I recently watched an excellent Neil deGrasse Tyson lecture several times. In it, he made an excellent argument for the origins of the “Intelligent Design” theory and how to confront it in the public discourse.
He brought up the instance of Sir Isaac Newton, one of the greatest minds in human history. Tyson listed his major achievements, most notable of which were his understanding of gravity and the motion of the planets, as well as Newton’s somewhat flippant creation of calculus. However, when it came time for Newton to explain the perturbations of the planets’ orbits by one another’s gravity, he was stumped. With what he knew, Newton could not account for this perturbation and could not understand how the planets remained in stable orbits around the sun. Rather than delving into the problem with a rational mind and keen intellect, he simply surmised that a great, divine power was at work. Possibly the greatest mind in Western culture was confused for a moment and explained something away by claiming that a god did it.
The problem with simply chalking a natural phenomenon up to the supernatural is that it instantly ends all analysis and intellectual work. Thought and investigation on the matter simply stop. Not only does the former investigator not have a good explanation for the phenomenon, the entire human race is poorer for it. It took nearly a century after Newton’s death for the perturbation of the planets to be adequately explained with science.
The same thing is happening in the case of intelligent design and evolution. The reason that evolution should be taught in the science classroom and intelligent design is not is that the possibility of evolution has scientific evidence behind it. ID does not have any scientific evidence behind it, just a bunch of idle speculation and lack of curiosity about the world. Science requires a curiosity about the world and its workings. ID discourages investigation and curiosity. Therefore, it cannot be considered science or a part of a proper science curriculum.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vrpPPV_yPY]
News broke on Ars Technica, among other fine tech news sources, that several wireless carriers announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that they are coming together to create their own, unified, somewhat open mobile application store that will provide third-party software to people using their networks. Among this group of carriers is Vodafone, Verizon, Sprint, China Mobile, Orange, and AT&T. Handset manufacturers LG, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson are also getting in on this deal, presumably because their hardware will be running these applications.
Several of these carriers are already carriers for the iPhone in their respective markets. They claim that this store is not meant to compete head-on with Apple’s App Store directly, but to simply offer third-party software to everyone who does not own a iPhone, BlackBerry, or Android OS smartphone. Apple does not make much money on the App Store, with most of its money coming from hardware sales driven by Apple’s 140,000-application store.
The carriers do not care about Apple’s sales. To them, Apple is just another hardware manufacturer that they do not have a problem slighting in order to increase their own revenue.
It does not seem likely that Apple will allow applications from this other store to run on their phones, opting to retain their locked-down walled garden of applications custom-built for the iPhone OS and interface. It will be interesting, however, how the presence of an application store that will support LG, Samsung, and Ericsson phones will affect sales of the iPhone or even Android-enabled phones.
On Justin.tv, and countless other sites, there is advertising. This is nothing new. Since almost the beginning of the web’s use by the common public, advertising has had a presence and has faithfully generated revenue for those sites so that they can stay up. This has created something of a meritocracy, where the sites with more traffic earn for money.
However, there is a phenomenon that has reared its ugly head and that is offering for-pay, premium accounts that lack advertising. Initially, I simply justified this as the site’s owners getting their income from another source, the user, rather than another organization buying space. On a recent episode of MacBreak Weekly, Merlin Mann stated that he felt paid, advertising free accounts were an abuse of the users and the advertisers. This was such a revelation to me that I felt it was worthy of a blog post.
Essentially, a site with advertising regards ads as a nuisance and a means to get money out of their regular users. They therefore are deliberately trying to annoy their users in order to elicit money from them. This has the added effect of treating advertisers as not partners, but tools for creating annoying, useless content. It also makes users despise ads and click through them, rather than pay attention to them.
Justin.tv does this and it is an abhorrent web design practice. It disrespects users and advertisers who choose to support the site in question. Any site that charges users money to make ads go away deserves neither money nor users. Speak up about this practice to any site admin that does this.
Patrick Proctor was here 