I just saw Ben Stein’s “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” last night and felt compelled to share a little about the movie and my thoughts. I know this is completely off topic from my typical blog posts, but hey, it’s my blog. For those who have not heard of the movie, Ben Stein provides commentary and interviews various scientists and philosophers from around academia regarding Darwinism, Intelligent Design and the effort by the pro Darwinian scientific community to exclude any debate and research that runs counter to classic evolutionary theory that all life evolved from non living material into a single cell into today’s spectrum of life on earth.
Here is the trailer to give you a very brief overview of the movie. The basic function of natural science is to question how and why things work and then to try and find an answer but in the case of evolution and Darwinism it seems like the scientific community, and to a large extend mainstream media, refuse to allow any questions or alternatives to be raised that counter Darwin’s ideas and theory.
Personally I do not belief in the traditional evolutionary theory that all life evolved from a single cell, that through some unknown process came to life, was able to survive, thrive, replicate, and eventually over time evolve into higher and higher life forms. I am not a biologist but I can grasp the basic complexity of a single cell and all the things that happens inside of that cell for life to happen. Essentially it is a mini factory that contains vast amounts of information (DNA) for sequencing proteins and manufacturing the various pieces of cellular structure for life and generation of other cells. Evolution requires us to believe that through some unknown process, various amino acids and other chemicals merged into a single cell that contained all sorts of information for functioning and reproducing.
How can something so complex happen by complete and random chance, even if given millions or billions of years? DNA is probably the most complex and compact information known to man, how does that happen by chance. If I took apart a computer piece by piece, placed all the pieces in a clothes dryer and turned it on tumble dry for a billion years would I end up with a fully assembled computer that also had vast amounts of legible and complex data stored on it’s hard drive? Why are we then expected to believe that is how we came about? How is it possible for the majority of the scientific community, and society as a whole to belief that outcome is possible yet reject any other options.
If evolution is true where does morality, ethics, compassion and justice come from? These are certainly not “physical” things, so how did they evolve? Why do humans exhibit these qualities when the rest of the physical living world does not? If everything evolved and natural selection (survival of the fittest) is the only guiding principle then who is to say what is right and what is wrong, everything should be relativistic, there should be no moral absolutes, the only “law” is the one I make that benefits my survival. If that is the cause why is murder wrong? Who could argue that murder is not right, it would simply be survival of the fittest, this person was stronger than that person, humanity would be no different than the animal kingdom. If evolution is true we are no better or different than animals, sure we look different but that is it. If evolution is true, there can be no moral absolutes (ie murder is wrong), if there are no moral absolutes who can say the Nazis where wrong. If Germany had won WWII would that mean they were right, only certain “desirable” people deserved to live? The thought repulses me to the core, and yet that is the slippery we must go down if we follow the path that Darwin started and society seems bent to accept and follow at face value.
The bigger question for me is why does society accept evolution and Darwinism? What is so appealing about it that makes people accept it without question, without considering alternatives, without thinking about the consequences and ultimate outcome of it. Are we just born, live, do what we want and then die? What is so scary about considering an alternative to that? What if we have a purpose? What if we go somewhere after we die? What if something or someone created life on earth? Is the answer to that question what scares society into evolution’s camp? What if we were created, what if there are moral absolutes that were programmed into us? What does that mean, that we answer to a higher power? Is that why science can not accept anything outside of evolution, because it would require humanity to acknowledge that we are not in complete control and yet something or someone else is? Is it a fear of religion, or possibly that if we were in fact created, that one religion is correct, that keeps us from considering anything other than evolution as the means of our origins.
My own personal beliefs are that the entire universe, the earth, and all living things were in fact created, by a loving omnipotent creator. I belief that science and religion are not necessarily contradictory but rather complimentary. When I look at the world around me, the wonders of nature, the complexity of things, I feel an overwhelming sense of awe and amazement. I am not some random chance that grew out of a pile of muck billions of years ago, I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
I respect the fact that everyone is entitled to their own opinions, that we do not all have to believe the same thing, we are free to make our own choices. All I ask it that you question current mainstream scientific thinking. Question your origins, do not accept at face value what a text book says, where it says you came from. Consider that science does not know everything and can not explain everything. Consider that belief in evolution, belief in the fantastic, virtually impossible odds of life occurring by random chance require as much or more faith and belief than belief in a greater power that created life.
Over the past few months I have been helping develop a Flex based instructional design application for Instructional Spice. For those of you who don't know (I didn't), instructional design is a huge market for flash development, but most of the work relies on custom development of training and learning modules by flash developers, who just happen to be in very short supply. Instructional Spice does for instructional design what Sprout and Wix do for creating flash content, it allows regular joes to build flash based instructional design modules and content in a simple to use GUI, with no development experience required.
The most amazing aspect of working on this project was that the lead developer had no prior Flex experience, he came from a .Net background but he had the interest and passion to learn Flex and build something great. I think he succeeded and based on feedback from beta and initial users, others agree.
For me the most rewarding part of the project was the reason I was brought in to help. It wasn't to help architect out the application or to lead the development, which is normally the case, it was to primarily mentor the lead developer, help him learn Flex and AS3 and provide some insight and guidance into building a Flex application. This was something I had never formally done before and had certainly never been contracted for. I'm sure having worked on various projects there have been times when I have informally "taught" junior developers, but never really mentored.
We setup a plan where Dale (the lead developer) and I would meet once a day to go over any issues or problems he ran into. We kept the meetings short and focused and were generally able to resolve most issues in a single meeting. One great thing about this arrangement was that it forced Dale to try and solve issues on his own first before coming for assistance. Too many junior developers just cry wolf when they run into a problem, they go running for help, looking for someone to fix the problem, instead of hunkering down and finding the solution on their own. Another benefit of this was that only the really critical or difficult issues filtered to me, which forced me to look at new problems and challenges and also try to recall how I had solved tricky AS3 issues in the past. It was also an opportunity for Dale to show me things he had learned, some of which were completely new to me. Overall mentoring was a win-win, for the mentor and student. I will definitely be blogging more about mentoring.
I am looking forward to seeing where Instructional Spice goes, it certainly changes the instructional design playing field. I am also looking forward to additional mentoring opportunities. In the past I had never thought that teaching/mentoring could be so rewarding for the mentor and I never thought I had the aptitude to do it successfully ..... who knew.
As they say necessity is the mother of all invention. In this case I need a simple tool to prep comma delimited files before importing them into a MySQL database. I had tried using the tools provided in PhpMyAdmin for importing csv and tab delimited text files without any luck. Each file required some tweaks for string delimiting, column names, etc. After a few hours of frustration I decided to create a tool to convert csv and tab delimited text files into import or update SQL statements, which can easily be used in any RDBMS. Download it here.
The import tool is super easy to use. First you select the csv or txt file you wish to import, set a few options for the import type, string delimiting and how to handle the column headers. Next you can view the columns contained in the file, you can edit the names to be used for the SQL statements and also exclude any columns from the import. Once the setup is complete you can run a quick preview to see how the data will look. If everything looks good you can generate a file that you can use in MySQL or any other RDBMS to import or update data. At any point after selecting the file to import you can also generate the sql file if you wish to skip the steps in between by clicking the 'finish' button.
Step 1 - Setup options
Step 2 - Column Setup
Step 3 - Import Preview
This is just the first pass at this tool, I'm sure there are a few bugs I have not run across yet, so please feel to try it out and report back on any bugs or issues you run across, or any features you would like to see added.
A friend of mine asked if it was possible to create a pie chart component using Degrafa instead of using the Flex pie chart component. Before this I had only looked at a few Degrafa samples but had never actually tried to create anything using their classes. I hummed and hawed and wondered how I would come up with something useful that looked good and functioned properly.
After a few hours of tinkering around and getting the basics of Degrafa down I came up with a rough first pass at a pie chart. A few more hours of how to build in the right functionality for handling different sized data sets and interpolating the data when the data sets changed and I came up with my first version (follow this link to see the source code) of a functional pie chart. For a first pass I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. There is still obviously a lot to add in, like labels and event handling, but the basics are there. Overall the learning process was not to painful.
The Degrafa docs are little lacking in places, especially when it comes to creating objects that can fire events (ie click, mouse over). Thankfully they have a ton of good samples and by picking apart some of the source code I was able to figure out some things the documentation did not really cover.
Now that I have the basic of a decent chart component in place I will hopefully find some time to build in some additional features and also create some additional charting components like a bar and line graph. Stay tuned for more details.
I just had the most surreal support experience I have ever had. I am running Windows XP Pro on my Mac using Parallels. I was trying to upgrade to XP Service Pack 2 and was having a few issues so I figured I would called Microsoft support and see if they could help. I figured I would get nowhere once they found out I was on a Mac.
After navigating their phone system I got a live person, actually persons, who were super helpful in getting me a new software key and straightening out some other issues in order to allow me to run the upgrade. I ran into a few more issues and the technical support rep, Siddharth, asked if I wanted him to jump onto my machine to help trouble shoot while I watched. I explained that I was running XP on a Mac and after a brief pause he said MS's official policy was to not support Windows software on Mac's, however he felt that since it was his company's software they did have some responsibility so he offered to help anyway. He jumped in, we had a nice chat for 30 minutes while he worked away and service pack 2 final got installed, thanks to Siddharth (you are the man).
I've got to say, this was probably one of the best customer service experiences I have ever had. This guy went way beyond what I had expected and everything worked out perfectly. If someone told me I would get outstanding customer support from Microsoft, especially while running a Mac I would have told them they're nuts, apparently I would have been wrong. It almost makes me want to switch back to PC ....... on second thought no, I'll just run their software on my Mac.
Derrick Grigg is a professional Rich Internet Application (RIA) developer based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He specializes in architecting and developing applications using a variety of technologies, most notably Flash, Flex and Coldfusion.
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