As you may or may not know, I have been sporadically working on a Ruby on Rails application called PISA, a personal finance tool. For a while I collaborated actively with [ aJ: Brian Guthrie | LJ: kralleus ] until his school work consumed him. Tonight I have officially committed the one hundredth revision of the code into Subversion. For those of you who ( Read more... )

The rain was falling hard; so hard that wiping the drops from his gold-rimmed glasses was a futile effort for Ebenezer, plodding across the cobblestone in the pitch of night.
The harvest moon cast an eerie glow across the wetness, glimmering and sparkling off of each drop that struck the stone beneath his feet. The sound of the falling water was ( Read more... )

As seen on Usenet (alt.sysadmin.recovery):
"...there is of course a theory which states that chickens are in fact somewhat evolved ambulatory plants. This theory is reinforced by various rural names for eggs, which include 'hen-fruit' and 'cackleberries'."

This only serves to perpetuate my habit of eating the delicious creatures-often, as last ( Read more... )

A society without religion is like a vessel without compass. -Napoleon
Compasses are for the weak, anyway. Now we have GPS and radar and sonar and things you can't even imagine. Having religion is like trying to drive from New York City to Los Angeles with a map that keeps telling you you're not good enough, but at the same time says "Don't worry, ( Read more... )

A cute tidbit.
The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain any more so it eats it. It's rather like getting tenure.

-Consciousness Explained ( Read more... )

So-called "Intelligent Design," or "ID," is the proposition of "irreducible complexity" in nature, which stipulates that life on Earth is too fundamentally complicated to have come about by random chance or natural process (i.e. evolution, chiefly). Numerous examples are cited in its defense, the most popular being the intricate formation of the ( Read more... )

"Whether he's a planet, an asteroid, or a radioactive matzo ball,
Pluto has proven himself worthy of a permanent place in all
horoscopes," says Shelley Ackerman, columnist for the spirituality Web
site Beliefnet.com. Ms. Ackerman criticized the IAU for not including
astrologers in its decision.
Because a bunch of kooks with no concept of science, ( Read more... )

From Sir Ken Robinson, recognized speaker and writer on creativity and education, from his talk given at TED.
Truthfully what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up, and then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side.
If you were to visit education as an alien and say ‘What’s it for?’, ( Read more... )

As many of you already know, I am moving to New London soon. While I was in the process of finding a place to live down there, I had this experience checking out a place called "Ocean Reef." Yeah, I know, scenic name, isn't it? That's all that was scenic about it.
Without further ado:
Ocean Reef apartments, managed by Tarragon Management, is one of ( Read more... )

Richard Feynman, in a Caltech commencement address, said the following about outrageous beliefs and how they relate to education:
But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to check on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that ( Read more... )