Brent Kearney

The good people at Parks Canada have really outdone themselves in their latest avalanche forecast, on December 24th, 2006. Unfortunately, they don’t record the forecasts in a chronological blog-like format, but rather, the same page is updated every 3 days or so, wiping out old content. There are a lot of great reasons not to do it that way, such as having the historical conditions available in an easily accessible way to those who are interested, but that is another story.

For your enjoyment, and for posterity, here is the Christmas Forecast:

Fantastic job, SM/MH!! Happy trails…

American Pentecostal Christians recently approached the Kenyan National Museum to request a change. The museum has a world-famous collection of hominid fossils, which clearly shows the evolution of humankind. The exhibit in question is simply a display of fossils. The Creationists apparently requested that the fossils be moved to a back room, where few people would see them. The evidence is apparently damaging to their dogma that the Earth is only 6,000 years old and that humans appeared out of thin air, as-is.

Prominent paleo-anthropologist Richard Leakey, former director of the museum, was interviewed on the CBC’s December 8th episode of As It Happens. He described the exhibit in question, and the problem that the church has with it:

There are a tremendous number of fossils, many of which my wife and I collected, and other people have collected as well. They represent a span of the human story from present time back to where it is really hard to discern whether its human or ancestral human, or simply ape. And what I think that the museum is proposing, is to show some of the more important specimens — not in any attempt using them to try to prove evolution — but simply to establish that we have in Kenya some of the finest fossils of early stages of human ancestry. You can interpret them as you will; the fossils are real, they’re on the table, you can pick them up and measure them.
…
The problem that these God-people have is that the fossils, the further back you go in time, look less and less like us, and I guess that’s what they’re worried about. But there’s no question that the fossils exist, and there’s no question that over the last 200,000 years they’re very like us, the last 4 or 500,000 years they’re less like us, and if you go back to several million, they’re not at all like us. Now, you can interpret that any way you like…

For your convenience, I have excerpted the part of the December 8th episode of As It Happens that contains the Richard Leakey interview, and you can listen to it here:

Alternatively, you can download the file and listen to it locally.

It is simply astounding that religion is so resistant to modernity, and that people can still respect an institution which would advocate hiding evidence because it contradicts their position. They appear to have no regard for truth, but the fact is, their whole notion of truth is warped. The concept of truth has been hijacked by the church so that instead of its nominal meaning, congruence with reality, it means — to the believers — alignment with church dogma.

The Apache 2 httpd source code offers these two appealing options, “--with-ldap” and “--enable-authnz-ldap“. You may have used them, as I, because you’d like to be able to use htauth to authenticate against your LDAP directory. When you compile the source, however, you probably run into this:

mod_authnz_ldap.c:40:2: #error mod_authnz_ldap requires APR-util to have
LDAP support built in. To fix add --with-ldap to ./configure.

mod_authnz_ldap.c:62: error: parse error before "deref_options"
mod_authnz_ldap.c:62: warning: no semicolon at end of struct or union
mod_authnz_ldap.c:76: error: parse error before '}' token
mod_authnz_ldap.c:76: warning: data definition has no type or storage
class
mod_authnz_ldap.c:92: error: parse error before '*' token
mod_authnz_ldap.c:92: warning: data definition has no type or storage
class
mod_authnz_ldap.c:93: error: parse error before '*' token
...

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Today I read a story about a man who lost a hand 30 years ago, and recently underwent a hand transplant surgery to have it replaced with a donor hand. It is apparently the third hand transplant surgery to have taken place; the first one was done in 1999. Not only is the reality of hand transplants remarkable, but that it could be done after 30 years is really amazing. This will inspire amputees worldwide, and put extra pressure on the rest of us to sign that donor card…