Since I posted yesterday about a religion quiz I took, I figured I’d follow up with this one, which a friend linked me to afterwards.

As I answered this short battery of multiple-choice questions, I began to become slightly perterbed.  Since I’m skeptical of the supernatural, I found myself consistently clicking the “not applicable” and/or “doesn’t matter” options, and thereby leaving the more magnanimous issues out in the rain.

Basically, when it was done, I realized that this test does not differentiate between nihilist and existentialist, cynic and idealist.  There was never a question that allowed me to expres how I, as one who some might call a deeply “spiritual” agnostic-atheist, actually view the universe.  So this is me expounding.  From my journal on 08 June:

“Of all the planets in the solar system, with their giant twisting storms, methane seas, volcanoes, craters, and deserts — zoom in on Earth.  In through the white clouds on top of today’s storm, you come in on several open windows on the corner of a house.  Rain pours down in terrible torrents all around, wind pulling it in curled wisps.  And then there’s a voice — a passionate song being sung not despite, not to, but with the rain.  A lone consciousness enamored with being alive, albeit thrust into a quasi-hostile environment and confined to a small world.  ‘We don’t know what’s going on, but we’re all in this together,’ goes my favorite rendering of the humanist mantra (A meaningful point right now, since I’ve started adopting the term ‘humanist’ to describe myself).”

You see, what the quiz missed out on was the feelings I have for existence.  I am utterly flabbergasted by the universe and the mystery it puts forward, and the existence it’s given me (Science says: “Big bang.”  I say: “why?”  Science says: ”Electricity and Magnetism.  I say: “hehe… magic.”  Science says: “Natural selection.”  I say: “Love”).  A lack of belief in some sort of inexplicable, albeit deeply felt spiritual meme does not lessen the wonder and sensation of being alive, learning about the world, having relationships and feeling empathy for my fellow man.  I am anything but apathetic about all this, whatever exactly it may be.

The fundamental question of naturalistic philosophy: “why is there something instead of nothing at all?”  We will probably never know the answer — and just because science can’t tell us doesn’t mean religion can do any better (*cough* speghetti monster *cough*) — but the question alone is enough to touch one deeply.

My results:

1.	Secular Humanism (100%)
2.	Unitarian Universalism (93%)
3.	Nontheist (88%)
4.	Liberal Quakers (73%)
5.	Theravada Buddhism (71%)
6.	Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (56%)
7.	Neo-Pagan (56%)
8.	Taoism (49%)
9.	Orthodox Quaker (40%)
10.	New Age (39%)
11.	Mahayana Buddhism (33%)
12.	Reform Judaism (30%)
13.	Jainism (28%)
14.	Seventh Day Adventist (28%)
15.	Bahá’í Faith (26%)
16.	Sikhism (22%)
17.	Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (22%)
18.	Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (19%)
19.	Scientology (16%)
20.	Hinduism (15%)
21.	New Thought (13%)
22.	Eastern Orthodox (12%)
23.	Islam (12%)
24.	Orthodox Judaism (12%)
25.	Roman Catholic (12%)
26.	Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (9%)
27.	Jehovah’s Witness (7%)

SigmaX Fyedernoggersnodden

PS: That signature is an experiment.  I don’t want to give up “SigmaX”, but my alternative alias, “Fyedernoggersnodden” is much more unique.  In fact, it’s entirely unique.  Makes it fun for googling .

Dear Mom and Dad:

Today I created an SQL statement that used three JOINs and five nested SELECT statements (It felt just like doing calculus!).  You won’t know what that means, but basically I either did something really convoluted, or really clever, or both.  The point is, I had fun, and you should be proud of me.

Hope your summer is going as well as mine!

Love,
Eric

Quiz link thanks to mmmhollywould on Blogster.com.  I must say I’m rather surprised that Christianity scored so low in relation to Islam and such.  I think it asked too many theological questions — I may not believe Christ was God, but I would revert to that long before I was convinced that Muhammed’s words were any more inspired.  The rest I understand and agree with, though.

Which is the right religion for you? (new version)

You scored as a Agnosticism You scored as agnosticism. You are an agnostic. Though it is generally taken that agnostics neither believe nor disbelieve in God, it is possible to be a theist or atheist in addition to an agnostic. Agnostics do not know or claim to know whether or not God exists, but could admit that someone else might know. An intellectually honest agnostic would have to take that position, as he has no more evidence of the impossibility of knowing God than he has of the existence of God. Agnosticism is a philosophy that God’s existence is not proven. Some say it is possible to be agnostic and follow a religion; however, one cannot be a devout believer if he or she does not truly believe.

Agnosticism		75%
Buddhism		70%
Atheism		70%
Paganism		60%
Satanism		55%
Confucianism		45%
Islam		40%
Hinduism		35%
Haruhism		30%
Christianity		25%
Judaism		5%

It’s okay if you want to pass people on the right, even though there’s a semi keeping you from actually getting around them, just to show your frustration that they’re only going ten miles an hour over the speed limit.  You can cut me off, it probably won’t hurt my travel time at all.  It’s okay if you want to turn a two-lane road into a four-lane one (As they often do in third-world countries) just because you can’t wait your turn like a decent citizen.  It’s okay if you want to tailgate me.  I might brake check you, but that’s my right (’ish) just like it’s your right (’ish) to wear you immaturity on your sleeve.

But blink.  Blink!  For Pete’s sake, blink!!!

Our problems figuring out how to communicate and adequately manage the flow of millions of automobiles in the country is bad enough already.  There are much, *much* better ways of doing things in any given traffic situation (For example, I’ve always wondered what would happen if everyone let off the brake when they saw the light turn green, turning the painfully slow-starting queue into an instantly moving train), and it’s quite ironic that smart individuals such as ourselves are stuck in a stop-and-go valve system that renders us as hardly more competant than blood cells coasting and cramming through a vein.  But we do the best we can short of having a hive mind.

The “best we can” involves blinkers.  Blinkers are what separate us sophisticated automobile drivers from the common, savage water molecule.  If you don’t use your blinker, I have to wait longer before deciding my course of action.  Sometimes that means *stopping my car* to wait for you to make up your mind.  I shouldn’t have to do this, because you already know what you’re going to do, and you’re already under legal obligation to tell me about it.  Why not share?  Communicate!  It’s so simple!

Blink!  Blink!  For Pete’s sake, blink!!!

Okay, I feel better now.

Siggy

Now I must confess that I totally jacked this recpie from a combination of a video I saw on MercyForAnimals.org and the buffalo wings recipe I saw on the back of the bottle of Louisianna Hot Sauce, but it’s totally awesome.  My wife and I thoroughly enjoy this recipe.

So here’s a recipe that I like, it’s a buffalo tempeh sandwich.  It’s a little spicy but it’s much more savory than spicy.

Here’s what you need:

• 1 package of tempeh
• 2 tablespoons of dairy-free margarine
• 1/4 cup of hot sauce (I like louisianna hot sauce for this)
• Your favorite sandwich bread (when I make nice sandwiches I like to make my own bread for it, but kaiser rolls and stuff like that work, too)
• 1 tomato, sliced for sandwiches
• enough romaine lettuce to make sandwiches with
• Veganaise or other vegan-friendly mayo
• Enough oil to fry in, I usually just fill the skillet until the oil is about a half inch deep.

Now comes the cooking.  But first, this dish puts up a lot of spice smoke that can make you cough, so make sure you’ve got a well-ventilated area and you’ve got your fan going.

1. Melt your butter, and wisk it into your hot sauce, and put those in a bowl that’s big enough to marinade your tempeh in.
2. Cut your tempeh into pieces about the size of two of your fingers (1 just one of mine, haha)
3. Stick the tempeh in the bowl with the hot sauce and margarine and shake it up a bit, let it sit for like 5 to 10 minutes.
4. Heat your skillet before you put anything in it.  Remember that hot oil always goes into a hot pan, and that cold food always goes into hot oil.  That’ll help your food from mushing, and it’ll help your food from sticking to your pan.
5. Take the marinaded tempeh and put it into the hot oil, let it fry for 3 minutes before touching it, or it may fall apart.  Once the first 3 minutes is up, try turning it over.  Cook the tempeh until it is brown all over, then sit the cooked strips on a paper towel to drain all the oil off.
6. Make your sandwiches, and enjoy.

Tempeh, while it sounds weird, is actually really good.  It’s really crunchy and it has a really cool nutty flavor that I just can’t get enough of.  I like to grill it and fry it and bake it.

I hope you enjoyed this recipe, please comment with any suggestions or modifications.  I’m always looking to improve my recipes.

So now that lava is built, I finished the PLUS edition.

Here are the additions to LAVA base

#FileSystem stuff
apt-get install fuseiso -y
apt-get install fusedav -y
apt-get install fusesmb -y
apt-get install gmailfs -y

#System Utils
apt-get install macchanger-gtk -y
apt-get install macchanger -y
apt-get install ubuntu-docs -y
apt-get install ttf-baekmuk -y
#apt-get install ttf-arphic-uming -y
apt-get install gnome-user-guide -y
#apt-get install ttf-kochi-gothic -y
apt-get install ttf-dejavu -y
apt-get install grsync -y
apt-get install readpst -y
apt-get install netpbm -y
apt-get install sbackup -y
apt-get install nrg2iso -y
apt-get install mdf2iso -y


#APPS
apt-get install ekiga -y
apt-get install openclipart-openoffice.org -y
apt-get install openoffice.org-starter-guide -y
apt-get install openprinting-ppds-extra -y
apt-get install gnucash -y
apt-get install gnucash-docs -y
apt-get install gnome-backgrounds -y
apt-get install gnome-games-extra-data -y
apt-get install inkscape -y
apt-get install comix -y
apt-get install scribus -y
apt-get install scribus-template -y
apt-get install blender -y
apt-get install blender-ogrexml -y
apt-get install xaralx -y
apt-get install xaralx-svg -y
apt-get install checkgmail -y
apt-get install gtk-recordmydesktop -y
apt-get install planner -y
apt-get install gnotime -y
apt-get install gnome-art -y
apt-get install gimp-data-extras -y
apt-get install gimp-dimage-color -y
apt-get install gimp-gnomevfs -y
apt-get install gimp-help-common -y
apt-get install gimp-helpbrowser -y
apt-get install gimp-help-en -y
apt-get install gimp-refocus -y
apt-get install gimp-texturize -y
apt-get install gimp-ufraw -y
apt-get install gtkam-gimp -y
apt-get install gimp-libcurl -y
apt-get install gimp-plugin-registry -y
apt-get install icc-profiles -y
apt-get install flegita-gimp -y

apt-get install gimp2.0-quiteinsane --force-yes
apt-get install gimp-resynthesizer -y
apt-get install pandora -y
apt-get install gnomescan -y
apt-get install gnome-photo-printer -y
apt-get install icc-profiles -y
apt-get install gphoto2 -y
apt-get install gimp-gap -y
apt-get install nzb -y
apt-get install gpar2 -y
apt-get install pidgin-extprefs -y
apt-get install pidgin-guifications -y
apt-get install pidgin-plugin-pack -y
apt-get install wallpaper-tray -y
apt-get install create-resources -y


#Video / Sound
apt-get install ardour -y
apt-get install audacity -y
apt-get install avidemux -y
apt-get install acidrip -y
apt-get install easytag -y
apt-get install exaile -y
apt-get install gtkpod-aac -y
apt-get install gpixpod -y
apt-get install python-gpod -y
apt-get install gaupol -y
apt-get install hydrogen -y
apt-get install hydrogen-drumkits -y
apt-get install brasero -y
apt-get install devede -y
apt-get install tovid -y
apt-get install tovidgui --force-yes -y


#Needs an ICON Created
apt-get install dir2ogg -y
apt-get install drip -y
apt-get install dvd95 -y
apt-get install dvd-slideshow -y
apt-get install mplayer -y
apt-get install mplayer-skins -y
apt-get install mplayer-skin-blue -y
apt-get install mplayer-fonts -y
apt-get install mencoder -y
apt-get install oggconvert -y
apt-get install ogmrip --force-yes -y
apt-get install pitivi -y
apt-get install qdvdauthor -y
apt-get install soundconverter -y
apt-get install soundkonverter -y
apt-get install streamtuner -y
apt-get install streamripper -y
apt-get install thoggen -y
apt-get install transcode -y
apt-get install audacious -y
apt-get install audacious-crossfade -y
apt-get install audacious-plugins -y
apt-get install audacious-plugins-extra -y
apt-get install gopchop -y
apt-get install ogmtools -y
apt-get install gocr-gtk -y
apt-get install gocr -y
apt-get install gocr-doc -y



#KDE Apps
apt-get install kino -y
apt-get install k3b -y
apt-get install k9copy -y
apt-get install libk3b2-extracodecs -y

#Emulators
apt-get install dgen -y
apt-get install dosbox -y
apt-get install fceu -y
apt-get install gfceu -y
apt-get install gsnes9x -y
apt-get install snes9express -y
apt-get install pcsx -y
apt-get install snes9x-opengl -y
apt-get install vbaexpress -y
apt-get install stella -y
apt-get install visualboyadvance -y
apt-get install xmame-sdl -y
apt-get install xmame-gl -y
apt-get install mednafen -y
apt-get install psemu-input-omnijoy -y


#Games
apt-get install billard-gl -y
apt-get install beneath-a-steel-sky -y
apt-get install bomberclone -y
apt-get install bzflag -y
apt-get install wesnoth -y
apt-get install wesnoth-ei -y
apt-get install wesnoth-httt -y
apt-get install wesnoth-music -y
apt-get install wesnoth-trow -y
apt-get install wesnoth-tsg -y
apt-get install wesnoth-ttb -y
apt-get install wesnoth-utbs -y
apt-get install freeciv-client-gtk -y
apt-get install frozen-bubble -y
apt-get install gltron -y
apt-get install glob2 -y
apt-get install gnome-breakout -y
apt-get install lbreakout2 -y
apt-get install lincity-ng -y
apt-get install ltris -y
apt-get install madbomber -y
apt-get install moon-lander -y
apt-get install neverball -y
apt-get install pouetchess -y
apt-get install pingus -y
apt-get install scummvm -y
apt-get install supertuxkart -y
apt-get install trackballs -y
apt-get install trackballs-music -y
apt-get install tremulous -y
apt-get install torcs -y
apt-get install tuxkart -y
apt-get install uqm -y
apt-get install warsow -y
apt-get install warzone2100 -y
apt-get install widelands -y
apt-get install xscorch -y
apt-get install tmw -y
apt-get install tmw-data -y
apt-get install tmw-music -y

Built new version of deb assaultcube from website and added to iso.

apt-get install enigma -y
apt-get install enigma-level-previews -y
apt-get install flight-of-the-amazon-queen -y
apt-get install orbital-eunuchs-sniper -y
apt-get install tecnoballz -y
apt-get install vectoroids -y
apt-get install vegastrike -y
apt-get install vegastrike-music -y

#Joystick Support
apt-get install joy2key -y
apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-joystick -y
apt-get install jscalibrator -y

#Add Multimedia codecs and DVDstuff
apt-get install ffmpeg -y
apt-get install flac -y
apt-get install libk3b2-mp3 -y
apt-get install libdvdcss2 --force-yes -y
apt-get install ffmpeg -y
apt-get install libavformat0d -y
apt-get install libavcodec0d -y
apt-get install libpostproc0d -y
apt-get install libdvdcss2 -y
apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse -y
apt-get install python-opengl -y
apt-get install python-gtkglext1 -y

apt-get install miro -y
apt-get install dvgrab -y
apt-get remove gnochm -y
apt-get autoremove gnochm -y
apt-get install kchmviewer -y
apt-get install tunapie -y
apt-get install blogtk -y
apt-get install autotrace -y
apt-get install potrace -y
apt-get install thunderbird -y
apt-get install thunderbird-gnome -y
apt-get install lightning-extension -y
apt-get install mail-notification -y
apt-get install prism -y
apt-get install gobby -y
apt-get install evolution-rss -y
apt-get install feed2imap -y
apt-get install gnome-splashscreen-manager -y
apt-get install gok -y

apt-get install ruby -y
apt-get install hwinfo -y

manually built latest cairo-dock and cairo-dock-plugins, spicebird, thunderbird, ruby, added mp4ize and added a right click to convert videos to mp4.

Added numerous extensions to nautilus via the right click script menus.

Added a bunch of thunderbird extensions and some themes. Tweaked Thunderbird and Spicebird to be more like I like them. Specll check before sending, send in html, timezone change in calendar extensions to chicago.

Also updated firefox extensions to latest versions.

Tweaked audacious to do on screen, tweaked streamripper to use audacious instead of xmms.

Manually configured mp4, mp3, pls, wmv, wma, mpg, mpeg, mov, avi to play in vlc.
Adjust vlc to some common setting I like, repeat play, OSD, etc.

Tweaked Cairo-dock to have my favorite apps already on launch bar and set default theme.

Configured compiz with cube/rotation, 3d windows, window preview, 6 virtual windows, and changed minimize to burn, etc.

Adjust GTK menus to run faster.
Removed openoffice splash screen
Added gnome-do to sessions startup so its loaded in the background when you get to your desktop.


I'll upload the iso sometime before the weekend end.

This is a response to TehAusum’s post, My Future? How about yours? as well as his comment on my post, The Great Office War.

So here are my rather unstructured musings on my experience as a Computer Science student (I’ve completed two years towards a bachelors in CS and Math):

It was not what I expected. That’s not a bad thing. It would be contradictory to the point of a liberal education if my perspective on what computing is hadn’t changed after a couple years of college.

I’ve been interested in computers ever since I was a little kid. I wrote my first C program at 8 years old, toyed with Visual Basic for a while, and discovered Linux and Open Source in high school. When I started college, my view of computing (And also of my prospective career) was limited to the world of server administration, coding for commercial and/or open source projects, and web design. I new I wanted to do *something* with computers — which I generally figured would either be programming or 3D graphics design. Funny how I tended to lump them all together vaguely.

IT is a Subset of CS. I homeschooled three years of high school, most of which I spent marinating in a Linux-dominated world of open source software. The skills I learned there were extremely beneficial, and without them I would have struggled when it came to my first IT-related jobs (Most useful skill: Use Google, mailing lists, etc to find answers when you want to do something technical. Never let yourself get stumped in cluelessness). Emerging into college showed me a bigger world, however. From my class notes in 2006:

“There is a distinction there between a programmer and a computer scientist.”

[The professor] emphasizes the advantage of educated programmers (”Computer scientists”) over “High-school drop-out” who learned only by experience. With a greater understanding of the why and the math beneath the functions, efficiency and security (Not to mention stability) can be more comprehensively implemented.

Some of my classmates grow frustrated when we learn things from a top-down approach, and aren’t given enough real-world practice to really learn practical skills. This is true to a degree. Rocket science isn’t very useful to a bulldozer operator. But if you really want to go on and accomplish something big in life (Like, say, going to the moon), the theory is important. It will become practical if you find sophisticated applications.

One of my favorite classes so far has been, believe it or not, Formal Theory of Computing. For an entire semester we built silly looking graphs that look something like a whole bunch of ping-pong balls connected by fishing line. The pesky, painstakingly created “automata” (Simple computers) would do little more than tell you whether or not a string contained a certain pattern of 1’s and 0’s (i.e. it would recognize a “language”). Most of us will go on from that class without ever using such designs again. Some of us, however, recognize these ideas as foundational to computing in the abstract as well as practical applications (i.e. automata are the heart and soul of parsing and Regular Expressions) — and perhaps we’ll be able to do our part in advancing the field in fundamental ways (Think for a moment on why it might be important to prove that a Neural Network can do anything a Turing Machine can do, which is pretty much anything).

If nothing else, there’s the whole “liberal education” thing: we have a better understanding and appreciation for the saga, the history of computing, and why things are the way they are. If you’re like me and enjoy relishing in the architecture of the big picture, and seeing where you might fit into it, that alone is worth the hordes of money we pay for school.

In short, IT is where the rubber meets the road, computing for the common man. Computer Science is where advancements occur, from the grand ideas (Turing Machines, Neural Nets, NP-Hard problems, Big-O notation) to common R&D (Systems analysis, DBMS design, software architecture). If you want to be able to make top-notch contributions (*cough* Scientist *cough*), you want to have a grasp of the big picture.

Experience is Imperitive. Most employers, I expect, feel that a degree is little more than a formality. A firm grasp of grandiose theoretical concepts does not translate to familiarity with the tools and tricks of a specific application. Even if you have enough conceptual understanding to single-handedly rebuild a multitasking OS and accompanying CPU from scratch in the event of global catastrophe (If given a few decades to tinker) — if you don’t know the programming language or software suite they’re using at XYZ inc., they’ll be hesitant to hire you (And with good reason).

Good programmers aren’t produced by the educational system — all school offers is perspective — they’re self-motivated. If the first programming you ever do is in CPTR101, it’s a red flag that you might be the bottom of the bucket. There are exceptions, of course, but don’t wait to be told how to program (Because you won’t be, not completely) — learn by doing. Finding projects can be hard at first, especially as a novice, and motivation to complete anything genuinely stunning can be tough to come by, but do *something.* Set up a web server. Build a personal website with a databased guestbook and photo album. Make a screensaver, or a game. Find an open source project to help out with.

As for me, I did a few programming projects, sure (Some games in Visual Basic, a couple utilities in C++, a website in PHP), but what really got me going was using Linux. Yes, we live in a primarily Microsoft world, but Linux is a big part of the industry too, and more importantly it has a community and system design that is perfect for the student. You learn just by using it (In conjunction with Google, forums, and IRC) and trying to do things the hard way. If you tackle Linux (Think of it as Latin), Windows be a cinch (Modern romance languages) when you go back to learn specific skills for the work place. Windows, then, will also insult your intelligence every time you turn around, and constantly get in your way, but that’s besides the point.

The most practical class I’ve had so far is Database Concepts & Theory. Databases store information, which, this would be a good time to remind you, is what the “I” stands for in Information Technology. Even if you haven’t done much database programming by the time you have a class in it (Though you really should at least teach yourself the basics ASAP), pay attention (This coming from the guy who made up fantasy alphabets and drew Pac-Man comics while the teacher rambled about the relational model — oops!). All that abstract stuff about relational algebra is perfect mental exercise for constructing SQL queries, and a good understanding of all those confusing cross product flavors (Joins) will come in handy someday. Oh, and I love Entity Relationship diagrams (Maybe it’s that latent affiar with graphics design coming out).

Computing and design are two distinct fields. At the University I attend, the Computer Science and Digital Media departments are literally on opposite corners of campus, in the two buildings that are further apart from eachother than any other pair of structures. I have several friends who are in both programs (I considered it myself), but there really is very little overlap courswise. Where I’m working now, the web designers and programmers are on two distinct teams. We work together closely, I do some CSS and image editing now and then, and I’m sure some of the designers know how to code, but the idea is that we are two separate specialties that compliment eachother.

Knowing both is surely beneficial: Graphics programming is a very intricate, not to mention titillating, field (One of my professors specializes it), and I wouldn’t be so proud of my personal and/or freelance websites if I hadn’t developed some artistic skill along the way. My point is, though, that the joy of creation is somewhat bifurcated into the visual technical realms in the real world — perhaps because of most people’s tendency to fall into the left or right brain camps (?).

My world has grown tenfold since I started college. The once gigantic and intricate world of IT has shrunk to one subset of the commonplace world of business application, a smaller fish (Though no less intricate) in the great lake of technology, research and science. I never would have dreamed to take on a Math major in addition to CS, but after seeing what I could do with it it seemed only natural. At this point I intend to go on to graduate school for AI research, having been attracted by Computational Intelligence — but high school is to CS as college is to CI, I suppose, and I don’t really know what I might be getting into yet (I would love to be able to ask a CI grad student what it’s like).
Of course, I just tend to be the sort of guy that gets interested in things — I also love history and philosophy, compose music, and am something of a writer. I realize that a lot of people despise liberal ed (Even if it changes their entire lives). On that note, CS is not a bad route if you want to go into IT. If you really, really hate school, and if you have enough experience to feel truly competent already, there are plenty of more business-oriented two and four-year IT degrees (Though at a small university like mine CS really is the only viable option, and serves as a catch-all). A CS program is geared with the real-world in mind (ex. our CS dept. has a masters program in Software Engineering) — it has higher aspirations for you than code monkey or cable-runner.

In short, the world is huge. Aim high. Computing is a gigantic and titillating field, and you will never be out of a decent job (Unless you’re an absolute dufus). If you’re good with technology, and it interests you, learn all you can as soon as you can — because all those skills will come to help you (Not to say you can’t be well-rounded — social reclusiveness and nerdhood is not a prerequisite for excellence).

*yawn.* Wow I’m tired. Too tired to edit. Hope this posts made sense .

SigmaX

This. Is. Friggin. Awesome.

Happy Tuesday,

Siggy

PS: This comes in the wake of some fun at work this afternoon.

I came across this image on one of those poorly designed, chaotic, look-at-me-I’m-Jesus sites (Which reminds me a lot of Michael the Archangel, who’s running for President of the U.S.). The author can “literally see” his initials and birth-date in an image of the second coming — this serving as one of his “proofs” that he is Christ.

Now, this is a hyperbolic example, and it’s arguably not worth my time to analyze obvious crack-heads. It catches my interest, however, because this instance of hyper-active pattern seeking is analogous to less-inane claims that we’re more likely to encounter in our every-day social circle, but which show similar leaps of bias (Here I’m showing my resonance with Michael Shermer’s How We Believe). A friend of mine on ThoughtCommunity.com gave a good description of the relevance of such things, after linking to a post titled “My Woo: A Confession” on the blog Science-Based Medicine:

“The skeptic and scientist side in me wants proof….show me a properly designed and double-blinded study please if you wish to convince me of the effectiveness of your product or treatment. At the very least, show me some measurable mechanism that would explain its workings that is based on established principles. The problem is that many of my colleagues, for whom I have high professional and personal regard, have no difficulty crossing over into the Woo and embracing it. Chakras, Reiki energy work, Angels, homeopathic remedies and other dubious concepts are all unapologetically espoused. Out of respect for them, and because I am constantly reminding myself that UNproven is not the same as DISproven, I keep an open mind and limit myself to the Spock response — the single raised eyebrow while uttering ‘fascinating’.”

I won’t spend too much time explaining, but after looking at the image, have a look at my article from high school (Which I now renounce) on the 70-week prophecy of Daniel 9, and see if you see any similarities. If you need to trace the patterns with bright red lines, then you’re pushing the limits of reasonable, scientific, educated guess, and entering the realm of crack-headity — that is, the sort of things I now tend to go Spock-like over, but still feel the social pull and the need to be respectful, attentive, and open-minded. I very much enjoyed my conversation with the spiritualistic hitchhiking hippie I picked up last weekend on my way to Chicago — but, in all honesty, I didn’t believe a word of his fantastic, albeit beautiful and inspiring, stories involving third eyes, Reiki, and breatharianism.

One last quote from a computer programming discussion that went theological after some cross-platform portability issues were pointed out in someone’s solution (You can get religious over anything — just make ANSI C your ancient scripture):

“IMO you’re way too eager to generalize limited experience
into Universal Truth — especially since your own experience,
had you bothered to examine it, would have contradicted your
generalization. You’re not out of touch with programming
reality, you’re *in* touch with programming fiction.”

SigmaX

So, some of you are aware of my recent move to veganism, but not many of you have been able to keep up with how my cooking has changed as a result.  This is just a taste of what I’ve been cooking lately, and it is my first real try at tofu as well.  Please note that I got this recipe from http://www.vegweb.com

If the word “tofu” puts you off, please know that I’m not a huge tofu fan myself, but this dish is worth a try, and it’s super simple, and super-cheap.

Here’s what you need:

• 1 package soft silken tofu (be sure that it’s the soft silken tofu or your consistency will be off)
• 1 bag (10oz) of vegan-friendly semi-sweet chocolate chips (carob can work)
• 3tbsp maple syrup
• 1.5 cups your favorite berries or sliced fruit

First, using a double-boiler (I don’t have a double-boiler, so I use a small sauce pot inside of a wok) melt the entire bag of chocolate chips.  Once the chips start melting, stir in the maple syrup.

Take the tofu, pour the excess liquid out and plop it into your blender.  Blend the tofu until it has a smooth yogurt-like consistency.  Then, pour in your chocolate chip mix and blend until well-mixed and smooth.

Cool the mousse, serve with berries or fruit.  Serves between four to six.  This is very rich and very filling.

This recipe is outstanding, I really enjoy it, and it’s just such a tasty treat that is good for you and is 100% cruelty free.

If you’re curious about what it means to be vegan, please check out this goveg.com article and if you’e like to know why my family and I are vegan, please check out this article from vegan outreach.

So this weekend was the annual Krasl Art Fair in St. Joe, which is probably the largest event second to Venetian Fest. Last year I showed up at the Krasl with my guitar and a tip jar, as I’m want to do from time to time, and quietly crashed it. This year I was feeling a bit more ambitious, so I brought my digital keyboard. It was a blast. I ended up being told to leave by a rather perturbed staff member (Right as I was leaving anyway), but I really had gotten permission from the person in charge of performances, honest, and had made sure the owner of the booth I set up next to didn’t mind (A nice chap with a quaint display of pottery — cool beans!).

For those of you who aren’t too familiar with street music, I should note that giving a musician a $5 tip is an *amazing* compliment, because it almost never happens. On a normal summer weekend in St. Joe (i.e. non-festival) I make somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 an hour with my guitar, and a little more with my keyboard. You really have to enjoy it for the music, as the money barely covers gas and batteries. Yesterday, however — no doubt due in part to my audacity in plopping myself right in the thick of the crowd — I made $33 in one hour fifteen minutes. That is freakin’ amazing.

The young lady wearing the straw hat in the picture is my girlfriend, Lizzy, and her mom took the photo. They were kind enough to help me carry my keyboard the 8 blocks back to my car — which was wonderful, considering I ended up with terrible bruises on my hips from carrying it in.

My passing street music hobby was probably particularly inspired by musicians I’ve seen in Paris and New Orleans. Some posts of historical interest from two years ago:

• I decided to do Street Music
• My first “performance”
• Meeting Tom
• Venetian Fest

Happy Tuesday,

SigmaX

PS: You can hear recordings of some of my music here.

So… Red vs. Blue et al made the front page of IEEE Spectrum this month.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.  Last month was the technological singularity, and now it’s machinima?  Please.
SigmaX

So, as most of you know, today was the release day for the new iPoops. I of course made jokes at everyone in the office who has one, and watched all of the complete idiots stand in line since yesterday hoping their iPoop had some Steve Jobs sweat on it. Anyways, woohoo, I could care less, but what I find funny is that people went and bought the new iPoops during the iTunes failure (Mako, there you go man! Add that to your list of errors, there are some good screenshots out there, or better yet Jono, Mass Fail!) and couldn’t activate their new waste of money. So, some people decided, hell, I will buy 2, put them on Craigslist and Ebay for $800. Holy smokes you Apple freaks, you are slightly iTarded! The AT&T store, about .75 miles from my hood, has all but the 2 they sold today, and the Apple store in Schaumburg still had some when I took a cruise by to see how many iTards were waiting in line. And people wonder why I hate the city of Chicago and enjoy the burb life, ya that means you Kevin ‘I use Ubuntu in my closet’ Harriss! We don’t have the silly hoopla the city has, and don’t have to stand in line, unless it is an $800 laptop on sale for $250 at Best Buy come the day after Thanksgiving.

Oh, and I just happened to stop by Best Buy yesterday and purchase my very own Ubuntu collection. Oddly enough, it was the last one and the guy at the desk started to act like he knew a thing or two, which was cool, though he didn’t know much except that Vista was better and not prone to hackers like Lie-nux is

OK, time to simmah down, watch today’s stage of the Tour de France and go to bed. Have a great iWeekend everyone!

OK, since the lazyweb totally owned in helping me locate a killer portable media device, I can use your help once again.

I have Googled and Googled until my eyes have exploded, and I have yet to find the answer I am looking for.

The question….Can you hot swap, not warm swap, SATA drives in Linux without having them a) setup in RAID, and b) not using a hardware RAID controller card? Someone told me that you can and the kernel works out of the box that way. Well, whoever told me was wrong. I have tried it in Red Hat, CentOS, Ubuntu, and SUSE. No go, the kernel panics and blows up and I have to call the Chicago Fire Department

Warm swapping works just fine, where I unmount the drive, pull the drive, put in a new drive, configure drive, and then mount the drive. That works, but when a drive fails that isn’t on a RAID controller, or is on one, and isn’t configured with RAID, I want to a) know about it, and b) pull it out without unmounting and what not first.

So, I know there are some of you wizards out there that can help me, so please, any information you may have or questions, please comment or feel free to email me directly (nixternal kubuntu org). Thanks!

On my work laptop running SLED10SP2, my local user has a UID of 1000. My eDirectory (LUM enabled) user has a uid of 603. If these UIDs are not in sync, this can cause some weird things to happen (which I'll address in future blog posts).

I changed my UID with YaST to 603 and rebooted my system. When I logged back in I couldn't access any of my data or use programs, as the files became orphaned.

I ran the following command to search for orphaned files and dump them to a text file.

$ find / \( -fstype ext3 \) -nouser -print > orphaned.txt

Once that was finished, I wrote a script to take the orphaned files and chown them (awb4422 is my username).


for file in $(cat orphaned.txt)
do
chown awb4422 $file

done

Everything works fine now :)

If you follow politics in the U.S. you that Congress is set to give our President the power to illegally wiretap American citizens.  Breaking the 4th amendment is unacceptable and Senators voting to approve this is unacceptable.  Wikipedia has a good article.  I whipped up a quick comic to express how the whole idea comes [...]

In an old episode of the Simpsons, Homer reveals that his aol account is ‘Chunkylover53′. Someone has gained access to this account and has posted in the away message:

 ’CHECK OUT THE NEW SIMPSONS EPISODE THAT WE’RE ONLY RELEASING TO THE INTERNET AIM FANS! BE THE FIRST TO EXPERIENCE THE MAGIC BY CLICKING THE FOLLOWING LINK: http://d4.myfreefilehosting.com

SELECT RUN, (or RUN from current location) OR save to DESKTOP and DOUBLE CLICK!

ENJOY, AND SEND US YOUR FEEDBACK!‘

This link points towards a kimya.exe (hmm, why would a video file be a windows executable?) My virus scanner shows this to be the trojan Truko-431.

As I doubt Homer Simpson is the kind of guy looking to mess up my system with malware, I wonder what kind of jerk would want to hack him? As I would assume that Matt Groening or one of the other Simpsons cabal created this account, has someone compromised one of their systems?

UPDATE:

Whomever has access to this account is now posting the following away message, probably because the first one was too obvious.


The link is now fixed everyone.

CHECK OUT THE NEW SIMPSONS EPISODE THAT WE’RE ONLY RELEASING TO THE INTERNET AIM FANS! BE THE FIRST TO EXPERIENCE THE MAGIC BY CLICKING THE FOLLOWING LINK: http://66.197.197.101/~ydelcom/Episode439.exe

SELECT RUN, (or RUN from current location) OR save to DESKTOP and DOUBLE CLICK!

If the hyperlink is unavailable to you, you can copy and paste it into your browser.

ENJOY, AND SEND US YOUR FEEDBACK!

I carefully downloaded this file, and it has an identical md5 hash as the originally posted kimya.exe. Are people really this stupid? Doing a whois on the ip address provided the email address abuse@hostnoc.net, and I’ve informed them about their service being used to spam trojan horses. So far exploration on this server hasn’t provided much of interest, but it’s still early.

So I am off tomorrow to pick up the tickets for my McDonald's L.A.T.E. Ride 2008. In case you are not familiar with the Bike Ride, it's a 25 Mile ride that is being held this Saturday. It features 10,000 bicyclists and benefits Friends of the Parks. It's a 33-year-old not-for-profit parks advocacy group whose mission is to protect and improve Chicago's parks and forest preserves in Cook County. If you are not doing anything or want to come cheer me on, you can get more info here: http://www.lateride.org/

I'll be the one with the Linux penguin T-shirt reading - "I'm cheap and Fun!"

Howdy lazywebbers!  I am currently in the market for purchasing a decent, relatively inexpensive portable music player. These are just some of my preferences for such a device:

• Must work with Linux of course
• Must support ogg vorbis either natively or by using rockbox
• Must be small, something around the size of the iPod Shuffle or a tad bit larger
• I don’t want to pay a lot for it, and I know you typically get what you pay for, but I will be using this while doing some extreme workouts and biking events.

I know if it is out there, you all will know. I went to a couple of stores today and none of them jumped out at me except for the Sansa Clip, which is nice and I heard it support ogg with a new firmware upgrade, plus it has FM radio on it. If any of you have this and it works well, let me know, as that might be the one I am looking for.

Looks like a full maintenance release of Ubuntu. I found a couple bugs in 8.04 but found workarounds - since 8.04 came out. I'm downloading the 8.04.1 iso right now and will test it out in a VM. If it is significant enough and fixes some of the issues I had 'out of the box' I think I might regenerate my LAVA and upload a new iso based on it. Actually the fact that it has the final build of firefox might be incentive enough.

Also I found a beta of a pdf import/editor extension for open-office that I thought I might include in the next build. It will give me an excuse to add it in as well.

So those of you who know of my old huge 17″ HP laptop, I have some news.  My sister-in-law graduated highschool this past year, and she’s going to college (I know, so exciting!), so my wife and I have gifted her with the wonderful HP happy that has served me so well.  This laptop is well travelled, well used, and well loved.  I’m sure it will serve her well.

Not only does she get this laptop, but I gave it to her pre-loaded with Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron, and she’s loving it.  She has never used GNU/Linux or any Free Software in the past, and I was delighted to see how fast she picked it up.

My in-laws are now considering a switch to Ubuntu GNU/Linux as a result.  This is all very exciting.  Anyway, I’m not dead yet, just super busy.  Don’t forget to check out my photo gallery at http://www.manchicken.com/gallery, and if you’re of the Vegan persuasion and you live near central Illinois, check out http://vegan.manchicken.com for some upcoming news on possible activities in this area.

Later.

Eighteen months after my last recording, I’ve finally cranked out the final version of a new composition for the piano. It was in the works essentially all through 2007, having been started near the completion of Focused Energy (See my music page), and I made the last changes to it sometime this spring. This may be the longest I’ve ever taken to finalize a piece, but I dare say it shows. As of yet it is untitled.

Downloads: mp3, ogg. I’ve started transcribing the score, but it’s tedious work and I’m an uber busy guy, so don’t hold your breath. As the composer, performer, and audio technician, I could point out all sorts of reasons why this recording sucks, but I don’t want to spoil it for you.

It’s generally vain for me to try and tie a song to a specific meaning, despite the intensity of emotion that I pour into them, but I can say that when I started writing this, cosmic images of the big bang and the mystery of the universe were in my mind. Most of the “bang” has since been discarded, leaving most of the song as representing the tumultuous relationships between stars and galaxies — but early in the piece there is a tumbling “waterfall” of a sound, going from the highest to lowest octaves on the keyboard. Originally this was intended to represent a “big crunch,” in which the universe that [may have] preceded ours collapsed to “bounce” into the one we have today.

At most any given time I have at least two songs under active development. By the end of the summer I expect to have finished a classical-romantic’ish piece in F# minor — a piece I’m pretty excited about, as it’s quite possibly the most complex one I’ve ever written. It’s been under development since August, when on of its motifs popped into my head right after some dream I can no longer remember. Also in the works, having grown from the first but been transposed to G minor, is a melody I’ve been practicing on the weekends with my electric guitar, passionate vocals, and synthesized percussion. No lyrics yet, but when I’m done it will probably be the most “normal” sounding song I’ve ever written, if only because I’m actually using modern instruments.

I wish I had more time for music. 18 months! I never go that long without writing a new song!

SigmaX

PS: I’ve just come up with the perfect title: Ubernova. [based on an inside joke]

Happy.

If you upgraded your install from Gutsy Gibbon to Hardy Heron, your modem may not work. You need to install the new hsfmodem deb. If you have the older version of the Conexant Modem driver, please uninstall it before installing the new one.

You can find the driver here. This is only for the 32bit version of Ubuntu, the one I use and recommend. 64 bit users will need to go here. There is no deb for the 64bit driver so installation can be a bit of a chore.

After installing the modem driver, you might get a pop-up window telling you that the Volume Control has quit unexpectedly and asks you to reload (or not reload) the panel. Click on Reload. Afterwards, the sound icon on the top right corner of the screen changes to "mute", but sound should be fine. A logout/login or GDM restart should have solved the issue. This issue happens because the modem driver lays down its own set of sound codecs and unloads the snd-hda-intel module during the installation process. But it doesn't, when I tried to modprobe snd-hda-intel I received an error. If you check the comments Mmandx has found a workaround. You can download an version of the alsa-driver package (from the ALSA project) with improved support for the HSF driver here.

I got home last night after the two-and-a-half-hour drive I make every weekend. The trip was rather uneventful — unless you count my forgetting to pump my gas at the Shell on Illinois Rd. It was kind of the inverse of a drive-off, I suppose — I pre-paid and then drove-off without my gas.Yeah. Embarassing.

Anyway, upon arriving at my weekend abode, I found four large boxes on my front porch (As well as a large manilla envelope hand-addressed to “Julian Forbes” — but that’s another story).

The long and short of it: They’re here!!! I’m now the proud new owner of an old 54-volume set of The Great Books of the Western World, Britannica’s compliation of Western classics. Thanks to Ebay, I got them at less than 1/3rd the price of brand new, with lots of bonus volumes including:

• 14 volumes of The Great Ideas Today: Kind of like a yearbook, with analysies of the classics in modern context, as well as additions to the series. They include such titles as “Science as Mystery: A Speculative Reading of Newton’s Principia,” “Kepler’s Anguish and Hawking’s Queries: Reflections on Natural Theology,” “An Introduction to Buddhist Thought,” a selection from Wu Ch’eng-en’s Journey to the West, and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.
• The 10-volume Gateway to the Great Books set: Anthogies of classical essays, organized by field.
• The 10-volume Great Ideas Program: A reading guide for the Great Books providing an outline for a “liberal education” and analysis/context to enrich the experience.

Granted, it’s an old set — all the copyrights are from the late 50’s/early 60’s (Save, of course, The Great Ideas Today, which go as lete as 1998). Given that most of these works are hundreds or thousands of years old, however, archaic publication isn’t and issue. Old looks good on a shelf, too, even if the analysis articles (Like those in The Great Ideas Program) are outdated by half a century.

This is like candy for me. I’m already browsing Book III of Principia Mathematica, specifically the part where he applies his model of gravity to tides, showing the effects of the Sun and the Moon on water levels. Isn’t it awesome that we could do that 350 years ago?

And yes, Benedicts, I’ve perused Spinoza’s Ethics. I’m intrigued by the proposition-demonstration format he uses — I’d heard before of that approach to philosophical writing, but had never actually seen it.

Aristotle’s explanation of the Rainbow in Book III of Meteorology is amazing, though clearly somewhat lacking as far as insight into optics is concerned. Without his early (And not half-bad) attempt at explaining things, though, I suppose we may never have gotten to the Optics of Newton et al.

SigmaX

A question regarding imagination more than anything else: Should I think of clouds as gigantic, magnanimous objects or as little more than opaque space?

The clouds rolling through the Midwest this time of year are truly amazing beasts to gawk at. Every day the weather is a little bit different — from tornado-bearing storm front to herds of tiny, migrating cumulus ‘mellows meandering their way through a mostly blue pasture. Given my recent venture to Titan, I can’t help but attempt to visualize our cream-puff overlords with the same awe I would grant a giant like Saturn.

But are they really all that significant? What do I even mean by significant? Of all the cosmic particles that swirled around Sol’s ancient accretion disk to form planets and moons, some of that matter was relegated to be the oil on the frenchbread, so to speak. The whisps of paint that color our otherwise blue-green globe.

Are they nothing but paint? A sparse accumulation of dynamic nebulae? Or is the shiver that runs down my spine when I’m in the presence of such a huge, arcing canopy justified? Is it just naiveté — much like how I viewed the small lumps in my childhood home of Illinois as grand until I learned about “real” hills and mountains?

SigmaX

Random UNIX zealotry:  I love the ‘diff’ command.  It makes life so much easier when you get emailed a filed that’s been “updated” and then have to figure out what got changed.

SigmaX

Planet Ubuntu Chicago is back online. This post is a test to see if I'm still syndicated.

I just pressed a button, at which point my computer automatically retreived a copy of ~64,000,000 bits of information from somewhere in the hive mind that is the InterWeb which it used to upgrade itself, adding new capabilities to its already feature-rich DNA (In this case, audio recording).
That’s freakin’ awesome!  Never gets old.  And people have the nerve to get *bored*.  Wake up!  It’s the 21st century for Pete’s sake!

SigmaX

[The following was scratched out in my notebook at a Chinese restaurant downtown this evening. As is generally the case with my fiction, it could really use editing to make the words more clearly communicate the complicated images in my mind. Tips are welcome — from grammar critique to scientific mythbusting]

His eyes heavy, Andrew struggled to complete the configuration he’d been working on for — oh, he couldn’t remember how long, but it should have been done ages ago. Streams of characters torrented across the screen, looking like Greek to his blurring vision. He reached for a half-empty cup of cold coffee, only to miss, spilling a container of DocChips all over the floor.

At first the tiny electronic capsules landed like pebbles on the hard ground. After a few seconds, however, each button-sized square emitted a pert little chirp, which signified the activation of thousands of its nanoscopic hairs, used for locomotion. Slowly at first but with increasing order each chip sought out a companion. They clustered, chirped excitedly at any stragglers, and finally clambered on top of eachother. The finished display yielded three neat towers of chips, tweeting like a nest of baby robins separated from their mother.

Andrew watched the miniature acrobatics dispassionately, with his forhead pressed against the desk. One of the chips seemed disoriented from the rest, despite their friendly cries, and wandered about in wide, frantic circles. Andrew reached down to retrieve the quivering pile of office supplies, and took the whole city of them — which had stopped screaming upon detecting recovery — over to pick up the rogue. It climbed on board with the rest, but as the hand of God lifted them all to safe keeping, disaster: A sharp prick caused Andrew’s hand to twitch, sending the whole population screaming in dismay as they plummeted through thin air.

He chuckled passively. Pop culture regularly capitalized on hyperbolic images of “death by DocChip,” when a swarm of activated DocChips, searching frantically for paper to clip together, mistake a human for meeting minutes and pierce him with a million tiny needles. Nobody was genuinely afraid of them, however, as the little switch that activates a DocChip’s paper-seeker is only seldom pressed on accident, and never en masse, and furthermore they can be deactivated by voice.

“Pfft,” Andrew smirked, “dumber than a doorknob.” A hundred small black flakes were purring contently in a neat stack on his desk before the irony hit him. Dumber than a doorknob? The computer in his apartment door could have not only completed, double-checked, and executed the system configuration he was working on by now, but it would also have written, artsied-up, dramatized and delivered a presentation to Dr. Thiery summarizing the procedure and its results.

“Andrew!” Jolted from what he was sure couldn’t have been sleept, a wave of dread shivered down his spine. “No I haven’t,” he mumbled in hopes of curbing the oncoming tyrade by being blunt. Dr. Thiery asked anyway. “Are you done? Can you give me a demo?”
“No, I haven’t,” Andrew repeated himself.
“Why not?” said the scientist, who hardly cared to hear details.
“It’s this blasted Percy algorithm. I’ve tried a dozen different flag parameters, and checked the documentation a zillion times, but it’s just broken!” A pause ensued as the manager glared at him.
“This is despicable!” grunted Thiery in a snide rumble, “teach em to put trust in an intern for gopher work!”
I don’t even see why we do this anyway,” Andrew mused angrily, rendered belligerent by two nights without sleep. “The Ci’s could have it done in seconds!”
“And so could an intelligent grad student,” Thiery shot back, exasperated with his upstart pupil for daring to discuss politics when there was so little time. “You *must* focus, Andrew! We only have two hours left until the signal arrives, and the chiefs expect these results yesterday!”

Andrew sighed, and zoned out sleepily for the next two minutes while his supervisor — who normally scared the hell out of him — told him in no uncertain terms what a terrible technician his student had turned out to be. Andrews’ head dropped apathetically. He heard something about how he would be fired if the mission weren’t so close, how his GRE scores were too high for someone of such low intelligence, etc, etc. nothing he hadn’t heard last time Dr. Thiery laid on last-minute pressure.

Too tired to fight despair, Andrew found himself musing half-aloud, albeit eclipsed by Thiery’s ranting. “You know, he’s right” he whispered, “first word from the Markians in eighty years and we’re going to miss the transmission. Not because some council chairman thought it was ‘too important’ to let the Ci’s record it. Not because of an interstellar EM burst. But because I’m an idiot that can’t even handle a Percy transform.” With that, he stomped out the door of the lab.

“Where you going!” belted Thiery, who’d been cut off in mid sentence. “To get my doorknob!” Andrew yelled without turning around.

[SigmaX]

PS: It may have been deja vu from something I’ve read about computational intelligence, or coincidence, but apparently there’s a real “Percy algorithm.”

So, I was sitting on a couch in the Allen County Public Library this evening, minding my own business and basking in hi-speed wifi, when a gentlemen sauntered past.  He stopped for a moment and glanced in my direction.  Perhaps I nodded, or otherwise acknowledged his existence (As I like to do from time to time, despite our massive western city-bubbles).  After a moment’s hesitation, he took a few casual steps towards me, and then, while gazing in the wrong direction, mused aloud “Whenever I see a Mac, I like to offer them congratulations from another Mac user.”

Heh.  Having been on a college campus for a few years that is absolutely swarming with Macs, I must say I was rather surprised, but I was just as pleased at his courage in executing an icebreaker.  He finally looked me in the eye as I held out my hand to shake his and said as un-awkwardly as I could, “heh, well I can take a congratulation!”

A couple minutes later he plucked up enough courage to saunter back and hand me his card.  Apparently he’s some kind of Democrat, and runs “http://ourdems.org”.

Ah, the wonderful feeling of having connected with another human being.  It’s funny how public is such a perfect crowd of the alone.

SigmaX

Independence strikes. Today, 23 June, 2008, 38 days before my twentieth birthday, I, Eric Scott, bought my first pair of self-owned eating utensils (I needed *something* with which to eat my leftover Chinese ). I intend to keep them in my backpack as insurance for future emergencies (Just like my three decks of cards, umbrella, colored pencils, scientific calculator, and compass).
Happy Tuesday.

SigmaX

[This was originally a forum post on ThoughtCommunity.com, replying to a post in which the Ontological, Cosmological, and Teleological arguments for God’s existence were brought up as conversation starters]

Whew. Well ain’t that a can of worms!

If you’ll permit me to misconstrue the ancient and traditional meanings of the words, I would draw corollaries between the arguments you mentioned and what I see as more-or-less modern manifestations:

From the Ontological argument I would draw a connection to the argument from personal experience and/or the Anthropological argument. Like much of medieval/renaissance philosophy, it’s hard to make the Ontological argument look credible in light of modern perspective. Making the jump from cause->effect to imagination->reality (Rather than reality->imagination, which leaves reality as only a subset of imagination) not only seems absurd and backwards in our (albeit lacking) understanding of the brain (As a computer science major I have to disagree with Locke, among others, who claimed the brain could not naturally give rise to thought without supernatural interference), but is can far too easily be abused satirically (Anything deep that I can conceive of is reality?).

Many Christians, however, defend their faith on the basis of personal experience — evidence they’ve seen in their own lives of supernatural involvement. Sometimes this is emotional (Feeling the spirit) or more miracle-oriented (Basket of fruit on the front door during financial crisis). It’s often held that one must have such experiences for him/herself, and that God works individually to convict each individual via their own unique path. As such it can also be used as a defense against the argument that science has not discovered global proof of God — “God doesn’t operate that way,” one might say.

The Cosmological argument is, of course, very popular. It is often iterated from the pulpit as a direct challenge to the big bang paradigm to show its incompleteness. “I say in the beginning God, they say in the beginning rock” says Kent Hovind in his rhetorical style. To me this just feels like a God of the Gaps technique, as if to say “we don’t know, ergo God.”

The Teleological argument is familiar today. From talk of the fine-tuned universe to ID and Creationism, this is where the loudest of proponents of religion who purport to stand on science find their base. The former is related to the Anthropic Principle, and while I find the details and nature of the universe to be stunningly amazing and mysterious, I personally hesitate to make any sort of supernatural conclusions about the nature of something about which we know so little.

Intelligent Design and especially young-earth Creationism (YEC) feel absurd to one infused by the perspective maintained by academia — much like white supremacy seems absurd to most raised up in the modern west, where our schools work so hard to establish a perspective of equality of individuals regardless of their race (Largely as a reaction to the 20th century push for eugenics) — and much like the marriage of gays in California is seen as an abomination by conservative Anglicans in Uganda, or Muslims in Iran.

As such, non-naturalistic depiction of the origin of life must begin in the west as an caricaturization of academia as too pro-naturalistic. ID and YEC both purport to be beacons of light pointing out evidence and truth that has been overlooked by the bias that pervades the scientific establishment. They cite how difficult it is to get published in academic journals, and how evolution is taught as well-established fact in schools. Some claim that this is the result of a desire that God should not exist, with the aim of being liberated from the divinely prescribed lifestyle — thus blaming the dominance of evolutionary theory not on science but hedonism and amorality. No wonder YEC is widely considered a conspiracy theory (Of course, evangelists, like the aforementioned Hovind, who lack critical thinking probably help most to establish that image).

I’m not saying that it’s impossible — cultures are like people, and they hold certain assumptions and biases along with the same unwillingness to change — but I’m extremely skeptical of an idea that must not only establish itself empirically but also tear down all of the worlds empiricists in order to even appear valid. The “bias” within the YEC movement seems much stronger than that without, arising almost exclusively from a desire to affirm an already-held literal belief in Genesis, and while some Creationist/ID individuals and institutions do publish good science (And we always need someone who is willing to challenge the status quo with rigorous critical thinking), overall I find it very difficult to see merit in the paradigm. Most importantly, it is not conclusive in any way — the arguments are not strong enough to give one enough confidence to leave agnosticism.

I don’t pretend to be able to give a “conclusive” argument for naturalism either. Given the paradigm that I am immersed in, it all seems to make sense: microwave cosmic background radiation establishes the big bang and the age of the universe, mathematical theories explaining the origins of stars and planets have existed for hundreds of years, the evolutionary explanation of life is grandiose, but by all outward appearance (I’m not a biology student) the fossil record, age of the earth, and macroscopic similarities between animals seem to support it, and the usefulness of natural selection in evolutionary computing (The field I want to go into) is an added plus to its cogence and apparent viability.

What “seems to make sense” to any individual, however, is primarily cultural. It’s based on what I read in canonical books, it’s based on what I sense in society around me, and it’s especially based in how many friends I have to resonate with — and thus gain confidence with — on the issues. Some of you have heard me recently talk about “indulging in youthful arrogance” when talking with you, because while I enjoy the sensation of being agreed with (And thus making my world less gray and insecure), I at least try to be aware of the fact that much of those feelings are purely social and emotional more than they are rational.

I can have a strong feeling that something is true without being able to give a thorough, rigorous argument for it. This is good, I suppose, or we wouldn’t be able to believe much of anything . A recent example: As of about two days ago, I feel like I understand how Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity follows from the Special Theory, which I’ve understood for quite some time. The Special Theory is hard enough to explain, and when I was fifteen I went through quite the mind-rending process to be able to comprehend time dilation — but the General Theory is even more difficult. How the blazes does the constant speed of light imply curved space? Seems like apples and oranges. Now I understand… I think… but there is no way whatsoever that I could explain it to you, not without much more study. Unfortunately, that also means that as of yet I do not know if this undeveloped path of reasoning, this belief of mine, is right or not: A flawed conjecture would feel just as true until it underwent the rigorous process of discrete communication.

Now, delving back a ways into my own journey, you can find some treatment of Bible Prophecy in a paper I wrote a year ago (Here). By the time I was writing it I had grown primarily skeptical, but to this day I feel that the 70 week prophecy of Daniel 9 (See an earlier article here) is one of the best arguments for the existence of a supernatural being — and furthermore a personally involved supernatural being — that I’ve ever been exposed to. Again, however, one is forced to take a few shortcuts in reasoning, and assume that certain interpretations (Best-guesses) are valid even though there are many more to choose from, and so it is not conclusive in any way. Such uncertainty is inherent, however, not only to history and archaeology but to all of scientific exploration, and so non-provability does not immediately imply that the idea is non-valuable.

As for me personally, I currently call myself a secular humanist, naturalist, and — just for fun and dreaming’s sake — a transhumanist. I do, however, take great pains to seek self-understanding, to juggle the biases inherent to any point of view, and to respect the fact that the world is gray, and while certainly some ideas are more true than others, individuals cannot be blamed for failing to separate the wheat from the chaff, since I’m guilty of the same short-sightedness.

SigmaX

From my journal this evening:

“Never abandon your dreams̶