EDGE Boston gives us the setup:
[Richard] Curtis, elected to the [Washington] state House three years ago, voted in the spring against a measure to provide domestic partnerships to gays and lesbians.
In 2006, Curtis came out against an anti-discrimination bill to protect GLBT people from being discriminated against on the basis of their sexuality.
I’m sure you can guess the punchline. Check your answer below the fold. Read More
I didn’t notice it at the time, but last week was ooblick.com’s tenth anniversary. Woot!
If you have time to waste, you can browse the Wayback Machine’s archive of crap I used to have.
If you enjoy solving crossword puzzles, you may have found yourself in the same position as I did the other day:
“Thug” is “GOON”, obviously: the O’s fit “OIL” and “NOTONYOURLIFE”. As for the G, well, I know nothing about ballet, so for all I know there’s someone named Twyla T. Garp out there.
I didn’t know what “With feet all askew” could be, but worked on filling in the words that intersected it, until eventually it became obvious that “_IGEONTOEN” couldn’t be right. The problem lay either in “GOON” or in “_IGEONTOEN”, but both were connected to other words: fixing one might unravel a whole section of a puzzle that seemed to fit together quite well. I wasn’t sure about “Zubin of music” → “MEHTA”, but other than that, my answers seemed pretty solid.
Eventually, of course, I figured out that “With feet all askew” was “PIGEONTOED”, and “Thug” was “HOOD” (though the name Twyla Tharp still doesn’t ring any bells).
And this strikes me as a good metaphor for how we understand the world.
I got to play with a Sony PRS-505 digital reader at a bookstore today. Basically, it’s an electronic device about the size of a slim paperback, with a big screen on which to read electronic books. According to the signs, it allows you to read plain text (it found a README file on the SD card I stuck in it), PDF files, and whatever proprietary DRM-hobbled format Sony’s pushing this year.
I think I could stick it in my back pocket like a paperback, but at $300, I wouldn’t want to accidentally sit on it.
The most impressive thing about it, in my opinion, is the screen. It was hard to judge with uniform neon lights, but as far as I could tell, the screen was reflective, like paper; not light-emitting, like cell phone and PDA screens. If you’ve ever struggled to read a PDA screen in bright sunlight, and like reading at the beach, you’ll appreciate the difference. The screen is also nice and crisp, with good resolution. It’s not quite like reading a book, but it’s up beyond 8-pin-printer and into cheap-ass laser printer quality. In fact, for a moment I was fooled into thinking that instead of a working model, they’d displayed a mock-up with a printed sheet of paper to show what the display would look like.
The device doesn’t have a touch screen, but there’s a row of ten buttons down the side to allow you to quickly select one of ten menu items. There are also buttons in different locations that allow you to turn pages, depending on how you want to hold the book.
Either the controls or the display seemed sluggish, though. This may be a limitation of the technology used for the display.
All in all, it seems a reasonable device that I could see myself using to actually read books. Even if I don’t want to shell out for proprietary-format books, Project Gutenberg still has a ton of good stuff, and there are lots of things on the web that are easily convertible to PDF. To say nothing of possibilities like uploading RSS feeds and whatnot.
Stepping back for a moment, though, this device (and others like it) seems to suffer from the same problem as MP3s: you can take the attitude that what matters in a book is the text, just as what matters in an album is the music. So you don’t need the physical book any more than you need the physical CD and booklet.
But books and albums are still, well, physical objects. Back in the days of LPs, album covers were often intricate works of art. CDs don’t give artists as much room to work with, but there’s still a lot that can be done to make the physical album an interesting object (like the Lego-textured jewel case for Very). Books often have cutouts in the cover, or fold-out pages (like the maps in the back of Lord of the Rings), or bleeds, or textured paper, and other elements that don’t lend translate well to bits. So while I concede that what matters is the content (and boy do I sometimes wish my O’Reilly bookshelf were greppable), sometimes it’s nice to hold a cool object.
There are people out there who want to keep science in a little box where it can’t possibly touch God.
[…]Scientists are not allowed to even think thoughts that involve an intelligent creator.
— Ben Stein in the teaser trailer to Expelled
There are obstacles confronting the scientific study of religion, and there are misgivings that need to be addressed. A preliminary exploration shows that it is both possible and advisable for us to turn our strongest investigative lights on religion.
Religion is not out-of-bounds to science, in spite of propaganda to the contrary from a variety of sources. Moreover, scientific inquiry is needed to inform our most momentous political decisions. There is risk and even pain involved, but it would be irresponsible to use that as an excuse for ignorance.
— Daniel Dennett, summaries of chapter 2 of Breaking the Spell, pp. 28, 53
Then there’s Victor Stenger’s book, God: the Failed Hypothesis, which considers the proposition that God exists as a testable hypothesis. Oh, and Dawkins dedicates a chapter to the God hypothesis as well in The God Delusion.
So who are these scientists that Stein is going on about, the ones who want to “keep science in a little box where it can’t possibly touch God”? Call me cynical, but I wonder if they aren’t the ones who are afraid that science would either disprove God or make him irrelevant.
(Update, Dec. 12: Welcome, ShoutWire-ites! I’m glad y’all liked this entry, but please don’t leave a comment if you’re retarded or can’t recognize sarcasm without a blinking 72-point smiley.)
The Astronomical Observatory of Padova gives us this picture of the large-scale structure of the universe:
Each point is a galaxy. Notice how they’re arranged in two cones that meet at a single point.
And what’s at that point? Us.
If that’s not proof that we’re at the center of the universe, the apex of God’s creation, I don’t know what is.
If you’ve never thought that the way molars develop in mammalian fetuses is way cool, you should read this article by PZ Mhieares at Pharyngula. It’s all about one substance in the environment of the developing jaw saying “you are going to become a bit of enamel”, and then that turns on another substance that tells neighboring cells, “cancel that: you don’t want to become enamel after all”, and stuff like that.
One fascinating thing about embryology is that the way living bodies develop is completely different from the way you’d build a house, or a credenza, or a sewing machine. It involves working in different media, with different tools, and that affects the way you do things, sometimes radically.
To me, the shift in thinking about building furniture to thinking about embryology is like learning a new programming language.
By now you may have heard about the late Rev. Gary Aldridge, friend of Jerry Falwell, who was dead in his home, with… well, why don’t you just read the autopsy:
In his talk at the Atheist Alliance convention this past weekend, Sam Harris decided to go all contrarian, and argue that we shouldn’t even use the word “atheist”. While he makes some good points, I feel that on the whole, he’s wrong.
I have a project in which I have a row of cells, and a number of segments of given lengths, and I need to try out all of the ways in which the segments can fit into the row. If you like, think of it as: how many ways can “eye”, “zygote”, and “is” be placed, in that order, on a row of a Scrabble board?
I’m doing this in Perl, so naturally I’d like to play to Perl’s strengths (pattern matching and substitution) rather than its weaknesses (arithmetic). And I’ve discovered a nifty little hack.