UFO Pyramid

Teach the Controversy shirts are great.

http://controversy.wearscience.com/

Because we know that the pyramids were really outsourced to spacemen

An Inconvenient Scoop

My new shirt!

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Message Found Inside of Shirt:
An Inconvenient Scoop: Savor the sweetness while you can! This flavor will soon be out of season!

The inspiration for this cool t-shirt design comes from Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth. The fact that our glaciers and polar caps are melting as a result of rising temperatures due to our pollution, over consumption, over population, and disregard for green solutions. There is nothing worse than a melting ice cream cone.

The Great Seal

The Great Seal
Message Found Inside of Shirt:
The Great Seal: The weight of the world rests on its wings…

The inspiration for this cool shirt design comes from a couple of related sources. The design comes from the U.S.’s “great seal” emblem found on the back of a dollar bill and a quarter. The eagle is also an endangered species that represents freedom, liberty, peace, and war. We believe its wings are being weighed down by the world’s dependence on oil. This shirt is one of those designs you have to take a closer look at. The eagle’s wings are made up of gas pumps while its legs are oil wells holding onto M-16s rifles. Also, the bottom tail feathers are a set of bombs.

http://www.spraygraphic.com/shop/the-great-seal-c-259-p-1-pr-16208.html

The Establishment

http://www.spraygraphic.com/shop/the-establishment-c-247-p-1-pr-16156.html

Message Found Inside of Shirt
The Establishment: We all need to wind down and walk on our own power.

The inspiration for this cool t-shirt design comes from many sources, but mainly it is about people thinking and doing for themselves. We believe in the power of faith, but we also believe people must take action, or else be subjected to oppressive routines that make people feel like their choices are limited.  That is not good…

Peeping Tom

http://www.spraygraphic.com/shop/peeping-tom-c-247-p-1-pr-16148.html

Message Found Inside of Shirt:
Peeping Tom: Big Brother is watching. Let’s give him one heck of a show!

The inspiration behind this cool t-shirt design comes from the proliferation of surveillance tools being used to “keep us safe” and to “keep us in power.” When a person knows they are being watched by a power structure that has the ability to inflict punishment on them, then that person’s changes their behavior to appease the watcher’s expectations. Surveillance is a means of controlling the masses. Important books that directly inspired this design were Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, George Orwell’s 1984, and Jeremy Bentham’s writings.

Bronze Age Thinking

Here is a great example of bronze age thinking:

“There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity. It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn.’

-St. Augustine

Here is another addition to the products of the bronze age beliefs that come with religion.

http://www.tulsaworld.com/opinion/article.aspx?subjectid=61&articleid=20090702_61_A12_Itappe431227

It appears that the people of the state of Oklahoma aren’t a big enough flock for state Rep. Sally Kern. Now she wants to take her message of hellfire and brimstone all across the land, possibly even to the halls of Congress and maybe even the Oval Office.

Kern, best known for asserting that homosexuality is a greater threat than terrorism, plans to circulate for signatures the “Oklahoma Citizen’s Proclamation for Morality,” a document that would “acknowledge the need for a national awakening of righteousness.”

Certainly we’re all in favor of righteousness, though there’s liable to be considerable disagreement over exactly how to define it.

More on that later. First let’s get to Kern’s new economic theory which, if proven accurate, could win her a Nobel Prize, or at least a chapter in economics textbooks:

“We believe our economic woes are consequences of our greater national moral crisis,” a draft of her proclamation states.

The Oklahoma City Republican isn’t the first to float that theory, but so far no adherents have been able to satisfactorily flesh it out. Maybe she’s referring to financial greed and corruption. We’ll anxiously await further details.

Apparently President Barack Obama’s proclamation declaring June as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month was among factors motivating Kern to come up with her own, which, if it advances, would have no real official weight.

The draft version says signers are alarmed that the U.S. government is “forsaking

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the rich Christian heritage upon which this nation was built.”

It also states signers are upset by Obama’s disregard for “the biblical admonitions to live clean and pure lives by proclaiming an entire month to an immoral behavior.”

Kern is entitled to her views, of course, just as the rest of us are. And while Kern and others hold that the Bible condemns homosexuality, many other equally spiritual Americans believe otherwise.

It would appear Kern and her ilk don’t embrace an American tradition cherished by most citizens: tolerance of other people’s beliefs and faith traditions. That precious freedom — to follow the religious tradition of one’s choice — is a hard-won objective that is an underpinning of the American way of life. Apparently that’s lost on Kern and company.

–Thanks to all the crazy people out their that give me a laugh and sometimes a cringe for all the blind following, lack of logic and reason, and happiness of not understanding.

Update

A job stemmed off my ability to fix the Apple Airport Extreme. Jonathan Hill, a mission planner at the Mars Space Flight Facility was so impressed that he told Phil Christensen (a PI on many instruments that have gone to Mars).

I am now helping make the targeting software for the THEMIS camera aboard the Mars Odyssey Orbiter load mosaics better by helping move files and metadata to a new database (postgreSQL) from the old database (mySQL). I enjoy working with all sorts of data ranging from Viking Albedo data to TES mineral abundances.

Field I went well. Mini-camp was fun.

Kayla and I got motorcycle permits and our Friend Brad has let us ride his Kawasaki Ninja 250cc around on numerous occasions.

There is an inactive Stargate at one of the Lightrail stations.

Kayla and I have moved in together (finally) and have acquired an awesome couch off of craigslist for only $100.

My friend Kirk Geiger has graduated from ASU with a Business Degree in the W.P. Carey School of Business in the Finance program.

Kayla and I went to the first Phoenix Cloud Cult concert in a great venue called the Rhythm Room.

More to come possibly come controversial stuff.

Microblogging

Okay, So I do not blog much at all. I have been busy working full time this summer at the Mars Space Flight Faciligy. I am curently working on a data migration project to make their targetting software (JMARS) to load mosaics better.

Sitting at a linux desktop for most of the day I do have sometime to microblog on twitter.

At “Mars” I have been working with data ranging from old Viking orbiter data to more recent TES (Thermal Emission Spectrometer) data. Today I started to work on TES andesite and basalt global abundance maps.

Linux is amazing.

Stay in touch:

www.twitter.com/kalofxeno

Palm Pre Release

CNNMoney.com - ‎4 hours ago‎

By Dan Frommer Palm’s long-awaited Pre smartphone — the phone that could either turn Palm around or send it down the toilet — is scheduled to launch before the end of June.

This release date may be intentional to be around the usual date of Apple Inc.’s iPhone release. If this is so, then I say that Palm may not be ready for the tricks that Apple is going to have up its sleeves.

Reports of the next iPhone say that the new firmware can support multicore processing.

I guess we will see towards the end of June.

First Day off Since 2/8/09

Kayla and I have not had a day off since 2/08/09. This is because we had back to back field trips for field geology the past two weekends. The first field trip was changed because ASU’s budget cuts have greatly affects the Geology department. Each field trip we have had to provide out own transportation.

Two weeks ago we went to a place called Carl Hill to map tuff and scoria layereds that have been reworked by water. Accretionary lapilli presence was evidence for this conclusion. Sunday the class went to Telegraph Pass on South Mountain to map the contact between the Telegraph Pass Granite and the Estrella Gniess that trended NW-SE.

Last week the class went to the Salt River to map terraces. The mapping area was covered well by all. I am pretty sure that everyone had a good time using aerial photographs and Mylar for mapping. Terraces that were mapped included the Sawik, Mesa, Blue Point, and Lehi. The Blue Point had a gravel and silt layer that was also plotted on the Mylar. Sunday, Kayla, Brad, and I finished early and went “Jeeping” afterwards.

Yesterday, Kayla and I helped out at the Mars Educator Conference. Teachers from all over Arizona attended the event and acquired 7 hours of workshop training in doing so. Keynote speakers included Dr. Ariel Anbar, Dr. Phil Christensen, and Dr. Bill Hartmann. Kayla was awesome and did some filming of the event. I helped Paige Valderrama-Graff in her session about Mars Public Mapping Program a.k.a. (MP)^2. The 20 laptops from the Mars Education Program were acting up because the Airport Extreme (Opportunity) was not configured correctly. I was able to change the appropriate setting and get all laptops online.

Last night, Kayla and I went to Rula Bula to officially celebrate her 21st birthday. A good number of people showed up to eat, drink and have a good time. Afterward we went to her place and played Mario Party 8 on David’s brother’s Wii.

Today was the first day I slept in a long time and included watching Stargate SG-1, Fringe and going out to dinner. We were originally going to go to Abby and Oliver’s for dinner and set up Abby’s MacBook for Dual Boot. She wants a Windows XP environment to work in and run macros.

Arnett Creek Minicamp is coming up and Field I is practically done after that.