If you wanted to evolve a musical composition — or better yet, if you wanted to evolve a piece of software that could write music on demand — how would you do it?
I came up with the following approach after reading Sean Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful.
The University of Texas Center for Nonlinear Dynamics has done some very cool research on ooblick (that’s cornstarch and water, for those who didn’t know).
The video shows holes that don’t fill in, holes that merge and split, and “fingers” rising up out of the dish and multiplying.
As you probably know, Bill O’Reilly’s been having a hissy fit over stores that say “Happy Holidays” rather than acknowledging that only Christians who celebrate Christmas are allowed to be guilted into a massive year-end shopping spree.
Here’s another shop that belongs on Bill’s naughty list (thanks to kos):
Read More
From today’s York Daily Record:
The satirical news program “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” came to town Monday to, once again, make fun of Dover.
Correspondent Samantha Bee spent the day in the area reporting on what it’s like to live in a town that, according to televangelist Pat Robertson, has been forsaken by God for voting out school board members who supported including intelligent design in the high school biology curriculum, said Matt Polidoro, a producer with the show.
The piece is expected to air next week.
I’m looking forward to it.
For years now, whenever someone argued that the insertion of “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance or “In God We Trust” on dollar bills was a violation of separation of church and state, there have always been people who’d jump in with comments like “What’s the big deal?”, “Get a life”, “Aren’t there more important things to worry about?”, “So just don’t say the `under God’ part”, and so on.
Now some retailers, in an effort to make as much money as possible during the various end-of-year holidays — and I hope you won’t think me overly cynical for thinking that a company like Lowe’s or Target is motivated more by profit than anything else — have been writing “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” on their bannners, flyers, and ads. And right-wingers like Bill O’Reilly and the American Family Association are getting their knickers in a twist.
I think this is the part where I get to tell them to get a life, and what’s the big deal, anyway?
Over at redstate.org, nazgul12 has an article on what it means to be a conservative:
But I think there are some pretty basic things that are central to the conservative movement, which is the movement the Republican party has come to identify itself with. If you fundamentally disagree with some of these central tenements [sic] of conservatism then you probably don’t really belong amongst the ranks of Republicans. Before someone says I’m being too vague I’ll try to list at least a couple. The the order is in no way meant to convey order of importance.
- Limited government
- Free market economies
- Democracy is superior to monarchy, dictatorship, communism, etc.
- A strong military is necessary to insure [sic] peace.
- Life is precious and innocents should be protected at all stages of life. In matters of diplomacy you should take that action which helps insure [sic] the greatest number of lives are protected. Sometimes this means declaring war to protect your people, even though it means the death of others.
Let’s take these point by point:
Read More
The apple has a much thicker skin.
I refer you to this series of comments in Bill’s weblog: Read More
As of this writing, the Ronald Reagan Memorial National Debt stands at eight trillion, ninety-five billion, nine hundred forty-four million, eight hundred ninety-two thousand, three hundred seventy-one dollars and forty-eight cents. That’s a stack of $100 bills 549 miles high ([1]). The Hubble Space Telescope orbits about 375 miles above Earth.
In fiscal 2005, the US government made $2.053 trillion, and spent $352 billion paying interest on the debt. This is just the minimum payment to keep the debt from growing even more.
In other words, for every dollar that the US government receives in taxes, 17 cents gets taken off the top right off the bat to pay interest on the debt. For every one of your tax dollars, the government can only spend 83 cents on defense, homeland security, urban development, law enforcement, Medicare/Medicaid, research, and everything else the government does.
We Americans love a good bargain. I don’t think paying $1.20 for a dollar’s worth of defense is a good deal.
If you haven’t seen The God Who Wasn’t There yet, you should. The DVD just arrived on my doorstep over Thanksgiving.
As the title implies, it’s a documentary that explores the notion that Jesus Christ never existed, and that religion — particularly extremist Christianity — is doing this country and the world more harm than good.
(Spoilers ahead.)
The central tenet of Intelligent Design is usually stated as “certain features of living organisms are too complex to be the result of natural processes, therefore they were designed.”
But as Michael Behe explained at length on the stand in the Dover Panda Trial, what he objects to (at least, when he’s on the stand) is the notion that these features could have been formed by natural selection. He also made it clear that as far as he’s concerned, the designer is God.
So really, the central tenet of ID should be restated as, “certain features of living organisms are too complex to be the result of natural selection, therefore they are the result of a powerful, intelligent, probably supernatural, entity.”