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 by pointing to one of the numerous instances when new species have arisen through evolution, e.g., […]
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 say the latest milestone is especially significant because it comes in comparatively conservative New Hampshire, where polls have shown […]
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 answer his question, e.g., by showing that point mutations increase the Shannon information of the genome, or pointing at the literature for gene duplication, […]
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 crap per se, but stuff that I only feel like listening to once in a blue moon. So here’s an […]
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 — the withdrawal of bank funds under the $10,000 threshold that triggers bank reports to the Internal […]
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, if I just want to edit a file).
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 opposite, when something is put in a config file that really ought to be in […]
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 and numbers, so we’ll need to use new types of problems to keep them out: Max was […]
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 can only take on one of 256 values and fits into a C char? The same goes for […]
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 assessment, though.) Yesterday, I went to a talk by Doug Hamilton about the axial tilt […]
