The whole issue is stupid, in my opinion, because there is absolutely no conflict between science and faith. It seems like a religious crusade to save people and to make those doing the saving feel good about themselves believing they have served a higher purpose; an act that seems very selfish to me.

"The school board member's concern was to counteract "science taught as dogma," [Patrick] Gillen [attorney for Dover, Pennsylvania, Area School District] said."
Source Article: Reuters UK

Science is not a faith, thus it cannot be dogma, sorry. I wonder where his "concern" originated and how he came to believe that science is a religion? Also, why is science really under attack? Wouldn't it be easier to insert Intelligent Design into curriculum's other than science?

"Scott A. Minnich, an associate professor of microbiology at the University of Idaho, testified for the defense on Thursday and Friday, likening intelligent design to seeing a watch and implicitly knowing that it had a designer - the argument the plaintiffs' lawyer called "a meager little analogy."
Source Article: The New York Times

That watch was "created" by a being to measure the passage of time using science as a tool for its creation. Perhaps Minnich went to some "special" university to get his PhD where, since science doesn't seem to be his strong suit, science wasn't stressed too heavily.

I wish more people could understand that there is no conflict between science and faith. The Dover school board members should consider working at a private school since they obviously seem to have issues with the public education system. They also seem to have critical thinking issues, which is ironic since they claim that they are trying to promote critical thinking with Intelligent Design. The US is a great place, people can choose private or public educations, but trying to make a public school cater to private interests isn't the appropriate course.

The music video for EVE Online titled EVE Never Fades is awesome. I highly recommend watching it, especially the XL version. Every scene in the music video was captured from actual game play, nothing has been externally rendered or enhanced. EVE is a beautiful game. The more I think about EVE, the more I think about playing. Hop in a ship, explore the stars, and blow shit up, all in settings that look like pictures from the Hubble telescope, sounds fun to me.

I have used WinAmp and iTunes for music playback for quite a while, but one thing that seems to be lacking in both is a sort of smart shuffle. As a Communications major, I took a class or two dealing with radio broadcasting, specifically how radio stations program content. The concept is simple, there are a minimum of three levels or categories of music, high, medium, and low rotation. The names are fairly self explanatory. High rotation songs are the popular songs that you hear hourly on a music radio station. Medium and low rotation songs are played with less frequency than the songs on high rotation, though they maybe songs by artists also in the high rotation category. Medium and low rotation are also where the songs that will become popular generally start out. Think of it as a rankings chart with the popular songs being played hourly and the songs near the bottom played perhaps every two or three hours.

Now, both WinAmp and iTunes us the ID3 tags for music, which includes a "rating" option from zero to five. People can rate their own music and then construct playlists that play their favorite songs. This is all well and good, but the problem with constructing a playlist of favorites is that it only plays the songs rated as favorites and ignores tracks that do not yet have a rating, such as new music. A person will never hear any of their other songs if they are only playing their favorite music, unless they manually switch to a different playlist or randomly shuffle their entire music library.

The problem that I have with shuffle is there is no way to control the songs that are played, because it is random. There are settings that can have shuffle choose songs randomly by artist, album, or group, as in iTunes, but it is still lacking.

I want a shuffle that plays my higher rated songs more often, while still playing songs randomly from my entire library. The reason is I like to listen to my favorite music, who doesn't? But I also want to listen to new music that I have added to my library or that I may not have rated or listened to yet. This kind of shuffle is why I think people enjoy listening to the radio, because there will be favorites mixed with new music that they may never have heard before but will enjoy.

With a smart shuffle, a song's rating would determine how often the song is played, or how likely the song would be chosen to be played. It would allow people to discover new favorites in their library that they might never have otherwise listened to, because any song could still be played from the library. This would also allow people to change musical moods gradually and naturally, by re-rating songs and thus altering how often those songs are played.

I would love to know if what I have described, or attempted to describe, actually exists, since I haven't tried too hard to locate the feature in iTunes or WinAmp. I was able to locate some WinAmp plugins that do almost what I describe, but they seem bloated and designed more for internet radio casts than casual listening.

My site is constantly getting spam comments that need deleting. I was wondering if inserting some referral code into the Movable Type comment.cgi would help make sure that a comment request was actually coming from my site and not from some bot making random requests to the comment file. Any ideas? Seems like it could be a simple solution.

Well, I updated to Movabletype 3.2 but the following MT code doesn't seem to work properly <MTArchiveList archive_type="Daily" lastn="7">. The code is supposed to display the last 7 daily archives, but it seems to be instead showing the entries from within the past 3 days. I want the last 7 days on which I posted to be displayed on my main page, Movabletype 3.14 was able to do this without any problems or modifications to my templates. Any advice? Going to the Movabletype support page was kind of a dead end because it told me what I already know; MTArchive description. I also have the same code in the sidebar, <MTArchiveList archive_type="Monthly" lastn="3">, is supposed to display the past 3 months with posts in the "Archives" section, it is instead only displaying 1 month. I am extremely irritated by this because I didn't want to work on my site and was happy just posting to it. Here is my index template code.

Well, though experimenting with the lastn="N" attribute I have concluded that, for some reason, my Movable Type build is dividing the "N" integer by approximately three. I was only able to get one day when I set lastn="3", but it displays seven days when I set lastn="21". I said "approximately" because the rule doesn't always work, for example I set lastn="14" and got five days of posts. I have no idea why my MT build it is doing this, it was fine before I upgraded from 3.14 to 3.2. Any ideas? Is Movably Type v3.2 not so good at math?

PBWiki looks kinda cool, but I'm not sure exactly how I would use it. Perhaps Jason and I could start a wiki for the turn-based strategy game that we were thinking about. If anyone has any ideas for making a wiki I would be very interested to hear them.

Hehe. I love making myself laugh.

[ Posted at 02:46 AM | Comments(2) ]

I recently, well a month ago, updated my Movable Type version, so some settings where a little off. Comments were apparently inaccessible as a result of that upgrade. Comments are again working. I was wondering why nobody was commenting on my awesome Frodo with a fro pic, but now I know.