A fun blog to read: Pharyngula by U.Minn. biology professor Paul Z. Myers. At least it’s fun for me to read, since the content often involves smacking down various ridiculous “Intelligent Design” proponents and other pseudo scientific drivel. Plus, lots of scientific goodness.
One fun thing to look into here is the ongoing intellectual beating Myers is giving George Gilder. This starts back in 2004, and continues up to this week with Myers responding to a very soft piece in the Boston Globe about the beating, where the Globe makes it sound like Gilder is the rational one. Shame on you, Globe.
Myers minces no words:
And the key thing is that, as in my original complaint, Gilder doesn’t know anything about information theory. Scientists do take information theory seriously, and we can see that Gilder doesn’t understand it. Or biology. Or science in general. What he is is a fast-talking con-artist who thinks he knows something. The reporter seems to accept his glib babble uncritically.
And he’s just warming up.
(See also Brad Delong‘s understated chiding of the Globe reporter for not doing his research.)
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Have I mentioned Charity Larrison here before? She’s someone who’s art I’ve been following since the WEF days, and currently I particularly enjoy days when she posts new pages to Busted Wonder.
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On a not-unrelated note, who knows anything about The Long Winters? I’ve pulled down some MP3s from their site (which I haven’t had a chance to check out yet) to give me some idea, but I want to know more. I was compelled to start this inquiry by a three-line snippet of lyrics from their track New Girl:
Twice you burned your life’s work
Once to start a new life
And once just to start a fire
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Over at his also-named-for-a-quote-from-the-classics blog, Greg Burgas (who I have never met or talked to, but who’s blog I was reading just for the name) proposes a new rule that will be implemented when he is dictator:
If you cannot name ONE song by the band, you’re not allowed to wear one of their shirts.
I plan to start a list of the rules I will impose when I am dictator, and I am not above stealing from others. I’ll definitely steal Greg’s, and I’ll take that Dave Barry thing about fining retail establishments for extra letters. Feel free to add suggestions for my list in the comments. I will also be adding my own hand-crafted rules, which will mostly revolve around the draconian punishments my regime will implement for people who do things like leave Cheeto-powder fingerprints in fine books. Also, anyone who owns a Left Behind book, you may want to flee when the revolution comes.
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Using a VOIP system? Thinking about it?
You might want to take a look at a couple of pages describing a couple of example tools for pulling entire conversations from the VOIP system, so you know what you’re getting into. I picked these two more or less at random from a Google search result, to illustrate the availability of this kind of tool:
I might be a bit leery of using a system that exposed my conversations to any script kiddie on the system who knows how to run a sniffer. Actually I probably wouldn’t care too much, but then my phone conversations are pretty non-sensitive most of the time, although my employer might disagree on that.
Still, I would be happy to see that Phil Zimmermann was on the case. Looks like we might see ‘zfone‘ pretty soon.
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How did I miss knowing about The Wately Review? It’s been going for two years, and usually I find out about these things, particularly these Onion-esque things, sooner. (<fogey> I created my first personal website back in the day when the only graphical browser choice was Mosaic, and consequently I remember when it was possible to surf the entire web. Nowadays it takes two years for me to even find out about these things.</fogey> And it’s great! So much information!)
Anyway, the current “Page Three” as I write this, a story about a fan-corrected version of the latest Harry Potter is the perfect burn on all fan-fic writers.
“Rowling actually said in a recent interview that she felt the romantic arc of her characters was “obvious,” fumed Pembroke. “Excuse me, but I don’t need her to tell me about who should pair up with whom.”
Pembroke’s version involves a new romance for Harry with an exchange student from America whose physical description is remarkably close to the picture on her website. The new character, who rapidly rises to the top of her class, has a mysterious scar on her forehead similar to Harry’s famous lightning bolt. She is also an “animagus” who can assume the form of a talking winged unicorn.
“If you read the earlier books deeply, if you understand the mythology and the deeper messages like I do, you’d realize that the narrative really leads up to Harry finding this remarkable soul-mate,” said Pembroke with a dreamy expression on her face.
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Schneier points out that Microsoft’s GM of platform strategy doesn’t really understand the point of IT security, and consequently MS Exchange is going to be enabling some features that punch a nice hole in a corporate VPN strategy.
Me, I’ll be glad when I don’t have to VPN my machine at home in order to pick up my work email (and presumably share my instant messenger status with co-workers via Exchange), but that’s only because the existing corporate security policies mean that while the VPN is running my machine can only see resources inside the work network. So currently I chose between being able to access stuff at work (incluing my email & source control) and being able to see everything else. With this little HTTP tunneling hole in place, I will need to give up the rest of the internet much less often throughout the day.
This is a great illustration of the nature of security as a tradeoff between user annoyance and degree of security.
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