2007, Epsilon Clue, Page 6

Religion

Retelling the Classics

Once, there was a man who had two children. One day, they said to each other, “You know what we should do? Make some movies and put them on the Internet, so everyone can see them.” So they built characters out of modeling clay, and sets out of cardboard. They made some stop-motion animations with a webcam they had lying around, and uploaded their shorts to YouTube. After a while, they learned quite a bit about how to make movies.

One day, their father surfed around the net to see his children’s movies and find out what they had been up to. It turned out that they had quite a lot of fans, including one person who worked in Hollywood and was trying to work out a deal for them to make a feature-length motion picture.

The father thought to himself, “Wow. If these kids can achieve so much with just a cheap camera and some clay, there’s nothing they won’t be able to do.”

So he took away his children’s modeling clay, burned the cardboard sets, and smashed their camera. So they stopped filming, and never did make that feature film.

(HT whoever for the original.)

Andrew Arensburger

Sep, Thu, 2007

Intelligent Design Links

Carnival of the Dembski

Bill “The Isaac Newton of Information Science” Dembski gave a talk at Oklahoma University in Norman, entitled “Why Atheism is no Longer Intellectually Fulfilling: The Challenge of Intelligent Design to Unintelligent Evolution”. But it appears that instead of the usual audience bussed in from local churches, the talk was attended by a lot of OU faculty and students. From all accounts, he gave a pretty standard presentation, but was ripped to shreds in the Q&A session.

Start by reading Golfvixen’s liveblogging of the talk. Then proceed to ERV’s account (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), and/or this summary at Further Thoughts (or better yet, this
roundup of coverage of the event^[1]).

And finally, a Christian who didn’t manage to get into the talk, but describes the Q& A and the goings-on outside.

Oh, and I would have liked to link to Dembski’s own account of how the evening went, but I can’t find one.

[1] Yes, he links here. When two carnivals link to each other, does it form a merry-go-round?

(Updated Sep. 21 to add another link to Further Thoughts.)

Andrew Arensburger

Sep, Wed, 2007

News Politics

Figuring Out the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act

I’m not a lawyer, nor do I play one on teh innertubes. But recently, H.R. 2826 was introduced (you can search for it at thomas.loc.gov). Dubbed the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act, it’s been all over the leftosphere, so I figured I should try to figure out what it’s all about.

Summary: the preamble pretty much says it all:

A BILL

To amend titles 28 and 10, United States Code, to restore habeas corpus for individuals detained by the United States at Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and for other purposes.

Note that habeas corpus is pretty much all that the bill restores (AFAICT).

(Update, Sep. 19: I guess this is mostly moot, since the bill has been defeated.)

Calculating My Tastes

One thing you can do in iTunes is to give songs a rating from 1 to 5 stars. It also has an option to play highly-rated songs more often during shuffle play, but frankly, I can’t be bothered to go through my collection rating songs by hand. And besides, the metadata that iTunes stores for each song includes things like the number of times it was played, the last time it was played, the number of times it was skipped, the last time it was skipped, and the time when it was added to the library. It seems that from this, it should be possible to figure out what I like and what I don’t like. Specifically, it should be possible to write an AppleScript script that goes through the library and computes ratings.

Fun With Playlists

One thing I like about iTunes is its “smart playlists”, which are not simply lists of songs, but are defined by certain criteria. For instance, I have one called “80s Music”, with the single rule

Year is in the range 1980 to 1898

which, obviously, contains all music from the 1980s, and is automatically updated when I add or remove songs.

Recent versions have added a number of other features and criteria, which make various interesting lists possible. Read More

Andrew Arensburger

Sep, Sun, 2007

Atheism Religion WTF?

Lack of Evidence for God Is Evidence of God, Says Pope

Quoth the NY Daily News:

“All believers know about the silence of God,” he said in unprepared remarks in Italy. “Even Mother Teresa, with all her charity and force of faith, suffered from the silence of God.”

He said believers sometimes had to withstand the silence of God to understand the situation of people who do not believe.

So God doesn’t actually, like, make himself known to people because he wants believers to sympathize with atheists? And maybe the fact that I can’t fly is a gift from Superman to help me sympathize with the residents of Smallville. I gather that “unprepared remarks” is code for “pulling lame excuses out of his ass.”

(HT Olly’s Onions via Jesus and Mo.)

Andrew Arensburger

Sep, Tue, 2007

Politics

Six Years Since 9/11

…so can someone please give me a good reason why the pigfucker behind it still hasn’t been caught?

Andrew Arensburger

Sep, Tue, 2007

News

Octogenarian Sex

By now, I think everyone’s heard the news that older people are having a lot more sex than one might think. But am I the only one who thought “good for them!” rather than “ewwww!”?

No, a random sixty- or seventy-year-old woman doesn’t fire up my libido, but:

a) No one’s making you look at photos of naked grandparents. And if you don’t like the mental image, think of something else, get over it, and move on.

b) In the majority of cases, I’m sure we’re not talking about random people. Most of these people are in a relationship, either marriage or friendship or something. If you think it’s normal for a boyfriend and girlfriend to have sex, why should that change just because they’re in their sixties or beyond? And yes, this is personal: my grandmother found a boyfriend after my grandfather died, and they were good for each other. If they wanted to get it on, who am I to say they shouldn’t? Sex is fun. Why shouldn’t grandma get some? Hell, I don’t care if she’s into leather and butt-plugs.

c) I hope to grow old some day (it sure beats the alternative), and I don’t plan on giving a rat’s ass what anyone thinks about my sex life.

The real news in the report, from my point of view, was that the sex drive doesn’t diminish as rapidly as I (and probably many others) had thought. If this grosses you out, get over it. Oh, and your parents had sex, too. Once again, get over it.