Indiana Jones, Metafilter, and brownpau

.

Speaking of mainstream media, I just got passing mention in E!Online, for a MeFi quip I made about the new Indiana Jones movie in the works. (Scroll down to the part where the article quotes from Metafilter.) I sure hope Harrison Ford doesn’t read it and get pissed at me.

“Isn’t Harrison Ford a bit, um, old for this? Or will Ben Affleck be playing his character too?” quipped one fan named brownpau, alluding to Affleck taking over Ford’s Jack Ryan role in The Sum of All Fears.

I’m in an internet cafe in the Dupont Circle area right now because I don’t have a key to the house, I don’t know where my aunt and uncle are, and my cellphone battery is dead. I’ve been wandering the streets of Washington like a homeless derelict.

“Weblogs aren’t journalism. Period.”

.

“Weblogs aren’t journalism. Period.”

Amen, Derek. I’m puzzled at how the mainstream media are treating blogs as some sort of revolutionary new “grassroots journalism,” when most blogs are about as related to professional journalism as poetry is related to biomolecular chemistry — it isn’t. Sure, there are news blogs and war blogs and other such issues-oriented blogs, but the blogging “revolution” is more about individual journaling than it is about journalism. The world of personal publishing does not position itself as an authoritative or intentionally pervasive source of news or commentary; it just exists as it is, in many forms: conversations, diaries, photo albums, sketchpads, scrapbooks…

Motorola Timeport

.

My aunt bought a new cellphone yesterday, a Motorola Timeport. I gave it a try, and hated it; Motorola produces some of the kludgiest SMS interfaces I’ve ever used. Too many buttons to press just to get to a complicated and non-intuitive Create Message screen, awkward and buggy predictive text input (you have to struggle to spell out the word, then hit “Select” to put it into the message), and no easy way to simply send the message to a single phonebook recipient. (The Send Message screen starts with a phone number field, and to enter phonebook entries into the field, you have to go through three menus and any number of button presses.) And I hate using the “1” key for spaces.

I’ll stick with my Nokia 3390, thank you.

Pentagon Conspiracy Theory

.

Ah, good, some sound and rational answers to the Pentagon conspiracy theory. (“Je ne vois pas un avion!”)

Also an interesting piece of napkin math calculating the kiloton yield equivalent of the WTC collisions and collapse. Hmmm, 1.9 kilotons and 3.5 kilotons respectively? Just for comparison, here’s a 1 kiloton fission detonation from the nuclear tests of the early 50’s.

Update: The ever-reliable Snopes have a definitive debunk of the Pentagon conspiracy theories, and Popular Mechanics has a full 9/11 myth-debunking section. Also see 911Myths.com.

(If you’re looking for more pictures of nuclear tests, check here and here. Hope you like mushrooms.)

Changelog 30 May 2002

.

Okay, I think I’m done. If you run into any problems, please let me know. Here’s what’s changed:

• Blog layouts now run from a PHP randomizer and a set of includes in index.php, rather than the old javascript redirect and .shtml indexes. Now you only need to click Reload to see another design. Lots of redundant HTML header/footer code which was needlessly duplicated through the old indexes has been reduced to simple functions in two or three common files. I’ll publish the code for y’all once I get it cleaned up and streamlined.

• The blogroll — which had gotten so overwhelmingly long that the hundred-plus blogs sometimes stretched farther than my blog posts for the week — now only displays twenty-five blogs at each load, in random order so that everyone gets some time in the sun. The whole list is still viewable on the links page, also in random order.

• Taking tips from Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think!” (very fun and informative usability guide), and somewhat along the lines of simple-but-beautiful slimmed down sites like Harrumph, HiveLogic, and 0format, I opted to drop the confusing mix of inside-content layouts, in favor of a simpler blue-and-brown scheme. (I was originally planning for a white background, but the brown title box reminded me so much of a nasty floater in a white toilet that I had to go for a more complementary shade of blue.)

• Also along the usability line of thought, I’ve made main navigation on blog pages more prominent, rather than mixed in with the sidebar links.

• A javascript styleswitcher makes fonts scalable and more readable for those of you who prefer larger text. I also added a small subroutine to styleswitcher.js which toggles CSS on or off. (Code filched from Strikeslip.)

• Monthly pages in the archive now display blog posts in proper chronological sequence, which is more logical for a sequenced compilation of past entries.

• There’s some other new stuff here and there. Look around; you’ll find it.

Battleground God

.

Battleground God: a challenging quiz game to test your consistency regarding matters of Deity. Excerpts from my results:

Congratulations! You have been awarded the TPM medal of distinction! This is our second highest award for outstanding service on the intellectual battleground…. The fact that you progressed through this activity without being hit and biting very few bullets suggests that your beliefs about God are internally consistent and well thought out….

You rejected evolutionary theory when the vast majority of scientists think both that the evidence points to its truth and that there is no evidence which falsifies it. Of course, many creationists claim that the evidential case for evolution is by no means conclusive. But in doing so, they go against scientific orthodoxy. So you’ve got to make a choice: (a) Bite the bullet and say there is evidence that evolution is not true, despite what the scientists say. (b) Take a direct hit and say that this is an area where your beliefs are just in contradiction. You chose to bite the bullet.

Interesting stuff. The parts regarding evolution jarred me a bit, as I realized just how separate we evangelicals are from the rest of the “rational” world in not regarding evolution as a proven and foregone conclusion. This despite the fact that, unlike most modern Protestant evangelicals, I am not a “young-earther.” My current outlook on creationism is a deliberate agnosticism — or more like a case of Orwellian doublethink — which hovers between “literal P.O.V. old-earthism” and plain old “theistic evolution.”

Hey, put those stones down. We’re brothers in Christ regardless of our differing creationist stands, right, fellow Christians? I said, put the stones down! No, NO!!! AUGH!!! (*repeated pelting sound*)

Related material:

– Mark Horne on the Days of Genesis 1

– Hugh Ross: Creation and Time (shameless Amazon affiliate link)

All Changing

.

It’s all changing. Please ignore any transitionary snarkiness, especially on the new inside layout.