brainstorms

Thursday August 11, 2005

quote of the day, about intelligent design

from paul r. gross's review of one of my favorite books, young and edis, Why Intelligent Design Fails, rutgers university press, 2004.

So it seems a trouble for busy scientists to give their time to truth-squads, examining (scrupulously, as do the WIDF contributors) the incessant nay-saying of creationists, and now of creationists who use the language of science and mathematics comfortably. But it must be done. There will be more anti-evolution, religiously motivated nay-saying, and there must be more books like WIDF. The stakes are high. Nothing less hangs in the balance than the hope that some fraction of the next generation of our children will get serious education in science, and that they will be capable of speaking truth not only to power, but to and for all their peers.

[made an exception and gave an amazon link this time, in case it helps sell additional copies of this superb book. it is not an easy read, but an important one.]

[black helicopter note: pratchett, stewart and cohen's humorous and enlightening science of discworld III: darwin's watch is still not available in the US. meanwhile, it can be ordered from canada.]

[image note: nearby storm drain cover, color coded.]

related site: fighting fashionable nonsense

[i have disabled further comments on this quote.]

itunes with freedb...

pinky, are you pondering what i am pondering?
narf, i think so brain, but how could i get itunes to work with freedb and still help you conquer the world?

i find the current itunes cddb customer lock repulsive but not unexpected from apple. also in keeping with this mode of business, gracenote (what a whopping misnomer) has dropped support for the original cddb1 protocol, which freedb also uses, and switched to a proprietary protocol. so the current dns workaround to use freedb instead of cddb no longer works. [interesting note from feurio about cddb2. also description and reference implementation of an alternative: compact disk metadata protocol]

i will be blunt. i never liked itunes. every passing day, i like it less, and wish for its eventual irrelevance like safari.

[addendum: geoff wondered if i am a mac user. my daily laptop is an ibook; all my photography and graphic work goes through macs. [see here and here for some notes] on the other hand, all software development is done on solaris, freebsd or netbsd, and sometimes on suse. i would disagree about browsers, but that will have to wait for another entry.]