The new version of Minecraft came out yesterday! My kids are thrilled, although we also got a copy of Halo 2 for our original XBOX yesterday, so there’s lots of competition for attention.
I guess the gloves are off, now. In America, where atheists are the most-hated minority, where 40% of people deny evolution, it’s typically off limits to bring attention to any article of faith. It’s a gentleman’s agreement: don’t mention how I pretend to drink my god’s blood and I won’t question your prophet’s marriage to a 9 year old girl. But the stakes are high. Mitt Romney has a slight edge in the polls. It must be too tempting now to resist pointing to that man behind the curtain.
But beware of the law of unintended consequences. Start laughing at someone else’s religion, and then you might find yourself amused by the absurdity of all religion. And after that, if you’re lucky, you’ll find yourself shedding your faith in the state as cure-all. That’s why I like Obama. He answers Romney’s bland pragmatism with raw nihilism. If we can only survive another four years of this self-destruction, we might have nothing left to rely on but the truth.
BEHIND THE VEIL: Never-Before-Seen Footage of Secret Mormon Temple Rituals
Mormon temple ceremonies are a closely held secret. Until now. For the first time in the 170+ year history of secret Mormon temple activity, those activities…
This looks like a good tool for naming my next project.
momomakura.com?
kokubakun.com?
cozypillow.com?
Browse Expired Domain Names by Pronounce-ability – Swola.com
Sift through recently expired (always within the past 7 days) .COM domain names in order of their pronounce-ability, characters & first letter. Domains with hyphens and/or numbers aren’t displayed; domains with less than a 50% pronounce-ability rating are also filtered out. New: Pagination (bottom of every page) & sort by day expired.
It’s interesting to contrast publishing of technical books now versus 1999 when Core PHP Programming first came out. Back then, I’m confident would have been a complete waste of time trying to publish it myself. Few would have considered a PDF an interesting source for the information. And while it certainly was a feather in my cap with regard to my career, the reward for the effort was respectable. I wouldn’t work for that rate today, but the publishing of the book helped me get to where I am.
For some time I’ve said I wouldn’t try writing another book because the reward couldn’t justify the effort, but we might be coming close to full circle with printed books in decline and self-publishing in .epub looking more feasible every day. Plus, I have to consider the thrill of sticking it to those emperors of walled gardens: Amazon, Apple, et al.
mir.aculo.us JavaScript with Thomas Fuchs » Blog Archive » 5 rules to sell thousands of copies of your ebook
Wondering what your “hourly rate” is when you go out and write a technical book? Traditionally, publishers will tell you that you do it for “exposure” but we all know that you can die from that. Seriously, even for the publisher it’s a big gamble, and with all the extra costs for printing, marketing, publishing, whole-sale prices, etc. there will be nothing left over for you. And “exposure” will not pay the bills.
No Benefit from Routine Checkups
The result sound counterintuitive – a recent Cochrane systematic review of studies looking at the benefits of routine health checks found that there weren’t any. How can that be? Screening for medical conditions that can be treated, where treatment is known to improve outcome, must be beneficial, right?
