"The meaning of the world is the separation of wish and fact." - KURT GÖDEL
"According to Peirce's doctrine of fallibilism, the conclusions of science are always tentative. The rationality of the scientific method does not depend on the certainty of its conclusions, but on its self-corrective character: by continued application of the method science can detect and correct its own mistakes, and thus eventually lead to the discovery of truth".
A guiding principle for accepting claims of catastrophic global events, miracles, incredible healing, invisible friends, or fill in the blank is:
“extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” - Carl Sagan
"Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable." - H. L. Mencken
I would add irrational and highly delusional to the mix when faith requires one to accept magical violations of the well known, well tested or easily demonstrated laws of Nature. - PWL
"Science is Progress and the Future. Faith is regression to the Dark Ages." - PWL
“It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.” - Carl Sagan
"It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." - Carl Sagan
"Two important characteristics of maps should be noticed. A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness." - Alfred Korzybski
"Science is a search for basic truths about the Universe, a search which develops statements that appear to describe how the Universe works, but which are subject to correction, revision, adjustment, or even outright rejection, upon the presentation of better or conflicting evidence." - James Randi
"Hypotheses are nets: only he who casts will catch." - Novalis
"Nullius in verba. Take no one's word for it." - Motto of the Royal Society
"I'm trying to find out NOT how Nature could be, but how Nature IS." - Richard Feynman
"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." - Thomas Henry Huxley
“A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.” Albert Einstein
"Science is empirical. Knowing the answer means nothing. Testing your knowledge means everything." - Lawrence Krauss
"Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism - and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency." - Stephen Jay Gould
"Science is best defined as a careful, disciplined, logical search for knowledge about any and all aspects of the universe, obtained by examination of the best available evidence and always subject to correction and improvement upon discovery of better evidence. What's left is magic. And it doesn't work." - James Randi
Debate between renowned journalist and author Christopher Hitchens and Dr. Barry Brummett (Chair, Department of Communication Studies, University of Texas at Austin) on the resolution “Religion has been a positive force in culture,” June 4, 2011. Organized by the Department of English Language and Literature, University of Waterloo (http://www.english.uwaterloo.ca/), as part of the Literature, Rhetoric, and Values Conference, 3-5 June 2011.
Moderated by Jian Ghomeshi, an award-winning broadcaster, writer, musician and producer. He is the host and co-creator of the national daily talk program, Q, on CBC Radio One and CBC TV (http://www.cbc.ca/q/). Since its inception in 2007, Q has garnered the largest audience of any cultural affairs program in Canada and has become the highest-rated show in its morning time slot in CBC history.
In Part 1, Jian Ghomeshi introduces the two debaters.
Preliminary video-editing by Ken Cooper. Final edits by MetaMedia Productions, Waterloo, Ontario.
The Department gratefully acknowledges the support of a Social Sciences and Humanities Council Aid to Conferences Grant for the Conference on Literature, Rhetoric, and Values.
The Elite Cult members of Government, have been using peoples delusions and fears to trick them as elites of all political persuasions have done throughout history. In this case Obama is using peoples very real god delusions and fears of retribution from their alleged god as a means of connecting with and conning them. Obama also plays the climate doomsday wild claims fear card as well quite frequently.
“I will not respect a book of lies. I will not tolerate intolerance.
…
What we are witnessing are efforts by authorities to confer special secular and legal privilege on the intangible aura of sacredness — a figment of the imagination of deluded believers, which they insist all we non-believers must honor.
OK, stop the presses, there is an article about study done by NCAR on the simulation of winds and how that might move water in dramatic ways. That is all fine and good except for the connection to the following religious notions and the fact that US Government Funds were used in this obviously religious study in violation of the strict Separation of Church and State in the USA.
“The parting of the waters described in the book of Exodus that enabled Moses and the Israelites to escape the pharaoh’s army is possible, computer simulations run by researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of Colorado at Boulder show.
To test the theory that the biblical account may have depicted actual events, the researchers studied maps of the region, archaeological records and satellite measurements to find a topographical feature where such an event might have been possible. They settled on an area south of the Mediterranean Sea where some oceanographers say a branch of the Nile River drained into what was called the Lake of Tanis, a coastal lagoon 3,000 years ago. Read the rest of this entry »
“When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are to entering to possess, and drives out before you many nations, and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy. Do not all any of them to live. This is what you are to do to them: break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their trees and burn them in the fire. For you are a people chosen by the Lord over all others on the face of the Earth.” – From the Old Testament of the Bible, Deuteronomy 7: 1-2, 5-6.
When God is on our side we can commit any crime. We are absolved individually from that crime by believing that we have a higher sanction and that is the danger of religion in that it allows people to do that, it allows them to kill without a shred of conscience. ” – Kevin Annett, former minister
Kevin Annett was expelled from the United Church for bring this matter of their crimes to their attention. Finally a priest with some actual ethics and morals who wouldn’t take it up the ass from his church hierarchy. Read the rest of this entry »
“Jesus Never Saved Anyone From Dying, Not Even Himself. Three Day Rotting Dead Corpses Shall Not Rise From The Dead, So Sayest Natural Biology! Sorry Zombie Fans.“
Conversation with Richard Dawkins and Steven Weinberg.
Part 1 of 8.
“The whole history of the last thousands of years has been a history of religious persecutions and wars, pogroms, jihads, crusades. I find it all very regrettable, to say the least.”
“Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”
“I can hope that this long sad story, this progression of priests and ministers and rabbis and ulamas and imams and bonzes and bodhisattvas, will come to an end. I hope this is something to which science can contribute … it may be the most important contribution that we can make.”
“This is one of the great social functions of science — to free people from superstition.”
– Steven Weinberg, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin, 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics
All belief is religion as belief isn’t based upon verifiable knowledge.
“A United Kingdom court has ruled that a man can take his employer to court on the grounds that he was discriminated against because of his views on climate change. …
Mr Nicholson successfully argued that his moral values about the environment should be recognised under the same laws that protect religious beliefs.
In the landmark ruling, Justice Michael Burton said that a belief in man-made climate change is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the religion and belief regulations.” Beliefs on climate like Religion, court rules
The word “belief” is a problematic word with so many definitions that you have to pretty much define what you mean either by the context or by direction definition.
Generally when I’m down on the word belief I specifically mean “religious belief” or “supernatural belief” and not a belief that my car is still parked where it is.
I don’t think it’s responsible to say that “I believe in Newton’s Gravity Theory” as to use the word belief to talk about facts mis-communicates to the masses of people out there without scientific training. It’s better to use other words. Your “belief” that letting go of a stone has nothing to do with whether or not the stone falls.
Common uses of belief basically mean that you don’t know or don’t have evidence and that you assume it is true anyway. Since you do have evidence that dropping a stone on earth will have it fall (unless it’s otherwise supported or blocked) using the word belief is a mistake. One instead should say “I know that when I let go of a stone at chest level, it will fall (assuming that it’s not supported or blocked in some other manner).” This has clarity.
It is a big mistake for Richard Dawkins to be using the word belief the way he does with regards to scientific knowledge. He should be more careful and define his terms more precisely when talking about scientific knowledge and what is know and what isn’t since the religious masses use the word belief differently.
Sure people have a “belief” that X person will be a good political leader, but that is an entirely different category and meaning of belief than “belief that god exists” which is a statement that has no evidence and will never have any evidence in all probability not even mentioning all the evidence against the possibility of any gods existing.
As for climate change caused by man the science isn’t settled and if you think it is that is your “belief” and not a valid scientific statement. The more I learn the more I learn that we don’t yet have conclusive answers and that politics of extreme environmentalism started it and now that mainstream politicians have gotten into the act it’s now even more highly suspect. So I’d say show the evidence in a context where it can be audited by anyone which means showing all the data, raw and manipulated, detailed and comprehensive explanations for the manipulations, the statistics methods involved and why they were chosen, the software and the data used to create the graphs, all the scientists notes, photographs, and other materials used in the preparation of all the science papers. It’s clear that climate scientists (and others) have not been up to the standards of other fields and that all publically funded science needs to have it’s standards of openness and auditability raised.
I’m a very strong show me the hard evidence guy. Belief has no place in science nor in the communication of science nor in the science education process unless it specifically means “we think it could be true or false but we don’t just know yet”.
Believing that murder is wrong is a statement of one’s moral values and the word belief is often used although I’d question it’s use there. I’d not say it that way. I’d rather be more specific and say that “Murder is wrong because human life is valuable.”
Is saying “gravity sucks” a statement of “belief” or is it a succinct statement of the known laws of Gravity? I pick the latter.
“The relationship between belief and knowledge is that a belief is knowledge if the belief is true, and if the believer has a justification (reasonable and necessarily plausible assertions/evidence/guidance) for believing it is true. … Later epistemologists have questioned the “justified true belief” definition, and some philosophers have questioned whether “belief” is a useful notion at all.” – wikipedia
So “belief” is shaky ground at best, and as such it’s best to avoid using it when speaking generally about science or anything that is a statement of objective reality or it’s nature. I also use it carefully. My main use is in talking about the belief and faith stricken members of society.
Is that my belief? No, it’s a precautionary guidance principle based on knowledge gained from far too many conversations with the belief stricken who set well placed linguistic and philosophical traps.
Over a period of 28 hours or so this long weekend I had a conversation with someone, CK, I met on Face Book who shared a common technical interest. We had a number of other exchanges with each other over the past few months but this one was different partly for it’s brutal honesty and partly since CK choose to jump out of what was likely the most important conversation of his life.
I managed to save a copy of the conversation moments before CK deleted my access (it was on his wall) and thus ending the conversation with us two. Likely he’s busy gathering agreement with his friends that I’m an evil no good person when in fact it’s likely that I’m one of his best new friends he’s ever had. Be that as it may, here is a non edited transcript (spelling corrections were made). Oh, from what I can tell CK is a young adult male with a gay lover and a roman catholic upbringing.
I hope this helps when talking with religious delusionals of all sorts but christians in particular since we deal with dispensing the christian miracle mythologies here.
I’ll add comments and expand my responses and even critique my own responses over the next few weeks or so as I have time to reread the transcript below and think longer it.
All the best and live long and prosper in peace. Your feed back and comments are appreciated.
PWL
ps. This Jesus and Mo comic is appropriate since CK’s solution for “resolving the incompatibilities” between science and religion is to become insane by fully embracing “cognitive dissonance” and not working to resolve the conflict even though he claims to work towards that end. More on this in the conversation. He also, as you will see, negotiates his way between these two incompatibilities by accepting part of Objectivism (it’s basic three axioms of existence, identity and consciousness) while maintaining his “faithful belief” in his invisible super friends even though acknowledging that objectivism provides “proof” that there are no gods other than those in human minds. Thus CK’s religious driven insanity.
CK: just wants to find SOMEONE who shares his philosophies… lol
PWL: What philosophy are yours?
CK: Except for the stance on matters of sexuality and religion, I’m a staunch objectivist. Go Ayn Rand!
I believe cognitive dissonance is the greatest evil in the universe.
That’s a good start to the summary. In essence, I believe you must accept a small set of axioms as true, and then use inductive logic based on that. If only I could put my axioms in words… lol
PWL: I am also a big fan of Ayn Rand.
People do work well together and can in many circumstances work towards their mutual benefit.
What do you mean by cognitive dissonance?
I’m confused by your sexuality considering you seem to be very catholic… seems mutually incompatible to me.
I’m confused by your religious stance and Ayn Rand, objectivism proves that your mythical god doesn’t exist and is just an artifact of your mind wanting comfort or what not. So you’re not a staunch objectivist if you believe in the mythical invisible super beings and thus the supernatural realm.
The real world doesn’t care about our philosophies since it doesn’t care about anything.
They are not axioms if they are not in words…
BUT then Leaps of Faith know no boundaries or limits and ignore any that are pointed out. That is the essential nature of a leap of faith, it destroys actual rational thinking with the emotional non-rational leap of faith.
“Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. The “ideas” or “cognitions” in question may include attitudes and beliefs, the awareness of one’s behavior, and facts. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, or by justifying or rationalizing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.[1] Cognitive dissonance theory is one of the most influential and extensively studied theories in social psychology.” – Cognitive Dissonance.
So if you believe “cognitive dissonance” is the greatest evil in the universe why do you practice it?
Why do you consider it evil?
MD: wow :{
CK: Sexuality: Rand didn’t exactly believe they should wait until they found the right one, and then stay with them the rest of their life. Yes, objectivism does reject the almighty.
When I say cognitive dissonance, I mean holding two apparently exclusive beliefs wihout batting an eye — it’s an offense to reason. In my case (objectivist Catholic), although you’d think they are exclusive, but the reason I believe they are not is that I do not blindly believe — I observe the positive effects of faith, I observe the evidence of miracles, and I make judgments for myself. I consider the beliefs and try to reason and justify them.
If I were to just say, “well, it is” THEN faith and reason would be exclusive. But to examine faith and try to reason about it, why you believe it even when you know science, then you have used reason. You just use inductive logic rather than deductive logic.
PWL: Actually you must use actual repeatable verifiable evidence not logic or some belief stricken dogma system…
As the saying goes you are mistaken about a great many things CK.
There are no real positive effects of faith that are not available without faith!
In the video you prove the speed of light with a microwaved piece of chocolate.
Given the speed of light and that nothing can go faster than it, not even god this means that god can’t be omnipotent, omnipresent, nor omniscient. Since those are defining characteristics of they invisible friends known as god must have in order to be a god, god can’t possibly exist. Enjoy the chocolate while your god delusion melts down.
Sorry, that also means no FTL warp drive for all you sci-fans and Star Trek Fans. No, and no worm holes for you Star Gaters either – you’d be crushed and torn apart in an instant, oh wait you are… never to be reintegrated again, sorry Too Much Critical Information Lost (TMCIL).
Looking on the bright side of life, chocolate tastes awesome especially when microwaved.
Many of the sentences in the bible and beliefs uttered at church are in fact designed to be rules that the congregation – aka cult members – can use to identify members of the cult and to more importantly identify those who are not members of the cult and to whom they can treat differently, often harshly differently with torture, murder, rape, death and nasty killing methods. The koran does this with us heathen atheists and anti-theists. The bible does it with the quote above and many others.
Actually what it is giving is a practical and effective rule for keeping members of a cult, any cult, in the cult when their family comes to attempt to save them from their doom as a member of the cult. The cult makes it ok to murder your own family members if they try to extract you out of the cult or to not follow the leadership of the cult “lord”, whomever that might be: jesus, hitler, stalin, bush, jones, the pope, … the list is essentially endless although groups without this don’t count.
Thanks, I’ll be using to in a very important letter to my evangelical young earth creationist zombie jesus death cult focused preacher sister to put into her own “literal” taking of the bible how and why she obliterated my relationships with over eighteen people in my family. It’s her faith that destroyed our family of eight siblings, a still living mother, and all the inlaws and their offspring. Very sad situation which this passage clarifies directly to the heart of it. Thanks. Peace.
“While the GPL powers as much as 77% of all SourceForge projects, Eric Raymond argues that the GPL is ‘a confession of fear and weakness’ that ‘slows down open-source adoption’ because of the fear and uncertainty the GPL provokes. Raymond’s argument seems to be that if openness is the winning strategy, an argument Michael Tiemann advocates, wouldn’t it make sense to use the most open license? Geir Magnusson of the Apache Software Foundation suggests that there are few ‘pure’ GPL-only open-source projects, as GPL-prone developers have to ‘modify it in some way to get around the enforcement of Freedom(SM) in GPL so people can use the project.’ But the real benefit of Apache-style licensing may not be for developers at all, and rather accrue to businesses hoping to drive adoption of their products: Apache licensing may encourage broader, deeper adoption than the GPL. The old GPL vs. BSD/Apache debate may not be about developer preferences so much as new business realities.”
Wow finally!!! The truth is said in public clearly about the vile pernicious bankrupt philosophy of Richard Stallman: enforced freedom and enforced sharing.
I think we live in a…universe…in which the GPL is unnecessary rather than futile. Mind you, I am not claiming the GPL is entirely useless. It’s a signaling behavior, like wearing a crucifix or yarmulke or pentagram; it helps build trust groups. But it has costs, too.
It [the GPL and it’s GNU Cult Members] creates a lot of needless fear from potential allies and users who suspect they won’t be able to control their exposure, if they let it in… Is the GPL‘s utility as a form of in-group signaling worth the degree to which [of] fear and uncertainty about it slows down open-source adoption? Increasingly, I think the answer is no.
The GPL may be a community-building signaling device, but it is also a confession of fear and weakness. To believe that it matters, you have to believe that you live in a…universe where closed-source development is such an attractive proposition that you have to punish people for trying to move to it.
BSD wins for open source business hands down since it lets the developers (the only ones who actually matter from our point of view) do what ever the heck they want without being forced by communistic licensing terms of the GPL to give away our competitive advantage!!! If you don’t like that too bad for you. This is our point of view. You don’t have to like it or accept it for yourself but just don’t force your commune upon our income earning potential. Thanks.
Che-Stallman, Commune Overlord and Dictator of The GNU Communistic GPL Viral Infective Software Cult Clearly we don’t advise anyone to put their code under the GPL license as that means you’ve joined the dark side of the force. Why? For the reasons listed in this articles and others that describe how the GPL license is pernicious and a viral infection. It also imposes serious limitations when one wants to use otherwise good open source code within ones projects – it means that one can’t mix any GPL code into your own program without it being infected with the GPL virus. What a waste.
Che Guevara, a communist militant who was involved in the murders of many thousands of people. Although Richard Che-Stallman might not have murdered any people it’s clear that his cult has had a massive disruptive effect preventing open source developers from maximizing the potential of GPLed software due to the insane communistic restrictions of the GNU project and it’s GPL philosophy of Enforced Freedom which is a Faux Freedom. Heck, you can’t even load a GPLed DLL without infecting your code!!! How crazy is that!!!
Embrace Truly Free Software, BSD, MIT, Apache, et. al. (where et. al. excludes GPL like restrictive licenses) to ensure your freedom.
Uncouth Hippie Icky Richard Stallman, the Publicly Rude Slob-Icky Poster Child of Open Source.
Get a bathroom dude. Wash your hands with soap for ten minutes Ricahrd. Now we know NEVER EVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES to shake Richard Stallman’s hands as we know that he doesn’t even care where he puts them. Tasty toe jam there Richard? Ick dude, get some manners Richard Stallman. Ok this is just too much to handle. Ick.
Most users never care about code. They simply want their system to work. It’s programmers who care about code.
If I want something you GPLers created I simply use it without paying you anything. There are ways around the GPL rules. Simply stick the darn program into it’s own space and only make essential minimal if any changes to it. Keep it a separate program wrapped in a protective condom to keep the GPL virus from infecting my code with it’s silly and stupid license terms that would convert my code into the GPL commune. No thanks, my code stays mine.
I have contributed some of my code to the GPL but always I have a dual license with the BSD license providing the true freedom for other coders (the only ones who matter are coders not end users) and even users.
Many projects are BSD-style licensed without the need to enforce sharing. That’s what the GPL does, it enforces sharing but it creates a nasty pernicious situation where if it’s included into your program ALL your code in that program becomes infected with the GPL virus license. Why? That’s totally insane terms. Just because I compile a source file into my program space ALL my other code in that space MUST become GPLed. Insanity.
So as a result wrap GPL code in separate program spaces to keep it from infecting other code.
Now, let’s compare that with BSD, Apache, MIT, the truly free license styles. They are truly free since I, a programmer, can include as much or as little of their source code in any program space I choose without their license infecting the rest of the code in that space. So they are non-infective and since they don’t require me to contribute my changes back to their projects I am free do so as I please: share or not.
I as a programmer dedicated to excellence in software for my clients do care about my end users, they after all provide my income. Producing the best software for them is paramount. However, giving them the source code won’t make the software any better for they are not programmers!!! So they really don’t care about the code. You just have to get that. The vast majority of end users are not programmers and never will be and really don’t care about the source code – it’s just gobbly gook to them. It’s geek without a translation matrix. What end users care about is great software.
Furthermore, more often than not the quality of open source software is, well, to be polite, a bit clunky and full of errors. That’s fine, you get what you pay for and since it’s free one must accept it as it is and if one chooses one can fix it as needed or even improve upon it as one is inspired.
The GPL is mainly aimed at people like Richard Stallman: DORKY PROGRAMMERS!!! Well, the vast majority of human beings will never program a computer. Certainly they’ll never want to go through the horrors of getting make files to actually work. It’s too geek for them. They are actually humans not geeks.
The GPL may actually make a lot of sense to people who are like Richard Stallman: dorky programmers who want a cause. You do know of course that Stallman is a hippie. Have you ever met him? I’ve meet him a number of times and he’s basically a geekie hippie with a cause. Great for him and his commune cult followers. Join his cult if you want, release your code as GPL if you want. Just don’t expect me to do the same. Just don’t expect me to be happy that you put so many restrictions on it that I have to alter my build process so as to not include your source in the same program as my code. Eesh. Annoying.
Anyway the work around the GPL is to simply keep GPLed programs within the condom protection of their own program space and to enhance them as needed to provide access to the real programs that are doing the primary work load: my code. That interface might be CLI in which case missing CLI options are added.
What’s really needed is something that is between CLI and having the code in my space. Sorta like a DLL loading but wrapped in a protective condom so that the GPL viral license terms don’t infect my application code. Maybe a program that loads up the GPL DLLs into it’s own space and then communicates with a BSD dll in my program space via shared memory. That’s the kind of protective bubble that’s needed to fully take advantage of ALL and ANY function in GPLed space. Not only would function entry points be visible but data structures would also be visible and usable from my program space through the protective layers always keeping the GPL infected code within it’s own memory space.
You see the lengths that you GPLers force people to go to just to take advantage of your code – some of which is good but most of which is well, to be polite, not. We have to jump through silly hoops that just mess up the beauty of code. That’s another reason that GPLed code is just a bad idea: it brings it’s ugliness to my code because hacks are needed to get around the license terms without actually violating them. I prefer to follow the rules when possible as it just makes life easier.
Ok, so we’ve established that you think that the GPL is hot damn and I think it’s communistic. Of course you’d like it as you gain benefits from being a member in the commune and don’t see the dark side of your jones town like commune with Richard Stallman as the nefarious one.
Ok, BSD, Apache, MIT, … are truly free licenses. Take the Apache project for example (or any of the big BSD projects or even a small project like minix3). These are all unrestricted licenses that don’t force sharing upon their members yet they still have people contribute freely. You see non-forced sharing is more free than forced sharing. When someone is forced to share under the GPL they are doing so against their will, I know many who have grudgingly shared. Yes, you counter with they don’t have to use your GPLed software and in some senses you are right about that, they don’t and I know many who don’t. However you falsely market your GPL software license as being “open source” when it’s not in fact “open”. The fact is that it’s “open with hooks into your flesh” as it REQUIRES you to share should you distribute your code as most/many programmers do who want to make a living from coding must.
If it’s truly open then I AS THE PROGRAMMER can choose what I want to do: (1a) including it in my program space or (2) keep it private for whatever reasons or (3) share it as I choose to or (4) contribute back as I choose to or …. many other choices that are LEFT UP TO ME!!!
Not the commune. When the commune gets to choose then it’s not free it’s communistic!!! You see when folks like you come out of the woodwork insisting that I follow your communities rules you are the ones enforcing the commune and being communistic! My mom came from a country that fell to the communists, I know many people who actually lived in real communist societies and yes some are even programmers and they have no hesitation in saying that the GPL is communistic in nature since it values the commune more than the individuals. Sure the propaganda would lead you to think otherwise however that’s just typical communistic propaganda, the official party line.
Anyway who cares really? I don’t use GPL code whenever possible. When I’m forced to use it either by it being required for a project or if it’s the only working solution out there it must be wrapped in protective condom layers so it doesn’t infect the rest of our code or other truly free code that we might want to merge with it – but we can’t merge them since the GPL virus wins in those situations resulting in our need to protect the truly free code from the nasty pernicious viral spreading of GPL.
So do as you do and continue your commitment to your communistic ways in your community of the GPL commune. I’m sure you’ll do fine.
I prefer the ways of true freedom unrestricted by being forced to share code. Apache doesn’t force me to share the code back so why should any GPL project do that? For no reason other than Richard Stallman’s geekie hippie communistic leftist agenda. So be it. We’ll wrapper the heck out of it and project ourselves and find alternatives to the GPL.
LLVM rules. LLVM proves that the GPL philosophy isn’t needed to make successful truly free and open source.
May you go in peace and leave us freedom fighters alone with our true freedom. Stallmanistic Communism not wanted here.
Just for fun:
Make sure to check out the list of links to “Tools [BSD Style]” at the bottom of the right column —>.
“We are risen apes not fallen angels.” – Andy Thomson
Science and Religion are highly incompatible for science is based upon the actual evidence of facts of objective reality while religion is based on nothing but faith that crazy ideas that have no evidence are true. Evidence verses nothing but faith. Science wins.
These photos and video where taken in Vancouver, BC, Canada a few weeks ago. Yes, it is a real surveillance helicopter… just don’t know who’s they are flying it for… Vancouver Police? CSIS (Canada’s spy agency)? RCMP? News? Someone else?
The chopper was flying near Vancouver General Hospital however it’s NOT a medical chopper as it didn’t land on the hospital like many choppers do. No, it circled for a while, maybe five to ten minutes… My Cannon G9 camera wasn’t going to get any better shots… need an SLR with a telephoto lens for that… besides I wanted closeups with the photo function of the camera. Anyway these are max optical zoom with digital zoom due to cropping and image magnification… otherwise no filters or touch ups… I tried a sharpen but it didn’t really help as the G9 is a bit grainy when you zoom in lots.
Here are some close up shots taken with the same camera in photo mode.
Can anyone tell what kind of chopper this is? What kind of camera is that? What are it’s capabilities? Whose chopper is it?
Definition of tea bagging: the act of lowering one’s balls onto someones face, or into their mouth while they are laying down. Kind of resembles dipping a tea bag into a hot cup of water.
Ha ha.
What is the name of the guest? Cox? Ha ha. Gotta love it.
Oh, there’s more… sure makes for excellent comedy on the nightly news. I gather that it’s clear to many now that The Daily Show and The Colbert Report have influenced mainstream news to have some comedy. It sure is fun.
Not done yet… there are more…
These with Keith Olberman are just hilarious… almost every line is a spicy zinger!!!
At the end they entrancingly have a couple of sentences about how this dim sun won’t cool the Earth enough to compensate for their imagined global warming. It’s just a disappointing brush off and not a serious treatment.
Who can slice and dice this news report? Please do. What is correct and what is just false? Why?
Sunspot maximum on left, sunspot minimum on right.
Even people who believe in Darwin can have delusional beliefs such as this Christian narrator of this BBC show “Did Darwin Kill God?”. Of course it does, it’s the last nail in the cross!
WARNING DELUSIONAL MATERIAL PRELEVANT IN THIS SERIES OF VIDEOS!!! DON’T LET YOUR BRAIN FALL OUT OF YOUR HEAD WITH THESE CRAZY DELUSIONAL BELIEFS OF GOD.
As the Hitchens points out Paul Edwards is evil precisely because he (Paul Edwards) embraces the notion of being a slave of “god” who will do whatever “god” tells him to do even if it’s committing murder and genocide because that’s what “god” might want. Since “anything is possible” with “god” “god” might want his slaves to commit murder and genocide and in fact the “bible” does advocate such actions in the name of “god” – thus it’s evil. Being a slave to “god” is to be evil because it removes your responsibility for your actions by deferring them to your imaginary super friend who ordered it or who forgives you. Read the rest of this entry »
The problem with conspiracies is that there can be truth to them even while they are stitched together in paranoid delusions. How do you tell if they are really occurring or not? Hmmm…
Warp drives have been the focus of science fiction writers for decades. But scientists kept them at arms length until 1994 when the idea was put on a firm (ish) theoretical footing by the Mexican physicist, Michael Alcubierre. His thinking is that while relativity prevents faster-than-light travel relative to the fabric of space time, it places no restriction on the speed at which regions of spacetime may move relative to each other.
Yes, imagination is wonderful. Nature is beautifully harsh though.
… Physicists have long wondered what would happen if you threw quantum mechanics into the mix? … They … studied a property of a quantum field called the renormalised stress-energy tensor which should be well-behaved under normal circumstances. But in the front wall of Alcubierre’s bubble travelling at superluminal speeds, the renormalised stress-energy tensor grows exponentially.
That strongly implies that such a bubble would be unstable. So it looks increasingly likely that, after a brief few years of excitement, Alcubierre’s warp drive is impossible.
To this someone replied:
When the word “impossibility” appears in discussions re science, I am always reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s quote:
“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.“
When “impossibility” is ignored and Arthur C. Clarke’s quotes start flying I’m always reminded of The Sagan Principle which states that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” which certainly applies to here and in general to FTL.
Do you object that Newton proves that it’s impossible given the Earth Moon System for a human being al natural to jump from the Earth to the Moon (without the aid of technology, aka space ships)? I gather that you’ll bring out Author’s old men quote for this case too. Gravity Sucks in so many ways, and one of those ways is in keeping you firmly within the Earth’s gravity well (unless you are one of the few to reach escape velocity doing the rest of us a favor).
The Fabric of Objective Reality sucks in so many ways. Not traveling faster than light is one of them.
Optimism or pessimism are both irrelevant to the Nature of Objective Reality. The Universe doesn’t care about us, as it doesn’t care at all about anything.
Each aspect of Nature, each Law of Nature that we learn is what is actually going on gives us insights into what is actually possible and what is impossible. Nature is the limiter not our imaginations. Clearly our imaginations run amok all the time (see Amok Time episode of Star Trek for an example of this).
When you willfully ignore hard earned scientific knowledge that can be tested, that has been tested, you might find yourself crossing into that no man’s land of fantasy and delusion. You are not alone as many if not most humans live their lives in the land of delusional fantasies that simply can’t be true given the harsh Laws of Nature, which are the very Laws of Nature that enable you to exist!
So be optimistic or pessimistic all you want. Nature is the final judge of what is possible and what is impossible. Not that Nature is an is. I choose to embrace Nature in all of it’s beauty and horror rather than have delusional fantasies about it. I save my fantasies for entertainment (like the upcoming FTL fantasy Star Trek movie out in about a month) and private relationships.
So enjoy your invisible friend of FTL all you want, just know that no matter how much you enjoy it your enjoyment won’t alter the Fabric of Nature one iota.
A really great series of videos that hit back slicing and dicing the silly inane beliefs of creationists with hard hitting science. As someone with a sister and brother in law who are young earth rapture creationist preachers this series of videos is excellent potential deprogramming materials for the creationist delusional insanity. Enjoy.
These videos were made for the communal and greater good. All these videos are copyright free for educational purposes, feel free to mirror these videos with or without accreditation. Part of a series of videos exposing the funny stupidity of creationists and why they deserve to be laughed at. In each case the creationist statements are shown to be outrageously stupid by even the most rudimentary knowledge of science. Creationist are tackled at every level from the scientific illiterates like venomfangx who want to play in the scientific arena but don’t even understand the words they use, to convicted fraudsters like Kent Hovind who abuse the scientifical illiteracy of people like venomfangx to dupe them out of money. An enterprise which is clearly very successful as merely the tax Hovind didn’t pay was about a million dollars. Hovind himself has no discernible academic education, and gets by solely on using his confident delivery of scientific terms to convince his audiences that he knows what hes talking about. Then of course there are the professional such as the Discovery Institute, the hub and founders of the Intelligent design movement. After the humiliating rout of ID in court where it was found that ‘ID is not science’, and that ‘ID is only a relabelling of creationism’ the Discovery Institute do not utter the word once in their latest promotional video. Instead they now have decided to ‘teach the controversy’ which is an irony as they are the only people who disagree with evolution. What they are really asking is not to teach the controversy, but to teach their views, which are supported by neither research or evidence, in schools.
Any video with nuclear explosions gets headlined on the first page and has my blessing!
What is clear however is the notion of objective reality as distinct from ourselves. While this isn’t an idea original to Rand it’s the key notion in her objectivism that forms the foundation for the rest which can be taken or cast aside.
The three core axioms of Existence, Consciousness and Identity are irreducible. And again these ideas are not original to Rand.
Yet the combination of these ideas and others is unique to Rand and that is her value to humanity.
The film Knowing pretends that it’s Science Fiction yet is a full on brain injection of the biblical story of the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Arc and the Rapture with a twist which is that “aliens” aka “angels” steal away, well invite away, a small number of human children in a Noah’s Arc and take them to a new planet to start humanity again, a lush Eden with a giant white Tree of Life. Rabbits are along for the ride to show the kiddies how it’s done. Yes, that’s it.
Yes, science can prove there is no god, and in fact has done so. Follow the evidence. e=mc^2 means that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, which means that gods can’t be omnipresent, omnipotent, nor omniscient since those properties would require faster than light travel for the disparate parts of an invisible being to communicate. Thus there is no god. This proof is provide by science.
This is as true as saying that Newton proves that a human being can’t fly or jump to the Earth’s moon without the aid of a spaceship.
Science not just proves facts it can equally disprove things that just can’t possibly be DUE to the very Nature of Nature. Newton, Einstein and others have uncovered hard laws of Nature that PROVE aspects of Nature and at the same time these laws disprove anything that contradicts these laws. This hold true for every hard law of Nature.
As a demonstration of how experiment and laws of Nature “EXCLUDE” possibilities as well as prove them here is a tidbit from a recent discovery quoted verbatim.
The territory where the Higgs boson may be found continues to shrink.The latest analysis of data from the CDF and DZero collider experiments at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermilab now excludes a significant fraction of the allowed Higgs mass range established by earlier measurements. Those experiments predict that the Higgs particle should have a mass between 114 and 185 GeV/c2. Now the CDF and DZero results carve out a section in the middle of this range and establish that it cannot have a mass in between 160 and 170 GeV/c2.
This demonstrates the use of science to PROVE that something can’t be via the use of EXCLUSION FROM POSSIBILITY in OBJECTIVE REALITY.
So many atheists are incorrect in their logic – including Dawkins – when they falsely assert that science can’t disprove anything. It does disprove things all the time! Logic must be connected to objective reality to be viable.
It’s a common mistake in thinking caused by a disconnect of logic from objective reality. All logic must be verified and validated and tested against the actual objective reality. Many philosophies of thinking, most in fact, fail to provide any need to connect with objective reality. Science is one philosophical method that attempts to do just that with a high degree of success. You just have to get that e=mc^2 not only proves things about matter and energy it also disproves by exclusion a LOT MORE by far – in fact it disproves an infinite amount of mind garbage. However, e=mc^2 doesn’t disprove everything which is an even larger infinity, but it goes a long way.
So sorry to those of you with invisible friends your friend is just a chemical drug your brain feeds you to make you feel good.
So sorry to you misguided atheists who think that you can’t prove by exclusion that things can’t be in the actual reality we exist in. We can and science and scientists do all the time! In fact science could not progress if it only could prove positives – now let that twist your brain!
Unlike Pi, this is not circular reasoning and in fact is a key essential aspect of scientific reasoning!
Yes, I’d have to agree with Knuth that “The Lord’s Understanding is Unsearchable” but not because I agree with Knuth’s meaning but because by viewing the meaning from my frames of reference it’s clear that no Lord exists thus it’s understanding isn’t searchable – you can’t search that which doesn’t exist, now can you?
It’s amazing that humans can invent something, The Lord, and then speak about it as if it’s real. This is one of the wonders of the brain, it’s ability to invent realities that are in reality fantasies that don’t even pretend to connect with the actual reality of Nature were we exist. That’s what is so wonderful about science and the scientific method, it takes the notion of testing our notions against Nature to see insights into the otherwise ineffable qualities of existence. It’s too bad that Knuth chooses to ignore reality when it comes to his spiritual existence. Maybe it’s not that he chooses, maybe it’s that he’s inflicted and has no choice?
Professor Donald Knuth visits Google’s Mountain View, CA headquarters to discuss the interactions between faith and science. This event took place on March 16, 2009, as part of the Authors@Google series.
In the fall of 1999, Donald was invited to give six public lectures at MIT on the general subject of relations between faith and science, during which he touched upon such topics as the interaction of randomization and religion, language translation, art and aesthetics, and the 3:16 project. During his talk at Google, Donald will similarly be focusing on the interactions between faith and science.
Unfortunately this talk demonstrates how clearly insane and delusional Professor Knuth turns out to be. Clearly he’s not thought out many of the issues that were presented to him when asked. He’s obviously got an active “god nodule” providing brain pleasure drugs in his brain.
Yes, Dr. Knuth the human brain, as all brains, are computers of a biological kind. To think otherwise is clearly ignoring the evidence. Knuth makes so many ontological errors that it’s not funny. Now how can I trust his computer science? It’s a good thing that I can test that easily as well as the notions of gods with science.
It was a very sad day when I saw this video. A hero became a nut job par excellence. Very sad indeed. Read the rest of this entry »
TRUTH, FAITH AND REASON: POPE BENEDICT XVI’S LECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF REGENSBURG
By Gerald E. Marsh
The Stupid Delusionals with Invisible Friends, it burns. Cartoon by Plognark dot com - Thanks...
Pope Benedict XVI interleaved two themes in his lecture at the University of Regensburg on September 12, 2006.1 These will be discussed here in two separate parts: Truth, Faith, and Reason and The Dialogue of Cultures. The first addresses the Pope’s proposal to expand scientific reasoning to include the “rationality of faith”; and the second with the threat of radical Islam, and whether a “dialogue of cultures” is possible if the West persists in its belief in what the Pope calls a “reason which is deaf to the divine”.
PART ONE: TRUTH, FAITH AND REASON The essence of the Enlightenment, as put by Isaiah Berlin in his essay The Counter-Enlightenment, “is the proclamation of the autonomy of reason and the methods of the natural sciences, based on observation as the sole reliable method of knowledge, and the consequent rejection of the authority of revelation, sacred writings and their accepted interpreters, tradition, prescription, and every form of non-rational and transcendent source of knowledge”. Notice that Berlin does not say that this approach is the sole method of obtaining knowledge, only that it is the sole reliable method, meaning that knowledge obtained in this way can be confirmed by experiment. This form of knowledge is increasingly coming into conflict with beliefs based on divine revelation.
Knowledge based on reason and the methods of natural science is threatening to many of those who hold conventional religious beliefs because the implications of such knowledge raise the fear that their lives may lose meaning and direction, and that they will no longer have an ethical basis for behavior. They especially abhor a future bereft of personal immortality. If the origin of life, and humanity in particular, has a natural explanation, how can one believe in the immortal soul, or that humanity is central to God’s creation? Belief in the findings of science about our origins will not only destroy the creation myths of humanity, but will also force the acceptance of the proposition that impersonal and indifferent forces were behind its creation, along with that of all other living creatures.
“We dare not blink at the magnitude, diversity and pervasive impact of the known crimes committed by the Bush administration. Wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Supreme International Crime, have killed hundreds of thousands outright, wounded, sickened and malnourished many more than they have killed and sent millions as refugees to neighboring nations while rendering homeless millions more. Indiscriminate killing of civilians, summary execution, arbitrary seizures of people and property, secret unlimited detention and torture have been authorized, widely practiced and both defended and denied publicly. President Bush, the self-proclaimed “decider,” reached for unlimited dictatorial power whenever he proclaimed the national security was threatened. And he considered himself above the law where domestic affairs were concerned even a he signed Acts of Congress into law.” – William Ramsey Clark, is a lawyer and former United States Attorney General.
The GPL may actually make a lot of sense to people who are like Richard Stallman: dorky programmers who want a cause. You do know of course that Stallman is a hippie. Have you ever met him? I’ve meet him a number of times and he’s basically a geekie hippie with a cause. Great for him and his commune cult followers. Join his cult if you want, release your code as GPL if you want. Just don’t expect me to do the same. Just don’t expect me to be happy that you put so many restrictions on it that I have to alter my build process so as to not include your source in the same program as my code. Eesh. Annoying.
At the end they entrancingly have a couple of sentences about how this dim sun won’t cool the Earth enough to compensate for their imagined global warming. It’s just a disappointing brush off and not a serious treatment.
Cartoon by 
It’s amazing that humans can invent something, The Lord, and then speak about it as if it’s real. This is one of the wonders of the brain, it’s ability to invent realities that are in reality fantasies that don’t even pretend to connect with the actual reality of Nature were we exist. That’s what is so wonderful about science and the scientific method, it takes the notion of testing our notions against Nature to see insights into the otherwise ineffable qualities of existence. It’s too bad that Knuth chooses to ignore reality when it comes to his spiritual existence. Maybe it’s not that he chooses, maybe it’s that he’s inflicted and has no choice?
Paths To Knowledge (dot Science) 