Quick Santa Claus rant.

A few ideas I'd like to express.

Christmas is coming. Y'know, that tradition which seems like a pagan tradition which was originally a Roman and/or Catholic tradition which coincided with a pagan tradition. That thing. Yeah. I just had a thought. But first, I have to make something clear.

If you're young enough to believe in Father Christmas / Santa Claus, you shouldn't be on the internet. So, to make sure that you don't accidentally see something you don't want to, I'm going to put some filler material in.

If you're going to make an Amiga MOD player, I have a few optimisation suggestions.

Firstly, pad your samples appropriately. If the sample length is 1 16-bit word, then you pad with 0s, otherwise you pad with the loop data. If you have a loop (that is, the sample length is NOT 1 16-bit word), then you duplicate the loop after the sample data. Once you've done that, add about 2500 bytes (1250 16-bit words) of padding.

Secondly, use a few 2D tables. Scream Tracker 3 uses one for translating waveforms through channel volumes. This would be rather impractical for 16-bit samples, but we aren't using 16-bit for .mod, are we? No, of course not. So we'll just use a 65*256 table (or *64 if we don't mind making a quick check to see if the volume is set to 64). Another idea I wrote down really only applies if you're mixing 8-or-so-channel MODs down to 4 channels on an Amiga, and that is to do a volume * volume table. 65*64 would be your best bet, while comparing if the two channel volumes are the same, unless you don't mind having a 65*128 table. You could also have another 65*64/65*128 table for selecting the actual volume.

Alternatively, if you're using an Amiga, you could do the 14-bit trick (set 0+1 to 64 and 2+3 to 1, then 2+3 hold the lower 6 bits while 0+1 hold the upper 8 bits) using two 65*256 tables. You could also do another 256*64 table for remapping the top and a 256 1D table for remapping the bottom when it gets around to adding stuff together. If you're working with 8-channel mods, you shouldn't have to clip for the bottom; however, the top will probably still need it.

Thirdly, you could use another table to clip your output volumes or something like that - this is probably most appropriate for non-Amiga MOD players. In a lot of cases, this is unnecessary, but if you're doing some reasonably advanced mixing, then this is probably the way to go.

And so on and so on.

I use the first two tricks in my J2ME MOD player. In doing so, I discovered that Blackberry phones suck at handling audio state signals. Oh well, at least it actually plays.

Blah.

E=mc^2.

(Actually, it's delta E = delta m . c^2.)

Still reading this? OK, here we go.

Christmas as we know it is pretty much... mess. A mess with the "Christ" label which the retailers can't seem to remove so they just skirt around the issue and basically say in their minds, "well it's just a name which doesn't actually mean anything". Their hearts? "La de da da I'm not listening (*tongue*)". However, what I've realised is that the retailers aren't the only issue.

Meet Mr Bribery. Mr Consumerism. Mr Claus.

The problem with naturalists is that they have to find some way to teach morals to their children. Santa Claus is one way of doing so. Hey, let's chop down a tree. Hey, let's decorate it. Hey, let's tell the kids that if they're good, they get gifts from Santa. No wait, make it that if they don't behave, then they won't get gifts from Santa.

So, uh, let's make that Mr Blackmail.

And everything's fine and dandy, and you're out there lying, and then eventually--

Midnight strikes. The kids are awake. Pretending to be asleep.

They hear you get out of bed and put the gifts in the lounge.

Game over. Your 10-or-so years of playing games with your children just to teach them at least to behave has, like Santa stuck in a burning fireplace, gone up in smoke.

Here's hoping that the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny have remained... Oh wait, those aren't behaviour bribes. Unless, of course, those have had a domino effect and now they don't believe a damn thing that teaches them at least good behaviour.

And, uh, yeah, we're about to go out to dinner soon. So, here's a couple of things you might be able to ponder: the Santa Claus effect on society, and how to make a really fast MOD player. Yeah.

2009 in the year of our Lord

It appears that the BC/AD (Before Christ / Anno Domini (In The Year Of Our Lord)) dating convention appears to be offensive to some, so they've decided to use the CE/BCE (Common Era / Before Common Era) dating system. The problem? It sucks.

This Conservapedia article best explains it. For those of you who won't touch Conservapedia with a barge pole, I'll reproduce the text here, because I can.

The term "Common Era" (CE) is an attempt to erase the historical basis for the primary calendar dating system in the Western world. "Common Era" has no real meaning, and even the origin of this term is unclear. The 1972 Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary has no entry for "Common Era." A later edition (11th) defines it as the Christian Era.

The established calendar dating system is based on the approximate birthday of Jesus, and no one disputes that. But this birth did not begin a "common" era, or any immediate change in history. The 1997 Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary gives a date of 1889 for the origin of the term "Common Era," but there is no indication of who began using it then, and why. Some claim it is a substitute for an occasional reference to the "Vulgar Era," with "vulgar" being Latin for "common" but acquiring a derogatory English meaning over time.

Then there's a snippet which is a citation of this page, (C) Ohr Somayach International:

Viviane Prager wrote:

Dear Rabbi:

I would like to know why we say "before the Common Era" and "Common Era" (BCE and CE). I mean, why do we call it "common?" Some Jews object to it on grounds that the "C" in CE could be misconstrued as standing for "Christ." I would very much appreciate if you could help me answer their objections. Thanks for your wonderful work.

Dear Viviane Prager,

When I was a school boy I thought that CE stood for "The Common Error."

Now, 25 years and a number of common errors later, I assume that Common Era simply means "the date commonly accepted and used." But the truth is that I don't know, so I asked your question to a professor of European history. He didn't know either.

As far as I can see, CE doesn't reference anything. It is meaningless. I view this as a half-hearted attempt to shun God from society, and it's not really working. Why don't they just set another reference point, for example, Charles Darwin's birthday, or, more appropriately, his publication of the Origin of Species?

How did people date in BC? They dated from the year their king came into power, and named the king. You see this all the time in the Bible. In essence, Jesus is the last and current king, and that is why we have AD. The BC just makes it easier to reference earlier dates.

So, two things that I have to say.

Firstly, as far as I'm concerned, CE stands for "Can't Explain". BCE stands for "Before we Couldn't Explain". Because the CE/BCE rubbish is just to remove the meaning of our dating system. This is absolutely pathetic.

And secondly, I intend on making AD more blatant, and say "in the year of our Lord".

Let's face it. CE is meaningless. Vanity of vanities.

Copyright & Consumerism

OK, if you saw that ranty bit about Linux and the announcement of binning my music collection in my last post (which is incredibly long, incomplete, and doesn't really conclude anything), you'll probably understand that I've taken a lot of steps to rid myself of consumerism. This was my recent conviction after watching a video on YouTube one night. The thought of "yeah, yeah, I suppose I could, uhh... DO YOU SERIOUSLY WANT ME TO BIN MY MUSIC‽‽‽" I prayed about it.

The next day was when I binned a bunch of toys and found some stuff I'd lost in the process (e.g. the serial cable for my currently broken palmtop, and the power adaptor for it, which also works on my piano keyboard - the original adaptor for that is yet to be found), and the day after that, I actually threw most of my collection into a rubbish bag, and the rest into a box (along with a lot of books - mostly fiction - and several stuffed toys).

Out of those in the box, I took back four today. These were Christian artists, of which the CDs were given to me. It helps to balance out all the mostly secular stuff (yes, I am referring to the free, mostly instrumental stuff). It would be nice to get some free stuff out there which could bring hope to others or something without people having to get stuck into the consumerist culture or something. I know that there are "Christian" artists out there who are actually spreading rather contradictory messages.

Some user on YouTube was singing one of these songs to himself as it came out, the one about "A couple dents in my Fender, a couple rips in my jeans", and a few days later, his jeans ripped.

Lyrics quoted off a blog, which I think is the official one:

‘Cause I got a couple dents in my fender
Got a couple rips in my jeans
Try to fit the pieces together
But perfection is my enemy
On my own I'm so clumsy
But on Your shoulders I can see
I'm free to be me

"But perfection is my enemy"... perfection is supposed to be our target. Didn't Jesus say at the end of Matthew 5, in the context of loving your enemies, "you must be perfect - just as your Father in Heaven is perfect"? That should give you an idea.

OK, back to the point of copyright and consumerism. The recording industry makes out that downloading music illegally is what they don't want you to do. Perhaps that is what they truly believe, and that it's something rather demonic which is driving the whole system. Whatever it is, there is an agenda. They want to see an end to "illegal downloading"... eventually. Once they get you hooked on consumerism, they'll want to see you play it by their rules. The answer here is not "piracy", but a change of attitude.

What is copyright for? The first copyright act, known as the Statute of Anne, had a 14 year term (and a 21 year term for those works already in print). This was about allowing authors to retain rights over their own work instead of having them ripped from them by the printing companies. Now it appears to have been turned around the other way as the music industry and the like force the authors into contracts instead, and hold tight to the copyrights they have authority by from their artists by contract.

This is the same deal with a quantity of software, although nowadays it appears to be changing, and I think most software that aren't games are free these days.

I repeat: most software that aren't games are free these days.

Why would one "need" Windows, anyway? To play the latest games. Which are all first person shooters these days, anyway. And yet a subset of the same type of people are going to knock me for believing a "violent, nasty book", as to which I have two things to say:

1. Why do you play games which involve killing everyone and then attempt to attack the Bible for the same thing? Aren't you a hypocrite for doing this?*
2. Since when were you God‽ We have authorities on earth who are able to use force against other people. They're called the Police.
   

* Yeah, well, they're monsters! And really bad people! Whereas the horrible Israelites are being sent by the most awful god ever against the ever so innocent Palestinians who have done absolutely nothing wrong!

TVTropes.org has a trope entitled "Rated M For Money". The title alone sums up most of the trash you get today. And yet people are sucked into paying for this trash.

I am not encouraging "piracy" here. I am encouraging something much more damaging to the industries but also much more legit. I'm encouraging you to be free from this sort of garbage they feed you.

The same applies to movies, really. The "Rated M For Money" principle also applies here, and everyone's killing one another with most of your action films. Horror films are guaranteed to have at least one specific type of blasphemy moment. I'm sorry, but that's what happens. Thrillers are the horror equivalent of action films. This leaves comedy and drama to taint. Some drama can be quite active and lively. Nevertheless, these can also be tainted. Hey, let's portray homosexuals as completely innocent and pure, and all those horrible Christians as nasty mean horrible bleeps. That's an example of tainted drama. Then there's comedy, which only need two words to explain the idea: South Park.

(I should also mention romance. Romance could teach rather bad things about sex. Also, all pornos are wrong by definition even if there any truths in them.)

I'm not saying all films are bad. I'm not even saying that all of the films in any of those categories are bad, but many, many are. Nevertheless, we have short films... and some very long short films, if it is necessary to make a new category. These usually express an idea that we could learn from. Of course, these can still be tainted, too, but they usually don't suffer from consumerism.

If there appears to be a whole bunch of hype about some film, album, book, game, software, sports game, fish tank, or anything else, and the hype is everywhere, it's got some A-list actor in it or it's written by a great author or it's by a world-class publisher or something like that, theoretically you could get involved. Or, alternatively, you could do what I do: don't. You don't need it. Eventually, you won't even care about it. That's usually the guideline.

I'm going to have to assemble a checklist, aren't I?

See how many of these you encounter.

• Is it something with a beginning and an end? (With games / TV shows, it's often preferable to not have an end when the next item is applied)
  
• Do I have to pay something each year/quarter/month/week/day/millisecond just to keep my subscription going?
• Is it actually achieving something, other than making me "feel good"?
• Does it receive much media attention?
• Do you hear it on the radio?
• Is it marked as copyright by a particular distributor as opposed to the author / band / group which is labelled whereever?
  
• Films: Is it an action, horror, thriller, or porn film?
  
• Software: Is it a game?
• Music: Is it about sex, violence, drugs, or "I got what you don't" (e.g. the "I'm so two-thousand-and-eight, you're so two-thousand-and-late" trash track I've heard where someone's showing off plasma screens... I heard it for the first time half way through this year, 2009)?
• Books: Is it fiction, and not "illustrative fiction"? Same could also apply to films, too.
  
• TV shows: Do I find an impulse to watch this one particular show every day/week/whatever at that specific time?
• Toys: Is it of a particular film / game / book / whatever character?
• Fish tanks: Does it... Well, I don't know.
• Does it have a huge franchise revolving around it or is part of one of these franchises?

This should give you just an idea of what is most definitely "consumerist".

I'm going to finish this off with a request. Please, whatever you do, do not use any of the Microsoft Office formats. At the very least, do not send me anything in those formats. Note the "not"s there. I'm not saying "don't use Microsoft Office"; I can say that another time. I'm also not going against you sending me RTF files or anything, despite it originally being a Microsoft format; at least it's human-readable. Ideally, if you can, use PDF - Microsoft supplied a horribly broken "Save as ODF" option in one of their latest patches of MS Office which doesn't even follow the standard properly, so I advise that you use the Sun plugin instead, or alternatively use something like OpenOffice.org, like I do - it's free, and more free than just "freeware".

So, uh, have some links to some pages on the Free Software Foundation website:

• Campaign for the OpenDocument format
• Put an end to Word attachments

And finally, I am not saying "don't support the artists". I'm saying don't buy into the culture. If there's an artist you would truly like to support, try buying it straight off them, bypassing the distributors if possible.

Ignorance: missing the bigger picture

'Lo there, I have something to say. Quite a lot, really. It seems that many people think they know everything. Well, let me correct you: you know everything that you know... at the time. Perhaps there's lost memories, but in that case, technically you don't know ("Argh! I knew it!", "I used to know that...", "I don't know where I put it / where it is..." and so on - I think we can agree on that).

A case for me is music. I don't know everything about it; in fact, I don't listen to the radio on a regular basis, and I haven't for at the very least a year now, because I hate ads. Even Life FM's "2 minute promise" is still torture... and you never know when that King's Cars ad is going to pop up (hint: it has a jingle, and I thought it was Cage Cars originally), or that particular one about farming where there's lots of pauses and it's trying to teach you something. They usually fit about 4 ads in the gap. One time I actually counted on More FM or something like that, and I counted at least 7 ads in the gap.

So that explains why I don't listen to the radio very often at all these days. The side-effect of that is that I'm unaware of a lot of music; in fact, I completely missed Nelly Furtardo's "Do It", which was stolen by Timbaland from a Commodore 64 remix of an Amiga MOD track made in 2000 by a Finn. I support the demoscene in preference to the music industry, and I have a message to those of you in the industry: I binned my CD music collection recently.

So what music do I listen to? Free stuff. Most of the tracks were written with a 1 hour deadline; this stuff, for instance, and here's a link to the current archive (WARNING: some track names / content may be highly inappropriate - you can weed them out by deleting the tracks in question). I have a few tracks in there (my nickname is "GreaseMonkey", although some may be using my laptop handle, "gm|lap").

Note: as of writing, the archive appears to be down. ToastyX appears to be offline so I can't poke him right now. If you want to listen to some of my music, there's my modarchive profile.

Now, here's some ignorance in action. Context: xiagan at the current time has an issue with his hand, and he needs to see a specialist as the generalists can't seem to work it out. So, I thought I'd try having some fun, and then...

from what i gather, doctors can't solve == TIME FOR DIVINE INTERVENTION :D :D :D
<@daidalos> ~~
<@daidalos> What doctors cannot solve they will be able to in the future.

...the yawn material comes out. This is a very general statement. It's also rather disconcerting, as for a lot of the people in question (cancer, anybody?), by the time the answer is found, they'd be dead. It's a bit excessive to say that about a hand, though. The best thing to do is to just keep plodding along and not get too wound up about it, taking a little bit of care at a time. I say this knowing that horrors such as gangrene and nervous system issues are possible, but it's best not to be worried about it. After all, a huge rock from outer space could crash into our house and kill everyone, but it's not what's important.

It almost seems that ignorance is necessary in some situations. But there's a difference between ignorance and unknowledge, as I don't actually know whether or when a rock will crash into our house (God forbid, of course; I'm just expressing an idea), and some ignorance is due to ignoring your unknowledge. There is also a difference between ignorance and suspension. Suspension is when you put something on hold, usually because you're focusing on something else.

I am aware that the RFID chip could be "the mark of the beast", but I look back at the bigger picture, and am aware of several different theories as to what it is, some which are considerably less "blatant". If you just jump out and say "a load of [blank] and lies", then that's not suspension. I believe it's willful ignorance (*tongue* I'M NOT LISTENING TO YOU!!!) because it's related to some topic which you have instilled into you as something which is really really bad and they're out to get you and stuff.

On that note, if the UPC/EAN-13 barcode system is the mark of the beast, it's not due to the allegation that each divisor is a 6; the only one which can be a 6 is the one at the end, as the pattern for 6 is 1,1,1,4, and not just 1,1,1. Nevertheless, it's still a possibility; consumerism is rampant in first-world countries. Hence my announcement to the music industry.

Most consumerist "industries" depend on ignorance and unknowledge to stay alive and kicking. The software industry, for instance. Let me burst that bubble for you, dear/sir: I. RUN. LINUX. (Technically it's GNU/Linux; it's just easier to refer to it as Linux, as any other Linux-based software which doesn't use GNU is either very rare or called something else, e.g. Maemo 5. But yeah, Linux is the name of the "kernel", and GNU is the name of the "userland".) It's like free, except... Oh wait, it is free, and you can learn from it and even change it if you want, too; the source code is available. Here, have a screenshot:



It even has solitaire. What more could you want‽* Unfortunately I suck at Klondike solitaire, so I only managed to get 3 cards out. Also, that track has been looping for 20 minutes now; I should stop it... done.

*Of course, you'd also want to spend time with friends and/or family. That's something I should probably do more often. Except for me, it's not always people I know. Which actually makes it quite fun... but make sure you know how to tell whether someone is trying to do something dodgy or screw you over. TIP: if you can't do that, you shouldn't be surfing the internet.

Nevertheless, socialisation is one of the reasons I go to university. And church, for that matter; however, that is not the main reason (NO it's NOT "because your parents do it", that is merely why I got there in the first place; I go there to be inspired and primarily to keep my faith going).

But you can see that it's not Windows (it's running on my laptop which is not a macbook), yet it still looks quite usable. Down the bottom you can see a couple of terminal windows. You most likely won't need to use these; I just find them quite useful. Up the top, there's 3 menus, and then 3 icons (Firefox, a terminal, and VLC respectively). After the gap, you can see the X-Chat and Pidgin icons. Pidgin is the IM client I use, and currently it's connected to MSN, AIM, and GTalk. There's a networking icon which shows the wireless strength, an icon for setting my display settings, and a charge meter (I have the battery taken out as it's starting to get screwy and I don't want to continue to overcharge it).

I also have 5 different graphs running: CPU time, memory usage (the lightest green is also available; it's just disk cache), network usage, swap space usage (that's what you use if/when you run out of memory), and system load (it's related to CPU usage). After the graphs, there's the virtual desktop selector/indicator. I use these all the time (although I usually use the Ctrl-Alt-(arrow) shortcuts) - this is why I can't use Windows anymore for anything serious. Then there's some icon which gives indicators of stuff. And then of course, we have the time... and the date! Finally, there's another menu with all of the shutdown things and stuff.

Of course, this is just one particular distribution, or distro, called Ubuntu. There are many others, and I am using only one of many window managers, this one being called GNOME.

This is where it goes outside the realms of unknowledge, and you really have two choices: ignorance or suspension (sometimes both happen). Sometimes neglect happens due to rather long suspension. Here's something else you should be aware of: Windows isn't free. When it comes with your computer, you pay for it with the computer. Same deal with MS Office. There goes that excuse. I should probably cover this in further detail in a blog about consumerism and stuff like that.

I am fully aware that I rant a lot, although sometimes I forget and then I reach a point where I just realise that I've started dribbling on, and then get a little apologetic. It's nice when you say that and you find out that they're actually interested. Now, this is where I need to focus and actually get a message out there.

In case you haven't noticed, I have held origins theories in suspension (actually more specifically the theory of evolution, but I generally don't try to dive too deep into the whole mess). Why? They are a distraction from my goal. For those of you who say that there's absolutely no evidence for God, you're looking in the wrong place. I'm not sure if there's a modern "best example", but testomonies like this are where the proof comes. And comments like this are ignorance in action:

This isn't proof, I'm afraid. This is a story about your mother with no evidence. There are many other possible reasons why that tattoo appeared to disappear.
'GOD IS REAL' is not evidence.

The subtitle of this blog post is "missing the bigger picture", and that's what you just did, VALENTINEBEAMS.

Or how about this one?

Proof?
Nope!
Try again.

My answerphone can do better than that, deathfortea.

It's not the "science" that leads to the proof. The Great Commission wasn't to find (or fabricate, as the case may sadly be - some "Christians" are actually hypocrites) evidence for God's existance, because then it would be like a MacGuffin (warning: link goes to tvtropes; don't get carried away!). Did Jesus walk around telling people, "I am telling you this scientific proof"? No! He performed miracles and drove out demons! Proof of God does not come from mere study, it comes from action!

I am identifying the truth so that you may understand. Please don't be put off if you have never seen a miracle happen to you or anyone around you, or any messages (I tend to get the latter, mostly from "co-incidences" such as finding Hebrews 13:17 on a whiteboard in the place I was sleeping in the day we climbed a mountain with the trig number 1317). Not all miracles are "KA-BOOM!" miracles; in fact, most aren't. Some can take an awfully long time. I read somewhere that, in order to drive out demons, you have to be more persistent than they are.

Somehow I have to tie this in with ignorance but I haven't got a clue.

Hehe, only joking.

What I see is a double attack where one cloaks the other operation. Currently there's a user on YouTube who is suffering from demon contamination. So, we've got a battle between God and demons. And then the naturalists walk onto the scene and say that neither exist.

What you might see is two mental disorders: multiple-personality disorder, and "OH NOES A CHRISTIAN HURRRRR MUST BE IRRARATIONAL" disorder or, as you might apply, "thing I don't like which I can insert a snarky comment about" disorder (or "disease", or "virus", or anything else demeaning), and you think that it's only natural (and you think that's nothing to do with you).

After watching this demon-contaminated girl being abused to attempt to attack someone, I now realise that you can get much, much more irrational than a naturalist. I have never encountered such disgusting filth in my life, something which acts like a lowly coward who's grabbing as tightly as they can to the little they have left.

There are at least two ways of ignoring with at least slight knowledge of the big picture; I call them "cutting up the picture" and "picture of a picture".

• Cutting up the picture: where you have the big picture and you attempt to separate the relationship, perhaps cutting something out of it. Although you usually don't end up using the big picture or really looking into it. deathfortea says something like this, and it is incredibly irrational. (Naturalists can be irrational, too!) In effect, what is being said is
  
• Picture of a picture: where you fabricate stuff to devalue it, even fabricating that something is there. VALENTINEBEAMS says something like this. But this user also forgot about the big picture. The story is the evidence we are given. "There's no evidence" is a complete fallacy. On top of that, you are not going to convince the woman in question.
  

You might end up suspending this idea, but please don't just outright ignore it. What I'm about to express may sound incredibly absurd.

Suppose that the theory of evolution is a conspiracy run by demons.

I'm serious. Suppose that's the case. Suppose that scientists are being shown all this fabricated evidence. Suppose that demons are tinkering with the results. This might sound completely bogus to you, but I'm pretty sure there's more than enough demons to pull it off. Which totally sucks.

I am not asking you to believe this. I am asking you to ponder. It would be ignorant to just say that this is 100% true and that anything contrary to it is false, no exceptions; it's not scriptural (but not antiscriptural, either), and when we get to these sorts of topics, generally, what is scriptural is the way to go.

Now, ignorance is a huge topic, and I could go on. I believe that there is a lot more that can be said. If you have any questions or anything to explore, please prod me and I'll try to get something blogged up to continue this. Right now, it's a good time to get some sleep. Good night and God bless.

My sincere apologies.

Oh dear. It looks like I got involved in that mess again. Uhh... Unfortunately, I don't seem to have a way of doing truetype text in the usual editor, so I'm going to have to go into the "Edit HTML" thing, because not everyone uses Microsoft fonts. It's true!

So yeah, have a kitten.

  ^   ^
 (_O*O_)
(Y) @ (Y)  *
 (_)(_)\__/

Richard Dawkins or Ray Comfort?

Who would "win" in a debate? Some of you are going to lunge for one and some for another.

OK, so I post some quote in my status message. I found it on someone's YouTube profile and I thought it was quite inspirational.

When the atheist claims that the Christian is enslaved, it is like a land animal telling a bird it's enslaved to the sky.

That had been sitting there for a few days, and then my naturalist friend quotes this:

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

I immediately recognised this as a Richard Dawkins quote, even though I haven't seen the original quote myself, I know that he quite frequently associates God with fairies, probably because fairies sound pathetic.

So, I put this in my status message, after it:

A beautiful garden usually has a gardener to keep it beautiful.

Also, I should queue "Cows keep a farmers' paddocks mowed so they don't turn into swamps - grass doesn't cut itself".

But anyways, compare the second and third quotes: the Richard Dawkins quote (apologies to the author if I misattributed this) and the counter-quote I whipped up. The counter-quote is the sort of thing Ray Comfort would say about this. His primary argument is that a painting must have a painter, a design must have a designer, a creation must have a creator. So, if we have a beautiful garden, there must be something to keep it beautiful. And that thing is usually a gardener.

Of course, fairies could also do the job, but that's usually not what happens.

I have a rough idea of what happens when you don't do the gardening. Now, I could almost credit Philos. Dawkins for being a scientist, and I would do that in favour of crediting him as being a gardener. Someone should give him a pot-plant and slip in a wandering willie or something like that. Hint: simply watering the plant is not going to deal with the weed.

Now, in a "beautiful garden", usually, the trees are trimmed so they don't become a huge mess. Grass is frequently mowed or scythed or something like that. Another good "challenge" suggestion would be to give Philos. Dawkins a passionfruit vine. We had one and it miraculously survived about 5 years. We trellissed it correctly, and we got a lot of passionfruit. After about a year or something like that, it was like a huge shrub. Looking from the kitchen window revealed that it was full of blowflies.

I'm going to let you decide who won this debate between Richard Dawkins and David Quinn, but I think we can agree that Richard Dawkins has been quite cowardly and/or arrogant in this debate (the "Yes it is / No it isn't" tossing which happens later on suggests playground techniques which really achieve nothing).

I'll quote this part [ (C) RTE Radio, 2006 ]. The context of this is that Philos. Dawkins claimed that naturalists can have free will, and David Quinn mentioned how Dawkins quoted something that William Provine said about there being no free will, and that "many of [his] colleagues" believed the same thing.

Tubridy: Okay. Richard Dawkins, rebut to that as you wish.

Dawkins: I’m not interested in free will what I am interested in is the ridiculous suggestion that if science can’t say where the origin of matter comes from theology can. The origin of matter… the origin of the whole universe, is a very, very difficult question. It’s one that scientists are working on. It’s one that they hope eventually to solve. Just as before Darwin, biology was a mystery. Darwin solved that. Now cosmology is a mystery. The origin of the universe is a mystery; it’s a mystery to everyone. Physicists are working on it. They have theories. But if science can’t answer that question then as sure as hell theology can’t either. [ emphasis mine ]

Quinn: If I can come in there, it is a perfectly reasonable proposition to ask yourself where does matter come from? And it is perfectly reasonable as well to posit the answer, God created matter. Many reasonable people believe this and by the way… I mean look it is quite a different category to say look we will study matter and we will ask how

Dawkins: But if science can’t answer that question, then it’s sure as hell theology can’t either. [ emphasis mine ]

Tubridy: Richard, if ...

Quinn: Sorry — if I can come in there — It’s a perfectly reasonable proposition to ask oneself where does matter come from. And it’s perfectly reasonable as well to posit the answer God created matter. Many reasonable people believe this.

Dawkins: It’s not reasonable.

Quinn: It’s quite a different category to say “Look, we will study matter and we will ask how matter organizes itself into particular forms,” and come up with the answer “evolution.” It is quite another question to ask “Where does matter come from to begin with?” And if you like you must go outside of matter to answer that question. And then you’re into philosophical categories.

Dawkins: How could it possibly be another category and be allowed to say God did it since you can’t explain where God came from?

Quinn: Because you must have an uncaused cause for anything at all to exist. Now, I see in your book you come up with an argument against this that I frankly find to be bogus. You come up with the idea of a mathematical infinite regress but this does not apply to the argument of uncaused causes and unmoved movers because we are not talking about maths we’re talking about existence and existentially nothing exists unless you have an uncaused cause. And that uncaused cause and that unmoved mover is, by definition, God.

[ my emphasis was pointing out the irony of the overuse of idioms which the person would be embarassed to admit they actually said that. ]

After this, Dawkins rebuts this by the presumption that Christianity is inferior to naturalism in terms of philosophy and therefore cannot win against it. It turns to custard there and he starts acting like a little kid. I would like to get an audio recording of this debate, as Dawkins has what I would like to call "a cursed pen", which makes him sound absolutely horrible when his words are written down (although I have heard him speak and sound arrogant, too, so it's not particularly unfair).

Dawkins: You just defined God as that! You just defined a problematic existence. That’s no solution to the problem. You just evaded it.

Hypocrisy, anyone? Someone said in one of his asking-questions things, "What if you're wrong?" and he turned it back on the person asking the question. (If I ever go to one of those things, I'd just love to ask questions completely irrelevant to his fight.) P.S. The applause was far from deserved, because he didn't answer the question.

Now, back to the title point. I haven't really said anything about Ray Comfort here. While his banana analogy "has been 'debunked'" (super scare quotes here to save the day!), as a wild banana is different from the banana we know about (wild bananas have lots of hard seeds, whereas our bananas are infertile and grafted from one of several original banana trees), he still has the apple analogy. The thing is, these apples are still fertile, and so the idea behind it remains.

He did apologise for his mistake, though, and I can't remember the theory he follows for the banana nowadays.

I have two books by Ray Comfort: "God Doesn't Believe In Atheists" and "Hollywood Be Thy Name". Note that the blurbs on the back are a tad misleading. The former does a lot of biblical referencing, whilist the latter has a lot of material which isn't actually about the film industry. This is one thing Ray and I have in common, despite never having met: we rant.

I don't know a lot about Ray Comfort's debating style. I know that he had a debate with the chairman of American Atheists, Ron Barrier. As the story goes, Ray offered a debate with Ron, who turned him down, then AA members called Ray a chicken, where he explained that Ron was the one who chickened out, so the AA members pressured him and he finally accepted it, even flying Ray there. After the debate, they hugged each other.

So, let's actually have a look... Who would win in a debate, Richard Dawkins or Ray Comfort? Philos. Dawkins seems to be afraid of Ray; after all, bribing Dawkins, first with $10k, then $20k, doesn't seem to do it for him ($20k would get you a lot of propoganda to put on more busses, y'know - after all, busses can't think for themselves, so why would they care?).

Seeing as I'm pretty much out of steam, I'll have to conclude something. It really depends on the audience. With the RD.N community, it doesn't matter who's doing the debate; if Dawkins were to debate God himself, Dawkins' followers would still claim a victory for naturalism. However, given a fair representation of the general population, I believe that, no matter who wins, Dawkins will be arrogant about it, and pretend to win.

What sucks about YouTube

It's one thing to say that something sucks, but it's another thing to actually explain why. I will be focused on discussing what exactly is wrong with YouTube.

OK, the thumbs-up / thumbs-down / rating in a video which has anything to do with religion is misleading, as most people who register for YouTube and spend a lot of time looking at videos about religion are hardline naturalists and a lot are really closed-minded. Why naturalists? Usually they have nothing better to do.

(I prefer to use the term "naturalist", as "atheist" is a very direct term. Think of it this way: "You are very welcome to join the 'I Hate White People' group. We're a very peaceful group and we love one another." I use the term "naturalist" because it refers to people who believe that we came to be entirely due to "natural" causes.)

Now, there's a user named jezuzfreek777. Like him or not, he's a legitimate user. Now there's jezusfreek666x. This guy is almost a doppleganger.

How can I report him?

Well, I have two options.

1. I could flag his videos. But it's not specific enough. Fortunately, I can give "bullying" as a reason.
2. I could report image violations on his profile.

Oh that's just brilliant. I could almost shove this post on my earlier blog - y'know, the one with all the F-bombs and that. Yeah.

So, I've tried #1, and flagged the "Pornography is good" video as "bullying". Click the button, and... great! I...

In order to help us understand your bullying complaint better, we'll need additional details. Please refer to our Safety Center for more information and the form to submit.

Looking at that, there's no form. But there is one instance of "form" on its own (not included in the word "information"):

YouTube doesn't allow videos with nudity, graphic violence or hate. If you come across a video like this, click the link on the video to flag it as Inappropriate and submit the form on the next page to report it to YouTube.

But there's no next page. I look on the video and find no "next page", either. Perhaps clicking "close" would do something?

... not at all.

Does anyone remember ChristianU2uber? He was roughly 12 years old and made a video about how homosexuality is wrong. It doesn't matter how spoonfed or how wrong he is, YOU ABSOLUTELY DO NOT DO WHAT HAPPENED NEXT. Yes, all-caps, bold, direct language.

One doppelganger would be worse than a single comment saying "HOMO"; nevertheless, both are wrong. He actually responded several times and got all fired up... there was a video where he yells "I AM NOT A HOMO", giving himself a red face in the process. But the number of doppelgangers? I'd estimate about 5. The number of comments saying "HOMO"? Far too many for me to count. Estimation? 10,000.

And that's not all; this bullying has been immortalised for all time* on Encyclopedia Dramatica, under the title... "Angry Homo Kid". I effectively used to say that Encyclopedia Dramatica is the cesspit of the internet. I stand by my position.

* Unless someone actually toughens up and shuts this website down. You who claim "freedom of speech" are only about defending your own freedom of speech and not the freedom of others'. There's a very good reason why God hates hypocrisy, and I hate it, too.

I'm not trying to portray all naturalists in a bad light here. A lot actually condemned their efforts (whilist in the meantime using their comment space as an excuse to shun God; after all, that's how naturalists seem to do it on the internet).

Now, you might be thinking that I just happen to have an issue with naturalists, and that all is fine and dandy elsewhere, but I happen to be at least slightly aware of "YouTube partners". I don't know all the details about it, but I do know that a lot of videos were pulled from YouTube because Viacom had a copyright claim on at least some part of the video.

Here's my advice. If you want a video pulled off YouTube, look for any copyright infringements. Because that's all they care about. Unless it's a tiny, tiny amount of copyrighted material, they'll do their best to shut it down.

(Although one of my videos has a "Download this song" advertisement as I used a track as background music... I guess that's nicer than "hURR not use copyrighted music delete now"... I might just delete it and replace the soundtrack with some stuff off Modarchive or some other demosceners' tracks and promote those artists, as I'm trying to stop consumerism - I have a .rar archive of about 50 tracks by dizzy, and about the same count for tracks by beek.)

The fact that YouTube appear to be more concerned about upholding copyright rather than upholding human rights is what bothers me. This, I believe, is what's fundamentally wrong with YouTube.

(Just one thing I'd like to add which sprung to mind last night. I've heard that, depending on where you look in your data, if you're looking for "ancestors" by the theory of evolution, we appear to either be closely related to the monkey, the pig, or the chicken. Each of these are used as derogatory terms. Which would you rather be: a monkey, a pig, or a chicken?)

Perhaps this is what my computing skills are for...?

Some idea that sprung to mind.

For quite some time, I'd been going on what could be considered a wild goose chase, working out how to build a computer, in terms of the hardware aspect. The motive was essentially that this would be a computer useful for the demoscene and gaming and stuff. However, I did manage to conceive a video chip design (theoretical, anyway) which would be useful for a windowing system and would allow for direct single-buffered graphics of pretty much any pixel depth at any time.

However, this idea could be used to go against the consumerist culture, including liberating people from the need to use a specific vendors' products (/me points finger at Apple and Microsoft).

Have a look at your computer... or a think about it if you don't want to open it up just yet. Out of all the components inside your computer, chances are, the most expensive one is probably your video card. If you have a laptop, you probably have integrated graphics, but still - some of these can be pretty powerful. Why do we have such powerful graphics cards? One thing: gaming.

I read an article in an APC magazine at least a year ago. It was about how graphics card companies like nVidia who were excited at how their video cards could process 190... somethings (we'll just refer to them as "processing units" - I only remember the numbers). The world's first supercomputer, the CRAY-1, could calculate 5 of these units, and an Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition or something could do 15.

So why hasn't the CPU experienced so much development?

It seems to be that, after a certain point of time, computers weren't about maths anymore. They were for gaming. (I blame Pong for this.) After trying to get the Commodore 64 to do anything decent (in an emulator, I don't have the actual machine), I stand back in awe (actually, more like horror) at the fact that the Commodore 64's predecessor, the VIC-20, was marketed as a "games machine". How they managed to produce good games, I don't know. Then again, Viznut of PWP managed to do some incredible demos for the VIC-20, of which I don't know how they were done, either - especially considering that he was only using 5.5KB of RAM and had to use some of it for video memory.

Nowadays, 5.5GB of RAM - yes, GB, not MB - is most likely present in some of the slightly higher-end computer models of today. This laptop has 2DMGB (drivemakers' gigabytes - it's really 1.9GB) of RAM. The integrated graphics on this (Intel GM45 Express) are powerful enough to run a free game called Nexuiz at about 40fps on the lowest settings, whereas using the OpenGL software renderer, I'd only be able to punch out... maybe 3fps. It's doing 2D acceleration as I type (either that or the 1.6GHz dual-core Intel processor, in comparison with the 1MHz 6502 processor found in the C64 and the VIC-20, is fast enough to blit stuff really, really fast).

The thing that's so absurd is the fact that they're now using graphics cards to do what a CPU would normally do. They have what's called a GPU (graphics processing unit, as opposed to central processing unit), which can crunch numbers faster than... uh... a CPU.

Something has gone horribly wrong.

I could go into detail about the war between the PC and the Amiga which I missed but nevertheless got to see an Amiga in action myself, but I'd rather get to a point. (In short: the PC eventually became a better option for gaming, and Commodore went bankrupt trying to develop a new project to battle the PC.)

The PC was originally designed to be as a productivity machine, the sort you'd have in an office. Now, put a coin-slot in, chuck in a few controllers, and it's the sort of thing you'd have in an arcade.

Here's where the plan begins.

I would like to develop a computer designed with productivity in mind. These are a few objectives.

• It needs to have a free, open-source architecture. For the first time in years, I feel quite strongly that this should go under the GPL.
• It needs to be repulsive to proprietary, third-party vendors. Forcing people to compile code might not be the best solution, but it's a start... or something like that. Something like the GPLONLY flag in Linux kernel modules (these are not LKMs, by the way - those are the old BSD kernel modules) could also help. Who knows.
  
• Ideally the software should be coded by the same sorts of people who can work wonders out of 4KB of code. Elaborating on this, all the software packages for it should fit snuggly onto a floppy disk. Therefore, the whole thing will most likely be coded in assembly.
• Its design must not be tampered with for the purpose of making it more suitable for gaming.
  

If you have any idea what kind of processor this should have, or if you reckon that I should pull an Acorn and make my own (despite having no actual hardware design experience), please say. The point is that this is to liberate people from having to buy software for their computer and to get people out of the "it has to be this company" mindset.

The other issue with the H1N1 vaccine.

The actual issue with the H1N1 (swine flu) vaccine is that it contains something with contains mercury which screws peoples' minds up. This video I would claim to be a good example, despite a YouTuber's claims:

Ummmmm... this guy has his stats wrong. Flu shots have not been proven to cause autism. Court cases aren't scientific proof..... there's been no scientific link found!

Nevertheless, the thing which contains mercury is the issue.

And then there's rather freaky stuff like this, which also has a video somewhere on YouTube (the blog covers what it says). Read it if you really want to, but I'll sum it up here.

The basic idea is of someone sticking nanobots in the vaccine which alter a humans' DNA so that they are no longer truly human. It then attempts to use the book of Revelation to back it up, and then pats itself on the back despite missing the "666" part of the prophecy. (If you're wondering, I'd have to say that the current theory of this is that it's the Catholic church, and it uses the Latin name, "Vicarius Filii Dei" (which is apparently attributed to Paul)... but there's a post in the comment box where they use the Greek for "Latin Man" and get the numbers. Still, this isn't what we should be focusing on in our lives, either.)

What this author is saying is not the other issue with the vaccine. It is what he's doing: fearmongering. At first, I was thinking: oh no. This is really horrible.

And then it hit me.

This is just to create fear. It's not solving any problems; just creating them. It's to take our minds off what we should be truly aiming for, and that is to do what the Lord commands.

I posted this just to address the issue of fearmongering. If you're considering taking the H1N1 vaccine, here's my advice: don't bother. I have a friend who has caught swine flu, and one who probably did (well, he was feeling sick, and just as he was getting well and was leaving, his sister got sick and was diagnosed with it), and both of them are still alive today.

Hey, why don't I just stop this rant here and let you focus on something more important in your life.



Last night I realised that I've been suffering from having a consumerist attitude. What I've done today is dispose of a bunch of old paper and a bunch of toys I don't use. I've invaded my drawers and tidied them up... and found some things I haven't seen in at least a year, I guess (like my 953MB USB stick, for instance - of course it's not really a GB, it never is these days). I have some CDs which I don't really feel enough compassion to throw in the bin, so I'm going to see who I can offload them to... or get more passionate when I get around to that department.

I still have work to do. This is just my drawers. I have two piles with stuff in it, a box of stuff, a wardrobe full of more stuff, and a bookshelf which is covered in dust and has a bunch of stuff piled on top of the books, including more books. The bookshelf is where my CD stash is. Then, of course, there's a few CD cases I have.

I have a couple of computers with Windows licence keys on the side. I might just give those keys away... on the other hand, I might just rip them off and bin them, as I've enjoyed using Linux and stuff like that (e.g. my desktop runs FreeBSD and my server which I might get around to donating runs NetBSD), and I believe these OSes to be practical enough for everyday uses. If you're still using Windows for gaming, then maybe you're being too much of a consumerist, too? You don't need games, anyway... I should blog about that, actually.

An untitled post.

If you think this post is a load of crap, then you're probably not the intended audience. Sorry about that. Try not to clutter up the comment box.

Today I was baptised with two girls at our church, Chloe and Rosie. You would be amazed at how much went through my mind was absolute rubbish, e.g. fearing that the water was cold (it felt almost too hot, actually). Apparently, Chloe actually had a dream where absolutely nobody turned up to the baptism and she was the only one there. Knowing how everyone really is (enough people knew that we were coming that someone would have said something if either of us were running late), this is a very blatant lie, primarily to instill fear.

I seem to have thought that I might not have been good enough, but with the absolute hammering I've been receiving today, I feel like there's something out there which views me as a threat to be silenced. I can recall 3 or 4 times I have tried to pray and been interrupted. The first time was this morning, and people were making an awful lot of noise, so I shut my door and prayed with earmuffs on... then both my grandparents came in and said something. Maybe the timing wasn't brilliant, but the last time I was interrupted, no-one was here, so I started praying...

...and then the truck pulls into the driveway. And then my parents call out my name, telling me it's tea time. I took that time to quickly pray for some time where I could actually pray properly. That time was spent in the shower, and I tell you what, there were no interruptions at all. Hallelujah!

I'm posting this here because we are in the middle of a very real spiritual battle. Something doesn't want us to succeed and is pulling out the stops (I was chatting to an exchange student last night about what this means, actually - here's a brilliant example) to screw us over. I say "us" because it would be a fair assumption that all three of us are being attacked, and there's suggestive evidence there.

Those of you who are thinking that there's nothing really going on would have to explain why I got a public comment on YouTube saying "Idiot, plain and simple." this very day (I deleted it and replied in private as the other user had comments turned off - I at least tried to be civil).

I also forgot to bring the sheets of paper with my testimony on it; thankfully, someone was able to run me home and back to pick it up.

So, I'd like to make a prayer request. If you're willing to pray for us three, then please do (I'm Ben, the other two are Chloe and Rosie). Even if you feel incompetent, you can still approach the Lord with a humble heart and the admission that you don't really know what to pray for. If you're one of us who got baptised, feel free to include yourself in the prayer - I did when I prayed for you, as I've been suffering myself.

Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication - something you might want to keep in mind.

And finally, some things to assist you from my little notebook... "The Devil wins when you let chaos take over." If you're in a confusing mess and can't think, you'll need to step back a bit and find some direction. I usually pray a rather desperate request for sanity at these times, and then pray a longer prayer to loose the demons and bind them back to Hell. There's another thing which is in The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis, where Hell is referred to as the Kingdom of Noise (explicitly referenced in XXXI/31, explained in XXII/22):

Music and silence—how I detest them both! How thankful we should be that ever since our Father entered Hell—though longer ago than humans, reckoning in light years, could express—no square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, but all has been occupied by Noise—Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and virile—Noise which alone defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples, and impossible desires. We will make the whole universe a noise in the end. We have already made great strides in this direction as regards the Earth. The melodies and silences of Heaven will be shouted down in the end. But I admit we are not yet loud enough, or anything like it. Research is in progress. Meanwhile you, disgusting little——

[Here the MS. breaks off and is resumed in a different hand.]

This book is fiction, of course, but it was written to portray truth about the tactics of the armies of Hell so we would be aware of them.

Actually, someone blogged about this in more depth.

In fact, I managed to obtain a second-hand copy for $5, so if you would like to have a look at it, then feel free to ask.

God bless.

- Ben

The Ten Commandments Of Secular Society

Something I was thinking of. It's a mish-mash of strong atheistic culture and consumerist culture. I'm not so great with Middle English, though, so if anyone would like to make any corrections, then please do.

1. Thou are thine own God, which Darwin hath brought thee out of the land of Israel, out of the house of Christendom. Thou shalt have no other gods before thineself: For when thine preserveth thineself, thine prospereth.
   
2. Thou shalt not honour any authority, or any likeness of any thing that is of heaven above, or that in the earth beneath: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for thou are against heaven; thou would prefereth honour of that in the water under the earth.
   
3. Thou shalt take preference in taking the name of the LORD thine Enemy in vain; for thine friends might take offence to the F word.
   
4. Remember the weekend, to keep it wholly filled with pleasures. Five days shalt thou permit labour, and do some of thy work: But the two rest days are the days of pleasure: Thou shalt freely be excused from any work and indulge in pleasure: For pleasure releaseth endorphins, which fueleth the chemical processes in thine brain, which decideth all thine morality.
   
5. Honour thy father and thy mother; dishonour thine brothers and sisters.
   
6. Thou shalt not kill or sterilise those who further the Evolutionary process for humanity; though shalt kill or make infertile those who dwindle behind; thou shalt kill thineself if it furtherest the Evolutionary process.
   
7. Thou shalt not forbid homosexuality. Thou wilt defend thine homosexual brothers by inflaming thine Christian enemies.
   
8. Thou shalt only steal from thine brothers when they are representest by large corporations, whom hath power to condemn thee.
   
9. Thou shalt witness against thy Christian neighbours and cloak thine hypocrisy.
   
10. Thou shalt not refrain from spending thy money on what thou lusteth for. For thine wallet is given to thee, and is deserveth to thee, and if thou neighbour hath what you desirest, either thou deservest, or thine neighbour not.

How racist are you?

There's a quiz on Facebook entitled "Are you really black???" which gives a rough percentage of how "black" you are.

How black are you? Not very. I have photos lying around on the internet, and I can assure you, I am about as white as the driven snow.
No really, how "black" are you? That's my answer.
No, how "black" (as in is black) are you? I'm sticking with my answer.
No, how black, as in, how much of a thief, a vandal, a hip-hop / "gangsta"-rap lover, a poor guy, an idiot, are you? This is what they really mean. The real question is, how racist are you?

What defines a black person? According to Google:

Definitions of black person on the Web:

• Black: a person with dark skin who comes from Africa (or whose ancestors came from Africa)
  wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
• The term black people usually refers to a racial group of humans with a dark brown skin color, but it has also been used to categorise a number of diverse populations into one common group. ...
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_person
• or Afro American, sh** shin, ghetto dweller, or n**ger (hyphen optional) is the racial, political, social and cultural group which includes all ...
  uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/African_American
  

Wait, how did Uncyclopedia get in there?

The definition I use is closest to the Wikipedia definition, and it's quite simple really. It's how dark your skin is. That's all there is to it.

The colour of your skin does not actually mean that you steal, vandalise, have a broken car muffler, have no taste in real music, and play "gangsta"-rap out your custom car sound system at about 2 in the morning. That is a culture attributed to black people, but it does not mean that if you are black then you do this, nor does it mean that if you do this then you are black.

I am not being racist by calling someone black. I am just using a term which describes their skin colour, which is generally closer to brown.

Someone I know took the quiz and was "60% black" (I'd actually say about 30% if we're talking about skin colour). And this is the associated text:

you are a wanna be black, even tho you are not, u want 2 be 1 really black.

The spelling says it all: "Hi, I am 'cool' because I spell on Facebook like I'm sending a text message, instead of taking advantage of a full-sized keyboard." It's a good sign that there's a quiz-app-maker-app lying around somewhere. Bebo has Quizzer. That is all you need. Not a bunch of other redundant quiz apps which require you to invite a whole bunch of people who couldn't care less just so you can see your answers. I think Facebook has a policy against that.

So yeah, asking "how black are you?" in terms of how they act doesn't make you cool. It makes you racist.

The Walk Of Hell

Note that this was in reply to someone's MSN status saying that there was plenty of evidence for evolution. So, I responded in my MSN status as to what it implied.

The basic theory of evolution is perfectly valid, and yes, there is evidence for it. However, to distinguish between the valid part and the excessive extrapolation, we refer to the valid part as natural selection. Yes, cells mutate, animals crossbreed, and other interesting things happen. But the full theory of evolution is a naturalistic extrapolation of this. And that part is out of despertation. And one would have to go all the way back to the Big Bang. So far, most of the evolutionists I've met don't believe in the Big Bang. But what also strikes me is the fact that they believe it will be replaced with something which works.

Try putting God in that void. It would break some of the theory of evolution, but you'll cope... Oh wait, you don't want to; that would then mean that you have a purpose and therefore a responsibility in life.

If you have any doubts about evolution, you have every right to. Remember that everyone involved in the theory is human, and therefore it is prone to human error. Remember that it is also supposed to be scientific, and scientific theories have changed many, many times through history.

When one believes they have no purpose, their life goes downhill as they look for things which give them fixes of pleasure. Money, fame, intellect, sex, and drugs. I can't list everything, but that's the main part. You try, you can't get enough, you get hooked. And you still can't get enough. I call this the Walk Of Hell.

If you think atheism is so great and amazing, you've obviously never been down the Walk Of Hell. It's what happens when you try to do everything by yourself. I know somebody who used to be a staunch atheist. Then he went through the Walk Of Hell. He could list about 10 drugs he took. He chain-smoked. He drank lots. He was into porn. And, by the end of it, he wanted out.

The fundamental problem with the full theory of evolution is not the validity of it. It's what it implies, but most importantly what people think it implies. People think it's great and whatnot because you are not held accountable for by God. But what it really implies is that you are responsible for anything and everything that comes your way and you have no help. Sure, you may have a few friends but when it comes to the deeply personal, you're on your own.

Have you ever been down the Walk Of Hell? If so, you know what it feels like. Are you still going down the Walk Of Hell? If so, you know how hard it is to get off it. Do neither of those apply to you? Then you obviously haven't lived long enough.

QND-zero: A zero-knowledge password proof scheme

This is my zero-knowledge password proof, QND-zero. QND is short for quick 'n' dirty: it works, and not much else.

Pick a random 32-bit seed. Set h (32-bit) to the seed. For each character in the password, from the first character to the last character, set c (clamped at 32-bit) to the character. Three times, you should square c, then add the seed to it plus one, then xor c with the seed. After that, add c to h, then rotate h left one spot, then xor h with the seed. After all that, h should contain your hash.

For languages which don't support rotate, but support left + right shift, try this for rotate left:

a = (a>>31) ^ (a<<1);>char is clamped to 32-bit and so is seed, and so is hash
pick a random seed
set hash to seed
for each char in the password (from the first to the last) {
do three times {
multiply the char by itself
add the seed plus one to the char
xor the char with the seed
}
add the char to the hash
rotate the hash left by one
xor the hash with the seed
}

Nice and simple, quick and dirty, zero-knowledge password proof scheme. Enjoy.

A quick test to see if you've done it right:
Seed = 0xDEADBEEF
"ab" -> 0x0D62D890
"ba" -> 0x91E6462F

This post and the algorithm are put into the public domain. I, Ben Russell, would like you to respect that.

EDIT: Whoops, my reference implementation was wrong. I've fixed the values.

EDIT 2: Apparently the pseudocode missed something vital. Fixed.

Gods of atheism: Power

Quite frankly I can't come up with a witty pun to do with hate, so, uh, yeah, if you haven't read the last post, then please do. And now we continue.

If it weren't for a lust for power, atheists wouldn't need to avoid God. They would be happy to let him be in control. But because they're too afraid to, for fear of losing their power and having to follow rules. And so instead they are deluded into thinking they have power all the while their lives are controlled by the evil voice in the back of their head. That thing seems to have power over them. It's called The Devil.

Isaiah 14:12-18 (KJV) reads:

¹²How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!
¹³For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:
¹⁴I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.
¹⁵Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.
¹⁶They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider thee, saying, Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms;
¹⁷That made the world as a wilderness, and destroyed the cities thereof; that opened not the house of his prisoners
¹⁸All the kings of the nations, even all of them, lie in glory, every one in his own house.

Lucifer had a lust for power, and attempted to overthrow God. Is this what you are trying to do? If you're trying to deny God's existance, you are pretty much trying to put yourself above God. Which cannot be done. Ray Comfort's analogy of a blind person not believing in colour is quite suitable here. Just because you can't see it, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

God works in mysterious ways. Some things we can't exactly comprehend, and we definitely can't predict what he'll do next. Nevertheless, God does have a personality, and there are things he won't do because it disgusts him.

The Bible is a collection of God-inspired books which are considerably older than this blog. So sometimes we can't understand parts of the Bible due to its divine nature. Sometimes it's blaringly obvious. Sometimes it makes no sense, then suddenly does.

OK, here's a chance for you to show your power. How many grains of sand are on the Gold Coast of Australia? I invite you to give me a figure accurate within one million. Even a British billion (American trillion - I use the American figures generally when it comes to -illions, even though it's a bit incorrect) isn't generous enough for you.

In the movie Bruce Almighty, a guy named Bruce gets given power from God and he can use it in the Buffalo area. And yet he can't truly cope with the millions of prayers he gets every few minutes from this area. Guess what happens when he answers "YES" to all those prayers? Two opposing teams both win a match in their sport. So many people win the lottery that they get $17 each. Chaos ensues.

With great power comes great responsibility. They say that you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you have no responsibility, then chances are you have no power, either.

Time for a truth table. (This is probably the best I can do with the "Compose" option. I could also try using HTML, but this demonstrates the point.)

P(ower) => R(esponsibility)

P=F R=F: T
P=F R=T: T
P=T R=F: F
P=T R=T: T

So, if you believe the saying, and you're irresponsibile, don't bother with power. And I've probably said enough here. I shall go back to writing my book.

Gods of atheism: Hate

If you think you're too good to read my last post on this subject, you're not. That post is for anybody to read. Especially you. It covers a bit about how atheists get into the mindset that they're better than everyone else. (Which of course is bogus). Once you've done that, you should be ready for this one.

Atheists tend to hate God. Why? I don't know why you should; I quite like the guy. Maybe he's an authority figure, and you can't be bothered following his commands? Oddly enough, they're not that hard to follow if you give your life to his son Jesus. The problem is that it takes a real leap of faith to do that.

So they hate God, the very God who put them here in the first place. But it's incredibly difficult to hate God and yet still believe in him. This is what leads to ignorance, and therefore the atheists deny that he ever existed, instead relying on a bunch of "science" which they know to be lies, but are too afraid of God, because they hate him, but would rather believe what they know to be a lie.

It's not rocket science to lie about the truth and claiming the truth to be a lie; I mean, it's easier than first-grade math. And I'm pretty sure that this can be shown using university style math in some way.

This is the sort of hate that gets people into a deadlock. And they spend their lives hating God, even though he loves them dearly, and wants them to repent. This isn't new. Look in the Bible. 1 & 2 Kings feature it very often, mostly in lists of kings which have disobeyed him. There are also cases in the book of Psalms, the books of the prophets, and so on. They mostly consist of God telling Israel that he exists and that he knows that they're blatantly disobeying him while they're looking for silly little excuses not to obey him.

And that's the key. Atheists are constantly looking for silly little excuses to try to avoid the responsibilities given to them by God. They hate having someone else being in charge; they want to live their own selfish lives; they want power.

I shall hopefully cover that one next, as I believe that to be the primary cause for atheism.

Gods of atheism: Pride

Hopefully you haven't procrastinated on reading my last post on this subject. If you have, I suggest you read it now. It covers how adding a ridiculously large number of years doesn't exactly work considering that some vital parts of our life aren't old enough (I gave the sun as an example). Read that? Good. Let's move on.

I would have to say that, not just most, but every non-agnostic atheist I have encountered has been unnecessarily "sure" about their position, even if they have admitted flaws in their theory. "Oh yeah, the Bible is full of mistakes, blah blah blah." That kind of thing. They act like they know it all when they don't.

One of my MSN contacts whom I only know over the internet was wondering what my picture was of... It was from an article on the Answers in Genesis website, comparing the Bible and the theory of evolution.

Which one are you going to trust??
The Bible: "It is written." - Matt 4:4
Evolution: It is REWRITTEN and REWRITTEN and ReWrItTeN and...

"Replace rewritten with improved." What?!

Out of all the fields of "science", evolutionism (not the actual scientific side which is a part of biology) has got to be the most desperate and most flawed. Seriously, there's enough literature on the subject pointing out what's so horribly wrong with it. It's not science, it's a religion. And here's the clincher:

This guy calls himself a "rationalist".

Hopefully your BS detector should be ringing alarm bells. I know mine did. The term "rationalist" is among one of the worst terms I have ever heard when attributed to this subject. Those who are wise enough to be true rationalists are wise enough not to advertise it. This was something I wrote at Easter camp this year (although this was on the "Before God" page, but I still stand by it).

The term "rationalist" is more appropriate for an agnostic rather than an atheist. An agnostic will attempt to be rational about their worldview although at the same time their motives aren't exactly the greatest (if it's not God, we won't bag it), but at least they try to try. (Like Bart Simpson: "I can't promise I'll try, but I'll try to try.") An atheist will claim they are 100% right when they are 30% wrong (one part of me thinks it's higher while another thinks it's lower), as if righteousness will fit in a 130% scale. Try slicing 130% of a cake off. You can't do it (unless of course the cake is a lie).

The thing is, I can't pin the term "rationalist" to myself, or other creationists: who am I to judge? So, all we can really establish is that if they claim to be a rationalist, they aren't. It keeps it simple.

This god of atheism tends to cover believers of many of the so-called "New Age" religions, too, e.g. Bhuddism (not exactly "new", but it's suitable), neo-paganism, and the sick atheist joke known as Satanism. These are in order of respect: I generally respect Bhuddists (although sometimes they can get quite fired up... something obviously isn't working!), find something wrong with neo-pagans, and, if I'm ever a manager of something, will probably kick Satanists out of where I work unless they truly repent and leave their deluded idea of Satan behind.

In fact, excessive pride is the primary reason why people move on to one of these fads: because they think they're better than everyone else, including God, whom they persecute. Paired with ignorance, this generally doesn't happen, but is a deadly combination nonetheless. When they realise spirituality occurring, however, that's when the transitioning occurs.

Atheists tend to use the term "enlightened" and its variants. They claim to be enlightened because they pretend to be liberated. Paired with ignorance, they use the term. But, as I may have said earlier, you are never fully in control of your body. Either God is in charge, or Satan. No middle ground. In this case, I feel enlightened to know that God is in charge and that he isn't going to screw me over, unlike my experiences when Satan was in charge.

Examine yourself, and if your prejudice against God isn't too strong, I suggest you find someone who can help you. If your prejudice is too strong, however, you may find yourself looking into one of the "New Age" religions for "enlightenment"... all the while Satan is still in charge.

Next time, I hope to cover some more, maybe hate, prejudice, or something else if I can work something out. In the meantime, how about some neo-pagan wisdom?

<@GreaseMonkey> when evolutionism came out, it took off with a big bang.
<@nenolod> your pun sucks
<@nenolod> that is all

That's not an excuse to make a one-off comment after you staying silent and me staying away for months, nenolod. You should know better. Running the network is not an excuse to be arrogant; in fact, it's a good excuse to abstain from that.

Gods of atheism: Time

If you've ignored my last post on this subject, I suggest you read it now. Yesterday I started a series about the gods of atheism: ignorance. Hopefully it summed up that many atheists willfully ignore the fact that they're being fed lies. And now we move on to the next part.

Given enough time, one thing might evolve into another. The chances of a mutation occuring are quite low, one in a billion for a successful, single-CATG-pair mutation, let's say (it's in the millions or billions, I just can't remember). Now, that's when a cell duplicates, so it'd probably happen a few times in your life. But the information in your DNA is so complex that it'd take a LOT of time for one thing to properly mutate into another.

OK, I know that each of us have 23 chromosome pairs, making 46 in total.

Let's assume that 1% of the DNA is uncommon between partners, that we have one trillion CATG pairs per chromosome, and that all chromosomes are of equal length. (They're not. This just simplifies the argument.) Let's also say that the 1% of common DNA is evenly distributed between partners.

I would probably use a Poisson distribution assuming I could be bothered. The thing is, I can't, so I'm going to take a wild guess. Assume that 5 CATG pairs mutate. That's 5 out of 46,000,000,000,000. Let's take the 1%, and assume that 1% of it changes, leaving us with 4,600,000,005 out of 46,00O,000,000,000. Not much difference there, right? (The O marks where the 4,600,000,005 starts.)

46,000,000,000,000 / 4,600,000,005 = 9999.9999891304342 (or 10,000 up to 4dp). Assuming a linear approach, and that all humans have a baby on their 19th birthday and have sex with people exactly their age, it would take a minimum of 190,000 years (up from 3dp) for the DNA to change into another specimen, assuming that all DNA combinations work. However, that's assuming that the set of common DNA changes every time. It doesn't. We have to work on that 5 out of 46 trillion.

46,000,000,000,000 / 5 = 9,200,000,000,000. That's how many pairs of people it would take (total people = 18,400,000,000,000), assuming no uncommon DNA this time, to have any chance of raising the uncommon DNA up to that level.

How do we reach that number? Let's start with one pair of people. Let's assume that everyone gives birth to quadruplets, or two pairs, and that they only have intercourse once in their life. It would take 43.06521 iterations (round it up to 44 as they're iterations) to end up with that many partners. Now, 44*19 = 836 years to reach that population. Then we'd need another 836 years to come up with something completely different.

Assuming the odds of giving birth to quadruplets is 1 in 200,000. We have this occuring about 2^43 times. The odds of this happening every time is 200,000^(2^43) which equals (I am using GNU bc here.):

Runtime error (func=(main), adr=17): exponent too large in raise

Ouch. Try 10 iterations.

200000^(2^10)
17976931348623159077293051907890247336179769789423065727343008115773\
26758055009631327084773224075360211201138798713933576587897688144166\
22492847430639474124377767893424865485276302219601246094119453082952\
08500576883815068234246288147391311054082723716335051068458629823994\
72459384797163048353563296242241372160000000000000000000000000000000\
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000\
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000\
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5429 digits. That is painful. And it's only 10 iterations. As you can see, my theory just isn't going to work in that short timeframe of 836*2 = 1672 years.

Now, I can't be bothered raising the odds to 50% to come up with something half-plausible, but as you can probably see, I would need to supply a lot of time. I am aware that this doesn't cover everything, but here's a best-case scenario, with a very strong lower limit, and very strict conditions. Of course, as you should know, DNA gives instructions on how to reproduce properly, and if these are tampered with, then they shouldn't be able to reproduce.

However, there is the point that we apparently share 98.5% of our DNA with a particular ape, the closest match found. Apparently we also share 40% of our DNA with lettuce and 60% of our DNA with bananas, and that a grape has more chromosomes than a human being. But given two truly random streams of DNA (which aren't going to reproduce unless you want to apply some pathetically unlikely odds), odds are they'll have a 25% similarity. But how does this scale work exactly, and are they using the same scale? Of course there'll be a close similarity, otherwise at least one won't reproduce.

From what I can establish, there is no one-to-one way of comparing DNA from two separate species, due to the differences in chromosome lengths and counts. Comparisons between human DNA and ape DNA range from 80% to 99% depending entirely on the scale used.

Quote (source):

Nobel prize–winning scientist George Wald once wrote,

However improbable we regard this event [evolution], or any of the steps it involves, given enough time, it will almost certainly happen at least once [...] . Time is the hero of the plot [...] . Given so much time, the impossible becomes possible, the possible becomes probable, the probable becomes virtually certain. One only has to wait; time itself performs miracles.

Time didn't make me able to look someone in the eye. My father has tried that many times. For nearly 18 years I couldn't do it, at least not very well.

Here's something else in that article:

What have scientists calculated the probability to be of an average- size protein occurring naturally? Walter Bradley, Ph.D. materials science, and Charles Thaxton, Ph.D. chemistry, calculated that the probability of amino acids forming into a protein is

4.9 x 10^-191.

This is well beyond the laws of probability (1x10^-50), and a protein is not even close to becoming a complete living cell. Sir Fred Hoyle, Ph.D. astronomy, and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Professor of Applied Math and Astronomy, calculated that the probability of getting a cell by naturalistic processes is

1 x 10^-40,000.

No matter how large the environment one considers, life cannot have had a random beginning [...] . There are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in (10²⁰)²⁰⁰⁰ = 10^40,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.

Atheists, when encountered with the problem of evolution being highly unlikely, decide to twist the odds in their favour. How do they do this? Simple. They add lots of time to the equation, and all of a sudden their odds look almost ever-so-slightly considerable. (Also, they add lots of space to the equation, too.) I've heard the term "time worship" before, and this is precisely what it is: adding time.

Unfortunately for these atheists, there's evidence to suggest that we have only been here about 6,000 years, and the evidence pretty much rules out the possibility of there being a billion years. E.g. the age of the sun. In 1976, a group of Russian astronomers found out that the sun isn't a middle-aged star, but a very, very young one, no older than 7,500 years.

So where do you find the time? Well, it might explain it in another solar system, but not here. Either leave it as speculation for somewhere else, or find a better theory (and by better I don't mean "anything which doesn't involve a creator", and neither should you).