Month: January 2004

It seems I got as much of the New Hampshire vote as Al Sharpton. Take that, sucker. Taking into account the margin of error (4%), I could have beaten him with my astonishing 0% to his possible -4%.

If you want to point out that I’m linking to American political news at MTV, your jeering may be better informed that I got the news originally from Fark.

If I was a more vocal blogger, or if I didn’t have a lecture to go to right now, I’d have more to say on this. I just dropped back here after a visit to slashdot, where I was met with an ad for a technology conference in O’Reilly Hall, UCD.

Over at Plasticbag, Tom’s got a pretty interesting discussion going on about genetic influences on sexuality. He makes a point of noting that he’s not an evolutionary biologist, but he’s clearly got a very good grasp on the most important point. The issue is that no-one (in the discussion at least; possibly no-one at all) can come up with a convincing advantage that might accompany homosexuality that would balance the fact that, clearly, gay people are less likely to reproduce.

The best suggestion so far, I think (and I would, because it’s mine), is that exclusive homosexuality is a relatively new phenomenon and one that only seems to exist in humans, so it’s likely to be a phycological or sociological extension of the more balanced bisexuality seen in many vertebrates.

The actual post includes extensive quotes from a New Scientist article (not available online) which has a very compelling explanation for why we can assume homosexuality has some evolutionary advantage, or at least no net disadvantage.

We’re number one. It’s been suggested that Mozilla.org got to where it is today by featuring the version numbers 1.x and 1.0.x a huge number of times. Whatever the reason, it seems Google considers it number one.

To balance the hardship and suffering displayed in the previous entry, I should note that I’m now the proud possessor of half a bicycle. In the juggling business we call them unicycles – from ‘uni’ meaning ‘one’, and ‘cycle’ presumably meaning ‘impossible to ride’. Let the games begin!

After months of telling Stephen that he should use Phry (my old content manager) to run his blog, he finally asked me for it at the beginning of my final semester. It turns out that it’s not as polished as I had thought, so the ‘small’ amount of work I would need to put in to make it useable for someone else turns out to be not so small. Worse, during a period of re-writing, it became obvious that most of its flaws had been ported to scatterbrain (my current content manager) during the Great Move of last summer.

The reason I mention this is that one of said bugs prevents my new custom error 404 page from displaying any style under most circumstances. Damn.

Djinn’s interactive story began today, with the first paragraph posted by your favourite blogger. I assume. It was me. The story is taking shape at http://netsoc.dit.ie/~joleary/story.php. I urge everyone to take part, even people who might not know Djinn or me – if there are any of you reading. Just write a paragraph to follow what’s there. I left it very open to begin with. Go write.

I know I’m being neglectful, but it seems I’m actually going to have to do some work for the next while. This means you’ll have to make the best of the links I throw at you without a standard witty write-up. For starters I’d like to point out the cyclone big enough to destroy a country.

The various questions surrounding theology have been mentioned with some frequency over the last year. This is mostly, or perhaps entirely, due to the fact that it is becoming increasingly acceptable to lack theistic belief. Despite this, I haven’t written a lot of serious debate on the issue. I am not about to start. Some points are better made by others, and I’m inclined to leave this one to the Richard Dawkins and Douglas Adams of the world.

I’ll do my part for the de-woolification of thinking by promoting those that do it best. In particular I want to point you to the Wonderful World of WinAce, which turns out to be far better than its design would lead you to believe.

A comment – by the eponimous WinAce – at Fark led me to his brilliantly ironic Organisms that Look Designed. This contains the following inspired quote:

Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose by God, but we won’t admit that even if he comes down from heaven and slaps us silly.

Ditchard Rawkins, Oxbored University Professor of Zoology by day, godless communist sympathizer by night

Digging deeper – or in fact equally deep, but in a different section – I found his Homorous Images for Online Use, further satirising clueless fundies and their arguments. And since I’ve mentioned the clueless fundies, check out Fundies Say the Darndest Things. Choice quote this time (there are thousands):

If you can quote one Biblical passage that proves God doesn’t exist, or Jesus didn’t come from God or that the moral standard didn’t come from God then I will start to think about what you are saying.

I was all set to laud this site for its satire – and plain old piss-taking – which is great in itself – when I discovered a serious aspect to the site. If you’re in a contemplative mood – and I recognise that people surfing the web very often aren’t – you may want to look into Questioning Theistic Beliefs. It presents a series of questions designed to ilicit that most dangerous commodities: rational thought. It leans towards questioning biblical fundamentalism, but much of it is relevant to many religions. A question at random:

Does the intentional destruction of every newborn in Egypt as a final demonstration of power to a stubborn Pharaoh seem more consistent with an actual act by a benevolent God than invention by a Bronze Age human writer?

Incidentally, the title of this entry is taken from the site; it’s not just an affirmation of my own personality.