sub specie aeternitatis
I don’t believe I’ve mentioned Ubuweb here before, and it absolutely needs mentioning. So, if you’ve never been to Ubuweb, you need to go there now!
Also, be sure to check out the 365 Days Project hosted at Ubu.com. Some seriously funny stuff to be found.
This is a missing dog poster that was up right next to my apartment this morning. For some reason I found it amusing:
I’m looking for a dog (named Boomer) lost almost one year ago around this region. He is a black lab with some white color on the neck, as shown in the picture below [ I didn't scan the picture ] . I and my girlfriend missed him a lot since then. On 09/05/05 at around 7:00 pm, I saw a girl walking a dog in the apartment area which is exactly like my Boomer. Due to some reason I didn’t get her correct contact info. If anyone happens to see a dog like Boomer (it’s a little bit bigger than the dog in the picture, and much fatter, but you can recognize it when you see it for sure.) Please let me know.
Thank you SO MUCH.
Btw, my girlfriend just left me for some reasons. I missed her everyday and every night. Boomer is the sweetheart of both of us but we lost it one year ago. If I find Boomer, my girlfriend will be moved and probably I can have a chance to get my girl back. It’s OK if Boomer’s new owner doesn’t want to return Boomer, we just want to know our Boomer is OK, we just hope he is safe and happy. If anyone sees Boomer, PLEASE PLEASE let me know.
This is a great piece from the Guardian on why schools shouldn’t teach “both sides” of the origin debate.
The argument the ID advocates put, such as it is, is always of the same character. Never do they offer positive evidence in favour of intelligent design. All we ever get is a list of alleged deficiencies in evolution. We are told of “gaps” in the fossil record. Or organs are stated, by fiat and without supporting evidence, to be “irreducibly complex”: too complex to have evolved by natural selection.
In all cases there is a hidden (actually they scarcely even bother to hide it) “default” assumption that if Theory A has some difficulty in explaining Phenomenon X, we must automatically prefer Theory B without even asking whether Theory B (creationism in this case) is any better at explaining it. Note how unbalanced this is, and how it gives the lie to the apparent reasonableness of “let’s teach both sides”. One side is required to produce evidence, every step of the way. The other side is never required to produce one iota of evidence, but is deemed to have won automatically, the moment the first side encounters a difficulty – the sort of difficulty that all sciences encounter every day, and go to work to solve, with relish.