Equinox of Insanity

Here’s everything you need to know about this movie: 

1.  Jason Statham assembles a gang of colorful characters, who then spend half the movie planning and executing a bank robbery.
2. In the process of robbing the bank they end up with some scandalous photos wanted by the British spy service (Mi5 or 6, I’m not really sure which).
3. Zaniness ensues as Jason Statham out-smarts the British government, corrupt cops, not corrupt cops, and a small-time gangster, and, as one might suspect, at one point Jason Statham exhibits awesome fighting skillz.
4. Saffron Burrows is smoking hot.
5. The movie is set in the 70s, which means there are lots of titties.

So yeah, it’s a good time. It does run a bit long, and is a bit boring, but after the sixth set of naked titties I really stopped worrying about those things. Yes, I have a 12 boob quality threshold.

Let’s review: humanity is wiped out in a nuclear holocaust instigated by a nefarious race of killer robots with a grudge against their human creators, forced to flee with the remaining 40,000 humans in a series of crappy ships defended by a lone battleship (which itself is kinda falling apart), they settle on a planet, build a terrible society, are dominated by the same ruthless robots that almost made them extinct, and then are rescued by that battleship, where they go on the run for their lives again.

Am I to believe that after all that the last 40,000 survivors of the human race would keep whining about their justice system or questioning the decisions of their military or spiritual leaders? Really?

I call bullshit.

After the American Revolution we elected General George Washington president. After World War II we elected General Dwight D. Eisenhower president. After having their race nearly exterminated and then getting rescued from New Caprica the people of Battlestar Galactica would have crowned Admiral Bill Adama frakking emperor of the Universe. At the end of “Exodus, Part II” the people were literally chanting his name. He was the humanity’s greatest hero. He was their savior. So to see in last night’s episode that the remnants of humanity were getting their panties in a bunch over Adama’s decision to send a garbage heap out of the fleet on a “secret military mission” quite shocking. Hell, our President makes a claim of national security and, regardless of how severe the case or specious his claim may be, people let it go pretty quick.

One of the questions Battlestar Galactica has presented to us is: what would be the nature of the society that would arise from a people that go through what the people of BSG have gone through? In the beginning, a very believable picture was being painted–the people would try, desperately, to recreate the society that they knew, even if it didn’t really make sense anymore. The first season of BSG dealt with that head on. Tom Zerek’s role on the show originally dealt specifically with that issue. In “Colonial Day” Zerek’s major political argument with Roslyn is that, since their society has been destroyed, they should create a new society that serves the new needs of the people (presumably with him as it’s leader), instead of trying to cling on to their old concept of what a society should be. Zerek ultimately lost that debate, made it clear that they would have to return to that question in the future.

The people of BSG continued to struggle with the structure of their society deep into season two. “Black Market,” a generally poor episode most notable for staring the black guy from Predator that wasn’t Apollo Creed, explored not only the seedier parts of the fleet, but also how the government of BSG would tolerate such evils. Adama ultimately decided that in order to maintain order in the fleet they would have to tolerate a black market, but that they would also keep it in check to make sure it didn’t get too vile (drugs and smuggling = ok, child prostitution = not ok). This was a completely understandable decision, given the circumstances. One could debate the appropriateness of the choices the characters made, but not their believability.

Season two ended with a massive alteration to the BSG society. The people of BSG ended up on a planet, eking out a meager living in their generally poorly structured society, and then the Cylons show up and subjugate the human race in brutal and sucky ways. People were forced to explore careers radically different than what they had known even after the attack on humanity, and the Cylons only made matter worse by pitting human-against-human. When Adama finally shows up with the Battlestar Galactica to rescue the people off the planet humanity couldn’t be happier to get off that crap-rock.

Everything would have changed with New Caprica, but the society really wasn’t profoundly altered by their experiences there. Sure, there was an episode or two that dealt with people “dealing” with the New Caprica debacle (read: killing the traitors), but there was never a reexamination of what the people thought about the nature of their society. Wouldn’t the people, having not only suffered at the hands of their enemies but also now lived under their tyranny, be more inclined to turn to the military that saved them? Would they still question the authority that tried to protect them from settling on New Caprica in the first place? Wouldn’t they (to steal from Obama) cling to their guns (Adama) and their religion (Roslyn, basically)?

Instead, we see there are people who are turning away from the their own religious beliefs and accepting the Cylon’s concept of God (apparently the next episode deals with this more). Excuse me, but when does it work like that? If anything, while being controlled by the Cylons some people might have converted, but afterward? That doesn’t make sense. The argument the show seems to be making is that people are losing hope, and therefore turning to alternate religious support, but wait, they’re starting to lose hope now? They have a very strong leadership, both in Adama and in Roslyn, a goal, a path to that goal, a general lack of threat by the Cylons, and a really devastatingly bad point of comparison to how miserable their lives could be if they ever submitted to the Cylons. If anything, they should be piss-full of hope and optimism right now.

In a show that is really a character drama you sort of have to have believable characters, reacting believably to the situations they’re placed in. Those situations may be unbelievable–such as those involving murderous robots and their resurrecting kinda-cyborg masters–but the believability of the reactions is what’s important. All through season one, and mostly through season two, the characters on the show were reacting believably to what was happening to them. Now? Not so much. And a lack of believability gives rise to apathy, which is, unfortunately, how I find myself feeling as I watch these episodes.

So I decided to bite the bullet and buy myself a copy of Microsoft Office 2008. It’s been out for a while now, and while I’ve found Pages to be a passable writing application, a couple of little issues have popped up that I thought Word would address. Turns out I was right, but I also realized that I’d been spoiled by certain features of Pages, and, ultimately, both apps have their problems.

I decided since I was shuttling back and forth between the two apps to figure out which one I liked better I might as well share my findings with the public (it’s the least I could do).

Please keep in mind that I primarily am interested in using a word processor for creative writing, so that’s where a lot of my focus is. Hopefully some of the comparison below will be applicable to your own writing interests, and if not I say: feel free to write your own comparison. Seriously, it will give me more time bitch and moan about Battlestar Galactica.

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Text

If you put a Pages document and a Word document side-by-side the first thing that jumps out at you is how much better the text in the Word document looks. Observe:

Long story short: Pages doesn’t use OS X’s subpixel rendering to improve on-screen text while Word does.¹ The visual unpleasantness of the text in Pages can be fudged depending on which font you’re using, it’s size, and the screen zoom setting, but in every case it’s always going to look worse than that same text in Word.

Given the purpose of the program is to write text, having the text display poorly is absolutely brutal, and, truth be told, it was pushed me over the edge in deciding to buy Office 2008. Apple may have foregone subpixel rendering for performance reasons (see footnote), but for a program that is exclusively focused on text I think sacrificing performance for proper text rendering is preferable.

User Interface

That said, Pages really is much, much faster than Word. Pages launches faster, opens documents faster, scrolls faster, and feels generally more responsive than Word. Word 2008 feels about as slow as Word 2004, and, in fact, they both take the exact same amount of time to launch on my Mac Pro.

In terms of how the apps look I prefer Pages’ look to Word’s. Pages looks more “Mac-like” and I think they’ve done a wonderful job laying all the controls out. Word’s new Elements Gallery (the not-Ribbon new UI feature) pretty much sucks. Though, to Microsoft’s credit, it animates beautifully.

Styles

Making proper use of styles is the key to working with a word processor like Pages or Word. Using styles allow you to independently manipulate the content and presentation, in much the same way HTML/CSS or LaTeX does.

Both Pages and Word make it relatively easy to access styles: Pages has a Styles drawer, while Word includes a section for styles in the Formatting Palette. Both work, though Pages’ drawer is vastly superior, in that Word’s style chooser is a fixed height, meaning you’re almost always going to have to scroll up and down in the list, even if you’re only using a few styles. Scrolling that stupid little list in Word gets real old, real fast. Oh, and it doesn’t seem to respond to my mouse scroll-wheel. Devastating.

While Pages makes selecting styles easier, Word takes the cake when it comes to modifying styles. Hover over a style in Word’s style list and an arrow appears that gives you access to the Modify Style menu (screenshot on the right). From there you can manipulate every conceivable setting of the style, including both where that style inherits it’s settings from and what style you want following paragraphs to be set in.

In contrast, Pages makes you modify all the text settings of a selected paragraph via the Text and Font inspectors, and then you have to choose Redefine Style from Selection in the Styles drawer.

The advantage to Word’s approach is that you can open up a new document at the start of a project and first define all the styles you’ll be using in the document right in the Formatting Palette, all without touching the actual document. Additionally, the ability to define inheritance using Word’s “Style based on:” setting (see screenshot) is incredibly useful, and allows you to easily change multiple styles by changing their parent. For example, you can have it so all your heading styles inherit from base “Heading 1″ style, and then if you want to toy with the heading font all you have to do is change the font on that first heading and all others will inherit the change. You can also have your document Footer inherit it’s style from the Header, and, again, you can easily keep the Header and Footer looking consistent as you modify the Header’s style.

Word also allows you to create a special margin under the Draft view called a “style area.” (The setting is under Preferences->View, set the style area in inches). This allows you to quickly see the different paragraph styles of your document. If you’re interested in retrofitting an old Word document that wasn’t made with proper styling then this style area will prove invaluable. Unfortunately, no such feature can be found in Pages.

Fields

In my previous post explaining how to set up a novel template using Apple Pages ‘08 I mentioned that Microsoft Word could handle setting up chapter headings much more elegantly because it has better automatic text generation features. I was specifically referring to Word’s Insert->Field… feature.

Fields are basically little bits of text that Word will automatically fill in for you, based on what you tell it to do. Dates, the author’s name, and page numbers are all examples of fields you might use in a document, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg — fields can also be used to dynamically generate content for you.

For example, let’s say in Word you’ve got your novel’s chapter headings defined under the “Heading 1″ style. Go Insert->Field… from the menu, and then select the field name StyleRef under the “Links and References” category (see screenshot). A StyleRef field will pull the content from the preceding element of that style and insert it into that field. So, if you choose “Heading 1″ as the StyleRef it will insert the current chapter heading into that field. Do that in a Header, and you’ve got a perfect Header that will always include the current chapter heading for every chapter of your book. Brilliant!²

In contrast, as I described in my tutorial, in Pages you have to manually insert the correct chapter number every time you create a new chapter. This isn’t impossible, but it is annoying, and compared it how Word does it, it’s down-right primitive. This is because Pages has a very limited number of automatically generated text types to choose from, and nothing with the power of what you can do with Word.

Micro-Templates

While Pages lacks the Fields feature of Word, it does have the very nice ability to “capture” sections and pages as micro-templates. For example, you can create a “Chapter” section with a unique layout, custom headers and footers, and placeholder text which you can insert into your document. For a novel this isn’t that big a deal, but this feature makes Pages’ built-in templates extremely powerful and easy to work with. For complex documents with many distinct page or section types you can build some really amazing templates with Pages that are much easier and more robust for future use.

Viewing Page Layout

The major advantage to writing in a WYSIWYG word processor, versus something like LaTeX, is that as you’re working you can see, clearly, what the finished product will look like. As such, both Pages and Word feature a “Two Up” view of your document, which flattens out the document as if it were a book, showing you both pages side-by-side. The big difference between the two programs amounts to this: Pages shows you an accurate view of your document, and Word lies to you. Observe:

The screenshot above shows Pages (left) and Word (right) scrolled to the exact same part of the document, but they’re different. Pages is showing the correct layout — Chapter 4 of this document is supposed to be on the right. How did this happen? There is a section break preceding Chapter 4, and I have the document set to always start new sections on the right (see my Pages tutorial). Because Chapter 3 ends on the right, the programs are supposed to insert a blank page into the document, and they do, but Microsoft Word refuses to acknowledge that it’s done that until you go to print.

Let me be clear: with Word, what you see on the screen is not what you get when you print it out.

If you’re going to try and do a complex page layout scheme with Word then I think you’re either going to have to do the whole thing by hand, or you’re going to end up with a bit of a head-ache. Pages, on the other, shouldn’t slow you down a bit. When you’re in the “Two Up” view you’re looking at the finished product right there in front of you. What you see is definitely what you’re going to get.

Document Navigation

Both Pages and Word have have a Thumbnail view side pane that you can use. Pages handles the thumbnails a bit better, in that if you click on one of the thumbnail pages a yellow box will highlight all the pages in that section, making it very easy to get a handle on how the section break-down of your document looks like (screenshot, left).

Not to be outdone, Word does have an extra “Document Map” view that shows the structure of the document you’re working on (screenshot, right). For a novel, limited only to chapters as sections, this isn’t a big deal, but it’s not hard to see how an outline-like map of a more complex document with multiple sub-headings would be incredibly helpful. I could find no equivalent feature in Pages.

Change Tracking

I love document annotation. Seriously, if you send me a document I will annotate the bejesus out of it, smiling all the while. So for me, change tracking is not only a must-have feature, but it’s also one that I’m bound to use heavily.

Both Pages and Word allow you to track changes to a document, as well as add comments. In terms of user interface, Pages implements both using simple but elegant square “bubbles,” and has an equally elegant control bar that appears above your document. Word 2008 has the same old rounded bubbles that previous versions did, and I think they’re far less visually appealing. Likewise, the Reviewing toolbar is nothing to write home about, and needs to be activated manually (unless you have it open by default).

The differences in appearance have functional implications, as well. Word sticks little arrows at the points of insertions or deletions which can make it difficult to see how punctuation has been changed. Pages also includes the author and date of a comment or change in the body the bubble, while Word has a separate bubble header for that info. This is important because, in the case of comments, the author info is part of the comment, and the only way to “hide” that info (to save space or just for aesthetics) is to delete that text from the comment. In Word you can simply choose to toggle off the bubble headers from the Preferences dialog.

I really like that Pages keeps comments and changes much more visually distinct than Word does. It makes it much easier to tell them apart, and I think it’s just prettier the way Pages does it.

Pages also has an advantage in allowing you more flexibility in how you can view the various changes to the document. With Word you can choose to view the document as “Original Showing Markup” or “Final Showing Markup”: in the case of the former you get to see any text that’s been deleted, and in the latter text that has been added, but you can’t view both at the same time. By default Pages will show you all the changes — be they deletion or insertion — and you can choose to toggle the deletions off if you choose. Word does include a separate itemized list of changes (Review Pane), as well as the ability to view the original and the final documents (before and after all changes), however Pages lets you export all the changes as a new document, which is really nice.

File Sizes

This is really a trivial point, but I think it’s interesting to compare the file sizes between .DOC and .PAGES files:

So the original .DOC format is the largest, with the new OOXML .DOCX smaller than that, and Pages generates even smaller files than either of them. To be clear, this document is a 50,000 word novel that ends up being around 108 pages. No images or tables are in the document, but it is fully and properly styled.

But, seriously, what’s a couple hundred KBs among friends?

Conclusions

The word processor situation is a mess, partly because both apps are so good, yet also bad. Each app has areas where it excels, and areas where it fails (sometimes hard). Word has a much more robust set of features, but screws up the simple stuff like proper WYSIWYG page layout. Pages looks nicer and properly shows you what your page will look like, but the text looks absolutely terrible.

I think the problem is for any one type of document you might make each app has it’s problems. If you’re primarily interested in writing a novel then Pages’ proper page layout will be very nice, but you won’t have the wonderful dynamic fields of Word to help set up your document, and vice versa. It makes choosing which app to use a strictly personal — subjective — decision.

Here are my (current) thoughts on how I would make the choice between the two apps:

• For simple documents — letters, short stories, maybe a résumé you only need to update every year or so — I’d definitely go with Microsoft Word over Apple Pages. Pages is faster and prettier, but the actual text looks like ass, which is totally unacceptable.

• For longer documents that aren’t structurally complex — such as a novel, thesis, or report — I’d write it in Word and then, when it’s all done, I’d move it to Pages for finishing. Word simply has too many features that are useful for building the document — such as it’s vastly superior style options and it’s fields — that it makes it difficult to consider doing a large project like that in Pages. Also, in Pages you’d spend a lot of time looking at ugly non-subpixel rendered text. Ick!

• For design heavy layouts — such as a brochure or a newsletter — I’d go with Pages, no question. Pages’ ability to capture pages and sections as micro-templates makes it a no-brainer for these kinds of tasks. Do it once, capture it, and you’re golden.

• For copyediting (where either app could be used) I’d go with Pages. While the lack of separation between author/timestamp and content is annoying, I think Pages has otherwise implemented commenting and change tracking better than Word has. I really like the way comments are visually distinct, and I think also like being able to see both deletions and additions to a text together with full markup. Honestly, Word’s change tracking/comment system could really use an update.

It should be noted that Pages will import Word documents without a hitch (at least no hitch that I’ve come across), while Word will not open a Pages document. Pages can export to .DOC, however, and that can be opened by Word (obviously). Just FYI.

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I’m have to say, I’m really happy Apple introduced iWork, and especially happy that Pages ‘08 is as good as it is. I think the competition will push Microsoft’s MacBU to work harder, and hopefully some of these problems — like the ridiculous un-WYSIWYG-ness of the layout view — will go away in subsequent versions. On the Pages side, Apple needs to catch up to Word’s amazing auto-generated text features. When you start working with Word’s Fields you’ll feel like a magician, and you’ll realize that you can can cut a lot of corners by having Word fill in information for you.

Both apps have room to grow, and it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

1. Michael Fortin gives a good explanation of why Pages does not use subpixel rendering here.↩
2. I’d also like to point out that this is yet another reason to use styles.↩

Last week I posted that really great quote about how 2001: A Space Odyssey predicted stupendously more impressive technology than we actually got in the year 2001, and that got me thinking about how totally lame the technology situation really is. Personally, I’m pretty bummed out that we still haven’t reached the level of technological awesomeness that was seen in the film Hackers.

Aside from teaching us that “RISC is good,” Hackers showed us a glimpse of a wondrous future where computers were even more super-neato, where a smokin’ hot broad like Angelina Jolie could be into computers and video games, and where Marc Anthony hadn’t impregnated J.Lo but had instead pursued a career as an FBI agent. That is to say, we were looking at a better world, except still stuck using dial-up modems (harsh).

Join me now as I walk through some of the great technology that was seen in Hackers and that is sadly absent from our supposedly modern world…

400 Inches of High Resolution Screen Real Estate

After begging and pleading with my old boss I got him to finally give in and give me his old 15” LCD monitor to replace the crappy 15” CRT that I used for our file server. Yeah, that’s right, recognize my badass network administration skillz.

Sadly, in the world of Hackers my 15” of RGB goodness paled in comparison to what the sysadmins of the Ellingson Mineral Corporation had at there disposal. Oh, yeah, Mr. The Plague and his Penn Jillette-looking sidekick had what had to be at least eight 50” flat screen monitors merged together. I’m sure the expense was totally justified — I mean, why wouldn’t a “mineral” corporation need to give their system administrators 200 inches of flat screen awesomeness to work with? What, are they supposed to do whatever it is the sysadmins of a mineral corp would need to do if with only a 30” Apple Cinema Display? Or even two 30” Apple Cinema Displays? Hell, Al Gore needs three for his home office, and what the hell is that lord ass doing.

Giant File Towers

In the Mac community there’s a much-loved acronym: FTFF. It stands for “fix the fucking Finder,” because The Finder, the file navigation system for the Mac, is total crap. I’m talking dog-shit crap. Every goddamn time they release a new version of OS X the Mac community asks, “Did the fix the motherfucking Finder?” and every time the answer is, “No, you fat asshole.” Damn it.

Anyway, compared to that nightmare the idea of having giant file towers sounds delightful. I’m literally talking about giant glass towers that hold all the files in them. I’m not really sure how they hold the files in there, but I’m guessing Time Machine has something to do with it. Or maybe Airport Extreme. Those were words I read on Apple’s website, so they must be important and awesome. Quicktime.

Imagine how great it would be to take a stroll through a labyrinth of towers to see what files you’ve got on your server. You’d be like, “Whoa, there’s the Anderson file,” or “Hey, check out that notice from facilities telling us that the red plugs in the building which are supposed to be protected by the building’s emergency power generators don’t actually work even though they’ve been telling us for four years that they do work.” Or even better, if you’ve got a file that’s really pissing you off you can bring your dog to work, take him for a walk through the file towers, and then have your dog literally piss on the tower with your file on it. Though, actually, that might not be a good idea because apparently the towers are also super-conductors of electricity. Freaky.

Floppy Disks Are Technological Marvels

DVDs are pussy storage media. Yeah, that’s right, I said it. And it’s not just DVDs, all optical discs are pussy media. You have to hold them like a little girl, because god-forbid the natural oils from my skin leave an impression upon the surface of the disc, thereby preventing the damn things from working. What the dooce?! Back in the day you could be eating your Cheetos and handle a disk without worrying if it wouldn’t work, partly because the diabolical geniuses that designed floppy disc thought of safe handling when they encased the damn things in plastic and gave them a metal shield for access. Why is my optical media naked?

Now sure, going back to the days of having only 1.33 megabytes of space on a disk is totally ridiculous, but, as we see in Hackers, surely modernization of the floppy disc technology could allow for much larger file sizes. The disks used in Hackers could hold the entire contents of the villainous garbage file — which we discover is a powerful worm capable of shuffling money around a multinational corporations myriad accounts and transactions. You think you’re going to pull something like that off in only 1.33 megabytes of code? My ass.

Ridiculously Awesome Computer Code

Speaking of code, let us not forget that the code seen in Hackers is far more sophisticated than any of the crap we’re writing today. Just look at it:

Seriously, what the fuck is that? It’s all algebraic and it’s moving around in a three-dimensional space and it’s purple. And what font is that? It’s some kind of weird, blocky serif font. Who programs in a serif font? Exactly.

Imagine how much cooler it would be to program in something like that versus, say, Javascript. You show your lady-friend a couple hundred lines of Javascript and she’ll probably be bored out of her might, but you show her that purple 3d moving code thing and you are definitely getting laid. Christ, Zero Cool ends up banging Angelina Jolie because of that shit. It’s like spanish fly, if spanish fly required a compiler and a strong foundation in functional programming.

Insanely Bright Laptop Screens

I know those new LED laptop displays are supposed to be brighter than the LCD one’s, but damn, check out how bright those freaking monitors are. It’s literally reflecting off of Zero Cool’s face. Imagine what it’s doing to his retina.

Battery life on those laptops must be shit, though.

Totally Newton Friendly

I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for the Newton, and the fact that Angelina Jolie and her slutty lips is also a fan of the Newton fills me with all kinds of happy thoughts.

I miss the Newton.

Self-Aware 3D Animated Full Motion Video Viruses

We used to have a guy in the lab who’s computer I’d have to clean up every few months, as he would inevitably get a virus on it that would slow the thing down to a crawl. That’s what happens on a Windows machine, but on a Gibson, you end up getting totally badass viruses that actually tell you what the viruses diabolical demands are. Yeah, there’s embedded audio in the virus. Also, really trippy visual effects. And hippies with long hair.

For some reason that’s how I always pictured Mac viruses, leading more credence to my theory that Gibsons and Macs are one and the same.

Double Decker Unlabeled Keyboards

Last year I switched from the Qwerty keyboard layout to the Dvorak, and I felt pretty badass for doing so, but when I see the keyboards they’re using to work with the Gibson I feel like a total douchebag. Check that out: it’s two tiers of at least 150 keys each, all unlabeled. What would you need that many keys for? Hell if I know, but I’m guessing a week on that thing and your wrists will be made of steel (or you’ll have carpal tunnel like a bitch).

Who do you think makes a keyboard like that? Logitech? Probably. I’ll wait for the Bluetooth version.

Geisha-Looking New Media Celebritards

Our heroes are guys like Robert Scoble and John Gruber. Hackers had Razor and Blade.

Hackers wins.

A More Secure Filesystem

NTFS my balls. Give me the insanely great and completely non-sensical file system that the Ellingson Mineral Corporation is using. The entire movie revolves around the fact that one of the hackers in the film retrieves a mysterious garbage file — named “Garbage” — from the depths of the monstrosity that is their file system. What is the address of that file? It is /.workspace/.garbage.. Really? The evil genius hid the insidious garbage file right off the root directory (the top-most directory of any filesystem)? And it took a team of computer genius hackers a butt-load of time — and awesome floating rotating phone booths — to find it? That must be a pretty awesome file system.

Supremely Badass Targeting Reticles

Zero Cool’s laptop screen is literally three feet away from his face, yet he augments the computer hacking with the help of a totally wicked targeting reticle. Is it a coincidence that the guy with the targeting reticle was the guy that found the super-secret location of the evil garbage file? I think not. Imagine how much less Windows Vista would suck if we the guys at Microsoft got targeting reticles. That’s what I’m saying.

1. If you understand what I’m talking about then give yourself +5 geek points.↩

Design firm mono has an awesome page that lets you shuffle and mix-and-match pieces of some of their employees’ faces. It’s pretty much hours of entertainment.

You can click on the face parts to cycle through the different peoples’, which allows you to mix and match your own, or figure out what Erin actually looks like (answer: cute). It’s a blast.

Speaking of my college education, here’s a YouTube video made in 1971 that explains protein synthesis through interpretive dance. At 3:30 into the video the dance starts, and a great many balls are tripped.

I bring this up to note that I watched this video in a Molecular Biology class at UCSD taught by Dr. William Loomis. I was one of the TA’s in the class, though, so I guess you can say I used the video to educate others. It actually worked well with my teaching style, which basically amounted to me giving everyone a handout covering the material and then doing a thirty-minute stand-up routine. I was a very highly rated TA.

(Via Jason Kottke.)

It looks like at least some good is coming from that Expelled nonsense — namely the free press for figures like Richard Dawkins and PZ Meyers.

I’ll be totally honest with you: I have no idea who PZ Meyers is. Apparently he’s been on the forefront combating the ridiculous “Intelligent Design is science” movement, which is very commendable, but I already have high enough blood pressure without having to think about that crap, so I’ll been a bit out of that loop. If not for his getting expelled from Expelled I probably would never have known about him, so thanks for that, idiots that made Expelled!

Richard Dawkins, on the other hand, is a name I do know, and have a great deal of affection for. Dawkins is the author of the absolutely spectacular book The Selfish Gene, which explains the concept of evolution so thoroughly that even yours truly was able to understand it. A professor of mine from college, Dr. Milton Saier (who is spectacularly wacky) loaned it to me after I asked him a bunch of (what are now clear to me silly) questions about the evolution of single-celled organisms. A professor handing me a book off his own bookshelf and telling me “Here, I think you’ll find this interesting,” was by far the most college-y thing that happened to me, which I suppose is a very sad comment on my college years.

Since then, I’ve recommended The Selfish Gene to everyone who I’ve thought was even mildly interested in matters of evolution or science, and, given the upheaval in the blogosphere over this stupid Expelled movie, I think now is a good time to remind people who are interested in this topic to get themselves a copy of this wonderful book. After all, knowledge is the real weapon we use against Creationist dogma, and the more knowledge you possess the more clear the ridiculousness of ideas like those in Expelled become.

A Word About Dawkins’ Atheism

So here’s the other thing: Richard Dawkins is a notorious atheist, with his more famous book being titled The God Delusion. I realize that doesn’t fly with a lot of people, and it gives the Creationist crowd ammunition with which to dismiss the very intelligent and important things Dawkins says about evolution elsewhere. Sensible but religious folks who really don’t have a great grasp of the actual concept of evolution are then easily lead to believe that the choice is between their faith and Godlessness.

The study of evolution doesn’t actually have anything to do with the philosophical or theological matters of God (which is why Intelligent Design is not, and has nothing to do with, science) and as such The Selfish Gene focuses on the science. I honestly don’t recall any religious aspects showing up in The Selfish Gene, and if they did my mind must have quickly dismissed them. I do recall, however, that there is a lot of truly excellent discussion of evolution, and what exactly it is that’s driving it at a molecular and chemical level.

In reading the book you should expect to come away from it as a more educated person, not as a Godless one.