Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Evolution versus Creation debates

"evolution" is one of my google alerts. Along with "The Evolution of Special Effects" and "The Evolution of Tom Cruise" I see scientific articles/blogs on evolution along with blog posters taking pot shots at evolutionary theory.

One that I took note of was a Jewish Blog called Chabad, which had a short piece on evolution followed by various people agreeing or disagreeing with the original blog entry.

In my mind, the article had nothing to do with evolution and the facts of the theory, but of how morally speaking, believing in God is better than believing in evolution.

I don't actually know if this is true or not. I have no idea (in general, I think truth is superior to delusion). The thing is, does that have anything to do with whether evolution is correct or not? The big, bright, shiny word that springs to mind is "irrelevant".

What if believing the laws of motion allowed you to launch missiles into third world countries? Oh wait! It does! We shouldn't believe in them! My reaction in a posted comment said pretty much that. What does the morality of the question have to do with evolution?

The funniest thing about the blog is that as I tried to post corrections to people's misconceptions, the moderator seemed to get annoyed with me and started disallowing my posts. That was after quoting me incorrectly and then removing the comment when I corrected him.

I guess with a moderated blog, you can allow and disallow whomever you like and colour the responses in a certain light. As obvious as that is, I hadn't considered it before and thought that moderation was more about filtering out bad language and abusive comments.

I have rarely worried about evolution dissenters before, after all, what does scientific illiteracy really matter? These people still use computers, cell phones and cars, all of which were produced through the same science that produced evolution. No one seems to notice that and by posting on line, they are nearly self refuting.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Kiwiwriters returns!

Far less mysteriously than it disappeared, Kiwiwriters is back up and running, albeit with old data.

If you've joined the site since September, please create a new log-in account. I just realized that this is perfect if you were unhappy with your original username. Now's the chance to fix it!

And, if you haven't thought about any writing for the new year, may I suggest the 20k Novella challenge we are offering for January?

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Kiwiwriters disaster!

Well, for the last week or so, Kiwiwriters has been completely down and out. Go to the link and nothing - just an error.

Now, since getting in touch with the hosting company, we realize that it's even worse than we thought. Not only is the current page no longer working because of a hardware problem on their main server, the backups are also corrupt.

The latest full backup that we have is from September! That's over THREE months old!

So, blog posts, discussion boards, news items, challenges, membership data etc.. etc... are all gone.

This entry is just to let you know, if you are a recent member, you will have to re-join kiwiwriters, since your username and passwords are all missing.

Sorry guys.