This is old news by now, but I wanted to post it and haven't had a chance to do so since I first heard about it the other day... 1) Go to Google 2) Type "weapons of mass destruction" in the search field 3) Hit the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button 4) Or just click here. The result is a nice little parody that pokes fun at the inability of the U.N. or Dubbya to find any WMD in Iraq. 9:46:15 AM    comment []  

A new study shows that P2P users buy music after listening to the track online [ArsTechnica]. Being able to sample music before you buy can greatly increase your confidence in a purchase. At nearly $20 a pop, a little insurance is very important.

This same concept is behind the QuickClips product that was announced yesterday by Loudeye [Puget Sound Business Journal]. I am part of the QuickClips development team, so I may be a bit biased, but I think the QuickClips concept should take the industry by storm. QuickClips offers an environment for finding and sampling music that far exceeds anything that has been available before. Unfortunately, the full product has not been released and the beta is not publically available. However, I will post a link here as soon as a version of it goes public. 9:30:45 AM    comment []  

The Followship Baptist Creation Science Fair, like its secular counterparts, offers kids the opportunity to get involved in science, but with a creationist focus. The 2001 winners included entries with the following titles:

• My Uncle Is A Man Named Steve (Not A Monkey)
• Women Were Designed For Homemaking
• Dinosaur & Man Walked Together
• Rocks Can't Evolve, Where Did They Come From Mr. Darwin?
• Using Prayer To Microevolve Latent Antibiotic Resistance In Bacteria
• Maximal Packing Of Rodentia Kinds: A Feasibility Study
• Young Earth, Old Lies
• Thermodynamics Of Hell Fire

Better titles couldn't have come from a Saturday Night Live parody. It would almost be funny if it weren't true. Even if the fair wasn't intended to be funny, it clearly has a funny idea of what science is all about.

This is also the first year that Muslim students from the Al-Jannah Islamic school have been invited to participate; two of their students presented a project on human anatomy entitled "Allah (SWT) Created Me" which, while it was found ineligible for a prize due to a number of Biblical inconsistencies, did win a special Interfaith Outreach ribbon.

It's good to know that they are impartial judges of truth. Using the Bible to validate "scientific" research is so ridiculous that it doesn't even deserve an explaination.

The scientific process is about creating a hypothesis and then trying to validate or disprove that hypothesis using experimention. If you believe that the Bible can be used as an accurate model of the universe, then fine; you can use it to guide your hypotheses. But for an inquiry to be "scientific", it must still include experimental validation/refutation of the hypothesis. The Standard Model of particle physics provides a model for how the subatomic world works, but a hypothesis can not be rejected a priori from the model. A good model will have good predictive power, but it is only after experimentation that you can know for sure if your hypothesis is an accurate description of the real world or simply a whimsical construct of the mind.

The Fellowship Baptist Creation Science Fair may be a good place to train kids in religious dogma, but it has very little to do with science. 9:04:31 AM    comment []