Daily Archives: June 29, 2008

Steven Gould Coopted Into Teleological Demonstration of Evolution!!!!!

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Proto Stephen Jay Gould
OMFSM you are not going to believe this. Over at the University of Chicago, someone is making a terrible fool of themselves. It is hard to say if this is Shankar Vedantam, the Washing Post Staff Writer, or Patterson Clark of the Washington Post or someone else.The title of the piece is “And the evolutionary beat goes on…”The piece contains a flash multimedia item that shows the face of a lemur evolving, through a series of other primates, into the face of Stpehen Jay Gould, White Anglo Male. Is there a moment in which he resembles an African person? Maybe. You be the judge. It doesn’t matter, really, the whole thing is so totally wrong that it is astounding.This is the caption of the morphing animation:

A morphing demonstration of human evolution shows the transformation from a small lemur, up the evolutionary ladder into a human: seen here as legendary evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould.

Up. The evolutionary. Ladder. Continue reading Steven Gould Coopted Into Teleological Demonstration of Evolution!!!!!

Gedit With It.

I find myself using a basic text editor more and more often. Even the relatively well behaved openoffice.or Writer had a tendency to do stuff I don’t necessarily want to do with a simple text file, and certainly, something like Word is the work of Satan.For instance, have you ever noticed strange goofy characters that are not supposed to be there in the title of the posts on this blog or elsewhere? That comes from using a text editor. What looks like “Hello World” in both a text editor and a word processor may not really be the same thing, when copied and pasted. Character encodings and all.Anyway, text editors are important, and they are not just for coders. In fact, bloggers need an excellent text editor, as do many normal people.Here is an overview of Linux text editors. I’ll make just a few comments.As the review says, vi (or Vim or Elvis … variants of vi) is installed on virtually every *nix computer. Therefore, if you are a system administrator, you will find …. wait, wait, if you are a system administrator you do not need to learn anything from me about text editors. Move along. northing to see here.OK, the review also discusses Gedit and Kate. I’ve written recently about Gedit, HERE, in what I think is my most under appreciated post … lots of work, good stuff, funny jokes, nobody read it. Go read that to find out more about Gedit. And spornography. And other stuff. Continue reading Gedit With It.

Darwin’s Bulldog

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On this day in 1895, T. H. Huxley died at the age of 70. Huxley was known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” because of his defense of Darwin’s important work in evolution. He debated Samuel Wilberforce in 1860, and people have been debating creationists since.Huxley invented the term “agnostic” and described himself as one.