When the World was Flat
Listening to
a Dave Matthews' song today made me think of some talk that I've heard regarding science, both in favor and against it. Mostly I hear misconceptions about the use of the word
theory, on both sides. The mystics say that something is "just a theory", while the science students insist that in science, theory is fact. Of course, neither are correct.
We have a certain set of
facts -- things that are known to be true by verifiable, repeatable experience. Science takes these facts, and builds
theories about the nature of universe such that the theories are consistent with all of the facts. These theories are conclusions drawn from the facts, they are not the facts themselves.
The scientific method cannot prove the theories, it can only disprove them. An experiment collects empirical evidence (that is,
facts that are experienced and/or recorded by our senses or instruments used to enhance them) and checks if they support a given
theory. If they do, then the theory stands, and if not, then the theory has been disproved.
The science students misrepresent scientific theory when they call it "fact." That's not what science is. A theory that stood for decades or centuries can still be disproved and replaced by a new theory. It has happened and is still happening. The religion students misrepresent science, too, by implying that the word "theory" means that it holds no weight. It's silly to try and discredit a theory when it still holds as the best explanation of the world around us, and not for a lack of attempts to disprove it.
I'm not Caucasian
Why is it that "white" and "Caucasian" have become synonyms?
I realize that if you just want to describe a person's skin color, that there's not many people that are more "
white" than I am. However, if what you want to describe is a person's ethnicity, then I could be Dutch or Irish or English or Danish or Spanish, but none of those people are from the
Caucasus mountains. Just because my ancestry is European and my skin color is white, does not make me belong to this invented ethnic group.
I think the real reason that term gets used is because the people that ask the question aren't interested in ethnicity or culture or heritage or anything like it, but are actually only concerned with skin color, and have discovered that ethnicity is a way to disguise that interest to people who don't like being categorized by their color.
Identity theft really happens (This is a serious post)
I've never really had any close experience with identity theft before, but I had a close call with it today.
I got an email from PayPal saying that they needed the users to make updates on their accounts within the next two days. It sounded like a big deal, so I clicked the link to update whatever they needed.
PayPal came up like normal, and asked me for my user name and password to log in, which I provided to get in to the site. I didn't notice anything was wrong until Firefox asked me if I wanted it to remember the password. I said yes, but I wondered why it didn't already know that password. I use PayPal all the time. Then I saw in the address bar what I wished I'd seen from the start: This wasn't PayPal at all. This was some other site with another address that was posing as PayPal.
This is where I went into panic mode. I'd already hit submit on the login. I didn't fill out any of the resulting page asking for my personal information, but I had already submitted my password. Now what could I do? I hurriedly went to the real PayPal site and changed my password before the con-persons could do anything with the information I'd just given them.
And now I've spent the last few hours changing all of my other important passwords, just in case the spoofers are smart enough to use that little bit of information they got.
I reported the site to PayPal, but I don't know what else I can do. Does anyone know how to report this kind of thing to any kind of law enforcement, or is that even possible?
I was going to include the fraudulent email itself, as well as a quote from the actual PayPal site about how to tell a spoofed email from a legit one, but since I'm feeling very paranoid right now I decided that I didn't actually want to quote the con-artists or link to them. Instead, here's the problems with the email that I should have noticed (but didn't, at least not right away):
- The email didn't know my name. It referred to me generically as a PayPal member. PayPal (and hopefully other sites with privileged information) know your name and will address you by it.
- The link didn't go to PayPal's site. I should have noticed this right away, but I'm glad I did eventually notice it before I made a worse problem. If you're looking at an email that wants you to click a link, here's what you should do:
Hover over the link. In the status bar (that's the little gray bar at the bottom of your browser) it will say the address to which the link points. If the text for the link is an address, make sure they match. (In my case they didn't.) Otherwise, just make sure that the address looks like what you'd normally see for the given Web site (i.e., www.paypal.com if the link is supposed to take you to PayPal). Likewise, when you're entering your password or personal information in the destination Web site, look at the address bar at the top and make sure that you are.
I consider myself pretty aware and hard to fool when it comes to the Internets and computers, but this email and its Web site looked official enough that I didn't even worry about it. I'm glad I noticed the problem when I did, but I'm afraid that some people probably wouldn't have noticed, nor known what they should be watching for. I just thought I'd post about this so that other people could be aware and hopefully a little more cautious. Good luck. It's dangerous out there.
Cucumber is the new lemon
Lemon. Not awesome.
At Christina's wedding reception tonight they had a jug of water (with an obnoxiously hard to use spout, which is entirely beside the point) that had a bunch of
cucumbers at the top of it. It was really good. I think that's my new favorite flavor of water.
"Yes, waiter, can I have a cucumber wedge with my water?"
And lemon wasn't my old favorite flavor of water. Water was my old favorite flavor of water. Except now it's cucumber.
