Jason Alexander on the recent massacre

Actor Jason Alexander had this to say with regard to the recent massacre:

These weapons are military weapons. They belong in accountable hands, controlled hands and trained hands. They should not be in the hands of private citizens to be used against police, neighborhood intruders or people who don’t agree with you. These are the weapons that maniacs acquire to wreak murder and mayhem on innocents. They are not the same as handguns to help homeowners protect themselves from intruders. They are not the same as hunting rifles or sporting rifles. These weapons are designed for harm and death on big scales.

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Site upgrade almost complete

Over the last two days, I've needed to upgrade WordPress and my website theme due to an exploit (the TimThumb image-resizing script). Lots of tedious work, and I'm grateful to two very smart tech-savvy guys who guided me through the process, and Solostream, which provided the upgraded theme. The end result: This looks about the same, but has a lot more functionality and it's now a safe installation. It reminds me of Oscar Wilde's quote: "This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again." Now, if only I can set aside more time for writing, in order to put out a better product . . .

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Not just a hot summer

At Rolling Stone, Bill McKibben puts the hot summer into perspective:

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

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Idiot Astronomy

Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku must be a fairly smart guy in some respects. After all, he is a Professor of Theoretical Physics in the City College of New York. What he had to say yesterday on CNN was idiotic, however, and to the extent that he demeaned the scientific method , he should be ashamed for making all scientists look like buffoons. I just happened to see a CNN "news" show as I was preparing lunch yesterday at my workplace kitchen (there is a TV hanging on the wall). At the end of one news segment, it was announced that we should stay tuned because there is new evidence of an ancient galaxy indicating that there are advanced civilizations living on other worlds.  What??? This announcement immediately sent up red flags.  I asked co-workers, "Who is the crackpot who is going to make these claims?" After the commercial ended, we met the crackpot: Michio Kaku. [More . . . ]

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