skizz.biz

So as of the weekend a a proud owner of a MacBook Pro. It is a great machine, although it looks disappointingly like the old PowerBook - except for the tiny (really really tiny) camera and a slightly wider trackpad.

I guess this similarity is a good thing, reinforcing memes of continuity and evolution rather than revolution and disruption. One of the things I have always found annoying in Windows world is the way that the new versions of the apps look different but still have the same old annoying quirks and bugs.

But it does have a slightly different feel - it is more like it used to be when I was using linux extensively - living on the bleeding edge and recompiling parts of the system every few days as new versions came out. I used to enjoy that, but one of the great things about the mac is the loss of the need or desire to do that so often. Everyhting is already beautiful and functional.

This feels a bit like those old days - googling for the latest beta versions of apps not yet universal. But I am loving it so far - TextMate is universal and I always run a compiled ruby anyway, and for that this thing rocks.

Says it all really -
a sad song for a sad time (Warning - video contains disturbing images)

James Blunt via the freeway blogger via onegoodmove.

I just noticed
this blog entry
referring to
this NYTimes article.

If anyone ever doubted the narrow ideological focus of the Bush administration and its nepotistic appointments these articles should cure that. They have been seeking to control, supress and distort scientific information from the governments own scientists for some time, but rarely as openly and disgustingly as this:

The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he was an intern in the “war room” of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen’s public statements.

In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word “theory” needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang is “not proven fact; it is opinion,” Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, “It is not NASA’s place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator.”

It continued: “This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most.”