Rainn Wilson (yes, the actor) had a great tweet the other day.

(Tweets are the short little messages that you post on the service known as “Twitter”.)

His tweet:

People who don’t believe in evolution really shouldn’t be allowed to get flu shots.

It’s pretty simple, really. The flu virus in the shots didn’t formerly exist. Flu is continually mutating and EVOLVING. It changes from year to year, which is why we have to get flu shots every year.

Some viruses don’t mutate like flu does. Take polio; it’s been pretty much eradicated from the United States (and most of the world, for that matter) because people got their vaccinations against it and those lasted their whole lives.

But flu changes all the time. This year, there’s two different flu shots available; one is the typical “seasonal” flu shot, which actually covers the three viruses that we’re most likely to be exposed to; the other is of course the infamous “swine flu” virus vaccine.

So there you go. You might claim that you don’t believe in evolution, that you think God (or someone/something) created the earth and everything on it in 6 days or whatever, but the reality is that if you get a flu shot, you’re proving yourself to be a liar. Your faith in science is stronger than your religious faith!

Let me ask you a question. Say you’re a notable public figure, someone who’s reasonably famous and of interest to the news media.

You are asked by a sports-related magazine to pose for a photo. Specifically, it’s a running magazine, so you pose in a tight-fitting red top, shorts, nylons, and running shoes. You pose with your hands on your hips and a leg bent forward.

Later, a different magazine, this one a news-and-politics magazine, uses that photo- that you POSED FOR- on its cover.

Do you have a right to bitch about it?

If you’re Sarah Palin, you whine about it when Newsweek does it. Here’s her comment:

The choice of photo for the cover of this week’s Newsweek is unfortunate. When it comes to Sarah Palin, this “news” magazine has relished focusing on the irrelevant rather than the relevant. The Runner’s World magazine one-page profile for which this photo was taken was all about health and fitness – a subject to which I am devoted and which is critically important to this nation. The out-of-context Newsweek approach is sexist and oh-so-expected by now. If anyone can learn anything from it: it shows why you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, gender, or color of skin. The media will do anything to draw attention – even if out of context.

The “context” she’s talking about is two essays about Palin which discuss, among other things, the fact that Sarah Palin has and doesn’t hesitate to hide the fact that she’s attractive. From one of the essays:

Let’s admit that Sarah Palin is more attractive—some might even want to say more appealing—than much of her enraged core constituency. But then all we are considering is a point of packaging and marketing, where charm is supposed to make up for what education and experience have failed thus far to supply. We are further obliged to consider the question: exactly how charming is the Joan of Arc of the New Right, who also hears voices speaking to her of “spiritual warfare”?

She might be upset, but when she poses for a picture like this, for a nationally published magazine, I think she’s on pretty thin ice whining that it got turned around and used by a different nationally published magazine “out of context”. In fact, I think it’s pretty stupid.

But then, for all her tough talk, Sarah Palin doesn’t hesitate to play the victim card.

Personally, I think she’s terrific for Democrats. While she can whip up a fervor among her followers, the reality is that if she emerges as a serious candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2011, and manages to win that nomination, she’ll eventually be utterly slaughtered by her own ignorance (via the news media) and in any debates against President Obama (assuming he runs for re-election).

Okay, you pervs, here’s the picture in question:

I got myself a “netbook” the other day. For those who haven’t been paying attention, netbooks are basically small laptop computers; while there’s no “official” definition of a netbook (just as there’s not really an official definition of what’s a “laptop” vs a “notebook”) they’re generally thought of as having no optical (DVD/CD) drive, an 11 inch or smaller display, very lightweight, not a lot of memory in them, and running a considerably less powerful processor.

Many netbooks don’t even come with Windows installed, choosing instead to go with a Linux OS of one brand or another.

I bought an Asus EeePC 1005HA. It’s a great little machine, though a bit pricier than many in the netbook category (one of the big attractions of netbooks is that you can often buy one for as little as 200-250 bucks).

I chose this model primarily for one reason- it’s among the very tip-top leaders in battery life. I was down to this or the Toshiba NB205, which also has tremendous battery life. Both of these units are claimed (by their manufacturers) to be able to run “all day”, up to 10 hours.

Netbooks generally have wireless networking built in, and many also have Bluetooth; of course both of these things run your battery down faster and it’s pretty tough to get the full 10.5 hours of runtime that the makers claim, but for the 1005HA I’ve found that I have been able to run it for several hours (and I’m talking like 7+ hours easy) while doing web browsing, which uses more power through the wireless networking.

The 1005HA has a 10 inch screen. I almost went with the EeePC that has an 11 inch screen, but it runs a different processor and in the end I decided that the main thing I was buying it for was portability- hence get the smallest, lightest one I can live with. The 10 inch screen serves me just fine, though I think if I had crappier eyesight I might have wanted the 11 inch model. (I don’t wear glasses and still see reasonably well even after a few hours reading, so I’m lucky there.)

The other thing that the Asus model has that Toshiba doesn’t is as close to a regular keyboard as possible. I write a LOT and am a touch typist, so a good feel to the keyboard was very important to me. The Toshiba uses a “chiclet” keyboard that I was not crazy about, but the Asus has one that’s basically a normal keyboard, just one that’s about 90 or 95% of the size of a standard keyboard.

How do I like it? I love it. The main factor is the portability, and it’s incredibly small and lightweight- less than half the weight of my old laptop (which is almost 10 years old now) and thin, too. The power supply is small and lightweight, too, with the brick in the middle of the cord being smaller than most.

Unfortunately, this means the power supply takes longer to recharge the battery- I ran it down to almost dead and after being plugged in for 7+ hours while the computer was turned off, the battery still wasn’t fully recharged. This makes sense, though- it takes a long time to run the battery down, and the power supply runs at a relatively low 9 volts or so.

The screen is plenty bright and sharp. A higher resolution display would be nice (it’s 1024X600) but it’s plenty serviceable. It came with the standard 1 gig of memory and I’ve been okay with how it runs on that, although I’m waiting for a 2-gig memory stick to upgrade it (you can run them with 1 or 2 gigs of memory and 2 is said to significantly improve performance).

I waited to order mine until Windows 7 was out; netbooks are still shipping with Windows XP and pretty much have ignored Vista. I use a computer at work with Vista and while it’s okay, I prefer XP; there’s really nothing wrong with it and that’s what I run at home. (Why upgrade when there’s nothing in the new version you need?) The OS works fine on the netbook and despite the fact that it’s a slower CPU, it’s actually as fast or faster than my home machine on many tasks. (Which is more a sign that it’s time to upgrade my desktop, which is some years old now.)

Finding a good case for it was actually more trouble than I thought. I wanted something with a harder shell sides because the whole point of this little netbook is that it’s super-portable; I want to be able to throw it into a backpack and haul it onto airplanes in carryons, take it to work, whatever. I found a kind of cool hardshell cover for it that I really like on the Toshiba site when I was deciding on which computer to buy.

I later found the same case at Fry’s for the same price as Toshiba sells it for. It’s not a full hardshell, but it offers good-enough protection plus the way it’s built you can use it as a little desk for your netbook and depending on which way you turn it, it’ll slope the thing away or towards you, depending on what you need (if you’re sitting up in bed, or sitting on a couch, or whatever).

On top of that, the case is “checkpoint friendly“, which is a pretty big deal if you fly a lot. Checkpoint friendly cases are ones that are transparent to the X-ray machines, meaning you don’t have to haul the computer out completely; just pull out the little case and lay it on the tray to go through the machine. This one meets the definition of a “sleeve”, so it works just fine.

The Asus also ships with a pretty standard neoprene sleeve with a zipper on it. It’s okay for basic use and of course weighs next to nothing, which is pretty cool.

In addition to the case and the 2gig memory, I bought two other accessories. One is a fairly normal USB DVD drive; it can run over a single USB plug but runs better if you use both of its USB plugs at the same time. It uses both USB connections to get more power. No batteries or external cords; it runs strictly on power from the computer. I don’t plan on traveling with it frequently; if I want movies I’ll just save them to the hard drive on the netbook or to an SD memory card (the netbook has a built-in memory card reader for SD/MMC cards, which is really nice when it comes to transferring pictures from a digital camera that uses those cards).

But for ease of installing stuff onto the computer, or as a “just in case” type of thing, it’s nice to have the DVD drive.

The other accessory that I bought was a mouse. I came across a returned Microsoft notebook/portable mouse at Fry’s for 33 bucks, which was a pretty good deal (this particular model is usually more like 40 to 50 bucks).

Most of your “portable” laptop mice have a little plug that goes into a USB port, but this one is Bluetooth, so no additional plugs are needed. It connects up more or less instantly to the computer and works like a charm. I love it; it’s one of the best mice I’ve ever used. They say that the battery life is very long on these, which is good; it’s also small and lightweight and comes with its own little neoprene carrying case.

Only downside is that if I ever want to use it with something else, that something else has to be Bluetooth-enabled. Oh well.

All this stuff set me back around 500 bucks, which is a pretty amazing deal. I love the netbook; its performance is just fine and it’s so much smaller and lightweight that it saves me a lot of hassle. Taking it with on trips is the default, whereas before I would have to strongly consider how much I really wanted/needed to have a computer along.

I’m flying to Houston this coming weekend and so I’ll get a chance to really try it out on a plane for movies for the first time. If I think of it I’ll update on how it works out.