One of the statements is not like the other one …

Rep. Katherine Harris (R-Fla.) said this week that God did not intend for the United States to be a “nation of secular laws” and that the separation of church and state is a “lie we have been told” to keep religious people out of politics.”If you’re not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin,” Harris told interviewers from the Florida Baptist Witness, the weekly journal of the Florida Baptist State Convention.

… and …

Harris campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Marks would not answer questions about the Harris interview. Instead, she released a two-sentence statement.

“Congresswoman Harris encourages Americans from all walks of life and faith to participate in our government,” it stated. “She continues to be an unwavering advocate of religious rights and freedoms.”

from the Washington Post. I wonder if that’s what conservatives had in mind when they said things like this:

Not very long ago, the term conservatives most often used to describe Katherine Harris was “rock star.” Writing in The Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz praised her as “a local official in Florida who looked to the letter of the law for guidance at a time when we needed the law the most.” [TNR]

This essay, quoted from Atlantic Monthly, suggests that your worldview can be summed up by what period of the 20th century you think 2006 is like.

1938ers think that Germany (Iran) is a growing threat that we ignore at our peril. Don’t repeat the mistakes of Munich!

1942ers think we are bogged down against Japan (Iraq/terr’sts) and we mustn’t give up the struggle because victory is inevitable if only we don’t lose our will.

1948ers see the growing threat of the Soviet Union (Islamist Extremists) but believe a policy of aggressive diplomacy and containment is the surest path to victory.

1919ers see Wilson (Bush) as a dangerous idealist who is sacrificing America’s interests on some vague, impossible mission.

1972ers think we should just get out of ‘Nam (Iraq) now since defeat is inevitable. Escalation to Cambodia (Iran) would be reckless and cruel.

The blogger adds his own commentary…

The only thing I might add to the argument is how Osama bin Laden, Zawahiri, and the Islamofacists see it - 1683, perhaps, early in the year, sometime before the Ottoman defeat at the gates of Vienna?

…but why would all the good guys be choosing a year that represents [narrowly-avoiding]-a-bad-choice-but-it-will-all-be-alright-in-the-end while the bad guys are so stupid that they choose a year that represents massive defeat followed by a long period of humiliation? If I were an Islamofascist, I’d be comparing al-Qaeda with the Saracens, not the Ottomans. But maybe he knows something I don’t. After all, he is a professor and I am not.

The essay’s author leaves the threat of 1914 dangling ominously but doesn’t make it clear how the allied and central powers could avoid sleepwalking into catastrophe. Which side are we? Do both sides need to wake up to avoid the abyss?

I’m a 48er. What year are you?

Researchers at Stanford University have used microelectrode arrays consisting of multi-walled carbon nanotubes to electrically stimulate rat retinal neurons.

The small diameter of the nanotubes - 50 micrometres - enabled the researchers to stimulate individual ganglion cells growing on the microelectrode arrays.

Cribbed from Neurophilosophy blog

Heard this on some blog or other

Evolution is just a theory. Science is just a bunch of theories.

I watched Sunday’s Meet the Press last night. The panel discussion was quite excellent but I  was horrified to hear all the panelists falling over themselves to claim that they never supported the war in the first place. Where were all those people 4 years ago?

I fully expect to hear someone in the ‘08 campaign claim that Republicans were against it from the beginning and it was actually Hillary Clinton who invaded Iraq back in ‘98. It will probably be the National Review. That NR editor woman was evil.

Raph Koster uses an analogy with sports to make a point about structure in multi-player games. He chose the wrong sport though.

First some terminology. Most of the recent online games require you to choose a class (a healer, a warrior, a wizard or whatever) and you are then constrained to learn only those skills that that class is allowed to learn. When you form a group to battle the dragon, you have to choose a balanced mix of classes - a healer to heal, a warrior to fight, a wizard to cast spells - because, clearly, there is no way that a warrior might know some magic or that wizards might learn some first aid. This gives the games, to me, an artificial feel. It takes away opportunities to improvise.

A lot of sports are like that - American football, baseball, cricket, rugby - they have rules about who can throw the ball, who can wear extra padding, who can stand in front of the back foot of the scrum. As a result, the people who excel at those sports start to look a little freaky. All the locks are 8ft 3in tall, all the linemen are 400lbs, all the batters look like they are on steroids.

Soccer is not like that. There are only two classes. The goalkeeper and everyone else. The goalkeeper is a special case (and freaky) but everyone else has the same skills - they all tackle, they all pass, they all score goals, they all cross the ball. They just have different blends of the same set of skills.

Look at Henry. You probably wouldn’t even pick him out as a sportsman. He just looks like an ordinary chap but he is one of the best players in the world. Look at Ashley Cole & Gabriel Heinze. Both defenders by trade but both able to slot in to the attack as well as any world-class winger. Players in the same role often have wildly different skills sets - Rossi, Rooney, Crouch, Adriano, Drogba and Shevchenko are all strikers.
Go to any random city in the world and find a group of 12 years to play some soccer and they will all be able to play in any position. Some will be better goal scorers, some will naturally choose to defend. Sure, they’ll argue over who is going to go in goal because goalkeeping is a different animal altogether. It’s the exception that proves the rule.

Soccer is skill-based. That’s just one more reason why soccer is the beautiful game.

My local public radio station, KQED, has these annoying pledge drives every six months. About 20 minutes of every hour are devoted to a blah blah blah blah telethon that lasts two weeks. My membership expired in June but I didn’t renew precisely because the pledge drives annoy me so much. So, I was delighted this morning when they announced a new format for the pledge drives that would skip all the blah blah blah.

I like to reward good behavior so I resolved to renew my membership on the very first day of the new drive. But then they did the piece about Pluto…

…by an astrologer.

I immediately tore up my virtual cheque and tossed it out the window.

Fortunately they redeemed themselves with a stay-in-the-car piece about 10 minutes later. Stay-in-the-car pieces are the ones where, when you reach your destination, you stay in the car to listen to the end of the article. The ones where your wife comes out to find out why her husband is sitting alone in the car in the dark in the garage rather than rushing inside to hug her and share the joyous news of the day.

This one was about tree galls. You know, those unsightly blobs on the side of trees. They are caused by a variety of parasites but the subject of this particular piece was caused by the gall wasp. Gall wasps inject snippets of RNA into the tree which causes the tree to manufacture a protein which causes an unsightly blob to grow on the side of the tree in which the gall wasp larvae can develop in comfort. Add in the fact that the wasps have two methods of reproduction - in one generation they do the usual male-female sex thing, in the next, males are unnecessary - and I found myself virtually taping back together that cheque that I had ripped up so angrily.

Once again, I reflected on how much more beautiful and fantastic and miraculous the universe is when seen through the lens of science rather than through the distorting spectacles and ad hoc, fairy-tale magic of the alternative explanations.

I have one last question on astrology and then I am done. Is astrology one of those belief systems that, while clearly nonsense, must be treated with respect?

All the UI gurus say that a good user interface should make the user feel in control. This firefox extension, Mouse Gestures, makes me feel mighty! Swish! You go back. Swosh! You go forward. Slash! That stupid image is gone.

Once you get the hang of it, you can draw a big ‘S’ to view source or an ‘M’ to see the meta-data but don’t try to learn them all at once.

Start simple. Swish, swosh and slash. Be mighty too!

Before the end of this year, the Bush administration will claim that the War in Iraq is nothing to do with the War on Terror and that no-one had ever claimed that success in Iraq was crucial to the War on Terror. The whole thing was made up by the sneaky liberal press to discredit the administration.

Bush will personally make this announcement in a Press Conference and he will use that condescending tone that says “Not only am I right, I have always been right and I don’t know why you are implying that I might have ever suggested otherwise” (like he did on Monday).

Don’t be expecting these every week now - unless we stay on top

I tried to put twenty quid on a ManU/Saha double at 66-1 but the mean old betting sites wouldn’t take my american money. I would be already counting my winnings about now!