Singpolyma

After Eden – Getting Crafty

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A friend of mine showed me this comic and I thought it was so great 😀


Source: http://www.answersingenesis.org/aftereden/view.aspx?id=161

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New Calendar

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Richard Conn Henry has a potentially revolutionary new idea, with a few bugs…

Richard Conn Henry (he credits others on the site, but I will just mention his name here) has created a new calendar system so that every date is the same weekday, every year. The idea is similar to the one familiar to any huge LotR buffs as the calendar of the hobbits. The difference is that instead of having days that are not part of the year, you end up with a whole extra week in its own ‘mini-month’ ever 5 or 6 years. The whole thing is worked out, except for a few quibbles I have with it, listed below as taken from an email I sent him. I may have thought of other stuff, but this is my main analysis:

– You mention the problem of people born on Jauray 31, etc. You solution (just celebrate on the new last day of the month) is very good, but there is the other option of celebrating when your birthday WOULD be, according to the Gregorian calendar date (i.e., the first of the next month)

– Most of the point of C&T is convenience, however you suggest the elimination of time zones… how is this convenient? I, for one, think waking up at midnight being normal is just plain inconvenient. Everyone already uses UTC for international dealings, why change how it is done locally?

– I really like the idea of going to 24hr time everywhere.

– The idea that everyone born on a Newton week should celebrate their birthday on the 4th of July is, in my opinion, a bigoted American idea. It would be the same situation as someone born on leap-day according to the current calendar. They would probably just move to the closest day.

– I like the idea of removing daylight savings time, however changing working hours in its place may be a problem. Most employers would simply refuse to do it.

– Although yyyy-mm-dd is ISO standard, I don’t see the problem with using the worldwide (excluding north america) standard of dd-mm-yyyy, it is just the same thing backward.

– Moving Christmas to a Sunday is not such a hot idea, for two reasons. One, it ceases to be a real holiday and is just a special weekend. Two, we Christians (who pretty much invented the original holdiay) will no longer be able to have a special Christmas service to celebrate the birth of Our Lord. We will be required to ‘specialise’ the normal Sunday service, thus degrading the holdiday.

– Are you aware that JRR Tolkein created a calandar based on a similar idea for use by the hobbits in LotR?

I found the original article on it at: http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20041222/news_1c22singular.html
and the site for the calendar itself is at: http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/calendar.html

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On a Phone…

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This is a good quote, too long for an excerpt.

Slashdot – perky
Things I want on a phone:
1. Small
2. Lots of space for contacts
3. Synch with Outlook
4. Some flash memory with a USB socket, like a USB memory stick
5. Well designed UI
6. Good audio quality
7. Shold look recognisably like a phone
8. Predictive text

Things I don’t want on a phone:
1. Camera
2. Video camera
3. Games
4. Audio recorder
5. mini qwerty keyboard
6. flashlight
7. GPS
8. Compass
9. Microsoft Office
10. A meda player

Things that are acceptable as long as they don’t get in the way:
1. GPRS
2. Some kind of WAP/internet thing
3. Bluetooth
4. a Java runtime

Someone is thinking, who wants a camara in a phone anyway??? Some of this stuff is okay, but some of it is rediculous! I must admit I have used some of these features on my dad’s phone, but they didn’t work really well. What we really need is a PDA that works as a phone, not a phone that works as a PDA. Incidentally, why did he want it to sync with Outlook? Outlook is pretty much useless and is getting worse every release.

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Dot-COM, a shame

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“…i’m afraid most people would automatically do .com…”

Is the whole web going dot-com? That domain is for businesses, yet everyone seems to use it, why? Dot-com is no more legitimate than anything else. Even obviously non-profit sites have COMs (i.e. getfirefox.com, under mozilla.org). And individuals have them as well (ryanrahn.com). For individuals dot-net makes sense, or a region specific domain (.us, .ca, .de) but again, dot-com makes no sense. Sure we have an e-business explosion, but why should we steal all the commercial domains?

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Search Engines and the Syndicated Web

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With all of the efforts nowadays to bring about the ‘Syndicated Web’ it is getting easier and easier to subscibe to the content you want, if only you can find it…

The major search engines list multiple pages from one site and rate things by hits, meaning that once something is at the top it tends to stay there, and multiple copies of it. This makes finding what you want next to impossible, isn’t there some way to list each site only once or something? And how about having the community rate content instead of rating based on hits? I, for one, have often clicked a link in a search engine that looked interesting and later wished I could takes the hits back from the site!

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