Under The Sun

A Slate report on the Davos summit raises the question “What is Yuk?”

When it comes to thinking about how to regulate the science, the
best test may be the “yuck factor.” This is, as you might imagine, a pretty
squishy concept, something along the lines of using gut reaction as a proxy for
a long and unproductive philosophical debate. Perhaps if people are grossed out
by, say, vat-grown artificial organs, they may not be ready to use them wisely.
Indeed, their gag reflex may be telling us something about the essence of human
nature and what might threaten it.

Fair enough; plenty of laws attempt to
reflect the sensibilities of society. But the problem with applying revulsion to
science, explained Dr. Baltimore, an esteemed cell biologist who is the president
of CalTech, is that it’s all awfully hard to pin down. The reason:
“Yuck is culturally determined.”

Romans 12:2 is a good place to start.

Are Americans from Mars and Europeans from Venus? This is the question
posed by a thoughtful analysis of
Anti-Europeanism in America

As a soon-to-be-enlarged European Union searches for a clearer
identity, there is a strong temptation for Europe to define itself against the
United States. Europe clarifies its self-image by listing the ways in which it
differs from America. In the dread jargon of identity studies, America becomes
the Other. Americans don’t like being Othered.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler — Albert Einstein.

In our Sunday morning services, the children are working through a version of the
Catechism for Young Children. The current topic is the Covenant of Grace:

Q. What is a covenant?
A. An agreement between two or more persons.
Q. With whom did God the Father make the covenant of grace?
A. With Christ, his eternal Son.
Q. Whom did Christ represent in the covenant of grace?
A. His elect people.
Q. What did Christ undertake in the covenant of grace?
A. To keep the whole law for his people, and to suffer the punishment due to their sins.
Q. Did our Lord Jesus Christ ever sin?
A. No; he was holy, blameless, and undefiled.
Q. How could the Son of God suffer in our place?
A. Christ, the Son of God, became man that he might obey and suffer in our nature.
Q. What is meant by the atonement?
A. Christ’s satisfying divine justice, by his sufferings and death, in the place of sinners.
Q. What did God the Father undertake in the covenant of grace?
A. To save sinners from the guilt, power and presence of sin.

Saved from the
guilt,
the power
and the presence
of sin - so simple, so profound, so wonderful.

What is the relationship between pixels and points in a web page? Jonathon Delacour says “72ppi or 96ppi—am I missing something?” — and so was I, but his article, and the comments to it, clarify things somewhat.

Corporations Claim The “Right To Lie”

When Nike were sued in a Californian court for allegedly making false claims about working practices:

Instead of refuting Kasky’s charge by proving in court that they didn’t lie, however, Nike instead chose to argue that corporations should enjoy the same “free speech” right to deceive that individual human citizens have in their personal lives. If people have the constitutionally protected right to say, “The check is in the mail,” or, “That looks great on you,” then, Nike’s reasoning goes, a corporation should have the same right to say whatever they want in their corporate PR campaigns.

One of my pet peeves with weblogs is that most of them specify
absolute font sizes in pixels, which means that Internet Explorer
(the browser
95.3% of us use) cannot resize the text using the toolbar font-size button.
Add light
text on a dark background, and you’ve got a site that my 40-something eyes
just can’t cope with. Yes, I know you can override the font size using the
browser accessibility feature, but this overrides the styling of all sites,
whether this is required or not.

Unfortunately there’s no perfect alternative, because
pixels are the only unit
that all browsers will render in the same way.
Mark Pilgrim has a neat workround, using browser-specific CSS selectors:

body {
  font-size: 93%; /* for IE/Win */
}
html>body {
  font-size: 100%; /* for Opera */
}
head:first-child+body {
  font-size: 93%; /* for Mozilla, IE/Mac */
}

This makes the text the right size in nearly all browsers currently in use, and
allows Internet Explorer users to resize it to their comfort. The only thing to
watch is that relative sizes compound, so two nested <div>s each with a
font size of 75% will give the inner <div> a font size of 56%. Ironically,
Mark has recently

abandoned this hack in favour of browser sniffing, but that’s not an option
for sites on hosts (such as BlogSpot) that don’t support server scripting.

I normally use Internet Explorer 6, so it took a while to notice that this page was horribly mangled in Gecko-based browsers (K-Meleon, Mozilla and Netscape 6/7). I eventually tracked the problem down to the Sitemeter script, which inserts an comment start tag (<!–) with no end tag, in order to comment out the <noscript> element in the HTML code. The idea is that the comment is closed by the end tag of the sitemeter copyright comment that follows the <noscript> section, but two consecutive comment start tags just seems to totally confuse Gecko.

The workround was to add a comment end tag after the <noscript> section to close the script-generated comment. With the script, it closes the comment properly and with no script it is just treated as text. Grrr!

Emma of skyedreams has an “incoherent rant” about the evil of
exploitative business owners. She concludes:

Do you know the real meaning of the word “sin”? It means an offense against God. To be a sinner is not simply to break the rules. It has nothing to do with the trivial rantings of tv evangelists. To be a sinner means to violate your own soul. It means to lose your way so profoundly that you cannot return to your own human nature without an active act of Grace from the Almighty.