DrGert Digresses

I saw a post about abortion recently, specifically relating to Planned Parenthood, and I decided to do some digging. Basic Info: The basic stats in the United States are staggering: 50% of pregnancies are unplanned [ 1 ] 40% of unplanned pregnancies result in abortion [ 1 ] which means: 20% of all pregnancies result in abortion  [ 1 ] In terms of absolute values - ~730,000 [ 2 ] or ~1 million [ 1 ]  abortions were performed in 2011 depending on the reporting source Nearly 30% of women in the US will have had an abortion by the time they are 45 [ 1 ] Tying in with Planned Parenthood for a moment - they provided around 330,000 abortion procedures in 2012 [ 3 ] and the 2011 figures I saw were similar. Looking at the numbers in Canada (where I live) it turns out that they are very similar to the United States; in 2011 there were 92,524 abortions performed [ 4 ] and around 380,000 births [ 5 ], so ~20% of pregnancies in Canada result in abortion ...

Update: As of January 4, 2015 this no longer works for me.  I updated and something broke.  Getting the error "[36741.873484] [ERROR]Cannot access secondary GPU - error: [XORG] (EE) NVIDIA(GPU-0): EVO Push buffer channel allocation failed".  Hopefully this is still helpful to some out there however. Well, I have some exciting news - after 2 years of messing around with trying to get my Optimus enabled videocard to work with an external monitor in Linux, I have finally found the right combination of blog posts to make it work. My setup: Lenovo W530 NVIDIA Quadro K1000M videocard Linux Mint 17 (which is based on Ubuntu 14.04 I believe) Credit: scyth and his or her blog post on from December 19, 2013 Lucas and his blog post from May 23, 2014 the commentors of the aforementioned blogs for changes and scripts Preliminaries: So, as scyth mentions one of the ways that you can get an external monitor setup to work with an Optimus card is to go into your b...

This last weekend I decided that I should do some baking and expand my kitchen horizons.  I thought a great idea would be to bake some banana bread, however due to an unexpected freezer issue, the bananas that had been patiently waiting for someone's tender loving touch thawed and turned into a giant mess. So, I decided that maybe I should start my baking career with something a little easier - non-banana bread! (although I have since been told that banana bread is probably easier to make). I used  this bread recipe  because it looked the most simple and some of the other ones I was looking at required a mixer, which I don't have at this point. Gather up all the ingredients (I am missing the salt in this picture): Put all the dry stuff in a bowl. Warm up the butter (margarine), water, and milk. Mix it all together (vigorously if you're like me and don't have a mixer :( ).  Then you let it rise! (the balsamic vinegar was sadly my rolling pin... ...

So as I'm sure everyone is aware, a week and a half ago was Christmas and I did all the great things that go along with that - too much food and drink, and lots of family time.  It was delightful. I spent about 10 days at my parents' place in Brockville before flying to Newfoundland (pictured with one of the first dumps of snow they received) on Christmas Eve. In Newfoundland we spent Christmas day with the girlfriend's family and had a very relaxing traditional Christmas dinner (turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, some veggies).  On Boxing Day we went to a family shindig for the evening and then went to the Boxing Day Time (located at the above pictured community centre).  We had some dancing, meeting new people, and a bunch of laughs and fun. That night was a little late and so the next day was spent recovering.  After the day of recovery we hit up the Geo Centre (pictured). The entrance to the Geo Centre contains a wonderful display of the planets! ...

I have been lax this week, so this is a two week update. I finished  Hatching Twitter   as an audio book.  It was very enjoyable.  It seemed that the author took some liberties with how the characters would be feeling during certain events, but he stated that he had access to all the tweets, many e-mails, and a chance to interview most of the "main players" in the story.  If you're at all interested in how Twitter came to be, I would recommend this book.  Next on my reading list are  In The Plex  (the story of Google) and  The Everything Store  (the story of Amazon). I took my car into the shop only to discover that I needed to get new brake pads, rotors, a new caliper, flex-pipe (exhaust?), front struts, and front wheel barrings.  It was time for my car to require some work I suppose as nothing major had been done in the last 6 odd years (and the car is close to 10 years old). I had the opportunity to go see  ...

I decided to make pasta sauce last night and thought, "Rather than just having noodles and sauce, I should make lasagna!".  Disclaimer: really I just wanted to play around with my camera and share the pictures.  I decided that I should edit the photos (cropping at the very least) which I did not do this time around.  Regardless, here we are! Step 1 - plug in the tree (thanks for the blinking lights and flaming angel Google Awesome). Step 2 - light a fire (which also included music!). Step 3 - get all the ingredients together (canned diced tomatoes, tomato sauce, mushrooms, onions, garlic, Parmigiano-reggiano cheese, Ricotta cheese,  mozzarella and cheddar cheese, ground beef).  Also, obviously, a delicious beer to help with the creative cooking juices doesn't hurt anything either. Step 4 - after you brown the meat and sauté the veggies, throw it all together with the tomato sauce and canned tomatoes and let that simmer for half an h...