fireworks 

 

I went up to Moscow for the 4th. Here are some pictures of a cool waterfall on Elk Creek. (Sorry Mike, forgot to turn off the date....) 

A question for the religiously inclined to ponder..

So I saw this weird thing on slashdot, about how "Pittsburgh's Safar Centre for Resuscitation Research has developed a technique in which subject's veins are drained of blood and filled with an ice-cold salt solution." Apparently they can keep the dogs "dead" for at least 3 hours before reviving them, at which point they come back with not apparent brain/organ damage. They plan to try it on humans sooner or later. So, if the animal/human is dead, where does the soul go during that time? And, if someone had this done, and then wasn't brought back, at what point would they really be dead? Would their soul stick around until the probability of resuscitation was nill, and then head for warmer (or in some cases more temperate) waters? If this is done to a person, and the soul gets kinda confused and takes off too early, will the person be revived a soulless ghola? We need answers from someone with some serious religious training here!

A little road trip

I went up to the UofI in Moscow last weekend, they have a nice campus up there. Tshering showed me the lab where she's sectioning fish eyes, and looking for optic nerves. The lab was spacious, modern and organized compared to others I've seen. Tshering even has her own desk!
Moscow is kinda fun too. The city reminds me of a mini Boulder CO, lots of big old style houses rented by students, some artsy shops, and lots of young people hanging around. I imagine the place is a real riot during the school year.
It was nice to be in a cool green place after dealing with the first heat wave of south Idaho summer. I was also particularly impressed by the huge rolling fields. Apparently they don't have to irrigate at all up there. The rain is sufficient to keep things green and growing.
Driving through the Nez Perce Indian Reservation, and then down out of the mountains into the lush green camas prarie, I couldn't help but wonder how the previous owners would view the roads, houses and towns which dot the fields which once were theirs. Seeing the richness of the land, gave me a new understanding of the motivation behind driving Chief Joseph and his people off of the land.

Questions...

So I was wondering.. if you are a pro-lifer, do you start calculating age at the day of conception? Since "pro-life" seems to be the way the country is headed (George et. al.), maybe we ought to throw out this whole "birthday" idea, and adopt "conceptionday" in it's stead. This is a whole new war yet to be fought between the pro-choicers and pro-lifers, and of course, the pro-choicers will all end up being 9 months younger, which could sway those who are worried about old-age towards a pro-choice stance. Still, it would be more compatible with what appear to be the up-and-coming social views (who cares whether they are biologically sound anyway). And lets not forget about the interesting impact on legal drinking age.

The rain was accompanied by a lot of hail. Here it has collected in screens. 

Finally, an excuse for all these big pickups! 

Luckily the houses are kind of raised. 

This car wasn't doing too well. 

The trailer park across the street got a LOT of water. 

Last Friday we got a lot of rain fast (2.7 in a few hours). Caldwell isn't really geared for this sort of thing, so the following madness ensued. This is the parkinglot of the place where I work. 

Here's me, in all my roguish Punk Dawg glory... 

The World (of Warcraft) as a rouge see's it. Ariia, Dio, some hunter named Phrosty (?) and I ran through Blackfathoms Deep. After we finished up with the huge three headed dragon, we came back for some photos 

Isaac mostly likes girls... but sometimes he likes to dabble... 

I was working on the layout (in OpenOffice) for the new super-document-management-system, when suddenly this just popped up. Weird.... 

Inez.....

"I got balls"

Hot Dawg!

Well Hot Dawg, I have a new Blog!
It is all about ECM research.. and hence has the address "ecmresearch.blogspot.com". I've already gotten a couple fun pictures posted, and more should be on their way soon.

Linux has less bugs (like we didn't know that?)

In my ongoing campain to educate doubters, I would like to point out this article which reports on the findings of some Standford researchers. Their conclusion is that Linux has many fewer bugs that most proprietary software (such as MS Windows XP).

Democracy?

In Ukraine, when politicians play dirty pool, the people turn out by the thousands, shut down the whole country and don't stop until something is done about it. In the US, things are different. When politicians lie and cheat, we re-elect them and put them on ethics committees. I guess this is the difference between a real Democracy, and those backward half socialist Ukrainians.. where do they get off not agreeing with the mandate of their leaders anyway??
(Apparently this software developer named Curtis has recently come forward with a claim that Tom Feeney a congressman from Florida, and yeah, you guessed it, a Republican think family values, hired a software company to write vote-rigging software with the intent of skewing votes in various Democratic precincts in Florida and beyond. Hoorah...)