Steve Pavlina has written some great pieces on how to become more disciplined and his experiment with polyphasic sleep, but his mainstays are things like how to stay ahead of the game, and how to get ahead in the rat race… Here’s some standard fare from Steve:

Homelessness is a huge upgrade from traditional employment… Genuine opportunities are based on creating and/or delivering value.

Makes you think, doesn’t it? But now and then he writes some satire that has a bit of bite to it.

In the case of this post, though, I determined he doesn’t care much for organized religion.

The title kinda gives it away: Ten Reasons you should Never have a Religion. Here’s an example snippet that will enrage or entertain, depending on your disposition:

Religion is spiritual immaturity. That’s a compliment.

It’s entirely possible to enjoy your life without spending so much of it bent over in submission. Pull your head out of your rear, and look around with your own two eyes. If you need something to worship, then feel grateful for your own conscious mind. Pull it out of the cobwebs, and boot it up.

– Steve Pavlina

Ouch!

Wonderful perspective on how English will survive the ages:

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that the English language is as pure as a crib-house whore. It not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary.

James Nicoll (b. 1961), “The King’s English”, rec.arts.sf-lovers, 15 May 1990

French authorities scurry about looking to keep their language pure by forbidding alien terms such as “le hotdog” and “le weekend” and “le sweater”. In English, we use whatever new term or turn of phrase conveys the thought best. Consider “Pretty” (Saxon), “Bouquet” (French), “Quota” (Latin), “Algebra” (Arabic). It’s part of why we English-speakers have a ridiculously rich vocabulary, and also why English will survive.

English purists who have icebergs up their butt will rail at the progress English makes organically and make themselves obsolete… you ain’t gonna keep folks from using the terms they want to, in the way they want to — it ain’t gonna happen, no siree.

Still, there are some constructs that just aren’t right, no matter how organic you want to get.

• “It’s” vs “Its” — With an apostrophe, it’s a contraction for two words. Without the apostrophe, it represents ownership, just like his or hers. So try using “him” or “her” instead and you’ll get it right:
  • That’s its main flaw <= That’s her main flaw
  • It’s been grand <= She’s been grand
  • It’s its own worst enemy <= He’s his own worst enemy
• “You’re” vs “Your” — Here the apostrophe version is most definitely a contraction for the two words “you are”. If you can replace the contraction with those two words and the sentence still makes sense, you’ve got it right; if not, use “your” which means ir belongs to you.
  • Your house is on fire.
  • You’re almost too late. (You are almost too late)
• “They’re” vs “Their” vs “There” — the first is a contraction for “they are”, period. The second means it belongs to them. The third means it’s somewhere besides here.
  • They’re screwing it up again. (They are screwing it up again)
  • Their car is in the shop. (The car belongs to them and it’s being repaired.)
  • There is the one we were looking for. (It’s not here, it’s there.)
    For this last one, just remember you’re starting with the word “HERE” and adding another letter “T” to get somewhere else that’s not HERE — it’s THERE.

Enjoy constitution day tomorrow — what liberties we have left remain because the fellas who put our U.S. Constitution together had lots of sense.

http://tinyurl.com/acqbv

There are lots of neat places to look online for the great Solar Eclipse of 2009. While us Amurrikans were watching dusk settle on July 21, July 22 was already well underway for India, China and Japan… and that’s where you could see all the Eclipse-y goodness.

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1912109,00.html?xid=rss-photoessays

I know these guys.

Managed to get Faith and Audra up on skates at the same time… and even managed to take a video or two, to boot. (if you have Quicktime (from Apple) installed it can play these *.3gp files, no problem.)

Ever get tired of hearing The Twelve Days of Christmas? We all do…

Until Straight No Chaser sing it!

This is exactly my kind of essay, and I’m surprised that I haven’t run into it before:

I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-minding!

– I, Pencil

This is a wonderful ode to the symbiatic relationships that spring up on their own when folks are at liberty to make their own choices, without anyone forcing them to do things ‘for their own good’.

Ran across two nice blogbites in one article recently:

It’s not a record high. It only looks that way if you don’t adjust for inflation. And that’s just silly. It’s like saying the movie “Rush Hour II” out-earned “Gone with the Wind.” The media should quote prices in real dollars, but when they get excited, they don’t. As the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA) acknowledges, once you adjust for inflation, it turns out that gasoline cost more 25 years ago in 1981.

Inflation makes a difference! So does perspective:

And gasoline is still a bargain. Think about what it takes to bring it to us: Drills must bend and dig sideways through as many as seven miles of Earth. What they find has to be delivered through long pipelines or transported in monstrously expensive ships, then converted into three different formulas of gasoline, moved in trucks that cost more than $100,000 each, and shipped to gas stations that have to have lots of expensive equipment to make sure we don’t blow ourselves up filling the tank. Even after all that, gasoline is still cheaper per ounce than the bottled water gas stations sell.

The article is from John Stossel

Take a look at this Global Warming video at YouTube:

Climate scientists need there to be a problem, in order to get funding…

The fact of the matter is, tens of thousands of jobs depend on global warming…

At least it’s not the same-old panic you hear from CNN. And it has at least as much science behind it.