Here's 'ole GWB's opinion on important Scientific Matters.

What's funny about people like GWB encouraging schools to present intelligent design or similar teleological theories alongside evolution is that they all seem to assume a universe brought into existence by an active creator naturally and automatically entails the omnipresent, omnipotent, omnibenevolant God they worship. Even if the marginally interesting points indicated by intelligent design believers are accepted as "evidence" -- the unlikely properties of water, the complexity of cilia, the gaps in the fossil record, the perfect alignment of physical forces; in short, all the serendipity of reality -- there remains no basis upon which to assume anything in any practiced (or even practicable) religion is in any way validated. In fact, if I'm to take a teleological approach to ontology, I find more evidence of an uncaring, unaware, or even cruel creator than I do of the God of Sunday School.

Robert J. Sawyer's Calculating God provides a somewhat entertaining fictional treatment of the subject, although the book is tortured by terrible subplots and an author who doesn't know much about the real world.

Has there ever been a US President who was also a scientist? Jefferson must have understood some physics in order to practice architecture; Teddy Roosevelt was into botany; Hoover was an engineer. Looks like... not really.

Everybody keeps asking me to jot down the parallels between "Battlestar Galactica" and current events. I always tell them to stuff it down their trousers with the rest of their paycheck. But I suppose I *am* starting to wonder about the interplay between Baltar and Cylon Six: he being British-accented, and she American; she representing the "children" of humanity (as America could be called the child of Great Britain); she working tirelessly to corrupt him, to seduce him to the dark side, to make him join in an unholy union that can only mean catastrophe for humanity -- in short, innocence corrupts experience like the gold of the New World corrupted the Spaniards. Six teaches Baltar that in order to be a man he must murder. And, as everyone knows, GWB has implanted a microchip in Tony Blair's brain in order to convince *him* of similar things.... How else to explain Anglo-American cooperation?

After God and Shakespeare, Robert Heinlein created most, including organ-replacement through cloning. In RAH's world that's done by extracting some tissue from the patient, then rapidly growing the organ itself for transplant. Unfortunately for the clones in *The Island*, that approach doesn't work. It just doesn't, so stop asking. They've got to merge some DNA with some kind of generic meat template and then grow it into a human clone and then keep the human clone in a closed off habitat until its owner has need of it. Which is... um... peculiar?

But who cares anyway. What's cool is the similarity to *Logan's Run*, where every-happy-body is shortly doomed to die, and no-friggin-body ever wonders why. Until someone does, and then all hell breaks loose. These clones all think they're going to the eponymous Island just as soon as they win the lottery. But then Obi-Wan-Clone wanders out of the facility and sees some shit nobody should ever have to see. And then the movie goes into Massive Chase Mode.

During Massive Chase Mode I had to call shenanigans about a dozen times, and of course you can pick at the nits buzzing around the clone habitat -- why does a clone have pierced ears? Why bother giving them makeup and expensive hairdos? Surely making the females more attractive is only going to encourage illicit contact by the males. Etc. And the movie is plagued (as in Black Death) by product-placements, but happily I lost count because it's a pretty entertaining movie overall.

7of10 Sleeping Godzillas

I'm sick of feature-rich software, so I've hacked together my own weblog posting type thingie. This is the first test of it right here.

Do you think Joseph Ratzinger and Rudy Ratzinger are related? Do you think -- could they be the same person? Secretly? That would be cool.

People often accuse me of tossing small rodents at the Hugo awards, but nevertheless! Here be the winners. Susanna Clarke won best novel for _Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell_, which seems to be a sort of Harry Potter Too set in Napoleonic Europe. Charlie Stoss, the geek favorite, won best novella for "The Concrete Jungle". Kelly Link won best novelette for "The Faery Handbag" (seeing some pattern now to free writing winning awards..?); I can also recommend "Most of My Friends Are Two-Thirds Water" -- that's a cool story. And Mike Resnick won best short story for "Travels with My Cats".

Yes, a pattern! All these shorter works are published online and available for free. Now to ponder the significance of this.... Oh wait, I know: marketing! Short of Oprah, nothing moves books like a major award sticker slapped on the cover. But then the one thing a Hugo award measures is audience popularity, so it's more evidence writers (if not musicians?) can potentially increase their audience by publishing online.

This Filmfocus article quotes Michael Madsen claiming Tarantino has written a script for Inglorious Bastards, and that the cast will include Madsen and Tim Roth, as well as -- get this -- Adam Sandler and Eddie Murphy. Also, the film will be in two parts. (I guess the bifurcated "Kill Bill" strategy worked out then.)

This is amazing -- and verily demonstrates the limits of the human eye to see.

It's hard to a be afraid of a giant chicken. Until it starts shredding people into a fine red mist with its beak and claws.

There is now a wikipedia page for the Flying Spaghetti Monster meme. I like the drawing. And the "MIDGIT", which provides a good sense of scale. The website also provides a list of similar nonsensical religions, including SPAM (Spaghetti and Pulsar Activating Meatballs), the Reformed Church of Alfredo, the Cult of Oregano, and Islam.

The offset house of Our Nearest Neighbor in the Offset Housing Development ("Shady Meadows") -- just over the border and down the hill from my apartment -- has installed a giant trampoline in their back yard. It spans the swimming pool distance between winding brick garden paths, consumes most of the available space behind the house (room enough still for the offset toolshed with its rooster weather vane), and children from around the world have been visiting in order to bounce up and down for a while. If I turn 180 degrees from my desk and gaze out the sliding porch door window, then crane my neck a bit in the direction of the Metropolis movie poster on my wall, I can watch the bobbing heads of bouncing children rise above the crest of the hill with their lips all contorted into joyful expressions, their eyes all expanded into buoyant exhilaration. It's become my personal equivalent of a sea-side view.

I've hacked together an RSS 2.0 feed. Get it here.

I originally used a library called RSSLibJ, but it lacked documentation, and had an annoying dependency on Glue (which is now owned by Webmethods, and when you go to that site it's all businessified and pastel and hard to find anything without first researching all their idiotic product names); so... I got an RSS 2.0 xsd from this guy, and generated an XMLBeans jar from it: viola, instant RSS 2.0 library. XMLBeans kicks ass.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court doesn't believe in private property anymore, it's become the job of legislatures to protect these rights in detail. These guys, a grassroots project sponsored by the Institute for Justice, track eminent domain abuse and state/local legislative efforts to prevent it. You can even buy a tee-shirt.

Based on this trailer, the new Doom movie will suck really hard. But if you like that sort of thing, there's also a Halo movie that will also suck.

For those of you determined to emulate me in every possible way, here's what I'm currently reading:
1) Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man
2) William T. Vollmann, Europe Central
3) Fletcher Pratt, The Battles that Changed History

I typically read three books concurrently at different paces: a genre novel (usually SF), a literary novel, and something nonfiction (usually history). (The pace at which I read one or the other tends to have a large influence on my daily mind-state, but that's a different matter.) There, happy now?

I'm sick of all these hurricanes, always consuming all the news bandwidth that should properly be spent worrying about missing white women. It's time to stop all the dilly-dallying (yeah stop all that) and just build a bunch of giant fans (like really huge fans) -- mount them along the threatened shoreline, blow the hurricane back wherever the hell it came from, go have a beer. Why are we still putting this project off?

I don't usually pay too much attention to computer hardware when I'm not actively shopping for upgrades, but the annual Ars System Guide at Ars Technica is always worth the read. As usual it's made me realize what a dinosaur I've become (although my recently upgraded HDs and one of my monitors made the Hot Rod list).

Speaking of monitors, the Ars Hot Rod suggests the Hyundai L90D+ ("Hitachi" is a typo in that article), which is a pretty good 19" 8ms TN flat panel, but I have to recommend the other monitor on my desk instead: the ViewSonic VP191b. This 19" 8ms MVA flat panel has better viewing angles and more colors (16.7 vs 16.2) at nearly the same price as the Hyundai. Compare the ViewSonic here with the Hyundai here.

We are quite pleased with the premiere of the new HBO series "Rome". Recently we suffered through ABC's attempt at exploiting this same subject with its miniseries "Empire", and were appalled by the vulgarity of the treatment, particularly its gross ignorance of the historical record, and its sad substitution of dross and drivel for drama and detail. Truly it was the product of lazy writing monkeys. "Rome" thus far is quite the reverse (although we shall withhold final judgment): the historical record seems in large part respected; the young Octavian is quite believable as the future first and greatest Emperor of Rome; and the writing has thus far demonstrated a willingness to risk confusing the perceived plebian portions of its audience (that unfortunate rabble so fervently coddled by networks such as ABC), neither skimming over the often bewildering complexities of Roman politics nor pretending the customs and mores of that people were somehow the same as our own. All hail HBO!