PHP-Nuke forks

John Lim has a neat summary of the evolution of PHP-Nuke and all its many forks.

Permalink | 1 Comment | id 3198

20:28 (utc-5)

 

PHP articles

Revjim

I love PHP. I really do. I swear. I just really get tired of seeing so many "articles" and "tutorials" and "code examples" that are complete and utter shit written by people who claim to be "experts".

Nice. I don't remember seeing that PATH_INFO variable anywhere though. It's not in my phpinfo() when I run it. Hmm...

Permalink | 9 Comments | Tags: Programming | id 3197

20:11 (utc-5)

 

What Darwin had to say about Evolution

I had lunch with my philosophy professor in McGovern's on Wednesday. Part of our conversation was about evolution. I asked him if he had ever read the Origin of Species (he hadn't), and I wanted to make the point I'd made in the past about what exactly Darwin had to say. Though I couldn't word it well then, so that's what I want to do now.

Darwin did a good job of showing all the different variations that evolved among different creatures. Really, he was a good scientist. He gathered a lot of actual data, which no one had ever done before. Unlike what most would probably think about people like me who don't believe in (macro) evolution, I don't hate Darwin I don't minimize what he did - he made a great contribution. But unfortunately, he failed to make an important distinction in his reasoning, he was ignorant of a lot of biology which was yet to be discovered (DNA, the inner workings of the cell, etc.), and he drew some conclusions that weren't justified.

Essentially, he said that evolution happens by natural selection. But that begs the question. There are two things here: how biological information gets there in the first place, and how beneficial traits are selected (and negative ones rejected) among individuals and then propagated to future generations. He was right about natural selection, but he had no mechanism by which changes can come about initially.

In my life I've never heard any proof offered for macro evolution, and lots of counter examples I've never heard anybody even try to explain -- for instance, how could multi-cellular organisms evolve from single-cellular organisms, and how could sexual reproduction have evolved? It's irritating to me when people think that I'm the one who's sticking my head in the sand and ignoring "science", when invariably the person who's insinuating this has no clue what he or she is talking about, and has never studied this stuff or thought about it for a minute in his or her life. Sigh.

In short, belief in macro evolution is simply a religious belief. It's not even a new one -- I was surprised to learn that there were Greek philosophers who had a very similar belief system to evolution thousands of years ago.

Permalink | 21 Comments | Tags: Religion, Science | id 3196

00:49 (utc-5)
edited: 02:54 (utc-5)