Intelligent Design

August 6, 2005 at 8:04 am · Filed under Uncategorized

The National Center for Science Education has an excellent description of Intelligent Design.

[via the Leiter Reports]

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Away, away

August 6, 2005 at 7:17 am · Filed under Uncategorized

Vacation. A deeply-needed but long-postponed vacation.

To be frank, it’s been the worst year in our family’s history. A real hell of a year. So we need it.

Back in a week from the rockpile.

Pictures and discussion here,as they arrive.

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Cisco plays a risky game — not by creating a bug, but by hiding its existence

August 4, 2005 at 10:15 am · Filed under Uncategorized

At Copyfight, more on the developing saga:

Kieren McCarthy at Techworld hits the nail on the head, noting that Cisco has been “heavy handed” and the result has been a backfire of major proportions. The story is everywhere; the presentation is hot. Note to all you control freaks: do not, repeat DO NOT hit the blob of mercury with the hammer. Really.

A bad business. On the face of it a very bad move on the part of Cisco. By which I mean coming down hard on the people who seek to spread word of the threat.

From the comments:

Improvements to internet security will NOT become a reality as the result of questionable secrecy or from commercial lawsuits that serve to mask the more substantial and fundamental problems within the information security industry and Internet community at large. Security through obscurity doesn’t work, and neither does security through lawyering. These practices make the Internet more, not less, vulnerable.

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You want it but you do not know you want it. [2 August 2005 edition]

August 2, 2005 at 11:27 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

We bought a little less than 3 acres of meadow a few weeks back. And soon we are going to have to build a house.

Our current house is a serviceable 1960s colonial-style with three supernumerary bedrooms (we use two) and 4 bathrooms and a partially finished basement and a two-car garage, all full of crap. Our new house, which will be all custom and handicapped-accessible and energy-efficient (and made mostly out of styrofoam and sawdust), will also be nicer because it will be much less full of crap.

I don’t think it will be much bigger. So you do the math.

Hang on — did I just say “crap”? Bad me. Far more accurate if I say desirable and hard-to-find gently-used items at rock-bottom prices.

Anyway, howsabout you see if you can make this fine stuff stop being my crap? We need the room. In a tripping-over-knee-high-piles kind of way. In an “Oh yeah did I mention the 20-by-10 storage facility full of books?” kind of way.

Until I get a certain minor RSS and Amazon Marketplace API thingie worked out, I find that I must to draw your attention to this by brute force. Viz, just look at these pleasant and alluring items on offer at Amazon.com, where there are about 250 books today, and will be maybe 5000 when we get done sorting out boxes:

• Make Way: 200 Years of American Women in Cartoons by Monika Franzen, Nancy Ethiel. University of Chicago, 1987.
• Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions : Essays in Comparative Religion by Mircea Eliade. Chicago, 1978.
• The Threat and the Glory: Reflections on Science and Scientists by Peter Medawar. Oxford, 1991.
• More Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion, & Morality/Book II (More Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion & Morality) by Steve Allen. Prometheus, 1993.
• Science and First Principles by F.S.C. Northrup. Ox Bow Press, 1979.
• Einstein as Myth and Muse by Alan J. Friedman, Carol C. Donley. Cambridge, 1989.
• Life at the Edge of Chaos: Creating the Quantum Organization by a Bunch of Crackpot Scam-Artists Mark D. Youngblood, John Renesch (Editor). Perceval Publishing, 1997.
• Story of Stupidity: A History of Western Idiocy from the Days of Greece to the Present by James F. Welles. Mount Pleasant Press, 1988.
• De figuris Veneris: Manual of classical erotology by Friedrich Karl Forberg. Holloway House, 1967.
• The Pomo Tarot: A Postmodern Deck for Navigating the Next Millennium by Brian Williams. US Games, 1994.
• License Your Invention by Richard Stim. Nolo Press, 1998.
• Graphical Exploratory Data Analysis by S. H. C. DuToit, A. G. W. Steyn, R. H. Stumpf. Springer, 1986.
• The Venture Capital Cycle by Paul Gompers, Josh Lerner. MIT Press, 1999.
• Reality is What You Can Get Away With by Robert Anton Wilson. Dell, 1992.
• Wilde West by Walter Satterthwaite. St. Martin’s Press, 1991.
• The Prydain Companion: A Reference Guide to Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles by Michael O. Tunnell. Henry Holt, 1993.
• Obfuscated C and Other Mysteries by Don Libes. Wiley, 1992.
• Tetrascroll by R. Buckminster Fuller. St. Martin’s Press, 1982.

And others. Many, many, many others.

You want books. You read — I’ve seen you doing it. Just, you know… do it more.

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