Time for another Odds & Ends.

Well-known evo­lu­tion­ary biologist PZ Myers (Pharyngula) was expelled from a viewing of a new cre­ation­ist doc­u­men­tary, Expelled, last night. Wait until you read the punchline. There is a God!

Lost, one MacBook Air: Steven Levy explains just how he (thinks he) lost his MacBook Air.

It was St. Patrick’s Day on Monday. Peter sent me the Muppets’ Danny Boy video. Andrew told me that the Irish bishops had moved St. Patrick’s Day. Monday was a holiday in Ireland, as is today (Good Friday) and next Monday (Easter Monday), so many people took Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday off this week. Bastards!

Emma and I walked with the Wild Geese Players in the Seattle Parade last Saturday. I walked into a fire hydrant afterwards, while pre­oc­cu­pied with my camera, leaving me with a deep bruise on my thigh. I must get around to posting those photos to Flickr soon (along with many others).

In Martian Headsets, Joel Spolsky discusses Microsoft’s recent decision to make Internet Explorer 8 be standards-compliant by default, which reversed their earlier decision to be backwards-compatible. He remarks that they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

In my opinion, Microsoft has erred too often on the side of backward com­pat­i­bil­i­ty. I’m firmly in the camp that wants IE to be standards-compliant by default. After struggling for months with IE6 (and IE7 to a lesser degree), I believe that we badly need to raise the level of standards compliance in browsers. As Jeff Atwood put it three years ago, IE6 is the new Netscape 4.7x: "the browser that we all wish would go away. The one that’s a pain in the ass to support."

Confused about the current financial crisis? Watch Clarke and Dawe on subprime meltdown. And read Can’t Grasp Credit Crisis? Join the Club.