Archives January 2010

ID ≠ YEC?

If you’ve been following the ID movement for any time, you know that the group they try to publicly distance themselves from the most, after Darwiniacs, are other creationists, especially young-earthers.

So you’ll understand my surprise when I saw this come in on the ID the Future podcast feed:

On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin examines a new peer-reviewed paper that demolishes a very common and very fallacious objection to intelligent design. That objection? “Aren’t there vast eons of time for evolution?”

I haven’t listened to it, so it’s possible that the blurb is misleading (it wouldn’t be the first time a creationist wrote something misleading). But are they so starved for peer-reviewed papers that they’ll even take something that seems to support YECism?

High-Tech Schlock

Less than a year ago, I mentioned Guitar Praise, a Guitar Hero knock-off that only plays Christian rock.

Now they’re making the same cheese available to today’s hip devil-hater on the go, with Guitar Praise for the iPhone.

Never before will you think to yourself, “what should I do while my hellbound teacher is trying to brainwash me with Darwinism, Copernicanism, and other satanic dogmas?” Just pop in your earbuds to block the blasphemous blather and pray for your teacher’s salvation — with rock!

Oy.

Network Problems Fixed?

As far as I can tell, FreeBSD 8 tickled something in the driver for my ethernet card, and caused it to behave unreliably. Rather than muck around with half-tested kernel patches or ifconfig settings, I slapped a $30 Whatevertheyhadontheshelf-3000 (read: common chipset that’s been debugged by a lot of people), and as far as I can tell, things are now working as they should. If the site stays up for a year, I guess we’ll know.

I also took the opportunity to add some memory. So whoo-hoo all around.

And while I’m at it, I should point out that FreeBSD is like a VW Bug: not the prettiest thing to look at, especially compared to various Apple or Linux offerings, but in a crunch it’s nigh-indestructible. Wanna run with a root partition that’s over 100% full? Sure thing. Boot a 7.2 kernel with a 8.0 /usr? No problem.

Network Problems

I’ve just upgraded the OS on the machine that hosts this site, and I’ve developed networking problems. If you see corrupted images or pages, that’s why. I’m working on it, but so far it looks nontrivial. Sorry for any inconvenience.

And happy 2010 to you too.