The Tease of Things I Don't Need

Publishing, e-Publishing, Copyrights, etc. Past, Present and will we be allowed a Future?

The latest pass-along from Warren Ellis is a public domain transcript of the text delivered yesterday by Cory Doctorow at The O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference. To say it's worthwhile reading is to understate matters.

I've added Cory's blog to the roll call.

As you will see, I've taken to adding the new material for the day at the top, so it's more obvious. The Haloscan comment codes are embedded in the Template, which means that they remain at the bottom of a day's entries. Anyone who can offer a quick fix to that (presumably putting code in my individual blog entries, so each piece will have its own Comment link at the bottom?) will be appreciated. (A "quick fix" means I have to be able to do it quickly and fairly painlessly, btw.)


Corman's Poor Four

Because I promised someone, here's a review I wrote in 1994 of Roger Corman's never officially-released 1992 effort, The Fantastic Four. I finally dumped it on the web three or four years ago, correcting some minor errors (though I see some are still there) but otherwise resisting nagging urges to tinker with it. I gave it a hair more of a boost than what I might do in a cold re-write of it today, as at the time I wanted to offer some balance to an almost uniform wall of flippant snipes and dismissals.

With a speculative 2005 release for the next big screen attempt at someone's conception of Marvel's first family, I'm not sure whether to look ahead with hope, keeping the X-Men and especially Spider-man franchises in
mind, or with dread as I consider what was done with both The Hulk and Daredevil. (Quickly, some opinion for the record: ol' Greenskin was given a very single-minded treatment that at least held together reasonably as a movie, despite heading off in its own direction, while the DD movie was an awful, broken thing, plainly resulting from several different visions and agendas held by people who didn't give a damn what was happening in the rest of the film.)


A couple additions

Not even through two weeks of this, so the changes are still coming rapidly.

So far today I've added two more sites to the blog roll over on the right.

One was Mark Gibson, who was not only kind enough to post some comments here and add me to his site's links, but happily provided items of interest on his own blog so my adding the link didn't make me feel like a whore.

The second is Elroyonline, which I became aware of just a few minutes ago once I found this image on a Fark thread of photoshops of Superpowers used in everyday life. To be fair, there were much better ones in the thread, but his loaded so quickly it was one of the first ones I saw, and I was in the mood for an old joke (in comics circles) being pounded repeatedly into the ground in the same image.

Dogma, Passion & Science are a Bad Mix

News from Ohio concerning the 10th grade science curriculum raises some thorny issues.

On the surface, the school board's voted 13:4 in favor of including a section titled "Critical Analysis of Evolution," in the curriculum.

Based on just that much information, I'd be inclined to say it was a reasonable decision, as science should always retain a healthy skepticism and avoid becoming emotionally entangled in prevailing perspectives.

However, the spirit of this "critical analysis" is reportedly derived from Jonathan Wells' “Icons of Evolution,” which is a cornerstone of the "Intelligent Design" movement. (Essentially, these are people who say that it's all too complex to have evolved - though they usually couch this in simplistic, self-serving language by saying "just happened", revealing their own ignorance.) By extension, this is being seen by critics as religious Conservatives opening the door for their message.

[A moment on that "revealing their own ignorance" comment I made above. I don't want any readers to think I'm being blindly dismissive, heaping ad hominem attacks on those I disagree with. The problem with the "just happened" proposition is that underlying it is a fallacy similar to that in the infinite number of monkeys pounding away at an infinite number number of typewriters proposition. What one has to keep in mind is that the matter and energy in the universe behaves in certain ways under certain conditions with respect to other matter and energy. Some things simply won't happen, or if they do they prove unstable and quickly break down. With that in mind, returning to the analogy, the monkeys aren't sitting at typewriters, but at word processors with aggressive spelling and grammar check features turned on. Another, simpler and more direct analagy, would involve Lego blocks, Tinker Toys or Erector sets. Sure, someone could pile them up in heaps, but any two pieces only fit together in a limited number of stable configurations.]

The short answer is that students should be informed that:

a. science is constantly evolving towards the most complete picture, taking into account all verified evidence.

b. evolutionary theory is well-established and supported, and the majority of the criticisms against it are coming from people with religious axes to grind who tend to misrepresent information, draw quotes out of context and lean heavily on early evolutionary theory from Darwin himself. Similarly, out of date texts are often referenced, most commonly claiming that the fossil records are dreadfully incomplete, which they aren't. (This is similar to those who still labor under the misconceptions propogated about the Shroud of Turin, which the true believers pushed decades ago as being scientifically verified as not being the work of man, when it's in fact been shown that it's a much more recent work and the likely method's already long since been pinned down.)

c. "theory" is a technical term that doesn't simply mean an educated guess -- that would be an hypothesis.

d. they are free to believe what they wish - faith is a personal matter - but "God created it" is a statement that has no place in science. It's irrelevant. Science must presume that there's a process involved in everything. Observing, hypothesizing, gathering information, experimenting, drawing theories from the conclusions, and publishing so others can attempt to analyze and reproduce the work -- that's the mill of science as it's supposed to be. The ultimate cause of everything remains a matter of philosophical, not scientific debate.

On that last point: Unfortunately it's not the way it always is, as people are people and it's human nature to want to think that everything's locked down, they know exactly which way is Up, and want to be smug about it. It's almost tragically part of the popular front for CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal), as it becomes too easily a matter of ridicule rather than reason.

Given the references in the story, I'm leaning towards those protesting the decision, though I'd need to see any specific claims of inconsistency (between evolutionary theory and scientific evidence) before I could comment farther.