They’ve [biologists] got the science right, but they can be inarticulate and high-handed, torpedoeing their own cause. Their efforts at communication to the public are stiff and a bit arrogant. Meanwhile, intelligent design advocates have hired the PR firm that brought us Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. [Emphasis added.]

Working scientists have to pull triple-duty: teaching, research, and dealing with creationists. The creationists just have to write checks to a consultant.

Sorry to be joining a weblog chorus, but folks, this is what killed Ms. Schiavo. When she tried to lose weight by throwing up what she had for dinner, she set herself up for the heart attack that starved her brain of oxygen.

But the article, written by Hendrik Hertzberg (who ought to know better,) speaks in glowing terms about her drastic weight loss.

One of the comments describes what an eating disorder really does:

A friend of mine from high school was anorexic, and when she was down near a hundred pounds, she was not slim, she was not vivacious, she was pretty darned near skeletal.

The site’s slogan is: “Lost your IT job? Blame HR and your management. Don’t blame India, or Indians.” I’d add, blame the Internet, wage-differentials, and technology.

It still has to be voted on by the State Senate and approved in a statewide vote, so there’s some hope that it’ll be stopped.

Note: I lived in Wisconsin from 1987 to 1996.

He calls his contrarian model Aloha Mars, and has elaborated it in two columns in Space Daily.

In the first, he thinks the warm, wet Mars advocates see running water when they should interpret it as frozen basalt.

The second column argues that the ‘blueberries’ found by the Opportunity rover are most likely frozen spheres of lava. The frozen lava and ash from a volcanic eruption fell on a permafrost deposit and the ensuing reactions yielded the landscape the rover dropped onto.

How will his unromantic theory hold up in light of today’s NASA press conference? His theory behind the blueberries isn’t contradicted by the press conference results, as they didn’t conclude the site was covered in water. Professor Bell will probably have another column ‘debunking’ the press conference real soon now.

However, the movie’s opened big; $26 million in the first day. So how much of the audience are people curious about the controversy, and how many are there because they see it as their duty?

In what will sound like the opening of a joke: a lapsed Catholic, an atheist, and a Jew will walk into a screening of The Passion next week. We’ll debrief over coffee and report back.

He liked the portrayal of Pilate. Gibson emphasizes the Hobson’s Choice he had of either executing Jesus and playing into the hands of the Pharisees, or facing an insurrection which would result in his recall to Rome (and probable execution.) So not all the Romans are sadistic thugs.

And yes, he said, it’s incredibly gory, this Christ does suffer for mankind’s sins. I didn’t ask if it was more or less bloody than Kill Bill vol. 1.

I’m still offended by all the blog spam promoting the movie, but if my agnostic screenwriting teacher thinks it’s a good film, it may be worth catching in the theatre rather than on DVD.

The fact that we are now going to have a war over formats that are separated by a trivial XML transformation is almost as depressing as February in New England.

Going back to the classic story of George Leroy Tirebiter:

I don’t know why you people seem to think this is magic. It’s just this little chromium switch here. You people are so superstitious.

– The Janitor, in Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers, The Firesign Theatre

And yes friends, there’s a blog named for that line.

On the Atom list, the well-formed feeds question is back, should aggregators attempt to parse broken feeds, or throw an error and refuse to process them?

There’s the Ultra Liberal Feed Parser that will munge most any batch of tag soup claiming to be RSS or Atom, but saying you’ll parse anything sent only encourages producers to be sloppy.

On the list, Henri Sivonen suggested educating users that sending broken feeds is uncool.

And in the current political climate, there’s one way to do it, leverage the foaming at the mouth reaction you get to the word ‘liberal’.

If Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh would denounce ‘liberal RSS parsers’ on air as a plot even more wicked than gay marriage, within hours, a large portion of the blogosphere would straighten up and emit valid and well formed data. The Lieberman bloggers would join in quickly as they wouldn’t want to be mistaken for Democrats.

That looks like a bug in the vote counting software.

And yes, I’m still willing to think it’s a bug, not a conspiracy, because I write software, and make boneheaded mistakes like everyone else.

I would like to propose, nay, admonish, that the name of the format and spec [ for the currently nameless but shiny new syndication/aggreagation format ] should be Atom, that the current naming vote should be killed, and we should move on to grander things without the auspices of “what’s it called?!” over our heads. This has been going on far too long.

AaronSw agrees.

The single most common cause of non-well-formedness that I see is unencoded ampersands. They appear in a feed as & rather than as &amp;. This is most often in <title>s.

In my experience this most often afflicts larger publications, not weblogs using Movable Type or Radio or whatever. My guess is it’s because these larger publications have their own in-house systems. Those systems don’t get tested the way weblog systems get tested. A weblog system will have many thousands of users, but an in-house system has just one user (the publication). (I mean user in the sense of publisher.)

So, our charter is to evangelize large feed producers, who may have to build syndication tools on top of existing publishing systems.

Why should they bother? Here’s an example:

• A Big Pub creates an RSS feed to increase its exposure. For instance, they can use it to bypass the corporate firewall.
• Big Co doesn’t allow its employees out into the internet at large, but they have a corporate portal. Big Co’s IT department integrated a little feed reader into that project to display work-related headlines.
• Big Co’s IT department uses an off-the-shelf Perl/Java/PHP XML parser to read RSS feeds. They do it to save time and expense. They have many projects to manage.
• If Big Pub’s feed is broken, it doesn’t appear in Big Co’s portal.
• Big Pub loses Big Co’s readership.

I’m wondering what the commercial content management companies are doing for RSS.

You don’t want war. You don’t want to produce a broken feed. It’s not that hard. Tim Bray explains why you at least want to produce a well-formed feed, because RSS isn’t just about weblogs:

[W]hen I’m reading a feed describing my credit-card transactions, if a charge comes through without a date-stamp I want the aggregator to scream loudly and let me know; something here is gravely amiss, either with the credit card, the bank, or the software.

That’s the difference. We can afford to be forgiving about markup ment to be read by humans. Our minds can work around errors introduced by parsers attempting to guess at the author’s intent.

Update: and of course, in the process of cutting and pasting a quote from Tim’s weblog, I broke my feeds. hubris: -1