dear^H^H^H^H our leader

How legit is this image, with linked story? I can't find nuttin on news.google.com about it.

The part of me that wants terrible things to be true wants this to be true.

Look at those cavemen go

Poll sez that most americans think that Gord created humans in their present form. I... was not aware of this. Anyway, I would not have guessed this.

The news zeitgest tells me that an Inherit the Wind-style battle over teaching evolution is in the making, at a national level. This makes me as nervous as it does you, but I take hope in believing that there is hidden opportunity here for We the Smart to actually gain ground against Them what's Ignorant, by the theory of evolution suddenly becoming a topic of public dialog. I believe this in the same way I believe this is happening right now with issues like stem cell research (née "theraputic cloning") and medical marijuana (née "legalizing pot"): here are things that most people had negative feelings about due to conventional wisdom, but slowly, slowly, more and more of them are being brought around, thanks to a constant bath in the truth as carried by the mass media. (And the truth is there, if couched in some amount of info-junk.)

Counterexample: Global warming. Maybe because it should be "climate change (née 'global warming')".

Do we need to come up with a née for the T of E? Any suggestions?

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Would you believe that a Catholic priest, of all people, was the one who broke it to me that the first few chapters of Genesis are mythology, in the purest sense? Blew the minds of a whole group of us 7th-graders while we were hanging around a classroom at St. Paul's after hours, for reasons I no longer recall. And here he was, our theology teacher, saying such a thing! An interesting conversation followed.

Up until then I somehow accepted Adam & Eve &c. as the truth even as I learned about and also accepted evolution, taught to me as the best truth we have by these same ordained Catholics, without a moment's hedging. I think that, despite what that one priest said, some of them may have felt the same way, even as adults, but who knows.

I wouldn't count this as hedging: Sister Marie, the principal and -- for a time -- also our science teacher, was reading to us from our textbook, about the very beginnings of life on Earth. At one point, the book speculated on the various sorts of magic that could have happened to zot our first unicellular paleomommy into being from the ol' primordial soup, concluding that we really have no way of knowing what brought it about. Sister Marie paused to look at her pupils and say, "But we know who made it happen, don't we!" Then she resumed reading.

(no subject)

For all my recent crowing about Wikipedia -- which has become my main outlet for non-bloggy writing, these days -- there is one major problem with its content: almost every article possesses a highly inconsistent style, not only switching voices but varying in stylistic correctness. And I mean "style" in the objective sense -- that is, readability and consistency, using the language to convey the encyclopedic information to the reader a way that's both efficient and engaging. There are infinite ways to do this right, and even more ways to do it wrong, ahem. I don't mind inevitable voice-change if all styles used are high quality, but my hackles go up when a good artcle is pitted with incompetently written or poorly thought-out edits.

An example is the article on immortality that I spent some time with yesterday. There were edits that were obviously stylistically wrong, like from the person who sprinkled non-sequitur references to a favorite Hindu mystic all over the introductory section. So I went ahead and fixed them, actually trying to make lemonade from this, creating a small section on "mystical immortality", mentioning this holy man's ideas as one example, and the alchemists' hunt for the philosopher's stone as another.

The article is rather high quality (the summary of major world religious views being particularly good) until the last major section, "Immortality in Fiction". Here we get a whiff of the fannish taint as people pile in sentences about the lifespans of elves in different role-playing systems and the myriad ways to kill vampires, finally ending in a barely legible paragraph about a Tezuka manga. To this writer's eye, the proper way of fixing this involves blowing the whole section away, and replacing it with a single, tight, link-filled paragraph. And maybe this would be the proper WP-ish thing to do. But I do not yet have the boldness to do it without hesitating and hedging.