Posts

Mar 12, 2006 — The central question I have been trying to satisfy myself about with these notes is the following: is there a way to formulate Intelligent Design as a scientific theory? (See part 1 and part 2.)

Mar 12, 2006 — This is a continuation of my discussion of ID (see part 1). Here in part 2 I have exerpted from Behe’s book in order to summarize his argument. I am using the 2003 trade paperback edition published by Free Press, lent to me by a work colleague.

Mar 12, 2006 — I am finally ready to write some definitive thoughts about Intelligent Design. I just finished reading Michael Behe’s book Darwin’s Black Box from 1996, and I’ve thought about it from the perspective of science, falsifiability, religion, and philosophy. I would like to be very careful about where I plan and do not plan to take issue with him, so let me start in Part 1 by delineating the argument.

Dec 10, 2005 — I’ve been meaning to write this down for a long time. There are two very widespread and very annoying idioms that I see a lot in amateur writing. The main example of the kind of writing I mean is product reviews on sites like Amazon, but I see it also on Macworld, CNet and other more professional sites.

Oct 19, 2005 — I just watched Contact again for the first time in a while. A major theme of the movie is that the goals of science and religion are so hard to untangle that the two main protagonists have a very complicated adult relationship based on it.

Oct 9, 2005 — There is a great deal of controversy at the moment over Intelligent Design (ID) being taught in science classrooms. I have always felt very strongly about the dangers faced by science in our society, and this crisis is a perfect example of what can happen without careful vigilance on the part of science teachers and practitioners.

Jun 16, 2005 — My second Mac moment came when using the text editor TextWrangler to work on ShelfCentered.com. Yesterday I had put my Mac on mute for some reason, and of course I forgot about it and was working away this evening. I was searching a document for occurrences of a word, and there were none. Now, usually this would produce the usual audible beep. But the developers of TextWrangler included a feature that automatically detected my Mac was on mute, and instead popped a message up on the screen that said “Not Found.” I didn’t even really notice how wonderful this was until a minute later, because I just received the information and proceeded accordingly. I managed to capture the message before it faded out:

May 15, 2005 — At my workplace, the Mac platform is often derided by what I consider typical “PC guys.” These are technically savvy folks who for whatever reason feel very strongly that the Mac platform is poor, or should go away, or that Windows has definitively proven its superiority. Sometimes these same people are also very skeptical of Microsoft, but usually not. It’s strange, though, that someone can feel so ambivalent about Microsoft yet so strongly negative about the Mac. Recently, the success of the iPod has served to greatly increase the bitterness and spite felt towards the Mac by such people.

Apr 26, 2005 — I’ve had poker on my mind since last Thanksgiving, specifically Texas Hold’em. At this point, I have special hold’em software, four poker strategy books and one nonfiction book about poker. I mostly study the books and play a bit with the software, but eventually I want to start a real-money account on one of the online poker sites. I feel that if I apply what’s in the books, then I can win money, which would be a very fun goal to shoot for. Of course, to avoid having a gambling problem I have to tread very carefully and lower my expectations within reason for the early stages. I have been procrastinating setting up a new checking account for my poker money both because I truly hesitate to take this step, and because I don’t feel I’m good enough yet.

Apr 25, 2005 — For the last couple of months, I’ve been working on a new side project that my wife, brother and sister and I came up with, called ShelfCentered.com. I haven’t posted about ShelfCentered.com as of yet, because honestly I suspect it might be a good enough idea to really become something good, and I want to protect us from competitors! For example, there are a couple of shareware programs out there already that do what we’re planning, and they’ve created some limited buzz, but so far no one has thought to put the idea online in a nice web site. I won’t go into detail just yet, but it’s hard to maintain a blog without mentioning the thing that’s my primary occupation outside work!

Apr 16, 2005 — My friend and former coworker, Robert Miner, has written an article about MathML in the latest issue of Notices of the American Mathematics Society, which you can read online [pdf]. MathML is a standard XML representation of math notation and semantics, and has been adopted steadily ever since Robert co-created it in 1998. When I worked at Design Science with Robert, MathML was becoming a major focus for the company.

Apr 8, 2005 — I don’t understand daylight savings time. No one I talk to has a clear idea of when and why it was invented. What country started it? What countries adhere to it? Why is Europe still doing it a week before the US?

Jan 17, 2005 — I visited my parents for the holidays again this year, and like last year I decided to read some of their C. S. Lewis collection. I felt like progressing on with his Christian works, and so I chose Mere Christianity.

Jul 17, 2004 — I’ve been renting Ken Burns’ Civil War shows lately, from Netflix. I thought I’d share a misconception I learned I had about the Civil War. My memory from school left me thinking that the war would involve a large set of complicated virtuosic battlefield maneuvers, and that I’d come to appreciate how all the famous generals were geniuses. In fact, I’d somehow developed the opinion that the generals during that war outshine generals in other wars, that through a coincidence of history, the best strategists somehow simultaneously appeared during that conflict.

Jun 1, 2004 — I’ve always thought Tolkien was essentially pessimistic, despite the happy ending of The Lord of the Rings. The power of Evil he describes, and the inevibatle comparisons to the horror of World War I make this a convincing point of view. The army of Gondor is forced to risk a suicidal attack against a formidable foe to even preserve their tiny ghost of a chance of victory.

Apr 17, 2004 — A new feature on Long Head is the new super-accurate “Greg Links” list on the left. Except for the other langmead.info sites, these links are the sites I’m actually actively reading every day.

Apr 17, 2004 — This winter I read three books by C. S. Lewis: The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters and Surprised by Joy. I’ve been introduced to Lewis before, when I was young. I read the first several books of the Narnia series, and I read the whole Out of the Silent Planet trilogy. Back then, however, I was looking for pure entertainment from those books, and although they delivered it, the religious level was also apparent, and detracted from their enjoyment for me.

Mar 28, 2004 — I’m blogging this from my new Clié TH-55. It has wireless networking and a full web browser, plus email. I’m still looking fo a free instant messaging client.

Mar 26, 2004 — After nearly three years of development, MathType 5 for Mac has been released. It’s been a long time coming, and I’m looking forward to moving on to other projects, but for now I’m happy it’s finished.

Mar 14, 2004 — I’m blogging this from a Starbucks in Hollywood, near the big shopping center called Hollywood & Highland. Alison is out with a friend nearby, so I decided to try out the Starbucks hotspot system. Works pretty well, but only for 24 hours – next time I visit a Starbucks I’ll have to pay $6 for an hour, then 10 cents a minute afterwards.

Feb 12, 2004 — I don’t think I’ll finish my rant against the Mac. I think that primarily I was angry about the state of affairs typically faced by a developer. However, despite the fact that I do think documentation of the Carbon toolkit is flawed, and I have some fundamental problems with the way these legacy facilities have been brought into OS X, for the most part I find I’m still very excited about the Mac, and I’ve had a very positive experience with the much more modern Cocoa environment. So, all in all, I think the game situation is pathetic, but the Mac still has many compelling advantages. Maybe I’ll try to sort this out in a later posting.

Feb 12, 2004 — I’ll be adding my thoughts soon about three books by C. S. Lewis that I’ve recently finished. Although I had a few false starts with the Narnia books as a youth, these were read more to find out about the real Christian thinker, and because I wanted to branch out from Tolkien to some of his colleagues.

Dec 4, 2003 — A few weeks ago I decided to put some thought into why I have so much trouble getting good at real-time strategy computer games. I went ahead and submitted it to GameSpot, my favorite gaming news site, which does a weekly set of op-ed pieces with a slot for a reader to opine. Well, my article was accepted! Have a read – I’m the second one down.

Oct 12, 2003 — I’ve made two changes to my video game family. First, I bought a GameCube and a couple games (Zelda, Viewtiful Joe). Also, a friend with a vinyl cutter made a wood-grain applique for my Xbox. Click to see the new family!

Sep 10, 2003 — I’m a serious gamer, just below the rank of what the press call “hardcore.” I own an XBox, a GameBoy, and a very fast PC. By way of Mac hardware, I own an aging 1999 Powerbook, and I have no plans to buy another Mac. In fact, any serious gamer must automatically reject the Mac.