To Texas, some Founding Fathers can be forgotten as well as the Enlightenment

by Tony the Misfit

Texas BOE Removes Jefferson From History Standard
[Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars]

The Texas Freedom Network continues to live blog the Texas State Board of Education hearings where the collection of ignorant dolts on that board debate and amend the social studies standards. And it’s getting downright surreal. They actually removed Thomas Jefferson and the Enlightenment from the history standards. Seriously.

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Watching the Texas Board of Education decide what gets put in our textbooks is always a horrifying experience. But removing Thomas Jefferson from discussions of the Enlightenment (Did the Declaration of Independence have no effects at all on such things as the French Revolution? The writings of John Calvin are more important than Jefferson’s in this area?), removing the term Enlightenment totally, and using the writings of several people who lived hundreds of years before the revolutions of 1750 onwards, seems particularly petty.

Oh and that the Second Amendment is much more important than the First. That appears to be the view of these latter day ‘patriots’. Too bad the Founding Fathers did not make it the number one Amendment.

And they feel that the Founding Fathers wanted to promote religion, not provide a separation.

They continue to make their warped world a big part of ours.

The animal world is very strange

What happened next? Zebra puts head in hippo’s mouth
[Via BBC News | Science/Nature]

A zebra at Zurich Zoo appeared doomed when visitors saw its head in the mouth of a hippo, but it was only cleaning its teeth.

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The picture is pretty amazing. I wonder if this is something that every occurs in the wild or is only zoo behavior?

I’d just declare victory and pay the fine

by cliff1066™

Microsoft loses second Word patent appeal, on the hook for $240 million in damages
[Via Engadget]

And the intellectual property rollercoaster continues. Microsoft’s second appeal of that $240m judgment banning sales of Word with features infringing on i4i’s XML-related patents has been rejected, leaving the Redmond giant with a huge fine to pay atop its undoubtedly sky-high lawyer bills. The appeals court held that Microsoft was explicitly aware of i4i’s patents before implementing the relevant XML code into Word — undoubtedly because i4i had been selling an extremely popular XML plugin for years and had approached Microsoft about licensing it. Yeah, oops. Don’t worry, though, there shouldn’t be any consumer impact here: old versions of Word aren’t affected, and current versions of Word 2007 and Office 2010 don’t have the offending features. Still, Microsoft might be able to appeal yet again, depending on a panel ruling on the matter — at this rate, we’d expect it.

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Hard to win when the apparent facts indicate they not only knew they were using someone else’s IP but had been offered a license. And people wonder why Apple filed suits over its IP.

Is IP protection that only small companies should be allowed to protect or does Apple, which is almost the 3rd largest company by market capitalization, be allowed to protect itself also?

Cosmos. The show, not the flower.

by OliBac

Cosmos on Hulu
[Via Boing Boing]

All of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. All for free. Enjoy.

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One of the best and most poetic of all the science programs on TV. Carl actually portrayed such a tremendous sense of wonder that drives to many scientists. We look at the marvelous things around us and want to understand them.

He makes that so very clear will also educating people. Too bad this ability to connect with the public led a virtual ostracizing by his peers. Many sniffed at his abilities, feeling they were beneath a ‘real’ scientist. So they prevented him from being elected to the National Academy of Science.

Academic jealousy is never pretty and often just petty. It really told me, a young scientist at the time, that the National academy of science was not really a reservoir of great minds but simply another old boys network dedicated to keeping the riff-raff out, like so many such organizations before it.

What Sagan did is important. We are only now really seeing how because we can revisit shows like this. Now for free. I hope I can embed the first episode below. Enjoy.

Losing a job because of a bogus claim

by perpetualplum

Science journo quits writing to fight chiropractic libel suit
[Via Ars Technica]

The UK’s libel laws, which place the burden of proof onto those who have published inflammatory statements, have had a chilling effect on journalism in that nation, and have led to a closet industry in “libel tourism.” As such, there have been repeated efforts to reform the laws, often led by professional organizations of writers and journalists. A 2008 case, however, brought a new community into the fight: science communicators, drawn in when the British Chiropractic Association sued a journalist for calling some of its medical claims “bogus.” Although the legal fight has continued, the journalist in question, Simon Singh, has now been forced to quit his job at The Guardian in order to defend himself.

Many of our readers who follow science news carefully are probably already aware of Singh’s plight, but we’ve not covered it at Ars previously, so a recap seems in order. Singh, who was working on a book on alternative medicine, took a look at some of the claims promoted by BCA members, which suggest that chiropractic treatments are effective for diseases for which there is no apparent spinal involvement, like asthma. In an article The Guardian has since removed from its website, Singh wrote:

The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.

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British libel law is so medieval. I really hope the strong-arm tactics of the BCA backfire. all because of the work ‘bogus’.

Looks like some of the people are fighting back. It is really tough if you call a bogus quack a bogus quack and then find yourself in legal jeopardy.

I hope Singh gets a really good book deal on this. Looks to me like the BCA just has not kept up with the times.

Getting news in the mobile connected world

[Crossposted at Spreadingscience]

So, I’m driving to the nearby Barnes and Noble to use their Wifi and get some work done. Plus I get a discount on their coffee. I get a voicemail on my iPhone from my Mom saying she hopes I’m not in downtown Seattle, that it looks like a real mess.

Not having a clue to what she was talking about, I checked Google News. I found a couple of articles like this one, about a man wandering around near the Courthouse with some sort of device on his arm. The police has him in custody and were examining the device.

Then I ran across this article which quoted a Police tweet about the incident:

In a tweet, Seattle police said, “Adult male in 300 block of James has made general threats against persons and property. He has taped an unknown device to his left hand.”

Whoa. I had not thought about that at all. You can follow the whole incident on their Twitter page! Here is a picture of the description so far:

Jeez. They have a picture of the device online already! Who would have really thought 5 years ago that information about something like this could not only be readily available but that organizations, such as the police, would be on the front lines of providing it. we no longer need to wait for the evening newscast or the paper the next day to get informed.

And as I finish this, the Twitter feed states that the downtown streets have been reopened.

Updated: I wonder into which Ring of Hell he belongs

by Sporko

Rove ‘proud’ of US waterboarding
[Via BBC News | News Front Page]

Former US President George W Bush’s advisor, Karl Rove, says he is proud of waterboarding as he believes it prevented attacks.

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For well over 80 years, water torture has been anathema to the people of the United States. One would have thought we had moved beyond a barbaric approach that simulated drowning, actually dying, in order to coerce information.

But Rove and his ilk think it is fine to torture someone, to say that they are different from the barbarians of previous centuries; that it is not even torture.

They represent a serious degradation of American sensibilities and mores, things that used to cut across political boundaries. “We should not torture and those caught doing so should be punished.”

It used to be that Americans were disgusted by the idea of torturing prisoners. That outcry resulted in the courts-martial of a couple of American officers in the Philippines. We tried war criminals for doing this. We court-martialed soldiers who did it.

Because they got ‘good’ intelligence or that it was only used on a limited number of prisoners does not in any way make torture an appropriate tool. One prisoner was waterboarded 183 times! But Rove says that is not torture.

Few non-elected politicos have been as destructive to America as Karl Rove. I wonder which Ring of Hell he should occupy?

The Eighth Ring might be one possibility. It is for those who deliberately and knowingly commit evil. There is a special ditch, the Eighth one, for evil advisors. Rove sure fits there.

But the Ninth Ring is for betrayers, with its Round Two for people who betray their country. I certainly think Rove would find himself amongst friends here.

Unfortunately, I think this is the only form of justice we will see here (i.e. the literary kind). I fear that Earthly justice in a court of law will never occur.

[UPDATE: Hear what retired colonel, Vietnam vet and Colin Powell's former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson has to say about Rove. Coward works.]

This should have been a Superbowl commercial

Found Footage: The Doritos iPad Parody
[Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)]

Filed under: Found Footage, iPad

Call me crazy but I think this is hysterical. Doritoscanada has put together a wry and dry iPad introduction parody using, of course, Doritos. It’s only one minute long so check it out and see if you don’t agree that it’s just about perfect.

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Can you believe how much buzz this would have gotten if it had been a Superbowl commercial? Of course, since the Superbowl was less than 2 weeks after the announcement of the iPad, it would have been a miracle to have gotten this put together that quickly.

Oh well, still an ad that should go viral.

Who fatally wounded Microsoft? Bill Gates

by Robert Scoble

Who fatally wounded Microsoft? Bill Gates
[Via MacDailyNews]

Why has Microsoft found itself in third place, behind Apple and now Google…

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This looks like a book worth investigating. This all seems to be an example of how MS just has not been able to transition to new software approaches as the needs of customers change. Apple, on the other hand, seems to have made this transition several times in its lifetime, reinventing itself and its own technology to cope.

Essentially, Windows is still Windows, running on Intel, while Mac OS is one its third completely new iteration. Mac OS has run on Motorola chips, PowerPC chips and Intel chips, all tremendous coding achievements but all transparent to the user. Apple has reinvented itself at the hardware level also. First coming out with iMac. Not only the first successful all-in-one in a long time, it also got rid of legacy input and adding USB. Then titanium laptops, then iPods, then the iPhone. Now the iPad.

Apple has constantly been reinventing itself, in ways that continually leverage its previous work while allowing for novel future changes. MS is still stuck in the world of Windows.

[Listening to: The Dance Of Eternity from the album "Scenes From a Memory" by Dream Theater]

[Listening to: Who Are You (Lost Verse Mix) from the album "Who Are You (Remastered)" by The Who]