Evolution? Phooey!

By way of /., a Newsweek Poll summarized on MSNBC states 48% of Americans believe "God created humans pretty much in the present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so" while an additional 13% believe that "humans developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process."

That's 48% of the survey respondents being firmly against evolution and up to an additional 13% falling in-step behind.

I hardly know what to say to this. Will science education in the classroom be dead by the time my kids go to school? I need a healthy dose of Daniel Dennet and Richard Dawkins now.

Competition for TED

I just noticed a single page spread in GQ advertising the New Yorker Conference/ 2012: stories from the near future. The site wouldn't render fully in Firefox so I didn't get a chance to explore fully but the print advertisement made it seem very TED-like.

The raw HTML meta content is somewhat interesting:

<meta name="keywords" content="New Yorker, Conde Nast, Conference, David Remnick, Malcolm Gladwell, Microsoft, Discover" />


<meta name="description" content="A rare opportunity to be a part of a brainstorm conceived by the writers and editors of The New Yorker. Join us for presentations, demonstrations, interviews, and discussions with experts across disciplines, both well-known and newly discovered, to explore what will impact our lives within the next five years, from board rooms and trading floors to music studios, design labs, art galleries, technology centers, think tanks and beyond." />

Microsoft is sponsoring the event. Condé Nast/CondéNet is the parent company of GQ and the New Yorker. The web server appears to be running an Akamaized version of IBM's web server over Linux. Wonder how MSFT feels about that?