the tindog coffeehouse

Students shouldn’t be allowed to debate. Students shouldn’t be allowed to draw their own conclusions. Students should never be taught that a controversial issue is in fact controversial and that not everyone agrees on it. Students should be taught one side and only one side of an argument, end of discussion.

At least that’s the position of political science professors Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer. According to surveys conducted by them, they found that a whopping 60 percent of biology teachers around the country allowed room for debate and doubt when teaching the subject of evolution. And that, they argue, is unacceptable.

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As I mentioned a while back, our church was challenged to read through the Bible in a year, and I’m happy to say that 4 months in, I’ve actually been able to keep up. But of course being the complete dork that I am, I couldn’t do it without a spreadsheet somehow being involved. So here you go.

Each of the boxes represents a chapter, and the shaded ones are those I’ve read to date. It doesn’t look like much, but it’s a start, right? Heck, I should get bonus points just for getting through Leviticus alone!

Previously:
Jesus as the fulfillment of prophecy
Thoughts on Genesis

The good news: This is the best blog post of all time. (Of all time!) The bad news: You’ll never be able to read it.

That’s because the Internet is shutting down. Closing up shop. Pining for the fjords. You see, we seem to have run out of IP addresses for everyone, so it’s only a matter of time before the last web server gets shut down and shipped off to a landfill in China. Pack up your PC, dust off your grandmother’s typewriter, and let the newspapers know they can stay in business after all. LOLcats, it was nice knowing you.

Well, we’re not completely out of IP addresses yet. But definitely soon. How soon? Maybe as early as February 2nd (according to Hurricane Electric) or as late as July 25, 2012 (according to IT security expert Stephen Lagerholm). Either way, we’re pretty much screwed.

How did this happen, you might ask? Good question.

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Here we go again.

Every year before, during, and after college football season, the anti-BCS crowd (which is legion) trots out to exclaim how evil the Bowl Championship Series is and how only a true playoff system would right its many wrongs. All in the name of fairness, they cry. And I suppose I’m a member of that crowd, having written at length about the current system’s lack of fairness and underlying motive to generate as much money as possible (see here, here, here, here, here, aaand… here).

But I don’t think anyone outside of BCS corporate headquarters really questions the unfair nature of the current bowl system. I mean, all anyone has to do is look at this year’s season to see that using polls and computers to choose a national champion is a joke. Auburn, Oregon, and TCU all finished the regular season undefeated, yet TCU was shut out of a chance to play for the title. Why? Because the voters and computers decided it was so.

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In the epic war between mankind and the Squirrel Liberation Front, it seems that mankind has finally gained the upper hand, at least in rural East Texas, where a contingent of courageous men, women, and even children have taken up arms against their tiny, bush-tailed nemeses:

I follow Wayne into an ancient oak bottom, the canopy ten stories above us, only a dim light filtering in. The understory is mostly open, but there are scattered stands of cane, holly, huckleberry, and pine. The birds are just waking up, Carolina wrens, a few warblers or vireos I can’t identify, and a cardinal. We stand listening and looking, and after ten minutes Wayne spots a squirrel high in a tree, cutting acorns. We spend another ten minutes stalking it, feeling the ground with our feet, taking care not to crack twigs, keeping our eyes on the treetops. When the squirrel moves, we move; when it stops, we stop—always careful to keep a screen of leaves between us and the animal. Wayne aims and fires, and the squirrel drops onto the forest floor. At that same moment I hear rustling overhead and see another gray squirrel running between the crowns of the oaks. I lead it and fire twice. It too drops to the ground. Wayne puts both animals in his vest.

Consider yourselves warned, varmints. Don’t mess with Texas.

Previously:
Squirrel Uprising: Spies among us!
All hail the solar-powered squirrel god
Squirrel Uprising: The latest updates

A couple of days ago, I was looking through Outlook and came across some emails from 2004 when I was doing some freelance web design work for a small ministry in Nacogdoches. The lady who ran the ministry had had a website built but couldn’t afford to keep paying the designer to maintain it. I heard about her through my wife and offered to take it over for practically nothing. Now, I should preface this by saying that I don’t consider myself in any way to be a web designer. But at the time, I had aspirations of building a web design business, so I was eager to get a real (paying!) client.

The existing site was a mess. The designer had used Flash to build all the navigation menus (almost a dozen of of them), so simply creating a new page required editing multiple Flash files. And the HTML was so convoluted, any significant changes to the existing pages were next to impossible without redoing the whole thing.

I hated that website.

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