Daily Archives: December 3, 2007

Kill! Kill! Kill! (A Linux tip)

Now and then a program (a “process”) will need to be killed. It got annoyingly slow, or got stuck somehow. In Windows, the final solution for killing a process is “alt-ctrl-delete” which may or may not give you the capacity to shut down a process, and if that works, it requires a lot of struggling with dialog boxes, etc. Best case scenario in Windows is that the process dies cleanly. Often, a Windows process will leave messy bits and pieces of itself behind that may affect performance or create security problems, and often, the worst case scenario happens … you’ve got to “kill” the process hard, by turning off the power or yanking the cord from the wall or throwing the computer into the nearest lake.In Linux, nothing actually goes wrong, of course. Continue reading Kill! Kill! Kill! (A Linux tip)

An Anti-Creationist Strategy

Mike the Mad Biologist suggests this:

One way pro-science citizens can influence what local and state governments do is through federal funding. The next time any educational legislation is proposed, a key component should be the release of federal support for educational programs contingent upon the adoption of educational standards that do not accept intelligent design creationism as science and that also support the study of evolution.

Continue reading An Anti-Creationist Strategy

The Bible as Ethnography ~ 05 ~ The Virgin Birth

i-fc0baa42c324cefa8495fdb0044234b2-dice.jpgI have a cousin in law who tells this story: Her youngest child found out about sex. Then he made the connection that if he existed, his parents must have had sex. So he confronted the parents with this, and mom was forced to admit, yes, of course, this is how babies get “made” and this is simply how things are. The child did not seem too concerned.Moments later, the child noticed his sister playing in the other room. A thought occurred to him … a light went on, as it were. He turned back to his mother with an expression somewhere between accusation and perplexity.”You did it twice?!?!?” Continue reading The Bible as Ethnography ~ 05 ~ The Virgin Birth

Supergroup Cell: A Sims simulation teaching cell biology

Why am I doing this…You may have wondered why I am always putting cell biology videos up on my site. I’m doing it for a few reasons. One is to provide a resource for teachers. Some day in the not too distant future one will be able to enter “cell biology” in the search box (upper left from your perspective) and get a few peer reviewed research papers and a bunch of movies.Pursuant to this is the possibility that others will watch the films and comment (Thanks Larry, especially, for doing a lot of that). Not all films are good, not all films are usable. You could go on Youtube and Teacher Tube and Google and find these yourself, but I’m doing it for you. I waste my time so you can waste yours.Finally, there is one other reason. My wife, Amanda, is a biology teacher. She has developed a number of routines that she uses to teach cell biology. All of them are dramatic but short interpretive dance routines, incredibly silly, and the students who see them never, ever forget what a flagellum, or endoplamic reticulum, or whatever, are/is. Well, these days with all these new fangled cell phones with videos and stuff on them, I’m expecting to find Amanda’s cell biology lessons on You Tube, and I want to be among the first to see them…OK, so this next bit is using SIMS 2 technology, and is an allegory for the inside workings of a cell.