Minneapolis is one step closer to becoming a wireless city. The city is currently considering two proposals, one from Earthlink and one from local company US Internet, to construct and maintain a citywide wi-fi network. I do wish the city would own and operate its own network. Internet access has saturated the country to such a point and has become so critical to our infrastructure that it should be considered a public utility. However, the political realities confronting Minneapolis probably make public ownership unlikely. If the city moved in this direction, it would likely face legal action from the big telecoms like Qwest, much as Philadelphia did when it began planning its own municipal wi-fi network. But I am pleased to see that the proposed prices for wi-fi network could be substantially lower than what I’m paying now to Time Warner. If I can get consistent speeds of 6Mbps on the wi-fi network, I’ll gladly switch.

A couple weeks ago, I read an excellent New Yorker story covering the “intelligent design” trial in Dover, Pennsylvania. The writer expressed admiration for the judge overseeing the trial and predicted the judge would strike down the school board’s attempt to bring the philosophy of intelligent design into public school science classrooms. And that’s exactly what happened. I find this whole “controversy” to be both amusing and a little sad. People who support the teaching of ID tend to be fundamentalist Christians who are normally quite vocal in their faith, but they get all coy when they’re asked to identify who the intelligent designer might be behind such wonders as the human appendix and the blind spot in the human eye. Was it a race of superintelligent aliens? God? The Flying Spaghetti Monster?
On this question, ID proponents are oddly silent.
I’m an atheist, but I understand the need to believe that there is an order, a purpose, to our lives. Life, even at its best, is difficult and it’s so comforting to think that we are all part of some grand design overseen by a benevolent and omniscient power. And people should feel free to believe that if it makes existence more bearable. However, it’s impossible to ground this belief in science. Science is the ongoing endeavor to observe and explain natural phenomena through methods that can be tested and proven. It’s not wish fulfillment.

For the past couple days, I’ve been experimenting with Konfabulator Yahoo Widgets. It’s a program that allows the user to run all kinds of widgets on the desktop. Right now, I have widgets showing me the weather forecast, my system’s hard disk and memory usage, and an analog clock. I’m not sure how useful these widgets actually are, but they do look kind of cool sitting there on my desktop. And I like the idea of being able to glance at my desktop for critical but generic information. I’m of the basic philosophy that you can never have too much information at your fingertips. People who complain about information overload are really saying they don’t have the patience to filter out the signal from the noise. I don’t have the problem.

According to CNN, nurses regularly experience sexual harassment on the job. I’ve heard about such harassment from a few of my own nurses. My group of nurses is a little unusual because about half of them are male, but generally nursing continues to be a female-dominated profession. And our culture loves to fetishize women who work as caregivers. I’m certainly not an expert on these things, but is there a profession more overrepresented in porn than nurses? Well, maybe pizza delivery guys, but they’re probably a distant second. I think the urge to assert some kind of sexual dominance over a female caregiver is a defense mechanism in some men who feel vulnerable because of an illness or injury. Or maybe a lot of guys are just dicks.
As for me, I like to think I treat my nurses with respect and decency. My male nurses are required to wear leather chaps and my female nurses are required to wear leather miniskirts only on Saturday nights. But that’s not really a sexual thing. Saturdays are my clubbing nights and I just want them to blend in.

It was snowing when I went to sleep last night. It was snowing when I woke up this morning. It was snowing when I left work this afternoon.
You get the idea.
I have to work on an operational protocol tonight that needs to be submitted to CMS soon. Even government workers get to put in extra hours once in a while. Depending on when I finish, I’ll try posting again.