Monthly Archives: April 2007

“But It’s Still Just an X!”

Posted on April 27, 2007 by arensb

I realize that “DaveScot says something incredibly boneheaded” is about as newsworthy as “dog bites man”, “Pope is Catholic”, and “Hollywood remake not as good as original”, but this time I couldn’t resist. Every time someone tries to demonstrate evolution … Continue reading →

Posted in Creationism, FFS | 2 Comments

Civil Unions in New Hampshire

Posted on April 26, 2007 by arensb

The Washington Post is reporting that New Hampshire is about to institute civil unions for gay couples. No word on how these civil unions differ from marriage, but there were some interesting bits in the article: Advocates of gay rights … Continue reading →

Posted in News | 1 Comment

Getting Information from Creationists Is Like Pulling Teeth

Posted on April 22, 2007 by arensb

Some of you may remember threads on time.com and Pharyngula where Egnor challenged “Darwinists” to say “how much new information can Darwinian mechanisms generate?” For completeness, you should read those threads, but the summary is that when people tried to … Continue reading →

Posted in Intelligent Design | 61 Comments

Friday Stochastic Fifteen

Posted on April 20, 2007 by arensb

You know the “Friday Random Ten” game: put your MP3 player on random shuffle, and list the first ten songs that come up. Good, wholesome fun. Unfortunately, I have an awful lot of crap in my collection. Well, maybe not … Continue reading →

Posted in :-) | Leave a comment

Hovind on Hold

Posted on April 20, 2007 by arensb

The Pensacola News Journal reports: An appeal by Pensacola creationist Kent Hovind and his wife, Jo Hovind, seeking acquittal on tax-fraud charges was denied. U.S. District Judge Casey Rodgers upheld the Hovinds’ November 2006 conviction on 44 counts of bank-structuring … Continue reading →

Posted in Creationism, News | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Making Emacs Do Stuff at Startup

Posted on April 19, 2007 by arensb

Like many Emacs users, I start an emacs session in .xinitrc and use it throughout the day. Since I’ve recently started using Emacs Planner, I wanted it to start up automatically in that first Emacs session (but not subsequent ones, … Continue reading →

Posted in Hacking, Things I've Learned | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Soft Coding

Posted on April 14, 2007 by arensb

Over at Worse Than Failure, Alex Papadimoulis has an article on soft coding. Hardcoding is when something is written in the code when it ought to be in a header constant or an external config file. Soft coding is the … Continue reading →

Posted in Hacking | 1 Comment

Captchas of the Future

Posted on April 14, 2007 by arensb

Captchas are good at weeding out spam, because they rely on tasks that humans do well and computers don’t, and because spammers use bots. But as spammers get more sophisticated, their tools will get better and better at reading letters … Continue reading →

Posted in :-) | Tagged | Leave a comment

What’s A News Octet?

Posted on April 14, 2007 by arensb

One of my peeves is the phrase “news byte”. A “news bite”, I can understand: it’s a bite-sized, i.e., small piece of news; something that fits on a napkin. But a “news byte”? What is that? A news item that … Continue reading →

Posted in Miscellaneous | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

How to Move an Entire Gas Giant Planet

Posted on April 13, 2007 by arensb

One of the advantages of working in academia is that there are often lectures on interesting topics. (Those of my friends who went drinking last night before heading out to the VNV Nation concert last night may not share my … Continue reading →

Posted in Science | Leave a comment