is about his children.”
– Diderot, French writer, philosopher (1713-1784), Addition aux Pensees philosophiques, c. 1762

FFRF is a site that is loaded with good information.  They offer numerous quotes by and articles about freethinkers, many of which I hadn’t before seen. Here are a few more of their quotes of the day:

“A religion, even if it calls itself the religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.”
– Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1921

“Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when a man has only one idea.”
– Alain (1868-1951), Propos sur la religion, 1938. Alain is the pen-name of Emile-Auguste Chartier, a French philosopher and exponent of French radicalism and individual rights, daily newspaper columnist and co-founder of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals.

“I have always been reasonably leery of religion because there are so many edicts in religion, ‘thou shalt not,’ or ‘thou shalt.’ I wanted my world of the future to be clear of that.”
– Gene Roddenberry (born Aug. 19, 1921, d. 1991), cited by Susan Sackett (http://www.InsideTrek.com/)

“Of all learned men, the clergy show the lowest development of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge customers from the divines of rival sects, and to denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks.”
– H.L. Mencken, American journalist (1880-1956), Minority Report: Notebooks, 1956

“My parents did not practice any organized religion, although my father was raised Roman Catholic and my mother was Jewish. But there was always an ethical context to our lives, a very strong notion of individual moral responsibility.”
– Harrison Ford, Parade, July 7, 2002

“In the early days of woman-suffrage agitation, I saw that the greatest obstacle we had to overcome was the bible. It was hurled at us on every side.”
– Elizabeth Cady Stanton, An Interview with the Chicago Record, June 29, 1897. For more on Stanton, read Women Without Superstition.

Here’s a new website worth taking a peek: www.sefora.org, Scientists and Engineers for America. A group who are trying to activize (um activate?) because of what has been happening to science in the public eye and the administration.

They are dedicated to removing theology from science teaching, and ideology from purportedly scientific reports used to decide public policies.

To say that the corrupted interests of massive corporations have twisted and perverted the social and political system into a flimsy chessboard sounds, of course, paranoid and highly cynical. No wonder then that casual observers of the democratic process scoff at claims of widespread corporate corruption as an outlandish conspiracy theory. It does often prove an unverified claim- how can you begin to cover corporate connections, campaign contributions, and the like?

Enter They Rule. This starkly decorated flash page has taken on the lofty endeavor of revealing the income, connections, campaign contributions, and other relationships between the board members of American’s biggest corporations. They Rule describes its mission this way:

A few companies control much of the economy and oligopolies exert control in nearly every sector of the economy. The people who head up these companies swap on and off the boards from one company to another, and in and out of government committees and positions. These people run the most powerful institutions on the planet, and we have almost no say in who they are. This is not a conspiracy. They are proud to rule. And yet these connections of power are not always visible to the public eye.

They Rule aspires to make these connections of power fully visible. The site does it in an inventive format- click on a company, and you’ll see a table with a small circle of its board of directors. Bring out another company, and They Rule will show a “web” of connections between people from both companies.

Each board member has their own icon, a small business man or woman of varying fatness. Their weight represents their income and their number of connections, naturally. The website also facilitates a quick search of each board member’s background- just click on their little corporate fatcat likenesses.

But They Rule truly shines in its use of the “map” feature. Some They Rule users have perused the long list of corporations and institutions with devotion, and created intricate webs that represent more than slight shadiness. Take this map, which links the board of the New York Times to the likes of Ford Motor, Pepsico, and pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly.

Don’t mistake this for a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon-esque stretch– members of the New York Times board serve on these other behemouth boards themselves. One degree seems pretty clear-cut to me. I also recommend the maps on the tobbacco and the pharmaceutical industry connections, and on Halliburton’s links to major media outlets such as Time Warner and Viacom.

Last week, at Washington University, I attended a lecture by architect Edward Mazria, who speaks nationally and internationally on the subject of climate change and architecture.  Mazria’s organization, Architecture2030 is dedicated to “slowing the growth rate of greenhouse gas emissions and then reversing it over the next ten years.”  His proposals are getting lots of attention among architects.

As he states at his website, it is imperative that we deal seriously with CO2.  It will

require immediate action and a concerted global effort. As Architecture 2030 has shown, buildings are the major source of demand for energy and materials that produce by-product greenhouse gases. Stabilizing emissions in this sector and then reversing them to acceptable levels is key to keeping global warming to approximately a degree centigrade (°C) above today’s level.

Mazria began his talk with a PowerPoint presentation that largely paralleled Al Gore’s presentation in “An Inconvenient Truth.”   Here’s how he sizes things up currently: 

Two profound, life changing events are converging to create the most significant crisis of modern time— the warming of the earth’s atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, and the rapid depletion of global petroleum and natural gas reserves. As these events intensify over the coming years, they will dramatically change how we live and how we relate to the natural world.

Here’s how Architecture2030 illustrates the warming of the earth (see the Architecture2030 site for better resolution):

As you can see, CO2 levels (the upper blue line) have never been as high as they are currently.  At his lecture, Mazria indicates that humankind’s exhorbitant use of fossil fues constitutes a massive “experiment.”  

Here’s how Architecture2030 illustrates the depletion of oil:

According to Mazria, at current rates we have 42 years of oil and 64 years of natural gas remaining. When we’re done with oil and natural gas, we’ll be much more dependent on much dirtier coal, and clean coal technology is “decades away.”  The Architecture2030 site presents the above information in detail.

What’s the solution?  Mazria looks to the biggest user of energy.  When we combine residences with commercial and institutional structures, buildings consume 48% of our energy, more than any other sector. (more…)

Would you like to see an actual photograph of a human soul entering an embryo at conception?  Here it is (in a low rez version):

To see the full-size high-rez photo, along with numerous other fascinating images, check out the collection at Pixwit.com.  Each image is accompanied with a witty commentary (the above image of an ensoulment comes with the following caption: “Ontogeny recapitulates theology.”).

You’ll find the above image in the “Religion” section of Pixwit.  In the “Religion” section, you can also see the image of G.I. Jesus , noted to be the “favorite political philosopher” of the Commander in Chief.  There are other images categorized as “Politics” and “Culture.”  

Pixwit is a collection that is really worth visiting for anyone with a subsersive streak and no fear of hell.

Yesterday I met an anesthesiologist who brought up the topic of backgammon at a deposition.  I mentioned to him that, many years ago, a friend tried to teach me how to play backgammon.  At first, I thought it was essentially a game of chance.  When the friend and I first began playing, we each won about half the time. 

That was before I read a book about basic backgammon strategy.   A couple of hours of reading changed my stats dramatically.  I started winning 4 out of 5 games against that same friend, simply by using about a dozen basic tips.

Yesterday, the anesthesiologist lit up as we discussed backgammon.  He has spent considerable time (much more than I have) learning higher level strategies.  

“If you want to really improve your game,” he said, “there is a free shareware version of backgammon that will trounce you.  It plays world class backgammon.” 

It’s called GNU backgammon and you can download it right here. Here’s what the About page says about GNU backgammon: 

GNU Backgammon (gnubg) is for playing and analysing backgammon positions, games and matches. It’s based on a neural network. In the past twelve months it has made enormous progress. It currently plays at about the level of a championship flight tournament player.

The software is loaded with features and options, including numerous ways to analyze an ongoing game.  It is a great learning tool, also thanks to the “hints” function.  If you want a further tutorial on using GNU backgammon, check out this page from the Backgammon International Group.

I downloaded it tonight and promptly got trounced.  I’m sharing this link with anyone else who wants to get trounced. Maybe we can all form a masochist’s club.  Truly, good luck.  You’ll need it.