Shooting 3D movies on Earth? So last year. Besides, when you’re an anti-human environmentalist zealot, why would you want to shoot video on Earth? It’s so…populated by people.

Not that the idea itself is not exceedingly awesome, mind you.

What do you do once you’ve broken your own record for the world’s highest-grossing picture film? Well, you go offworld, of course. James Cameron, in his infinite benevolence and multidimensional wisdom [Yeah, right! -- Ed.], has convinced NASA bigwigs not to forgo the inclusion of a high-res 3D camera on the Curiosity (aka Mars Science Laboratory) rover, which is set to depart for the red planet in 2011. Budget overruns had led to the scrapping of the autostereoscopic idea, but the director-man — who has been involved with this project for a good few years now — felt the results of the mission would be far more engaging if people could see them in 3D. Hey, if he can make us watch the Blue Man Group reenactment of Fern Gully, don’t bet on Cameron failing to make extraterrestrial rubble interesting with his 3D voodoo.

Admittedly, being able to take a 3D virtual tour of Mars would be the next best thing to sheer, blinding awesome. Of course, he’d probably try and use the footage in some future movie, which he could then claim was the first feature film actually shot on another effing planet (!!!)…which, actually, also sounds awesome.

It’s really just the associate with James Cameron that ruins this for me.

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Posted by: Saint Angilbert
Posted in: Celebrities - Movies - Space | Tags: 3D, Curiosity Rover, Earth, James Cameron, Mars, Mars Science Laboratory, NASA

Either today or tomorrow, everyone’s favourite Web Elf will be posting a new Free Canuckistan round-up post.

So keep checking back…at Binks’ website…is what I’m saying to you.

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Posted by: Saint Angilbert
Posted in: Freespeechery - The Interwebs | Tags: Free Canuckistan

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Posted by: Saint Angilbert
Posted in: Daily Cutie | Tags: cutie

We hear, constantly, about how the big, bad Church covered up the sexual abuse of minors. And to be fair, yes, there were bishops and priests within the Church who were not abusers themselves, but who aided and abetted abusers by covering up their actions and shuffling them off to other roles, other parishes.

Pope Benedict XVI, ever since he was — as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (or Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, if you prefer) — appointed to the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), has been working tirelessly to reform the Church’s approach to and handling of abuse cases, and has done wonders in this regard. The Church has surged ahead and become nothing less than a world leader in dealing with abusers within its ranks.

In contrast, American teachers continue in their own efforts to cover the asses of abusers in their midst:

The New York State School Boards Association and the State Association of Counties are opposing a measure that would temporarily lift the statute of limitations on child sexual abuse cases, allowing victims to seek legal redress up to 40 years after they turned 18. The bill, which originally focused on the Church, has been expanded to include other public institutions.

My question is: how many of the members of the New York State School Boards Association (or the State Association of Counties, for that matter), were perfectly in favour of this bill when it only applied to Catholic priests? Now, when it comes to rooting out the sexual predators in their own ranks (and there are far more abusive teachers than abusive priests), they are circling the wagons.

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Posted by: Saint Angilbert
Posted in: American News - American Politics - Catholicism - Crime and Punishment - Education - Sex | Tags: CDF, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Joseph Ratzinger, New York, New York State School Boards Association, Pope Benedict XVI, sexual abuse, State Association of Counties, statute of limitations, the Church

Hint: they won’t remain parishes:

A year after Sunday services stopped because no one was attending, ministers of the First United Church in the Downtown Eastside had to remove the pews and pulpit in the sanctuary — to make room for all the people.

The congregation is back, but the overflow crowds spilling out of the old, battered building at the corner of Gore and East Hastings Streets have been driven to the church by poverty, not a search for faith.

That growing demand has led the church to launch a major funding drive on Wednesday, with the goal of raising more than $31-million. The plan is to redevelop the church into a multi-service facility that will provide everything from health care to housing in the heart of one of Canada’s poorest neighbourhoods.

Okay, let’s face it: the United Church of Canada can hardly be called a Christian church anymore; it parted ways with Christian orthodoxy many years ago, and continued along that trend as the years progressed, even going so far as to name as its moderator a man who denied the resurrection of Christ. As far as liberal Christianity in Canada is concerned, you’d have to become a Unitarian to get any further away from mainline, rational, orthodox Christian faith.

And not surprisingly, the UCC‘s membership has been flagging in essentially direct proportion to its liberalness; this trend has also been observed in other denominations that have taken either hard or gradual leftward turns. In contrast, denominations which have adhered to more traditional/orthodox Christian teachings have seen their ranks continue to grow, sometimes by leaps and bounds.

Don’t get me wrong: I like the idea of re-purposing this church into a homeless shelter and clinic; that’s certainly better than turning what was once nominally a house of God into a bunch of trendy condos in which common-law couples can fornicate freely and open their Christmas presents on the solstice. But the larger point is, of course, that this is a fate that most liberal Christian parishes can expect to one day come to: abandonment by their congregations and re-purposing into something other than what they were built for and could have remained, but for the theological meanderings of their supposed shepherds.

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Posted by: Saint Angilbert
Posted in: Canadian News - Christianity | Tags: Canada, Christ, Christianity, faith, First United Church, God, homeless shelter, UCC, United Church of Canada, Vancouver

I tend to look on things like this with an air of…not skepticism, in the strictest sense, but practiced caution. Call it an innate Catholic hesitancy to believe too strongly in coded messages hidden in the text of the Bible, as many Protestants are wont to do. Still, this is getting some attention in the blogs today, and is worth remarking on (if only in passing):

Ghost of a Flea also provides this graphic:

Is there something there? Maybe. Certainly, Walid’s point (which Flea cites) about how everything which is considered holy in Christianity is considered blasphemous in Islam is worthy of consideration, and would certainly comport with the view that Islam is, in essence, a demonic perversion of faith. His follow-on point about how the things attributed to Satan in the Bible are attributed to Allah in the Koran is also worth some additional investigation, I think, if only to confirm or deny the claim.

And I will grant, based on the above, that there are certain similarities between the shape of the original text and the shape of the name of Allah (which is often worn by members of the Islamic faith, and then on e.g. headbands).

At the same time, the fact that we’re ultimately comparing the shape of Greek letters to a rotated and flipped version of the Arabic symbol puts me firmly in “take with grain of salt” mode; we’re definitely in “Bible codes” territory here. (That, and I don’t need anything quite so explicit as this to understand — or be convinced — that Islam is a perverted and possibly demonic simulacrum of faith.)

What does the good reader think?

(via)

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Posted by: Saint Angilbert
Posted in: Catholicism - Christianity - History - Islam | Tags: 666, Allah, Book of Revelation, Catholicism, Christianity, faith, Islam, Koran, Mark of the Beast, Protestantism, Satan, the Bible, Walid Shoebat

As in: nuclear fusion, the stuff that makes the Sun do what it does, and that makes thermonuclear bombs as powerful as they are.

Using lasers to trigger a fusion reaction has been done before, though perhaps not ever on this scale:

Here is the boiled-down recipe for how the Livermore lab plans to cook up a star:

Step one: Build the largest laser in the world, preferably inside a drab-looking office building. (To do this, you’ll have to suspend all previous notions about what a laser looks like. This one is basically a giant factory full of tubes. The laser beam, which is concentrated light, bounces back and forth over the distance of a mile, charging up as it goes.)

Step two: Split this humongous laser into 192 beams. Aim all of them — firing-range style — at a single point that’s about the size of a BB.

Step three: On that tiny target, apply a smidge of deuterium and tritium, two reactive isotopes of hydrogen that can be extracted from seawater. Surround those atoms with a gold capsule that’s smaller than a thimble.

Step four: Fire the laser!

If all goes well, the resulting reaction will be hotter than the center of the sun (more than 100 million degrees Celsius) and will exert more pressure than 100 billion atmospheres. This will smash the hydrogen isotopes together with so much force and heat that their nuclei will fuse, sending off energy and neutrons.

What the article doesn’t get into, and what will ultimately prove to be the key consideration if fusion power is ever going to become practical, is whether more power can be produced by the energy from the mini-star than is expended in firing the lasers to create it in the first place. I seem to recall that past experiments have tended to require more power than could potentially have been produced from the results, which is of course a losing game.

Still, you have to love the article’s opening statement: scientists will attempt to use the world’s largest laser to make a star bloom on the surface of the Earth. Yeah…that doesn’t sound dangerous or anything (it’s not, by the way).

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

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Posted by: Saint Angilbert
Posted in: British News - Research - Subatomic | Tags: deuterium, gold, hydrogen, laser, Livermore, nuclear fusion, tritium

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Posted by: Saint Angilbert
Posted in: Not Exactly Daily Game |