Over the past few weeks in my surfing the blogosphere, I've read several anti-creation posts over at sites such as Pharyngula and via Dave over at Galloping Beaver who twigged me on to a YouTube series on debunking creationism called Why do People Laught at Creationism. This has inspired me to present as a public service the evidence for a very old universe.

For MPG given in US gallons, use this formula:




For MPG given in Imperial gallons, use this formula:




Both yield L/100km.

Well it's the end of week one with the new Macbook. So far I've successfully installed Windows and partially installed Linux. So it is now tri-boot, with the cavaet that Linux doesn't yet boot fully, which I'm still working on. Other than that the new computer works great. There's only one problem, and it's a bug in Mac OS X that's truly annoying. It seems that there's issues with the WPA drivers for the wireless card. Now from what I've seen on Apple's it's a widespread problem that has people up in arms. For example, for my network, the bug prevented me and Mrs. Evil from connecting to Google. Everything else worked fine, unless they linked to Google of course. So if you need WPA, you may want to wait till Apple gets this bug fixed. I've gotten around the problem by using the less secure WEP protocol which does work. Other than that, I've no complaints about the computer.

For a given voltage divider:



To work out the output voltage Vo:



To work out the value of R1 for a particular Vi and Vo:



Where R1 and R2 are resistances in ohms and Vi and Vo are potentials in volts.

The purpose of this section is to store formulas that I have found useful and don't want to have to remember or hunt down again.

For those of you out there who live in caves, spam, or unsolicited email or comments of a commercial nature, is a huge problem on the internet. Here at castle evil alone I get an average of ten to twelve thousand spam attempts a month against my and my wife's blogs. Now given that this blog is basically a disused off-ramp on the information super-highway with only about 1800 actual visitors a month, most of which look at my model railroad site, a significant amount of traffic here is spam.

The chair car I'm currently sitting in has power outlets in the seats for notebook computers. I am bitter about this as had I known this, I'd have brought my DVD's with me in the car instead of packing them in my checked luggage. Oh well, it has given me time to finish reading the newspaper that came with my room this morning. It is newspapers that have me writing now (that and the electricity). The past two days have had Microsoft stories in the Globe and Mail's Report on Business. They weren't good news stories.

Microsoft has been a huge influence in the computer world for the past 20 years or so. They have a near monopoly on the home computer market in terms of operating systems as well as in office applications such as word processors. So why the title of this article? Well the state of Massachusetts has just announced that all documents that the state government will use must be in an open standard. So what's the problem for Microsoft? None of their file formats qualify as an open standard.

As the US waits to be hit by the second force 5 hurricane in as many months it gives pause for thought on global warming. How are these two things connected? Well, as the Earth warms up, the process is slowed by one main factor, the oceans. Water can hold a heck of a lot of thermal energy, way more than air and even rock. So as the energy from the Sun is trapped by the greenhouse effect, some of that energy goes into the oceans which, acting like a large heat sink, moderates temperature change.

I've been getting a bunch of comment spam the past couple of days. More a nuisance than anything really as I've been deleting them as I find them. The main reason for this post is to tell you all that I've upgraded the software. The newer version of Geeklog, the software that runs this site, is better at dealing with comment spam. If you find something that's not quite right with the site, please contact me as that means I've missed something in a config file.