LinkedIn Hacked?

So says the LA Times...

LinkedIn and Goodreads are my favorite social media hangouts.  I have no time for Facebook, having been Zucked one too many times, and Google's offerings are many and confusing.  I should play with Twitter, but I haven't gotten around to it.  Anyway, a member of my team sent me the breaking news that a Russian hacking site has allegedly posted 6.5 million LinkedIn passwords.  Apparently they're hashed, but that is not the same thing as unbreakable.  I'm not usually an alarmist about such things, but inasmuch I'm unfamiliar with LinkedIn's ability to restore my account if someone should mess it up, I took 30 seconds to change my password, which I was behind on anyway.

Stuff Your Eyes With Wonder

"Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories."

Ray Bradbury, the author of one of my favorite books of all time, Fahrenheit 451, passed away today at the ripe, old age of 91.  He's being remembered eloquently in thousands of papers, zines, websites, and blogs today, but I would be remiss not to comment on his passing.  Reading Fahrenheit 451 was a formative experience for me.  Francois Truffaut's grim movie adaptation was uncanny and wondrous as well.  Yes, Bradbury wrote many other novels and hundreds of short stories, but his apt realization of a dystopian future which resembles our current reality all too well was his greatest gift to me.  Thank you, sir, well done!

A Twice In A Lifetime Opportunity

But this is your second of the two chances...

Transits of Venus occur when Venus passes between the Earth and the Sun.  Because the Earth and Venus travel around the sun at different rates and orbit in slightly different planes they are not that common, on a human scale.  Transits of Venus are observed in pairs on a repeating pattern; 121 years, eight years between pairs, then 105 years until the next pair.  The most recent transit occurred in 2004.  Before that the last transit was in 1882.  The next will be in 2117, almost certainly too late for anyone reading this in 2012.

All my favorite blogs are chatting it up and showing you how to make your own viewer, or where to watch it on-line. 

I have a pinhole viewer set up.  It's a little more sophisticated than the two sheets of cardboard we used for the partial solar eclipse of the sun a couple weeks ago.  Don't know if I have sufficient resolution to make out the small black disk of Venus moving across the face of the Sun, but we'll give her a go.

WARNING: Do not look at the sun directly, let alone through a binocular or telescope, without appropriate filters!

Update: No joy.  We could not make out the disk against the sun, despite playing with the length of our viewer.  Caught the live feeds a couple times throughout the evening.  Oh well, maybe next time...

Dragon in the Drink

The end of a perfect mission...

The SpaceX Dragon ended its picture perfect supply mission to the ISS when it splashed down in the Pacific Ocean approximately 560 miles southwest of Los Angeles at 8:42 a.m. Pacific Time, Thursday 31 May 2012.  I don't quite know how to embed video but here's link to the YouTube video of the Dragon's descent by parachute, three big orange and white ones, very much like the ones Apollo used back in the good old days.

Well done, SpaceX!

Photo credit: Michael Altenhofen

They Shall Take Up Serpents

Yet another Pentecostal snake handler learns his lesson the hard way...

Mark Randal "Mack" Wolford, Pentecostal pastor of the Apostolic House of the Lord Jesus in Matoaka, West Virginia, died after being bit by his timber rattlesnake at a religious service last Sunday afternoon.  Wolford spent eight hours on the sofa in the living room of his mother-in-law's trailer home praying to be healed.  Eventually paramedics were called and Wolford was taken to hospital where he was pronounced dead.

Shuffling off the mortal coil in this gratuitous fashion is not unusual in his family.  When Mark Wolford was a teenager he watched his own father die exactly the same way.

Christians who demonstrate their faith by handling venomous snakes and drinking strychnine draw their Biblical guidance from the Gospel of Mark, specifically Chapter 16 Verses 17-18:

"17 And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; 

18 They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover."

What never fails to amaze me is that these Biblical literalists choose to ignore the fact that the author of the Gospel of Mark originally closed the story at the end of Chapter 16 Verse 8.

"8 And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid."

The longer ending, Verses 9-20, was amended to the text by some unknown copyist at a later date.  Portions of the revision are quoted by patristic writers in the late 2^nd century and the entire interpolation is seen in some 4^th century texts.  While modern Biblical scholarship is pretty clear on the idea that the Gospels were not penned by the men for whom they were named, all the snake-handling, poison-drinking, devil-casting faithful have been following the advice of some even more anonymous scribe who was not even present when the original document,  the only one according to Christian doctrine which was inspired and inerrant, was written.

UPDATE: cgosling, a commenter at the WEIT blog, succinctly summarizes the pointlessness of this practice: 

"If he is not bitten it is God’s will; if he is bitten it is God’s will; if he survives the bite it is God’s will, if he does not survive the bite it is God’s will."

Perhaps a person has to be a member of Pentecostal Christian snake-wrangling, strychnine-swilling cult for that to make sense...

Photo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crotalus_horridus