Saw this quote from fortune as my /etc/motd today:

"Evolution is a million line computer program falling into place by accident."

Even though I'm usually in favour of having some kind of context for pretty much everything I read, without it, that quote is unique in that those who do not subscribe to some kind of creationism myth and those who do can both agree on it.

Of course I think it is marvelous that we've evolved to the state we're in today after a few billion years and trillions to the trillionth power random chemical interactions...

I had a little time over the weekend and got around to converting the site's backend database from MySQL to PostgreSQL, something I've been meaning to do for a while.

Now the odd thing I found was that using PostgreSQL made the site consistently faster. Odd, considering MySQL is generally held to be the faster of the two.

Take a look:

Well, I'm sure the party spinsters will do all they can to limit the damage, but at this point so late in the election, I think it's been done.

Via newswire.ca:

John Tory today announced that proposed legislation to expand public education will only proceed after extensive consultation and support from Ontarians through their elected representatives.

And:

"I have said from the beginning that this is not the most important issue in Ontario today," said Tory. "So let's talk about what the most important issues are, and why Ontario needs new leadership to make a difference on those issues."

I found a source for the previously mentioned Bill Murdoch quote on newswire.ca.

Here's another quote from Mr. Murdoch:

"I started this campaign defending the policy, but very quickly heard - loud and clear - while canvassing door-to-door, on the phone, via mail and e-mail - that the people of Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound are predominantly against the extension of funding to faith based schools.

Apparently there is growing disagreement about John Tory's proposal for private religious funding for schools amongst John Tory's very own Progressive Conservative ranks. Deputy Premier George Smitherman himself says that "Conservative candidates are questioning John Tory's judgment." No small claim considering what's at stake for the PC party.

Garfield Dunlop, the Simcoe-North MPP notes that "Many Tory MPPs did not know religious funding would be part of the campaign."

Heard a cool song on CBC this afternoon. The program was Definitely Not the Opera and the song was by one Craig Smith.

The CBC Radio 3 website writes the following about Craig:

The Kitchener, Ontario native was lured at a young age from his religious upbringing, and developed a taste for the darker side of life by way of the rock music secretly played from a bedroom cassette player.

From today's Star:

Tory vow of tax dollars for faith-based schools will 'define' election

and from Dalton himself:

"I don't think that Ontarians believe that improvement or progress is defined as inviting children of different faiths to leave the publicly funded system as we know it and go to their own schools," he added.

I too will be afk for a few days, so there won't be much action from me round there parts. But I've recently rediscovered Eric Hoffer's brilliant analysis of mass movements titled The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements after a 4 years of neglect (first year sociology, forgot about it since) and will leave two quotes to consider while I'm away.

Haven't had much time to work on the site lately, and the comment spam has become a bit of a nuisance, even with the captcha module enabled. The problem? Someone has written a bot that uses "people" as a comment subject, innocuous sounding enough, and http://www.google.com as a homepage.

Now it would be easy enough to simply blacklist the offending IP, but I don't want to first get spam and then have to delete it. No, I'd much rather check that both those conditions (name and url) are inappropriate and then redirect the bot. I could also change the code to check the username, but that is much more variable across the spams I've seen, which is too bad since it it a mandatory field for posting a comment.

So I've tweaked comment.module a little and added the following to take advantage of the neat 403.php script over at the most excellent The Net is Dead tech/design blog:

"It is my contention that Christianity, when it is full-blooded, is simultaneously reflexive, reasonable and faithful [repressive, irrational, and fanciful]." Those words (with my reinterpretation in brackets) from a post titled Are Christians as Inflexible as they say we are? over at one of Phil Steiger's blogs, Every Thought Captive.

I did not know this (but am not surprised) that a Mr. Steiger, a member of the world's largest Pentecostal denomination, the Assemblies of God, has somehow, by some torturous and tautologous reasoning, managed to reconcile his church's stated position "that all matters of faith and conduct must be evaluated on the basis of Holy Scripture, which is our infallible guide (2 Timothy 3:16,17)," with a statement such as the following:

"The tools of reason and analysis are actually built into and intended to be used by the faith system of Christianity. If God has given us intellectual tools such as reason, and if all truth is God’s truth, the Christian has nothing to fear by examining all things in pursuit of their faith."