So, I've been coerced by the thought of Free! Stuff! in to linking to those chaps who are running a thing called BLOGZOT 2.0 on MacZOT.com where they are giving away licences to SubEthaEdit from CodingMonkeys by, erm, using the power of hyperlinked doodiddles. Even as a confirmed OPML nut, I'm a SubEthaEdit fan. Bribery complete. Back to your normal, regular programming. I can neither confirm nor deny that I can be bribed by similar offers in the future. 
Funny stuff. A few of the entries need updating though, most notably Adam Curry and Ray Ozzie, who have since moved on to bigger things than humble blogging (one involving smoking dope and distributing MP3s, the other trying to lure Microsoft away from Steve Ballmer's gorilla visions). This is snarky, but it's quite interesting - if you randomly picked ten words from that lot, you'd have some interesting source material to build the future from. Very Microserfs and all that.
A word I hate at the moment: vlog. It sounds horribly hard Russian and ugly. The "bl-" sound in blog has lots of great words like blabber and bloat and blotto. Meanwhile the "vl-" has such words as Vltava (a river in the Czech Republic) and vlast. Yuck, yuck, yuck. Give us "video podcast" instead. Far nicer. Nothing is better, though, than "plugging the a-hole" (analogue). Writing "plugging the anal. hole" is the copyfighters version of those photos they'd take of Conservative MPs outside their local office, cropping the picture so it says "Conservative Ass".
I've just added a new pimped out subscription box on the right hand side. It lists all of the aggregators I can think of. I'll add any new ones I can think of.
Andrew Sullivan has some lovely pictures of his native Sussex. I ought to take some next time I'm out on my walk.
If you've been enjoying the Adam Curry/Madge Weinstein drama, the next episode is the latest Eat This Hot Show with Wanda Weinstein, Madge Weinstein, Ragan Fox and Rachel Kann. Good stuff. 
Lee: "Basically the GOP has become an amalgam of everything I hate about conservative social values and everything I detest about the liberal view of the role of big government. The GOP is essentially a Christian socialist party."
Londonist on Tom Cruise: "We get it. You're not gay."
Tom Coates has got some pretty del.icio.us visualisations.
Matt Marshall has a review of Sphere, a new blog search engine.
I just got Yahoo! Mail Beta. It's nice, but I'm still gonna do the Gmail.
A day in the life of Mike Arrington 
The plane got back to SFO, and a tired Michael Arrington disembarked. Cheap airfare was a real enablr for Arrington's business. He could go and hang out with startups, and meet some really nice chicks in the Airset.
He got in to the car and flickred the radio on and tuned it to the last.fm station on the dial. It was ideal radiotime. Sometimes the music really can fluctu8 too much, but this wasn't the usual grat.uito.us crap you find on FM radio which pushes people to buy and iPod and turn it upto11.
As he was driving, he pulled over to the McDonalds drive-thru and decided to order a cheese burger. He pulled up and winded his window down.
"Simpy, Chuquet blurb rrove! Get me a wobblog you qype!"
The voice hesitated and then responded.
"I'm sorry, sir, we are out of that."
"I'll have McNuggets instead. And bring it here fastr than last time, or I'll beat your ookles in you dimewise sxip!"
Back on the road, he tucked in. "These are del.icio.us!" he thought to himself. Usually they're foul, but something must have kept his ikarma levels up. He'd stuck to the 9rules he'd learnt from Mozes.
At the end of the day, even if he spends all of his time climbing the blogladder and hanging out with people with lifetypes, at the end of the day he sits back and enjoys a crazyegg, a quick beer and a hackoff to pics of Lulu. He's only human after all.
Kirk Cameron is a dumb arse
I'm being blunt and rather crude. Kirk Cameron is talking absolute rubbish on this video that's been circulating. Let's take a look.
First, we skip past the first seven odd minutes. They've got random people at a zoo to talk about evolution. Fantastic. It proves that the average Joe doesn't know much about science. Fortunately, science isn't done by people who've just walked in off the street, but by people with a drive to know and a drive to learn about why.
They all admit they aren't experts, so why judge evolutionary biology on the basis of three individuals who have gone out for a fun day at the zoo and are being harangued by creationists rather than, say, talking to professors of biology or students with something beyond their mandatory schooling in science (which is, if my experience is worth anything, pretty rubbish).
Cameron then goes on to say that there is a lack of transitional fossils, and that evolution cannot be proven without these fossils.
There aren't a lack of transitional fossils. It is quite difficult for something to get fossilised, and that's why we don't have many of them. But the idea that evolution cannot be shown to be true without a lot more fossil evidence is ridiculous. Richard Dawkins writes: "it is surprising how much we would still know about our evolutionary past without them" (The Ancestor's Tale, hb version, p. 16-17).
He goes on: "The fossil record could be one big gap, and the evidence for evolution would still be overwhelmingly strong. At the same time, if we had only fossils and no other evidence, the fact of evolution would again be overwhelmingly supported. As things stand, we are blessed with both." (p. 17)
Cameron then goes on to point out that drawings - in, say, a science book - are not proof. I had this same argument with a Muslim creationist (who refused to call himself a creationist, despite the fact that he believed in a God revealed in the Koranic scriptures who, erm, created). He pointed out that drawings can be very inaccurate and are a guess. Of course, drawings can be quite inaccurate, as are scientific theories. They are subject to the evidence available, and if the evidence isn't available, then one has to provide a more general picture.
This happens with testimony. On television, you get reports of crimes, and the programme then produces a dramatic reproduction. They picture the rape victim wearing blue jeans not black, and with a slightly different hairstyle, and the lighting isn't quite the same. On that basis, let's throw out all stories of rape as inaccurate. That's what creationists are asking people to do.
Learning materials are just that - materials and aids. They are never 100% accurate, because there will not be a 100% accurate scientist. A certain degree of the things scientists say are wrong. The point about science is that it's possible to then work out when they are wrong by presenting more and different evidence.
He then has a rather natty shot depicting what "the scientists actually have" - himself and a tastefully dressed monkey. The video then superimposes the "missing links" in between. Let's forget the fact that there's loads of evidence that one can see over here (there's more than that, but it's a neat chart because it shows you how creationists throw things all over the map). The missing link isn't between modern human and modern monkey. It's between modern human, modern apes and an ape-like ancestor. This is a simple fact that creationists get wrong about evolutionary theory every time they try and play in our toybox.
They then get on to hominid and pre-hominid fossils. Lucy, aka the Australopithicus afarensis, they claim is nothing but a three-foot ape. Of course, that's not really true now is it.
Then there's Nebraska Man, which was an error. (Of course, they cite it as if it was still part of the evidence which demonstrates hominid descent, even though it's not). (See here) And Piltdown Man, and Neanderthal Man too. Yawn, this is what I got from the bonkers guy on the ladder with the Koran, only he didn't have tacky music.
They then quote Steve Gould's "extreme rarity" statement. It's a quote-mine. Don't worry about it, it's just creationists misrepresenting scientists. Nothing new, folks.
They then have a cringe-inducing sequence with Mr Cameron doing some horrible gesturing, which then cuts to one of our evolutionary cousins doing the same thing. They're smart, we get it.
He then compares a biplane with a 747, and asks "did they evolve?". Of course not! They had a common designer! (Actually, they didn't... the 747 was designed by Boeing and the Tiger Moth from their picture, was designed by de Havilland). They used "a similar blueprint". Funny you should mention that, because the analogy between a blueprint (or, better yet, a recipe) and that funny DNA stuff is rather a nice one.
If you are putting forward the functional repetition across species as proof of common design, by what method can we verify and falsify that? Is that an inference to the best explanation or the most ideologically pleasing? I'm gonna lay my bets...
Another "humour" section - if apes are our relatives, why can't we take them on the plane? I guess it was easier to call some airlines than it was to call some scientists.
They then decide to try and prove that monkeys aren't that intelligent by taking one to a diner. Congratulations on proving the obvious - that table manners aren't a useful adaptation for our hairy chums. You know, out in the jungle, they don't have "shirt and shoes" rules to contend with when they get the munchies, so using up them neurones on table manners isn't high on natural selection's agenda.
The other presenter goes on to say that they are another species and this explains it (gee whiz: they used the word "species" rather than "kind", which is a nice surprise from this kind of nonsense).
Back to Cameron. He pulls out a nice big bound copy of Darwin and quotes from a rather more Victorian passage about "The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexs is shown by man attaining to a higher eminence in whatever he takes up than woman can attain, whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands." (from their quote of The Descent of Man - I haven't checked the reference though).
Cameron then completely misunderstands the point of that passage, which is not that Darwin is arguing a moral superiority over women, but rather that men have certain advantages that favour them in the theory of sexual selection. These differences are picked up by Peter Bowler in his superb tome "Evolution: The History of an Idea" where he writes that "Darwin's theory of sexual selection seemed to reflect Victorian stereotypes about what was "natural" behaviour for males and females and thus formed another source of prejudice." (ed. 3, p. 313).
Modern sexual selection theories have, of course, evolved. Darwin's social and moral views (as well as religious and cultural views) are interesting pieces of history to read and understand, but any moral failings do not affect the truth of the theory of evolution, though do possibly throw some cold water on his epistemic values (or, to quote Bowler, it suggests that his theory "reflect[s] the tendency for male assumptions to become embedded in scientific thinking" - p. 314).
This carries over to Cameron's discussion of Darwin's possible racism. The point is that, whatever his flaws as a person, Darwin proposed a mechanism which later scientists have shown to be the most accurate of it's time, and he did so lucidly in his writings. Should modern evolutionary biologists be embarrased by Darwin's Victorian social beliefs? A little, but not so much as to turn you in to a creationist. Any person in Darwin's circumstance would have similar social beliefs, and that may have made him err in certain details of his work.
But the whole point about science is that it can correct those things - it is an epistemological system that has a self-corrector built right in to it, something creationism sadly lacks.
A couple of natty quotes (nothing earth shattering), then were back to the gormless people they picked up at some zoo or the other. They finally find someone with a Ph. D. in biology, who they show for a few seconds until they say something that proves their point. From what he was saying, he actually was talking a lot of sense. That isn't accepted in creationist videos though. His final point is a matter for philosophical and theological debate, and also clear demarcation of fields - evolution deals with the origin of complexity not the origin of life.
Cameron then goes in to "training the hordes" mode. Evolution, he says, isn't an issue for anybody he has witnessed to. He guides them to talk to the conscience (he points to the heart, I point to Nietzsche), and "circumnavigate the intellect" (oh my!). That's right - if you want evolution to go away, tell people not to think. You got that one right on, buddy.
You don't have to become an expert, the other guy tells us. And you don't have to remember long words. That reminds me of one of my favourite quotes by one Senator John Randolph from Virginia who said to some Baptists who wanted money to start a school for their flock: "But, my dear sir, if you educate them, they will no longer be Baptists" (source).
Are they being anti-intellectual, they ask? Of course not. They've got a book! And they're gonna pimp it to you. They can't be anti-intellectual if they've produced a book!
It then descends in to the usual evangelical pap. So what have we got? Holy rollers, some moderately amusing monkey shots and a load of unscientific nonsense combined with distortion, misrepresentation and out-and-out bullshit about evolutionary science.
I haven't written one of these in a long time, but now I have got back in to the groove, it's kinda fun.
Here's the video if you want to see that train wreck for yourself. Why can't these fools read some science books written after 1900, not base their opinions on Jack Chick and save me a lot of Googling finding all those nice skull pics so I can go back to lying, cheating and adulterating? Or at least, lying to the Amazon Wishlist, cheating at cards and adulterating raw chicken. These guys were less fun than the Muslim guy I was arguing with the other day, and it was raining then!
