Innocent American children are
being taught about God in biology class

N the latest of many arguments on the issue of intelligent design, a high court judge bans it. As a scientist, I find it rather disturbing that religion penetrates scientific education. It ought to be taught among cultural history or theology perhaps.

 
A court in the US has ruled against the teaching of “intelligent design” alongside Darwin’s theory of evolution.
 

Related items: TV budget takes precedent over science

Recommended site: The Edge

UITE recently I mentioned Google’s negotiations with AOL. There is a $1 billion deal in stake. It turns out the the deal may lead to more graphical (i.e. imagery) ads, which thus far Google have trialled and tested on a mere subset.

Users of Google’s search engine will soon see something they are not used to on the notoriously spare site: advertising with logos and graphics. And the advertisers will not be limited to America Online, whose talks with Google prompted the change in policy, according to two executives close to the companies’ negotiations.

This could break the long-standing tradition of non-obtrusive ads from Google. It will, nonetheless, be avoided by many advertisers who opt for text-only ads. This comes only 7 months after Google ads in feeds were initially introduced. Speaking of unwanted intrusion, feeds are often intended to serve pure content in a minimalist way. Ads are adverse to their true purpose.

My message to Google: “With food comes the appetite? Is the mantra losing its mana?“

EARING in mind that humour should not be taken as reflectant of true views, here are a couple of sexist jokes that crossed my mind recently. [smile] I feel as though I need to unburden myself, getting them off memory and onto (non-volatile) text:

• Last week I was approached by a girl with a SuSE laptop. Attractive one even (true story actually). I couldn’t wait to get my hands on her… machine.
• If she had run a set of servers, I’d say she has a nice rack.

It would have be easier to use somebody else’s jokes, but that would be pointless. Surely, such humour becomes a deterrent to women in the IT industry. I believe it to be quite derogatory, so I was honestly on the verge of retracting the post. To borrow somebody else’s joke (Linønut from nntp://comp.os.linux.advocacy):

 
Windows is like an asshole. You need to wipe it quite often.
 

WordPress 2.0: coming to a blog near you by Christmas?

recently mentioned rigorous testing of WordPress 2.0. There are still odd bugs here and there; And yet, only hours ago came out a word of gossip. It suggests that WordPress 2.0 will be officially released just before Christmas. I wonder if it is rushed merely because of the important date. There is a typical download rush throughout the holiday. People have time to spare, so they upgrade software or hop on the blogging wagon. Christmas last year was the time of heavy WordPress 1.2 downloads.

Moving on to a different subject, after lengthy use and experience with WordPress, I decided to join the support forums and make contributions on rare occasions. I participated in the mailing lists for a long time (roughly 1 year), but never in the support forums. My first post was addressing to the problem below.

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An common inner conflict

HERE seems to be a certain apathy among girls towards computer science. This does not necessarily extend to all fields that are engineering-related. My older sister studied computer science, but decided to leave a year early due to lack of interest and passion. She was very much capable of graduating and was a top student in her class. Yet, she had no incentive to staying up all night or becoming obsessed with technology, which was associated with what she perceived as “nerds”. She now works on a Masters degree in management.

These thoughts were stirred up by an article that appeared in the
Boston Globe only yesterday.

Women shunning a field once seen as welcoming

MEDFORD — As a young high school teacher in 1982, Diane Souvaine leapt into graduate school for computer science having taken only one class in the subject.

An example output image from the simple text-to-sign generator

Check out this on-line church sign generator. You need only enter some text to get an image generated ‘on the spot’. Notice the nice embedment of the letters in the sign. This page was brought to my attention by Dr. Scott Tobkes.

Image/text generation tools:

• ASCII Banner Generator
• Cyborg Name Generator
• Polaroid Images

ALM have intended, for quite some time in fact, to ditch Palm OS in favour of the Linux kernel.Then again, there are independent efforts by individuals to boot and run Linux on Palm devices, regardless of Palm’s mainstream initiatives.

Two new examples:

• The Palm LifeDrive
• The Palm Tungsten T3

Related (older) items: Linux on the Tungsten E