Flame on. I’m reading this miserable piece of excrement about recent debates in cosmology. I just got to this sentence:

If you are inclined to skepticism this debate might seem like further evidence that cosmologists, who gave us dark matter, dark energy and speak with apparent aplomb about gazillions of parallel universes, have finally lost their minds.

I mean, if you think the astronomers are crazy, go talk to the physicists- who’ll start going on about cats being both alive and dead at the same time, things teleporting from point a to point b without traveling between those points, and time being slower as you travel faster.

There is a difference between skepticism and stupid ignorance. No one is more skeptical of ideas like dark matter and parallel universes than your average astronomer. The difference is that the astronomer actually knows the facts that give the theories credibility- to the point where the astronomers are dragged, despite their skepticism, and generally kicking and screaming, to the conclusion.

But this isn’t about the facts- the facts have no place here, this is the news. If ignorance is bliss, this is nirvana.

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Okay, now that I’ve griped at MySQL a bit, I need to say something nice about it: the toolset support (at least on RoR) is second-to-none. As a great example, check out assert_efficient_sql, a plug-in which allows you to write unit tests and check for inefficient SQL queries. At this point, it mainly looks for things like returning too many rows and writing to the file system to do a sort, but the idea is cool.

One catch that jumps out right away is that you’re going to have to run this against a DB that looks a lot like production, since MySQL will punt to full table scans on smaller tables, and your unit test data probably qualifies as “smaller tables”.

The other catch is that it doesn’t detect an excessive amount of queries in order to implement a piece of functionality. The fact that you could merge three or four queries into one or two, or move queries around to minimize trips to the database — those are developer-level decisions that (I think) it would be hard to programaticaly detect. I dare you to prove me wrong: just be sure to open source the plugin proving it. :-D

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Now, I’ve been promised that through the magic of .htaccess and WordPress plug-ins, all feed traffic should be magically redirected through the FeedBurner feed. And, if you hit the feed page directly, it seems to work out okay.

But, if anyone is having trouble getting the feed, let me know ASAP. You can try subscribing to the FeedBurner feed directly: it’s located here.

Of course, if you’re having trouble getting the feed, you’re probably not seeing this, either. Hrm….

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It’s news items like this that make me really, really hate the Republicans:

On the sixth anniversary of the imprisonment of detainees at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, a United States judge threw out lawsuit brought by four former British detainees against Donald Rumsfeld and senior military officers for ordering torture and religious abuse, ruling that th the detainees are not “Persons” under U.S. Law, which according to another judge, means that they are less than “human beings”.

Think about this for a moment- Corporations are persons, the court rules that time after time. But human beings are not necessarily persons. This puts a different spin on a lot of arguments- for example, the fourth amendment only guarantees the right “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” only applies to people. Simply being a human being isn’t sufficient condition to be a “people” (unlike being a corporation).

Judge Henderson is in place to make this ruling due to Republicans, see here. I find it especially fitting that she was promoted by George H.W. Bush to a seat being emptied by a promoted Ken Starr.

And this isn’t just some wacko judge issuing some crazy one-off ruling that won’t survive an appeal. This is central to Republican ideology. Because remember the original state’s right: that some human beings are not people, some human beings are property. The political parties change, the philosophy does not. We’re returning to that era once again- except this time the difference between a “person” and “property” is not going to be race- it’s going to be economics. The only real people are those who own or control corporations, the neoaristocracy.

Remember this when it’s your turn to be waterboarded.

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So, at my current gig, we’re using Microsoft Word to edit FIT files. For an introduction to FIT, check out my post “FIT, AntFit, and FitNesse: Test-Based Communication Tools“. For a conversation on using version controlled files editted in MSWord vs. FitNesse, check out Todd and I talking over here.

Anyway, we ran into a bit of a problem. The newest version of MSWord, in a fit of helpfulness, will inject namespaced XML into your HTML. Some of this will cause awkwardness and ugliness in the source, some of it will inject arbitrary additional rows, and some of it will cause other random errors. After joking around that we could get it to stop by finding the “Turn the Suck Off” switch, my coworker (Steve Hupert) actually went in and found that switch.

Here’s a picture of the “Tools > Options” screen, and the “Embed Smart Tags” switch that needs to be off:

Once that’s off, things went really well.

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