Parity Violation

An interesting article about science and religion appearing in Tuesday’s NY Times. A lot of secular scientists (specifically one Richard Dawkins) are growing fed-up with religious people, or even tolerance of believers and religions.

I think this is a backlash against religious ideology trumping sound rational arguments or scientific thought – especially here in the U.S. where we see things such as creationism and intelligent design trying to be put into schools. Or where our policy on research (stem cells) or public health (sex education, contraception) be manipulated by a small minority of people with religious-specific objections to these otherwise rational ideas.

However, I don’t think Dawkins and his kind are helpful in the long run. They simply crystallize a hostility towards religion that the religious right would have you believe motivates all scientists anyway. Bill O’Reilly goes on about “secular progressives” and well, that probably actually describes someone like Dawkins.

The fact of the matter is that the existence of God is not a testable hypothesis. It is rational to both believe and not believe in a supreme being. Now, when religious ideas are just wrong (ahem, Sun goes around the Earth anyone?), they should be rejected. But, the overall question – Does God Exist? will always be open for debate.

Certainly we should not let religious-ideas influence our public policy. (I think about my post on pro-life groups objecting to scientifically accurate information about birth control.)

But, these political / policy questions can be dealt with independently of attacking all believers. A tactic that won’t win Dawkins or any scientist many friends in a world where the vast majority of people still believe in God. (Myself included.)

An excellent blog post at chron.com on the changes in vote totals by precinct in the Cohen-Wong and Culberson-Henley races.

With the exception of Afton Oaks, both candidates did considerably worse in areas that would be effected by the light rail. Culberson’s demagoguery on rail seemed to hurt him in areas that would use the rail. It would seem the “no one wants rail” on Richmond theory isn’t quite right. At least, it didn’t translate into more support for these two anti-rail candidates.

Well, the Zune came out today, to the clamor of the public – all eager to purchase this wonderful new … eh, not really. The early reviews are fairly mediocre. I see it as just another mp3 player, much like Sony’s and everyone else who has taken a run at Apple.

Above all, I think the Zune is insignificant because it’s a competitor only to the full size iPod – the video iPod so to speak. The iPod Nano is the best selling music player in the world, and the Zune is in no way comparable. So, even if by some chance the Zune experience was great, they’re taking aim at Apple’s second-best selling product.

I don’t think more features can beat the iPod, as I have said before. I doubt the Zune will capture the imagination of the public. We’ll see how it plays out.

Engadget reports a myriad of problems installing the Zune software on their Windows machine. What a shock that Microsoft has problems making software that isn’t buggy.

To me, looking at all the confusing options and prompts in the installer – the device couldn’t be less iPod-like. Granted, I use a Mac, but I don’t remember doing anything the last time I got an iPod. I plugged it in, told it to sync, and boom. Although, I guess I already had iTunes installed.

If you ever struggle with your CSS and are wondering why some stupid link isn’t behaving the right way … the nightly builds of Safari have a marvelous feature called the web inspector – which shows you exactly which spans and classes every element on your page is being exposed to and helps debug lingering font or color problems. Very cool.

So, why is Firefox less “Mac like” then Safari and Camino and what do I mean when I say that? Well, the best way is to look at the widgets on the Wordpress new post page, where I am typing these very words.

There is firefox. Note the buttons, and the pop up menu. Now look at Safari

Finally, Camino, a Cocoa-using mozilla based browser… sort of splits the difference – but certainly looks better than Firefox.

Update This doesn’t address the real reason Firefox isn’t “Mac like” which is that it doesn’t use the OS X keychain, spellcheck, address book, or any other Mac feature. It’s basically a Linux application living on a Mac. That does not appeal to me. It’s Camino or Safari, no question.

Hopefully, the election results bode well for rail on richmond. The chronicle has a story on the election results possibly diluting Culberson’s impact on the project. Thank goodness. What a worthless ideologue he is. I miss having Jackson Lee as my congresswoman. Stupid redistricting.

Also, Martha Wong, who was anti-rail, was defeated so hopefully that helps the cause as well.

The house is ours. The Senate may very well be. The GOP spin? Oh, the democratic majority has lots of conservatives in it. Whatever. They lost because of this debacle of a war in Iraq and an incompetent and ideological president. It was hubris, and they paid for it. The country never wanted Bush’s right wing agenda – and they certainly don’t want its incompetence.

The people have spoken! I love election day! For the first time in a while, I’ll love the day after election day too!

In 1994, Democrats hoped that the spectre of Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich would scare people into voting democratic. Didn’t happen. Nor will anyone besides right-wingers be thinking about how awful it’d be if Nancy Pelosi was speaker when they vote on Tuesday.

Another myth I’ll dispel while I’m here is that President Clinton was a “polarizing” figure the way Bush is. Clinton left office with 60ish approval ratings and they’ve only gone up since he left office. Bush will be lucky to crawl out of office over 50% and I wouldn’t hold your breath on that.

A Salon article on a very scary HBO documentary of electronic voting makes it very clear that we must throw away every single electronic voting machine and return to paper, optical scan, ballots. The problem in 2000 was chads – not paper. Paper ballots are, far and away, the best way to go about voting.

I have no confidence whatsoever in any electronic voting system.