My blog software, Serendipity (yes, there is something else out there besides WordPress), released a new update.  After waiting a few weeks to let all the bugs get found and now that the first maintenance release is out, I thought I would take the plunge and perform the upgrade.

I’m pretty bad about doing regular backups, but before a version change, I always do them.  It turns out the database for this little blog had swelled from 7MB back in August to nearly 50MB.  Something was definitely awry.  I took a look in the file and found one table that had nearly 60,000 records.  The spamblocklog table.  Once I emptied that table the database was down to 4MB.

What a mess.  This blog doesn’t get many hits…it’s not something I expect to given the content and my lack of marketing effort, but to find out that that much spam is hitting this little site is mind boggling.  I can’t imagine the amount of crap major websites have to deal with.  When I looked through the list, the majority of it was for pharmaceutical and pron sites.  Good thing the spam filters work as well as they do.  I occassionally get some spam comments I have to delete but they come in spurts then subside.

You have to give it to the spammers, they know how to try to get their message out there.  Now if only I knew how to market my site as well, maybe I’d have more traffic

For now, I’ve turned off logging of the spam, but I’m thinking it might be interesting to see how much I get after posting a new entry, just to see.  Maybe a post for another day.

Lots of stuff happened Thursday at the meeting of the Texas SBOE.  They’re wrangling over the science curriculum standards so I’m sure you can imagine…and if you really want to know, you can read about it here.  It’s not over, in fact, there’s another vote today and then a final vote sometime in March, so I’ll have plenty of time to vent, but right now, I don’t really feel like writing anything about it.  If I had, it would’ve been about the comments on that article.  They really show the lack of understanding of the topic.

But instead, I thought I would post something entertaining (hopefully).  Just watch the video…the second half is amazing.  The money quote is "now it’s getting boring so we play around".

wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

And I thought our Texas SBOE members were crazy.

As many of you are no doubt aware, the Science Curriculum standards are up for review this year in Texas.  This event happens once every decade.  And, as myself and many others have pointed out, our State Board of Education is seeded with creationists who want to impose their specific brand of religion on the rest of us.

Well, there’s a new website up that hopefully will be another aide in the battle to keep religion out of our science classrooms, it’s called Teach Them Science.  It’s sponsored by the Center for Inquiry and The Clergy Letter Project.  I like the format of the site and I wanted to highlight one of their points that’s on their homepage.

"God and Evolution get along just fine."

That says a lot.  As much as the small minority want there to be a conflict between the two sides, going as far as implying that only atheists believe in Evolution, it’s good to be reminded that for a MAJORITY of religious organizations, there is NO issue with Evolution.  The two co-exist just fine.  But this rational view is lost for many of the Texas SBOE members.

The Texas SBOE is scheduled to vote on the science standards at their meeting that begins on January 21st.  The current version of the standards are pretty good.  Much of the language about "strengths and weaknesses" has been removed.  But I’m positive the creationist faction will try to modify the standards before the vote.  They pulled a similar stunt before the vote on the English/Art standards last year.

What happens in the next few weeks will decide what path Texas is going to take.  Will it follow in the footsteps of Kansas and now Louisiana in becoming a laughingstock to the rest of the nation if not the world? or will it follow the path of rationality and reason.  We will soon know.

Let’s hope reason prevails.

I thought I would follow up on a few issues I had with some electronics for my home theater.  I’m sure not too many care, but since I posted about the problems earlier, I thought I would close things off.

I had posted earlier about my subwoofer dying and well, it turns out getting it fixed wasn’t that big of a deal.  It’s a Velodyne HGS10, which I bought back in 1999.  It’s since gone out of production, but a simple call to Velodyne, filling out a form and sending it via email and there you go, an RMA was issued.  I shipped off the defective subwoofer (the electronic guts only) and they promptly shipped back a replacement, after a rather substantial charge on my credit card, but certainly less than a new subwoofer.  I expected as much…no warranty lasts 9 years.  When it arrived, I put it all back together and voila, back in business.  The whole endeavor took less than two weeks.

Next, some of you know that I received a Roku Netflix player for Christmas.  Unfortunately, it was Dead on Arrival.  On Christmas day I began the email exchanges with their tech support, jumping through the basic troubleshooting hoops…yes, I tried another electrical outlet and yes I tried resetting the device, and finally, two weeks later, they ask for an address to ship a new device to.  I wait a few days…no response, so I prod them via email.  Two days later they inform me they’ve processed my replacement and are shipping it to me.  Well, I received it today, plugged it in and this one is alive and kicking.  The whole process took a little over three weeks and they included a return mailer for the defective device.

With all the horror stories you hear and read about customer service, both of these were rather pleasant and relatively easy to deal with.  But I suppose no one writes or rants about good customer service experiences, do they.

No, this isn’t about the football game tonight, or the old joke about how does Texas stay attached to the rest of the United States, but instead it’s about how Oklahoma has introduced an “academic freedom” bill in their legislature.  You all know about these right?  It’s the new way to get religion into the schools, by caging it as a freedom and equal rights issue.  Here’s a quote from the article, taken from the bill.

“Scientific Education and Academic Freedom Act,” SB 320 would, if enacted, require state and local educational authorities to “assist teachers to find more effective ways to present the science curriculum where it addresses scientific controversies” and permit teachers to “help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories pertinent to the course being taught.” The only topics specifically mentioned as controversial are “biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.”

And here’s a section of the bill that would effectively allow any student to refute any scientific theory based on their own personal religious beliefs and not have it be counted as incorrect.

“Students may be evaluated based upon their understanding of course materials, but no student in any public school or institution shall be penalized in any way because the student may subscribe to a particular position on scientific theories.”

An example of what that section would allow would be if a student were asked on a test how old the Earth is, the student could answer 6000 years and have to be given credit for it if that is their personal belief, even though the scientific evidence shows the earth to be nearly 4 and a half billion years old.  This would be the equivalent of allowing a student in a math class to answer that 1+1 = 5,124,973.

But frankly, science isn’t up for a democratic vote.  Science is based on observation, evidence, experiment and peer-review, not popularity or personal belief.  Do we want to teach our kids about reality? or do we want to encourage and promote myth and superstition?  Which do we think will help them understand their world and succeed.

And let me be clear, I’m not saying Texas is much better, just wait and see what shenanigans go on later this year when our own Board of Education updates our science curriculum standards.  That will be a circus.  The same controversy is going on here about allowing “strenghts and weaknesses” to Evolution to be taught.  I’m just pointing out that Oklahoma is the first of 2009 to introduce this type of legislation, but they won’t be the last.

Diligence people, diligence.

Most critics and websites have been posting thier best movies of 2008 lists all throughout December, but I decided to wait until now because my list doesn’t just contain movies released in 2008, but instead, mine is a list of the best movies I watched in 2008, regardless of when they were released.  Who has time to watch every movie released in a year.  Not me, I have a day job.

Over the last 12 months I watched 62 movies in a variety of categories and I’ve picked my favorite in each.  But first, here’s a breakdown of the ratings.

• 5 star – 0
• 4 star – 21
• 3 star – 23
• 2 star – 13
• 1 star – 5

Not a bad distribution with only 8% that really sucked.  I am a bit surprised there were no 5 star movies.  Maybe I’m too harsh, but to me, a 5 star movie is one that I would want to go out and buy immediately and wouldn’t mind watching again and again.  That’s a pretty high bar to jump over.

What this distribution does show is that I have 21 movies to choose from.  And at least one of the 5 to lampoon.  Now on to the winners.

Read the rest of this entry »

I know I’m a bit late with this, but I just got back from Taos, NM where I had little access to the Interwebs, so I couldn’t post this on New Year’s Day.

For those who don’t know, 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy.  It’s an effort to remind everyone of the impact of astronomy and other fundamental sciences on their everyday lives.  And it’s not just an effort going on in the United States, hence the international part, but a global effort with chapters in well over 100 countries.

I began the IYOA by spending the first evening of the new year in a hot tub on the side of a mountain in the secluded area of Arroyo Seco, NM gazing up at the night sky.  There was very little light pollution to obscure the view and it was spectacular.  It’s amazing how much we miss out on in the “big” city.

For me personally, the IYOA means spending some more time on a hobby that I enjoy.  I’ve never gotten into the concept of learning constellations, although I see the value, but instead I’ve been attracted to the more “strange” concepts of astronomy, like black holes and cosmology.  But this year I plan to spend some time reading up on the elusive concept of Dark Matter.  Why?  Well, it’s amazing to me that we think we know so much, but we don’t know what makes up 95% of our universe.  You see, normal matter, the kind that you, me, stars and planets are made of, is only about 5% of what’s out there (we think).  The rest is Dark Matter and this stuff called Dark Energy.  No one really knows what Dark Matter is made of, but I want to read up on it and find out more about what the experts think it is.  There’s plenty of active research going on into Dark Matter, so I don’t think I’ll have any trouble finding things to keep me busy.  I’ll post occasionally about what I find and hopefully learn something that I didn’t know before.

2009 should be a great year for astronomy and science in general since it’s also the 200th birthday of Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his On the Origin of Species.  There will be celebrations galore for those interested in science this year.  And finally…Happy New Year!