I’m glad that I’m in science. I don’t think I could survive corporate culture. It’s just too nauseating. I/O psychology has eviscerated the landscape. There are no employees anymore. Everybody is an “associate” or an “engineer.” Everything is about “enterprise” and “innovation.”
The list of newspeak terminology in corporate culture is endless: 360-degree thinking, strategic thinking, [...]
Archive for June, 2008
Business Newspeak
Posted in Culture on 30 June 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The Lensky-Schlafly debate
Posted in Science on 30 June 2008 | 1 Comment »
John Timmer at Ars Technica comments on the Lensky-Schlafly debate. Timmer is incisive as always.
Richard Lenski is a microbiologist and member of the National Academy of Sciences, who holds a professorship at Michigan State University. He has been growing E. coli on glucose-limted growth media containing citrate for 20 years — over 44,000 bacterial generations [...]
Playing with the desktop
Posted in Linux on 30 June 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Human Clearlooks theme with the panels and menus consolidated.
Notice the notification area, volume control, temperature and time are set next to the workspace switcher and trash can.
The Applications, Places and System menus are consolidated into one parsimonious menu.
This layout gives you a little more screen real estate, which is especially useful on widescreen monitors, where [...]
Clean, elegant desktop theme
Posted in Linux on 28 June 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Clearlooks Wise.
World Wildlife Fund goes ape shit
Posted in Environment on 27 June 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I don’t understand the point of this advertisement. Is the World Wildlife Fund suggesting that mean sea levels will rise so much that we’ll have to evolve fishoid adaptions to survive? Whatever message they are trying to convey, the ad is absurdly alarmist and patently false. With modern technology we obviate most environental selection pressures. [...]
Automatic updates in Ubuntu Hardy
Posted in Linux on 26 June 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I installed Ubuntu on my parents’ computer a few years ago. They are approaching 60 and they aren’t very computer savvy. I keep telling them to click that orange/red icon in the top right corner to install updates, but they never do. So when I visit every few months I have to update hundreds of [...]
What constitutes evidence
Posted in Philosophy on 25 June 2008 | Leave a Comment »
In my last post I pointed out that evidence gleaned from experiments must be used to arbitrate between the possible explanations of an observation. But what constitutes evidence?
A proper experiment changes one variable in the system, and valid evidence is the observation of the final state of the system after an experiment is performed. If [...]
Evidence for the existence of God
Posted in Philosophy on 25 June 2008 | 2 Comments »
Believers tend to be confused about what constitutes evidence for the existence of God. The believer might say something like, “My mother had advanced-stage cancer and it spontaneously went into remission. How else could that have happened? It must have been God.”
The problem is that his mother’s cancer going into remission is not evidence for [...]
The Google experience
Posted in Internet on 24 June 2008 | 1 Comment »
It’s amazing what you can do on the Internet without ever leaving the Google family of web sites.
Gmail
The best feature is threaded emails, which I believe Google has a patent on, so nobody else can offer this convenience. It’s great if you’re on mailing lists.
You can also add labels to your emails. For example, I [...]
Current desktop theme
Posted in Linux, Personal on 24 June 2008 | Leave a Comment »
A modification of the Debian Etch theme:
