A Choice

After reading this article in the Lexington Herald Leader about the Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee hearing on Global Warming chaired by Jim Gooch, who by his position is the default chief Democratic strategist on the environment, I felt the need to post the following video. I really wish the Committee had been able to see this video.

Please watch.



Thank you.

Free Rice.

Free Rice is a fun little website that tests your vocabulary while helping to feed the world. For every vocabulary question that you answer correctly, 10 grains of rice are donated to the United Nations World Food Program. I am warning you that the game is addictive as you try to reach ever higher vocabulary levels. If I can get past level 42, I will be a very happy camper.

Go try it and help feed the world.

A New Record!

Today was a very Jack Conway kind of day.

After 12 years of voting, I finally batted .1000 at the polls. Every candidate that I voted for won.

My uncle Robert has accused me for years of being a yellow dog Democrat and I have resisted this label. Yes, I usually vote a Democratic ticket but it isn't because of some unhealthy alliance with the party. Rather it is because the Democrats usually are more inline with my ideological beliefs. The two Republicans I voted for deserved to win and their Democratic opponents were morons that deserved to lose. It was nice casting a bi-partisan ticket and having the candidates I believe deserving win.

Also, I saw Kentucky play basketball tonight for the first time this season and was pleased with what I saw. As AnnaMarie said, "They need a lot of work", but even though they were leading by 27 points, the look in their eyes said that they were not happy with their performance. And they shouldn't be. There is a lot of work still to be done but I believe the the drive is there to win.

Yes, it was a very Jack Conway kind of day.

Just a little clarification.

I am amazed by the number of people that are unsure if waterboarding should be considered torture (like Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey). So in the spirit of education, here is a factual description of the technique.

Waterboarding induces panic and suffering by forcing a person to inhale water into the sinuses, pharynx, larynx, trachea, and lungs.

The head is tilted back and water is poured into the upturned mouth or nose. Eventually the subject cannot exhale more air or cough out more water, the lungs are collapsed, and the sinuses and trachea are filled with water. The subject is drowned from the inside, filling with water from the head down. The chest and lungs are kept higher than the head so that coughing draws water up and into the lungs while avoiding total suffocation.

As you will see in the picture, water is kept out of the lungs by the 15 to 20 degree angle of the subject. As long as the waterline remains below the level of the lungs, the subject does not asphyxiate.

Here is a list of things waterboarding is not:

upright or face-down dunking: People dunked face-first in water can keep water out for as long as they can hold their breath. When one is inclined with the head back, holding one's breath will not prevent the upper respiratory tract from filling with water.

asphyxiation: Survivors of near-drowning experiences report that the sensation of water flooding down the larynx and trachea as they struggle to breathe is the most terrifying aspect of the experience. In waterboarding, this begins quickly, long before the onset of oxygen starvation.

submersion: Waterboarding does not require immersion in standing water. Someone can be waterboarded with as little as a canteen or two of water.

simulation: Waterboarding is actually forcing large quantities of water into the pharynx, trachea, and lungs, inducing choking and gagging in the subject.

Now that you have the power of information, you can make up your own mind.

Thanks to the fine folks at waterboarding.org for the information.

Very Interesting.

Here is a link to an interesting website that determines the reading level of your blog.

Get a Cash Advance

Wii are the Future.

I have been reading for over a year how the Wii is a fad and that the novelty of its unique motion sensitive controller will wear off. Video game experts “in the know” repeat over and over this old chestnut and state that either the Xbox 360 or the PS3, depending on their personal favorite, is going to “win” in the next-gen war. The theory is that because the Wii cannot compete against the graphic and processing prowess of the Xbox 360 and PS3, that the Wii’s huge sales numbers are going to begin to fall as gamers move back to “traditional” video games.

In my mind, this past weekend proved that the people “in the know” don’t know what they are talking about. And it is because they are too close to the industry as it was, to see where the industry is going. Anna and I hosted about 13 members of her family for a small weekend family reunion. During this time, it seemed our poor little Wii was never turned off. After countless games of baseball, tennis, snowboarding, bowling, billiards and tennis, both Anna’s brother (who hasn’t owned a gaming console since the Atari) and her uncle (who has never owned a video gaming console) have decided that they are going to get their very own Wii.



What the industry experts don’t realize is the intense appeal of a gaming system that is obviously fun to the non-gaming public. These family members would never have been enticed to play a traditional video game with people sitting around holding a controller pushing buttons, but the wild gyrations involved in playing a Wii game are irresistible. Video game pundits just can not grasp the fact that Nintendo has effectively tapped an untapped market that the conventional wisdom did not believe existed.






Coming in the spring of 2008 we are going to see the release of Wii Fit which will include everything from aerobics to yoga poses to muscle conditioning, and it will even measure your BMI. It is titles like these that will persuade people to purchase a Wii that never would have dreamed of buying a 360 or PS3.

This means that hardcore fanboys are not going to be the only audience in town. Right now the average production cost of a traditional first person shooter is in excess of $50 million dollars. If you aren’t a first person shooter or sports fan, then console gaming really wasn’t up your alley. Things are going to change. With such a large audience in place that doesn’t really care about these type of games, you are going to see a decrease in the amount of resources a video game publisher will be willing to invest in these sorts of titles, when they could concentrate on a cheaper to produce and more widely accepted title for the Wii. I recently read a quote from an EA Games executive that they can have four to five teams working on various Wii games for the same cost as one PS3 game.

For me personally this revolution is a wonderful thing. I don’t really care about Halo or Madden ’08, but love games like Civilization, SimCity and Alpha Centari. In the past these types of games only appeared on a computer and usually required a top of the line computer to run them effectively. That all started to change today. Will Wright, the legendary creator SimCity, announced that his newest project called Spore will be released on the Wii. The interview that announced this wonderful news quoted Mr. Wright as stating that “Somebody asked me what I thought next generation meant and what about the PlayStation 3 was next generation. The only next gen system I've seen is the Wii – the PS3 and the Xbox 360 feel like better versions of the last, but pretty much the same game with incremental improvement, but the Wii feels like a major jump – not that the graphics are more powerful, but that it hits a completely different demographic. In some sense I see the Wii as the most significant thing that's happened, at least on the console side, in quite a while.”

Spore is my idea of a dream game, the game allows a player to control the evolution of a species from its existence as a multicellular organism to a spacefaring sapient creature. The game is mindboggling in its scope. For example, just in the spacefaring section, you will be able to beam down your creature to interact directly with an alien species. You may interbreed different species genetically, or place a "monolith" (in the style of 2001: A Space Odyssey) on a planet, triggering evolution of intelligent life, then come back later to see what has evolved. Also, Will Wright explained that there would be over half a million different stars, each one having its own planets, more than anyone could visit in a lifetime. If your console is connected to the internet, many of these worlds will be populated with creatures and civilizations created by other players. The creatures, vehicles, and buildings the player can create will be uploaded automatically to a central database, catalogued and rated for quality (based on how many users have downloaded the object or creature in question), and then re-distributed to populate other players' games. As is traditional with most of Will Wright's games, the game never presents the player with an absolute ending and the Space Phase continues for as long as the player wishes.

Viva La Revolucion!

Gratuitous Cuteness

Just a couple of picture to fulfill your daily quota of cuteness.





And for good measure, this is the license plate that I designed for the back of Sophie's car that you saw a few posts back. Do you get the joke?