…Intelligent design is not an argument of the same character as these controversies. It is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class. In those cases, the demand for equal time for “both theories” would be ludicrous. Similarly, in a class on 20th-century European history, who would demand equal time for the theory that the Holocaust never happened?
— Richard Dawkins & Jerry Coyne, in The GuardianPirates, ho!
For anyone who might be interested in a top-level view of how Sato is adapting the Miniskirt Space Pirates novels for anime, here are the chapter titles of the first two books, along with the volume titles of all seven.
Mild spoiler potential, of course. If they keep the current pace, I’d expect book 2 to take the series up to around episode 9.
Not spam
Just saw a piece of email get caught by my spam filters. The subject line read:
Find the best mount for your vehicle
Despite its resemblance to the sort of awkwardly-euphemised spam that offers sexual enhancement products and/or partners, it’s actually a perfectly reasonable ad from GPS City, a company I bought something from in May, 2004.
Back to Louie!
Apparently, about six months ago some circle did the OCR and proofreading for the first four Rune Soldier novels. I had done the first two chapters of book one myself, to get them into a readable state, but it was slow going, so I never got around to finishing. Now I can run them through my scripts and read them at a reasonable speed.
(and in case anyone’s wondering what happened to my progress on the AsoIku novels, I just got busy with the pre-holiday work, the trip to Japan, helping some new friends study for the JLPT, etc, and haven’t picked them back up again yet. I’m near the end of book 11, and I definitely want to reach the revelations about Aoi’s family, which are perhaps the most significant things coming up soon. I’m hoping that the side stories that were included with the Blu-ray discs are eventually collected into a book, but otherwise, it looks like book14 is the end of the series, with an awful lot left unexplained)
In an unrelated note, my mom gave me a copy of the English edition of 1Q84, and I read it over the weekend. Short take: a plus-sized Charles de Lint novel, with Tokyo replacing Newford. I think de Lint would have done it better, and in about half as many pages, but I still enjoyed it. There were a few places where Jay Rubin’s emphasis on precise translation produced phrases no American novelist would choose, but there was already so much about the book that screamed “originally in Japanese” that it didn’t bother me.
Outsider picks up speed
Outsider has had three new pages this month!
Progress, Apple-style
OS X Lion apparently changed the cookie storage format in one of the recent minor releases. If you use Safari 5.1.x under Snow Leopard, cookies are in Apple’s well-defined Plist format, which is generally stored as XML. If you use Lion, that file still exists, but the actual cookie storage has moved to binary garbage.
Not the Core Storage model they usually push on everyone, which is a perfectly sensible SQLite database, but an on-disk representation of the NSHTTPCookieStorage class, containing a mix of big-endian and little-endian data. Use Apple’s method calls to read and write it, or prepare yourself for pain.
(via jwz, who is quite naturally baffled by this giant leap into the Nineties)
Someday's Dreamers anime re-licensed for US re-release
Digital first, apparently, with DVDs to follow. A very pleasant series, but the decision seems to have a lot of folks scratching their heads.
