Polarman

Expelled Exposed

This National Review Article,

A Blood Libel on Our Civilization, exactly captures my feelings on the intellectual dishonesty of the Intelligent Design movement and their stupid movie, Expelled.  Intelligent Design is nothing more than warmed-over Creationism, a bunch of religious claptrap pretending to be a science.  The fool that wrote the book on ID couldn't be even troubled to do more than going to the edit menu and choosing Replace All on creationism and changing it to Intelligent Design.  Too bad a conservative judge caught him and called him on it. 

I guess now that Intelligent Design has been shown to be the same thing as Creationism, the Creationist will have to rename their movement again...  In Florida, it's being called Academic Freedom, the right for teachers to "critically examine" Evolution.   I wonder why these anti-science clowns don't want to critically examine gravity.  I suppose it's because the intellectual step-children of the pope that Galileo challenged consider that battle to have already been lost. 

Astrological Magazine folds due to... (wait for it) Unforeseen Circumstances!

Sometimes the jokes just write themselves.

 

http://www.astrologicalmagazine.com/

 

I took a screenshot just in case it vanishes.

 

Follow up to the Erdős Number being sold on EBay

A few years ago, William Tozier attempted to auction his Erdős number on EBay.  An Erdős Number is like the six degrees of separation to Kevin Bacon number using published papers instead of movies and using Paul Erdős instead of Kevin Bacon.   The attempt to auction his Erdős Number off apparently created a lot of interest and controversy in academia.  Wikipedia currently reports that the winning bid was around $1000.  I distinctly recall some angry mathematician submitting an outlandishly high bid of around a million dollars or more, but saying that he had no intention of paying.  Hopefully the angry mathematician's EBay account was canceled since I consider the auction process to be just as worthy of seriousness as the academic distinction of an Erdős Number.

William Tozier is now giving a detailed explanation how William Tozier auctioned his Erdős Number and the consequences in a post entitled One measures a Circle.  I look forward to his follow up posts.

Downloaded Beta of Live Writer

I just downloaded Windows live Writer from http://get.live.com/betas/writer_betas.

The one killer feature is the spelling checking is live like in Microsoft Word, so that misspelled words are underlined.  This is a great feature.  I am not familiar enough with the previous features to know the other improvements.

Why can't a computer be more like a brain?

Jeff Hawkins, who founded Palm Computing, writes in IEEEE Spectrum, Why can't a computer be more like a brain?  In this article, he brings us up to date with his latest endeavor, Numenta.   He covers progress since his book On Intelligence and gives details on Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) which is a platform for simulating neocortexial activity.  Numenta has created a framework which allows anyone to build HTMs.

Test positioning of pictures

I'm interested to understand better the relationship between typepad and how it deals with pictures and so forth.

 

Here's the first test picture (above) of Liz and Carolyn.

All these were taken in 2004.

I think perhaps it would be good to remind people that you can click on the picture and see the picture in higher resolution.

Postal Service Removes clocks

The Houston Chronicle is reporting that the Postal Service fixes long waits by removing clocks:

The Watson Post Office is one of the nation's 37,000 post offices in which clocks have been removed from retail areas as part of a "retail standardization program" launched last year. The effort is designed to give the public-service areas a more uniform appearance, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported in Thursday editions.

"We want people to focus on postal service and not the clock," said Stephen Seewoester, Dallas spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service.

People should consider this when thinking about how health care would work if run by the federal government.  For health care, they'd remove calendars.

Tildes

Just wanted to confirm that if you create a tilde (for example, Alt-0241) that it works through Typepad's editor.   ñ

San Luis Cultural Preservation

The oldest continuously operating business in Colorado is R&R Markets.  It's about to celebrate its 150th year anniversary of doing business.  The anniversary will be celebrated on June 30th, 2007.

The Skeptical Optimist recommends

It's always a pleasure reading the posts by The Skeptical Optimist.  In his latest, he recommends The Origin of Wealth, a book I look forward to reading.  In fact, I'm adding it to my Amazon wish list.