Open thread

Since I’ve been neglecting this blog while work is slowly wearing me down (and Fallout 3 has so much of my attention), please, feel free to consider this a “blank post” so you all can rant to your hearts content.

I’m upgrading WordPress again, as well, so let me know if anything breaks.

820 spams blocked?  Jeez.  Why do they even keep trying?

Open thread
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Why do people, PhDs included, keep misunderstanding the concept of evolution?

This is why physicists don’t generally work on biology problems, and vice versa.  Two scientists at Princeton University made an interesting protein discovery, where a specific protein acts as a sort of error-correction for DNA strands, only now they think the protein they found is actually the mechanism driving evolution.

Now, you must be thinking, “what the hell is a computer geek with no science credentials doing, telling some PhD level scientists they’ve got their heads up their asses?”  And normally, you’d be dead right.  But in this case, these scientists are claiming that this protein is driving biological organisms to change themselves within their own lifespans, when all they’ve proven is that the protein corrects DNA replication errors (think Scandisk for the DNA in all your cells).

Here’s the thing about evolution.  It has no intent.  There is no driving force, no guiding hand — evolution is not equal to God fiddling with our DNA, it is rather the by-product of the natural world.  Evolution is defined as the net sum of what happens when biological organisms change from generation to generation, with the environment and random chance (like how even creatures with evolutionary advantages might sometimes eat a rotten berry or get seen by a predator and eaten), ending certain genotypes early.  Evolution is not pushing creatures to change — evolution IS the change, over time, of creatures upon whom an evolutionary influence is exerted.

So, here we have creatures that mutate certain genes naturally when they reproduce.  Some of these gene mutations are advantageous, and those creatures have an increased ability to survive.  Some are disadvantageous, and they are more likely to die before reproducing.  These mutations happen when the zygote is formed.  Later on, once out of that zygote stage, those aforementioned proteins try to prevent DNA replication errors throughout the body, because if a cell’s DNA is altered through a mutation, it can become a freckle, a mole, a cancerous tumor, et cetera.  So these proteins fight what could become cancer and kill you, but they don’t actively drive a living creature to suddenly sprout an extra arm or grow gills during that creature’s lifespan.

There need be no magic mechanism that “explains why all that random chance formed you and I”, because the naturalistic explanation works just fine in explaining that.  Over millions of iterations of reproduction, wherein genes have fused, new genes expressed, genes have had errors in transcription that happen to work out nicely, whole new features can come into being practically spontaneously when the environment selects for certain abilities.  The Cambrian Explosion happened after a dramatic shift in the environment.  Likewise when plants evolved to emit oxygen and started pumping out that otherwise corrosive gas in record amounts, so too did creatures evolve to breathe it.  No need for an invisible hand rewriting our genetic code, and no need for a special protein to drive us to change within the span of our own lives to adapt to the new circumstances of our environment, when reproduction and natural selection (meaning specifically, how some genes can be advantageous for survival or reproduction) both have explained the whole process quite nicely.

I’m likely to edit this post later to include a bunch of links or videos to explain things better.

Why do people, PhDs included, keep misunderstanding the concept of evolution?

Two computer cases I had tonight.

Tonight I fixed two computers “on-the-side”, not relating to my actual job.  One was a Vista laptop whose password had been lost — I downloaded and burned a copy of Offline NT Password & Registry Editor, used that to change the person’s password to the same as her BIOS boot and hard drive passwords.  This was a bright, shiny new Compaq, and incredibly hefty.  The screen was gigantic and beautiful.  A shame it was sullied by Vista.  I’d have had Ubuntu on that baby and travel in style, with XP on a boot partition for playing games away from my desktop (which would be possible given the sweet on-board NVidia it had access to — a shame it was wasted on Vista’s Aero decorations).

Heeeeey, I could play Fallout 3 on it and be able to not be a hermit.  You know, hang around out in the living room with Jodi while playing that Oblivion-engine-based Fallout revival.  I’m a bit surprised by how much of Oblivion I can still see in that game.  They did a decent job making what appears to be a first-person shooter with heavy exploration elements, basically Oblivion with guns.  Called shots (VATS — dunno what it stands for) are cool.

But I digress.  More on that later.

Case number two was a fantastic issue, and by fantastic I mean it puzzled me for several hours.  Local-ISP Internet Security Services, a rebranded F-Secure by F-Prot, apparently stomped on some files installed by Google Toolbar, causing the venerable old toolbar to refuse processing DNS while in Internet Explorer.  By extension, because the stomping seems to have damaged the internet stack itself, which Firefox has to share, it refused to process Firefox requests for certain webpages, and seemingly pushed all internet traffic over a localhost-based proxy (which I’m assuming Google Toolbar used to interpose itself into the flow of internet traffic).  As a result of this, the issue I was approached with was that the Local-ISP internet services installer was unable to, after installation of the software, actually contact their registration service (since its own traffic was redirected to that no-longer-existing Google Toolbar proxy).  The poor owner shut the computer down rather than letting the computer run without any kind of antivirus, and called me for help.

Local-ISP Tech Support had been no help whatsoever, having run through the uninstall and reinstall of the security product to no avail.  I’m thinking either they’re not aware of the incompatibility of their software with Google Toolbar, or I might just be off base on the exact cause of the situation as the whole timing thing is my only real concrete link between cause and effect in this case.  That, and uninstalling Google Toolbar via HijackThis having fixed the issue, which isn’t quite a solid evidence one way or the other for whether or not the security suite actually stomped the Google Toolbar files.  The thing is, I can’t see any other possible cause for the toolbar to have just fallen over and died.

Anyway, the installer for the Local-ISP software is running now, and I have all through the weekend to finish this thing, so I might as well go to bed.

Oh yeah.  Back is still sore, I’m heading back to the doctor ASAP.  It’s getting better, kinda, but it’s way slower than it should be.  Granted, I haven’t come to another crisis yet, I’m more worried that I’m just going to be stuck like this if we don’t start getting some x-rays or MRIs or whatever else and figure out what the hell is bugging my back so much.

(Mini update — I fixed the time frame.  I had intended to post this tomorrow morning if I didn’t get it finished, but I did, and forgot to go back and change “last night” to “tonight”.  Bet that’ll be funny in the RSS feed.)

Two computer cases I had tonight.

Well, they’ve stopped discriminating against blacks…

…but they’re still discriminating against gays.  Arizona has amended their state constitution so that only man/woman marriages would be recognized as a marriage in the state, effectively banning gay marriage; Arkansas has banned gay couples adopting children; and ballots are still being counted on the California proposition to repeal the law allowing gay marriage but so far the “yes” side is (meaning it WAS legal, but now it’s not, leaving who knows how many gay married couples in the lurch).

In two tiny bits of happy news amongst all that idiocy, at least medical marijuana is approved in Michigan, though that won’t stop the federal drug warriors from cracking down on all those evil 70-year-old glaucoma patients.  And the Colorado initiative to define “persons” for the purposes of legal definitions as being any human life from the moment an egg was fertilized, has failed, thankfully — and let’s get this one straight, that has absolutely nothing to do with fair protection under the law, it’s entirely for the religious folks who want to legislate women’s va-jay-jays.

Well, they’ve stopped discriminating against blacks…

What a relief.

MSNBC has called the election for Barack Obama as the projected winner with 297 to 146 electoral college votes, with 270 to win.  Who knows what the final map will look like?  Maybe 330+ EV for Obama, and if Bush can win with 50-percent-plus-one and call it a mandate, this goddamn landslide will provide a super ultra double secret mandate.  Early reports say that McCain has called Obama to concede, though that’s unsubstantiated.

At least now I can sleep.

Update: McCain just gave his concession speech.  Fuck sleep, this I gotta savour.

What a relief.

This is how you get interviews with Palin

Apparently, you have to have an accent and pretend to be a foreign head of state.

Some choice quotes:

Palin: “Thank you for spending a few minutes to talk toooo… meee!”

Fake Sarkozy: “We have the equivalent of Joe the Plumber in France – it’s called Marcelle the Guy with Bread Under his Armpit.”

Fake Sarkozy: “I love the documentary they made of your life – what’s it called, Nailin’ Palin?  It’s very edgy.”

After revealing the prank: “If one voice can change the world for Obama, one Viagra can change the world for McCain!”

This is how you get interviews with Palin

Sci-Attica! Sci-Attica!

So last night, my dear Jodi was good enough to take me to the hospital at 3:30 am after failing to get to sleep for two hours due to an insane amount of pain in my lower back, which had the side effect of making my legs tingly and numb.  Over the past two weeks, I’d been having what I thought was a combination of leg pain and the “usual” hip pains that I’d been having seasonally for the past two years. It was only a few days ago that I realized that putting heat on the small of my back was actually way more effective in soothing the pain than applying the same heat to my hip or leg.

During my visit to the emergency room last night, the doctor told me that it seems my sciatic nerves were being affected, meaning I’m experiencing sciatica.  The diagnosis of sciatica isn’t exactly a revelation — it’d be like someone having a stomachache and being diagnosed with dispepsia.  Sciatica is simply the medical definition for this group of symptoms, and as you can see by the Wikipedia article, it can have a large number of causes.  Of the ones presented, I’m hoping it’s simple wear-and-tear, but I have to get to my family doctor to start investigating.

When I visited the doctor originally about my hip problems, he diagnosed the issue as being a bursitis that was affecting my sciatic nerve.  At the time, I was prescribed Naproxen, an anti-inflammatory, which seemed to help quite a bit, though it did a number on my stomach.  Now that I know I have sciatica presently, it makes me wonder whether or not this whole seasonally affected aspect of this pain is indicative of a bone spur or herniated disc, something that would be affected by barometric pressure, and I’ve been stupidly toughing it out all this time.

At the moment I’m on a 5mg dose of oxycodone (a.k.a Percocet), which is at the very least quite effective at distracting me from the pain — think Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb.  Outside these first few days after my initial crisis of last night, I’ll be relying on ibuprofen (up to 8 a day), and a stomach acid blocker to keep the ibuprofen from ripping my stomach apart, using the Percocet only to help get to sleep at night.

The long and the short of it is, I’m having a good bit of trouble getting around, since last night’s crisis, but I’m now managing the pain effectively, so hopefully it won’t affect my ability to get my work done and try to maintain my home life.  And I’m also hopeful to have a proper diagnosis as to why this is going on, now that we know it’s something more serious than a seasonally recurring bursitis.

I suppose the upshot of this is that I’ll have more time to write here, and to try to reopen communications with some e-mail friends I’ve been neglecting lately while in shoulders-of-Atlas mode with work.  It’s funny how I always have such a guilty conscience about losing touch with the people I care about, but there’s always such a barrier to have to surmount in reestablishing these communications.

I’m grateful that Jodi was willing to take me in last night.  The fact that when my hip issues first presented, I was living on my own at the time, and almost blacked out from the pain (which in retrospect should have been a clue that it was more than just a bursitis, given the location of the pain — the lower back, same place that’s killing me lately), makes me all the more grateful that I have someone I can rely on.  I hope I can return the favour someday.

Sci-Attica! Sci-Attica!

They prayed… before… a golden… bull.

A GOLDEN BULL! Seriously, no shit!  Pharyngula has more than I can bring myself to say here… it’s ridiculous.  Hey you religious types — praying doesn’t get us out of every problem, especially not monetary problems.  Remember the whole thing about throwing the money lenders out of church?  How about the part where rich men can easier get a camel through the eye of a needle, than get through the gates of heaven?  Or maybe about helping the least of us — you know, socialism?

I can tolerate religious folks, it’s the hypocrites and asshats that don’t know their own mythology that get me.

They prayed… before… a golden… bull.

Don’t rush to upgrade Java.

Michael Horowitz at CNet News’ “Defensive Computing” blog has an article up on Java 6 Update 10, which was just released this weekend, and whether or not you should update from your current Update 7.  This is great advice — well thought out and perfectly reasonable, especially where this new version does not contain any security fixes, only new features.

Wish I’d read it before I spent all day updating my work’s computers to Rev 10, finding out it was incompatible with a tool we need to use, then having to roll everyone back.  Oh well, live and learn.  Lost most of the day to this little escapade, but the day’s almost done so I’m okay with that.

Don’t rush to upgrade Java.