Rational Rose methodology

We’re using Rational Rose on my current project.

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Books: Monkey Girl has arrived

My presents arrived today: a copy of Monkey Girl, a movie of March of the Penguins, and as a special treat, the book March of the Penguins. For your pleasure, here’s a a link to a rveiew of Monkey Girl by Kit R. Roane,a senior writer with U.S. News & World Report:

“Although Humes attempts to keep an even keel in reporting on this maelstrom, he clearly has a hard time finding much good to say about some of evolution’s opponents, expressing amazement at the “near-total incuriosity and ignorance” of a board member who admitted “chirpily” on the stand that she was opposed to a science she didn’t understand and was helping to ram through a creationist textbook she had never actually read. Such displays, he adds, shocked even the presiding judge, a conservative jurist and devout Christian — and, indeed, he ended by ruling against the school board.”

Speaking of religion and society, tonight I went to hear Ayaan Hirsi Ali at one of our local Indigo bookstores. When the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered for producing the film “Submission,” about the Muslim religion from the point of view of women, her name was pinned to his chest with a knife. It was her screenplay. She is now living in the U.S. and there were police at the talk (and book-signing) to guard her.

43% of illiteracy

…is caused by cats:

"Irreducible Complexity" explained–in 1918

In 1918, Hermann Muller explained how evolution enabled systems of “interlocking complexity” to develop, largely by protein modification. The systems would start out being simple and not irreducible, then would garner links or steps over time and gradually change to become more interdependent, until they could no longer operate independently. That, of course, is the Intelligent Design state of irreducible complexity.

Muller gave real-world examples of systems in various stages of transition.

So the great conundrum of IC was solved 89 years ago!

Hermann Muller went on to win the 1946 Nobel Prize in medicine for his work in genetics and mutation.