From New Scientist: 13 Things that do not make sense. I like the fact that science not only admits that it doesn’t know everything, but seems to _enjoy_ that fact. Incidentally, I suspect that the solution to 9 of the 13 specific things mentioned in the article will involve aliens.

I’m way late on this one, but… Our fabulous annual holiday “Coaster” was released last week. Play it yourself at swoop-to-nuts.com. The arcade player in you will love it. Take a moment to get the hang of the controls and fly like a… well… like a squirrel!

On the other hand, Michael Bay’s The Island pretty much sucks. Mr Bay did The Rock, which was great. After that, it’s been all downhill. Besides Michael Bay is a blowhard. _Lots_ of noise about not much. Scarlett Johansson is not-quite-too-pretty and very watchable, but skip this one.

Serenity is a surprisingly good science fiction film based on Joss Whedon’s ill-fated Firefly television series. Don’t let its T.V. roots stop you. Serenity is better than all three recent Star Wars movies. It’s funny, the dialog is reasonably fresh, and there’s actually a fair amount of character development. Oh, and a hovercraft chase – naturally.

I can never quite get used to reading “justified” text on the web, especially within the typically narrow columns used in most weblogs. It _looks_ better, but doesn’t read as easily. I’ve changed this text to ragged right (left-justified) and even though it looks messier, I believe it’s easier to read. **[Update]**: According to WDG, “Although justified text may look pretty, human factors analysis shows that ragged right is actually easier to read and understand.

I had always considered John Gruber’s Markdown an also-ran, with Textile from Dean Allen the clear winner. It’s no longer that clear. While textile can do nearly *anything*, Markdown only does the essentials. The reason I’ve switched the default text processor of this here blog is because of the following from Gruber’s site… The idea is not to create a syntax that makes it easier to insert HTML tags. In my opinion, HTML tags are already easy to insert.

Today, Switchtower became the preferred method of deployment for Rails apps. Why? Because when a new version of an application needs to be pushed to production, I can now type “rake deploy” on my development machine and it’s done. With judicious use of switchtower recipes, all of the little things that typically need to be done when updating a web app are handled automatically. And what’s more, if something goes wrong I can simply run “rake rollback” and the old version gets put back automatically.

A judge in Dover, PA (God love him) rules in favor of reality by making it illegal to teach “Intelligent Design” in classrooms. Our kids may have a chance after all. “To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect,” Judge Jones wrote. “However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.

Ara Paparo writes a very insightful post on why Blink.com failed and perhaps why del.ico.us didn’t. Main point that I took away: Don’t try so damn hard right out of the gate. The engineering team went to work, building a complex algorithm for evaluating the groupings of sites within folders (damn folders!) and finding other sites that had been grouped similarly. It was pretty sophisticated stuff. Sophisticated enough that it couldn’t run in real-time and often had a several day processing backlog to overcome.

For those times when “callipygian” just isn’t the right word, there’s always “ba-donka-donk” “Those dusky Afro-Scandinavian buttocks, which combine the callipygian rondure observed among the races of the Dark Continent with the taut and noble musculature of sturdy Olaf, our blond Northern cousin.” – Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow

Eric Meyer finds yet another reason to love Adium Seriously. The entirety of an Adium chat window is an XHTML document that’s being dynamically updated via DOM scripting—all of it pumped through WebKit, of course. In creating a message theme, you define what markup will be used, and write CSS to style it. You can even define variants on your theme by writing additional style sheets.