Logic

I often attend meetings of Gator Freethought, a club for students to evaluate religion with a critical eye. We’re a motley bunch; although there are a lot of atheists and agnostics, there are also theists who may be questioning their own religion or who just want to see how other people think. A few weeks ago, I ran into a guy I recognized from the first meeting of the year. We’ve talked to each other a bit since then, and we’ve gotten to learn a lot about each other. He’s a Christian, and he wanted me to check out this lecture called “If You Could Ask God One Question.” It was supposed to be about what one guy thought God’s answers to big questions would be. I thought it was interesting, so I decided to check it out.

The lecture was Wednesday night. I didn’t give any consideration to the kind of group that would be putting it on and the kind of agenda they might have. Turns out it was hosted by Campus Crusade for Christ, which likes to refer to itself less confrontationally as CRU. The first half of the lecture — one hour — consisted of the speaker offering various arguments for the existence of a supreme god. At first, these were framed in a general theistic context, but then the arguments took a decidedly Christian turn. Here were some of them:

1. If God didn’t exist, life would be meaningless.
2. That sounds really depressing.
3. Therefore, God exists.

1. The Bible says Jesus is the Son of God.
2. Bible scholars say that the Bible is true and that the discovery of Jesus’s empty tomb is a historical fact.
3. Since the Bible is true, then it is more likely that Jesus is the Son of God than other explanations such as, for example, that the disciples stole Jesus’s body.
4. Therefore, Jesus is the Son of God.

1. The Bible says that if you try hard enough, you can feel God’s presence.
2. Therefore, God exists.

1. If God didn’t exist, there would be no absolute standards of morality.
2. If there are no absolute standards of morality, who’s to say that the Holocaust was bad?
3. Therefore, God exists.

Couldn’t morality be genetically hard-wired into us as a mechanism of survival? The speaker brought that up but scoffed at the idea. However, he had no problem presenting the following argument:

1. If God existed, he would want us to believe in him.
2. New evidence shows that god-belief tends to be hard-wired in humans.
3. Therefore, God exists.

Amusingly, he compared hard-wired god-belief to object permanence — the understanding that objects still exist even after they have disappeared from one’s vision. Although he didn’t use the term itself, it happens to be the only thing I remember from high-school psychology. He said that babies are born with object permanence, when in fact, they are not. They acquire it over time.

Getting back on subject, I think it’s clear that while morality is beneficial to the survival of a species, there are no totally absolute moral standards. Interestingly, the speaker mentioned discrimination as being an absolute moral wrong. While I agree that discrimination is immoral, it seems to me that morality varies from time to time, from place to place, and even from person to person. In the recent past, discrimination was considered perfectly moral.

Allow me to present another example. Throwing rocks at gay people till they died was once considered virtuous by everyone, and to some people it still is. Why the change? People have discovered that being gay does nothing to harm society. Thus, our society’s morals are changing before our eyes, and they fortunately seem to be converging on the doctrine that “If it harms none, do what you will.” If morals are absolute, I would think that they should be based around that idea; that’s what I feel would be best for society. I think that a sign of maturity is recognizing that there are few (if any) absolutes. We’ll probably always be trying to perfect our morals and keep our selfish human nature from getting in the way.

So, anyway, I found the speaker’s arguments pretty weak overall. They seemed to reflect what he wanted to believe rather than what logic would lead him to. (The second half of the presentation, in which he answered questions from the audience, is outside the scope of this post. I don’t have much to say about it anyway.)

I’ve found more evidence that people tend to believe what they want to rather than what makes sense. Gator Freehthought’s meeting last night featured James B. Twitchell, a professor who recently wrote Shopping for God: How Christianity Went from In Your Heart to In Your Face. He described the premise of the book, which is that people tend to buy things for the feeling they get when they buy them, and that advertising serves to create that feeling. He extends this idea to Protestant Christianity, namely megachurches, which have offered people basically the same doctrine but with a more satisfying church experience. (I was going to say “worshipping experience,” but apparently these churches extend beyond improving that. For example, with their diverse social clubs, they try to replace the fraternal organizations that were popular in the early 20th century, according to Dr. Twitchell.)

Fox News makes a lot more sense when there’s a laugh track added. Here’s a Bill O’Reilly interview that’s suddenly a lot more entertaining.

30,000 speech bubble stickers were printed. They were placed on top of ads all over New York City. Passersby filled them in. Later the results were photographed. It’s The Bubble Project.

Here are 10 Incredible Old Computer Ads. They’re pretty credible, actually.

Intervjuo

On Saturday, I got an e-mail from a reporter from my local paper, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. She got my contact information from Esperanto-USA, which I recently joined for 2008, and wanted to interview me by phone for an article on Esperanto, which I’ve recently gotten interested in again.

Now time for the obligatory aside. Longtime readers may have a hazy recollection that I was interviewed and photographed by the Sun-Sentinel for an article on blogs in 2003, and interviewed and photographed again by their indie-style paper’s more cynical article on blogs in 2004. So I’m no stranger to being interviewed by the Sun-Sentinel. In fact, I rather enjoy it. I find that when I’m talking to reporters, I become more eloquent that usual, even profoundly so. But that was when I was being asked about myself and my blogging. This time, I expect, I’ll be asked about Esperanto, which I don’t know as much about as I could.

Anyway, I gave her my number and told her when I was free, and she asked if I knew of any other Esperanto speakers in specific Broward County cities. I said I did know my friend Andy, a fellow Browardite up here at college who was familiar with the language, although I didn’t know what city he was from. (He’s one of the friends I’m starting the Esperanto club with.) So I hooked them up, and yesterday she interviewed him by phone. She asked him for further details on Teach Yourself Esperanto, the textbook I used to teach myself Esperanto, and on Pasporta Servo, the worldwide Esperanto hospitality network, so I gave him the info. He also joined Esperanto-USA. He said he’s getting really excited about the whole Esperanto club thing, which is great, because it’s enthusiasm that we’re going to need… since we still can’t find a faculty advisor.

So she hasn’t called me yet, and I’m not sure if she will. But even if not, I’m glad Andy got a chance to represent Esperanto to our local paper. Now if only the local paper up here — or even a campus newspaper — did a story on Esperanto, it would really be great for our nascent club.

And Friday is February 29, that once-in-every-four-years leap day. Four years ago, I thought it would be cool to document the day in photographs, and I sort of pledged to do the same every leap day afterward. I don’t have the photos online anymore ’cause they’re kinda dumb, but I’ll probably put them back online along with the photos from February 29, 2008. It’ll be interesting to see how I’ve changed in the past four years.

This video is from The Onion, but it may as well be true: Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early.

We’ve all heard of people who will do anything that scammers tell them to, but did you know that it also works the other way around? This guy conned a Nigerian scammer into copying Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by hand.

This is what passes for police blotter in Bozeman, Montana: The Best of the Bozeman Chronicle Police Reports.

The visit

It’s the weekend!

On Friday, when 5:00 rolls around (the time I get out of my last class), I don’t find myself very excited. Instead, I’m exhausted. These two-day weekends are too short. At least last semester I got done for the week at 10:30 on Friday morning. (I know what you’re saying: I shouldn’t complain because I have no classes on Tuesdays. But it doesn’t feel like the weekend on Tuesdays because everyone else has to go to class, and because it’s surrounded by Monday and Wednesday. Ugh. Don’t even get me started about Wednesday.)

This weekend has been pretty interesting because my roommate’s girlfriend came to visit. She’s thinking of transferring here, in fact. She arrived on Thursday night and slept in our room. It felt a little odd at first. (She visited one weekend last semester, but I was away most of the time.) In any case, I’m glad to see that the two of them have spent time together. She’s already left, actually. I hope she enjoyed her stay. (Actually, I know that she did.)

Random thought: I still can’t believe I have a MySpace. Sure, I’m on MySpace constantly, but I don’t feel quite like I fit in because I don’t partake in the whole “make your profile take 20 minutes to load with semi-transparent images and animated GIFs and bad colors with your favorite song of the moment playing automatically, causing everyone who views your page to turn off their sound” thing.

I can believe I have a Facebook, though. My praises of Facebook still hold. Something I thought about Facebook immediately upon signing up was that it seemed to be “what MySpace wants to be when it grows up.” And guess what? MySpace has been trying to grow up. Over the past few months, MySpace has been adding Facebook-like features such as statuses and photo-tagging. Now they’re nagging everyone to enter their full name for search purposes, which is something many people haven’t done in the past. (On Facebook, users go by their full names, while on MySpace, users can change their display name at will.) But the most interesting step is yet to come as MySpace has just announced that it’s going to open its API to outside developers. Translation: Facebook-style apps on MySpace. Yeah.

Is it useful to have a profile on more than one social networking site? I would say yes. Each seems to have its strengths and weaknesses as well as different user bases. The recent finding that Facebook users are more likely to be college-educated than MySpace is mind-numbingly obvious. Facebook tends to be for my college friends and my friends in colleges, while MySpace tends to be for everyone else. In addition, some people just have favorites and spend more time on one than the other.

This whole social networking thing really places decreased relevance on high-school reunions, doesn’t it? As a member the first social networking generation to graduate from high school, this remains to be seen. I’ll find out in 2017.

So, I guess the Oscars are coming up or something? Here are 79 Years of Best Picture Winners in Posters.

The presidential candidates have been photographed countless times in the past year. Inevitably, some of those photos have been unflattering.

I might have posted something like this before, but it’s worth posting again: World’s Most Interesting Bridges, Part 2.

This picture makes my head hurt. Have a good look.

Nostalgia

There was a lunar eclipse last night. I went to check it out with my sister, plus Omar, Amanda, and some of Amanda’s friends. The people I didn’t know apparently knew of this place that would make for great eclipse watching. Their special spot turned out to be the side of the road in Paynes Prairie. The weather wasn’t looking very cooperative at first, but eventually the clouds cleared up and we could see the moon turn red. There were also a lot of stars. A heck of a lot. Do you realize how big the Big Dipper is? It’s really big.

I’ve found myself looking back on my high-school days a lot lately. In particular, I’ve been reading my archives for May 2007. What exciting times those were. Between coming in second place in the programming competition, taking an AP test, winning big at the senior class awards, going to prom, graduating, and more, I made a lot of memories there that I’m sure will last for a lifetime. Once in a while I look back on those days only a few months ago when everything was so different. Before going home for the holidays, before the first semester of college, before meeting my roommate and making friends, before that last summer, I was just a high school student standing on the brink of… life.

Which is not to say I’m living a lot more now than I was then. I’m not, really. It’s just that I seem to have broadened my horizons a bit. Things in high school were so simple. Every day was the same. Things will never be that simple again. Not until I’m old and retired, anyway. I just wonder what things would have been like if I had done things differently. For example, what if I had been cooler? Then I’d probably be really cool now. Anyway, you get the idea. I’m just feeling nostalgic, I guess.

I know my readers are smart enough to know this, but you probably know some people who will find it useful: an explanation of why evolution is not “just a theory”. (In short: scientific laws describe how things work, and theories are developed to explain why they work.)

Advice from a 50-year-old: 50 things I’ve learned in 50 years, a partial list in no particular order.

Turns out you can recycle more than you think. Here are 21 Things You Didn’t Know You Can Recycle.

Not Mardi Gras

I got to spend a weekend with my suitemates. On Saturday, Adam, Cameron, and I went with Evan to his house in Tampa, and we went to this post-Gasparilla parade. Actually, we left kind of late from Evan’s house (having been treated to steak), so we only arrived in time to see the last float. After that, people were just sort of… reveling, I guess you would say. They were throwing around beads and stuff. Evan, who was in New Orleans a few weeks ago, says it was much more tame than Mardi Gras. Biggest excitement: we went into a cigar store, and Adam bought a cigar. It was either that or seeing the hippie-types with their tie-wearing dog.

So, no, we didn’t get drunk, pass out, and wake up in Nevada a week later. We left around 11 as things seemed to be dying down. We went back to Gainesville the next day after having breakfast. It was cool getting to spend a weekend with my suitemates. I wish we could do stuff like that more often.

I’ve been getting into Ekiga lately. Do I really need a phone/videophone program on my computer? No, but it’s awesome. Speaking of which, I’ve found a webcam that works. Since it was so terribly hard to find information about which webcams worked with Linux and which didn’t, I want to spell it out here for you, me, and Google:

The Logitech QuickCam for Notebooks (model #961404-0403, USB product ID 046d:08ae) uses the gspca driver and therefore works out-of-the-box with Ubuntu 7.10.

And here’s the proof:

Ekiga is available for Linux and Windows (the latter being beta). The only programs whose audio and video are compatible with the latest version of Ekiga (2.0.11) are XMeeting (Mac), NetMeeting (Windows), and Windows Messenger (not Windows Live Messenger). But many others have compatible audio, and better video compatibility will be included in the upcoming 3.0 release. See this page from the Ekiga wiki for more details on compatibility.

So, does anyone want to say hi? I’m sip:jordon@ekiga.net.

Last Wednesday, one of the men standing in the background on the cover of the Beatles’ album Abbey Road died at the age of 96. His name was Paul Cole, and he was visiting London with his wife. Since he was tired of visiting museums, he waited on the sidewalk outside one while his wife was inside. That’s when he happened to observe some young hooligans being photographed crossing the street. He didn’t realize he was on the album cover until about a year later, when he saw the family’s copy at his home in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Yes, a resident of my hometown was on the cover of a Beatles album. Who knew? (Here’s the full story).

RSS is pretty handy, but RSS feeds can be annoying. Maybe there are some things you’d rather not see in an RSS feed, or maybe you’d like to combine several feeds into one. That’s where Yahoo! Pipes comes in handy. You can use it to make mashups of RSS feeds. Here’s one I use for reading the J-Walk Blog. It excludes posts that mention banjos or bacon.

Ever notice how some celebrities look like crosses between other celebrities? It’s celebrity math(s).

VD

I’m still alive, really. I’ve been busy. I present to you a post I started working on yesterday but didn’t have time to finish.

Tuesday was Free Pancake Day at IHOP, and my sister really wanted to go. We went with our friend Amanda. The pancakes were good. They tasted really free. Since man cannot live on pancakes alone, I also had some eggs Benedict. The point of letting everyone have a free short stack was to raise money for charity, so we did our part. In that sense, the pancakes weren’t really free.

They still tasted free, though.

Also Tuesday, I had my first test in my programming class. I think I got an A. It helps when you already know some basic programming concepts. Today in programming discussion, we were doing exercises with loops (which were just taught yesterday). The hardest one was to implement Leibniz’s calculation of pi. I got it, and I’ve been playing around with it. It turns out that it converges to pi extremely slowly. With 1 billion terms, it’s accurate only to 8 decimal places.

Of course, the proverbial elephant in the room is that it’s Valentine’s Day. You know what that means: it’s my anniversary… of switching to Linux. You probably know how I feel about Valentine’s Day, or you can probably guess. After reading this, you will be able to guess.

I went to a Gator Freethought meeting last night. To make things interesting, the topic of discussion was how your religious beliefs affect your views on love, sex, dating, and the like. To make things more interesting, “stoplight” dress code was made optional: wear green if you’re single, red if you’re taken, and yellow if you’re “It’s Complicated.” While the people there spent the entire time debating the definition of love, I couldn’t help but wonder: Why cant everyone dress this way all the time then we wouldn’t have any problems or rather I wouldn’t have any problems. Seriously the last 3 girls I asked out or wanted to ask out were already taken and I didn’t know it at the time WTF. I hate this. I really do. And it’s only getting worse. I’m just going to make this clear:

I can’t get a date.

There. I said it, for everyone to hear. It’s hard to exude coolness and confidence with a track record like the one I have.

However, I do have some joy in my life by volunteering for Get Carded, which gives out organ donor cards. Today we gave out cards with a Valentine’s twist: “Have a heart, sign a donor card” was the slogan, and the idea drew some people. The chocolates also drew some people, no doubt. It was a productive day, though, and that’s good. I like knowing that I’m helping to save lives.

Time for Ask Jordon:

Brian: Is Justin secretly Stephen Rea?

Your IP address indicates that you sent this from the University of Oregon. Is Brian secretly my friend Luke?

Dan in Japan: Did you ever read Pulp Novels? If so, did you have a favorite hero? (Example – The Spider, the Shadow.. etc.)

No, Dan the Man in Japan, I’ve never read those kinds of things. I think they were before my time. I thought Pulp Fiction was okay, though. By the way, your IP address indicates that you are in Japan. Good job.

Just to fit into the theme we’ve got going here, here are 50 Very Simple Ways to Be Romantic.

And this probably fits in too: Your Eyes Don’t Lie – Reading Thoughts By Eye Movements.

The flipping goes on…

If you’ve hung around The World of Stuff for a while, you might be vaguely aware that one of its component pages is actually a separate web site in itself: flipacoin.net.

The oldest part of TWoS, predating the site itself, flipacoin.net was released to the world on August 21, 2002, after I thought it would be cool to have a web site where people could virtually flip virtual coins on the virtual web. It soon became boring to maintain. Over the years, I added coins infrequently. I figured it would never integrate well with TWoS since its catchy name happens to be based on its separate domain name, among other reasons.

Although I still thought it was a cool idea, I decided it was time for someone else to keep the dream alive because I really wasn’t doing a very good job. In December, I posted a notice on the site asking for a new webmaster. Recently, an Australian named Brandon Zubek decided to take up the offer. Effective today, flipacoin.net is no longer under my ownership or control. Wish Brandon the best of luck, and keep flipping those coins!

In other news: My suitemate never came back after his suicide attempt last month. I haven’t seen him since he was in the hospital. He’s withdrawn from his classes for the semester, and Evan from down the hall has moved in to take his place. Evan didn’t like his roommate very much, so he decided to move out without telling him. That’s pretty funny, if you ask me. He’s a cool guy, and I’m glad to be one of his suitemates. (My dorm is like this: two roommates go in one room, and two rooms plus a bathroom make one suite.)

Here’s a video that zooms in on a part of the Mandelbrot Set, a well-known fractal. It’s at least worth listening to for the catchy tune, which is also about the Mandelbrot Set.

Use the Weird Converter to convert between weird units of measure. Did you know that a newborn baby weighs as much as 20 hockey pucks?

Here’s a page by a high-school student who was unhappy with the job the photographer did on his senior picture (including changing the color of his eyes) and decided to take a self-portrait that he thought was a lot better: Rip-off Photography.

Stream of consciousness V

I am sick, so nobody can kiss me today. Sounds like it’s time for some stream-of-consciousness action.

I had some tests over the past few days. Last Wednesday, I had a test in my biology class and I did well. On Friday, I had a test in differential equations and got a pretty good grade. On Monday, I had a test in physics, and, well — it counts as a C on their own special grading scale. Let’s leave it at that. (Leaving it not at that, I just want to say that I’m glad that a B+ is between 80-90%.)

I’ve actually been sick since I woke up Monday. (Great way to start a Monday, isn’t it?) Monday and yesterday it was a throat thing. Today it was a nose thing. There are no more tissues around here.

Random thought (I’m writing stream-of-consciousness-ly, so I’m allowed to inject random thoughts): If this is my fifth “Stream of Consciousness” post between November 18, 2005, and today, and the Super Bowl has occurred annually since 1967, then in what year will I write a stream of consciousness post that has the same Roman numeral as that year’s Super Bowl? Express your answer as a year in Roman numerals.

(Note: I just want to test the idea that if a site has a sufficiently large fan base, then its loyal and devoted readers will do anything you ask them to. Or, at least, one of them will, anyway.)

How about that Super Bowl, anyway? I had an inkling that it would be the most-watched Super Bowl ever, and I was right. In fact, it was the second most watched TV program in American history, behind only the last episode of “M*A*S*H.” (That’s fun to type.) But anyway, I knew it would be an exciting game, no matter who won. What an upset for the previously undefeated Patriots. They’ll be talking about that one for years to come. (And my poor roommate, who’s originally from Massachusetts, wasn’t very happy.)

Speaking of roommates and rooms, today was my day to sign up for housing for next year. I decided to stay in Hume Hall, and luckily, I won the lottery to stay. I even got to pick what room I could stay in (from a selection of a few). I chose a room on the opposite side of my same floor. I like being on the second floor. I don’t have to spend too much time walking up and down the stairs.

Ah, there’s nothing like a detailed entry about your web host’s new bandwidth pricing policy to attract zero comments from readers. I’m starting to feel the savings now, though. I can actually watch my bandwidth costs go down. $0.9837 per gigabyte and falling, baby!

My sister’s going home for the weekend, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to. Well, for one, I go away a lot as it is, and I think it’s important for me to spend time here and socialize with my dorm-mates. Also, since I’m paying $tons to stay here, I might as well get my money’s worth. On the other hand, it is nice to see my family. I’ll probably still be sick on Friday, so I don’t think I’m going to go home. (It’s bad enough being sick and feeling awful, but being sick and feeling awful in a car for five hours? Bleah.)

And for those of you keeping score at home, this is my 899th post.

I guess the Oscars are coming up or something, so read about 6 Odd Moments in Oscar History.

More about that friggin’ Super Bowl: If you watched the Super Bowl (I accidentally typed “bowel” there — good thing I allow myself to correct typos in these kinds of posts), then you probably noticed a lot of advertising from Bridgestone, the tire company. Well, it turns out they’re just trying to clean up their image in the face of a human rights lawsuit.

Science education in Florida’s schools rather sucks. I should know because I was subjected to it for a few years recently. Okay, my school in particular wasn’t so bad, but it could have been better. Anyway, there’s a petition you can sign that aims to change that.

Now, time for some hot soup (of the ramen-like variety) and probably some rest. Ah, that sounds good. Oh, and a hot shower, too. Yeah. But not in that order.

As I write this, my bandwidth is now $0.9829 per gigabyte.

The savings!

I’ve long enjoyed the reasonable prices that my web host, NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, offers, not the least of which has been their $1/GB bandwidth rate. But as my bandwidth has slowly but steadily increased, my costs have slowly increased as well, to the point that a significant amount of my charges are for bandwidth. Here’s a graph showing the breakdown of my hosting costs for the past year:

At this rate, I’d just keep paying more and more for my site, and the pay-for-what-you-use pricing model would no longer be worth it. Not without some big change, anyway.

That change has arrived.

The folks at NFSN have long been aware of the relatively high costs that its popular sites incur, and now that they’ve gotten some savings on bandwidth, they’ve decided to pass it on to the customers who need it the most. Now only your first gigabyte of bandwidth costs $1: from there, the cost per gigabyte will go down logarithmically. Once your sites have accumulated 10 GB worth of transfers, you’ll be charged $0.50 per gigabyte. By the time you hit 100 GB, it’ll be $0.33. Of course, the decrease is smooth at every value in between, so, for example, you can expect correctly to be paying about $0.62 per gigabyte once you’ve racked up 4.13 GB worth of transfers. The savings continue until you’ve accumulated 10,000 GB of transfers, when the cost per gigabyte will be fixed at $0.20.

For the more mathematically inclined, the cost per gigabyte as a function f of gigabytes transferred x is as follows:

I’ve been playing with my graphing calculator to see what my savings will be. Of course, it helps to have some real numbers. I know that the bandwidth cost for my site during the past year was $53.72, which works out to 53.72 GB of bandwidth. Now that this new pricing plan is in place, my next 53.72 GB will cost $24.39, and the 53.72 GB after that will cost only $18.55. (I knew calculus would be helpful in real life.)

I’ve fallen in love with NearlyFreeSpeech.NET all over again, and I recommend them to basically everyone (except people who need stuff like SSL and e-mail, which they don’t offer).

Super Bowl XLII is tomorrow. Have a look at Super Bowl logos from the past.

This is pretty cool: The Freecycle Network is all about giving away and reusing stuff so it doesn’t go to waste.

And, to finish this post, something you’ve always wanted to know about but have never been able to because you didn’t know what it was called:

Shave and a haircut, two bits!