More interesting items than in science news. Disturbing, yes?

• ID Becoming Mandatory in Kansas? – Kansas continues to lead the nation in falling behind.
• Schools Sued for Not Using This Garbage – Christian schools are upset that religious courses are not counted for credit by some universities. (title not mine)
• Royal Society President Warns of Fundamentalism – It’s not the best thing going for the world right now. On the other hand, the Royal Society is not exactly progressive lately (see my previous post).
• The Rapture Index – Good for a laugh, or a cry, depending on whether you’re a half-empty or half-full glass type person.

That’s enough of that.

technorati tags: religion, fundamentalism, royal society, rapture, intelligent design, kansas, education

Hurricane-ravaged New Orleans will deploy the nation’s first municipally owned wireless Internet system that will be free for all users, part of an effort to jump-start recovery by making living and doing business in the city as attractive as possible.

New Orleans’s New Connection

I find this pretty exciting, though I know that it’s going to piss some people (read: Cox and Bellsouth) off.  You know what? That’s just too bad. They would never have done this on their own, and now they’re going to bitch and moan about the unfair government competition for service they were never going to offer in the first place.

I think this will be an enormous boon for New Orleans, and frankly, the city needs any help it can get right now.

A few points of interest:

• I have added Amazon wishlist links on my personal site and here (down at the bottom of the sidebar). The wishlist is here. Not that you should buy me anything, but there it is.
• I added some status info to the personal site as well. I don’t know how good I’m going to be about updating that.
• Apparently, Jihadists are killing 76-year old Buddhist monks in southeast asia. Lovely.

I was more productive today than yesterday. I was still not as productive as I should be. I partially blame the delays in transferring files from our cluster to my machine. It’s a little 5-10 minute window of waiting where I don’t want to work on a different project, so I’m tempted to read things on the Internets. I continue to go back and forth with my simulations, as I find little details that cause problems. I’m trying to match conduction velocity with some experimental data, so it’s tweak, tweak, tweak, check fiber directions, tweak, etc.

My mother bought some Abita Restoration Ale at the grocery store. That’s some damned tasty beer. I had three. My run today was faster than last time, but I had some soreness in my lower legs. I’m using my cheap running shoes from the Target in Duluth, MN, and they’re not so good for me. I left my good running shoes in St.Louis, but I should have brought them to Mandeville. At least the streets in the neighborhood are blacktop and not concrete. I’m doing alright on the coffee and tea. I shouldn’t have had the second cup of coffee, or even a whole first one, but like the kit-kat bars in the pantry, it’s just there, and the temptation is pretty strong. This is why I keep limited amounts (read: none) of snacky-type foods in my apartment. It’s easier to avoid a temptation if it’s not right there in front of you. Also, I was going to take my car in to get the tire patched this morning, but by the time I was able to get a call through they were quite busy. I’ll try first thing tomorrow. First thing is 07:00 in this case, so I’m off to Bedfordshire. Good night.