Techno-Chicken!

Morning world, here's your daily dose of WTF? Hope you enjoy the hell out of it!

If I owned a club, this would so be a nightly feature!

Poorly Written Science Articles

I posted this to my facebook wall a moment ago but it got truncated so I'm reposting it here...

First, the crappy article: Here

As a fan of science and, in particular, evolutionary science this article seems to be exceptionally poorly written, especially for Science Now (I sort of expect science writing like this from NPR and other mainstream news sources who seem to think evolution is a living, breathing thing, instead of a theory to be used to understand the world).

1) "And that... could be bad for the evolution of the entire species." What kind of poorly thought out sentience is that? Helen Fields, please explain to me what qualifies something as being good or "bad" for the evolution of a species? This strikes me as very similar to saying something is "bad" for the thermodynamics of a particle. It is nonsensical and doesn't convey any information about what is actually going on. Something can't be "bad" for evolution. It may decrease or increase the rate of evolution or alter the direction of species evolution but nothing about those is, in and of itself, bad.

2) "This experiment adds to evidence that evolution doesn't always lead inexorably to progress for the species..." I would argue that evolution rarely leads to "progress for the species". Looking around at the majority of the world's species of animals today, it seems relatively obvious that given a significant amount of time and the right evolutionary conditions, evolution leads to speciation and, likely, the eventual extinction of the originating species due to pressures from the new species or multiple new species.

To take human evolution as a case in point, it is widely accepted now that the common ancestor of humans and the apes no longer exists precisely because of evolution and the speciation of our common ancestor into at least two new species which competed for the same resources as it did.

I'm so tired of reading articles about evolution and evolutionary science that seem as informed on the matter as my elementary science book was 23 years ago.

Online Comic Strips You Should Read

One thing I've noticed about a lot of my new friends here in Tampa is that they seem to not read any of the online comic strips that I so love. In an attempt to remedy this, I figured I would do a quick post highlighting some of my favorite individual strips from my favorite comics. (click on the images below to see the whole thing).

First up, Penny-Arcade

Penny-Arcade is probably the most popular comic strip out there right now and is certainly the most popular online comic strip. Their humor tends to centralize around video games, D&D, and just nerd humor in general. Here's two of my favorite strips from them...





Next up, we have XKCD

While the art isn't necessarily much of a draw with XKCD (just about everything is stick figures) the humor itself is priceless. It tends to focus on general geek, math, and language jokes. Here's a couple of great ones from there...






And finally, my current favorite, Questionable Content.

Unlike the other two, you really don't have to be a computer, gamer, or D&D nerd to enjoy Questionable Content. As long as you have a bit of geek streak to you, relating to this comic should be a breeze. It is also the only one of the three that has a continuous ongoing story line, so once you start reading it, it can be a bit hard to stop. I highly recommend just going to the website I linked above, clicking the "random" button, and following the first story line that catches your eye (although if you do this at work, don't plan on getting anything done today). Here's a couple I really like...

Life in Tampa!

To say I'm loving my life in Tampa would be a drastic understatement. Besides the fact that it is just a cool place to live, with a ton of stuff to do every day of the week, I've also...

bought my first home


made some amazing friends




have a good job


and am dating a great girl!

Woot! Pandora Widget!

As most people who know me know, I love Pandora! Just wanted to write a quick post that they now have a widget that you can add to your Blogger sidebar (to the right there) by going to your profile page within Pandora. Pandora also added the ability to post what songs you are listening to onto your Facebook page, at some point in the last few days (I just noticed it this morning).

Thank you, Pandora!

Buying a Townhome!

Woohoo! I'm finally going to have a place to call my own! I've been regretting not buying my own place for about three years now, ever since I got out of the navy and settled for a crappy apartment in Edwardsville, IL because I didn't give myself enough time to find a place to buy there before starting my new job there. So finally, two jobs and three years later, I'm going to own my own place!

It's not huge and its far from my dream home but it is definitely something and fits my needs very nicely.

These are the pictures from the model they have set up for tours.









Needless to say, I'm super excited about the whole thing!

Playing Soccer Again!

I coached soccer for a bit over the spring / summer but I'm finally going to start playing in a league again, two leagues actually, for the first time in about ten years! Just one more reason that I'm loving my life in Brandon, FL so far.