I’m pretty excited right now, because I’m not that far away from the launch of a project that I’ve been working on almost nonstop for the past several weeks. It’s involved the writing of several thousand lines of code, more than a few sleepless nights (thank you, coffee), and flurries of emails and text messages. …read more…
Science thrives on errors, cutting them away one by one. False conclusions are drawn all the time, but they are drawn tentatively. Hypotheses are framed so they are capable of being disproved. A succession of alternative hypotheses is confronted by experiment and observation. Science gropes and staggers toward improved understanding. Proprietary feelings are of course offended when a scientific hypothesis is disproved, but such disproofs are recognized as central to the scientific enterprise.
Pseudoscience is just the opposite. Hypotheses are often framed precisely so they are invulnerable to any experiment that offers a prospect of disproof, so even in principle they cannot be invalidated. Practitioners are defensive and wary. Skeptical scrutiny is opposed. When the pseudoscientific hypothesis fails to catch fire with scientists, conspiracies to suppress it are deduced.
Carl Sagan
Earlier today, someone on a help forum said that I had shown them tough love. I don’t deny it. After all, they were trying to do something very simple in a very complicated way. To make matters worse, they described themselves as a “newbie” even though they’ve been on this forum for over a year. …read more…
Thanks to Martin Rice for the recent donation. It is much appreciated.
Amazing that an anti-spam plugin author would spam in the #WordPress forums. #irony "If you do it, it's spam; if I do it, it's promotion." — Professor O (@iswpw) May 27, 2013 You can read about it in the WordPress forum here. Kind of ironic that someone who is promoting an anti-spam plugin would resort …read more…
So I took the Which Star Trek Character Are You? quiz that Jeff Baker offers on his web site. Guess what? I’m a red shirt! And proud of it! (I think.) Your results: You are An Expendable Character (Redshirt) An Expendable Character (Redshirt) 90% Spock 84% Geordi LaForge 75% Jean-Luc Picard 65% Data 64% James …read more…
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
For the first time in a long time, I didn’t bring any work home with me this weekend. I’m just beat and I needed a break, so I took one. This is what happened. Saturday, I went to the music store and spent money I didn’t have on a book of bass chords and another …read more…
For the past ten years or so, I’ve always used my own index.htm file as the homepage for all my browsers, adding to it the links I visit the most. Over the years I added and deleted links, and occasionally tweaked the css, but for the past few years, it’s been pretty static. I recently …read more…
No, not really. But that’s what Facebook apparently thinks. After I logged out the other day, I noticed this ad: “Okay…” I thought. Let’s find out about that special rate. So I clicked and this is what the big blue FB showed me: Sadly, that’s funny for me, but not for Claro Brasil. After all, …read more…
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