The US Military has a $660 million contract with the Michigan company Trijicon, which manufactures rifle sights destined for use in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As it turns out, the company has been surreptitiously placing references to Bible verses on their sights. So much for this not being a holy war.

From the company’s mission statement on their website.

“We believe that America is great when its people are good,” says the Web site. “This goodness has been based on Biblical standards throughout our history, and we will strive to follow those morals.”

John 8:12 "Prepare to eat lead, raghead."

Dear God. These people make me shudder.

“It allows the Mujahedeen, the Taliban, al Qaeda and the insurrectionists and jihadists to claim they’re being shot by Jesus rifles,” he said.

Weinstein, an attorney and former Air Force officer, said many members of his group who currently serve in the military have complained about the markings on the sights. He also claims they’ve told him that commanders have referred to weapons with the sights as “spiritually transformed firearm[s] of Jesus Christ.”

He said coded biblical inscriptions play into the hands of “those who are calling this a Crusade.”

That’s precisely how this looks to Muslims.

When imperial powers engage in this kind of religious warfare, things can get very nasty. The Sepoy Rebellion was instigated by the same kind of tactics in colonial India, when the British were accused of greasing their bullets with beef tallow and pig fat, which are ritually unclean to the native Hindus and Muslims respectively.

In order to load their rifles, the soldiers had to bite the cartridges. For Hindus, this meant they would lose their caste. For Muslims, it meant that if they were shot by such a ‘tainted’ bullet, they would die unclean and be excluded from paradise.

So they revolted. And much fun ensued.

(h/t Pharyngula)

For those out there that believe the Noah’s Ark story was a literal worldwide flood, you might want to check this out:

Unreasonable Faith recaps some of the points they make in the video:

1. Even if Noah took out all the “variations” and only stuck with “kinds,” that would still have been over 2 billion animals.

2. For a year in the ark, two elephants alone would require 365,000 lbs of food and 65,000 gal of water;
two giraffes would require 54,740 lbs of food
two lions would require 16,000 lbs of fresh meat.

3. If Noah took all baby animals, how would all the babies get there from around the world at the same time? Or how would all the animals have babies at the exact same time?

…

5. Not even most of the sea life could survive due to the changes in temperature, pressure, sunlight, filtration, salt.

The video makes the point that at an elevation of 29,055 feet, all the animals would freeze to death, or suffocate to death because the air is too thin.

I don’t think that’s right, because you’d displace the air upwards as well. 29,000 feet would be the new sea level, and the pressure would be the same as current sea level (or just a tiny bit less, since the air is occupying a larger volume).

But that’s just a nitpicky detail.

It’s also worth considering that the rainiest place on earth gets 39 feet of rain a year, or 1.28 inches a day. In order to cover Mount Everest in 40 days, it would have to rain 8,716.5 inches per day (726 feet). That’s so much rain that you’d drown standing in it. The sheer downward pressure of that much water would probably sink the boat.

Nothing could have survived (unless it was magic).

This Dvorak experiment^1,2 has been going really well. I am actually approaching the speed at which I used to type using QWERTY, which was give or take 50 wpm. Not that impressive, I know.

I suspect my actual typing rate may be over 60 WPM, but there are a bunch of weird handicaps they impose on you at typingtest.com, which, in the interest of consistency, is the testing site
I always use. For example, once you hit space after a word, its spelling is recorded and cannot be modified. So, if you make a mistake, you aren’t allowed to go back and fix it. Also, the text they want you to type is above the entry field, which is kind of a pain. In practice, if you are transcribing something, it’s always next to your screen, so that’s not really accurate.

Anyway, below I have included a graph of my progress over the past couple months. As you can see, it’s pretty steady. I am hoping I will keep increasing at this rate until I reach about 70 WPM, and then I can boast that my typing is actually a skill. Not that I would ever want a job as a typist or transcriptionist, but it would be good for a writer or copyeditor.

I have been at this Dvorak thing for a couple of weeks now, and I have been making considerable progress. This weekend alone, I have improved my typing speed by 10 words per minute.

I admit that if I hadn’t converted my home keyboard and reconfigured my one at work, I probably would have already given up. It really takes forcing yourself to do it to make any progress. Instant messaging has become a near impossibility, and the same for typing blogs — hence the lack of new entries over the last week.

Anyway, I have found some interesting resources along the way. There is a typing game that really forces you to speed up, as well as one based on asteroid, and there are some awesome typing tests here. Probably the best online resource for Dvorak beginners is a set of lessons I found, which are specifically designed to teach Dvorak.

One of the most interesting things I have found is that the dubious claim that Dvorak allows you to type the most common words of English faster may actually be true. There is a typing test that comprises only the most frequently occurring words, and while my overall typing speed is now around 30 wpm on other typing tests, it is over 40 for this one.

Once I have been doing this for a while, I plan to post a graph of my improvement through time.

Oh, man. I have been trying to learn a new keyboard layout called the Dvorak layout, and it has been really difficult. It has taken me like ten minutes to write the last two sentences, no joke. Anyway, here is what it looks like:

I even went as far as popping all of the keys off of my macbook and rearranging them to match. The advantages will supposedly eventually be decreased risk of carpal tunnel and increased typing speed, because, unlike QWERTY, the most commonly used letters of English are on the home row, which already allows you to type 70% of English words.

It has been difficult, but I can already feel it getting faster. We’ll see.

I finally got to a place where I am reasonably satisfied with the way the blog is working. I am still kind of pissed that it has to open in a new window, but I am currently unable to edit the PHP to make there be a link back to ‘home’ at the top of the blog; it only goes back to the blog home.

I did a pretty shitty job with the images for the blog site, as I am sure you can tell, when compared with the ones on the main site. There was basically no way I was going to be able to mess with the formatting in the PHP, so I just straight up edited the images they had in the template! Kind of a half-assed way to do it, but whatever.

I am going to start putting some content on the main pages themselves, maybe sometime in the near future.