Category: Miscellaneous

Arrr Pirates Passe?

If this isn’t just sweet enough to give you a toothache… Two artists created a comic book description of their courtship and engagement.

Sorry I’m still bitter about my own situation; I actually liked the comic.

From the sound of this article from physorg.com, Dr Norman Wildberger, a University of New South Wales academic, has rewritten the arcane rules of trigonometry and eliminated sines, cosines and tangents from the trigonometric toolkit.

Does this mean schools the world over will be updating their curriculum? It makes me happy because I was one of those students that memorized the old rules for trigonometry long enough to take the tests and then promptly forget about them. I hope it’s safe to assume these new rules can be applied to computer programming and physics as well.

I’ve been listening to Science Friday via their podcast lately and I love it. It’s a great science show published by the NPR.

“Each week, we focus on science topics that are in the news and try to bring an educated, balanced discussion to bear on the scientific issues at hand. Panels of expert guests join Science Friday’s host, Ira Flatow, a veteran science journalist, to discuss science – and to take questions from listeners during the call-in portion of the program.”

Science Friday is a little like the CBC’s Quirks and Quarks but due to a labour dispute the CBC podcasts are on hold. In the meantime check out Science Friday’s feed.

I don’t think there are satanic messages in Rock music but apparently the Catholic Church officially does. Vatican’s Rome university, the Athenaeum Pontificium Regina Apostolorum is now offering exorcism training.

The 10-week course includes sessions in exorcism rites, how to talk to the Devil, the tricks he uses to fight back and signs of the occult hidden in rock music and video games.

Video games too? I need to expand my website.

Update: Plastic has an interesting writeup on this article.

Monday September 19th is Talk Like a Pirate Day. I spent a while in photoshop today creating this vector pirate and ship for the occasion.

I’ve been working on this one on and off for several weeks now. I decided to finish it up today.

I discovered The Animation Podcast site a few months ago, but I never got around to subscribing to their feed until today. I really like learning about animation and animators and this podcast is awesome for that.

I wanted to create a text file of a directory listing but didn’t know how. A simple search on the net and a little browsing brought me these simple instructions that will let me create a text file on any directory with a simple right click.

I just finished using it to create a text list of my iTunes subfolders and files. It works perfectly!

1. Open Notepad, and then copy and paste the following three lines of text into it:
   @echo off
   dir %1 /-p /S /D /o:gn > C:\Temp.txt
   exit
2. Save the file as Dir2Txt.bat in the root of the C:\Windows directory, and then close Notepad.
3. Start Windows Explorer, click Tools, and then click Folder Options.
4. Click the File Types tab, and then scroll down the list of registered file types until you find the Folder entry in the ‘File Types’ column. (You may find it easier to find if you sort the entries alphabetically by clicking on the grey bar at the top of the ‘File Types’ column).
5. Click on the Folder entry to highlight it.
6. Click on the Advanced button.
7. Click on the New button.
8. In the Action box, type Directory To Text File.
9. In the ‘Application used to perform action’ box, click browse and locate the Dir2Txt.bat you saved in step 2. Then click OK.
10. In the Edit Filetype box, click on the Explore action and then on the Set Default button. Explore will turn to bold. (Personally I set OPEN to default instead of Explore).
11. Click on OK then on OK again.
12. Open Windows Explorer, right-click the folder that you would like to create a text file of, and you should see a new entry – Directory To Text File. Click on it and a text file called C:\Temp.txt will be created. This file can be opened with Notepad and will contain a detailed listing of the directory’s contents – including sub-directories. This can be printed out if required after formatting.

Note: The required filename (C:\Temp.txt) can be changed in the bat file if required and the existing text file is overwritten each time, so move or rename it if you want to keep it.

Michael Newdow has won round one in his bid to remove ‘under God’ from the Pledge of Allegiance. This time he represents families who have legal standing, which was the sticking point in his previous attempt, which was dismissed by the US Supremes.

From the page:

“Imagine every morning if the teachers had the children stand up, place their hands over their hearts, and say, ‘We are one nation that denies God exists,'” Newdow said. “I think that everybody would not be sitting here saying, ‘Oh, what harm is that.’ They’d be furious. And that’s exactly what goes on against atheists. And it shouldn’t.”