Snowflake

So the current rumor is that Mac OS X 10.6 - "Snow Leopard" - will be announced at WWDC in Monday's "Stevenote" and ship at the beginning of 2009.

Given that I've started on Snowflake - interesting name alignment, considering I thought of it the day before I heard about 10.6 - it would seem I've got six months to wrap up this foray into The Life.

I have less than 1,068 days and a 3-year-old G4 PowerBook, so it seems I have my work cut out for me...

Strengths and weaknesses

Good article in the NY Times on a new creationist tactic. The opening line is great (emphasis mine):

Opponents of teaching evolution, in a natural selection of sorts, have gradually shed those strategies that have not survived the courts.

Heh.

Creationists are really after a unified belief system - "God and/or the Bible explains everything" - kinda like science has (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) the goal of a Theory of Everything.

The difference, of course, is that science is always willing to throw out the current explanation and replace it with a better one provided the new theory stands up to experimental verification. There might be some resistance at first - scientists are people, after all, with egos and prejudices fully intact - but facts will prevail when the dust settles.

If you want to believe God put everything in place 6,500 years ago and pressed the Start button, that's all well and good, but what can you do to prove (i.e, test) it?

You can't, and the unified belief system sure as hell doesn't explain something like bacteria evolving to become drug-resistant, does it?

Repairing the Damage, Before Roe

Good essay in the NY Times today on that least controversial of topics: abortion. The last two paragraphs make their point:

It is important to remember that Roe v. Wade did not mean that abortions could be performed. They have always been done, dating from ancient Greek days.

What Roe said was that ending a pregnancy could be carried out by medical personnel, in a medically accepted setting, thus conferring on women, finally, the full rights of first-class citizens — and freeing their doctors to treat them as such.

I'll add that given my gender, I believe I'm entitled to my opinions on the subject but without much ethical ground to impose them.

'Nuff said.