Rom's Rants

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Zune 2.5 WTF

I really like my Zune, and I'm glad that I can now buy TV shows if I want to, but come on...$144 for a single season? The shows are already slightly more expensive than they are on iTunes ($2.00 instead of $1.99), but season passes on iTunes are a wee bit more realistic. Most are in the sub-$40 range.

posted by Michael Russell at 5/07/2008 07:33:00 PM | 1 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

Saturday, May 03, 2008

Injuries

While I was in my training track today, my granddaughter Alex was hit by a car while she was crossing I-10 around here to head home.

She's currently in the trauma ward at Texas Medical Center in Houston.

Beyond that, I have no information. I'll try to keep you posted.

Update: She was jaywalking across the frontage road while talking on her cellphone. She has a fractured pelvis, possible spinal and head injuries, and keeps drifting in and out of consciousness. To top it all off, she isn't insured. Still trying to get more information.

Update 2: She's supposed to go home today. No spinal or head injuries, just a broken pelvis and a quiet sense of gratitude for having been skipped by Darwinian selection.

posted by Michael Russell at 5/03/2008 07:59:00 PM | 3 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

Eight Days of Exhaustion

I am sure that everyone has had one of those weeks where even though nearly everything has gone wonderfully, you still want the week to be over. This is one of these weeks.

Note: I will update this post later with relevant hyperlinks. (Update: Updated and typo fixed.)

I am currently sitting in the Addison Conference and Theater Center for Dallas TechFest 2008. I had to leave at 6:15am to get here, and since the only wireless available to me is unsecured pay service, I'm typing this on my BlackBerry for lack of anything better to do.

A week ago today, I was lucky enough to get to see a live riffing by the crew at Cinematic Titanic of their next movie riff, the Roger Corman "classic" known as "The Wasp Woman.". (You can see this over at archive.org...but do you really want to?)

I have spent the last week poring over nearly 100,000 data records to try to find an integrity issue with our numbers, putting out fires at work, and overall just working myself a lot harder than normal...and now I am here so I can learn more stuff so that I can do more work.

Let nobody tell you that coders make sense. At least I am investing some time in my future. I know many coders who don't...or even worse, won't.

Anyway, I'm going to be posting a bit over at some other blogs in the near future. Currently finishing up a post called "There are no theists in QA.". Guess what the topic is?

Labels: DallasTechFest

posted by Michael Russell at 5/03/2008 08:03:00 AM | 2 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Ken Miller on Intelligent Design

This webcast starts with a prayer, but do not let that distract you. This nearly two hour webcast is Ken Miller speaking at Case Western University about Intelligent Design (ID).

Ken Miller was one of the plantiff's witnesses in Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District, the recent case where ID was essentially struck down.

His lecture is approximately 70 minutes with the rest dedicated to a Q&A session, but even if you are not scientifically minded, I highly encourage you to watch this webcast. He isn't negative against religion, he isn't needlessly pro-science, he doesn't talk down to people. What he does do is show what is at risk in very stark detail. Pay attention at approximately 1 hour, 7 minutes, 40 seconds.

posted by Michael Russell at 4/27/2008 06:52:00 PM | 1 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

Saturday, April 26, 2008

"Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" Lacks Intelligence

Some of you may know about a new film recently released by Ben Stein called "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed." The basic premise of the movie is that if you believe in creation instead of evolution, your views are being suppressed in education and that the "controversy should be taught."

The Net is abuzz with controversy about this film. Everything from one of the people interviewed for the film being kicked out of a screening for no apparent reason to Yoko Ono actually doing something admirable and suing the film's creators to ask them to remove a clip from John Lennon's "Imagine" that was used without permission.

As an aside, I think it's funny that a film of creationist propaganda would use a song that espouses "Imagine there's no heaven...No hell below us...No religion," all of which in the first half of the song...but I digress.

Now, I'd try to tear down some of the arguments posed by the film, but fortunately, I don't have to. A YouTuber by the handle of "Thunderf00t" has been doing an amazing job of it already. He has an amazing video series called "Why do people laugh at creationists?" that takes arguments put forward by creationists and tears them apart.

Here is his edition specifically focused on the PR campaign for "Expelled."

Now, this isn't to say that there are not legitimate controversies within evolution, but the controversies are not about the accuracy of the theory. The debate within the scientific community is more about the specific mechanisms in force during natural selection. Is it group selection, Dawkin's "selfish gene" theory, or others? All of these have merit and the evidence to support all of them is currently building.

If you insist on teaching the controversies present in science, make sure that you are teaching the controversies that are actually there.

posted by Michael Russell at 4/26/2008 11:31:00 AM | 4 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions