From Nature's June 26 2008 issue (#453) comes more evidence from the Devonian period that fills in more of the gap in our understanding of the evolution from fish to land animals.

The gap in our understanding of the evolutionary transition from fish to tetrapod is beginning to close thanks to the discovery of new intermediate forms such as Tiktaalik roseae. Here we narrow it further by presenting the skull, exceptionally preserved braincase, shoulder girdle and partial pelvis of Ventastega curonica from the Late Devonian of Latvia, a transitional intermediate form between the 'elpistostegids' Panderichthys and Tiktaalik and the Devonian tetrapods (limbed vertebrates) Acanthostega and Ichthyostega. Ventastega is the most primitive Devonian tetrapod represented by extensive remains, and casts light on a part of the phylogeny otherwise only represented by fragmentary taxa: it illuminates the origin of principal tetrapod structures and the extent of morphological diversity among the transitional forms.

The Associated Press have a story on it, but I don't much want to support them with a link or text considering the job they did on the drudge report.

Well the weekend is over and DrupalCamp Toronto 2008 has come and gone. Thanks to the amazing group of volunteers and presenters, we managed to feed, clothe, and entertain approximately 150 geeks for two whole days with 26 different sessions ranging from theming and jQuery, to implementing Drupy, that is Drupal in Python. Thanks to the fine folks at The Faculty of Information Studies who helped me run around booking rooms, projectors, arranging furniture and access the the building over the weekend.

And more importantly, thanks to the folks who presented sessions and all those who attended! Without interesting material and interested attendees, the weekend would have been a write off. I'm already looking forward to DrupalCamp Toronto 2009, we'll have to start planning early in the spring to outdo this year's effort.

I've been getting a lot of requests lately from people about the Firefox plugins I use on a day to day basis. While everyone's browser needs are different, there are a few indispensable plugins that I think many people could (and already) benefit from using. They are:

• Customize Google - Forces https for many Google pages, blocks some Google ads, streams search pages so you never have to click next (since no one ever does anyways), anonymizes your Google cookies, uses Google Suggest, and more.

• Google Preview - Gives a small thumbnail preview of each search result page, immensely useful to gauge things like layout and navigation on a page before you visit it, any to find pages that you may have visited before but don't remember the URL exactly but have an idea of what the site looks like.

Via suyka.com

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I had a few ideas derived from Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment that I wanted to post here, but every time I came back to this post I found another and better quote from their book that expresses my interpretation of their ideas in their own more eloquent and coherent words.

Another simple one for y'all.

Well, part way through writing a paper about statistical methods used to compare universities across Canada (the Macleans rankings), I've just about made it through discussing how Enlightenment skepticism a la René Descartes undermines the authoritativeness of such statistics no matter how accurate they become. Specifically, because the entire methodology is predicated on falsifiability and the reduction of doubt, and that we consumers of the rankings information did not collect or analyze the data ourselves.

Via djp at the linuxcaffe here are a list of someone's Top Fifty Atheist T-Shirt and Bumper Sticker Aphorisms.

Among my favourites:

If God Wanted People to Believe in Him, Then Why Did He Invent Logic?

Viva La Evolución!

That are some that are rather more unsavoury (but hilarious) that don't bear posting here. But #1 and #16 are relevant to Rolf's post about a Brampton Church sign, and the comments on that post ;)

Thought I'd post a Jay's Pick, and it just so happens that there's a video to go with the tune that is in keeping with the theme of this site.

The song is No Danger by The Delgados, a now disbanded but eminently influential band from Scotland that saw its heyday in the beginning of this decade. One commenter points out on the YouTube page that it is too bad there are so many people in the world with "cloth ears"--the bitrate leaves much to be desired. However, at proper CD quality the track sounds superb. I highly recommend the whole album The Great Eastern from 2000. Worth finding a copy.

So with Gmail's recent deployment of IMAP to various accounts, I've got a reason to use my Gmail account now. Since I don't want anyone able to read any of my mail (including google) I've setup my Gmail account to store encrypted backup copies of messages from my main mail accounts. My main mailserver is fine the way it is, and has rsnapshot backups of everything on another server, but just in case, some more transparent remote redundancy would be nice.