Yokimbo

The Texas School Board seemingly wants to finish that sentence with “brains”.

On John Gruber’s recommendation I installed Anxiety, a self described lightweight to-do list manager. It reminds me of Stickies with check boxes, which is a good thing. It’s plain and simple just like you’d want it to be. However, it also has the additional feature of using Leopard’s Calendar Store that ties your to-do lists in with Apple’s iCal and Mail programs. Pretty sweet. I’m giving it a test run as we speak.

Finally, a stable Leopard release of Lightroom, version 1.3.1. Here are the fixes I wouldn’t have released 1.3 without that are now in 1.3.1:

-The Lightroom 1.3 Print Module could previously cause the application to crash on either OS X 10.5 or 10.5.1 during template usage.

-On Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.5.1, the import process from a card reader or other device into Lightroom could fail to import all or a portion of the selected images.

-The Lightroom 1.3 Develop module could cause the application to crash if adjustments were made in quick succession.

Source Adobe’s Lightroom Journal

The Texas Board of Education, headed by a creationist with no regard for science, really showed his true colors when he and his staff forced the resignation of 9 year director of science curriculum for the Texas Education Agency, Chris Comer. The reason she was let go, at least the reason they gave Comer, was that she forwarded an email about an upcoming speech by Barbara Forrest on the intelligent design (ID) aka creationist movement.

A lot of people are very upset at Ms. Comer’s firing, including but not limited to me, the NCSE, the American Institute for Biological Sciences, many, many, many Texans, the NYTimes, somebody in Wisconsin, someone in Oregon, PZ Myers, and many more. Ms. Comer was even briefly on NPR’s Science Friday. Hopefully that fired up a few more thousand people.

Texas is screwed. But, at least Florida isn’t that far behind.

The scoop from NSCE

I recently joined the NCSE, a non-profit organization that concerns itself with keeping Evolution, a scientific theory, in the classrooms, and keeping creationism and intelligent design, religion not science, out. Creationism and intelligent design belong in churches, theology courses, and people homes. They do not belong in science classrooms. Evolution, being a scientific theory, which until this year I didn’t fully appreciate, belongs in the science classrooms. Anyone who tells you different either doesn’t know any better (i.e., does not understand science), is fooling themselves, or is flat out deceiving you (there’s a lot of power and money behind the anti-evolution movement).

It is my belief, and I’m not alone in this, that in order for our country to continue to be an economic, technological, scientific, powerhouse, we need to teach out children about science. If they don’t understand the basics, they’re screwed. And evolution is part of the basics. Someone, I think PZ Meyers, said that there’s as much evidence for the atom as there is for evolution. And, in learning more about evolution over the past 6 months or so, that’s exactly what I’ve found.

Anyway, there is much to be said about this particular issue. But, it’s late, I’m tired, and many smarter people have said much more than I could ever hope to. So on a closing note I have to highly recommend the PBS special, “Judgement Day“. It’s a wonderful documentary on the Dover Penn., trial dealing with evolution and ID.

After trying MarsEdit for 29 days, I finally bought it. You can’t beat the convenience and the interface is good. It really does make me blog more often, which is sad because I don’t blog often enough. I need to have my wife use it too for out fetus blog.