Dawn of the Geeks

AAAS Backs Groups’ Copyright Move Against Kansas School Board

With misinformation about evolution and the nature of science at issue in proposed Kansas science education standards, AAAS strongly supports two national science organizations that announced today they are unable to allow use of their copyrighted material in the standards.

AAAS also said it would be more than willing, through its Project 2061 science-literacy initiative, to help the Kansas State Board of Education improve the pending standards.

“AAAS is extremely concerned that the proposed standards misrepresent both the content and the standing of evolution as a scientific organizing principle,” said Alan I. Leshner, the association’s chief executive officer.

AAAS, which provided advice during the drafting of the standards, is eager to help craft appropriate language on evolution so the state’s schoolchildren are not confused about the subject and the nature of science.

For many months, national science groups have been urging Kansas officials to revise the draft standards. The standards both single out evolution as a controversial theory, despite the wealth of evidence supporting it, and delete a previous reference to science as a search for natural explanations of observable phenomena.

There is no “wealth of evidence” supporting evolution. There is a wealth of evidence that shows that things change over time. This does nothing to disprove Creationism or Intelligent Design. The key doctrine of evolution is that species evolve into other species (man and apes evolved from a common ancestor). There’s no definitive evidence to support this. And as such, evolution is a fairy tale, a religion. This is why those who blindly accept evolution are throwing a temper tantrum and blocking their literature from being used in a school system that dares to challenge them. Their position is indefensible. Kansas was being fair by trying to teach two sides to an issue but some evolutionists aparantly are too childish to be able to deal with that.

Which is fine I think. Kansas should just throw evolution out of the school system entirely and tell their students if they want to learn about it, they can look it up on-line. Schools can’t teach everything. Schools can instead just teach the science that things adapt to survive and cut the religious part of evolution out entirely. Adaptation is NOT Evolution. Why waste everyone’s time by indoctrinating students to believe that humans and apes have a common ancestor when they could be far more productive teaching real science; adaptation?

Leave the “where did we come from?” question to the philosophy courses where it belongs.

Don’t Fox with my local news

Every once in awhile I get spam to my university e-mail address. This is because people like Timothy Karr are retarded. Just because my e-mail address is run by a government owned institution doesn’t mean you get to spam all the university students with your idiotic drivel. “Raven Magazine” also spams and their magazine sucks. Which is probably why they have to spam. One time they sent a sample cartoon trying to show how cool and hip they are. I don’t think I’d ever seen anything less funny.

I happen to like the idea of Fox News getting involved with local news stations. Maybe they’ll finally start to be a little more balance. But that’s not what far left, unfairminded people like Karr would like you to think. The far left constantly whines that the media isn’t promoting their idiocy and insteads tends more towards center if a little off to the left. But not left enough for the far left.

Too bad.

Air America is exactly what the far left wants all media to be and not surprisingly, Air America is involved in a scandal (they borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars from a charity of all things) and has horrible ratings. People don’t want to watch or listen to uninformed rants and raves. And I especially don’t want them in my inbox unsolicited.

Leerink Swann & Company Initiates Coverage of Avanir Pharmaceuticals (AMEX: AVN)

This morning, Senior Biotechnology Analyst, William Tanner, Ph.D., initiated coverage of Avanir Pharmaceuticals (AMEX: AVN) with an Outperform rating. His investment rating is based on his research that Avanir’s agent for pseudobulbar affect (PBA), Neurodex(TM), could be used with nearly half of the patients with PBA, implying a market opportunity in excess of $250 million, as supported by MEDACorp survey findings.

Industry Recognizes Provident Energy for Efficient Operating Cost Management

Provident Energy Trust (Provident) (TSX:PVE.UN) PVX was awarded a Canadian Upstream Achievement Award for Western Canadian Operations today at Ziff Energy Group’s 2005 North American Gas Strategies Conference. The award recognizes the fact that Provident, despite its fields’ declining production, has been able to maintain the same unit operating costs (dollars per barrel of oil equivalent) by focusing on operations that reduce total costs.

where you just can’t seem to say anything intelligent?

I’m going to try to break the cycle before I go to bed tonight.

PVX…tanking. AVN…tanking. These are the two stocks of which I own a small number of shares. AVN just sold like 13 million dollars worth of shares to investors and the stock promptly dropped below the price they were bought at. I can imagine the buyers feel a big R of regret right now. But, hey, AVN is a small company so they can just say it was charity. Business loses are also a tax right off.

I really don’t know what PVX’s problem is. I imagine it’s Hurricane Wilma threatening the oil refineries in the gulf that’s a big part of it. Otherwise, who knows. That stock goes up and down a half dollar at a time on some days. It’s rediculous. I’m used to stocks that move a few cents on any given day either up or down. PVX is having seizures.

My ad revenue is going up. I’m actually getting on track to my first $100 month. This is due in large part to using mod_rewrite and Digital Point’s ad-network program. Since both were implemented near simultaniously I can’t say which had the bigger effect. I can only judge the number of refering web-sites vs the number of search terms that result in hits. More web-site referers means the ads are working. More search term hits means the mod_rewrite is working.

indie-mobile has seen the largest increase in visitors. It should, I mean in all non-modesty, the site is awesome. The only problem is lack of exposure which seems to be getting fixed. If I want a ringtone, I use indie-mobile. If I want the lastest MP3 on my phone I can use myMobile. If I want a picture out of a magazine or a photo I took as a wallpaper on my phone, I use myMobile. It’s all free. There’s no reason to charge for a ringtone except that people will pay for it for some reason. And I don’t care to rip people off.

At the time of this entry indie-mobile has served up over a quarter of a million tones. My goal is to break 1 million before the two year mark since I started keeping count. So maybe 1/3 of a million this year and at least 2/3 next year. I think a double is a modest goal. We’ll see.

The Register has a run a story on the failings of Wikipedia.

Choice quote

Traditionally, Wikipedia supporters have responded to criticism in one of several ways. The commonest is: If you don’t like an entry, you can fix it yourself. Which is rather like going to a restaurant for a date, being served terrible food, and then being told by the waiter where to find the kitchen. But you didn’t come out to cook a meal - you could have done that at home! No matter, roll up your sleeves.

This isn’t a wikipedia problem. It’s an open source problem. Nobody wants to take responsibility for the crap they write. It’s everyone who complains responsibility to fix it. In the closed source world in which I work when you write code, if there’s a bug, you get a e-mail telling you what the bug is and that you need to fix it. In Open Source there’s a complete lack of responsibility. Or maybe it’s just the “help” that wants to push this misguided ideology.

Its philosophical approach deters subjective judgements about quality, and its political mindset deters outside experts from helping.

The Closed Source mindset is “throw money at it.” The Open Source mindset is “throw people at it.” Throwing money at a problem results in paying skilled people to do the job. It’s throwing people at the problem but by giving them a real incentive to do it right. The Open Source model is just out looking for any idiot that can print text on a screen. I’m sorry but a million idiots are not going to build a spaceship any more than throwing a million tons of iron into an oven is going to turn out gold.

The amount of work does not produce quality. It’s the quality of the work. The quality of the individual determines the quality of the product. Not the quantity of individiuals. This is why there’s an abundance of open source projects and not so surprisingly, the really good ones have serious financial backing with paid professionals working on them.

Jack Thompson Calls Cops on Penny-Arcade

So far the story goes that Jack has filed a wrongful death suit against Rock Star, claiming that GTA is a cop killing training simulator responsible for the murder of a pair of cops. He also offered $10k to charity if anyone who would develop some ridiculous murder spree game. When someone did it, and he changed his mind and Penny-Arcade donated the cash instead. All of this is being documented on the Penny Arcade website, in phone calls, rants and comics, as well as an ‘I Hate Jack Thompson’ T-Shirt. (Note, Slashdot’s parent company owns ThinkGeek). He has now called the cops claiming harassment.

Big stories get visitors. But I think this is one story I’ll let pass.

I signed up with the DigitalPoint Ad Network and it seems to be sort of working. If nothing else I’ve gotten some tips from the person I was referred by on how to improve my ranking on Google in order to improve my weight on the ad network. It’s totally free and non-obtrusive. It’s basically an experiement by the owner to create a Google AdSense like program except nobody gets paid and it’s actually more of a web-ring with only a “random” setting. It’s also impossible to block on the client side since it’s just HTML links that get rendered. No javascript and no fixed URL that everything goes through. The downside is that it’s only possible to tell how many ad impressions you’ve gotten on any given day but not possible to get a click thru rate.

Your weight, the amount of clout you have which in turn decides how many ad impressions you get, is based on how many of the pages of your site are linked by Google. So this is why it’s important to turn your site into a Google Slut(tm).

Previously I was using a dynamic URL to browse around various sections of my site like Indie-Mobile and the DevCenter. Now, instead, mod_rewrite is being used and it looks to the user that you’re browsing a directory structure.

Google loves directories. Google does not like www.localhost.com/index.php?page=blah, it wants http://www.localhost.com/blah

Hopefully the magic will work and Google will come to love my massive web-sites and many more visitors will come. Typically Google will rate any given page of mine quite highly within a week or two. It’s constantly making rounds through all of my sites. My goal is that by the end of the year every major section of this site is getting at least 500 unique visitors a day.

Marijuana-Like Drug Increases Brain Cells, Relieves Depression

A drug modeled on marijuana’s active ingredient increased brain cells and appeared to cut anxious, depressed behavior in rats, researchers report.

The drug is called HU210. It’s a synthetic drug that is chemically similar to pot’s active ingredient and activates cannabinoid receptors in the brain.

But HU210 isn’t pot. Pot contains a mix of chemicals, and the body may handle marijuana smoke differently than the administration of HU210.

The researchers included Xia Zhang of the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. They didn’t study people and don’t make any recommendations about pot use.

The study appears in theJournal of Clinical Investigation.

Broadcast Flag

Charles Pickering - R Missippi
Edolphus Towns - D New York
John Shimkus - R Illinois
George Radanovich - R California
Mike Ferguson - R New Jersey
Marsha Blackburn - R Tennessee
Mary Bono - R California
Bart Gordon - D Tennessee
Lee Terry - R Nebraska
Ed Whitfield - R Kentucky
Bobby Rush - D Illinois
Vito Fossella - R New York
Elliot L. Engel - D New York
John B. Shadegg - R Arizona
Albert Russell Wynn - D Maryland
Michael F. Doyle - D Pennsylvania
Charles A. Gonzalez - D Texas
Charles F. Bass - R New Hampshire
John Sullivan - R Oklahoma
Frank Pallone, Jr. - D New Jersey

If this passes the vast majority of TVs will be obsolete simply because the RIAA/MPAA want to enforce digital restrictions on shows.

My two winner stocks AVN and PVX are currently diving a bit. Both are worth more than I paid for them but they’re down in value. I don’t know how daytraders do it. There’s no way I’d want to have to panic over the daily falling and rising of stock value.

I’m confident that both these stocks will continue their overall upward trend for quite some time. If not, I’ve always got my ING account with a 3.4% interest rate. If I need a guarenteed return I can just shove my money in that. However, it’s not nearly as fun. Though I suppose many people don’t find the prospect of losing money “fun.”