Crabby Night Owl

Dogs and Cats Living Together– Mass Hysteria!

Rick — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 02:33:30 +0000

Lacey and Sabata Sleeping In

One good thing about sharing an apartment with someone who is owned by three cats: my dog always has a comfy place to sleep, and there are always lots of chances for cute pictures. Well, I guess that was two good things.

Dream Journal: Reignited

Rick — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 13:00:48 +0000

Those of you who actually remember Crabby Night Owl in the days of yore may remember my dream journal. That journal mostly consisted of reposts from my Usenet days on alt.dreams and alt.dreams.lucid. I posted under the name of Wolfie Nox (just click the “repeat the search” link if it shows up. Trust me: there’s much more. I even posted a few under just “Wolfie” before I realized that there was already another poster by that name. If you do look for the Wolfie posts, be aware that only a few of the more recent ones are actually mine.)

If you go looking for my old post on those groups, google may have you log in to their discussion group search. Lotta hassle, that. That’s why I’m thinking about importing them (again) to Crabby Night Owl. Besides, searching for “Wolfie Nox” in the Google archives, you’ll come upon my posts in groups such as rec.drugs.smart and alt.sci.time-travel, among others, and some of those posts are parts of discussions, rather than dream reports.

Anyhoo… while I seem to have forgotten the very vivid dream I had last night that prompted me to write this post (and subsequently fall into a 2-hour session of reading my old posts and admiring how intelligent I usually sounded way back then), the point of this post is that I’m thinking about reposting those dream posts, again, to Crabby Night Owl.

House of Flesh and Blood

Rick — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 00:25:13 +0000

Okay, it turns out that I wasn’t dreaming when I found this last night. In Vitro Meat Habtitat. As in a living house made of live meat. With bones for structure and nourished by blood. That you live in. Yep, we’re not talking stacking pork chops as if they were bricks, or carving out a tauntaun to get a good night’s sleep. This is a Frankensteinian thing of living flesh and bone.

The man behind the meat is researcher Mitchell Joachim. Inhabitat.com reports,

From the boundary-pushing team of archi-visionaries who brought us the fabulous Fab Tree Hab comes a new (and somewhat disgusting) way to grow a structure — using animal flesh! The In Vitro Meat Habitat is a futuristic concept home composed of meat cells grown in a lab. We can’t imagine that these residences are going be replacing suburban tract homes anytime soon, but it sure is a provocative idea! The creator of the concept, Mitchell Joachim, is a futurist with a twist– he says he is actually developing the concept in a lab.

Maybe someone will code the DNA for one of these meat houses, so we can grow them where we need them. Probably not too practical, though, considering how much it costs to raise something like a cow. Imagine the cost of raising a house to maturity. And then there’s the life expectancy. How long will your house live? Repairs would be simple, since the house would be able to heal itself, but they’d take longer than a Saturday afternoon to complete.

At least, if your house burns down, you’d have enough meat to feed your family for a couple of days.

Videos at 3 AM

Rick — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 10:00:00 +0000

So I like Russian things. Does that make me a Communist? Does it matter that I was coincidentally sipping Smirnoff instead of Bushmill’s when I happened upon this video? And what if I did have Bushmill’s in my glass, as I usually do. Would I, maybe, have found the following video? “Bloody ‘ell! The Corrs and The Chieftans in the same concert!”

MythBusters Draw Mona Lisa in .008 Seconds.

Rick — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 13:45:45 +0000

Adam and Jamie have built their own inkjet printer out of paintball guns to demonstrate the difference between using your CPU and using a graphics processing unit for drawing images on a monitor. Gotta love those MythBusters.

Welcome to Graffiti art 2.0.

Outside Links

The Price of Technology

Rick — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 06:22:51 +0000

One of my hard drives crashed last night. I have two: a two-year-old 6 kilogigger, and a 5-month-old terabyter. The older one died. Of course, it was the one with my Windows install, and it had all of my device drivers and whatnot. Fortunately, I’ve been migrating files onto the new HD, so all of my important data is safe (-ish. I’ve been a little slow to back it up elsewhere.)

I keep a binder with my Windows CD’s, and a bunch of others that I’ve had for a long, long time (since, like, 1996). Prolly should clean it out, since I’ve still got install discs CD’s that are 3 and 4 upgrades old.

Anyway, I’ve had to install Win XP from scratch, meaning that I had to go out and buy another network cable since I couldn’t get online through my wireless connection (housemates’ internet connection; I’m not pirating wireless), just to download the drivers for my wireless adapter. But, now that I’ve got a wired connection, I’m not gonna worry about the wireless until I move.

So, I’ve spent several hours downloading Windows updates from before SP1 (that’s a looong time ago, in case you’re not up on your Windows history), while simultaneously downloading and installing my anti-virus updates, while also searching for drivers for my video card and monitor, ’cause the default 60 Hz refresh is giving me a headache. I need to fix other video problems, too, but that is the worst.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I got to thinking: if I didn’t have a computer, I wouldn’t have to be going through all of this (even if it wasn’t a Windoze box). That’s about eight hours I could have spent watching television. (Heh, not bloody likely. I probably would have spent much of the time meandering the paseos around my current house.)

Further along that line of thought was this: I spend a good third or more of my waking life worrying about, tending to, or otherwise enslaved to technology. Mostly computers, but I’m a technophile at heart. If I had any less self-control, I’d be like the supervisor I had who was so completely overtaken by the thought of merely owning an iPhone, that on the release day, she could think of nothing else, and I mean literally nothing else. She was under an Apple-scented spell, and the only way to break it was to drive her to an Apple store and let her get her iPhone. Total addiction.

Our tech is leaching away our peace of mind. If we don’t have it, we want it; if we do have it we’re worried about losing it. And if we do have it, and aren’t worried about losing it, then our world comes to a gut-wrenching, mind-numbing halt when when it goes away.

So what if there were no high-tech gadgets for me to worry about. What if flint and steel were the killer app? What if catching my day’s food occupied a third of my waking life? I think I’d be okay with that.

And, thanks to Windows update asking my to restart my computer every five bloody minutes while I’m typing this entry, I’m now pretty sure I’d be okay with it. If I could just kick the tech habit.

So, what about you? How much of your life do your tech items take over, and what would you be doing if you didn’t have to text, or tweet, or drive while talking on your cell phone?

Abortion: For My YouTube Contingent

Rick — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 12:13:19 +0000

Yeah, I picked a pretty controversial topic to start commenting on with this particular YouTube user name. I probably should have done it as YouTube’s “The Varo Edition”, but that would have meant changing to that account, and I was too lazy/tired/ambivalent to go through the hassle.

So, I’ve defended Angie the Atheist on her right to abort an embryo at 4 weeks. However, I’m of two minds about the fact that she posted it on YouTube.

On the one hand, she posted it on YouTube: “I’m having an abortion. Right now.” Sensationalistic attention-seeker? Maybe. She could have taken her RU-486 and quietly let things happen, but she chose to broadcast the event. What’s a 5-letter word for controversy? A-n-g-i-e? Yep. CNN even picked up her story.

On the other hand, she did hold up her experience as an example to any woman who is considering abortion for health reasons, but who is scared and unsure of what to do. And she did it with full knowledge of the type and intensity of the fallout that would ensue.

Many women and girls do get pregnant, in spite of birth control, and don’t know what to do. While, I disagree with abortion for any reason except to save the mother’s life, the option is available if it’s needed. Angie held up a torch for these women to follow, and she showed them a viable option. Not necessarily the best option, but one that could work for them.

Hot Topic

Abortion will always be a hot topic for debate, with elements on each side calling for the deaths of everyone on the other side. It amuses me to no end that it’s usually the “no, don’t kill da baby” crew that are calling for the assassination of anyone involved in an abortion. If abortion is murder, how is murdering an abortionist not murder? (For purposed here, an abortionist is anyone who voluntarily participates in the termination of a pregnancy.)

Personally, I think abortion should be a last resort–a plan Z, of you will– after all other means to solve the problems brought on by the pregnancy have been exhausted. Angie aborted at week 4 due to health reasons. Blastocyst–>Embryo–>Fetus–>Baby. She terminated an blastocyst. It was nothing more than a mass of cells with the potential to become an embryo. She didn’t “Kill a baby,” so she’s not a murderer or baby-killer. There’s the science and the law.

As for the religion, exactly when does a human acquire a soul? I have looked for this in the King James version of the Christian Bible, but I can not find where it says that. Someone please point out where it is, because I’m not seeing it. I’m pretty sure that, since God knows whether or not a blastocyst will survive to embryohood, that the the whole soul-bonding thing would wait until at least after the embryo stage, yes?

Show Me Proof!

Unless I see proof that a human acquires a soul at conception or earlier, this is where I stand:

Blastocyst to Embryo: a potentially parasitic growth within the host (the mother). At this stage, it is merely a growth. It has no brain, or heart or nervous system to even mark it as an animal.
Fetus: potential baby, but still a parasite. Early on, it is more embryo than baby. Status judged on a case-by-case basis.
Baby: Last trimester, on. Remains a parasite until the umbilical cord is severed, but still a baby. Once an embryo has reached baby status, it may as well be considered human. At this point, it can be murdered. Exactly where this point is reached it currently a legal matter, but I personally know a 6-month premie who survived.

So, there ya have it. A woman has a chemical abortion as soon as her body realized it was pregnant. She did it in a controversial way which garnered her her 15 minutes of CNN fame. She is a positive role model for women and girls in a similar situation, and a demon for all the haters.

BTW, Angie has yet to hear from the true Christians on the matter. None of those who judge her can accurately call themselves “Christian,” because Jesus Christ specifically commanded his followers not to judge others.

And, yes, this post really does belong on The Varo Edition.

Links

Blog: Interrupted

Rick — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 07:22:47 +0000

It’s great to be back! Maybe no one remembers Crabby Night Owl from a few years ago, but that’s okay. If you do, didja miss me?

For the rest of you: Hi, I’m Rick Nagle, and this is my blog. This is a personal blog, devoid of any specificity, except for my personal thoughts, opinions, and life narratives.

Soon, I will have the unenviable task of blogging about my life without making anyone else look bad. In some cases, this will be very, very hard.

For now, dear reader, welcome. If you’ve come upon this website by accident, then I humbly direct you to my other site, The Varo Edition. It’s a site trending toward the metaphysical. I’m compelled to reconcile the dogmas of religion with those of science, and The Varo Edition is my arena for doing it. In a future post on that site, I’ll discus dogma and why it’s an impediment, and what intelligent beings should do about it.