The bright side of a Moon
I’m volunteering this weekend at the Stumptown Comics Fest. I’ll be there on Sunday. I’ll probably swing by on Saturday, too, and poke around.
I’m the A/V guy.
I think that qualifies me for the title of “geekiest of the geeks”.
I got street cred. Geeky street cred.
Word.
I’ve been averaging around 2400 hits per day, so when I my web stats program showed that I was ~2400 hits from 500,000 last night at midnight, I figured sometime today I should pass that magical and entirely arbitrary point.
I’m home and waiting for “The Office” to come on, so I manually ran my webalizer script early to see how close I was.
And as of 8:40 PM tonight, my site had recorded 502,527 hits since 25 August 2007.
Today’s not over and I’ve already received over 4,622 hits just today. That rocks in an entirely unimportant and yet deeply geek-y way.
There’s probably no way for me to tell when, exactly, the 500,000th hit came in so I can’t give away a prize or anything. But thanks to all y’all.
The statistic that means the most to me, personally, is the number of visits, which is more closely related to the number of actual people viewing my site, and, presumably, reading my words and looking at my pictures. My average visits per day is 483. Almost 500 people a day are paying attention to what I’ve written.
I love you all.
In response to Kevin’s comment on my previous post, I have three points.
I must have miscommunicated my analogy if anyone got the idea that I was saying that “intelligent design” has the same goals as science. ID is a car, science is a house. Any similarities between ID and science are deliberately inserted and magnified (dishonestly) in order to advance a political goal, not advance our understanding of the world. See the “wedge document” from the Discovery Institute for details on that particular subterfuge.
Any “flaws” in our current understanding of the world will be corrected by application of… the scientific process, logic and rationality. That’s the single best method of advancing our understanding; indeed, it’s the only thing that works to date. Unlike, say, fundamentalist religious beliefs, which remain exactly the same, stubbornly resisting centuries of being proven wrong, non-predictive, and even detrimental in the face of new evidence.
Science is the filter that separates out what actually works and best describes all the data available, from the infinity of things a human mind is capable of believing but which are wrong, non-predictive and even detrimental. Science is not strictly a “majority rules” situation.
Thanks for helping me clarify my message.
Forcing a comparison between evolution, a well-documented and supported story of how species have differentiated over the millennia, and intelligent design, a cart-before-the-horse religious doctrine with no logical standing and no predictive ability, as an example of “freedom of thought” is…
…well, it’s like someone shopping for a house, and having a friend shoving car want ads in front of them, and arguing about how they haven’t really shopped for a house without considering all the options, like houses, say, and who are they to suppress the right of people to buy houses! That’s repression, man!
Sure, people spend lots of time in both houses and cars, and you have to provide fuel for a car just like you have to heat a house, and yes, they both have storage space and entertainment value, but, in the end, they’re just, well, completely different things.
Got out of work at 4:30 tonight. By 4:38 I was standing in the lobby of the Pioneer Place Theaters, ticket in hand to see Leatherheads.
Cute movie, but the timing seemed a bit off to be the screwball comedy it clearly wanted to be. Also caught John Krasinski looking directly into the camera on at least one occasion, which works for “The Office” but not so much for a major motion picture. Hope that guy finds another role that suits him. I like him but he needs to bust out.
Also, I think I have a little crush on Renée Zellweger. I don’t get it, either. But she’s cute.
On a whim, because I don’t normally care, I checked my work email right before going to bed. I discovered an email that announced a change in personnel, a big change for me and my friends, even, I might add, a change that I had been working towards of late, but without much hope of success.
Surprise! There it is. A political victory, wrapped up with a ribbon. Not really my victory; I was a recent participant, a new recruit to the campaign. I have some investment, though, in the result.
It’s a small thing, though, and though my co-workers and I will be discussing and dissecting the meaning, timing, and eventual outcomes from this decision for weeks to come, it is of trivial importance to the vast majority of the world.
So I shall not bother you with the details.
But my bus ride to the office this morning is graced with my pleasant smile.
I came up with a cockamamie scheme to spam-proof my reader survey, but the implementation is taking me a bit to figure out. Don’t worry, I’ll have it up in no time.
Also, I’ll be launching my next site in the Lunar Obverse media empire soon. Seriously. Just remember that “soon” is a vague time frame.
I’m just 3 or 4 days from receiving my 500,000th hit since moving my server, calculated from my web stats page.
I’ll do a big shot of vodka when I cross that threshold. Or gin. Or dance a jig. One of those.
I’m probably posting my survey tonight. Unless I think of more questions to ask. Y’all are OK with answering a 50-page survey, right? Right?
“Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” is a deeply dishonest documentary.
I’m mad enough about it to give the movie and its claims a full-on, point-by-point rebuttal, but here’s two small tastes.
Did you know that Darwin was responsible for The Holocaust? That’s practically the film’s central thesis. They start laying the groundwork for that little bit of propaganda right from the top, as the credits roll over stock footage of the building of the Berlin Wall. Communists, Nazis… and Charles Darwin. The 15 minutes (I’m guessing) of Ben Stein being given a tour through a Nazi sanitarium and concentration camp are surreal – is this really appropriate for a movie purportedly about science? The film descends into self-parody long before Ben Stein tries to pin the evils of the world on noted hate-monger John Lennon.
No. I am not kidding. That’s the level of evidence that Mr. Stein and the producers are aiming for. Judge them by their conclusions.
Another argument the film tries to make is that scientists who attempt to research “Intelligent Design” are somehow shunned and blacklisted from the scientific community, denied any grant money and silenced for daring to challenge the orthodoxy of Darwinism (the over-use of that word makes Darwinism seem like some dangerous cult, doesn’t it?). But in order to evaluate that claim, the film’s producers leave out a huge piece of evidence for evaluating said claim, and leave out some background material to boot.
Like… the evidence. There’s virtually no discussion of what research Dr. Gonzalez (who is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, noted creator and proponent of the wedge strategy to get religion back into public schools), Dr. Meyer (Director of the Center for Science and Culture, a branch of… hmm… the Discovery Institute), or Dr. Crocker (Executive Director of the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Center, whose board consists almost entirely of Senior Fellows of… hmmm… the Discovery Institute, again), were all pursuing. The most information we get is that their research included the phrase “intelligent design” and that they had their contracts not renewed, their tenure denied, and their research money taken away.
Gee, those poor scientists, just scraping by on the meager earnings they get from the Discovery Institute and the IDEA Center, which has funding from Christian conservatives in the millions. Yeah, that’s sad. And obviously they’ve been simply crushed by the scientific community. Oh, wait, no – they’re all collecting incomes and getting grant money from those pseudo-scientific and secretly-religious “think” tanks.
But, besides the money issue – where’s the research and evidence that is supposedly being denied? If their research is, in fact, credible and not just strings of half-truths and bad logic, why didn’t the producers spend some of their time on, y’know, showing the evidence? Oh, wait, they were too busy dwelling on the horrors of Dachau. I forgot.
Even on the “Expelled” website (which I am not linking to – Google it yourself) there’s absolutely no mention of their research. Maybe because said “research” couldn’t even stand up to a layperson’s review.
So much more to say… but suffice to say that “Expelled” is simply dishonest. Much like the Creationism movement itself.
Saw “WITW is Osama bin Laden?” and now I’m waiting for “Expelled” to start. Plan is working.
A lot more people in here. So sad. But still only about 17, not including me, so it ain’t no summer blockbuster.