A ‘verse, a ‘verse, my brain for a multiverse!

The ability of Creationists to fool themselves into thinking they understand science always astounds me — they so obviously and plainly fail at it on every level. And yet they always seem to think that they are able to see something that actual scientists don’t or won’t, because there’s some huge anti-Creationist conspiracy of scientists who hate God or something equally ridiculous – and they, by golly, with their third grade level of science understanding, are just the ones to overturn all those thousands of hours of study and experimentation.

Or something.

Egomania

Egomania is an obsessive preoccupation with one’s self[1] and applies to someone who follows their own ungoverned impulses and is possessed by delusions of personal greatness and feels a lack of appreciation.[2] Someone suffering from this extreme egocentric focus is an egomaniac. The condition is psychologically abnormal[3] and has been attributed to various historical figures and celebrities.
Wikipedia, Egomania

See also the writer of this post.

Nom nom nom

Just a quick one – happy birthday to me! I got myself a pair of Chuck Taylor Converse All-Star Hi-Tops, which is just killerbee. I’ve been wanting a pair for a couple of years, and I couldn’t find any in my size until now.

I also have a new bike on order, which should be arriving on Friday, and it is possibly one of the coolest bikes in the world. It’s single speed, tough, utilitarian… Oh, yeah, and it’s also bright orange with custom white tyres. It’s made by a company called Old Skool Hooligans, and it rocks so hard that I may have to get a special business card made to express just how awesome it is and give it out to complete strangers.

It’s going to be a good birthday week

Woohoo! I’m still here…

It’s been a while. That seems to be the way I open all my posts lately. I know, I haven’t been saying much. So sue me; I have a life you know, unlike the rest of you basement-dwelling freaks.

Ahem. Yeah, so. Been a while…

A lot’s been going on with me which I didn’t write about because I’ve kind of been dealing with it. The first thing is that I was notified in about mid-March that my job was going to be made redundant. Arrgh, arrgh and double-arrgh. Not the best time for it to happen, to be honest, what with that global economic meltdown and everything.

So, I started applying for jobs. I was applying for jobs more or less the same field as I’m already in, administration. After a few rejections, I started getting some traction and some interviews, partly with the help of the county’s internal job finder service.

I almost ended up with a job working in the central library in Oxford, which looked like it would’ve been very interesting, if a little bit of a dead-end, career-wise; similarly, I was down to one of two for a position with a carer’s advocacy group.

Then, however, I happened to mention to a friend at work that I was being made redundant. My friend happens to be a moderate-sized cheese in the facilities and support department, and she immediately helped me by pointing out a vacant position in one of the social services teams and by throwing her weight behind getting me into the post. In short, I will be starting on 11th May in my new job, just one building over from where I am now, on a significantly higher pay-grade than before. All in all, getting made redundant is probably one of the best things that’s happened to me in a while.

I’m excited, maybe a little nervous, too. The post uses a completely database than the one I’m used to; two different databases, in fact. So, the first thing will be to get trained up in those, but it doesn’t seem like I’ll be thrown in at the deep end immediately, which is good.

According to someone else who works in the building, the team is quite quiet; there’s not a huge amount of stuff to do, although I won’t count on that. In a way, though, a nice quiet job would be just the thing — I could stand to not be on edge all the time wondering what work is going to drop on me today. I suppose what I mean really is a job with routine, as opposed to random bits of work appearing out of nowhere… We’ll see what happens, I guess.

I plan to be making a few more posts here from now on, although I’m staying true to the idea of blogging without obligation: the moment this becomes a chore, something I feel like I have to do, I’ll stop doing it at all, most likely.

Hitchens curbstomps Friel

I’m not a huge fan of Christopher Hitchens, generally; he’s arrogant, boorish and often far too pleased with himself. I get enough of that looking in the mirror to want to spend my free time on someone else doing it. There’s also his lurch to the political right in recent years; he’s probably centre-right more than right, to be honest, but he’s still to the right of me, which makes his politics occasionally distasteful. Something I saw this morning, though, has utterly redeemed him in my eyes, at least for now. This comes courtesy of the righteous PZ; cheers, Professor!

Oh, my sides!

My aching sides… If I laughed any harder, I’d give myself some kind of hernia and internal bleeding.

I was going to write a detailed critique of the ridiculousness of Joey Nelson’s post here, but I think it speaks for itself.

Next up, definitive proof that Harry Potter really, really can do magic!

Wow… Who knew it’d be Iowa?

Iowa becomes the third state in the nation to allow same-sex marriage, after Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Friday’s decision upheld a 2007 ruling by a lower court that Iowa’s 1998 law limiting marriage to heterosexual couples went against the state’s constitution. It becomes effective in 21 days.

“This is a great day for civil rights in Iowa,” said attorney Dennis Johnson, a co-counsel with Lambda Legal, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of six same-sex couples seeking to marry in Iowa.

Via CNN.

This is great news for gay rights in Iowa, and hopefully the rest of the States.

The fear now, of course, will be that some kind action akin to Prop 8 will occur, and remove that right. However, I don’t see this happening. The Iowa State Constitution provides that the means of altering and amending it are legislative in nature; a proposed Amendment has to pass through two legislative sessions and then be voted on. Given that the General Assembly is currently dominated by Democrats, I don’t see this happening; hopefully the issue will have lost any meaningful traction by the time the Assembly becomes Republican-dominated or more evenly split.

We’ll see.

With Love, To My Wife

One year ago today, my wife and I were married by a judge in the San Antonio courthouse.

It was a long time coming, and we’d been through a lot before that, and a lot since, but it has always been worth it. We’re a perfect match, like cheese and tomato, every element coming together perfectly, like a BLT.

And yes, I did just compare our relationship to a sandwich. It’s a good sandwich, and besides, my wife loves a good BLT.

We’ve been a couple now for almost a decade, all told. There have been highs and lows, good times and bad, but whatever has happened, I’ve been happy and grateful for every minute that she’s been in my life. Even when we’ve argued, even when we’ve shouted, screamed and stomped around, I’ve felt lucky that I was arguing with her.

My wife is my one true love. She makes me happy; she supports and validates and completes my life. Without her, my life would be so much worse, and if I believed in a god, I’d bend my knee every day and thank it for bringing her into my life. As it is, all I can do is appreciate her, love her and cherish her for every minute of the rest of our lives, but that seems like more than enough to me.

There’s no way that I could ever tell her how much I love her and how much she means to me, but you can bet your last penny I will spend the rest of my life trying. I believe in us, and always will.

Happy Anniversary, Lottie. I love you!

Noodling, the White Rose, Birthers and Somewhere People Talk Like in Fargo

I’ve been noodling around the internet lately reading a good bit about a variety of subjects as they take my fancy, but there have been two major preoccupations for me of late: webcomics, and birthers.

As you can all see, I have a section of blogroll on the left where I list the webcomics which have particularly caught my attention. If you’ve ever dipped into them, you’ll have noticed that they’re a pretty diverse bunch: they range from the abstract, like XKCD and Circle versus Square, to the anime-influenced Questionable Content and the semi-photo realist style of Dr McNinja.

The basic thing that links all of them, though, is that they are all pretty sharp and have good ideas; the writing is usually fresh and funny, and often thought-provoking, as in the case of Subnormality, which is really the one I wanted to bring to your attention.

Snow, Shoulders and Benjamin Button

OK, I know I haven’t posted anything for a while. I’ve been kind of busy, really, and then I was abducted by aliens… Well, OK, maybe not.

We had snow down here, several days in a row. At one point, it was bad enough that I got half way to work and had to turn back because I couldn’t see where I was going. In the end, I was going to go in when the snow had died down some, but I got a call to say not to bother.

In other news, I’ve been having some problems with my shoulder recently. A few aches and pains, reduced movement in certain ways. Rather than being all McCain-y and saying that I couldn’t tie my shoes or use the interwebs, I went to my doctor. He confirmed what I had suspected – I’ve injured my rotator cuff, which is not so good. Basically, it controls rotational movements in the shoulder.