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As is the usual custom here at The Knight Shift blog, I am going to take the next few days off to celebrate Christmas. That’s not to say there won’t be blogging. If something obscenely crazy and dire comes up that demands writing about, I’ll get back behind the keyboard and do my best to report about it. And let’s not forget that there’s the annual Doctor Who Christmas special that I’ll no doubt be downloading, watching and then reviewing as soon as our Brittish brethren have it online 🙂

But for the most part, I’m taking a break. And this is one Christmas that it hasn’t been more needed.

The past few months have been one of the worst of my life. A lot of things have happened behind the scenes that I haven’t touched on here. In many ways this is already set to be a Christmas that ...

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Shades of Michael Crichton’s Timeline, or television’s Lost: archaeologists are stumped at the discovery of a Swiss watch within a Chinese tomb that was sealed more than four hundred years ago. While excavating the Ming-era tomb in southern China, researchers heard a metallic object hit the floor. When they picked it up they discovered, encrusted with the detritus of time, a tiny watch stopped at 10:06 and with the word “Swiss” engraved on the back.

Four hundred years ago there were no watches. And Switzerland didn’t even exist as the country as we know it today. The watch itself is thought to be around one hundred years old.

The archaeologists have stopped with the dig until experts from Beijing can arrive to help unravel the anachronistic riddle....

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Is there anything more pathetic than a person scrambling against time in a vain effort to ensure that history will be kind to him or her?

Perhaps only if that person happens to be a current President of the United States.

George W. Bush was at West Point yesterday, trying to spin his eight years in office as a blazing success. The most foolish man to ever occupy the Oval Office actually defended his policy of pre-emptive war (something that had never been done before in American history) and declared to the assembled cadets that “With all the actions we’ve taken these past eight years, we’ve laid a solid foundation on which future presidents and future military leaders can build.”

The Decider also boasted that the present condition of the United States military is “”stronger, more agile and better prepared” than how he found it when he first took ...

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People keep asking me what do I think of Barack Obama, now that he is going to be President come January 20th, 2009. Which I’ll admit a kind of devious joy in answering them since I didn’t vote for either Obama or John McCain (in keeping with my policy of never voting for anyone who runs a single negative ad, neither one of ’em deserved my vote). Whenever anyone’s asked me that in the past few weeks my answer has been the same: that I can’t see Obama being a good President at all… but as bad as he would have been on his own, he will be even worse because George W. Bush paved the way first.

It will be decades before we fully understand the damage that Bush has done to this country, and consequently to this world. Yet Bush is so self-deluded with grandeur that he seriously ...

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On a quiz covering fundamental American history, civics and economics conducted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, United States elected officials crashed and burned. Politicians averaged 44 percent, while average citizens scored better but not by much: 49 percent. The test was given to 2,500 Americans.

Want to try it yourself? Here it is.

How did I do? Not bad: my score was 90.91%. I missed three questions, but one of them I’m inclined to contest if that were possible and the other two, I have to wonder about also. Maybe that’s giving away too much already about which questions they are 😛

So… what does this test say about us as a country?

The Founders understood that the United States would only endure and thrive if her people were educated, vigilant, and actively seeking enlightenment. Hard to say that we’re doing any of that.

So does anyone ...

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It’s turning out to be quite a week for the science of genetics. First the DNA of the woolly mammoth has been mostly reconstructed.

And now comes word that the final resting place of Nicolas Copernicus has been positively identified.

Copernicus was the sixteenth-century astronomer who turned human understanding of the heavens upside-down (and would later on invite the wrath of religious officials especially after it was championed by Galileo Galilei) with his treatise “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies”. Copernicus contended that in spite of the unquestioned assumptions of Ptolemy fourteen hundred years earlier, the Earth was not at the center of the universe! That in fact the Earth and all the other planets revolved around the sun, which was just another star among countless others. The heliocentric theory was of course correct and for this, Copernicus is widely regarded as the father of modern astronomy. ...

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This is what happens when otherwise normal individuals don’t think for themselves with the minds that God gave them…

It was thirty years ago today – November 18th, 1978 – that the Jonestown Massacre occurred at the People’s Temple Agricultural Project near Kaituma, Guyana. Following an ambush at a nearby airstrip (which took the life of United States Representative Leo Ryan), People’s Temple founder and leader Jim Jones told his followers that their enemies were coming to destroy them and that the only option left to them that afforded any “dignity” was to commit “revolutionary suicide”.

Jones then ordered his faithful to drink cyanide-laced fruit drink. Many families used syringes to squirt the deadly poison into the mouths of infants, before they themselves ingested the fatal fluid. All told, 909 people – including Jones, who was later found with an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head – killed themselves ...

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A Greek scholar has conclusively proven that the classic “Dead Parrot” sketch made famous by Monty Python’s John Cleese and Michael Palin actually goes back sixteen hundred years.

Hierocles and Philagrius were the original comedy duo who came up with the concept. Except in their version it wasn’t a dead bird, but a deceased slave. One man complains to a friend that the slave he bought from him died not long after purchase. The friend replies “When he was with me, he never did any such thing!”

Also among the 265 jokes found in the Philogelos: The Laugh Addict collection are some poking fun at marriage. One of them goes: “A man tells a well-known wit: ‘I had your wife, without paying a penny’. The husband replies: ‘It’s my duty as a husband to couple with such a monstrosity. What made you do it?'”...

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After going to vote today I took a “scenic detour” back, going west on US 158 from Reidsville. When you get to the Monroeton community, turn right onto Monroeton Road (at the original Monroeton Elementary School buiding).

About one and a half miles on the right after that, you will find this stone wheel…

This stone marks the site west of Reidsville visited by George Washington during his tour of the southern states in 1791, when he was the first President of the United States. I’ve heard a lot of people say over the years that the stone even marks the spot where Washington and his colleagues camped while in the Monroeton area. The main draw during this leg of Washington’s tour was the nearby Troublesome Creek Iron Works, which was used during the Revolutionary War. And then in 1781 General Nathaniel Greene and his soldiers camped there after the ...

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Fifty years ago today Jack Kilby, an engineer at Texas Instruments, demonstrated what is today known as the first microchip. It wasn’t much to look at (click on the picture on the left): some circuitry etched in a germanium medium, sandwiched between glass. But Kilby’s little gimmick not only worked beautifully, it ended up revolutionizing the world. Everything from the computer on your desk to the television in your living room to the iPod in your pocket has a heart of silicon that is a lineal descendant of this odd blob of materials.

Click here for Custom PC’s story commemorating the occasion of the integrated circuit’s birth....

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