Epsilon Clue

The story so far:
Back in 1996, when Intelligent Design was in its infancy (and pretty
much indistinguishable from today’s Intelligent Design), Michael Behe
defined an irreducibly complex system as:
composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that
contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of
the parts causes the system to effectively cease
functioning.
Recently, the Disco Tute
presented the [...]

.figure {
display: block;
text-align: center;
}
.caption {
font-style: italic;
}

Just something I discovered recently while using Audacity to clean up some old vinyl recordings:
The Click Removal tool does a darn good job of cleaning up most scratches, but not all. IME it’s still necessary to go back after it to fix what it missed (I find that the Repair tool works well [...]

I can only assume that BillDo took heed of my strategy paper on the War on Christmas™, because here’s what he’s moaning about now:
“The latest gambit by the anti-Christmas Czars is to flood public parks with a vast array of cultural symbols. For example, at the Fort Collins Museum in Colorado, in addition to a [...]

Summer solstice for our friends south of the equator, but up north, it’s the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. This celestial event occurs every year at the peak of the holiday shopping frenzy, as millions of people step out of malls and pronounce the traditional phrase, “Holy crap! The sun’s down already? [...]

You may have heard of the tragedy of Jesse Kilgore, the college
sophomore who commited suicide after, as
WingNut Daily reported,
reading The God Delusion and having a crisis of faith.
Now, just when you thought the Disco Tute couldn’t sink any lower,
they’ve produced a
melodramatic episode
of their Intelligent Design the Future podcast about this
(the “melo” part is literal: the [...]

Anyone who’s watched Frank Capra’s
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
knows what a filibuster is: the Senate has no time limit on debate, so
a senator can just talk and talk and talk for hours, thus preventing
the Senate from taking a vote. This can be stopped if 60 senators vote
to halt debate (a cloture vote), allowing Senate business [...]

Greta Christina
makes a great point:
if conservatives want to argue that gay marriage goes against the
principles that America was founded on, remind them of that founding
principle explicitly spelled out in the declaration of independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights, that [...]

Character encoding schemes (UTF-8, ASCII, ISO-8859-1/-15,
Windows-1252, etc.) are an incredible source of headaches. Stay away
from them.
(Oh, and if you tell me I mean “raw character encoding” or “codepoint
set” some such, I’ll whack you upside the head with a thick Unicode
reference.)
In case you hadn’t noticed, I upgraded WordPress not too long ago.
Being the cautious sort, I [...]

We’ve all heard the expression “There are no atheists in foxholes”. As
I understand it, it means something like:
It’s easy to be self-reliant when everything’s going well.
But when times are tough, when the situation is desperate, you will
find that you’re not able to fix everything by yourself, and will need
to turn to someone else for help. [...]

Dear Fox News pundits and assorted wingnuts,
I assume that this year, as has become tradition, you will once again be talking up the War On Christmas™. Since I am a liberal godless atheist who supports both separation of church and state and the ACLU, presumably this makes us enemies in this war.
So I thought I’d [...]