Godwin's Law - Are you a Nazi?

I'm not sure how true it is, but it sure was funny...

I happened across a reference to Godwin's Law today. I must admit, I've never seen this happen before, but it is very funny nonetheless!

Here's a quote from Wikipedia explaining what Godwin's Law is:

"Godwin’s law is often cited in online discussions as a caution against the use of inflammatory rhetoric or exaggerated comparisons, especially fallacious arguments of the reductio ad Hitlerum form.

The rule does not make any statement as to whether any particular reference or comparison to Hitler or the Nazis might be appropriate, but only asserts that one arising is increasingly probable. It is precisely because such a comparison or reference may sometimes be appropriate, Godwin has argued that overuse of Nazi and Hitler comparisons should be avoided, because it robs the valid comparisons of their impact. Although in one of its early forms Godwin’s law referred specifically to Usenet newsgroup discussions, the law is now applied to any threaded online discussion: electronic mailing lists, message boards, chat rooms, and more recently blog comment threads and wiki talk pages."

I've been involved in a lot of very long discussions in a large variety of topics. Some of them have gotten very heated, to be sure! None, however, have ever made reference to Hitler. At least none that I can recall. :)

FireFox 3 (beta) fixed the FF2 massive memory leak problem!

I recently switched from FireFox 2 to Opera because FF was eating up 800MB+ of my 1GB of RAM. It would eat more and more memory as I browsed, and finally eat up so much that it slowed my system until it crashed or I killed the process.

Opera is great, but unfortunately its handling of JavaScript is less robust than FF and IE, so I had problems using my Yahoo! Mail and GMail accounts. They worked with Opera, just not very well.

So when I heard that the FireFox 3 beta was available, I jumped on the chance to give it a go and see if they'd fixed that massive memory problem that FF2 was having.

I've been testing it all day long, and watching the process to see how much memory it's eating up. I'm very, very glad to say that as I close down pages and instances of the browser, the memory usage actually decreases (it never would in FF2--it only increased).

So I've switched back to FireFox. I really love its built-in spell-checker for text area boxes. Makes posting to my blog a lot easier. :)

I've read about some bugs and kinks in FireFox 3, but so far I haven't run into any issues with it on my system. I'm back to being in love with FireFox. Thanks Mozilla!

Ghostbusters 3 is coming.

I was one of the Ghostbusters fans who thought Ghostbusters 2 was a great movie. I know I'm not in the majority, but that's that. Now number 3 is set to come out, but not as a movie, as a video game.

Dan Aykroyd always wanted to a third one done, and now he sorta gets his wish.

According to JoBlo, Sony and Vivendi have secured the major players from the original cast - Murray, Akyroyd, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson - to provide their likenesses and voices for use on the new game, set for release late next year. I don't know if Sigourney Weaver or Rick Moranis are involved, but I sure hope so.

The game is going to be released for the PS3 and Xbox, and maybe more platforms as well.

Below are a few screen shots of the new game:

Crayon Physics has got to be the coolest game on the planet.

This new game really makes you think, requiring you to "draw" the solutions to each level of the game.

Watch the video below and it will all make perfect sense. In Crayon Physics, the person playing the game has to draw objects that will solve the puzzle presented to them, moving the ball toward the goal (the star).



The interface looks like something you would hang on the refrigerator that your preschooler drew, but being a programmer I can promise you that the level of complexity underneath is astounding. To have a piece of software "understand" how the object you've drawn would behave in the real world is simply mind boggling in its programmatic difficulty.

My hat's off to the creators of this ingenious game. Maybe I'm a nerd for thinking it's so cool, but I really think it's so cool!

Expert warns of great danger from Peruvian volcano

The tall mountain called El Misti, overlooking Peru's second-largest city, Arequipa, could soon pop its lid in a major, dangerous eruption.

If and when it goes, Jean-Claude Thouret said, El Misti could be extremely hazardous, posing as much danger for the 750,000 residents of Arequipa as Italy's Mount Vesuvius holds for the people of Naples. El Misti, just 11 miles from Arequipa's center, has emitted ash falls every 500 to 1,500 years, and even worse events have occurred every 2,000 to 4,000 years.

Thouret bases his warning for Peruvians on the 19,000-foot-tall volcano's eruptive history. According to the Geological Society of America, studies have shown that El Misti produces ``alternative explosive events'' that lead to ``pyroclastic flows, surges, tephra (airborne ash) falls.'' The last such ``event'' occurred about 600 years ago.

Despite years of work and the rather obvious hazards, it is still not possible either to predict exactly when an eruption will come from El Misti or how large it might be. But by studying the layers of rocks, ash and pumice in and around the tall cone, geologists can discern the mountain's behavioral patterns through thousands of years.

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Troy Smith on the rampage! (Browns Football)

The chips are already in the Browns' favor for this Sunday's game against the Baltimore Ravens.

Backup Kyle Boller has been named the team's starting quarterback due to another injury to starter (and the ineffective) Steve McNair. Boller had had some success against the Browns in the past, but any time that has occurred, it has been in relief of McNair or another quarterback. When he has started versus the Browns, he has resembled what the Ravens offense is this year: awful. What happens if Boller doesn't last the entire game? What if he suffers an injury and is forced to leave the game?

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Sleep better. Live Better.

That's the moto of the folks at sleepbetter.org. Their new Zzzz score is designed to help you know what sleep-related products will work for you.

I'll be honest: I don't sleep well. My allergies often keep me tossing and turning at night. Sometimes I can't sleep at all, even though I'm very tired. Often it takes sheer exhaustion to finally knock me out for a few hours of restless sleep.

The folks at SleepBetter are targeting people like me. Apparently I am not in the minority. 1 in 6 Americans (14.71% or 40 million people) have some kind of classifiable sleep disorder.

So SleepBetter has developed what they call the "Zzzz score". You take a short quiz (it's 6 multiple-choice questions), and it "ranks" you. I scored 17, and was presented with a selection of pillow that experts say should help me sleep better.

Something tells me that just changing my pillow isn't going to solve my problems, but hey, it's a start, right?