Thursday, 31 March, 2005. 12:02:58 AMScientists right to boycott evolution hearings
What if the State Board of Education held evolution hearings and no
scientists showed up?
A boycott of the hearings now appears likely -- and it's understandable
if scientists stay away in droves.
Simply put, the hearings have no credibility.
Kansas Citizens for Science called for a boycott earlier this month,
saying scientists shouldn't participate in a "rigged hearing where
non-scientists will appear to sit in judgment and find science
lacking."
Mainstream scientists seem to have reached a similar conclusion: This
is a show trial.
"We're not getting any takers," said Diane DeBacker of the Kansas
Department of Education staff, which is helping organize the May
hearings. She said they've contacted the 10 scientists who submitted
peer reviews of the "minority report" of the standards committee.
They've also contacted all six Kansas regents universities.
No takers.
They've gone national, too, with similarly dismal results.
It's not hard to understand scientists' reluctance.
The format of the hearings --"experts" debating for and against
evolution -- suggests a rough equivalence of legitimacy that simply
doesn't exist.
And what about credentials? What kind of standard will there be for ID
witnesses? A science Ph.D.? Significant publications on evolution in
mainstream science journals?
As Steve Case, co-chair of the BOE science writing committee said in
opposing the hearings, "This kind of forum has nothing in common with
the way the science community advances scientific understanding."
Besides, the three creationist BOE members presiding over the hearings
appear to have already made up their minds. So what's the point?
The hearings serve no purpose other than to provide political cover for
these board members, who know they must give at least the appearance of
academic rigor and legitimacy to their anti-science crusade.
The scientific community shouldn't give them that cover. for the
editorial board, Randy Scholfield
--
Tony Schountz, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Biology
Mesa State College
1100 North Ave.
Grand Junction, CO 81501
http://home.mesastate.edu/~tschount/
Office 970-248-1936 : Lab 248-1815 : FAX 248-1700
Wednesday, 30 March, 2005. 01:44:32 PMA: Because it destroys the flow of conversation.
Q: Why is top posting dumb? --clover_kicker
Wednesday, 30 March, 2005. 12:03:24 PMI'm back in St. Louis now, after travelling to Michigan for Grandma's
funeral. The funeral was very nice, though the service was done by a
Baptist minister. Grandma was a Salvationist; a member of the Salvation
Army. The church is organized into a military-like hierarchy, with
a high ranking officer leading a church in the role of a minister. My
Aunt Peggy was in charge of organizing the funeral, and for whatever
reason she didn't try to get the Major of the Salvation Army in Kalamazoo
to do the service. He was available, because he attended the funeral
and said a prayer for grandma, but the Baptist minister performed the
actual service. Grandma wasn't Baptist, and she never was. Nevertheless,
he did a nice job, and respected the language of the Salvation Army, using
the term "promoted to glory" as a Salvationist would.
Whenever my father's family gets together, there's always something
happening, usually a commotion of some kind. It was Dave's turn this
time. The Major and his wife (also a Major I believe) arrived early.
The Major's wife walked up to the grandma's children seated in the
front row to offer her condolences. As she walked up, my Uncle said "Can
I ask you a question?" Just a few minutes before, my Uncle Dave told me
an off-color joke about the Salvation army, so I sort of knew something
bad was coming. The Major's wife said "yes, of course", so Uncle Dave
said "Does the Salvation Army save bad girls?" At that, I started walking
away very quickly. I didn't want to stick around for the punchline,
but I could hear it unfold behind me. The Major's wife must have been
suspicious, because she didn't answer right away, but then said that yes,
the Salvation Army does. Uncle Dave finished the joke "In that case,
could you save one for me?" The Major's wife was not amused, and I heard
a very stern "NO!" behind me. I was very quickly and thankfully out of the
room.
Everybody has a crazy relative in their family, but my family has
a greater than usual dose I think. Despite minister fiscos, and
off-color jokes being told to minister's wives, the day turned out
very nice after all, certainly no worse than any other family reunion.
Friday, 25 March, 2005. 09:42:46 PMFound the memory bug in the bash parser. PTList had an extra child node
that was set to NULL.
todo:
-Word Equal needs to print out the text
-redirections need to print out the redirection type
Friday, 25 March, 2005. 12:43:27 AMThe bash parser just parsed a second complex script successfully, but
the routines that display the parse tree have a bug in there somewhere.
Wednesday, 23 March, 2005. 11:59:08 PMGrandma's funeral is on Monday, so I'm going to go to Austin on Friday
night as usual, but I'll return to St. Louis on Sunday instead of Monday.
I'll drive up to Michigan in the rental car, attend the funeral, and drive
back to St. Louis on Tuesday. I'll be back to work on Wednesday.
Wednesday, 23 March, 2005. 11:50:54 PMShould Congress and the President be involved in the Schiavo matter?
Yes 13
No 82
The Republicans have really hosed themselves this time. The memo leaked
from Santorum's office a week ago predicted this would be a "great political
issue" that they could bash Democrats with. That's what they get for
meddling in the private affairs of a family, and for meddling in the
business of the State of Florida, to cynically take advantage of a tragic
situation.
Tuesday, 22 March, 2005. 10:02:33 PMJust got off the phone with Mom. My Grandma died tonight at 20 minutes to 10PM
Eastern time. She was 92 years old. I'm on an assignment about 8 hours
from E. Lansing in O'falon MO, so I will be driving up there to attend
the funeral.
Tuesday, 22 March, 2005. 12:56:47 PMJust got a call from my sister in Minnesota. She says that my grandmother
is in the hospital and isn't doing well.
Tuesday, 22 March, 2005. 11:40:32 AMEvery time we get our Audi fixed we get followup phone calls and things
in the mail asking us to take a survey to tell them how they are doing.
Damned annoying, as annoying as spammers and telemarketers. I'm going
to see if I can get them to stop calling us.
Tuesday, 22 March, 2005. 11:14:34 AMThe OpenOffice setup program is called oopadmin.
Monday, 21 March, 2005. 04:10:31 PMThe enlistment age is now 39, because of recruitment shortfalls.
Friday, 18 March, 2005. 10:08:27 PMAlso the number of files in the bash parser has expanded to 75.
Friday, 18 March, 2005. 10:04:31 PMThe basis for the treeview is built now, but the addition of the wxWidgets
library has caused the compilation time to go from 1:15 to almost 5 minutes.
Friday, 18 March, 2005. 02:30:07 AMI found a bug in the Debian version of the wxWidgets library. The debug
version of the setup.h file has the symbol wxUSE_DEBUG_CONTEXT set to 0,
which disables debugging contexts. If I set it to 1, then the wxDebugContext
symbol is undefined. It looks like the debug libraries are screwed up. I
think that I may have to build my own copies.
Thursday, 17 March, 2005. 01:35:12 PMMy food database now contains a full year of everything that I have eaten.
Wednesday, 16 March, 2005. 05:16:49 PMTiVo made a big deal with Comcast this week to put their TiVo software into
subscriber's cable boxes. This is great news, because I don't want to
see TiVo fail. I got mine in August of 2000, and I've hardly watched
a commercial since then, hardly missed my favorite shows, and hardly watched
anything I didn't want to.
Tuesday, 15 March, 2005. 11:47:16 PMThe bash parser is coming along pretty well now. I'm working on the code
that builds the parse tree structure. I've added about 2000 lines of code
this week so far, and the number of files has ballooned from 6 to 50. Most
of the work right now is furious typing, adding the code to build the tree
to all of the grammar elements in the parser definition. When that's done,
I'll be building the visualizer code. For that I'm planning to use the
wxWidgets cross platform GUI library. Once that is complete, then I will
return to some parser and lexer debugging.
While thinking about how to analyze the parse tree I came up with an interesting
idea for how the language will look. I'll have to spend
some time thinking about how this is going to work.
Monday, 14 March, 2005. 05:36:53 PMKristiana is starting to develop her sense of humor now. When she was done
eating on Saturday, Alex was asking her if she was done, and if she
wanted out of the high chair she should say "down". Every time Alex would
ask her to say "down" Kristiana would say "up" and start laughing. And on
Sunday night I was giving her a bath when the dogs came in to see what was
going on. They stuck their heads up to the edge of the tub and Kristiana
was letting them lick her hand while at the same time laughing hysterically.
Friday, 11 March, 2005. 01:25:46 PMThe parser is mostly working now, so it's time to build the parse tree
and the parse tree visualizer. With these I will be able to examine
in detail exactly how each script is parsed, to track down any remaining
bugs in the parser.
Lemon accepts an additional parameter on the parser, which I am using to
encapsulate the parser state. Part of the state will be a pointer to the
root of the parse tree. Each node in the parse tree is derived from a
basic tree object, and corresponds to a syntactical element. The tree
is built up as the source is parsed.
Friday, 11 March, 2005. 12:08:53 PMFrom Wikipedia: "James D. Nicoll made the oft-quoted observation: 'The
problem with defending the purity of the English language is that
English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow
words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways
to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.'"
Friday, 11 March, 2005. 12:01:18 PMI have a tricky problem with the bash parser. The bang character ('!')
can precede a construct called a pipeline where it negates the return
value of the pipeline. Or, in other places a bang can be a parameter to
an internal command such as 'test' or a parameter to an external command.
After some thinking I believe that I can distinguish between the two
in the lexer by checking the last tokens list. If the previous
significant token read is a WORD, then the bang character will also be
a WORD. If the previous token read is not a word, then the bang character
will be tokenized as a BANG.
Thursday, 10 March, 2005. 11:01:27 PMI'm working through another script with my bash parser. This one uses some
different kinds of string, which are forcing me to tweak that whole
section of my lexical analyzer.
Thursday, 10 March, 2005. 03:50:46 PMMy bash parser has accepted it's first full real shell script! The script
was the 887 line /usr/bin/ucf found on my Debian system.
Wednesday, 09 March, 2005. 02:58:01 PMIn 2000 I said (you'll just have to take my word on it) that diabetes
would be completely cured within 10 years. By cured, I meant that
patients would not have to take insulin or do anything special
because of their condition. Today, the BBC is reporting that
a 61 year-old
man has become the first person in the UK to be cured of type 1
diabetes. And it turns out that I missed that the cure was first
successful in 2001 in Canada. It works by transplanting islet cells from
a donor pancreas into the patient with diabetes, but there's a shortage
of donor organs. Japanese researchers are working on a way
to transplant cells from healthy/alive people, and there is also work
on turning stem cells into pancreas islet cells.
Monday, 07 March, 2005. 02:32:39 PMI've been meaning to write a few words about the 360 Primo coffee shop
on Great Hills Trail in Austin. I first noticed it a couple weeks ago,
so Alex and I went in an ordered some coffee. When we lived in Lansing
we used to go to the Cappucino Cafe regularly. They had good coffee
and we'd meet friends there. Since we've been in Austin we haven't gone
to too many coffee shops, since I can't stand Starbucks' nasty coffee.
360 Primo has really terrific coffee, the way it should be made and
served. I was pleased that when I ordered the coffee they didn't ask if
I wanted the Big Gulp, Super Big Gulp, or the Mega Super Fatty Gulp. I
ordered a cup of coffee, and I got a cup (8 ounces) of coffee, Italian
Roast, just perfect. I had a bagel too, though they didn't have salt
bagels at all. Nobody in Texas seems to have heard of a salt bagel. Anyway,
they need to have a few more customers there, and some more seating would
be nice too. The shop itself is very slick looking, which was probably required
by the corporation that franchises the shop. I've been meaning to try out
the Trianon coffee shop on Far West too. It's a local business, and local
flavor is part of the whole point of living in Austin.
Friday, 04 March, 2005. 01:19:55 PMA star of just 96 times the mass of Jupiter was discovered. That's 0.09
solar masses. I was wondering just how long a star that small would last.
The formula for the lifetime of a star is:
lifetime = 1/star's mass in sol mass units^p-1 E10 years
For small stars, p is 4, so the formula becomes 1/0.09^3 X 10^10 = 1.37174211E13 years. Written out, that is 13,717,421,100,000 years, or almost 14 trillion years. By comparison, our own sun will burn out after a lifetime of about 10 billion years which is less than a thousandth as long.
Thursday, 03 March, 2005. 03:18:11 PMGlobal Flyer landed safely in Salina, Kansas this afternoon. I went downstairs
to watch it on the big screen TV's by the cafeteria.
Thursday, 03 March, 2005. 11:33:47 AMSteve Fossett in the Global Flyer is back over the United States this
morning. He picked up a better than expected jet stream wind of 150mph,
and that gave him the additional speed needed to finish the flight on
the fuel he had remaining. He should be landing again in Kansas around
1:20 PM central time.
Wednesday, 02 March, 2005. 02:19:03 PMThe fuel problem on the Global Flyer is turning out to be a possible
fuel miscalculation. The plane was loaded with 18,000 pounds at takeoff,
but due to an unknown problem about 2,600 pounds are now missing. It
is not known if the fuel was loaded incorrectly, or if it leaked after
takeoff. Earlier in the flight the Global Flyer reached its cruising
altitude of 47,000 feet over the mid-Atlantic instead of over Saudi
Arabia, because of better than expected aircraft performance. Now it
seems clear that the better aircraft performance was because it was
missing 2,600 pounds of fuel weight.
Wednesday, 02 March, 2005. 11:27:56 AMGlobal Flyer is over Japan, but is suffering from a problem with the fuel
system. It may not have enough fuel to complete the flight. The plan is
to continue on to Hawaii and then decide if they can make the destination,
or if they will have to land somewhere in the Western US.
Wednesday, 02 March, 2005. 01:18:44 AMGlobal Flyer is over central India. By tomorrow morning it'll be well out
over the Pacific ocean.
Tuesday, 01 March, 2005. 03:01:15 PMGlobaly Flyer is over Libya with no problems to report.