Intelligent Design Considered Harmful

Here's a disturbing article in which a science-writer finds himself disturbed by the the Christian Fundamentalists' latest chimera, Intelligent Design, which y'all know by now just drives me utterly batty.

I agree with his basic thesis -- so called "Intelligent Design" is an assault not only upon Biology, but upon science itself. It took Sputnik to scare our native theocrats back into their caves; what will it take next time?

Once upon a time (back when I was a seminarian trying to explain what the hell I was doing with my life), I used to explain to people that matters of faith are not beliefs. Beliefs may be contradicted, whereas matters of faith are "more true" than facts. Sadly, I'm now terrified that I may in fact have been more correct about this than I'd realized. We've all seen the mathematical proof that 1 equals 2, and the division by zero that underpins it. Is religious faith similarly dangerous? How can we convince people that religion belongs in the sphere of morality, not the sphere of facts, before they turn us into a psuedo-Christian version of Iran? Or worse, before the socialist utopianists convince us that all morality is wrong because it leads to fundamentalism?

Ipod squee

Maddie got me an IPod for my birthday and I spent the weekend loading up all the music at home that drives her nuts (she doesn't do metal, or industrial, or anything with significant dissonance). This was cool enough.

But today I rode my bike to work.... Motorcycles are definitely enhanced with KMFDM.

Beware Yahoo Spyware

I was installing stuff onto my new machine this weekend (replacing Black, my venerable old black Dell notebook -- the new one is Grey, a shiny new Alienware beast that hopefully'll last me at least as long as Black did), and suddenly I found my Internet Explorer had a Yahoo toolbar. Since all I'd done was to check mail, that means that Yahoo ran a script on my machine to install this software against my will, and is probably doing the same to other folks's computers. I'm outraged, personally, although Yahoo probably doesn't give a crap about that, even if I do pay them money for their service.

If your browser suddenly gets a Yahoo toolbar, before they can do anything nefarious with it, go to the control panel, to "install/update/remove software" and scroll down to the bottom of the list. You can get rid of it with a click of the mouse. I can't promise it'll stay gone, though. And people wonder why Google is so successful when most of the industry is run by crooks!

Ugly?!

Live Science has a contest to vote for the ugliest animal. I don't understand why they consider most of these animals ugly at all, and they somehow seem to have missed Senator Kennedy too. The fruit-bats definitely don't qualify. Now maybe if you were a poor defenseless peach ripening on a branch somewhere I could understand it, but these guys: ugly? They're not ugly, they're Weapon's Grade Cute!

Kitty Porn

The video of Photon & Vespers grooming has been dustbinned due to bandwidth constraints plus malfunction. In the event of need for Grooming Squee, Photon & Vespers will be happy to do live shows (in exchange for Fancy Feast).