A direct line to God?

"'God loves you, and I love you,' the president said during a particularly fatuous promotion of his efforts to give government money to church groups that discriminate in their hiring. 'And you can count on both of us as a powerful message that people who wonder about the future can hear.'"

Maybe it's just me--but doesn't God not appreciate people putting themselves at his own level?

Sounds like someone's looking for a smiting.

Grammar quiz

Should one use "has" or "have" as the verb following the noun phrase "the growth of spherical drops by coalescence in simple shear and axisymmetric straining flows?"

Unlike the copy editor of my most recent paper, move to the head of the class if you said "has."

Senator swap

Just a request.

Could somebody let Zell Miller know that he's really a Republican--and swap party affiliations with him? Chafee, Snowe, Collins? Anybody?

How Miller lives with the constant cognitive dissonance is beyond me.

It's almost a fact

Apparently the Bush administration can't be bothered with providing actual facts about its planned changes to Medicare coverage. HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson has promised to continue providing "fact-based information," not actual facts.

Doesn't that make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside?

Signs there is no justice in the world

If the Muslim- and Arab-American community see Bush's "100 Days" ad and don't immediately drop their support for Bush in the next election, we deserve what we get.

Muhammad Horton, indeed.

Just a hint. . . .

Sending the same spam e-mail six times in an hour--using five different aliases--is not a good way to convince people that you're running a respectable establishment.

In the role of "The Stalker" today will be . . .

It's been a weird day. I've just run into the same person for something like the sixth time day.

This wouldn't be bizarre--we work in the same building after all--except for the fact that I've seen this person literally all over the campus.

Apparently, it's my turn to be "stalked" by said person this week.

Enshrined

Well, not me, but a CD cover design I did for the MIT Concert Choir a few years back has found its way into an exhibit at the MIT Museum. It's not the best of the designs I've done for them (it's actually one of the worst, in my opinion), but it probably made its way into the exhibit because it featured a work by John Harbison, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer who just happens to be on the MIT faculty. Oh, well.

But it was an interesting surprise, to say the least.

Web searches gone wild, take N (N large)

The latest entries into the "how'd you get here" pool:

• Bush "treatment of the economy"
  
• Visa Olympics commercial
  
• "team introductions" Super Bowl XXXVIII
  
• Bush "more for civil rights than any other"
  
• Zinger Saturday Night Live
  

Now things start to get truly weird:

• the animals we gotte get out of this place
  

This is a search from a Belgian Google engine--and only hit my site because I forgot an "n" in the phrase "gotten out of hand."

And, my two personal favorites:

• Narcissism mania
  
• Bitonal pedestrians
  

If anybody can explain this last one to me, I'd love to hear it.

Caveat non-emptor

Now this is a dangerous scam--watch out for it.

You'll get an e-mail saying: "Your credit card has been successfully charged for $69.95." Then you'll probably say to yourself: "I didn't order anything," which means that you'll want to cancel the order--for which they conveniently provide a phone number to contact "if you never purchased this product." Of course, to cancel the purchase, they'll need to get your credit card number--which they never provided in the original e-mail. Very clever, and possibly very effective, because they want you to panic about having your credit card charged fraudulently and contact them to correct it.

The real kicker, though, is that the web site "processing" the transaction does not actually sell the products alleged in the e-mail--and even has a warning on its own website warning users about the scam.

While clever, though, the spammers (or, in this case, scammers) weren't quite clever enough. The game is given up, in this particular case, because the e-mail address to which this message was sent is a mailing list. Nice try, though.

In-your-face evangelism

Seeking out converts is a goal of multiple religions, including both Christianity and Islam. So obviously I can't say that evangelism is, in itself, a bad thing.

However, there's no doubt in my mind that there's the right way to go about preaching the word of God. One bad way to do it is to go around a bus stop asking people: "Everybody who wants to go to heaven, raise your hand," and then quoting the usual Biblical passages. I'd say that the angry reactions of several of the other people waiting for the bus--some of which are quite unprintable--was entirely justified under the circumstances. I was quite sorely tempted to make a rather snide response to the woman, but decided that it wasn't worth engaging in a long conversation, considering I had just gotten back into town.

And the reason for that will be a story by itself, but one that will wait for another day.