Local Insanity

This is a post where I try out ecto, a desktop blog manager for Mac OS X. So let’s see, what can it do…

There’s an iTunes button: Such Great Heights from the album “Give Up” by The Postal Service

That’s neat. There’s an Amazon button:

“Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)” (Neal Stephenson)

That’s what I’m reading right now. Unlike iTunes, I had to tell it what I’m reading.

Hmm… we’ve also got an iPhoto button, but it doesn’t seem to help me put the image on my page - too bad.

The other thing I wanted to address in this post is that I found the FSM, and it is good. I appreciate parody in the face of complete and utter breakdown of reason.

Technorati Tags: ecto, fsm, blog

And here I thought that Paul Thurrott was the most outspoken personality in support of Microsoft Windows. Even if he is, I don’t think he holds a candle to Mark Russinovich. What I don’t understand about this guy is that he seems to know Windows really, really well - like he wrote it (not really) and all the little utilities he uses to probe it (really!) - yet he seems to like the system. He has not looked into the eye of the beast and run away screaming.

I guess Mac OS X and/or Linux is not for everyone, but at least those of us on this side of the fence can pretty much ignore things like the Sony BMG DRM debacle that Mark covers so well.

I recently interviewed at j2 Global and they decided they liked me enough to offer me a job in Santa Barbara. I’ll be doing web development there, which should be fun. I start on Jan 3rd after all my Thanksgiving and Christmas plans happen. I’m pretty excited about the job and the prospect of actually making money. While I won’t get to do Rails (at least nothing is planned), I will get to do some Agile stuff and learn Java.

Moving to a new place means getting a new apartment, so I spent Monday and Tuesday looking, and I found one. It is located just north of La Cumbre Plaza, between Goleta and Santa Barbara. It is 3.9 miles from my work, which means that I can use the bus or bike to get to work. I get the apartment on the 4th, but I won’t be around then, so I’ll just have it until I move in sometime after Christmas.

While I’ve yet to get a response from any of the people I contacted through Craig’s List to find an apartment in Santa Barbara, it’s only been about 30-90 minutes. Time will tell whether it’s a great idea well-executed or a great idea without a man behind the curtain. Perhaps the coolest thing about it is the RSS feed for searches.

Some of the people I contacted were of unspecified gender. If they’re female I’ve pretty much gotta rule them out (Sarah would get jealous, hehe). What percentage of my income ought to go to rent, btw? I don’t want a crappy place, but it doesn’t exactly have to be the Ritz either.

Oh, and I got a job at j2 Global. Yay me!

I read an online comic called AppleGeeks (”I think I taste QuickTime.”). One of their fans recently used a site called LuLu to print a collection of their comics. This post was originally a comment I was going to leave on the guy’s site, but turned long. Here goes:

This is an interesting topic. While Chris didn’t have any real monetary gain from this, LuLu’s did, but without the knowledge of any possible copyright infringement. Does that mean that LuLu’s is to blame because they benefitted? Does that mean that Chris is to blame for (possibly) violating copyright law and LuLu’s terms of use?

I think it’s pretty clear that LuLu’s is not to blame. Their service is viable as it is intended to be used, and holds up to the test of legality (in my mind) that many file sharing networks apparently failed.

Chris seems to have acted without the intention of harm to AG, and has since offered to do what he could to remedy the situation. That seems fair to me - all the talk of lawyers above has me somewhat nervous. Are we really so anxious to litigate in our society?

For those of you who would like to assign blame to Chris because a third party benefitted from the situation, think about this: in order for you to do anything online that could potentially violate a copyright, various ISPs (and possibly advertisers) are making money off of the traffic you bring with your activities. In this sense, any online copyright violation has the side effect that someone is profiting from it. Whether the situation changes when the third party is directly involved in the violation (as with LuLu) is yet another interesting topic.

Kansas, what hallucinogenic drugs have you been taking recently? I’ve recently heard in some depressing news that Kansas has decided to teach not only evolution but also the “alternative view”: intelligent design.

Like many others, I feel that intelligent design is merely creationism dressed up as pseudo-science. From what I can tell, Kansas has opted to ‘teach the controversy’, a phrase taken from an article I read. As far as I have ever heard, there is essentially no controversy among the scientists studying evolution - they nearly all concede that it happened, but the details are still being worked out. There are a few things I’ve noticed in reading about it that have really irked me:

Apparently, the claim that humans share a common ancestor with apes (the ABC article I linked to incorrectly implies that monkeys are our closest relatives - they are not) seems to be hard to swallow for those supporting intelligent design. Why? If evolution happened at all then we must share a common ancestor with modern day apes unless you are willing to say that humans and apes developed along completely different branches of evolution and just happened to converge on very similar body plans.

This sort of thing has happened before, many times actually. It’s called convergent evolution, and a good example of it is with eyes - human eyes and octopus eyes developed along distinct lines of evolution. They are designed (of course I don’t mean this in the literal sense, but as shorthand for ‘appear as if designed’) for the same purpose - seeing - yet they are very different in structure. They are different solutions to the same problem. As it turns out, octopus eyes are actually much better designed (remember the shorthand) than ours are.

The point of my convergent evolution example is to illustrate that, while it’s possible that the resemblance of apes’ and our heads, eyes, arms, and behaviors are the result of convergent evolution, it is extremely unlikely because of the evidence that we share huge portions of DNA in common with them as relates to our common features. The chance that the variety of problems needing to be solved by apes and humans were solved in almost the same way, with almost the same genetic code, with almost the same historical baggage (e.g. post-anal tail), and without sharing a common history is so small as to, in my mind, make it a possibility not worth considering without significant evidence to support it.

Why the hesitation to admit that humans could have shared a common ancestor with apes? I believe it is a problem of dignity which the intelligent design community has inherited from the creationist movement. For more information on the plausability of evolution and a well-written account about it, see Richard Dawkins (also this paper about ID).

In all, I see it as shameful that fundamentalist Christian groups are using the political process to further their aims at the expense of science and reasonable Christians. I’ll be writing more about this later, I think.

The California Special Election happened yesterday. I started the day in San Diego, so I barely made it home in time to vote. It makes me sad that some of the most reasonable people I know (Kelly, Mom, Sarah) didn’t vote. I’m going to run through my vote on each just for future reference:

Prop 73

NO. While I believe that, in most circumstances, a girl ought to tell her parents that she is planning on having an abortion, I do not believe it is the State’s place to force that on us. I would never force someone to do it, so I believe we should not have a law for it. An interesting and frightening fact about 73 (which I didn’t learn about until after the vote) is that it also would have redefined abortion as the death of a child. I’m not sure what this would entail legally, but it appears to be a wedge driven in by the Pro-Life camp to make having an abortion more difficult and, in the future, possibly a criminal act. I’m glad this one didn’t pass, though the closeness of the vote has me worried.

Prop 74

YES. The effects of this one were vague to me, but my experience with the context of this proposition is that there are times when teachers ought to be fired. Often it is so difficult to fire them that nothing is done about it, leaving the school to work around the problem as best they can, but still subjecting students to the having a dismal sophomore year of English, for example. That this didn’t pass doesn’t really bother me too much - just as it is often too much work to remove a bad teacher, sometimes it is too much work to remove a bad policy.

Prop 75

YES. I don’t much care for unions, so this seemed like a good way to reign them in. That it didn’t pass doesn’t bother me, as I will most likely never be part of a union and I hope to never have to deal with one.

Prop 76

NO. Setting artificial spending limits like that sounds like a recipe for disaster. Make a budget based on your needs, not based on the last three years and blindly following it.

Prop 77

NO. Not sure what redistricting would do exactly, so status-quo seems okay.

Prop 78, 79

NO. My concern with both 78 and 79 was whether it would actually reduce state spending or not. One argument for it was that if people got medications, they would not simply not take them and then end up in the emergency room once they’ve gotten sick as a result. I can see this happening. Why I ultimately voted no is that I feel by giving reduced-price drugs we’re trying to patch a hole on another problem we created years before: public hospitals effectively can’t turn away patients, a policy that costs taxpayers huge amounts of money to care for those who can’t afford it. I’m glad neither passed, but I wonder about what the next attempt will be.

Prop 80

NO. The state hasn’t done anything recently to lead me to believe that it is better at regulating the electric industry than the market is. Therefore, I leave it in the hands of the market.

As most reports claim, I believe this was an election on issues that just weren’t on the minds of most Californians. We’ll see how it affects the governor’s popularity.