I have my reasons, damn it, I really really do have my reasons. Really……

Anyway, here is a facinating article about Denyse O’Leary.

Yep that guy. Did he dust himself off and reapply at a major research university? Nope. It is a evangelical private liberal arts college–Grove City College. Despite the polemics at the discovery institute blog, its clear this is a hell of a downgrade. The college is totally humanitarian based and is moving towards starting a minor in astronomy. It is also ranked as a 3rd teir school once you move out of conservative envangelical circles. His research will now be “during the summer” and funded by the “discovery society.” I can’t help but think if he had just shut up and moved on when the tenor denial went through and if the discovery institute had kept its mouth shut he would be much better off.

Well my fellow wiki editors Firefox 3 is finally out and they have improved the proccessing speed several orders of magnitude. That means for anything form based like, say, wiki editing it is a drastic speed bump.

Everyone should check it out, and no one should be using Internet Explorer.

Download it here.

So Ron Paul is out of the race, finally, and all his supporters can maybe stop talking about how is still going to win in a super secret take over of the convention.

Paul called for his supporters to organize an epic march on Washington. This is suppose to take place on July 12th and is being played up as a grand revolution.

Paul has some luck with “moneybomb” days during the campaign where all his supporters would give him money on a single day. They are attempting the same thing for this march on D.C. It is happening today on “flag day” and they are trying to raise $50,000. Think it will happen? I don’t…but let us see!

Follow the money bomb live!

I love doing my research. Coming up with problems, brain storming solutions, and testing them out. But I am really struggling with the whole “writing” up the results once it is done. I can move along at a brisk pace get a lot of work done then it is time to write it up for publication and I stop doing anything for weeks. Why is this stage so damn hard?

So I should be trying to get to sleep right now but instead I am thinking about automation. I have recently been working hard behind the scenes at RationalWiki to get several wikibots working every night and working in a fully automated sense. When a function is turned over to a machine we are giving up any sort of human control mechanism and relying on the algorithmic decision making of the underlying code. The program will do exactly what you have told it to do even if you really didn’t mean to tell it to do that. It also has very little to no adaptivity or creativity to respond to novel input. I think we only really relinquish human intellect behind decision making for processes that we really feel are “black or white.” Anything that we sense has an inherent ambiguity to it we pull back from complete automation.

I think this can be seen clearly in the difference between what a site like RationalWiki chooses to automate and what something like Conservapedia chooses to automate. RW’s automation seems to focus on highlighting articles that may not fit our mission statement, need expansion or keeping our “main space” clean. Conservapedia automates blocking users. RW would never automate blocks because of our natural aversion from our experience at Conservapedia. We feel that the decision has to have human intelligence behind it because when to block is viewed as a really ambiguous potentially dangerous decision. Conservapedia, however, would never allow a bot to go through and mark its articles as potentially unworthy. Andrew Schlafly hordes his articles in an obsessive compulsive manner and abhors the evil templates.

Automation is all over the place though, not just in our little wiki projects. One of the rules in defense automation is suppose to be that no weapon is ever discharged with out human intervention somewhere a long the line. Automated spy plans or satellites are free to take pictures of but not blow up tanks. But where does that leave something like a landmine? Seems to bypass the human intervention part to me. Ah well, its time for bed.

The Bilderberg Conference has all the ingredients that new world order cranks just love. Powerful people in the fields of economics, politics, and defense all coming together to meet in a secret. It is just ripe for the pickings. And thew new worlders, 9/11 truthers, and Ron Paul fan boys do not disappoint. The highlight has to be Alex Jone’s bull horn vitriol about the cancer in the vaccines! Which thankfully has been video tapped and youtubed for our enjoyment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5vsh1mRqTI

I am still playing around with the site, I have just re-done the frontpage of RationalBlogs. If anyone has any better ideas for slogans and the like let me or Linus know. I have also been playing around a lot in the code for themes and plugins so if you notice something weird let me know.

Programming is oddly relaxing actually….RationalWiki and now RationalBlogs is giving me lots of excuses to waste time trying muddling in program code. I like the whole straight forward logical algorithmic thing programming has going for it. Real life could use a lesson….

My first e-mail address came into my possession in 1991 as a stolen account on the local University network. Back in the day when a 10 year old could hack anything he felt like and not really get into much trouble…I mean it is not like anything important was on-line. A few years later I had 6 e-mail addresses, that peaked at about a dozen and I have since attempted to consolidate all of those into only a couple.

Web 2.0 has come and now I find the number of “blogs” I half heartedly write multiply like e-mail addresses. Consolidation is in order. Not that I “blog” enough to justify any of them. This is pure pablum at the moment while I play with RationalWiki’s new toy blog site.