www.donaldmarino.com

Just when I become worried that science and rationality are beset at all sides by the all-dumbing forces of religious belief, final proof comes in to show that we’re even dumber about it than I ever knew.

Now, new findings have come to light that prayer is not a successful treatment for heart-attack patients.

Uh, yeah. I think common sense dictates that much. Apparently not, because some of our leading medical departments were in on this silliness. Harvard, The Mayo Clinic, et.al.. I’m truly disturbed for several reasons:

1- Did they really expect to come out and say “You know the patients people prayed for seemed to miraculously get better, but the ones we told ‘em not to pray for, well they just withered away…”

2- The study cost 24 Million dollars. Money that could be used trying to find real treatments to real medical realities.

3- Religion and science don’t mix. Religious beliefs and science stand in direct opposition. If someone is funding this kind of study, they are obviously looking for an affirmation of their beliefs or some other result. Science is about proving and disproving fact. Religion is about ignoring science and believing anyway. There are no “facts” in religion. That’s why “Faith” is touted as such a virtue. You actually get -extra- points for believing things that can’t be proven.

4- It didn’t matter. Not one patient was made healthier by this travesty of reasearch funding. Sad. But those grant checks sure were sweet!

So, although I promised myself no atheist ranting in this blog, I can’t withold my opinion (it’s my blog after all).
It makes me very disheartened to hear about the religious folks throwing their power and money around in this country. In fact it’s disgusting. As an atheist in this country, I barely feel safe. A recent study of Americans’ public opinion found that there’s only one religious theme that all Americans can agree on. Athiests are scum. Apparently, it does not matter which religion you choose, even Islam - as long as you have one, Americans think you’re ok. In the public’s opinion, we atheists consistently rank down there with the child-molesters and rapists. It’s true. Around 3-8% of the public admits to being atheists (and these numbers I believe are skewed higher by people who are theists but don’t identify with a particular religion). To most Americans being atheist is like having the plague. You could never win office, for example in this country if you didn’t profess a religion (and you can’t be President without putting your hand on a bible and saying ’so help me god’ -ugh). I’ll never forget G.W. Bush dew-eying the camera during the 2004 Presidential Debates and stating to his “base”: “I just don’t know how anyone could be President without a relationship with the Lord!” I’ve never been more furious at a public official in my lifetime. As if that was at all relevant - just read the United States Constitution (what, that old thing?). The separation between church and state is fully under assault and the public is heartily approving. Disgusting. Wrong. Moronic.
Hopefully, this tide will pass. In Europe, atheism is not nearly as frowned upon, and atheist public officials have been elected. We have to take our tolerance where we can get it, I guess. Hopefully, the time is coming when atheists will be more accepted. I don’t think so, though. I see the day coming when it will not be safe to admit you’re an atheist. Maybe that’ll extend to doctors and scientists, too, since they often prove religion wrong (um, see the ‘prayer study’ above). In this day of extremism and polarity, I doubt anyone will give up such a popular punching bag as atheists so easily. Hey, at least we can all agree those _heathen_ souldn’t have any rights, I mean come on, they’re like animals!

They don’t even pray for sick people.

I have been screwing around with locators lately a.k.a geocoders. If you are not familiar, a geocoder is a tool that takes an address or placename and returns a geographic coordinate - a location. What a useful and interesting tool. Geocoding used to be a very difficult and expensive proposition not so long ago. Now, you can choose from numerous free services to use that are uncannily accurate. The bottom line: it’s easy to find stuff you need to find.
In 1999, I was a mapping specialist at an enormous commercial real estate brokerage. We cranked out tons of cartographic products every day. We had a large budget for GIS data and aerial images each year. One of our chief products was basically a map of a list of properties. We made billions of these suckers. We didn’t have a geocoder until about a week before I left the company, and that thing was no great help as it was. We used the Pierson Graphics Map Books and basically memorized a vast portion of the street map for the 7 county metro Denver area and hand geocoded many of the addresses, creating our own buildings database as we went. Back then I swear you could say a business address and could just point to it on the map. An believe me I’m no savant trickster like the zip code guy in Boulder. (go here, scroll down to Z) You do it over and over, you’ll remember them too. We all did. Scary.

Now, take your pick. Google’s mapping API (here, docs ), Yahoo! Maps API (here), MapQuest OpenAPI (here), and others all provide quite robust mapping services including geocoding and are quite easy to use. There’s a free perl module that uses USGS TIGER data out there (well, here). There all pretty darn accurate too. I’ve been using both Google and Yahoo!’s geocoders lately and I’ve been impressed so far at their ability to find random things, such as:

“Hollywood Sign” –> Google Maps found it, Yahoo didn’t.

“Central Park New York” –> Both found

“winsconsin” Note misspelled –> Google maps found Winsconsin College of cosmetology 2960 Allied St, Green Bay, WI, but to be fair, would prompt you in real life that it was misspelled.
Yahoo finds Wisconsin, which I thought was cool.

But anyway, it’s amazing to me that this is a free service. It’s expensive to do geocoding well for most people. You need top quality mapping data. It has to be complete, new and accurate. That costs tons of money. Now that all these data indexing giants have been competing in the GIS/RS data and tools arena, they’re putting the power of these huge data libraries to good use.

If only I’d had that in 1999-2000. We’re lucky these days.

Well, I kept thinking to myself that blogger.com was lame, so I finally took the time to move the blog to donaldmarino.com. Ah, home. If for some reason you wanted to see the archive, you can still visit it here.

I moved the blog onto www.donaldmarino.com.

Here’s a few pics of my 1989 Palmer P39EC. It is distinctly possible that this instrument saved my life in the early 90’s. I haven’t played it in a while (I have others now), but a fresh set of strings, polish ‘er up, and it sounds and plays great still. Here’s the thing, though: this was a bargain-basement buy even in 1989. There’s no real reason to have even expected this guitar to sound or play nicely even when new. $200 dollar guitars rarely do. This thing is an exception, though, because it’s a player and it sounds great. Except for the pickup. That sounds terrible. I never plug it in. But the guitar has outperformed expectations by so far that it’s amazing. I tried to find out some info about Palmer Guitars and utterly failed. There isn’t one iota of evidence they exist on the internet. No customer service, no website, nothing. I did find two intances of internet merchants who claimed to have a few Palmer guitars for sale. Maybe they went out of business, maybe they just don’t have a website. Dunno. I cannot ever remember seeing another Palmer, strangely. It’s a really nice instrument for what it is. It it very close to the end of its useful life, though. It’s cracked, beaten, bent, and broke. It wouldn’t do for a daily player anymore, but it’s still nice to take for a spin now and again. 15 years of memories is almost half my life. They’re in that rosewood fretboard like ghosts.

Anyway, Here’s what a cheap guitar looks like after you work out 15+ years of your feelings on it.

I am heartened by a nice, momentary convergence of the fates. Apparently, beards have become fashionable for men to wear. Like, big time fashionable. Ralph Lauren runway models, style editors and hipster New Yorkers are sporting beards now. The New York Times even had a style piece on how cool beards are now. Big, bushy ones too, not just some token George Michael stubble, either. As a man who hasn’t shaved in almost ten years now, it’s amusing to me that this momentary fashion trend has arrived. I’m in style again, randomly!
I suspect that it’s a huge backlash from the not-so-subtle not-quite-homo metrosexual thing that has been afflicted on men over the last few years. Gentlemen under a certain age have been expected to look pretty girly of late, and, well while the ladies may really like their men pretty as girls with fashion labels and lots of cologne, men won’t stand for that forever. “Look! I am a man! With a big manly beard. And a Prada shirt!” We’re men after all. Hopefully. So, I suppose to re-assert their manliness, the metros are growing beards. It smacks a bit of desperation. “You can make us wear gay clothes, but you can’t make us shave!” I can’t remember who said it, but it was true - If women decided they like men who walked upside-down, within a week half the earth would be walking on their hands. Funny, but true. If you need any more proof that it’s true, go to LoDo (Denver) on a friday night. The poor gentlemen of today have been quite emasculated, becuase metro is a style the young ladies prefer. We’ll see if beards are here to stay, but if not, look for this fashion trend to be short-lived. The chicks will have what they want in the end. Funny thing is I grew my beard years ago at the request of a girl I was dating. Men were still allowed to be men back then I guess. And women hadn’t invented metrosexuality to doll up the young men yet. Here’s to hippie beards (like mine) on fashion models

The late Elliott Smith.

My favorite musician of all time. Bar none.

I just read a really dumb statement, and because I’m mean, I’m going to have to share it with you.

Apparently Windows Vista needs a lot of RAM to run. Like a whole lot. Official spec is min 512MB, but apparently thats only if you only run I.E. and don’t like to multi-task.

But this takes the cake. In some talkback on a forum, this one bright spark announced that he was ok with that because his WinXP machine had never used more than 480MB of it’s 1GB RAM. “Now, ” he says “at least I’ll be putting that extra RAM to use.”

I don’t even know which end of that statement to ridicule first, so I’ll just leave it to the gentle reader to consider.

The more I watch this, the cooler it gets.
Next time you fold your laundry, think about how bad you suck.

Laundry-Fu Video

Love it.

D

Do you take it for granted?
If you don’t prefer Windows, and you don’t use Windows, you should thank Richard Stallman.
Even if you don’t like him or what he says (he’s like, kinda extreme, yo). Because it’s not that likely you’d have much/any choice if it werent for him. Really, you might not, and it would really suck.
That’s my thought for today.

D