Been having trouble with my Firefox bookmarks lately. For whatever reason, a whole folder is missing, and a zillion bookmarks are scattered everywhere. It's as if a tornado found its way in there and knocked my filing cabinet over. Anyway, that's my excuse. Firefox users, have you experienced any similar oddness?

• MMMmmm. Salmon soda.
• When China, champion of their own insularity, admits it's serious, it's most likely pretty damn serious.
• Can anybody beat Kobayashi's 67 hamburgers in 8 minutes? I doubt it. And who cares?
• I had heard that peanut allergies can be pretty bad, but I never would have imagined they could be this bad.
• Apparently the U.S. Patent Office could use a little reformation.
• It's good to see that someone has this important work covered.
• Satan asks that we cut him some slack.
• Bueller....?...Bueller...?...Frye...? Y'know, I've really come to like Ben Stein's blog, which is actually more of an op-ed thingy for Yahoo, but hey.
• There was a time not long ago where it seemed that everywhere I looked in the blogosphere there was a new conspiracy theory about 9/11, and all of them sounded too improbable even to me. I'm glad to see that some qualified folks have busted the mythos before they could become logos.
• Say, that reminds me...I was gonna bring this up a while ago, cuz it's just so damn interesting, but it got lost in that tipped-over filing cabinet that I mentioned earlier. Keepin' tabs on this one...
• My dog is part aardvark. Whenever our peanut butter is down to brown streaks and the butterknife can no longer mine it effectively, we give the jar to the dog. The other day I gave her the end of a jar of Peter Pan. Oh, how that tail wagged.
  
  I hadn't noticed her jar-dredging technique until then, though. Pretty impressive stuff. To get at the bottom, she takes the jar into her mouth sideways, with the top of her mouth outside the jar and her jaw inside. That gives her tongue those critical extra inches. Like an aardvark tongue-whipping ants from an anthill, she lashes at the bottom and stares forward into oblivion. All her attention is in her tongue. The jar emerges absolutely spotless.
  
  And is there a word cooler than aardvark? Say it a few times. It just gets better and better.
• Every now and then I like to revisit Post Secret. It's fascinating how much interest this thing has generated.
• Remember Sam, the ugliest dog? Well, he's now the ugliest dead dog.
• I'm sure that on the day this news hit the wire, celebrity spats and shark attacks crowded the headlines.
• Great pickup line for the desperate: "Excuse me, does this rag smell like chloroform to you?"
• Usually, I can't stand Inside the Actors Studio. Doesn't matter who the guest is—James Lipton lays on the praise. He lays it on thick, and it never ends. He lays it on like these actors are really, really important. But if you have a chance to catch the Robin Williams "episode", watch the whole thing. The guy's pretty damn amazing.
• Here's your great song of the day.

Labels: commentary

Beat me if you can: I made it to just over 20 seconds on my 4th try. Figured that was enough, considering he benchmarks success at 18 seconds. The "game" isn't really worth a fifth try, so I like my odds against'cha.

I love indie movies. Usually they're superior in many ways to the big budget films we call "Hollywood" films. But don't bother with Me and You and Everyone We Know. It was so pretentious, so full of its own desire to be awkward, that I had to wonder if it was a parody of indie films. It would be a bad parody if true, but it's not the case. It tries to charm with clumsy sweetness, but it's as dull and shallow as it is contrived. It's not a fraction of the film that Napoleon Dynamite is. That's how you do clumsy sweetness.

If the goal of Me & You is to point out that there are lonely, quietly desperate people in the world, then it succeeds, sort of. But there are so many scenes that fail to serve the story or its characters that I wondered aloud how it could have won at Cannes. Then I remembered other films that have won at Cannes, and it made more sense. If the acting wasn't pretty good, the failure would be complete. You do sort of root for the two leads, but that's not enough. If you want to waste four bucks to feel empty and somewhat pissed off at times, then by all means watch it.

I really like Triscuits. Always have. The almost burnt ones are best.

Never been a big candy bar guy. Then I tried a Take 5 at Dave's. Uh-oh.

For what it's worth, I like the following following five words, just for their wordness alone.

• Triage
• Quarrel
• Booger
• Parlance
• Bungalow

Now that you know that, you can get on with your day.

Intelligent Design Revisited

When I realized recently that "Intelligent Design" was a political movement and not just an ontological concept being bandied about (why yes, I had been in a cave), I figured there must be some interesting angles and perspectives out there to ponder. I looked and looked but couldn't find anything particularly compelling on the ID side. A lot of political tripe, and a whole lotta anger, but not much in the way of new ideas or scientific thought.

In fact, some of the arguments being made by proponents of teaching intelligent design in schools seems remarkably simplistic to me. Natural selection has stood the test of time better than any theory of life, period.

But then I did find an argument that stopped me. The notion of "irreducible complexity" is an interesting idea. About ten years ago, Michael J. Behe posited the notion that structures that are irreducibly complex cannot be the product of natural selection because there would have been no selection catalyst for the intermediate steps required to create those complex structures. He uses the human eye as an example. He writes:

How can we decide if Darwin's theory can account for the complexity of molecular life? It turns out that Darwin himself set the standard. He acknowledged that:

"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But what type of biological system could not be formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications"?

Well, for starters, a system that is irreducibly complex. Irreducible complexity is just a fancy phrase I use to mean a single system which is composed of several interacting parts, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to cease functioning.

Let's consider an everyday example of irreducible complexity: the humble mousetrap. The mousetraps that my family uses consist of a number of parts. There are: 1) a flat wooden platform to act as a base; 2) a metal hammer, which does the actual job of crushing the little mouse; 3) a spring with extended ends to press against the platform and the hammer when the trap is charged; 4) a sensitive catch which releases when slight pressure is applied, and 5) a metal bar which connects to the catch and holds the hammer back when the trap is charged. Now you can't catch a few mice with just a platform, add a spring and catch a few more mice, add a holding bar and catch a few more. All the pieces of the mousetrap have to be in place before you catch any mice. Therefore the mousetrap is irreducibly complex.

An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly by numerous, successive, slight modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional. An irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would be a powerful challenge to Darwinian evolution. Since natural selection can only choose systems that are already working, then if a biological system cannot be produced gradually it would have to arise as an integrated unit, in one fell swoop, for natural selection to have anything to act on.

Demonstration that a system is irreducibly complex is not a proof that there is absolutely no gradual route to its production. Although an irreducibly complex system can't be produced directly, one can't definitively rule out the possibility of an indirect, circuitous route. However, as the complexity of an interacting system increases, the likelihood of such an indirect route drops precipitously. And as the number of unexplained, irreducibly complex biological systems increases, our confidence that Darwin's criterion of failure has been met skyrockets toward the maximum that science allows.

Then he goes on to show, from a biochemical standpoint, how truly complex the human eye is, and how complex the process of seeing really is. It reads like a giant run-on sentence with words you've never seen before, like rhodopsin and transducin. It's fucking complex, I'll give him that.

So it bugged me for a while. I lit a cigar and took the dog for a long walk and it continued to bug me. Man, this guy had a real moment when that light went on, I thought. But then it hit me. He's looking at function as an immutable concept. Irreducibly complex systems like the eye could indeed evolve in stages because the function of the system, or the function of individual components in the system, can change over time.

In general, I think many people assume that God is incompatible with evolution, but how can that be the case? These are not mutually exclusive concepts. Why they can't find comfort in the possibility that God, whatever that means, created natural selection as the process of creation, so that creation does not have these sudden binary moments: Life On, Life off.

We should all keep digging.

But anyway, back to work...

Okay, now THIS is cool. It took me a while to realize what I was looking at. I wonder how long it'll take Google to buy these guys. Check out the MyBlinkx.tv link. Imagine combining this with Google's burgeoning video database. It's a little choppy at times, even with broadband cable, but I can see where this is going.

You can lose hours in there.

So an old 1975 Ford Escort fetched nearly $700,000. Yes, someone wanted this classic lemon, this emblem of decades-long inferiority for American automobile designers and engineers, because it was once Pope John Paul's car. It's headed for a museum. Would you stop to look at a Ford Escort? I guarantee someone will see Jesus or Mary in the bumper rust.

Speaking of which, I'm becoming more and more fascinated with the naivete and desperation at the root of this kind of delusion. It's a branch. A branch.

When I read the headline, "Microsoft Aims to Trounce Google", I had to chuckle. In a battle of brains, strategy, and speed to market, I would NOT bet against Google. But there IS a war on the horizon, and it should be fun to watch.

If I had seen this Alan Greenspan Halloween mask in time, I'd have worn it every time the doorbell rang last night. Dang.

Speaking of Halloween and last night, two large vans parked on our street. They were packed with people not from our neighborhood, who proceeded to ring ring ring, fail to say "Trick or Treat", and stand there with open bags. Many of them didn't even have costumes on. I asked one kid, who was about 16—too old to participate in the first place—why he wasn't wearing a costume. "I'm some guy from T.V."

I gave him a stale caramel.

Two or three adults...I'm talking 40 year olds, also showed up with open bags. One woman had the gall to show up twice. The second time, I said, "You've already been here. And this isn't about handouts. It's for the kids." She looked at me as if *I* was the asshole.

Another guy, who might have been fifty, showed up alone and without a costume. I gave him my pissed face.

"What are you?"

"I'm a bum."

"Honesty is good. Have a snickers."

Last year, it was all kids in superhero outfits with their parents waiting at the end of the driveway. A Hallmark Halloween. Next year, our front light might be off. Besides...unless you're at a party, Halloween sucks.

So, Mr. Sulu is gay. Perfect picture for the headline, but:

1. This was deduced years ago, George.
2. WHO THE HELL CARES?

Okay, this is one of the neatest articles I've read in a while. Give it its due five minutes. Even if you couldn't care less about absinthe, it's a good read.

This guy is pretty damn scary.

I wouldn't have guessed that we'd turn to wasps for bomb detection. Pretty amazing stuff.

I love this song. I've always loved this song. This song takes me directly to 1992. It takes me directly to the things I felt at that time. I love this song.

Labels: commentary