Andrew Busey: My Musings

CNN article:  Scientists find most Earth-like planet yet

This is a huge deal.  Given how big the universe is and how little of it that we can actually see and we’ve already found an Earth-like planet.  We’re rapidly advancing the things we can see using more powerful telescopes and various other technologies and we’re seeing a lot more of the things around us in space.  This is a big deal.  I think there is a reasonable chance we see some strong indication of life on another planet in this century.  We might not get proof, but I think we’ll get close. 

This will change peoples perceptions of reality.  Right now, the idea of extra-terristerial life is so alien (excuse the pun) to most people that they don’t really consider it a real possibility.  I think even among the scientific community there is a high degree of skepticism.  I’ll admit to being skeptical, but I think given the size of our universe that it’s crazy to think that life has not developer elsewhere.  Discoveries will start to make the case for extra-terrestrial life very strong.  I never expected things to move this fast.  Finding an Earth-like habitable planet within out visual range is shocking and amazing.  Again taking the vastness of our universe and the little swath we can see and then finding this planet is, well, wow. 

I feel like I’m rambling now, so I’m going to stop…. but wow this is an amazing discovery.  The ramifications…

UPDATE:  Here is another cool article from Time - Life on the New Planet?

Well I went back to the site, went to watch The Unit again and it offered to play from the beginning or resume.  I resumed.  It seemed to work.  Then right at the exciting conclusion - when the shooting starts - it plays a FREAKING PROMO REEL for THE SAME EPISODE I am trying to watch.  

PLEASE SOMEONE AT INNERTUBE - FIX THIS CRAP!

I don’t watch much TV, maybe 4-5 different series.  Two of them, The Unit and Criminal Minds are on CBS.  In the last two weeks my CRAPPY POS Scientific Atlanta DVR has failed to record the last 10-20 minutes of the most recent The Unit and the last two Criminal Minds.  I suspect this is because it didn’t have enough space and it was two stupid to make space by deleting old crap.  So I went to the web in hopes of finding these episodes (legally).

Neither are available on iTunes, which if you’ve been reading I have recently been testing with AppleTV.  That would have been cool.  Becuase then I could have watched them.

So while Criminal Minds is strangely unavailable, CBS does offer the most recent episode of The Unit online through their video service, called Innertube.

I’ve now watched the “full episode” of last nights The Unit twice.  Except that the ENDING IS NOT FREAKING THERE.  WTF!  I mean making me watch it twice - well the commercial at least, you can fast foward through segments of the show, but not the commercials - is really annoying.  But how can they not have the ending?  If it is intentional it is the must consumer unfriendly, crappy thing ever.  I mean its not like I have some other way to see what happened.  If it is unintentional, which I hope is the case, someone is really idiotic.  FIX IT!  These guys wonder why YouTube is killing them.

This is not making me a fan of innertube or CBS.  Not that they care, but gah. 

I wrote a while back about wondering what defines success in blogging (post).   So I started getting a few spam posts.   Then I got more.   I assume this meant I was getting indexed somewhere, perhaps pretty favorably.  And then the spam just started getting out of hand.  I installed Akismet. 

Today I see:

Akismet has protected you from 918 spam comments.

918!  In a month or so.  (Can’t remember when exactly I installed it, so much for scientific tracking.)   Wow!  That’s crazy.  I guess that’s a partial indicator of success.

I recommend getting Akismet if you are you using Wordpress.

This is cool:

 Water Found in Extrasolar Planet’s Atmosphere

I think it’s pretty cool that we’re looking for this stuff and finding it.  It’s going to be interesting to see how people freak out when they find something else alive.

Wow, this is the kind of stuff that scares the crap out of me:

Schumer calls for subprime bailout (New York Democrat wants funds to help subprime borrowers.)

What we should be doing:

• Borrowers:  If someone took one of these loans and they can’t pay, there should be a foreclosure.  However, I’m all for allowing them some kind of class action against the shaded mortgage brokers and banks who gave them the loans.  But really it should just make them whole and it shouldn’t come from other tax payers.   The mechanisms for this already exist and I am sure there is no shortage of shady class action lawyers looking to jump on this bandwagon.
• Lenders:  The government should crack down on these clowns. 

There are two principles near and dear to me at play:

• Responsibility:  If people are too stupid to read their loans or do some simple calculations they probably shouldn’t be buying a house.  This country already lets people abdicate personal responsibility way too much.  Buying a house is a big responsibility, people shouldn’t be rewarded for being stupid in the way they do it.  It’s not fair to all the people who were.  The problem is politician’s love to position themselves as “helping the little guy” when in fact they are just letting people shirk responsibility for being stupid.
• Wasting Money:  Anytime my tax dollars go to fix someone elses mistake IT PISSES ME OFF.  What a waste, I don’t pay taxes to fix other people’s mistakes - I pay them for infrastructure, security, and advancement (ie: science, research, etc.).   Of course our government pisses away a lot of money on stupid stuff.  But this is really stupid.  Let the system sort it out.

Schumer and everyone else behind this:  Stop grandstanding and shut the fuck up unless you are going to actually do something reasonable to fix it.

/rant

Well I got my AppleTV.  Hooked it up, synched up, and turned it on.  I would say its interesting, but probably not ready for primetime.   If you just want to listen to iTunes stuff on your home theater… and maybe put pictures on your flatscreen, it’s probably good for that.

It would be much cooler if you could buy TV shows right from the couch, but you can’t.  You have to buy them on iTunes, wait for them to download (not much Apple can do about that I suppose), and then watch them. 

So I bought the pilot of a new show called Supernatural.  It had good reviews on iTunes and seemed interesting.  It took a while to download, it was 464mb, but I watched it eventually.  It seemed to be the right aspect ratio, but not HD.  So it was a little dark, but not too bad.  All-in-all a reasonable experience.

But not really a wow experience.  It wasn’t so cool that I’ve downloaded 10 more shows.  I did try to buy 1 or 2 other shows because my crappy Scientific Atlanta DVR (PIECE OF SHIT) decided to only recorded 53 minutes of several shows rather than the whole show.  I still can’t get over how bad that thing is.

Anyway, my recommendation on the AppleTV is to wait until version 2.

Unless you have an addiction to shiny new technology gadgets… but in that case you probably already bought one.