The Kraft Bagel-Ful:

Hillary Clinton and John McCain want to suspend the national gas tax for the duration of the summer, when travelers drive the most. And they’re jumping down Barack Obama’s throat for opposing the plan. The big reasoning for the suspension is to help Americans pay to fill their cars, but it won’t help very much even if it will seem like a big difference:

At a meeting with voters in North Carolina on Monday, Mr. Obama said lifting the gas tax for three months would save the average consumer no more than $30, a figure confirmed by Congressional analysts. Mr. Obama has previously dismissed Mr. McCain’s proposal as a “scheme.”

“Half a tank of gas,” Mr. Obama told his audience. “That’s his big solution.”

ProFont is my favorite monospaced programming font. You can see it in this shot here:

For my own future reference, here’s how you get ProFont working in Debian Etch:

cd tmp
wget http://www.tobiasjung.net/download.php?file=ProFontWinTweaked.zip
wget http://www.tobiasjung.net/download.php?file=profont-x11.tar.gz
unzip ProFontWinTweaked.zip
tar xzvf profont-x11.tar.gz
sudo cp ProFontWinTweaked/ProFontWindows.ttf /usr/local/share/fonts
sudo cp profont-x11/* /usr/local/share/fonts
sudo fc-cache -fv
sudo mkfontdir /usr/local/share/fonts

Finally, add the following line to /etc/X11/xorg.conf in the Files section

FontPath "/usr/local/share/fonts"

then restart X.

I took some time last night and played with Git for a bit. Git is a distributed version control system written by Linus Torvalds to manage the Linux kernel. Git recently gained a bit of notoriety because some big projects (in addition to the kernel) like Ruby on Rails are switching to Git.

The whole concept of distributed version control is pretty neat: every developer has a complete copy of the entire history of a project, can make changes on his own local repository (with full history, etc.) and can choose what and when to push back to the rest of the team.

For a single person, like me, the advantages are a little less, although I like the idea of having multiple copies of a full source tree kicking around. The move from Subversion was dead simple, and being forced to pick and choose which modified/new files go into a particular commit is nice. I often find myself running svn commit -m "Some commit message." file1 file2 directory1 (or cvs commit ... if I’m less lucky). It’s easy to forget the files on the end of the command there and then you end up with a commit whose message doesn’t correspond to the actual changes.

Hooray for jumping on new-software-bandwagons.

The New York Times weighs in on Expelled:

Every few minutes familiar — and ideologically unrelated — images interrupt the talking heads: a fist-shaking Nikita S. Khrushchev; Charlton Heston being subdued by a water hose in “Planet of the Apes.” This is not argument, it’s circus, a distraction from the film’s contempt for precision and intellectual rigor. This goes further than a willful misunderstanding of the scientific method. The film suggests, for example, that Dr. Sternberg lost his job at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History because of intellectual discrimination but neglects to inform us that he was actually not an employee but rather an unpaid research associate who had completed his three-year term.

Today they have a video about Chris Comer, who was forced to resign from her job for failing to remain neutral on the Evolution vs. Creationism issue in Texas public schools:

Scientific American has a review of Expelled:

Expelled is a movie not quite harmless enough to be ignored. Shrugging off most of the film’s attacks – all recycled from previous pro-ID works – would be easy, but its heavy-handed linkage of modern biology to the Holocaust demands a response for the sake of simple human decency.

…

It speaks to their anti-intellectualism and fundamental misunderstanding of science that for the makers of Expelled (and ID advocates more generally) the answer “we don’t know yet” is a badge of shame. “We don’t know yet” is what defines the fruitful frontier for science; it is what directs scientists’ curiosity and motivates them to spend years on research. Research starts where knowledge and certainty drop off. It’s one of the many ironies of Expelled that Ben Stein says he wants this movie to free people to ask questions about science, but the ID theories he defends would close off inquiry with nonanswers.

Carry On Wayward Son

Will Ferrell and Dave Grohl