August 31st

Return of the Inquisition?

Do you know what a ribosome is? Do you know where they are found, and why they are important for our modern knowledge about evolution? If you don’t know, you can count yourself among the vast majority of Americans. If you do know, you are in a small, embattled group of Americans that believe that science is an important, noble endeavor, not an evil, godless abomination.

Many Americans know more about Atlantis than they do about biology. Indeed, more Americans may “know” about the so-called Coso Artifact found in 1961 in the Coso Mountains of California, than know about what ribosomes are. According to the finders of the Coso Artifact, it was a cylindrical metal and ceramic object embedded in a 500,000 year-old geode. Many people still believe this to be true, despite the fact that experts pointed out that it was a spark plug from a Model T Ford from the 1920s embedded in a hunk of mud and pebbles. The artifact has mysteriously been disappeared just in time to prevent it from being analyzed by modern analytical techniques.

In a recent poll, almost 2/3 of Americans think that creationism should be taught in science classes. Is this because they know both sides of the debate? For the most part, many Americans don’t want to hear scientific accounts of anything. Science, to many evangelical Christians, is not about knowledge, it is pure politics to them. And so their response is political in turn. Indeed, evangelicals have been teaming up more and more with fringe groups that think modern science is all wrong about everything. There are “alternative archeology”, “alternative space science”, and “alternative history” proponents that believe everything from the existence of Atlantis, to alien abduction to the idea that humans have lived on earth for billions of years. The main purpose of the alliance between evangelicals and fringe science conspiracy theorists is to damage the credibility of science among the public.

Andrew O'Hehir writes in Salon: In an influential 1987 essay, historian William H. Stiebing Jr. wrote that alternative archaeology "functions in the way myth does in primitive cultures. It resolves psychological dilemmas and provides answers for the unknown or unknowable." The "strong emotional attachment" some people feel for such explanations, he went on, seemed directly related to "the unscientific, quasi-religious, anti-Establishment nature of the theories."

It is much easier to think about god creating everything in 6 days than it is to learn about ribosomes, and their connection to evolution. For those few who have gotten this far, and aren’t sure what they learned about ribosomes in biology class, I’ll give you a little refresher. Ribosomes are the key to life on earth. They are tiny RNA-reading molecular complexes which act in all cells from bacteria to brain cells to convert RNA information into functional proteins. They are at the heart of the system that converts DNA information into RNA information, and then into proteins that are required for all cells to perform their various functions. The reason that ribosomes are so important for the study of evolutionary relationships is that ribosomal RNA has changed in a much more conservative way through biological time than most other types of RNA. As such, they have permitted scientists to determine the evolutionary relationships between living organisms, by analyzing the changes in their ribosomal RNA. The idea that you could trace evolutionary relationships from bacteria to humans by examining and comparing their ribosomal RNA is a much more satisfying study for me than reading the biblical account of genesis.

                                           Dr. John

August 30th

ATI in Trouble?

Previous PC graphics card king, ATI, is now having significant troubles on several fronts. First, a number of class action law suits have been filed against the Canadian graphics card company for overstating earnings and production capacity in 2004. Also, it looks like ATI is having manufacturing yield problems with their new R520 chip, which may delay the release date. Finally, ATI is not getting a dual-video card solution to market in a timely manner to counter NVidia's SLI video cards.

All in all, it's a down time for ATI, but I expect they will get past these problems, and deliver great graphics cards in the future.

Dinosaurs Lived With Humans: Official

To the consternation of evil evolutionists, more and more conservative christians are saying that evolution is a fake, and that dinosaurs and humans cohabitated with one another in the garden of eden. If you do a Google search on dinosaur + bible, you'll get hundreds of hits like this one, or this one. Finally, scientists are being put in their place by those clever christians, who claim that science is "dumbing down" our children. Indeed, evil scientists are using the alluring images of dinosaurs to turn little children into yet more evil, atheistic scientists. This must stop. We must educate our children in the ways of religion from the day they are born, which will help them get good jobs in technical fields when they grow up.

                                           Dr. John

August 26th

Gates Taking Heat for Funding Irreverent Design

More scrutiny has been focused on Bill Gates' multimillion dollar donations to the Discovery Institute, a "don't think tank" made up of prosthelitizing creationists. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, famous for funding malaria research when pharmaceutical companies see no profit in it, says it didn't know about the Discovery Institutes "ID" agenda; they were only interested in funding research on improving public transportation in the NW. But my question is, what does "ID" have to do with transportation? What makes the "thinkers" at this "tank" experts on transportation issues? We want to know.

                                      Dr. John

August 25th

Intel Gives Up Before Fight Begins

AMD officially challenged Intel to a dual-core processor smack-down by taking out advertisements in major US papers. Intel gave up without a fight for obvious reasons (inferiority).

One Down, 250,000 to Go

Police arrested one of the worlds most prolific spammers yesterday, in this case, one of the guys who fill your inbox with adds for prescription drugs without a prescription. Christopher William Smith, 25, from Prior Lake Minnesota was responsible for spamming from "Xpress Pharmacy Direct", along with two other miscreants, all of whom have been arrested. So maybe we should say 3 down, but in this case, the kid was responsible for the spamming operation, the other guys dealt the drugs. They are all being held without bond (yes!). It will be nice to have one spam less in my inbox this morning, but I expect it will be but a drop in the bucket, or should I say ocean of spam I get every day.

                                       Dr. John

August 24th

Who Would Jesus Assassinate?

Pat Robertson's suggestion that it would be cheaper to assassinate Argentinean President Hugo Chavez than it would be to start a war with Venezuela has me wondering about how well conservative Christians have learned the lessons of the bible they so covet. The Christian religion prides itself on being a movement based on the brotherhood of mankind, and on helping the poor and downtrodden. So what does it mean when a Christian leader selectively drops one of the ten commandments for political reasons? Who does Pat Robertson think Jesus would want assassinated? What countries would Jesus start pre-emptive wars against?

I wonder.

                                       Dr. John

"Google Talk" Beta Launched

Google has released the beta version of their instant messaging and VoIP software, called Google Talk. It installs almost instantly, and is one of the easiest VoIP applications I've seen to date. You must have a GMail account in order to log on, so that will be a stumbling block if you don't have one yet. All in all, it looks like a great little application!

August 22nd

NY Times "ID" Follow Up

The Times has a follow-up article on the front page today on the "other side" of the evolution debate. Again, not very well written or researched, but better than yesterday's praiseful article on the political savvy of anti-evolutionists. For example, the reporter mentions that within a species there is great diversity (phenotypic diversity in biospeak). The reporter erroneously claims that such intra-species variation arises from genetic mutations.

Wrong. Phenotypic variability arises in all species from a large and diverse gene pool that is non-randomly recombined by selective mating behaviors among the sexes (think of bird mating dances, or deer rutting). If you look at any one gene in an animal or human population, there may be 5 or 10 different variations of that gene, all of which get the job done to greater or lesser degrees. Hence, genotypic variability leads to phenotypic variability, leading to increased or decreased fitness in a given environment/niche.

One big problem in this whole "evolution debate" is that one debate team refuses to learn the rules of the game. If you don't know anything about the science of evolution, you can't make educated statements about the subject. You can't criticize what you don't understand. So when "Intelligent Design researchers" write mathematical formulas to prove the existence of god, they are performing an exercise in futility. Math can show you what values do or don't equal other values, or how things are related in a quantitative way, but it can't prove or disprove the existence of a phenomenon. First science proves the existence of the phenomenon, then mathematicians formalize a mathematical description of the scientific finding. To skip the science part and go straight to the mathematical part is like trying to fry the fish before you bait the hook. Nope... not gonna work.

                                        Dr. John

August 21st

Bill Gates Funding "Intelligent Design" Scam

This is not a joke. The NY Times has a horribly written article on the so-called "intelligent design debate", which only discusses how the movement is funded, but offers nothing about what it's proponents do to study the origins of life. The authors fawn all over "ID" as a much more savvy version of creationism, and depict the "ID" fanatics as nuanced and effective. Effective at politics that is, not science.

The part that got me the most was that Bill Gates gives the "Discovery Institute" the think tank of ID fanatics, $1 million a year! That's right, the billionaire who laments the lack of good science and math education in the US is helping fund a bunch of zealots that push religious nonsense on the public in the guise of science.

The article is so superficial as to be disturbing. The NY Times has become exceedingly conservative in recent years, and this fluff piece does nothing but praise the political savvy of a bunch of religious fanatics who are trying to dilute and politicize science education in the US because it doesn't conform to their narrow, naive view of the world.

What clearly escaped the clueless reporters at the NY Times throughout all 5 pages of the article was that the "ID" fanatics did not even once mention how they do "research" in the "field". One astronomer says he is trying to figure out how to do the research, which sounds incredibly pitiful to me. I hope he gets back to the NY Times once he figures out how to talk with god about creation.

They also let the fanatics spread their anti-Darwin propaganda as usual, with the constant din about how Darwin's ideas were political not scientific. Such statements prove that they never read Darwin's Origin of Species, which is a beautifully written and well documented scientific work that changed the way scientists view the world.

Christian conservatives are bringing propaganda to the classroom, and it's time for rational people to stand up and say "no politics in the science class, no religion in the science class, no propaganda in the science class, period".

                                        Dr. John

August 18th

New Theory of Gravity Proposed

A new, and tantalizing theory of gravity has been proposed by researchers at the renowned ECFR which has secular gravitists in a tizzy. In this new theory, known as "Intelligent Falling" (IF), objects do not fall because of gravitons or gravitational waves, but do so at the behest of an unseen intelligent force in the universe. Proponents of the Intelligent Falling Theory point out that there are major gaps in the secular theory of gravity, including the fact that Einstein's theory of gravity is mathematically irreconcilable with quantum mechanics. "IF" researchers want the theory to be taught alongside secular gravity theory in physics classes in order to present students with both sides of the issue so they can make informed decisions.

AMD Doubly Trounces Intel

At a recent chip conference an Intel engineer said that getting 2 Pentium 4 cores onto one die was very difficult. One person in the audience asked the presenters how Intel demonstrated a dual core P4 back in the Spring; was it by simply bolting two P4s together? The Intel engineers fell silent, which speaks volumes. AMD has had solid, well-designed dual core chips to market for over a month now, and Intel is apparently trying to figure out how to do something similar with their large, unwieldy chip. So once again, Intel is the follower rather than a leader in the chip industry. Second to 64-bit processing with a kludge, and now second to dual-core chips with another kludge. To add insult to self-inflicted injury, AMD is suing Intel for using strong-arm marketing tactics to maintain market share despite an inferior chip design.

                                        Dr. John

August 17th

Rbot Worm Conspiracy Theory

I really hate conspiracy theories, but I'm going to start one anyway. The more I think about the Rbot worm attack that mainly hit Capitol Hill and several news organizations, I have to ask myself, "what's the connection?" I mean literally. What kind of interactions between Capitol Hill computers and those at ABC, CNN and the New York Times could account for the apparently localized infections occurring here in the US? Good question. The simplest explanation I can think of is that someone on Capitol Hill with an infected computer was in contact with (leaking to) reporters at these news organizations, and that the virus was passed to reporter's computers that way. I just love conspiracy theories.

Didn't Patch Windows 2000? Oops!

I was watching CNN yesterday evening as they came on with a story about their computers rebooting over and over due to a virus infection. There was a lot of confusion at first, but apparently an Rbot variant of the Zotob worm had infected networks that included unpatched versions of Windows 2000. Microsoft had just released a patch last week, but apparently CNN, The New York Times, ABC and even some computers on Capital Hill were all infected. At CNN, not only did they get the worm, but some computers had other problems because they behaved differently than other infected computers by constantly rebooting. It was reported that at ABC, reporters had to resort to manual typewriters to meet deadlines.

To me the most interesting part about this is that 3 major news organizations were not only using an outdated version of Windows, they were using an unpatched, outdated version. Really dumb - and these folks are supposed to keep us informed?

                                         Dr. John

August 14th

Bush Administration Almost Admits it Can't Win in Iraq

Approaching 2000 dead Americans, and many thousands more wounded or maimed for life. Three hundred billion dollars of borrowed money spent on a politically driven war that the American taxpayers will have to pay back in the future. And for what? A shining new Democracy in the Middle East, a bastion of hope for a beleaguered people?

No, now the Bush administration is admitting that they can't beat the insurgency in Iraq, they can only weaken it. They can't impose a Democracy, they can only hope for it like they hoped they would be greeted by the Iraqis with chocolate and flowers. But it turned out to be bullets and roadside bombs instead. Bush and his people, especially Dick Cheney, have been lying to the American people about this war from long before it even started, and they continue to lie to us now. If their public assessment is that things in Iraq may not be "quite so rosy", what they really know behind the scenes is that they failed to secure the peace after the invasion, they infuriated the Muslim world with prisoner abuse, and they failed to put enough troops on the ground with enough armor to protect and secure the borders.

Iraq is descending into a civil war, as predicted by all those retched peaceniks, like me. We said you can't bomb, shoot and torture a people into becoming a democracy; they have to have the desire to do it themselves, and they have to work for it themselves. Democracy, like communism, can not long endure when imposed on a people by outside forces. The chicken hawk neo-cons were wrong from day one, and now they are talking about leaving with honor, and hoping for the best. Thank goodness one mother of one dead soldier isn't accepting Bush and Cheney's lies anymore, and more Americans are flocking to Crawford every day to make sure that Mr. Bush's 5 week holiday is not 5 weeks of blissful ignorance about the death and destruction that his disastrous policies have wrought.

                                         Dr. John

August 12th

Mac OS X x86 and No Native Open GL in Windows Vista?

From the "weird stuff" department comes news that Mac has released an x86 CPU-compatible operating system that will work on any Intel/AMD system!! That's pretty darn cool, but the big buzz on the net is that the security features have already been cracked (in one day). I sure hope they didn't spend too much time or money on that protection scheme.

Next is perhaps even weirder. Microsoft has always disliked Open GL, the graphics API that offers game developers an alternative to MS Direct X. Games like Doom III are written in Open GL. Microsoft has announced that Windows Vista (Longhorn) will not allow direct hardware access using Open GL. This means that Open GL games will have to be layered on top of Direct X, thus slowing performance.

Every time MS does something like this, and abandons full support for an API platform such as Open GL, it invites others to fill the gap. Microsoft has usually tried to make sure there were no gaps to fill, so this intentional lack of features is curious.

                                          Dr. John

August 10th

Mucho Copy Protection Schemes for Blu-ray

Tom's Hardware has a nice little piece on the 3 different copy protection schemes; including programmable cryptography, so-called digital watermarking, and a type of self-destruct code. In the ominous self-destruct scheme, the system maintains constant connection with the internet (and won't work at all if your connection is down?) allowing content providers to not only track what you do and watch, but even would allow them to remotely disable a disk, or even the player itself!

I'm surprised they don't have a built-in web cam that can't be disabled..... Oh Lord, did I just give them an idea?

SCO Admits Its Products Contained Linux Kernel Code!

A former SCO employee, Erik Hughes, testified in court last year, and the transcripts have been obtained by Groklaw. Mr. Hughes testified that SCO Linux Kernel Personality, Unixware 7.12 and Unixware 7.13 contained Linux kernel code until May of 2003. So rather than Linux pilfering Unix, it turns out that SCO stole portions of Linux and put them in their Unix products. The reason I say "stole" is because SCO did not distribute their Linux-containing products according the the GPL license, as required.

Keep in mind this is only the testimony of one person in the ongoing legal saga between SCO and IBM. There is certainly more juicy stuff to come out over time. In any case, between the "smoking gun" email, and this testimony, it seems clear that SCO is not going to win this court fight. I just hope SCO is ordered to pay all of IBM's legal defense costs.

By the way, what nickname do the folks at SCO use to describe the Linux crowd? "Long Hair Smellies". Nice. I guess that makes the SCO guys "Pasty Face Fat Boys".

                                          Dr. John

August 9th

Dell to Use Non-Intel?

It's a rumor floated every time Mr. Dell wants to leverage better prices from Mr. Intel. But this time, it's real! No, Dell will not be using AMD CPUs, but they will be using motherboards with non-Intel chipsets! Why? Because marketing pressure has forced them to offer a dual-video card SLI setup for gamers. Intel has no such thing, and ATI is way behind, so the only choice now is NVidia. The new chipsets are called SLI X16, and offer true dual 16x PCI-express slots. This should make for some awesome gaming rigs, without the need for the NForce Pro (2200/2050) chipsets that are meant more for servers than gaming.

This ought to get Intel's attention.

                                         Dr. John

August 6th

FCC Kills Internet Access Rule

In a 4-0 vote sure to go down in the annals of consumer protection history, the FCC killed the rule that forced Baby Bell telecommunications companies to provide their competitors discounted access to their high-speed data lines.  This rule let smaller companies like Earthlink provide competitive service to Verizon, thus keeping prices for the consumer lower. But the FCC voted to reclassify the service from a "telecommunications service" to an "information service", thus permitting the big telecoms to charge any price they like to competitors. So folks can expect rate increases on their internet access if they are not using a major ISP that owns it's own lines.

                                         Dr. John

August 5th

Novak Nervous?

I was watching inside politics on CNN yesterday afternoon, mainly because Bob Novak was on and I wanted to see if the host, Ed Henry, was going to ask Novak about his treasonous outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Wilson. As usual, Novak and the crusty James Carville couldn't help but talk over each other, but at one point in the show Carville mumbled something that was difficult to hear while Novak was demanding to be allowed to finish his slow, tedious diatribe about Catherine Harris in Florida. Novak got livid, and said "That's bullshit". Ed Henry didn't miss a beat, and began to ask Carville a question about Harris, but Novak just stood up, took off his microphone and tossed it down, and then just walked off the set. For the remaining 10 minutes of the show it was just Henry and Carville.

At the end of the show Henry apologized for Novak's profanity and unscheduled exit, and mentioned that he had told Novak that he would be asking questions about the Valerie Wilson case. Further, it was revealed that a copy of "Who's Who" was sitting on the desk in front of them, which suggests that Henry was going to ask Novak if he really got the name of Mrs. Wilson from that source, as Novak claimed on a previous CNN show. We still don't know how much trouble Novak is in for outing a CIA agent, but my guess is that things aren't going too well for him. He has now been suspended from CNN (which should have happened months ago), and will have difficulty getting other gigs after his outburst and lack of self control.

The Special Prosecutor is applying the thumb screws to a whole bunch of people who thought they were above the law, and it gives me hope that our system still works, albeit sluggishly. Rove, Libby and Cheney, and their cronies like Novak in the press, are in for a very hot Summer, and it couldn't have happened to a sorrier group of bastards.

                                         Dr. John

August 3rd

Bush Pushes "Intelligent Design"

President Bush in his infinite lack of wisdom has suggested that evolution and "intelligent design" should both be taught in science classes in the US. How much do you want to bet that Bush knows nothing about modern biology, or about evolution? And yet he is arrogant enough to tell science teachers what they should be teaching children in science class. That's not the blind trying to lead the blind, that's the blind trying to lead the sighted.

Even the proponents of intelligent design (ID) do not equate it with a scientific theory because theories need data, and must produce testable hypotheses. But Bush wouldn't know anything about such things. Just exactly what experiments would you perform in order to test "ID"? What testable hypotheses come from this type of inquiry? None. A general rule of science is that your theories must provide testable hypotheses, so because ID fails this most basic tenet, it is not a science, it is a faith, just like religion.

"ID" states that the world and living things are too complex to have come into being without an "intelligent designer", whereas evolution states that simple cells arose spontaneously about 3.8 billion years ago, and have evolved into the life forms present today.

I've gone over the fallacious aspects of ID before, so I will only recap them here quickly:

1) If complex things can't arise from simpler things without a "designer", then any "designer" or "god" could not have arisen by itself. Therefore we must postulate an infinite regression of designers in order to explain how such complex 'deities' arose.

2) Snowflakes are very complex, organized things. Does Bush think that each one was designed by an "intelligent creator"?

3) The evidence in favor of evolution is so vast and deep that biologists no longer consider it a theory, they consider it to be settled fact. The precise genetic, population and ecological mechanisms that drive evolution are still under study, but they involve such things as non-random sexual reproduction, genetic rearrangements during meiosis and fertilization, physical and behavioral speciation mechanisms, descent with modification and to some extent, natural selection of the resultant offspring.

4) The fossil record thoroughly and completely contradicts creationism.

5) Living organisms have lots of genetic and phenotypic "baggage" left over from their ancestors, and are therefore not perfectly designed. Is "Old Man ID" supposed to be an omnipotent creator, or a slacker of an engineer?

6) There is enough evidence for evolution to fill millions of pages of scientific journals and books, but there isn't one single piece of scientific evidence for the existence of any god.

People who don't read, and who's brains hurt when they try to tackle tough problems like "what am I going to eat for lunch?" shouldn't try to tell scientists how the universe works, or tell teachers what to teach in science class.

                                         Dr. John

August 1st

SCO Self-Destruction Almost Complete

SCO has been having a bad couple of weeks. First, an email was released which clearly shows that the investigators hired by SCO could not find any code in Linux that was purloined from Unix. SCO trotted out an email from 4 years earlier, saying that there might be infringing code in Linux, to try to counter the final conclusion reached by the investigators years later. They must think everyone is really stupid.

Next, Novell has finally filed it's counterclaims against SCO in court. The claims are not good news for SCO. First, Novell claims that in 2002 when Darl McBride became CEO of the company, that SCO repeatedly called Novell to ask it to join in a "Linux licensing scheme". When Novell declined, Darl asked if instead Novell would amend the Asset Purchase Agreement to transfer the copyrights for Unix to SCO. Again, Novell declined (which means that SCO knew from the beginning that they did not own the copyrights). Novell only transferred licenses to Unix, not the copyrights.

This brings us to the biggie: "Novell retained the right to receive royalty payments under SVRX licenses, prior approval rights relating to new SVRX and amended SVRX licenses, the right to direct Santa Cruz to take certain actions relating to SVRX licenses and the right to conduct audits of the SVRX license program."

Under this agreement Novell retained the rights to audit SCO's use of it's Unix licenses. In particular, Novell requested the opportunity to audit SCO's transactions with Microsoft and Sun Microsystems (the folks who helped finance SCO's attack on Linux). SCO has refused to permit the audit. Novell also says that they can request royalty fees from SCO for the licenses they issue, like the ones they issued to Microsoft and Sun. As a result, Novell has asked the court to confiscate 95% of SCO's revenues, and to place them in a trust to prevent SCO from dissipating all funds in litigation.

I can't wait to hear what the court does this time!

                                         Dr. John