I don’t celebrate Lent every year; my feeling about spiritual practices is that you practice things you need to work on and let the rest go. So there have been years that I really couldn’t figure out what to give up until three or four days into Lent; there have also been years when I …read more…
this is going to be a thing…
I’m pretty excited right now, because I’m not that far away from the launch of a project that I’ve been working on almost nonstop for the past several weeks. It’s involved the writing of several thousand lines of code, more than a few sleepless nights (thank you, coffee), and flurries of emails and text messages. …read more…
Science thrives on errors, cutting them away one by one. False conclusions are drawn all the time, but they are drawn tentatively. Hypotheses are framed so they are capable of being disproved. A succession of alternative hypotheses is confronted by experiment and observation. Science gropes and staggers toward improved understanding. Proprietary feelings are of course offended when a scientific hypothesis is disproved, but such disproofs are recognized as central to the scientific enterprise.
Pseudoscience is just the opposite. Hypotheses are often framed precisely so they are invulnerable to any experiment that offers a prospect of disproof, so even in principle they cannot be invalidated. Practitioners are defensive and wary. Skeptical scrutiny is opposed. When the pseudoscientific hypothesis fails to catch fire with scientists, conspiracies to suppress it are deduced.
Carl Sagan
The Forest of Spam, Part 2
Sometimes the comment spam I get is oddly poetic. Here’s one I recently got on one of my other blogs: “As a transcribe gentleman’s gentleman I liked to predisposition in living soul , carry from it what you can and actively liquidate gain of every moment. Pooped elucidate days in the backyard with his friends …read more…
Tough Geek Love
Earlier today, someone on a help forum said that I had shown them tough love. I don’t deny it. After all, they were trying to do something very simple in a very complicated way. To make matters worse, they described themselves as a “newbie” even though they’ve been on this forum for over a year. …read more…
My Photography Background
A long time ago, I became very interested in photography. But I didn’t really get involved with it very much until college. Boring and irrelevant backstory: During my senior year in high school, I had so many credits toward graduation that I only needed to take two or three classes. I asked my guidance counselor …read more…
Thanks
Thanks to Martin Rice for the recent donation. It is much appreciated.
Thanks
A much belated thanks to Robert Batson for his donation in April of this year. Sorry it took so long for me to post this. It is greatly appreciated.
Kitchen Scales
I use a digital scale all the time, mainly because I buy a lot of ingredients in bulk, and if I didn’t have a scale, I would have to guess as to what constitutes a pound of beans. Bakers prefer to weigh flour because it is more accurate than measuring it by volume, and I …read more…
Spammers Suck! and so do you…
Amazing that an anti-spam plugin author would spam in the #WordPress forums. #irony "If you do it, it's spam; if I do it, it's promotion." — Professor O (@iswpw) May 27, 2013 You can read about it in the WordPress forum here. Kind of ironic that someone who is promoting an anti-spam plugin would resort …read more…
I’m a Red Shirt!
So I took the Which Star Trek Character Are You? quiz that Jeff Baker offers on his web site. Guess what? I’m a red shirt! And proud of it! (I think.) Your results: You are An Expendable Character (Redshirt) An Expendable Character (Redshirt) 90% Spock 84% Geordi LaForge 75% Jean-Luc Picard 65% Data 64% James …read more…
