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.

Things coming up

Tonight, Jack Kevorkian is speaking at UF. As an advocate (and erstwhile practitioner) of physician-assisted suicide, he’s pretty controversial. Over the past week or so, the debate has been heating up around campus. As I walked past the facility where the former doctor is due to speak, I saw that there were seemingly makeshift “free speech zone” signs posted around. My sister reports that a plane is currently flying over campus with a banner saying that Planned Parenthood kills babies and Jack Kevorkian kills parents. I think we can expect about as much protest as there was when Alberto Gonzales spoke a few months ago. That is to say, a lot. Difference is, I’m actually going to this one.

Opinion: Terminally ill people in a sound state of mind should be able to put themselves out of their suffering. And why is it any of your business?

(Let the flames begin!)

From the Why-Don’t-You-Join-a-Club Dept.: I went to the first few meetings of Gator Freethought hoping to have some intelligent discussion with freethinking Gators. But the meetings got increasingly boring as they tended to focus on yawners like philosophy. I didn’t even go to the last few meetings, which were about morality and Nietzsche and things. Luckily, the student organization’s “new year’s resolution is to have more fun,” and they’re going to start the fun with a meet-and-greet on Thursday night at a local restaurant-type place.

The meeting after that will be just before Florida’s presidential primary and will deal with how our religious beliefs (or lack thereof) will affect our choices in the polls. The next meeting will be around Valentine’s day and will be a discussion on religion and dating. This is an issue that affects me (in fact, I’ve been meaning to complain about it here), so I’ll be sure to attend… unless I have a date. In fact, I’ve figured that going to Gator Freethought meetings is probably the best way to meet a sweet atheist (or agnostic — I’m not that picky) girl, so it should be really interesting to see what other people in my situation have done or are doing.

If you’re a freak who notices every single little change I make on this site, you’ll know that last week, I changed the Creative Commons license for this site to allow commercial use of my content. (Previously, commercial use without special permission was prohibited. Attributing to me and sharing alike — that is, releasing the derivative work under the same license — are still required.) Here’s a brief summary of the old license, and here’s a summary of the new one.

Why the change? I’ve occasionally gotten requests for commercial use of my images, which, because they were prohibited by the old license, had to be approved by me on a case-by-case basis. To give a recent example, the Piute County (Utah) Chamber of Commerce asked to use my image of a $1 bill signed by former U.S. Treasurer and Piute County native Ivy Baker Priest. I decided to allow their use of the image as long as they credited me and my web site. Every time someone asks for special permission to use my stuff commercially, I allow them to do it, so I figured I’d change the license to allow it in general.

Some people might be concerned about this apparent display of flip-floppery. Most of the content that was under the old license is now under the new one. Which license applies? It depends on when you accessed the content. If you saved an old copy of an article or post from this site, that copy still falls under the old license. But if you access that same sexy article today, the new license (which has fewer restrictions) applies.

You’ve probably heard a lot about the OOXML standardization debate, but it’s all very confusing. Here’s an overview of the ISO standardization process that OOXML is attempting to go through.

Read some stupid essays by some guy. They don’t look like they were really printed out and graded by an actual teacher, but they’re still funny.

Here’s a film from 1967 (confirmed authentic by Snopes) reporting on what technology would be like in A.D. 1999.

Lazy Thursday

I’ve known about geocaching for a long time, but until recently, I’d never actually done it. Basically, geocaching is where you hide a small box with little things in it and post its coordinates on the Internet so people can try to find it. People who find your cache can sign a log in the box and swap out whatever little trinkets you have in there. It’s for people who like treasure hunting and going out into the wilderness and things like that.

My suitemates Adam and Cameron recently found out about geocaching, and one of the first things we did together when we got back from winter break on Sunday was to look for some caches in the woods next to our dorm. Cameron had seen on the geocaching web site that there were two there. With their coordinates programmed into his GPS, we set out to find them. Adam found the first one in a tree that had fallen over. That one was pretty easy. Searching for the next one was pretty interesting because it took us to an area we didn’t even know existed; it was pretty scenic, like a park.

The spot where the cache was supposed to be was near a boardwalk, so we looked over and around it and in the surrounding woods, but to no avail. Finally, Cameron found a hidden container with a few things in it — but it wasn’t a geocache. It was a letterbox; letterboxing is similar to geocaching, but this wasn’t the cache that Cameron had found out about online. The notebook inside indicated that it had been placed earlier that same day.

So the search continued. Eventually, I found a box that was hidden along the side of the boardwalk; it was the same color as the wood, so it was camouflaged very well. That was the geocache we were looking for. According to the log inside, numerous people had found it over the past few years.

It only goes to show how popular geocaching and letterboxing are. Maybe I should get into it. I do have a GPS receiver at home that I never found much use for. And if we were able to find two (actually three) caches in such a small area, I can’t even imagine how many there must be all over town. (Actually, if I went to the geocaching web site, I could look it up, and then I would be able to imagine it.) And, of course, it would be cool if I hid my own cache somewhere and checked back to see if people had found it. It’s a cool idea.

Buying textbooks is kind of crazy. Luckily, my purchases were covered under my financial aid, but that doesn’t mean that things had to go smoothly. As I picked up my order from the bookstore on Monday, they gave me the wrong Physics books; I was supposed to get parts 1 and 2 of the textbook when instead I got parts 3 and 4. Unfortunately, I didn’t notice till I had gotten back to my dorm, so going back and trying to explain the situation was a big hassle. I got the books I needed, and to give back the ones I didn’t, I was redirected to the return and exchange line, which started outside the door of the store. My new books set off the anti-theft alarm. Lovely, right?

So I’m trying to explain to the security guard why it seems like I’m stealing these books. I don’t think he really suspected that, but when you have a store security guard saying “Let me get this straight…” to a long-haired college kid in a Rolling Stones t-shirt, it tends to look suspicious. Once I managed to explain that I paid for parts 1 and 2 and needed to return parts 3 and 4, they held the new books for me (standard procedure, y’understand) while I waited in line to give back the books I didn’t need. Finally, when I got the cashier there to understand what was going on, he deactivated the bar code on my new books, which a staff member had brought over, and took back the books I got by mistake.

I should have kept them for next year.

I haven’t had much luck selling my books. I managed to unload my chemistry book, but my calculus book is now out of date, and nobody wants the old edition. I did sell my course pack for Social Geography, though; I pulled it off by standing outside the class as it got out on Tuesday and asking if people wanted to buy it. I was asking $50, but the guy I was talking to only had $45, so I took that. Not bad for a $63 book.

New feature: when comment on a post, you can now choose to be notified of future comments on the post via e-mail. I’ve tested it out, and it seems to work, so give it a try. With each e-mail, you’ll be provided a link to manage your subscriptions and even change your subscription e-mail address. As usual, your address is safe with me; it won’t be given to anyone ever in any way. I enjoy this feature when it’s employed on other blogs (such as mcgees.org and now All About Me – And Then Some), and I think you’ll enjoy it on The World of Stuff. Hopefully, it will encourage commenting, discussion, and “first post” comments. That would be awesome.

If passed by the House of Representatives, H.R. 888 would be a grave insult to non-Christians and everyone who cares about separation of church and state in America. Joshua McGee says it better than I ever could.

Diamond-encrusted gadgets are always tacky. Here’s Wired‘s list of The Worst Diamond-Encrusted Gadgets Of All Time.

Here’s a pretty cool periodic table.

The day before Christmas

It’s Christmas Eve, and you know what that means. Tomorrow’s Christmas. It’s a time when a lot of people go to church who otherwise wouldn’t. As an atheist, I have to make this decision. Should I go because it’s a family tradition, or should I not go because it would be dishonest on my part? Or: should I be a pushover or a jerk? About.com has this to say:

The people at church are pretty nice to me, and I would enjoy hearing the music and seeing the kids put on the Christmas pageant (if it doesn’t get severely abridged like it did last year). If I go, I will feel really awkward like I did last year. I wanted to shrink away to nothing. I saw people I used to see all the time and expected them to say, “And where have you been?” If I don’t go, I’ll still feel really awkward because I did go last year. It’s a no-win situation for me. But I guess I’ll go along to watch because I feel as though I need some good humiliation now and then. It’s the Catholic in me.

The Christmas season is a time that reminds us to be generous. To that end, I’ve decided to make some small donations to non-profit organizations that are responsible for providing the world with free knowledge and software. Actually, I forgot to bring my checkbook home, so it’ll have to wait till I get back to school. But I plan to donate to Wikimedia and the Free Software Foundation. I’d donate to Ubuntu, but they don’t seem to take donations by check. Does anyone have any other ideas?

So I took this elaborate personality test. Here are the results if you want to read them, but I thought I’d make a note of the recommendations it had for me:

• Appreciate that your skill set can be useful in many ways; your attention to detail and your familiarity with the inner-workings of things are valuable assets.
• Try looking beyond the earthly qualities of things in order to expand your perspective, without losing your grounding in reality.
• Because other people would benefit immensely from your understanding and insight, you should try to be more outgoing in social situations, even when they make you uncomfortable. Others will want to hear what you have to say!

A guy spent 30 minutes watching CNN Headline News and decided to make a pie chart with a breakdown of the content. Not much of it was actually news.

Read ultra-condensed versions of classic books: Book-A-Minute Classics. There are also similar collections for sci-fi/fantasy, children’s books, and movies.

Some taste-testing experiments demonstrate the subjectivity of wine. In one test, the same wine was put into both a cheap-looking bottle and a fancier bottle. Wine critics thought the expensive-looking wine tasted much better. In another test, critics praised a red wine for its fruitiness even though it was actually a white wine dyed red.

A day in the life

Fall classes ended today. Tomorrow and Friday are reading days (studying days), and then it’s finals week. In fact, I got a package a few days ago from Romina, who I used to work with for the last two months or so before I had to quit my job, which is really something. What’s really something else is that I only worked one day a week, so I really didn’t know her all that well. But she was fresh out of college, and she wanted to make sure I (and my sister, who also worked there) would do well and have fun. Hence the package that came the other day with pens, giant notecards, Post-It notes, a highlighter, a marker, cough drops, Advil, some food, etc. It was really nice, and I thanked all my old friends from the office for putting it together.

I really can’t believe the fall semester has gone by just like that. I thought it would drag along like my first semester of high school. But nope. Does this mean that the second semester will go by even faster? And the next faster than that? Is this how life ends up passing you by? Because things just go by so fast? I’ve tried to make the most of my time, and I think I’m getting better at it in some ways. But I won’t worry about it too much right now. I have exams to study for plus a paper to finish, and I’m looking forward to sleeping in.

As a high school student, I probably thought about what being in college would be like. Actually, I probably didn’t because I didn’t want to think about college. (In fact, when I was in eighth grade, I couldn’t even bring myself to hear it mentioned.) But I’m sure some of my younger readers are wondering what the daily life of a typical college student is like. So I’ll tell you. It’s quite simple, really. Let’s take a typical… Tuesday… from my schedule. And let’s run with it.

At 9:20, I would wake up (courtesy of my cell phone’s alarm clock feature), do 14 minutes of shovelgloving, get changed, eat some breakfast (banana bread made and mailed by my mom), brush my teeth and all that stuff, and get out the door. I’d usually be out by 10:00. My roommate would still be asleep, for which I envy him. (I particularly liked Tuesdays because I could sleep in the most. On MWF I’d wake up at 6:20, and on R — Thursday — I’d wake up at 8:20.)

I’d set out on foot to the chemistry building and get there around 10:20 or so. The class would start at 10:40, but I like to be at least 10 minutes early to class, and earlier if there’s a quiz I needed to study for, as I often did. This was my chemistry discussion class, where I’d be quizzed on topics from the lecture on MWF. The quizzes were pretty easy. They were given by a teacher’s aide (or teaching assistant, or however you can expand “TA”) who would go through the problems on the quiz before we took it.

After that single period (50 minutes), I’d go back to the dorm for a little downtime (oxymoronically, on the Internet) until about 1:10 P.M. or so, when I’d head to the dining hall (cafeteria) for lunch. They have some pretty good food there sometimes. It’s hit or miss. But I have a meal plan that consists of 150 prepaid dining hall meals as well as $300 to spend at other campus eating locations, including a Taco Bell (a criterion, incidentally, that helped UF secure the number two spot in CollegeHumor’s annual Power Rankings of colleges and universities this year).

After that, I’d have one period of America in the Fifties — a class of about 12 people with lectures and the occasional class discussion — and then, immediately after, a two-period lecture for Social Geography. The professor for that one was cool because he wouldn’t lecture for the whole two periods. He would wrap up about half an hour early, leaving me done for the day at around 4:30.

So I’d mosey back to my dorm room, chillax some more, do my online chemistry homework that would be due most Tuesdays, maybe hang out in the common room where people would be studying or playing cards, go back to the dining hall with some people for dinner, and sleep… only to do it again the next day. On Tuesdays I’d have to go to sleep pretty early because of how early I had to wake up on Wednesdays. But it was all good.

So that’s what a day in the life of this new college student has been like this semester. In about a month, I’ll be getting ready to get into a new routine.

If you’re using Ubuntu 7.04 (“Feisty Fawn”) or 7.10 (“Gutsy Gibbon”) on a laptop, be sure to check out this fix for an unexpected behavior that may be shortening the life of your hard drive. It worked for me.

The North Alabama Freethought Association is organizing Operation Foxhole Atheists, a project that’s sending care packages to atheist soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Here are 21 facts you probably didn’t know about the Internet.

In a recent edition of Ask Jordon, I was asked if I knew anything about string theory. Turns out Discover Magazine recently held a contest to find the best two-minute video that explains string theory. The winner was called String Ducky, and it actually helped me understand the theory.

I’ve got a lot of stuff to do: people to see, money to make, y’know what I’m sayin’?

As I’ve mentioned, adapting to college life has been pretty easy. In fact, almost too easy. I thought it was going to be really angsty and blogworthy like high school, and here I am, disappointed by not being disappointed. I mean, there are tests and things, but that’s pretty much just like high school. If you’re able to keep yourself afloat on your own two feet (two clichés that mix like oil and water), you’ll do fine with your classes (it seems). You just have to make it your priority; that’s why you’re in college, after all. And if you can do that, then you can shift your focus to extracurricular activities. But if you don’t stick your schoolwork, The Beatles can tell you what happens:

But then again:

I have somewhere to go. In fact, I can go wherever I want (within reason or walking distance). That means that college is a lot better than high school when it comes to extracurricular activities. I could never join clubs in high school because I don’t drive, and staying after school would cause me to miss my ride. In college, I call the shots, and I can walk (or take a bus) not only to but also fro. So I’m taking advantage of that opportunity by checking out a few of the hundreds of student organizations on campus. Yesterday, Mark, whose blog I found before I started college here, invited me to check out the hacking club, where they’re apparently going to teach people how to identify vulnerabilities in web servers. It’s not as interesting as I thought it would be, so I don’t think I’ll follow up on that.

Last night, I went to the first meeting of Gator Freethought. It apparently originated as the Atheist, Agnostic, and Freethinking Student Association, and has adopted a new term to match its new ideals. While freethought is usually associated with atheism and agnosticism, Gator Freethought is not necessarily an atheist or agnostic group. Freethought is about rationally analyzing your worldview rather than sticking to dogma that you might not entirely have a feel for. Among the 50 or so people at the meeting, there were not only atheists and agnostics, but also Christians and Jews who wanted to analyze their own beliefs with a rational eye. Some of them will probably keep their current beliefs, and others will change theirs entirely. There were also people at the meeting who didn’t want to identify with any labels. The point of the group is to allow people to think for themselves, discussing and examining their own beliefs and those of others. I enjoyed being in the presence of other atheists and freethinking persons, so I’ll be going to the next meeting.

Today, my friend Amanda told my sister and me about some sort of organ donor club. As an afterthought, I went. The group, as it turns out, is called Get Carded, and the idea is to get people to become card-carrying organ donors. I learned quite a few things at the meeting. Donating organs is a good thing. Well, I knew that. But what I didn’t know is that people buy into myths that make them hesitant to become organ donors, and that’s why there are so few people who aren’t selfish with their organs. I ended up volunteering to man the booth that they’re going to set up outside the stadium at next week’s football game. It’s good to know that I’ll be helping to save lives. Now that I’m 18, I should probably become an organ donor myself.

I’ve been busy going to club meetings, but what else? I’ll let you in on a secret: I’m not exactly the most social guy in the world. I sometimes find it awkward to talk to, say, the opposite sex? I know, it’s really surprising, since you always see bloggers getting chased by ladies. But anyway, going on dates always would have been a problem in high school, because some girls are really shallow and they probably wouldn’t like it if you didn’t have a “whip” (car) of your own. Being driven to a date by your parents is also pretty lame. But now that everyone’s living close together, transportation isn’t really an issue, and I can develop my relationship skills… once I find someone worth developing them with.

Have you heard about Glazastik, Russia’s new Internet hero? Neither had I.

Here’s an 85-minute documentary called Revolution OS. It’s a few years old now, but it’s still an interesting look at Linux and the free software movement from some of the people who brought it about.

Today is Christmas

Today is Christmas. Yes, indeed. This is the second Christmas since I cast off religion and the second since I told anyone that I had. Almost a year later, it remains kind of a sore subject, although my parents have been good about letting me think for myself and do what I think is right. It could be much worse, and I’m glad it’s not.

But since it’s Christmastime, I’ve thought that I would expected to go to church on Christmas Eve just this one. As it turned out, I got multiple requests to go to church and make everyone else happy. I had anticipated it, and so I gave it some thought. Should I compromise my principles or make the family happy? I hardly see how tagging along in church in a semi-participatory manner compromised my principles in any way, and you don’t understand how much my family wanted me to go. So I went, and I stand by my decision to go.

I have mixed feelings about Christmas. It’s supposed to be about the birth of Jesus, but that meaning was retroactively applied to non-Christian winter solstice festivals that celebrated the births of other godlike figures. So is it appropriate for non-Christians to celebrate Christmas? I guess not, although it does seem a little odd. However, Christmas seems to be getting more and more secular because people insist on celebrating it in public, and you can really only do that on a broad scale with a secular holiday.

One of the more notable things I got for Christmas was a cell phone. I’ve never had one before, if you can believe it, so it’s kind of embarrassing even to be saying this. But yes, today I entered the mind-twistingly confusing world of cell phones. My parents had asked me if I wanted one, and I said I did because I did. I need to use a cell phone every once in a while, and I always have to borrow someone’s. Well, now I have my own — a Nokia with a Cingular plan — so I’ve been figuring out how to use it and stuff. It has some bells and whistles, but like all bells and whistles, they cost extra, so I can’t use them (not right now, at least). Still, I set up my voice mail and e-mailed a few people to let them know my number (which I’ve almost committed to memory). I think this is an important step in my “transition” to the lonely life. Might as well make the change as smooth as possible.

In other loot: I got a Florida Gators shirt, which is good because people can stop asking me just where I’m going to go to college. I also got this year’s Beatles compilation album, Love. It’s a soundtrack to the Cirque du Soleil show of the same name, and it features remixes and mashups of the Beatles’ songs. The songs all sound great, and it’s really interesting to hear tidbits of one song dropped perfectly into another. One moment that really got me was listening to “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”, which is pretty normal until the ending: “…and tonight, Mr. Kite is topping the — wham! — bill…” Right then comes the explosive, pounding riff from “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” coupled with Paul’s manic vocals from “Helter Skelter.” And it ends just like the original version of “I Want You”: abruptly. It cuts to the sound of wind blowing. There are many more examples. “Drive My Car/The Word/What You’re Doing” is a fantastic example. Not all the tracks are so mashed up, though. Some, like “Help!”, are just remixes. It’s really worth hearing though because they’ve thickened the sound on a lot of the songs by doubling some of the tracks, like the piano and chorus on “Hey Jude.”

Anyway… ahem. There was a nasty string of bad weather that was supposed to come, and I guess it did, but it weakened before it got here. No tornado warnings for us this Christmas! All in all, it’s been a good Christmas, and I’m glad. Oh, I forgot to mention one thing: the past few years I’ve gotten scratch-off lottery tickets as stocking stuffers. I got a total of 6 this year, and 3 were winners. I gained $35 out of the deal. I don’t think I’ve ever won anything from a scratch-off before, so that was nice.

Stay away from Snow plows (YouTube).

Do you love Microsoft Paint? Who doesn’t? Well, I don’t, but you might be interested in trying CanvasPaint, an online re-creation of the timeless app. (Minimum requirements: Firefox 1.5, Safari 1.3, or Opera 9. Sorry, IE users. No — I really feel sorry for you.)

One year ago: “I think one of the shepherds was mugging a camera.”
Two years ago: “So, they get to the stable, have kid, etc.”
Three years ago: “There was one king, but no one was really sure if he was supposed to be King Herod or one of the three kings or just some random king who happened to be there.”

The programming diaries

Whoowee. There’s nothing like a little late night programming to get the juices flowing. Well, not really. Yesterday after uploading my fourth Greasemonkey user script to userscripts.org, I decided it would be a good idea to make my own little namespace for them all. So I’ve created a Greasemonkey page that has links to the scripts and an explanation of what Greasemonkey and user scripts are.

All the scripts I’ve successfully written are really simple. But last night, I got an idea for another one that would take some effort. It would be for MySpace, and it would hide links to bulletins posted by certain friends. I spent two and a half hours working on it. After the first hour or so I got it working on the main home page, or so I thought, but I spent the rest of the time trying to get it to work in the expanded list of bulletins. I learned how to use JavaScript to remove rows from a table, but I couldn’t remove the right rows. I know it sounds so simple, but it wasn’t… for me. The script would remove the first bulletin successfully, but after that it might leave some that it was supposed to get rid of or vice versa. See, it would count which row the bulletin was in and then remove that row. But after that, the table would have a different number of rows, so if it kept chugging along, the numbers would be all out of whack. I tried everything I could think of to get the counter not to increment after removing a row, but the result was the same.

So, after two and a half hours, it was almost 1:30 in the morning, so I decided to hit the hay. I hadn’t given up, though. I woke up a little after 7:30, probably because it was hot and bright and noisy and I was uncomfortable in bed — not to mention that I had had unsettling dreams about my malfunctioning script. Even after a frustrating session of programming and so little sleep, I thought I could continue. I went back to the computer, which had hit a snag while shutting down and was still on. After spending some time trying different ways to fix the problem, I gave up. Then, because I was so tired, I tried to take a nap, but I never can, so I decided to tackle my problem from the opposite direction by guzzling a can of soda. Maybe I’ll read this in a few months and get inspired to give the script another whack. After all, it is potentially useful. Another idea I had was to filter bulletins with certain words in their titles. That would be just as much work, if not more.

Anyway, there’s a lesson to be learned here, and that lesson is this: if you try to do something, try really hard until you have no choice but to give up.

Gabbly is a pretty cool site that allows you to have a live chat with other people who are viewing any web page. Go to the site to see what I mean.

How much do you know about atheism and atheists? This YouTube video, “Atheist,” challenges the popular notion that atheists are horrible people. I recommend that everyone watch it.

One year ago: “I don’t know what beer tastes like.”
Two years ago: “In my June 22 post, I talked about the Linux operating system and listed four reasons why I might someday switch to it.”

I hate soccer, so sue me

I’m glad this World Cup thing is almost over. I’m probably risking being chastised by readers when I say this — I can’t mention my soccer opinions without getting a verbal lashing from someone — but I think soccer is boring. Doesn’t anyone else think so? I enjoy playing it for fun, but to a spectator, it’s a slow, low-scoring game that’s void of any excitement. Fans guess what the final score of a game will be. That’s how boring it is.

The frivolousness of it all is compounded by the degree to which most of the world goes ga-ga over the sport. And it’s all “My country’s better than your country.” The rabid devotion of fans to their national teams is disgusting. That’s how World War I started, by the way. I don’t think worldwide sporting events such as the World Cup do anything more than inflame national tensions. Don’t believe me? Soccer makes people go crazy.

I’m probably just pushing myself toward further bashing, but I might as well add that I’m glad that Brazil is out of the competition. After the last World Cup (of which I had been blissfully unaware), the Brazilians all went crazy because Brazil’s team won. I was in a car at Sample and Dixie, and people were honking their horns, running around, and generally causing a ruckus. I didn’t feel safe. I mean, who cares if their team won? What does that prove? It doesn’t say anything about them personally. I guess people just want to feel like they’re better than everyone else, and that’s no good. Try to control yourselves, people of the world. Just wanted to let you know: this soccer thing, it’s gone to your heads.

I should probably add that I don’t like sports in general. You probably hate me already, so what does it matter?

Yesterday, Independence Day, we had some relatives and relatives’ relatives over. We played this game called ladder golf, which is actually fun. After having some all-American fare like corn, some beef thing, and other stuff, we went to see the fireworks show on the beach. It was pretty nice in spite of the fact that a zillion people and Lee Greenwood were there. (Oh, speaking of which, God blessed America yesterday. All those incantations have paid off!) After that, we went back home and burned firework-type things. It was fun.

Top Ten Stock Photography Clichés. You probably know them all too well.

Look Around You is a British show that parodies old educational programs programmes. The first season, which aired in 2002, poked fun at cheesy science films/videos of the 1970s and ’80s. Each episode was about 9 minutes long. Now, thanks to the miracle of YouTube, you can watch them all: Maths, Water, Germs, Ghosts, Sulphur, Music, Iron, and The Brain.

One year ago: “I have a good mind to marry into Irving Berlin’s family.”
Two years ago: “It’s not even really funny, but it might claim the title.”

Take a drive… in

Yesterday I was invited by my friend Andrew to go to the local drive-in for his birthday, like last year. Only a few other people went along. Luckily, the owner didn’t get Tasered by the police this time, so there was little to keep us from getting there early. We had some food — Fritos, chicken wings, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, shrimp, Bagel Bites — and then relaxed and watched The Da Vinci Code.

I thought I would bring a small radio to add to the sound of the movie — they broadcast it on the FM band, so you don’t need to hook some box up to your car like the Flintstones did. Anyway, it seemed that the radio, which is small, cheap, and old, couldn’t pick up the station no matter, though I fiddled with the dial quite a bit. I could still hear the movie (the car stereos were tuned in too) but not as well as I would have liked to. Come to think of it, I should have brought my portable CD player (with digital tuning) and headphones. Oh well.

Anyway, I don’t really have much to say about the movie itself. I haven’t read the book, so I can’t compare it to that. The movie was pretty engaging and enjoyable. I don’t think anybody should fuss over the ideas presented in the film. It’s just fiction, after all. In fact, it’s metafiction. If you’re that insecure about your beliefs, you should probably reevaluate them. Also: I didn’t like Tom Hanks’s hair.

Today I’m going to my friend Mark’s house so we can start that band we’ve been meaning to start. It’s about time. I just (as I was writing this) got a call from Mark saying that we’d also be doing the whole pizza/movie thing. It should be cool. If we manage to play some music, it’d be a good opportunity to use my relatively new and now totally working digital recorder.

The Lake Peigneur disaster of 1980 wreaked environmental havoc and drastically changed the ecology of that Louisiana lake. The lesson learned: don’t drill for oil in a lake that sits above a salt mine. For this item, a tip o’ the hat to Damn Interesting, a blog whose name doesn’t seem to lie. This probably won’t be the last link of theirs that I post.

According to these atheist/agnostic statistics, nearly 27,000,000 Americans don’t believe in gods. Similarly, here are a ton of maps showing the prevalence of some major religions by U.S. county.

One year ago: “I hadn’t really known her before, so we sort of met for the first time.”
Two years ago: “The upperclassman said to him, ‘Here at Harvard, we don’t end sentences with prepositions.’”