This blog has some loose talk about Roberti Bellarmine, or St Robert as the Catholic Encyclopedia calls him "the hammer of heresies." Here is more from the presumably infallible tome:
... 1599 he [Clement VIII] made him Cardinal-Priest.. Bellarmine did not live to deal with the later and more serious stage of the Galileo case, but in 1615 he took part in its earlier stage...it became Bellarmine's official duty to signify the condemnation to Galileo, .. [RB dies 1621 or 22?] ...a life which had been no less remarkable for its virtues than for its achievements.
The good book fails to mention Giordano Bruno and is eminently weasel-wordish about RB's old buddy Galileo. I suppose there is a viewpoint from which burning a man alive could be considered a "remarkable virtue" RB book advertised here http://www.stjohnfisherforum....
a calm and personable Aristide in a navy-blue suit tells Ribbe that before his ouster, he was visited by two high-ranking French emissaries -- Regis Debray and Veronique Albanel -- who threatened him. ''Either you resign or you might be shot,'' Aristide said he was told. - a threat, noot a warning. In the '60s, Regis Debray fought beside Che Guevara in Bolivia. dir 2 years in chokey. Seems to have swung as far right as anyone of our generation. Now acting as a heavy for Empire, deserves to be shot on sight.
coon pictures http://www.flickr.com/photos/... .. http://www.flickr.com/photos/... ... and dog http://www.flickr.com/photos/latenightowl/4 921598/in/set-16693/" title="http://www.flickr.com/photos/latenightowl/4 921598/in/set-16693/" target="_blank"http://www.flickr.com/photos/... cant link to this kind of flickr, you have to click.
Mae Marsh This was on my wall for years even tho Birth of a Nation was a shill for the Klan. I also had an Arthur Iles Maori girl with moko, some say AI was sentimental & colonial but this girl was fierce
other Iraq treatment welcome back to Fallujah http://photos3.flickr.com/453... cruise missile 'freedom' http://photos3.flickr.com/370... girl terrorist http://photos2.flickr.com/335... girl terrorist http://photos2.flickr.com/335... rpg http://photos3.flickr.com/347... _________________________ _____________________ Nanosolar Palo Alto promising solar electricity at 5 cents per kWh .. molecular self-assembly..quantum dots (10nm) 100x thinner than thin-film amorphous Nanosolar SolarPly 14 x 10 feet 120 W/in² at 110V ..below $1 per peak watt. http://www.nanosolar.com/prod... _________________________ _________________________ ____________________ I'm thinking of going to Bamako & Dakar, for the music. I've never travelled to a desert country, not even back of Bourke. Mali being tres poor, there probably arent as many buses as SEAsia. Plan to spend all the inheritance. Then what? Suicide is painless, but it aint easy. As a youth I would climb up unfinished buildings, sit on the 10th floor slab, think about the jump (building site security was lax in those days]. Later I got hold of Potasium Cyanide, sometimes would lie with a cap held in forceps over my open mouth. Threw those caps away one day in Grey Lynn in 1971, after smoking some Aceh black. Life suddenly seemed immensely interesting.
Mali Climate cool, dry season October - March very hot April - June rainy July - September ..when it rains it doesn't last all day, nor does it rain every day; and the countryside is green and fresh (dust-free). Syd-Paris $1800-$2200 Paris-Bamako $1270 Mopti has a Paris plane, but not Internetted.
_________________________ ______ "I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it," he wrote last year. "Big darkness, soon come. Take my word for it." Hunter S T
Oriental pde band rotunda, Mersenne 42, GAM onscreen, Spike, Birding in Babylon
the Flickr Zeitgeist can be all pics, or your pics... http://www.flickr.com/fun/zeitgeist/" title="http://www.flickr.com/fun/zeitgeist/" target="_blank"http://www.flickr.com/fun/zei...
Nemonox
the Technorati search doesnt appear to work. Maybe it finds tags?
_________________________ ________________ 3/3/2005 10:55AM 42nd Mersenne prime 225,964,951 - 1 7,816,230 digits. by a Dr Nowak in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (Gimps) _________________________ _______________ 2/3/2005 SBS TV Dateline John Martinkus interview with GAM Commander Muharram "They attacked us with all their war machinery, their huge fighting force, their warplanes and ships, their Scorpion tanks and so on. They also conducted brutal operations against the people. The slightest suspicion, such as giving a cigarette to a GAM member, could get you shot. Because they conducted such brutal operations, they banned the international community from coming to Aceh. They don't want them to come to Aceh to report what they see. Why don't they want them here? Because they don't want the world to witness their brutality."
Aceh: Nusa: 20Jan05 "We are still waiting for the elephants to come and pull out all the trucks,"
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Ray Kurzweil and the Spike. Lets be clear. The Spike is real and immanent. But its foolish to believe in: 1) Computers smarter than people: Lots of GFlops do NOT a super intelligent being make, merely a faster computer intelligence requires a body, a care. fast switches do not intelligence make. We care because we die, and because we have chemical emotions. Machines dont care. Even if we try to make them care, say by adding a "care" accumulator, a 'smart'; machine would simply set the accumulator to 'full', bingo, care no more! Something like a junkie machine.
2) self replicating nanobots. Before a tiny machine can replicate, show me a normal size factory that needs no people supervision at all. It takes an entire economy to make a gadget like a DVD player. No nanobot can do it alone.
3) immortality We have no idea how the inside of a cell works, nor how neurons grow. There is NO possibility of replacing my right sciatic nerve. Absent that, 'immortality' is an absurdly hopeless proposition.
4) Scanning nd downloading minds. This is an absurdity. It is just not possible to scan at the Molecular level. It is probably impossible in principle. There is certainly no inkling of a method. Even if a scan was possible, the reconstruction is not. It is by no means clear that a molecular-accurate scan would constitute a mind.
5) Teleportation is meaningless Even granted scanning & transmission, what would be constituted at the far end would be my twin, not me. At this end I am supposed to agree to be destroyed so my twin can walk free at the far end? Not on your Nellie.
Despite these caveats, it seems clear that exponential growth in machine complexity will lead to a social complexity beyond current comprehension. BUT EcoCrash may subsume the Spike.
Ecocrash: Soil depletion. Water contamination. PeakOil [PO] no cheap oil will gut this culture. 2 Billion township souls with no gardens, no water tanks, will trash the towns. Cheap weapons and sensors will render security obsolete. Car culture, having trashed village level interactions, will stall with PO, leaving us within walking distance of precisely nothing. Global Warming imposed on an unstable system - aka agriculture - will cause instability, wide swings, aka crash. Nothing to eat, no trucks to truck it, no pumps, no water.
Human rights, habeas corpus, due process have already gone - did you notice? Torture, disappearance, assassination, character assassination, have arrived - did you notice? Forgery has replaced elections - did you notice? Forever war has arrived - did you notice? Concentration camps are in use - have you noticed?
There is a nice irony in car bombs: oil troopers pulverised by cars packed with explosives. Car culture brought these troops to this town, Cars smash them down
We made the trek down to a base near the ruins of ancient Babylon. I stayed right next to the Euphrates River, which is significantly smaller than the Tigris. The camp was dotted with hundreds of date palms, olive and pomegranate trees, and thick reeds next to the river.
The next morning I birded in the ruins of Babylon proper. An Iraq babbler sat obligingly on a fence for a few minutes before diving into the reeds. In the same area I saw a few young white-cheeked bulbuls that were just fledging. A pond near an amphitheater from Alexander the Great's time had a black-crowned night heron, a few little egrets, pied kingfishers, and black-winged stilts.
Near the ruins I saw my first laughing dove. It was walking around near the base of a date tree. I really enjoyed the combination of the lush surroundings, the birds, and the history of Babylon, not to mention that this base is much safer than mine -- it almost never gets attacked.
I returned to Baghdad and took another walk to the scrubby area near the lake. I was treated to a great view of an immature isabelline shrike hunting insects along a dirt berm. I also saw two male black francolins -- large chicken-sized game birds -- chasing each other around in the scrub. When I got too close to them they flew a short distance on their broad, short wings and scurried away into the brush. The birds were spectacular, with their black bellies, deep chestnut collars, and white cheek patches.
Steve Fossett is 1/3 the way around the world in globalflyer Tracking Page ..Hope he has enough speed to stay awake the 70 hours. I did that once, it gets weird.
Rio. Dont know why the San Fran Fags who turn up in Sydney cant do anything 1/10th as good.
no reason, just because I saw this.
Titan shoreline, still the 'raw' image. When will we see the 'cooked' images? http://www.solarviews.com/browse/pia/PIA07236.jpg" title="http://www.solarviews.com/browse/pia/PIA07236.jpg" target="_blank"http://www.solarviews.com/bro...
offroad Segway, cant decide if this is a bad idea or a really bad idea
I like these scripts,
even though they kill
my Background Image