Rob Bos

It bothers me a little that technology has advanced far enough that Clarke's Law - that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - seems to apply to the vast majority of the population.

An implication of that law seems to be that when technology is indistinguishable from magic, too many people assume that magic is technology.

I have no other explanation for the proliferation of stuff like homeopathy, chiropractic, vaccination conspiracy theories, and global warming denialism. People who assume science is like magic, or magic is like science.

Happy War on Christmas!

It's that time of year again, when atheists, agnostics, and non-Christians the world over get together for traditional War on Christmas events and carols, huddle around burning Nativity scenes with the family and praise Satan for his support in helping us destroy the tiny, persecuted, embattled, and hopelessly outnumbered minority of Christian sentiment.

So join me in a cup of good cheer (cheer: 1 cup eggnog to 1 ounce rum), go flip Santa off on a street corner, and remember:

Be good for goodness' sake!

Here's a longish quote from Obama about security matters, as discussed by Bruce Schneier (who just sent out his newsletter), and it's a big part of why I'm liking Obama more and more as the days go by.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/10/barak_obama_dis.html

Short version: Obama is saying that security tradeoffs must be made at a high level, that the war in Iraq is a complex situation, but it's only part of the larger picture of military deployment.

Consistently, when I hear P-E Obama speak like that, it's like he's speaking my language, in terms that I understand.

Contrasting that to Bush. Bush, when he deigns to speak the public at all, coaches his decisions in terms of patriotic fervor, kicking ass in the name of Gawd, and about how the terrorists are going to kill us all. When Bush speaks, I feel like he's specifically kicking my world view in the crotch.

I think the USA might just do all right with this guy steering.

Oh, I forgot to follow up my previous post on my World of Warcraft progression.

We took Illidan down to 2% before the patch 3.0 nerf, and very handily destroyed him the next week. So I'm counting that as a win, since we had a week of cancelled raids after one of our main tanks went out with personal problems, and another went on vacation.

This week, we've brought down Kalecgos, Brutallus, and Felmyst, with the help of a raid leader from a further-progressed guild.

Before next Thursday, the final server ranking for "Good With Ketchup" on US-Kilrogg will be either 12 or 13.

Not bad for a casual little guild that split off its parent guild a year and a half ago, and could only pull together seven people for Karazhan. It goes to show how important it is to get good people and focus on progression content over farm content.

I'm quite proud of our accomplishments, and I'm looking forward to Wrath of the Lich King. I hope we can have as strong a showing.

http://www.ketchuponline.com

What do you hope to see out of the Obama administration?

Answering this for myself, I'd like to see a return of Habeus Corpus, a reinstatement of the first amendment (free speech zones my ass), a general policy of treating terrorism as criminal activity instead of warfare, and a serious presidential evaluation of the Iraq situation from a hard military occupational perspective instead of a wishful-thinking-fairy-pony perspective (they'll all welcome us with open arms, am I right? Or perhaps, America should just pull out all of its troops right away and everything will be hunky dory).

Bonus points if Obama lifts the executive order preventing the release of White House papers, and we can find some evidence to get Rove and Cheney indicted for treason.

We were prepared:

GWK Illidan kill video

It's disheartening to read about some of the attacks being made on naturalism and secularism in recent years; agencies like the Discovery Institute, politicians like Sarah Palin, the usually bafflingly illogical challenges made by various writers, generally self-labeled "conservatives" but perhaps better called "fundamentalists".

I don't fear for the long term, however. It seems to me that all these incidents are not attacks, but counter-attacks: desperate holding actions by religion, fighting retreats on every front, hastily-erected revetments to deal with an impossible onslaught by the forces of naturalism. The defenders of magic and mysticism are desperately trying to come to terms with the challenges that the naturalist philosophy bring to the table. That being, the simple fact that naturalism works. Every time, every time that naturalism and magic have tangled, naturalism has won. Lighting is NOT created by magic. Babies are NOT created by magic. The Earth is NOT 6000 years old. Not once, not once, ever, has something been taken away from naturalism, and re-attributed to magic. The magicians do wail, and there is much gnashing of teeth and tearing of clothing, but their deep magical mysteries are taken away from them every time.

As our tools for understanding the world around us get better and better, we take more and more things away from the magicians. Their most vociferously-announced ideas are repeatedly shown to the be the lies of con men, control freaks, and slavers of the worst kind: slavers of the mind. Every time we take one of those ideas away from them, their positions as slavers grow more and more shaky.

One might conclude that the magicians never had anything real in the first place, that they never actually had information that the rest of us don't have, that magical beings do not talk to them and not us.

One might conclude, in fact, that the voices the magicians hear are not real, and that the magicians are just making it up for their own benefit.

Every advance that science makes reinforces this conclusion.

And the magicians are scared. Shitless. They're desperate, and their every action shows it. Those revetments are going up because they can't adapt to a world without magic. Their privileges rely on people who believe in magic, and as the magic is systemically removed from the world and replaced with knowledge, their privileges go away. Suddenly, shaking the juju stick and speaking in magic words isn't having the effect it used to. People are starting to ask sneaky questions, like, "Where did all the gold we gave you go?" or "What is it you actually do around here?". It's an uncomfortable position to be in.

So we see people attacking civil rights on a religious basis (good luck, California), attacking neurology because it might explain human consciousness without a soul, attacking .. well, the entire vast structure of human knowledge because it points to an Earth over 5 billion years old, and a universe exceeding 20 billions of years old.

These people are desperately trying to hold onto their magic, and their magicians have much political power.

It'll be a hard fight, but they're on the defensive, and they'll stay on the defensive as long as we keep on searching for knowledge.

As long as we stand up and insist that "god did it" is NOT an acceptable answer to all of life's questions, we'll win. That should never be forgotten.

My little guild is facing Illidan. We may actually beat Burning Crusade before the next expansion is released. The clock is now ticking.

I've been watching Carl Sagan's "Cosmos", and in part 7, there's a bit where he introduces Leonardo Da Vinci's workshop. I don't know if it's his actual workshop or not, though several scenes were filmed in Vinci, so it well could be.

A little bit into it, he talks about Leonardo's lifelong dream of flying, and somewhat later, about the Orion and Daedalus ideas, and spreads out a rolled schematic.

The thought of spreading out concept schematics of a genuine starship on Leonardo Da Vinci's desk struck me as an intensely romantic notion, and put a lump in my throat for a moment. What would the master think of that, I wonder.

I'm finding that I don't have much use for LJ. It's too public a medium to be a diary, and I don't have anything I particularly feel compelled to share with the world at large or with the various people on my friends list.

I'm not about to delete my account, but I'm occasionally panged with guilt over not posting here from time to time. I still lurk occasionally through my friends page, and comment on the odd entry that strikes my fancy, but beyond that there's not much interest.

A few years ago, I'd share my opinions on any subject that came up, with anyone that happened to be in earshot. I don't feel so compelled to do that anymore. Whether that's because I don't want to spread my seed on barren ground, don't particularly care what people believe, or no longer have a particularly high opinion of my own opinions, I don't know. I suppose in any of those cases, it's a positive development.

It's been a while since I wrote anything of any length. I no longer take university classes, so there's no reason to do any writing of consequence. Blogging (still hate that word, but I've come to accept it) is a pretty good way to keep up one's writing skills. Once I would write voluminously on nothing at all; now I find I write sparsely about daily events in a writing style that feels both monosyllabic and stunted.

I'd like to re-cultivate writing skills, but I don't know where I might write productively; a sense of economy of time seems to prevent me from spending time that I could be spending more productively elsewhere on writing.

Might be an idea to keep a private journal again, or perhaps pontificate here.

Anyhoo. Might put more time into this, might not.

I've had La Marseillaise on infinite repeat for two hours.

I think it's bedtime now.

edit:



Hint: which way is she spinning?

gakked from Pharyngula, in fact copied and pasted, because it amuses me and because Expelled disgusts me:

CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE EVOLUTIONARY APPARATUS DIRECTIVE
• OBEY • OBEY • OBEY • OBEY • OBEY • OBEY • OBEY • OBEY • OBEY • OBEY • OBEY • OBEY •

We need to get the NCSE's counter-site to the hideous little propaganda film, Expelled, to rank higher in the search engines. The way to do this is for lots and lots of you to link to the Expelled Exposed site with the word Expelled. It's not hard: just copy this code into a blog post.

<a href="http://expelledexposed.com/"><i>Expelled</i></a>

Whenever you write about the movie, use that link. Do it a bunch of times, if you want. It's more effective if many people use the same link every time, though, than for one person to be repetitive.

• OBEY • OBEY • OBEY • OBEY • OBEY • OBEY • OBEY • OBEY • OBEY • OBEY • OBEY • OBEY •
CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE EVOLUTIONARY APPARATUS DIRECTIVE

For those of you who haven't been hearing about this movie, here's a summary:

"SCIENTISTS HATE US. :("
"evilutionists are HITLER"
"Richard Dawkins says ALIENS MADE EVILUTION"
"YAY GOD"

The majority of my spam (75ish%) is in Hebrew. This is after blacklisting, greylisting, and other DNS checks.

I have no idea why.

Tempted to turn off all my spam blocking and see if that percentage holds.

I just received ASCII art spam.

That's a new one.

I completely lack words.

http://www.lolcatbible.com

The Ten Commandments: http://lolcatbible.com/index.php?title=Exodus_20
The Beatitudes: http://lolcatbible.com/index.php?title=Matthew_5
The Song of Solomon: http://lolcatbible.com/index.php?title=Song_of_Solomon_4
Creation: http://lolcatbible.com/index.php?title=Genesis_1
Revelation 22: http://lolcatbible.com/index.php?title=Revelation_22

It's great to first read aloud the original, and then read the lolcat version.

Created by the same guy who brought you xkcd:

The Limerick DB top 150

Love it.

"beeping" refers to the emerging practice of using cellphone rings as a single-bit form of communication - one ring, or perhaps two rings, and then hanging up - to communicate without actually having to pay anything.

The entire paper is interesting, but search for "repertoire" for a list of examples.

http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/donner.html

Anyone else do this?

My WoW account got hacked on Dec. 31st. :(

They managed to abscond with the guild bank, vendor about fifty epics, and auction off a metric shittonne of raid consumables.

Stupid gold farmers.

I blame myself, really, I used a stupidly dictionary password.

I just picked up a new 2 terabyte Terastation Pro fileserver off ebay for $800.

Probably could have built something similar out of generic hardware for about $700, but hey, pretty box. And compact.

2TB of network-attached storage should do me for a while. Not sure whether to run it mirrored or striped... probably striped, 100 megabit ethernet isn't exactly going to challenge this thing performance-wise. :P Next step, upgrade to gig E in the apartment.

Watched "The Producers" a few days ago.

"Springtime for Hitler" won't get out of my head. >_