Do I have to draw a picture?

Since the Oozer Zealots don't read or think, typing any more, is pointless. Maybe a picture will sum the whole thing up.

This puzzled me for a moment. Okay, from the labels on the graph, he's talking about evolution, but Oozer Zealots as a term for Creationists is a new one on me.

Then I realised that Oozer Zealots is actually a derogatary term for people accept Evolutionary Theory. Paul - the poster in this instance - is arguing the Creationist point of view.

Well, I went into the comments to see what people had to say about that, and to add my $2 (partly inflation, but mostly because I have a lot to say), only to find that the comments were closed.

Trackbacks weren't closed, though, and Paul receives a well-earned spanking from Pharyngula. Even better, the Commissar offers these two detailed posts, followed by (mostly) informed and rational commentary, explaining where Paul is wrong, why he is wrong, and how we know he is wrong.

Paul does not help his case with this response:

You are an idiot.

And a paranoid idiot at that.

Now I'm a closet bible thumper?

Way to advance an argument.

Back in December, I wrote this:

My aim is to promote Science and Civilisation, and it's a selfish aim. I want the products of Science and Civilisation for myself: Peace and wealth and effective medicine and a comfortable home with air conditioning and a fancy computer and an interesting and productive job. The people who attack Science and Civilisation are trying to deprive me of all that, and I won't allow it.

The Creationists pushing their fraudulent spin on Evolutionary Theory; the Post-Modernists denying the concept of Objective Truth; the Islamists trying to do both at the same time; the historical revisionists; the Psychics; the "Alternative Health Practitioners"; the academics who see their role being not to teach but to brainwash their students into leftist zombiehood; the "free speech" proponents who want to stamp out speech they don't like; Mysticism and Obscurantism; the spammers and scammers and hackers who are doing their level best to destroy the Internet; the nanny-state idiots and the totalitarian hardliners who try to legislate problems out of existence: These and more are what I truly oppose.

The only way you can maintain a Creationist belief system these days - if you are an adult in a developed country - is through deliberate ignorance. Maybe you don't care much about evolution. That's not so bad; not everyone needs to be a biologist. Still, it is probably the single most significant scientific theory ever formulated, and you should care. But if it's not your thing, and you have chosen not to study it, and you've gone into, say, accounting or civil engineering, that's not a problem.

But that doesn't apply to Paul. He's not only chosen to ignore the facts that are at his fingertips, but to spit in the face of the people who are patiently trying to explain the facts to him. He has inflicted ignorance upon himself, and wishes to inflict it upon others.

No.

There are valid questions regarding Evolutionary Theory, but Paul asks none of them, merely repeating the tired old Creationist talking points. You know how you feel when you hear the same old Democrat talking points, refuted countless times, trotted out once again? Well, yeah. Only this is worse. This is Science he's messing with. This isn't just politics, this is real. More even than democracy, this is the bedrock of our civilisation.

Fortunately, in science, what Paul thinks doesn't matter. No working biologist cares one whit what Paul has to say about the matter. No paleontologist is going to lose any sleep over his posts at Wizbang. No geneticist is going to have an upset tummy at lunchtime today.

There's a little saying popular among scientists and engineers: It's so bad, it's not even wrong.* What this means is that what someone has said is so confused that it is neither true nor false, it simply doesn't make sense.

That's where Paul finds himself from the scientific perspective. He is attacking one of the best supported scientific theories we have, from a point of ignorance, with claims long since refuted. Neither Creationism nor it's stepchild Intelligent Design are scientific theories; nor indeed do they have anything to do with science apart from distorting and misreporting scientific findings.

I'm not going to offer a point by point refutation, because it's been done. If you're interested, there is no better place to start than the Talk.Origins Archive. The works of Stephen Jay Gould are also a wonderful and accessible source of information (though he had his disagreements with other biologists on the fine points of evolutionary theory). There is an unending wealth of information on the subject, much of it wonderfully written (and illustrated!), a joy, a delight of learning. All of which Paul has rejected.

In that post in December, I remarked in closing:

So I shouldn't want for subject matter.

* Attributed to Wolfgang Pauli

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:32 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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I have replied, in likewise polite and carefully chosen words, that I do not find this response entirely satisfactory.

We'll see.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:32 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Grrr.

You can't win.

On Wednesday I ordered a new monitor because I noticed it had come down in price. $770 before Christmas, and only $450 now.

Of course, the reason it's so cheap is that they don't make them any more.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:59 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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You cannot switch from using iPod photo with a Mac to using it with a Windows PC (or vice versa) without erasing all data on iPod photo.

This of course explains why the miserable piece of crap decided it had to be formatted before I could use it. (It's still bloody formatting.)

Look, Apple, I have a PC and a Mac. You want to sell Macs to PC owners, you have to make the iPod work with both. None of this insane reformatting bullshit, it has to just work.

Now stop sitting on your thumbs and fix it.

(I deleted the first version of this post, in which I was rude.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:16 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Of course, one would be wrong.

Oh, and one might advise one's service staff not to fob off customers by blaming the problem on line filters. This applies doubly in instances where there are no line filters installed.

And you know what? You know what? It's bloody hard to write consistently in the first person indefinite subjunctive.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:14 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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All those who answered "one" go to the head of the class.

There is, apparently, a way to fix this, since the second failure was a transient glitch and the drive actually works. However, it involves scary things that I haven't done before.

Grumble grumble.

I've posted a cry for help in the appropriate newsfroup, and I'll see what happens.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:21 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Then I found one in English. It reads:

Season's Greetings

Well, quite. And a Pleasant Summer and Cheerful Winter to you as well.

James Lileks has his own observations on the topic.

(It's Felice Fiestas as it turns out. And isn't it Feliz Navidad in Spanish? Are Fiestas of a different gender to Navidads or something? Why are you looking at me like that?)

* Or printed, or however they do it these days.
** I think.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:04 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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For about fifteen minutes. Then my computer crashed. And again ten minutes after that. And again twenty minutes after that, and five minutes after that, and... so on. The screen freezes, or goes black, or drops me back to Windows, or when I'm really lucky the machine just reboots.

I thought maybe the power supply wasn't quite coping, what with the three new hard disks I added. I pulled out a couple of cards I wasn't using (video capture and second network card) and it seemed to be going longer between killing my sims, so yesterday I ordered a shiny new 480W power supply and this morning I installed it.

As you can probably guess, it wasn't the power supply.

So, now I have a problem. This is the second video card I've had trouble with in that machine. The first one locked up all the time, even when I was just scrolling a web page. The replacement has been reliable enough until now; I can use it all day for applications and web stuff and watching videos without even the hint of a hiccup. But it sure doesn't like Sims 2.

I could buy a fancy new video card, which would make things faster - except that AGP, which is what I have, is fast being replaced by PCI Express, so if I buy an expensive video card now it's not going to have a very long life. And this is the second time I've had problems with video cards in this machine, so what if it's not the card? If I spend hundreds of dollars on a new card and it doesn't work either, I won't be a happy bunny. Now, a few times I have got actual errors back from the video drivers, so I'm sort of confident that it's the card, but what if the chipset on my motherboard is slightly wonky? But then, it runs fine for days when I'm not using 3D graphics.

Mrble.

Fortunately, I'm currently building a couple of systems for work right now. So I've ordered myself a cheap Radeon 9250, and if that works at home I can then put it in the new work machine and expense it, haha! And then go on the waiting list for an Nvidia 6600GT, which is currently a yes, we have no bananas sort of thing.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:57 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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YES I BLOODY WANT TO DELETE THE BLOODY THINGS YOU PIECE OF CRAP!!!!

If you design your software so that it treats your users like morons, you will soon find that only morons use your software. And you will have to take all the support calls because everyone else will somehow contrive to be at lunch when the phone rings. Even if it's 8 am.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:15 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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A pox!

Yes, while I was backing up everything on my Windows box so that I could attempt to convince it that the boot disk was not the G drive and that the system disk was not that spare disk I installed one day with a certain amount of comfort that I would not lose every last one of my files, my trusty* external disk decided that it didn't want to play any more. Well, it decided it was going to make some unhappy noises and refuse to write anything more and Windows decided that that was a good enough excuse to lock up completely.

So I've now pressed my emergency back-up Linux box into play. It's built up out of all the spare parts I have lying around from previous systems, and it has so far stubbornly refused to die. Of course, it's old and clunky and slow, but it actually works.

So now I can copy all my files onto that, reformat everything attached to my Windows box, reinstall Windows for the third time in a week, and then copy everything back again. Joy.

Then I'm going to buy me a UPS.

* It hasn't suffered massive file corruption for, like, months.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:30 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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