Friday, April 07, 2006

The Downside of Upgrading

This is tangentially related to the previous two posts. I am generally one of the last persons to update my system software -because 1) I wait for the kinks to get worked out first, 2) I don't want to tempt fate (the corollary to if it ain't broke ...) and 3) does the latest version have something I would like to have or absolutely cannot survive without.

So, I sat on the sidelines content with Jaguar (and older versions of iTunes, Quicktime etc. -although I did upgrade as far as Jaguar 10.2.8) through all iterations of Panther but then along came the Tiger. It appeared to be a more efficient system and had some features that I thought would be useful and/or fun -so I went for it. One such feature was podcasts through iTunes.

So I was checking out the podcast directory and looking at the various 'science' podcasts (Nova, Scientific American, Nature, Ockham's Razor and more) - all good, right? But there lurking in the science podcasts was this:











Ahh, yes a 2-minute daily dollop of delusion from *Ian Taylor purporting design in biological functions. As you can see from this laughable podcast description:









you can report a concern about a podcast (you can also wirte a review). Several people have written reviews indicating that the podcast has nothing to do with science and, therefore, belongs in the religious category and this may be reflected in the fact that if you look through the 5 pages of science podcasts it's not there now -but I didn't find it in among the religious podcasts either. Fortunately it's no longer among the top 100 podcasts as it was a couple of weeks ago but if you search for creation in the podcast directory it is still categorized as a science podcast -maybe a few submitted concerns would take care of that problem.

Steve has come to the point where pity for these people is waning and forgiveness dependent on their corrective actions - I moved from pity to disdain a long time ago. These people and their religiousity may not be the root of all evil(?) but they are the root of way too many of our society's ills.

*Yet another reason NAFTA was a bad idea.