Tuesday, August 23, 2005

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Inelegant design I had thought there was no way to top The Onion's brilliant parody of Intelligent Design -- "Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory." But the Web's hive brain has now done it, with the rise of the Flying Spaghetti Monster meme. This "Open Letter to Kansas School Board" appears to be the source-point of the new cult of Pastafarianism (Wikipedia has more):   Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him. It is for this reason that I’m writing you today, to formally request that this alternative theory be taught in your schools, along with the other two theories. In fact, I will go so far as to say, if you do not agree to do this, we will be forced to proceed with legal action. I’m sure you see where we are coming from. If the Intelligent Design theory is not based on faith, but instead another scientific theory, as is claimed, then you must also allow our theory to be taught, as it is also based on science, not on faith. Darwin/Fish bumper-sticker designs on the Flying Spaghetti Monster theme are proliferating at an alarming rate over on BoingBoing. comment [] 10:29:28 PM | permalink

CMOS. CMOS run. Run, CMOS, run! I seem to be out of the hardware woods, at last. After my old box died, I thought carefully about its replacement. My computer has, among other things, become my chief music library and source; it's also where I edit family videos. The old computer, an Athlon system I'd rebuilt twice and extended with far too many expansion boards and IDE devices, whirred and hummed like a dilapidated helicopter. This time, I thought, let's get something quiet. (I know, ye Mac fans, Steve Jobs has promoted silent computing for decades! If it didn't mean moving 8 years of data and investing in an entire new set of software applications, I'd have switched.) So I ordered a system from EndPCNoise.com, whose site impressed me as a source of reasonably honest and detailed information about "silent PC" products. I paid a little more money than I'd have spent on a vanilla box, but after my experience with the slow decay of my Athlon system, that seemed a reasonable trade-off for higher-quality components. I had only one problem: after I installed my old sound card, an M-Audio Delta, the new system seized up with the fast-four-beep distress signal on boot. I did what I knew how to do, which was to roll the system back by removing everything I'd added; no good. I knew enough to pop out the CMOS battery, which should have allowed the motherboard to return to its default settings; no good. I began to fear that I needed to return the system, but a brief conversation with the folks at EndPCNoise solved the problem: to reset the CMOS on my particular motherboard, you have to move a jumper. That, along with a few reboots and trips into the BIOS configuration, did it -- everything worked again. (It turns out that this particular kind of professional sound card is highly picky about which of the five PCI slots you put it in. Or I guess it's the motherboard that is picky. Or the software that configures the interrupts. Anyway, it's a bit of a Russian roulette game with your system until you find a slot that works.) I find it highly amusing that, almost 25 years since I first messed with jumpers on a PC motherboard, I'm still at it. Plus ca change... On the other hand, for under $1000 today, I have a system with a gigabyte of RAM, hundreds of gigs of disk space, and more processor speed than most of my applications know what to do with. Now I can get back to work! comment [] 9:47:43 AM | permalink