rianjs.net

Unfortunately, no pics. However, I went over David's house last night and we broke out Quake 3 Arena for the first time since probably 2001. One of the boxes, an older Pentium 3, hadn't been booted up since October 17, 2002. That's over 3 years.

It still worked, and had Quake 3 installed from the last time we played.

WTF LOL

The nation's second-largest retail pharmacy chain, CVS/pharmacy, has opted to standardize on the Firefox web browser. This move comes as a result of chain-wide hardware updates, which means that everyone that works in a CVS/pharmacy location that accesses the corporate intranet — Internet access is unavailable — is doing so using Firefox 1.0.4.

CVS's proprietary prescription-processing software, Rx2000, runs on SCO's UnixWare, and the previous browser was Netscape 4. Along with recent hardware upgrades, their backend software was updated which included a migration to the Firefox browser.

Firefox is steadily gaining momentum in corporate circles. The migration to Firefox was likely not done lightly, as maintaining the servers of over 5000 stores is no easy task, even for a $22 billion company. Firefox is steadily gaining mainstream acceptance: Dell is pre-installing the browser on OEM machines in the UK, and the browser's popularity is steadily growing, despite occasional downturns in marketshare.

(I haven't found this story anywhere, so I thought I'd let the world know.)

A few weeks ago, my shiny new laser printer arrived. I bought it because I wanted to print things to read offline — I have a hard time reading large amounts of text on a screen (though I have no problem writing), and I wanted a way to read many of the things that I thought would be interesting. Normally, I'd leave them in a tab in a browser for a few days, lose interest, and then close the tab. I can't even begin to guess how many things I wanted to read, but never did. In the hundreds, anyway. I've been doing it for years.

I discovered that many websites have a convenient little "Printer friendly" option. The BBC, Yahoo news, etc. And many of the things actually worth reading are formatted so simply that you don't need a printer friendly option because that's the way it's going to be formatted anyway. Basic webpages look like shit on the screen, but they're lovely on paper.

Here's a rundown of just some of the stuff I've read in the last week or so. These are just the full-length articles, not the short news blurbs that I print out as well.

• Inside the KLAT2 supercomputer
• Quantum search algorithm implemented using off-the-shelf optics?
• The Ars Technica Motherboard Guide: Part I — motherboard fundamentals*
• Breakthrough of the Year: Evolution in Action
• Road test: Four databases tested*
• Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District*
• The end of the period*
• LISPing at JPL

* Denotes an especially excellent article

It's a safe bet that I wouldn't have read any of these articles if I hadn't printed them.

(And yes I'm recycling the paper. :p)

Here's some more of my awesome MS Paint art.

OMG LOL

I'm in the mood for a list, so in no particular order, here are my favoritest Christmas songs:

• "Christmas Canon" - Trans-Siberian Orchestra
• "Somewhere in my Memory" - John Williams and the Boston Pops with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus
• 'Twas The Night Before Christmas - narrated by Robin Williams (OK so it's not a song, but I know all the words to the poem :))
• "Carol of the Bells" - Trans-Siberian Orchestra*
• "Christmastime" - Michael W. Smith with the Vienna Boys Choir (eargasm!)
• "The Little Drummer Boy" - Johnny Mathis
• "Mary's Boy Child / Oh my Lord" - Boney M (fuck you very much)
• The Hellelujah Chorus - sung by a live choir (I need a better version)
• "Snoopy vs. The Red Baron" - The Royal Guardsmen

* This is the best Christmas song ever. It is probably one of the most singularly compelling songs I've ever heard from any genre.

One of the things I've noticed about a lot of Christmas music is that they lack power. They aren't compelling. They don't grab you by the ear and command you to listen. That's the problem with most Christmas music. Some of these songs do, some don't. This list is hardly exhaustive, and I'll probably be modifying it in the near future.

PS- Jacqui sucks for not liking TSO.

Today the Dover Intelligent Design case came to a close — Ars has some great coverage — but I wanted to explore the notion of why and how the Intelligent Design controversy ever took place to begin with.

Fundamentally, it all has to do with the way news works. The other day, boingboing.net had a great article which explained to the layperson how news is created. (Journalists and others who "create" news largely know how this operates already.) For the most part, the creation of news is done one of two ways. The first way is that a journalist goes out, cultivates, and then writes a story. The second way is via press releases. This is true for business news, science news, almost any kind of news you can think of.

For instance, most of the news that a publication like New Scientist covers is actually rehashing of press releases that can be found on eurekalert.org. So when someone mentions that an "original article" can be found [insert New Scientist/BBC/news source link here] — this is actually not correct. The original link — unless it's a story a journalist went out and found on their own — can be found on eurekalert, or another, similar press release website.

In the realm of science, press releases serve two purposes. The inform the public (and publishers) of various scientific breakthroughs at academic institutions, or they can be the tool of a company like Sangamo BioSciences to let the world know about a scientific breakthrough that their company has created. I wrote about such a story yesterday in Nobel Intent — in general I don't care where breakthroughs come from, a breakthrough is a breakthrough regardless of whether it's accomplished by a non-profit university or a for-profit company. Motivations might be different for each, but a breakthrough is a breakthrough.

In any event, in a case like the Intelligent Design case in Dover, PA, their campaign was largely based on the idea of "teaching the controversy." The Controversy, of course, is an entirely fictitious creation: there is no controversy within the realm of science. There is, however, a controversy when it comes to melding science and faith, especially amongst Bible literalist circles. The Discovery Institute (and the Thomas Moore Law Center) successfully conflated this idea in the public eye. In fact, they created it specifically for this purpose. (Much the same way that "Cyber Monday" is a term fabricated by retail associations whose goal it is to drive holiday sales.) Made-up terms have quite a lot of influence on the public, particularly when they are picked up by the mainstream media and reported as Truth.

In the case of Intelligent Design, there is no controversy, except that which the Discovery Institute — a conservative Christian think-tank — created. And then released into the wild in the form of press releases which could then be picked up by the mainstream media and eventually make its way into the minds of mainstream America. The campaign was largely successful: reporters have been reporting the Intelligent Design case in Dover, PA by telling both sides of the story in an effort to appear fair and balanced, not taking into account that one side of the story (the alleged controversy) is completely made up to begin with. As a result, fringe beliefs are given the same equal time as real scientific theories in the eyes of the public, introducing fear, uncertainty, and doubt into mainstream thought. The responsible thing to do would is to call ID what it is: a creation by a fringe group for the express purpose of bringing creationism back into the classroom under the a-religious guise of "intelligent design."

Unfortunately by exploiting the convoluted way that "news" is created, ID proponents under the auspices of the Discovery Institute were able to shoehorn a non-existent controversy into the hearts and minds of the American public with the help of the mainstream press — who should largely know better. Unfortunately, political correctness and efforts to deliver "fair and balanced" reporting only exacerbated the (non-)situation in the first place.

You Are Mashed Potatoes

Oridnary, comforting, and more than a little predictable You're the glue that holds everyone together.

If there's anything I'm not, it is predictable. And they spelled "ordinary" wrong. GG idiots.

This isn't really fodder for Nobel Intent, but these two links are worth checking out. This one is Penn & Teller's Bullshit episode about the Bible. It's horribly slanted, but interesting nonetheless. And entertaining.

The second is Evolution 101 from Berkeley. I printed out the whole thing so I can read it offline. I don't know what your science education was like in high school, but mine referred to evolution, but never taught it, because of the strong religious convictions many people in my town felt. This is good starting place to learn more.