29 October 2007

Science Skeptics


Got involved in a forum discussion today about Climate Change that really depressed me.

It wasn't just that no one else follows the scientific consensus of human-caused global climate change. What frustrated and depressed me was how thoroughly they misunderstand the very nature of science, let alone the science of the Earth's climate.

One poster even claimed there was plenty of room for "his science" and "my science." He may have thought he was being nice, but he couldn't have been more wrong.

There is no "your science" or "my science." There's only Science. You either believe in the expansion of human knowledge through repeatable experiments or you don't. Science is based on consensus, not opinion.

How can these "skeptics" undermine faith in the scientific method using technology only possible because of that method?

Help me out here. Am I way out of line to come down hard on them? Should I just let it go? Or have I stumbled onto a nest of irrationality that must be confronted?

18 October 2007

Freebird


I've switched. Not from PC to Mac, but from Mac to Linux.

That's right. I'm a card-carrying geek.

But I've switched to the friendliest Linux flavor I could find: Ubuntu. It's free, it's open source, and it's MINE.
Mine, because everyone that uses Ubuntu owns Ubuntu. Everything is customizable, from the Desktop background down to the very kernel the operating system runs on. I can even use entirely different desktop environments if I want, kind of like being able to run a Mac OS 9-style interface on Mac OS X's code. Unlike a Mac, I can change the code anyway I want, and no one'll come after me with a lawyer.

In fact, if I make it better, they'll thank me. That's how I get tech support now: from other users, who have tweaked and poked and written code and twisted things to work just how they want, then published how-to's online. Check out the Ubuntu Forums for some examples.

So yeah, I've gotta use a command-line interface a little more now than before. And yeah, I've gotta spend time testing and tweaking some things to get them to work. But I *can* get them work, and I didn't have to pay a dime for them.

Oh, and did I mention I can get Windows games to run, in Linux, without booting up Windows? Check out the Wine project. That's the power of open source, folks.

17 October 2007

First New Post!


A bit of doggerel to start us off:
(best recited with a thick brogue)

"Yer man's head took a piss
When he went for a hit 'n miss;
Now his name's on the list
Of them that got no wits!"