There are some setbacks for gays and people who believe in ending heterosexual privilege in the news today.. The governor of New Jersey has announced that he is gay, and that he has been cheating on his wife with some guy. He's stepping down next month. Not exactly good PR -- it's possible to have nice, calm, stable relationships between people of the same gender, but the masses will no doubt fixate on people being gay as a fear for existing relationships, and make it off to be a threat to their way of life even more. We can see the GOP attempting to capitalize on it already, calling for his immediate resignation. Oy. And then the expected happened -- the gay marriages in Cali were all annulled. It's going to be a long struggle to abolish this problematic privilege.

The new server arrived at work. Penguin Computing packs some nice goodies with systems they ship, and their systems also look really cool. Unfortunately, the system I got is also kind of loud. It's intended for rack use, so it figures.. I'm downloading Feodra/AMD64 ISOs right now.

Here is an interesting paper discussing group selection and what it means to modern evolutionary theory. It's basically the last thing read to conclude a long discussion last night that started on the topic of science, its practice, and its meaning, at the coffee tree. My argument was that genes, and especially memes, both are part of group selection, acting as another fabric on which selective theory can work. The paper suggested that my terms (but not so much my ideas) were sloppy, in particular, thinking of individual and group selection as being binary seperators for selective theory. Most interesting -- I wish I could remember every detail of that conversation. Oh well.

My birth certificate is no longer in my possession. Reason? I went to take care of the paperwork today for my passport, and they apparently take the birth certificate and mail it in with the rest of the stuff. My passport photo didn't turn out too well either. Oh well. I guess in about a month, I'll be able to leave the United States. Concerns? I guess I need to figure out what to do with the Iguana...