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.

A couple of observations

Whatever your politics, I offer a couple of observations for consideration:

John McCain's limited, highly controlled access to his medical records is probably a good indicator of how open his administration would be. Ditto for releasing tax returns months after Clinton and Obama, the latter being first (and least affluent of the three).

Barack Obama's organized and disciplined campaign is probably a good indicator of how organized and disciplined his administration would be. In the same vein, Hillary Clinton's campaign reflects poorly on her administrative skills.

Okay, so we get some things right...

More info here:

OMG!! Parachute!!!! Photo!!!!!!

Too frackin' cool...

Ha!

Childish superstition: Einstein's letter makes view of religion relatively clear

No more being subjected to that "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." quote. 'Nuff said.

350

350. Pass it on. More here and here.

Been takin' a break...

Now that the crises have mostly died down and we're no longer trying to get everything duct-taped together enough to make it through wide-area testing (seriously), I've been on a "less computer time" kick, hence the gap since my last post.

I've even cut my RSS feeds down to 28. I had been as high as 200+, and yes, I had a problem keeping up with all that. That's the problem with drinking from the firehose.

Anyway, the technical feeds I'm still subscribed to include the usual suspects -

• Joel on Software [Joel Spolsky]
• The Old New Thing [Raymond Chen]
• Mark's Blog [Mark Russinovich of SysInternals fame]
  
• Eric.Weblog() [Eric Sink]
  
• Coding Horror [Jeff Atwood]
  
• stackoverflow [Atwood and Spolsky, only podcasts at the moment]
  
• dive into mark [Mark Pilgrim]
  
• Paul Graham: Essays
• Stevey's Blog Rants [Steve Yegge at Google]
  
• The Daily WTF [not sure I'll keep this]

- but one I added recently is Avery Lee's VirtualBlog. Having been away from video for a couple of years now, I'd forgotten how interesting it is, and also how damn smart Avery Lee is. He reminds of the CTO for my employer in Tampa, except that fellow was even smarter. Avery's posts also remind me I still have a hell of a lot to learn about system programming, which is effectively where I live these days.

Imagine...

...if instead of invading, occupying, and truly screwing up a country half-way around the world - a country which posed no significant threat to either this country or its "allies in the region" (i.e., Israel) - we invested some of that energy in our own backyard, say, Haiti or Honduras.

Shameful.

Zapffe

Came across this on Steve Dekorte's blog. Interesting philosophical perspective (from the 'pedia):

Zapffe's theory is that humans are born with an overdeveloped skill (understanding, self-knowledge) which does not fit into nature's design. The human craving for justification on matters such as life and death cannot be satisfied, hence humanity has a need that nature cannot provide satisfaction for. The tragedy, following this theory, is that humans spend all their time trying not to be human.

Here's my sardonic (some may say cynical) take on his "four principal defense mechanisms":

• Isolation: work ethic, keep busy so you don't have to think about things too much
• Anchoring: religion
• Distraction: TV, web, reading blogs...
  
• Sublimation: philosophy, science