If you’re looking for a good way to follow what’s happening in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case, where parents are fighting an Evangelical-heavy school board’s attempt to force anti-evolution propaganda into science classrooms, here’s a few blogs you may find enlightening:
Sunday I went to the Feast of the Hunter’s Moon with some friends (coincidentally the same ones I had watched Steamboy with the day before). I figured hey, it’s an almost free ticket (we were able to wrangle free passes for all but one of us, so we each chipped in for the last ticket), and I had never gotten around to going the other five years I’ve been here.
For those lucky enough not to be in Indiana, Feast of the Hunter’s Moon is an annual weekend event hosted by the Tippecanoe County Historical Association. It’s like a Ren Faire, but for 18th century Northwest Territory days.
I finally got around to reimplementing the site’s theme “properly” for WordPress 1.5. The new way of doing things is quite a bit nicer than it was in 1.2, that’s for sure.
I think I’ve got everything working again, but if you notice something broken on this site, let me know so I can fix it.
Tip: Always keep your bag with you, so that it doesn’t look like you’re planting a bomb somewhere.
Tip: Never keep your bag with you, because apparently that’s also considered suspicious behavior.
Any president worth his salt has it. The ultimate weapon. The last resort. The big red button. The recourse so terrifying you rarely ever speak of it directly.
The nuclear option.
I used mine Saturday.
The number of Unix installations has grown to 10, with more expected.
– The Unix Programmer’s Manual, 2nd Edition, June 1972
I just watched Steamboy with some of the improv crew. Which was a good idea, because being able to give the movie the MST3K treatment made it enjoyable.
The animation looks pretty good, but the dialogue is mediocre at best and the plot is brain-damage-inducing. The story’s set in an industrial revolution-era-ish Britain, and the plot revolves around this “steam ball” invention that seems to be a Zero Point Module for steam. It’s Icelandic, apparently. Various groups are after it so they can use it to power their steampunk war machines they’re going to show off at a vaguely-defined tech expo in London that’s largely a front to sell arms to a bunch of international stereotypes.
If you’ve been considering upgrading your copy of Rhythmbox to the 0.9.x branch (whether version 0.9.0 or CVS), please be aware that Rhythmbox Applet only works with Rhythmbox 0.8.6 through 0.8.8.
Recent development releases of Rhythmbox have changed the Bonobo interface that prevents Rhythmbox Applet from working properly. Even if you recompile the applet against the new IDL file, the applet may only be partially functional.
However, rest assured that work is being done to correct this, namely by adding support for the new D-Bus interface offered by new versions of Rhythmbox. Once this is completed, Rhythmbox Applet should work seamlessly with both Rhythmbox 0.8.8 and Rhythmbox CVS.
If you’re brave and don’t mind fiddling with the source code, you can check out the latest Rhythmbox Applet code from the Arch repository to check on current progress, though as of this writing the D-Bus support there is only half-functional.
And just in time for the website overhaul, Rhythmbox Applet 0.1.8 is out! Changes include:
I just finished a (long overdue) overhaul of the Rhythmbox Applet website. No, it doesn’t look very different, but the backend changed from a bunch of HTML pages generated by applying XSLT to an XML data file to a set of PHP pages that reads in that XML data.
Why the change? Mainly for this bit of niftiness: the main page now syndicates the latest Rhythmbox Applet-related entries from my blog. No more manually cross-posting news to both places! Hooray!
Intelligent design is not an argument of the same character as these controversies. It is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class. In those cases, the demand for equal time for “both theories” would be ludicrous. Similarly, in a class on 20th-century European history, who would demand equal time for the theory that the Holocaust never happened?
The Ship of Fools will be performing with The Crazy Monkeys at the PSUB Improv Night this Friday, starting at 8:00 pm in the North Ballroom of the Purdue Memorial Union. Tickets are $3 for Purdue students and $5 otherwise.
In general, the only difference between a manmade disaster and a natural one is the cause. After a disaster occurs, it doesn’t matter.
Tonight is the Purdue Improv Club’s callout! If you’re interested in joining, curious as to what we do, or just want to enjoy a free improv show every Friday night, you won’t want to miss it.
Music Applet checkins Old Lady checkins