My home Internet connection has been dropping out every day for nearly a week. It always goes down between 10:30 and 11:00, and doesn't come back up until the evening, sometimes as late as 9:00. Since I host my websites from home, this means the sites go dark during this period as well. Frankly, you're lucky to be reading this at all.

Comcast is sending someone over to look at it today, so hopefully it will be resolved soon.

I've been doing line monitoring through broadbandreports.com - they'll check every ten minutes from three different cities to see if your connection is up, and keep track of it for you. They even provide some nice graphs, which geeks love.

Here's a graph of my connection for the past two days:

See the green bits? Those are the happy places. They're like vast tropical seas of lime Jello Mountain Dew margaritas that you can swim in to your heart's content.

You'll also have noticed the blue bits. Those are evil mountains of fear and despair amongst the tranquil green seas. They're blue because they're actually giant piles of dead Smurfs.

It's very disconcerting when you have no Internet access. It feels a lot like that scene in Apollo 13 when they go around the moon and are out of radio contact for a while. There's no telling what could happen during that time - you can't get email, you can't Google anything, there's no Wikipedia, no Facebook, no Flickr, no YouTube… seriously, it's like 1996, it's fucking medieval.

I hope they fix it soon.

Just seen on Lifehacker: if you don't like the driving directions Google gives you, you can just drag the route around until you do. It updates the directions automatically.

Today I checked out Crisis in Darfur, which is a joint project of the U.S. Holocaust Museum and Google. It provides Google Earth layers that document the humanitarian crisis in Darfur.

It's a pretty remarkable effort; the vast scale of the genocide in Darfur has never been more apparent. The overview screen is littered with red and yellow icons; each one represents a village that has been partially or utterly destroyed. The project has collected photos, videos, and testimonials from victims and displaced people, in addition to high-resolution satellite imagery that provides undeniable evidence of the destruction.

It's all part of the Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative, which seeks to collect information on potential genocides and present it to world governments and humanitarian organizations. That's the worthiest use of technology I've heard of in a while, and I'm in the business.

Kudos to these folks for an incredibly moving and compelling piece of work. See for yourself - go get Google Earth, install the Darfur layers, and get educated.

I just finished reading Sam Brownback's opinion piece, What I Think About Evolution, in the New York Times. It was… strange.

Brownback, of course, was one of the three Republicans to indicate that they did not believe in evolution when asked during the Republican presidential debate. His Times piece seems to be an attempt to clarify, or perhaps to back away from, or possibly to defend, that position. I've read it several times and I can't tell.

He says:

The premise behind the question seems to be that if one does not unhesitatingly assert belief in evolution, then one must necessarily believe that God created the world and everything in it in six 24-hour days. But limiting this question to a stark choice between evolution and creationism does a disservice to the complexity of the interaction between science, faith and reason.

Fair enough. And:

Faith and science should go together, not be driven apart.

Great! Let's be friends. We can end the incredibly divisive, yet completely pointless, debate about whether we came from monkeys or not. But:

If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true. If, on the other hand, it means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.

OK, wait a second. First of all, to be clear, the question in the debate wasn't "Do you believe in microevolution within a species," or "Do you believe that the world is guided by an intelligent being." It was "Do you believe in evolution," and evolution, in this case, would seem to mean the entire theory as currently accepted by the scientific community. So, since this theory includes more than just microevolution, Brownback rejects it. So far so good.

But what happened to the part about "limiting this question to a stark choice between evolution and creationism" being a bad thing? In Brownback's view, he must either limit his acceptance of evolution to changes within a species, or deny God. And so now we're back to science and religion being at odds again. So much for the happy reunion.

Isn't there any other way to jive evolution with the existence of God? Evolution is pretty nifty - it's the kind of system that any God I can think of would have come up with to make sure things kept working properly. If you believe that God created Earth, then why not evolution, too - just more evidence of divinity at work. Right?

Then:

There is no one single theory of evolution, as proponents of punctuated equilibrium and classical Darwinism continue to feud today. Many questions raised by evolutionary theory - like whether man has a unique place in the world or is merely the chance product of random mutations - go beyond empirical science and are better addressed in the realm of philosophy or theology.

The most passionate advocates of evolutionary theory offer a vision of man as a kind of historical accident. That being the case, many believers - myself included - reject arguments for evolution that dismiss the possibility of divine causality.

Okay, so what about the other, less passionate advocates? Might they, perhaps, have a theory that does not dismiss divine causality? Remember, "there is no one single theory of evolution." (Oh, and the "fueding?" It's called scientific discussion, and it happens when you're allowed to ask questions and express doubt.)

See, Brownback wants to say that he's bringing science and faith together. But he's not trying very hard. He chooses to take a very deterministic interpretation of evolutionary theory, and then he proceeds to show why most of it is incompatible with his beliefs. But there are many religious scientists who don't have trouble reconciling their beliefs with the entirety of evolutionary theory. Brownback is right that faith and science can coexist. But they can coexist even better than he thinks - marveling at the complexity of the universe and believing in a being that can create such a universe are two sides of the same coin.

What's clear is that Brownback was right to raise his hand in that debate - his version of evolution is not supported by scientific evidence. But the problem is not science's inability to incorporate faith. It is his faith's inability to incorporate what science has shown us to be true.

We almost always watch TV shows online. There are fewer commercials, and the quality has improved a lot since the early days of online offerings. Lately, I heard that NBC would be revamping their online video player to better compete with ABC's. I've used both, and NBC's is a sad caricature of ABC's. Only a few shows are available (not including The Office, which is unforgivable), and the audio and video quality are terrible.

ABC's player, on the other hand, has many more shows plus some online exclusives. The video starts almost immediately, and although it is blurry at first, it transitions smoothly to a very sharp, large image after a few seconds. You quickly forget that the video is streaming at all.

There's only one problem with ABC's player. After every commercial break, you have to click a link to start the next segment. This is aggravating… haven't remote controls been around, oh, I don't know, since I was born? I'm lazy - once I get comfortable, I don't want to get up, dammit. Please don't make me click something every five minutes.

So it was good to hear about NBC stepping up to the plate - I'd like to see what they come up with. But this morning I see that ABC is (to mercilessly mix sports and gambling metaphors) upping the ante. They'll be streaming their shows in high def. That's a bold move, but it's pretty exciting… as long as they don't add more commercials, which is why I watch TV on the Internet to begin with. NBC will probably have to meet the challenge too… who knew providing free TV over the Internet could be so competitive?

Why are there no services where you can pay to download a movie, burn it to DVD, and watch it on your TV? Ars Technica has a rundown of the problem. It seems that since there is no end-user license for CSS (DVD's copy-protection system), there's no way to legally allow end users to burn CSS-protected DVDs. Without protected DVDs, the movie studios won't buy into any scheme, for fear of people using the system for piracy.

I'm shaking my head as I write this. How ironic that CSS, a copy-protection system, is actually preventing copy-protection measures from being put into place. How ironic that CSS has been trivially circumventable for years, and that anyone who can put a DVD in a drive with the right side up can rip a movie.

These are the kinds of tangles you get into when you become a purveyor of DRM. Eventually, it's going to trip you up somewhere - content that protects itself and limits its own usage is by definition not portable, and DRM schemes can't keep up with people's ideas about how content can be consumed. And you lock yourself in to an ever-escalating battle to create the next generation of "uncrackable" DRM, which is in turn cracked in days, weeks, or months.

How sad that so much mental energy is spent on this dead-end technology. Once a DRM scheme is broken, it may as well not be there at all - it doesn't stop the real, financially damaging commercial piracy, and it doesn't stop the casual pirate either. All it does is artificially limit what the average consumer can do with "their own" content.

When you discover that your $1000 iTunes library won't play on the new shiny brown Zune you bought, you get frustrated. You haven't done anything wrong - you bought the music fair and square. So maybe you return the Zune to the store. Maybe you give up. And maybe, just maybe, you turn to piracy. And that's ironic.