Uncomfortable Questions: Was the Death Star Attack an Inside Job?
- March 26th, 2008I’ve had my suspicions all along.
(via reddit.com)
That damned evil nazi science
- March 26th, 2008Here’s something from the reviews of the movie Expelled that bothers me. The movie apparently goes to some length to connect the theory of evolution to Nazi policies that lead to the Holocaust.
Supporters of Intelligent Design divide evolution into macroevolution and microevolution. Macroevolution is the large scale evolution from one species into another. Microevolution on the other hand is change that comes about from selective breeding within a species. It is hard if not impossible to argue against microevolution because it’s effects are observable. And from what I can tell no one who supports Intelligent Design disagrees with it.
You don’t need to go further than a concept of microevolution to find some scientific justification for eugenics. Macroevolution is actually noise as far as any argument around eugenics is concerned. The idea is about improving humans as a race by selective breeding and not about creating a new species of super-humans.
It is also certain people were aware of the idea of microevolution before Darwin, we’ve have been breeding animals for millennia. Eugenics isn’t anything new either. In Sparta, weak babies were left out in the cold to die. If wikipedia is anything to go by, this was something of a point of inspiration for the Nazis.
The movie is about how the Intelligent Design people are getting the short end of the stick. And this is the bit of evolution pretty much everyone agrees about. So how did it end up in the movie and as an example of the theory of evolution gone bad?
Roshan’s Photographs
- March 23rd, 2008
Rosh’s photography skills appear to be getting better. Some credit due to those awesomely expensive lenses he owns. More pictures on picasa.
PZ Myers was expelled from Expelled.
- March 21st, 2008Using the exam document class[pdf]
- March 14th, 2008I’ve started using Latex and it’s exam document class to set our recruitment question papers. This is after spending some time wrangling with NeoOffice to get the formatting right. The biggest issue for me was that I just couldn’t get nested lists to work. I’m sure the options are all there somewhere, but since I don’t do much word processing it didn’t seem worth the effort.
I could possibly have used HTML instead of Latex, but then I would have had to invest more time into the css and getting the formatting correct. The exam document class let me get up and running pretty fast. And I doubt html would look better.
Latex has a couple of plus points over the competition, the ability to generate pretty mathematical formulae, embed the solutions into the question paper, syntax highlighting for code snippets. And it handles page breaks beautifully.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
- March 13th, 2008Ferrofluids for sale
- March 10th, 2008You can actually buy ferrofluids. They even can be ordered through amazon.
Thanks Rosh, for pointing this out.
Ghoti
- March 10th, 2008An alternate spelling for the word fish using the fa sound from tough, i from the plural women, and sha from solution.
(via kottke.org)
dirdiff.py
- March 8th, 2008This is simple script for creating a zip file that can be used to patch a directory with a newer version.
It is pretty easy to use.
python dirdiff.py newdir olddir diff.zip
Newdir has changes that need to be added to olddir.To apply the changes all we have to do is run unzip.
unzip diff.zip -d olddir
There are a couple of limitations in the script. There is no way of telling it to ignore particular files or directories. Since I work with svn I have to get rid of the .svn directories by doing an svn export before running the script. It doesn’t do anything smart with end of lines or spaces. This is not a issue for me because I make sure all my code follows unix end of lines. And since the output is a zip file, it won’t delete files or directories that are no longer present in the new version.
india.reddit.com
- March 5th, 2008Reddit added an india specific sub-reddit a few weeks ago. It's a bit slow, early days I guess, but it should pick up as more people start using it.
I get a lot of my news and information through reddit, and to a lesser extent dig. The US slant is a bit tedious but I've learnt to filter it out. One thing I really miss on reddit is local content, so this could be pretty cool.