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Apologies for the uncredited audio, I ripped it from a videoblog post a while back, and forgot who it was from. Regardless, the first time I heard it, it was just begging to be remixed. If you’re the videoblogger, please let me know.
I’m not a fan of still photography, particularly in “olden times”, when most photographs were posed for. I don’t like modern posed photos either (he says, noticing the posed shot of himself on his website), but that’s fine, as we have other methods for documenting history.
Looking at old “posed for” photographs, I can’t even start to visualise what life must have been like. The body poses are all put on, as are the faces, all those happy smiling faces. I find it hard to believe that everyone was happy in the early 20th century. It’s like watching professional models in an advertisement for Versace or Coca Cola, everyone’s happy, everyone’s beautiful… and everyone’s jacked up on speed and Cocaine, which they well could have been back in the 1800s when it was all legal, and the most famous poems in history were all drug induced. I’m starting to ramble…
Anyway, I’ve done photography rants to death already, so I’m not going to do that again. But I am going to point out that this is one of the reasons why videoblogging is so cool. A lot of it is real people in real situations, not acting, not putting on anything, just doing the real stuff they do, and being passionate about it.
In 100 years, our successors will look back at the massive amount of real media documenting real people, and although it won’t be like being here, it will be pretty damn exciting being able to view audiovisual representations of hundreds of years in the past. Imagine if we could see crystal clear (digital) quality video of Napoleon, King Henry VIII, that peasant guy from London who shovels shit off the cobblestones each week, or even a videoblog from a convict sent to Australia in the late 1700s.
This video is a snapshot of real people wasting real time.
Kitzmiller, et al v. Dover School District, et al
Pennsylvania court decision that ID is not a science, and the teaching of it violates the first amendment of the U.S. constitution.
Wow, this is so exciting! It is rare to get good news from big media, but today we must celebrate a U.S. court decision in Pennsylvania, that Intelligent Design cannot be taught as an alternative to evolution. I know there have successes and failures elsewhere, but this is the first big test of ID (creationism, you know fire and brimstone stuff) against the U.S. constitution, and a surprising statement by Judge John E. Jones III:
In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not
The case came up when a Dover, Pennsylvania school board ordered teachers to read a statement to ninth grade biology students, saying that there were still gaps in the evidence for evolution as a theory. Eleven parents then sued the school.
Some of the more significant statements from the 139 page decision:
We hold that the ID Policy is unconstitutional pursuant to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and Art. I, Section 3 of the Pennsylvania Constitution.
Intelligent design is nothing less than the progeny of creationism [..]
The judge even went so far as to head off complaints of bias and activism:
Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred [..] Rather this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources
There’s good coverage at The Guardian and Sydney Morning Herald. You can grab a PDF copy of the Kitzmiller, et al v. Dover School District, et al decision, from the court’s web site.