Technology
loom | August 2, 2005After a day-long road trip from Ohio, I finally had the chance to read the news that President Bush thinks that schools should discuss Intelligent Design alongside evolution, so that students can "understand what the debate is about."
As Bush himself said, this is pretty much the same attitude he had towards creationism when he was a governor. His statements back in Texas didn't actually lead to any changes in Texas schools, and I doubt that these new remarks will have much direct effect, either. But, like Chris Mooney, I'm a journalist, and like him I would have loved to have been in the…
stcynic | October 28, 2004Here we go again....
What a surprise, it turns out that Ed Brayton et al. may have jumped the gun on the missing-explosives story. Astonishing!
The link here is to a story in the Washington Times that claims that the Russian government sent transportation units into Iraq to help them move the WMD to other nations immediately before the war began, and speculates that they may also have moved the 380 tons of missing explosives from Al Qaqaa as well. But even a cursory reading of the article shows that it does not, in fact, undermine my position at all. First, there is no evidence offered in…
loom | August 26, 2004If you took a census of life on Earth, you'd probably find that the majority of life forms looked like this. It's a virus known as a bacteriophage, which lives exclusively in bacteria. There are about 10 million phages in every milliliter of coastal sea water. All told, scientists put the total number of bacteriophages at a million trillion trillion (10 to the 30th power). Bacteriophages not only make up the majority of life forms, but they are believed to have existed just about since life itself began. Since then, they have been evolving along with their hosts, and even making much of their…
tlambert | June 23, 2004Think tanks vs Open Source
The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute's attack on Linux is just the latest in a series of attacks on Open Source by think tanks:
Date
Think Tank
Author/Title
Extracts
Sep 19, 2002
Competitive Enterprise Institute
James DeLongSoftware Wars: Open Source And The New York Times
Writing aps without incorporating some operating system code is difficult, and those who want to engraft proprietary aps onto Linux are taking a legal risk.
Jan 31, 2003
Washington Legal Foundation
David S. EvansOpen-Source Software Poses Challenges for Legal and Public…
stcynic | February 13, 2004Alan Leshner, the head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has written an article concerning the recent controversy in Georgia over evolution in science classes. What he writes seems to support my contention that all of the public handwringing over the superficial issue of whether to use "evolution" or "changes over time" was a planned distraction. He writes:In preparing draft standards, Georgia officials sought permission from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world's largest general science society, to draw upon our national Project…