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Read http://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Fascism-American-Mussolini-Politics/dp/0385511841/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213699181&sr=8-1

Flickr:
http://flickr.com/photos/tags/processing/
http://flickr.com/photos/tags/generative/

Individuals:
http://flickr.com/photos/joshuadavis/ || joshuadavis.com
http://flickr.com/photos/flight404/ || flight404.com

Many others to be found here:
maxalot.com
http://www.maxalot.com/xpsf/xpsif_all.shtml
http://www.bridgesmathart.org/art-exhibits/jmm08/index.html

References:
Art in the Digital Age

See track number 7.

That would be an extremely heavy backpack to cause any significant damage. And highly unlikely. All those commenting on this topic at the least should read Levi's On Nuclear Terrorism published late last year. You will have a much greater understanding of the issues involed and the extreme difficulty of getting even a crude explosive device in position to do damage and exactly how extensive those damages might be. FYI - the book is not overly technical and should be understanable by most anyone, you don't need a physics Phd.

A first-year physics student called John Aristotle Philips did all this as a summer project his first year at Princeton, way back in the early 19790s. Read the book - it's quite enlightening (as well as amusing).

http://www.amazon.com/Mushroom-True-Story-Bomb-Kid/dp/0671827316/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213618717&sr=1-2

If I could use a rusty boxcutter to carve a new orifice in my body that's compatible with this link cable, I would already be doing it. I can just imagine the pure musical goodness that would flow through this cable into the wound and fill me completely -- like white, holy light. Holding this cable in my hands actually makes me feel that much closer to the Lord Jesus Christ. I only make $6.25/hr at Jack In The Box, but I saved up for three months so I could have this cable. It sits in a shrine I constructed next to my futon in Mother's basement.

I only gave it four stars in my review because I can't find music that is worthy enough to flow through this utterly perfect interconnect.

Disappointing quality

I was disappointed. I consider myself an audiophile - I regularly spend over $1000 on cables to get the ultimate sound. I keep my music-listening room in a Faraday cage to prevent any interference that could alter my music-listening experience. Sending any signal down ordinary copper can degrade the signal considerably. While ordinary listeners might not notice, to somebody with even a rudimentary knowledge of sound, the artifacts are glaring. Denon should have used silver wiring (hermetically sealed inside the rubber sheath to prevent any tarnishing, of course), which has a significantly higher conductivity than copper. Furthermore, Denon needs to treat the wires they use in the cable with a polarity inductor to ensure minimal phase variance.

Needless to say, I returned the cable and wrote an angry letter to the so-called engineers at Denon.

If I could use a rusty boxcutter to carve a new orifice in my body that's compatible with this link cable, I would already be doing it. I can just imagine the pure musical goodness that would flow through this cable into the wound and fill me completely -- like white, holy light. Holding this cable in my hands actually makes me feel that much closer to the Lord Jesus Christ. I only make $6.25/hr at Jack In The Box, but I saved up for three months so I could have this cable. It sits in a shrine I constructed next to my futon in Mother's basement.

I only gave it four stars in my review because I can't find music that is worthy enough to flow through this utterly perfect interconnect.

Disappointing quality

I was disappointed. I consider myself an audiophile - I regularly spend over $1000 on cables to get the ultimate sound. I keep my music-listening room in a Faraday cage to prevent any interference that could alter my music-listening experience. Sending any signal down ordinary copper can degrade the signal considerably. While ordinary listeners might not notice, to somebody with even a rudimentary knowledge of sound, the artifacts are glaring. Denon should have used silver wiring (hermetically sealed inside the rubber sheath to prevent any tarnishing, of course), which has a significantly higher conductivity than copper. Furthermore, Denon needs to treat the wires they use in the cable with a polarity inductor to ensure minimal phase variance.

Needless to say, I returned the cable and wrote an angry letter to the so-called engineers at Denon.

I thought so at first, too, but in depressing fact, that's the real price from Denon.

And it looks like you save 100 pennies if you order from Denon rather than Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Link-Cable/dp/B000I1X6PM

The reviews are hilarious :)

timothy

Check out the Amazon reviews!

Even Amazon.com sells them - that means it can only be good, right?

Right?

*nudge nudge wink wink*

np: Anthony Rother - Liquid System (My Name Is Beuys Von Telekraft)

I would have nominated Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri but that one broke many a kernal ago on a glibc update. Too bad Loki is dead or they could have updated it.

On a related note, the other day I was really wishing I had purchased the combo pack (SMAC + SMACX) for Linux which was selling several years back. I was checking on Amazon, and apparently nowadays a used copy of SMACX goes for ~$110, with $150 minimum for a new copy.

I'll vouch for this one too. I've had one for years for presentations/demonstrations. Here's a link: Amazon.com

I use a Versapoint RF keyboard, they usually sell for around $150. They advertise 100ft range - I have never tried mine at this distance but I do use it at 20-30 feet through a wall and it works great, I highly recommend it. It also has a built in mouse, which was what sold me for it over a Gyration keyboard.

instead of ssh, synergy2.sourceforge.net I use this plus a EEE pc + DPG-1200 (dlink wireless video device)

zvbox would have been better, since my Tivo could then cache Netflix movies, and turn off the pc. it's definitly more costly.

link is broken. but then again, what is the post of your posting?

My point is that none of these would be a problem if they innovated a computer thaat was secure, by default, without the poor sufering end user having to: Take steps to protect against phishing and spyware, identity theft, viruses and malware, e-mail, web surfing and Internet use, instant messaging. Add a 'personal firewall' which is next to useless, endlessly downoad and install patches that break something .. and so on ad nauseum ...

Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know

Your post is ridiculous. Research into the neural correlates of consciousness has been progressing significantly over the past decade. The explanation is coming together from research in different areas. Damasio's model, for example, is seriously backed up by neurology: http://www.amazon.com/Feeling-What-Happens-Emotion-Consciousness/dp/0156010755
On the philosophy side, the usual objections to the reductionist approach and other philosophical nonsense like qualia are crushed by Dennett's well-thought-out arguments. The consciousness problem is well on its way to being solved.

If we are to rationally analyze the success or (comparative) failure of the OLPC, it is crucial to understand that the big NGOs are staffed by people who don't much care about the good of the poor. Many of these people are also vastly corrupt and tied into the regimes they are supposedly working to change; regimes that gain from having desperate, ignorant, weak populaces. Myanmar really isn't that anomalous.

Should the OLPC even try to get computers in through governments or would they be better trying to get the relevant officials bribed to just stand aside? I don't know. But we cannot understand the decisions of nations like Libya and Nigeria without starting with the assumption that the good the children is, at best, fourth or fifth on the list of things they looked at when saying yes or no to OLPC.

From the Back Cover

* Phishing and spyware
* Identity theft
* Workplace access
* Passwords
* Viruses and malware
* Remote access
* E-mail
* Web surfing and Internet use
* Instant messaging
* Personal firewalls and patches
* Hand-held devices
* Data backup
* Management of sensitive information
* Social engineering tactics
* Use of corporate resources

- unquote -

If they let their own IT staff get on with the job, instead of ordeing in the latest innovative fad, then we wouldn't even need a security policy architecture, what ever that is .. :)

>>As for black slaveowners in America: Citation please. (i.e. I call B.S.)

http://www.amazon.com/Black-Masters-Michael-P-Johnson/dp/0393019063

There was something like 10,000 black slaveowners in 1860, compared with about 400,000 white slaveowners.

One of the largest slaveowners (in the top 1% of slaveowners) in South Carolina at the time right before the Civil War was a former slave named William Ellison. He was a brilliant guy, who invented a way of sharpening cotton gin blades in a way that they held their edges a lot longer; farmers all the way from Kansas would send their blades to him to be sharpened. Demand for his services grew so much that he ended up buying quite a large number of slaves to work in his machine shops. He (along with another black slaveowning family) got a bench on the floor of the local church, and successfully sued white people for money owed him when they didn't pay up. He was known as a harsh master, bred slaves for sale, and hired slave catchers to bring back runaway slaves.

Things got bad for blacks during the tense months leading up to the Civil War, so he and his family fled to the North, but apparently his sons (college educated in Canada) tried to enlist in the Confederate Army, and the family actually bought a lot of confederate war bonds to support the war effort. After the war ended, their slaves were freed and the bonds were defaulted, bankrupting their family just like all the white plantations.

When I was in Sumter County, the local museum took a group of us out to his house, and we toured his plantation, and visited his grave. Fascinating story, and very different from the common perception of slavery, and black slaveowners (who we perhaps assume bought slaves merely to free them).

I'm sure there are bad guys in Guantanamo who have harmed Americans, or who wanted to and were preparing to. But we have weak to no evidence against many of the prisoners at Guantanamo. In fact, most of them were not captured by Americans, but were turned over to us by third parties, for whatever reason. Murat Kurnaz, who was arrested in Pakistan and handed over to American forces for a bounty payment, for example. At worst, you have to consider such a person a suspect, not a convicted criminal. And of course we decided to torture and punish these prisoners first and then, maybe later, give them a trial. Not exactly a shining example for the world.

One way could be to demonstrate a situation in which skepticism and questioning could have saved lives. For example, in James R. Chiles' book, Inviting Disaster, he mentions the example of a British flight where the right engine had caught fire, but the pilot went on the PA and announced that he was shutting down the left engine (based upon misread instruments, according to crash investigators). At this point, if one of the passengers had been skeptical of the pilots judgment, and had stood up and alerted the flight crew, the subsequent crash may have been avoided.

In another example from the same book, Chiles shows that one of the main reasons the Three Mile Island incident turned out as badly as it did was because of the fact that the operators were trained to not be skeptical of their instruments, despite the fact that many of these instruments had documented constraints on their measurement ability (like temperature sensors that failed to show readings outside of a certain range). If the reactor crew had exercised more skepticism about some of the inconsistent readings they were getting, billions of dollars of damage could have been prevented.

"in time of war" Which goes into the secret history of Hitler's deployment of Terrorists in the US by submarine, at a time when we were not at war with germany.

My kids were never able to defeat Tot Lok.

They are a pain in the rear to install, but once installed properly, your kid is not going to get that cabinet or drawer open before you figure out what's going on.

That's the whole idea, really--to slow them down. Just make sure you put the key someplace that the kid can't get to without constructing some serious access ramp.

You want the parental, "Just what do you think your doing?" to refer to constructing a ramp rather than you kid spraying her little brother with Raid because "he was bugging her".

The best book I ever read on this subject is here.

This book gives you a deep fundamental understanding of science and the scientific method. The chapters focus on debunking a variety of outrageous pseudoscience. Ideas from UFOs to conspiracy theories to the Lost City of Atlantis are swept away by convincing arguments. Once you read enough of this, the higher meaning presents itself. Don't let the nonsense comfort you falsely. Be skeptical and trust in science. It is the most reliable methodology for getting to the truth.

Few books really changed my outlook in life. This is one of them. Read the reviews at Amazon. You will see I'm not alone. For me, in this crazy world, science really has become a candle in the dark.

I don't think geeks are much more skeptical than other groups of people. Everyone thinks groupthink and bias don't apply to them, but the reality is a lot more subtle. A good book I've found for learning about innate human biases is How We Know What Isn't So by Thomas Gilovich. It's filled with examples of how pattern detection and reasoning are skewed by the same heuristics that make our brains so effective in the first place.

AI's exist in a perfectly designed environment, they have humans feed them power & data and all they need to do is process.

I'm not arguing against this point, I just thought you had a silly example of the difficulties involved.

Imagine the size of big blue if it had to actually see the board and physically move the pieces.

Yeah, it would add another $139 to the cost, like this device. If you were thinking about a device that can recognize and move the pieces of any "normal" chess board, then it would be a bit harder, a robotic arm, a camera, and some image recognition software, but still probably at a cost below $1000000, including development. Most likely somebody has already built it as part of a thesis in robotics already.

If, on the other hand, you are thinking of a device that has to go the library/bookstore and borrow/buy books, and then read them, in order to extract and encode the knowledge in its database of opening moves and endgames, then it would be a tad more difficult. If it also had to learn the rules of chess this way (and how the chess-pieces looked), it would be even more difficult. And if it also had to go to the library to learn about alpha-beta-pruning to learn how computers efficiently play chess, and reprogram itself in this way, even more so. If it also had to design its own hardware for chess playing, even more so. All of these problems would probably require full AI capability/human-equivalent thought (something we do not know how to make)

On the other hand, it could also be the case that these problems eventually become "easy" when they are finally solved. Circuits that could add and multiply seemed pretty much like magic when they first appeared. Today they are viewed as "dumb". Face-recognition software is rapidly becoming mainstream, even though just a few years ago it was viewed as extremely difficult, and thirty years ago people like me would probably say it would require human-equivalent thought. Natural language processing and computer learning could take a similar leap, but it wouldn't necessarily mean that computers would be able to do everything else we do.

Because computers doesn't recognize faces like we do, they do it another way, but it still works. Similarly, a breakthrough in natural language processing or computer learning could mean that computers understood natural language (or learned) as well as we do (just like they currently recognize faces as well as we do), but still in a different way. Eventually the frontiers of AI move. When it's a solved engineering problem, it's no longer AI.

I don't know what the definition of AI is, but when humans are no longer needed, I guess we have it.

Huh? He wrote a whole book about his lousy Scheme function, and you can in fact try out the code.

Funny you should mention: Recaro makes an office chair. Awfully pricey, though.

>As for black slaveowners in America: Citation please. (i.e. I call B.S.)

Not that it affects the argument one way or another, but...

http://www.amazon.com/Black-Masters-Family-Color-South/dp/0393303144/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213336625&sr=8-1

You wrote that whole rant but couldn't be bothered to look at what was on your screen? It actually *forces* you to examine the certificate (via the 'Get Certificate' button) prior adding an exception, which is a good thing (to prevent users from blindly clicking OK). Making the exception temporary is as easy as unchecking the 'make this permanent' box.

I'm glad Mozilla has done this, as hopefully it will motivate some webmasters to fix their broken websites.

My company asked me to go through an ergonomic assessment. After getting someone to take pictures of myself at my desk, they recommended a keyboard stand (http://www.ultimatebackstore.com/product-exec/product_id/151?cid=11341%5EScooter+Stand%5EFRO) and a Bodybilt chair (http://www.amazon.com/Bodybilt-100053-400-0402-K3507-High-Back/dp/B000C9T40G). The scooter stand helps get the keyboard in the right position (especially difficult if you have a large monitor).

The chair was really expensive (the link is to one with all the bells and whistles), but has proven to really help. FWIW, I upgraded from the Aeron, and find the Bodybilt to be a lot more comfortable.

I agree completely with the post discussing the relative benefits of buying a great desk chair vs. buying an expensive car. My body spends a LOT more time in the chair!

(No affiliation with the stores I linked to.)

I work at a computer 10-14 hrs a day and I can't sit at a desk. It would drive me nuts. I set up my office with couches and use Belkin Cushtop Stands.

Have you read the book "Daemon" by Leinad Zeraus? Or how about "The Footprints of God" by Greg Iles?
Do you think The Singularity is approaching, and if so, do you think you're prepared for it?

Have you read the book "Daemon" by Leinad Zeraus? Or how about "The Footprints of God" by Greg Iles?
Do you think The Singularity is approaching, and if so, do you think you're prepared for it?

As much as it seems to run counter-intuitively, certain sectors of the government, at different times, whether out of necessity or to follow a fading fad, are using "starfish" decentralization design. Consider Rod A. Beckstrom who wrote The Starfish and the Spider who was appointed to the head of the National Cyber Security Center in March of this year. For whatever the root reason, I for one am glad to see such change taking a foothold, for it seems to be a stepping stone toward greater efficiency and cooperation.

Personally knowing that corporate Wiki's require tender care, I wish this little Wiki luck on it's journey.

http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-History-Tim-Weiner/dp/038551445X

Legacy of Ashes, listening to this in the car right now. Holy shit, the way the CIA operates, it reminds me of my time at a dot.com. Seriously. You have these unwarranted and outsized egos combined with dick-all knowledge of espionage and intelligence-gathering. The same pitiful fuck story that we've read about with Iraq is pretty much the way the CIA operated throughout its entire existence.

Just reading about the idiots in charge is enough to make my teeth hurt. I worked for exactly the same sort of people at dot.coms but hey, ignorance and hubris don't get people killed in the dot.com world. In the spy world, having Soviet agents throughout your organization feeding secrets back home will get people killed. We sent in thousands of agents to infiltrate Soviet-occupied Europe, Korea, China, all of them killed because our organization was compromised. We parachute people in, the secret police are waiting for them on the ground. We get top-level moles in the USSR? Fucking American turncoats sell them out and they get the firing squad. And the CIA directors continue to lie to the President, not that presidents throughout the Cold War were going to disagree when they were told exactly what they asked to hear instead of what they needed to hear, etc etc.

Our government is so fucking incompetent, it's almost like the Russians deserved to win. Our only saving grace was that the Soviet system was more hatefully backward and ignorant than the one we were running. Since the fall of the USSR, our government seems to be desperately seeking to close the stupidity gap.

I am a Drupal homer too. Drupal has a nice book btw. I think Drupal has similar issues of not have a cohesive set of docs. Pro Drupal Development: http://www.amazon.com/Pro-Drupal-Development-John-VanDyk/dp/1590597559/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213215314&sr=8-2 is a nice book to fill in the gaps. I used drupal for a few years before I got my hands on that book. I still don't get Joomla or Mambo.

"Auxiliary pump's broken, sir. Refrigeration. We're losing our ice!" A shower of warm rain shivered down upon them. The captain jerked his head right and left. "Can you see the trouble? Christ, don't stand there, we haven't time!" The men rushed; the captain bent in the warm rain, cursing, felt his hands run over the cold machine, felt them burrow and search, and while he worked he saw a future which was removed from them by the merest breath. He saw the skin peel from the rocket beehive, men, thus revealed, running, running, mouths shrieking, soundless. Space was a black mossed well where life drowned its roars and terrors. Scream a big scream, but space snuffed it out before it was half up your throat. Men scurried, ants in a flaming match-box; the ship was dripping lava, gushing steam, nothing!

...It took all of four seconds for the huge hand to push the empty Cup to the fire. So here we are again, today, on another trail, he thought, reaching for a cup of precious gas and vacuum, a handful of different fire with which to run back up cold space, lighting out way, and take to Earth a gift of fire that might bum forever. Why? He knew the answer before the question. Because the atoms we work with our hands, on Earth, are pitiful; the atomic bomb is pitiful and small and our knowledge is pitiful and small, and only the sun really knows what we want to know, and only the sun has the secret. And besides, it's fun, it's a chance, it's a great thing coming here, playing tag, hitting and running. There is no reason, really, except the pride and vanity of little insect men hoping to sting the lion and escape the maw. My God, we'll say, we did it! And here is our cup of energy, fire, vibration, call it what you will, that may well power our cities and sail our ships and light our libraries and tan our children and bake our daily breads and simmer the knowledge of our universe for us for a thousand years until it is well done. Here, from this cup, all good men of science and religion: Drink!

I wish everyone driving knew how to rebuild their engine. Fuck, I wish they even knew how to change a tire properly.

There will ALWAYS be just a minority of people who really care about how any given thing works. The vast majority of people just don't give a shit. They know just barely enough to get their jobs done to get money to buy the shit they want. They think NO further about things than that. And it's always been that way. It's sad but, as the great philosopher Ron White said, you can't fix stupid. It's a Sisyphean task to attempt to do so ;)

I'd be curious if you'd answer a question for me: What would it take for you to accept evolution as the origin of the species?

Sure, here goes.

The way I understand, there are two really big flaws with evolution as the origin of species. The first is as described in the bookDarwin's Black Box. The author of this book (nuts -- I didn't jot down his name while getting the link from Amazon, sorry) is much more qualified to explain the problem, but I'll give it a shot. When Darwin proposed the theory of evolution, he acknowledged that science had not yet progressed far enough to tell if the difference between similar structures in organisms could indeed have developed in a stepping stone fashion, that is, if for example, the progression from a very simple eye that is capable only of detecting the absence or presence of light and a slightly more complex eye where the light detecting surface has folded into a cup that contains a liquid that acts as a crude lens (one of the examples in the book). Darwin wrote that if such a change could happen in discrete steps small enough to allow individual mutations to build to the more advanced structure, then evolution makes sense, but if such a change could not happen in this fashion, then evolution is a flawed theory. In "Darwin's Black Box", the author claims that these steps are far more complex than Darwin believed, and that they are in fact, too complex for evolution of new structures to occur. Why? Because even a simple change, such as described in the eye example above, is not a single discrete change -- it requires hundreds of mutations in the genome, without any one of which, the organism is no longer more competitive, but rather less competitive, since it is using resources to build structures that are not necessary, until all of the components are in place. This is a layman's explanation of the first problem I have with evolution; the author of "Darwin's Black Box" describes it much better (that is, he begins describing the structures that are required, how they are built and how the genomes code for them; I don't recall all of this information right now).

The second major problem I have with evolution as the origin of species involves the chromosome count of different species. Scientists tell us that either chimps or bonobo apes are the animals most closely related to human beings. Science also tells us that every species on the planet can be distinguished by the number of chromosomes -- IIRC, humans have 23 chromosomes, but both chimps and bonobos have a different number of chromosomes. If humans had evolved from primates, then that means that not only would we have to have evolved the physical differences between humans and apes, but we would also have had to evolve a different number of chromosomes. But that's not enough, either. Suppose through random mutation, such an uber-ape were to evolve. That's not enough, unless like the E. Coli bacteria in TFA that sparked this thread, the apes could reproduce asexually. What happens when you cross-breed two closely related, but still distinct species? In every case so far that leads to living offspring (i.e., horse and donkey, lions and tigers, etc.) you get completely sterile offspring. Thus, for the uber-ape to reproduce and create viable offspring, you would have to not only mutate the genes to create new physical structures and mutate the genes to produce a different number of chromosomes (that is, a different species), but you would also have to simultaneously have a male and female of this new species at the same time so that they could reproduce and perpetuate the species. But we still have a problem. What happens in any sufficiently small, isolated group of individuals? More mutations, most of which are distinctly bad for the mutated individuals. Think of pure-bre

Read, learn, cast off your ignorance.

http://www.amazon.com/Moment-Truth-Iraq-Greatest-Generation/dp/0980076323

For all you 'bush lied people died' ... catchy slogan, but ignorant.

Of Course, when you are draining the swamp, you need to start somewhere ...

The simple way is to look at the Bible for what it is: A collection of writings by different human beings at different points of time who all had different views of the world. That pretty much covers all of the conflicts. It does, however, require you to use your brain from time to time.

Hi! I'm a Christian, and I'd like to introduce you to a version of Christianity you might not have known existed: The kind that believes that if facts conflict with dogma, then facts win.

Rant follows:

There's an interesting history to Fundamentalism, and it (and the history of the Bible) is well-covered in the phenomenal book Whose Bible Is It?. But the short version is that at some point, along with all of the Scientific knowledge that was challenging a lot of how we understood how the world works, a lot of Biblical scholarship occurred since the Enlightenment that was challenging to some standard dogmas. For example, the original Hebrew prophecy of the Messiah spoke of a "young girl," which in the Greek Septuagint -- which was the most popular "Bible" back when the New Testament was being written -- translated into a word meaning "virgin." Well, this eventually snowballed into the Immaculate Conception, but starting from the 1700s or so Christians started to recognize that what really happened was that young teenage Mary got herself knocked up.

As people began to recognize these sorts of things, obviously there was some resistance from those who felt that commonly-held and well-treasured dogmas that had been held for nearly 15 centuries really weren't up for debate, and sometime in the early 20th century these "not up for debate" dogmas were published as pamphlets titled, "The Fundamentals." (From which we get the name, "Fundamentalism.")

Now the key thing to note about this is that this didn't begin as a war between Science and Religion. It started out as a conflict within Religion itself. And it's notable that the Fundamentalists were taking the view that tradition trumped whatever the Bible actually originally said, that mistranslations and misunderstandings of what was in the book that had become traditional -- such as Young Earth Creationism -- were really more important than what had actually been written. You'll note that this is a very different thing from believing in a "literal" interpretation of the Bible.

Well, what's happened is that the Fundamentalists won the war. There are some good churches out there left, but generally the populations in those churches are elderly and dying off; in the rest of the churches, intellectuals are ostracized. Young Christians today know little more than a dumbed-down version of Christianity that's based on living through certain traditions, rather than a "way" or a "walk" to try and understand and learn about God; they think they know all they need to about God, and are ready to show the rest of the world just how it is. (Get off my lawn.)

And this is the Christianity that they now inflict on the rest of the world. It is not my Christianity, not the Christianity I grew up with. But even that good old church was taken over by the Fundamentalists shortly after I left for college. And that war is over.

Oh, as for Genesis 1? When you look at the text repeated in the verses, you see the same things over and over: "And God created... and said it was good." I think the point here is that God created the universe and everything in it, and called it "good." Note how the sun was not created until the 4th day -- so how could there have been an evening and morning? The "days" are just a poetic device, part of the oral tradition, a (very effective) memory trick used to help people remember the story during the many centuries the story existed but hadn't yet been written.

(But if you are one of those Christians who needs the Bible to say something before you believe it, just take a peek at Psalm 90:4; given that Genesis is "The Fir

When you can't see Cheney's right hand and his lips are moving.

i agree with you that the post above is not insightful; however, i will disagree that humans have a higher mutation rate than e.coli. humans have much more accurate error correction machinery than bacteria.

http://www.genetics.org/cgi/content/full/156/1/297

however, the previous post is not insightful for a multitude of reasons. the crucial error is that the anonymous coward is not taking into account various evolutionary forces. the citrate mutation could have appeared and disappeared by chance (genetic drift) multiple times if the citrate metabolism gene did not confer enough of an advantage (generally it has to be s > 1/N, where s is the advantage and N is the population). so the simple arithmetic while adorable, is deeply ignorant. to edify, get this from your library...

http://www.amazon.com/Population-Genetics-John-H-Gillespie/dp/0801880084/

Michael Behe (author of _Darwin's Black Box_ and others) makes an interesting response to this study.

He says, " ... all of the beneficial mutations identified from the studies so far seem to have been degradative ones, where functioning genes are knocked out or rendered less active. So random mutation much more easily breaks genes than builds them, even when it helps an organism to survive."

There still remains little, if any, evidence of random mutations producing MORE and USEFUL genetic information, a key distinction that ID folks like to make.

Scott McClellan's book says not only that they were lying, it says they KNEW they were lying about the intel when they said it.

http://www.amazon.com/What-Happened-Washingtons-Culture-Deception/dp/1586485563