That is what you think it is--smoke from the California wildfires that have taken at least two lives and hundreds of homes. The fires are being driven by high winds, evident by the dust cloud also visible in the image above.

Answers in Genesis has an article about Sweden's new ban on teaching creationism alongside evolution. And because private schools in Sweden receive government grants, even Christian schools have to abide by these rules.

Chuck Colson did a BreakPoint commentary a few days ago to talk about Behe's book The Edge of Evolution, and about how the New York Times asked Behe's intellectual enemy Richard Dawkins to review it (a review that consisted partly of scientific rebuttal and mostly of insults, I'd add). "That would be roughly the equivalent of the New York Times asking me to review one of Dawkins’s books," said Colson. "Fat chance." I was interested to hear Colson's intimation that he doesn't personally accept common descent.

 Slashdot posted a story that linked to this essay paralleling Darwinian evolution with self-correcting information systems like Wikipedia, prediction markets, and recommendation systems. It's ironic the author of the essay chose something like Wikipedia to represent evolution by natural selection, because, after all, Wikipedia works because of intelligence. And rather that causing the "survival" ability of Wikipedia to occasionally improve, mistakes and misinformation are always detrimental, and need to corrected by designers, who understand the language and have a rigidly specific goal in mind (accuracy--information corresponding with a reality outside the wiki system).

In that light, Wikipedia is actually more descriptive of creationism than neo-Darwinism. I'm so glad he thought of it.

NASA wildfire image created by Jesse Allen.