Then, what you're looking for is the Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal. Lots and lots of tits. And scantily clad lady ninjas too. And it's actually a pretty good book, also. Believe it or not.

It's been over a year since I read Wind-up Girl, with many books between then and now, so my memory is kind of hazy... but thinking back, I can't remember any electrical energy in that world. Was it all mechanical? If it's all mechanical (for whatever reason), that really limits what sort of energy sources are useful. Especially portable energy sources. Most current energy sources, green or otherwise, are to produce electricity. I'm have no idea why (if I am even recalling correctly) electricity doesn't work, but it would only take a sentence to reasonably dismiss electricity entirely in a sci-fi world. You can write that sentence for yourself in your head while reading, if it doesn't exist.

Of course one thinks first of steam, for mechanical power. But what do you burn to get steam? That's a problem. Also, while the oceans are still abundant, fresh water seems like it might be kind of dear in that world ... at least so it seems, as I'm recalling the torture the Windup Girl undergoes constantly trying to get water to keep herself from overheating, and it not being easy to acquire.

It should be noted that Windup Girl takes place in a world already mostly established by Bacigalupi in his short stories in Pump Six. Pump Six is a collection of short stories. Windup Girl is sort of, in some ways, like a really long short story. Not everything is explained. (I think Pump Six is a significantly better work than Windup Girl, though Windup Girl is still quite well done.)

ixquick.com (or startpage.com) is a privacy oriented meta search engine that's been around a long time. Its current incarnation anonymously repackages google search results. DuckDuckGo is pretty cool. But I don't like Bing's results as much; and also I've been using ixquick for a long time... you hear about duckduckgo a lot these days, but sadly rarely hear of ixquick/startpage.

Nice try, Dr. Zaius, now back to your cage.

Here is a list of 500+ Atheist vs Christian debates if anyone is feeling they are missing out on this one. And you might find it interesting to note that actually, though the list is posted on an Atheist site, the Christian side "wins" most of these debates. The reason isn't necessarily that they Christian side is right, but that the Christian side generally has the better public debating skills: they dominate and frame the questions.

In fact there's a bit of an obsession out in Atheist-land at beating one guy: William Lane Craig, who is considered technically by many to be the top Christian debater... and arguably has never "lost" (sorry I really have to put that last word in quotes), as the linked Atheist site describes, despite going up against some serious popular intellectual heavyweights such as Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. Famously, Dawkins recently backed out of a debate with him.

It's worth noting here, for anyone interested, this blog which does a pretty nice job of reviewing and rating many of these debates from an Agnostic perspective.

These debates generally are not specifically on evolution, but virtually all of them include it to greater and lesser degrees.

I got an old G1 online for less than $100 (including shipping). It is a bit slow, but still quite functional, unless you want to be running processor intensive games like Angry Birds. I have around 100 apps installed that run fine. The thing is jail broken, and has a cyanogen mod installed (SparksMod currently). And I actually use it for my primary mobile phone -- with no data plan (because I refuse to be gouged any further by our Canadian oligopolies)... wifi is good enough for me. And I'm loving the 4 row physical keyboard.

I've heard nothing but bad about Mugabe over the years -- and I have non-white inlaws from there. However, I don't really know all that much about the place. But reading over the Wikipedia Mugabe page I found the section on "Social Programs" especially interesting. From the indicators reported there, things seem to have improved radically in terms of literacy, infant mortality, and life expectancy during the first 10 years of his leadership. After that the IMF imposed it's usual austerity program on them, in exchange for cash... and things seem to have gone downhill from there. Of course this is just wikipedia... so who knows... but it's interesting to consider that besides the complicated and violent political and ethnic internal problems, that the external influence of the IMF may have (yet again) be also a villain here.

My kids (3 and 5) love, love, love, love, love TuxPaint... they run it on Linux, but I see it's available for Windows as well. They also deeply love StarFall -- which just requires a web browser and flash.

I was also afraid to switching my mom to Linux, but finally after yet-another-windows-disaster I finally snapped... set her up with Kubuntu. I have to say, it was pretty painful for a while. Lots of "but I used to because to do this-like-this" pain. Especially around area of really simple stuff which is actually pretty frustrating on many linux desktops: - drag web pages from firefox to desktop - setting wallpaper - downloading photos from digital camera But anyhow, things have settled down. She still has constant problems. But now I can fix them so much more easily! It's not a hair-pulling mysterious inexplicable balls of pain. It's definitely worth it switching relatives to Linux if you support their computers. And when they complain that some stupid windows program they are missing, just tell them to go back to windows if they want but you won't be touching their computers anymore... And also "remember all the problems you had on windows?" Amazingly they quickly forget the horrors they experienced on windows fairly quickly, and need to be reminded.... Bottom line. Most people just *hate* change. Force them to change somehow. It *will* be painful. But it's totally worth it in the long run for sooooooo many reasons.

I started on Google Reader, and actually moved to Bloglines. The "beta" interface had some nice features that Google Reader didn't have at the time. And it was nice to have a break from Google. Casting around for an alternative, I stumbled into NetVibes. At first it doesn't look like a replacement for the type of site that Google Reader or Bloglines are, but after playing around with it for a bit, I found it actually is pretty decent. You can import your .opml file (via the big green "add content" button which took me ages to find!) and it throws all your folders up as "tabs" on your "dashboard". It has decent organization (drag and drop, mostly) and you can toggle from the default block-style mode (widget view) to plain list display (reader view). NetVibes pretty much entirely avoids mentioning "RSS", obviously aimed at a more oblivious public... which may be a good thing. But really it's quite a decent online RSS reader for the rest of us who know what RSS is all about.