I Say!

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Looking into the sun (with glasses)

December 28, 2011 / / 0 Comments

I remember the first – and perhaps only – eclipse I ever saw.  It happened in August 1979, when I was on fifth grade.  I remember getting out of the classroom to look at the sun – despite warnings that we shouldn’t.  Somehow I managed not to blind myself (though I developed myopia not too long after that, hmmm….).  Since then I have been more responsible and have not looked directly into the sun – until yesterday, that is.  You see, Mike mentioned a few weeks ago that the kids and him had gone to some science event in which they had glasses they could use to safely look at the sun.  I looked them up and found out that they are super cheap (though only sold in bulk) so I decided to get him a set for Christmas.

The glasses are quite simple, they are made of paper with black polymer lenses which filter all of the harmful ultraviolet and infrared light, as well as practically all the ambient light.  Put them on and look anywhere but at the sun, and you’ll see pitch black.  Then sun, however, looks like a perfect orange circle.  When I looked yesterday I couldn’t see any sun spots, but now that we have the glasses I can look often until I see them 🙂

These glasses are going to be perfect for the annular solar eclipse that will take place on May 20th this year.  It won’t hit the Bay Area, but the 20th conveniently falls on a Sunday making a trip up north (Redding is near the center path for the eclipse) easy enough.  As if that wasn’t enough, on June 5th Venus will be transiting between the earth and the sun! It’ll be the last time that this happens while we are alive, so I’m sure it’ll be worth seeing it.

I got the glasses at the Rainbow Symphony Store.  They are usually 85-cents each, plus very reasonable shipping, with a minimum purchase of 25.  But if you don’t care what the frames say (which I didn’t), you can buy them for 40-cents each with a minimum purchase of 50.  With shipping, this came out to less than $25.  The store’s website is very simple – very 1990’s – but I liked the vibe of it, and the glasses came very quickly.

Some Patchy Catholic Censorship

December 2, 2011 / / 0 Comments

As my local friends from San Leandro (the town I live in) well know, I participate a lot in local politics and write and comment on my San Leandro blog and Facebook page about anything going on in this town.  I’m also a very active participant in the San Leandro Patch, an online hyper-local news portal owned by AOL (which wants to become a media company).   Here again, I comment about anything and everything.

One thing I commented about last night was a short frilly article on what some moms tell their kids about religion.  My comment(s) were left alone, but when a gay atheist man commented about his own experience raising a son and how he feels about the Church’s stands on gay marriage, his post was quickly deleted because the editor considered it an attack (won’t say how or on whom, however).  In any case, I am posting his comment here so that everyone can read it.

I am an atheist and I raised my son to find his own way with religion, he went to quite a number of local church youth-oriented faith events in his teens and I did not pressure him to believe or doub. He has become a wonderfully warm and caring kid, and we both have found our moral compass without any connection to the Judeo-Christian belief system. We are good people because that is the right thing to do, not because a book tells us to do it, or because we live in constant fear of an eternity in hellfire. As a gay man I find the ongoing religious demonization and intolerance toward LGBT families simply outrageous and so NOT what Jesus would do. The Catholic church leads the pack in this regard, Archbishop Dolan makes weekly statements about the horrors of allowing gay couples to get married, while at the same time his church seems to be maintaining the largest group of pedophiles the world has ever known. The hypocrisy that exists in the Catholic church is appalling, an organization that prides itself on ‘justice’ clearly does not mean if it you are a child or gay, and heaven help you if you are both. In closing I will paraphrase Caria: “At the end of the day what is most important to me is that my little boy grows up to be a man who is secure in his heart, his mind and his faith that we as humans should love one another.

Billy Bradford

And I’m posting this cartoon because it’s funny and oh so true 🙂

$40 for a link!

November 16, 2011 / / 0 Comments

I just got an offer from someone I suppose works for a search engine optimization (SEO) company offering to pay me $40 to advertise on one of my web pages.  I get these offers from time to time, but this time I decided to inquire a little bit further and find out exactly what they wanted from me.  It turned out that they wanted me to place 3 links on my Cantabrian cheesecake recipe page.  That, in itself, was pretty weird, as I can’t imagine that page gets many visitors, but what was weirder was the actual links they wanted me to include.  They were to websites for building birdhouses!  Two of the websites, moreover, where government websites (I guess park departments must encourage birdhouses).   Now, this puzzled me as I was sure that government websites would not be paying for links, specially from irrelevant pages like mine, so I decided to do a bit of investigation.  This is what I found out:

– Nobody knows exactly what Google’s algorithm for listing websites is, but one factor is how many other sites link to that one site.

– The “quality” of the site where the link is matters, Google gives more weight to websites that it deems “legitimate” (i.e. not created for the sole purpose of linking to other sites).

– The word it links from matters too.  In this case, the SEO seller asked me to add the words “cottage cheese” to my description of queso fresco and link to the one commercial birdhouse site from the word “cottage”.

– Google, however, does not assess the relevancy of the link to the subject matter of the page.  In other words, Google won’t notice/care that the link to a page on building birdhouses came from a recipe page.

– If Google catches you buying or selling links, it will penalize you by not having your website show up at all or in the first few pages of search results.

I still don’t quite understand how this person actually found my Cantabrian cheesecake page (what word could she have been searching for that would have led her to that page?).  In any case, I thought this was interesting to share.

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