I am currently crafting my response to Christopher Maloney. This will be fun.
Oh, and he thinks my middle initial is L. He’s wrong about that, too.
Filed under: Misc | Tagged: Christopher Maloney, Thought of the day | 1 Comment »
Thought of the day
Posted on May 25, 2010 by Michael
People are composed of ideas. These ideas are what drive personalities, behavior, actions. Remove them and it no longer is possible to define a person. I know, I know. It’s so effin’ obvious, right?
So then why do the religious pretend like it isn’t true? Maybe they want to try to describe a person that is without ideas? I’m not sure.
Filed under: Misc | Tagged: Ideas, Thought of the day | Leave a comment »
A show better than LOST
Posted on May 25, 2010 by Michael
Not that it’s hard to find cable shows that outshine network TV, but here’s one example.
Filed under: Humor | Tagged: LOST, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Rowsdower, The Final Sacrifice | 2 Comments »
More Facebook lies
Posted on May 25, 2010 by Michael
Facebook’s failed privacy policies are an ongoing problem for the company. Now that blogs and other media have helped to bring attention to them, Facebook has taken to lying.
In an open letter published Monday in the Washington Post (whose chairman, Donald E. Graham, just so happens to sit on Facebook’s board of directors), Zuckerberg wrote that Facebook has been “growing quickly” and admitted that “sometimes we move too fast.”
“Many of you thought our controls were too complex,” Zuckerberg’s letter reads. “Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls” — uh, you can say that again — “but that may not have been what many of you wanted. We just missed the mark.”
Zuckerberg promised, in “coming weeks,” privacy controls that will be “much simpler to use” — including an “easy way to turn off all third-party services” that can access your account.
The concern is false. It’s a lie. The company is pretending like they’re going to vastly improve things – because any change sounds nice – but they’re going to make slight modifications which still favor the invasion of privacy by default. It may become easier to say “No, don’t take my private info”, but it’s going to remain necessary for people to go out of their way and do it. And that’s the complaint; Facebook just doesn’t get that people are mad because most users sign up with the presumption of default privacy.
Not that the owner, Zuckerberg, cares:
But Zuckerberg is also being dogged by an embarrassing IM thread from when he was a 19-year-old Harvard student, bragging that he’d gathered personal information from thousands of users for the nascent TheFacebook.com. “People just submitted it,” Zuckerberg messaged, “I don’t know why. They ‘trust me.’ Dumb [expletive].” (This comes via Silicon Alley Insider.)
Awesome.
Filed under: News | Tagged: Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Privacy | Leave a comment »
Thought of the day
Posted on May 23, 2010 by Michael
I’ve never even come close to watching an episode of LOST. I’m glad. It looks looked like a shitty show.
Filed under: Misc | Tagged: LOST, Thought of the day | 5 Comments »
Red Dead Redemption
Posted on May 23, 2010 by Michael
I finally broke down and got a 360. I have no idea how Ebert could be so ignorant. This is nothing but art.
Filed under: Misc | Tagged: Art, Red Dead Redemption, Roger Ebert, Video games | 1 Comment »
How science has already tested the assertions of supernatural faith
Posted on May 23, 2010 by Michael
* The earth was suddenly created, complete with all its species, 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. This was falsified by science. The falsification likewise goes for other religions’ creation myths, like those of Hindus and the Inuits.
* God put the earth at the center of the solar system and the universe. Also falsified.
* God is both omnipotent and benevolent. Falsified by the data.
* All humans descend from Adam and Eve, who also lived a few thousand years ago. Falsified by genetic data.
* Praying for sick people makes them better. Falsified by the intercessory prayer study.
* People who lived in the past can be reincarnated as modern people, complete with their earlier memories. Investigation has shown no evidence for this.
* Jonah was swallowed and regurgitated by a giant fish (or whale). Probably impossible; nobody has survived such an occurrence.
* God confounded all the languages at once at the Tower of Babel. False: languages diverged gradually from common ancestors.
* Tribes colonized North America from the Tower of Babel several thousand years ago. (Book of Mormon). No evidence.
* Faith by itself can cure dire diseases and medical conditions, which result not from organic conditions but from imperfect belief. (Christian Science). No evidence for such faith healing.
* U.S. soldiers will return to South Pacific islands bearing wonderful goods for the inhabitants. False: won’t happen.
Don’t forget water-to-wine and virgin births. Of course, we haven’t given David Blaine a crack at these magic tricks yet.
Filed under: Religions, Science | Tagged: David Blaine, Faith claims, falsification, Jerry Coyne, Science | 16 Comments »
The most important fact about Venter’s achievement
Posted on May 23, 2010 by Michael
If not the most important fact about what Craig Venter did is not that it raises ethical questions or anything like that (the questions are overblown anyway). Instead, it’s that what he did was a massive technical feat. It’s long, long, long been known that what he did was possible in theory. Everyone expected it to work. The problem was in making it work. That side of the problem came with different expectations. Almost certainly someday, yes, we ought to be able to synthesize a genome and insert it into a cell, but today? Could Venter’s team do it successfully using such a length of base pairs? The answer is yes, but that wasn’t always clear.
While I’m at it I suppose I can point out two more huge facts: first, the organism has no parents. It was not conceived sexually or replicated asexually. It is a product of pure chemistry, and that tells us something about the cell. Second, this achievement means we can go into a computer, change a few amino acids, and come up with completely different gene products. The first application may well be for industrial use (wouldn’t it be great to produce bacteria that just love to eat up oil spills?). I suspect another major application will somehow involve cancer treatment. The creation of an enzyme which makes it more difficult for cancer to recruit blood vessels (angiogenesis) or which reduces some other product cancer brings about for its own perpetuation may be the next big revolution in the so-called “War on Cancer”.
Filed under: News, Science | Tagged: cancer, Craig Venter, Synthesized organism | 1 Comment »
For the Sake of Science 