Stephen Green is a little bit angry with Governor Bobby Jindal (who majored in biology in college) and his support of the LSEA, the new Louisina bill allowing, in so many words, intelligent design to be taught in public school science classes:

Social sciences are, almost by definition, soft-skulled bullshit. So let the liberals teach it. Real science is supposed to mean something… and when it no longer does, then we’re all screwed.

So am I emotional on this issue? You bet your ass I am. And I’ll get emotional whether it’s a Kansas school board, or the legislature and governor of a state I’ve barely even visited.

In the churches, faith can and does sustain good people of every stripe — and in ways biology, physics, and math never could. But forcing our preachers to teach in the scientific method would ruin the religious experience. Just as surely, mixing faith and science would destroy those things science offers us.

And with that, I’ll step away from the pulpit for a while. I’d like to think that Governor Jindal would do likewise and get the hell out of our classrooms.

Read the whole thing, especially Green’s engagement with soft-skulled ignoramus hpb in the comments.

Now, the foundations of human knowledge, and science, are by no means sure things, and are open to reasoned, intelligent criticism^†. If you are going to teach criticism of modern scientific theories, as the bill states, you’d be much better off teaching applied epistemology^* than what the bill’s writers intend (hat tip).

Matters of faith have no place in our science classrooms.

^† And yeah, intelligent design ain’t it.

^* Ha, make sure to read their terms of service.

Ever since I switched to Macs, I’ve been using the gorgeous Flurry screen saver (yes, even before it was built into the OS with the release of 10.2), and been happy with it. I had my energy settings set to put the computer to sleep a mere 5 minutes after the screen saver activated, so I didn’t see it or think about it much. When I did catch it, though, it had the ability, as all good screen savers do, to short circuit my brain and leave me staring at it and drooling.

A little while back, however, I stumbled across this list of the top ten Mac OS X screen savers. Electric sheep isn’t even listed in the top ten—it’s an honorable mention—though it should be. It’s stunning, mesmerizing and addictive, and also has the coolest title of any screen saver I’ve ever seen. What makes it truly special, though, is that it requires an internet connection; the abstract animations are generated collectively by all the computers with electric sheep installed.

Enough talk; you really have to see it to believe it, so go get it already. It’s available, by the way, for Linux and Windows as well.

The week in Yelp: let’s play “Who’s the bigger dick?”

I noticed recently that the J, L and M Muni metro lines had been, rather than stopping at the Embarcadero station like always, coming all the way out to the Caltrain station on 4th and King on weekday mornings.

I thought this was a great idea. With a bit of schedule reshuffling to avoid congestion at Embarcadero, adding more transit capacity for the ever-growing residential population of Mission Bay could only work out for the better. In fact, it doesn’t really make sense for those lines to stop at Embarcadero anymore.

But I had no idea what the schedule was, if any—recall that I had only seen these trains on weekday mornings, as none of the trains I rode in the evenings went past Embarcadero, necessitating a switch to the N or T—if this was a permanent change, or what. And sadly, there seemed to be no news or announcements about it anywhere. So I wrote in to a Muni-themed blog to ask if the author or readers knew anything about it.

Alas, it turns out that the switching yard used to turn the aforementioned trains around at Embarcadero was temporarily out of order, so those trains were going all the way out to the switching yard at the Caltrain station. It appears that this was only a temporary measure.

Sigh. God forbid that Muni do something that was useful, for a change.

If you have WordPress 2.5, chances are you’ve run across the media upload problem. As for me, I didn’t so much run across it as into it. At 100 miles an hour.

A brief background on the problem: it’s not that uploads don’t work at all, but that the asynchronous Flash uploader doesn’t work—in fact, you can disable the Flash Uploader and go back to the old one-at-a-time upload method if nothing else works for you. Every time you try to upload a file or batch of files, you get the nondescriptive “http error” message and the file upload fails. Most of the time this is caused by a configuration problem on your webserver.

Now, for most people a workaround listed on the official WP support topic will fix the issue. But—wait for it—not me. I’d been breaking my head against the problem for the better part of two full days before finally getting the Flash uploader working just a little while ago.

I won’t bore you with the troubleshooting details, but my problem wasn’t that the mod_security module was causing a problem, or that my uploads folder didn’t have the right ownership/privileges. It was the fact that the entire WP installation was protected by HTTP authentication such that only a few users on our work server could access it. Since Flash is entirely incapable of authenticating uploads, all attempted file uploads were failing.

Specifically, two files in the WP installation were getting 401 Authentication Required errors: wp-admin/async-upload.php and wp-admin/admin-ajax.php. To fix this problem, you need to (in addition to disabling auth for the wp-content/uploads folder) add the following lines to an htaccess file in the wp-admin directory:

<br />
# Disable HTTP authentication for Flash uploads<br />
&lt;FilesMatch &quot;(async-upload|admin-ajax).php&quot;&gt;<br />
  Allow from all<br />
  Satisfy Any<br />
&lt;/FilesMatch&gt;<br />

This solution, of course, assumes that your webserver allows htaccess file overrides.

For a very long time, my Netflix queue has been out. of. control. I’d had over 400 movies on it, less than half of which I even remembered why I’d added. So yesterday, I did some ruthless pruning, and I’ve made a resolution to never let it get above 50 movies. Period. You basically only care about the top 10 or so, but since some of what I’m interested in watching are TV series, I gave myself a little wiggle room. Hopefully this will streamline my Netflix watching a bit.

I have had the following two movies from Netflix for months now, and I finally got around to watching them:

• The Departed – 4 stars

  This movie would have gotten a 5 if not for the fact that I had already seen Infernal Affairs, the 2002 Hong Kong film on which it was based (also 4 stars), thereby dulling the visceral reaction to a first-time viewing. In fact, The Departed was what Infernal Affairs should have been. In the hands of a far more gifted director than Andy Lau (sorry, but it’s true), the story realized its full potential. Scorsese kept what worked, reworked what didn’t, and came out with arguably his best film. With a stellar cast^* and great performances from every last one of them, it’s no wonder that so many people love this movie, and that it got so many awards (which, for a change, it deserved).

• American Gangster – 4 stars

  This understated but powerful crime drama hit all the right notes. Interesting story, good cast, good direction. And lots of violence. What’s not to like?

^* Not to take away from the always excellent Tony Leung, but he couldn’t carry the movie by himself.

that public transportation in San Francisco does not work, and one of the biggest reasons for it is poor signage. And this on the BART, which is arguably the only transportation system in the bay area that is actually and consistently useful. It’s hard to find your way around the stations, to find your way out, to find your way in, and worst of all, to figure out where you’re going or should be. It’s a mess.

A local designer, frustrated beyond measure, recently put together an incredibly detailed proposal overhauling the BART signage and maps. Pay attention, kids: this is great design. Let me say it again: this is great design. The type face and color coding are simply brilliant; you might notice a distinct similarity—not coincidental, I’m sure—to existing US road and highway signage. It’s simple, distinctive, and doesn’t reinvent the wheel. Beautiful. Though I have to wonder, like my friend citrusboy (hat tip), where the color coding and destination designations are on the trains themselves.

Every local resident should read it, and then go to the next monthly meeting for the SFMTA (Muni) Citizen’s Advisory Council (CAC) Engineering Maintenance and Safety Committee (EMSC) (Wednesday, 25 June 2008) and demand that it be implemented forthwith.

from happiness? Cause I think I might have one. I just found out that possibly my favorite manga of all time will be made into a TV anime this fall.

• McCain-Lieberman 2008? Sounds like a great idea. Lieberman is a hawkish social liberal that I can really get behind, and most importantly a politician with integrity. Do I think it’s going to happen? Probably not. That very social liberalism would alienate the socially conservative evangelical base that McCain already has trouble with. If only, though. (Via InstaPundit)
• On the other hand, Lexington makes the case against Jim Webb for the Democratic VP candidate. His sway with working-class whites would undoubtedly be a powerful weapon in Obama’s arsenal, but:
  

  The main worry about Mr Webb, however, is that he is a genuine fire-breathing economic populist. He appears actually to believe the sort of stuff that Mr Obama only says during Democratic primaries. Since vice-presidents sometimes become presidents, this matters. American workers, says Mr Webb, “are at the mercy of cut-throat executives who are vastly overpaid, partly as a consequence of giving [the workers'] jobs away to other people.” Illegal immigration and globalisation “threaten to dissipate” the American middle-class way of life. He predicts that, unless the government acts to restore “economic fairness”, America “may well go the way of ancient Greece [or] greed-ridden Rome”.

  America may be horribly unequal, but it is not, as Mr Webb imagines, apocalyptically so. And judging by his book, Mr Webb has only a shaky understanding of the economic system he decries. He thinks South Korea is more productive than America, and that “most” investors are among the wealthiest 1% of Americans. (In fact, about half of Americans own shares.) He is worryingly hazy about how he would make America fairer. But his instincts are plainly hostile to the free flow of goods, investment and people across borders. Mr Obama, who has recently started to sound less protectionist on the campaign trail and has appointed a team of impeccably centrist economic advisers, can surely do a bit better.

  For appeal amongst blue-collar whites, I’d probably go with the oilier Al Gore or John Edwards, the latter of whom also has some markedly protectionist tendencies, but could conceivably be convinced otherwise, or at least more easily than Mr. Webb. (Via Democracy in America)