geoff – Page 11 – Geoff Arnold's Blog

The week's twitterings – 2011-02-06

I'm really fed up with the new @skype UI on the Mac. Lots of gratuitous white space and flashy coverflow, but no compact view. Frustrating. #
“@aaronpaxson: It astounds me that scientists don't believe in God. Who else can make things so perfect and "in balance"?” <Gotta be a troll #
“@stevel: @geoffarnold http://t.co/A0q7yTH” < Helps a bit, but still terribly wasteful of screen real estate. #
“@GeorgeReese: I don't believe in string theory.” <Of course, the universe is indifferent to your opinion. #
“@craigmorgan: @geoffarnold @stevel front it with Adium" < But I mostly use Skype for video chat 🙁 #
“@adrianco: @GeorgeReese @geoffarnold E8 theory is more elegant than string theory” < Surely the E8 *model* – lots to do to make it a theory #
Great piece by Julia Galef on the epistemological status of "intuition". http://t.co/t2Z3fnd #
Hitchens is devastating on why The King's Speech is a gross falsification http://t.co/nYx3IKR via @guardian. Loved the film, but he's right. #
Today is a day for weak tea, dry toast, and sleep. #delhibelly #
Corvid savants: http://t.co/xFafX7Y – check out the video clips! Crows (and rooks, and ravens) rule! #
Catholic priest/exorcist: "We have a rite that’s recognized, even by the demons, as legitimate." Lawful evil demons? http://t.co/qfbaySY #
Somehow I wound up pulling an all-nighter last night. This can't end well. (Though today ends with me getting on a plane, so….) #
11:25PM – time to check out and head to the airport for my BLR-FRA-SFO flights home. (How come I only ever see Indian airports at 2-3AM?) #
And here I am, back at the Tower Lounge at Frankfurt. I have a 3+ hour layover, then I'm heading home to SFO. #
My Yahoo-supplied 15" MBP is gorgeous & fast, but just too big and heavy for a road warrior. Switch to 13"?
Or is a new MBA in my future? #
Back home: I just watched Wolves beat ManUtd. Not what I expected. Good match, though. #

The week's twitterings – 2011-01-30

Early to bed (10:30PM); I've got a limo coming for me tomorrow morning at 3:25AM. First Boston, then on Thursday I fly to Bangalore. #
Waiting in the LH lounge to board my BOS-FRA flight. I'll have a couple of hours in FRA, then on to BLR, arriving in the middle of the night #
“@GeorgeReese: @vambenepe SOAP must die.” < Big +1 to that! #
“@longword: hmm, wooden stake, garlic, or silver bullet? <Not silver bullet – try searching for "lifecycle silver bullet". Great paper! #
“@GeorgeReese: I guess I did just advocate violence against SOAP.” < Actually well-informed indifference is doing the job pretty well! #
At the LH Lounge in Frankfurt for 6 hour layover. (@united PremEx = Star Alliance Gold). Good food&drink… but WiFi is 8 Euros for an hour! #
Uneventful flight from FRA to BLR on LH, in a antiquated 747-400 with overhead TVs and no personal IFE. Only @United and LH, I guess… #
Anyone know of a Firefox plugin to facilitate the creation of a "tab sweep" blog post? Build a page of linked tab titles, ready for editing? #
Got to Bangalore hotel at 3am, slept until 9, intending to have breakfast. It's now 11:50am, so I guess I'll call it lunch. #fightingjetlag #

The week's twitterings – 2011-01-23

Setting up S11 zone on new server to host my friends+family domains. Yesterday DNS+certs. Today Apache. Tomorrow email. Test. Then migrate. #
Brooks on consciousness: – but the key point is that there is no place for the supernatural in this. We are material. #
Vatican edict in 1997 rejected calls to report priests who abused: from @the_irish_times #
Esquire on "Will We Remember Tucson? Was It Enough? Is Anything?", remembering Oklahoma City – http://shar.es/XMyMK #
Now here's a political realignment I can endorse: replace Left/Right (Dem/Rep, Lab/Con) with Modernist/Regressive. http://shar.es/XMS5T #
Just discovered Google Sketchup – http://t.co/g8m9Lws This is a very cool toy^H^H^H tool. My colleagues can expect lots of 3D in emails. #
music so excellent i just happily paid 8 clams for it @bandcamp: http://music.amandapalmer.net/album/amanda-palmer-goes-down-under #

What makes you feel good is not necessarily effective

A code to yesterday’s piece: Some of the Christian bloggers asserted that “What is needed in the face of all this is a more assertive proclamation of the value of our faith than many Episcopalians, especially clergy are comfortable giving.” To this, I would point to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and in particular:

It is not clear that arguments against atheism that appeal to faith have any prescriptive force the way appeals to evidence do. The general evidentialist view is that when a person grasps that an argument is sound that imposes an epistemic obligation on her to accept the conclusion. Insofar as having faith that a claim is true amounts to believing contrary to or despite a lack of evidence, one person’s faith that God exists does not have this sort of inter-subjective, epistemological implication. Failing to believe what is clearly supported by the evidence is ordinarily irrational. Failure to have faith that some claim is true is not similarly culpable.

So while it may make you feel better, it’s unclear that such proclamations will actually make a dent in secularism…..
Tip o’the hat to John Loftus.

The fear of irrelevancy

After reading a few Christian blog and Facebook pieces today, I just had to vent. Please excuse.
Please forgive this atheist if he finds it hard to take US Christians seriously when they talk about experiencing “hostility” and worry about possible irrelevance. Christianity remains the dominant culture of the USA, even if its adherents are better at talking the talk than walking the walk. As we saw in Tucson, the president of the country is comfortable using language which completely excludes non-believers, and many other national leaders are unhesitant in describing the US as a Christian country.
Even though 6% of the country may describe themselves as atheist, how many of our representatives do so? Not only could an atheist not be elected to the Presidency; even the deist Thomas Jefferson would be unelectable today.
So when a (very few) atheists voice the kind of sentiment that Christians have been dishing out for years, it seems disproportionate for Christians to complain. OK, vilification of atheists rarely comes from the Anglicans or the Methodists, but why should atheists have to sort out the distinctions between the many different groups that all describe themselves as Christian?
It seems to me that the problems faced by religious moderates have little do do with atheists. There have always been atheists and agnostics in the US, and if they are more visible today it is because modern communications technology is giving them a voice and a community. Secularism may provide a convenient windmill at which to tilt, but in the long term fighting that battle seems futile. Surely TEC and CofE should be trying to figure out how to reach those who are inclined to belief, including other Christians. If you’re trying to sell more wine, your new customers are probably going to be beer-drinkers – not teetotalers.
PS Please drop the term “militant atheist“. In matters of religion, militancy is what we’re seeing in Nigeria or Pakistan today. Publishing a book is not an act of militancy.

The week's twitterings – 2011-01-16

The new British Library iPad app is just gorgeous. Magnificent. Exquisite. Check out the illuminated manuscripts… #
“@amandapalmer: I just wrote the stupidest. Song. Ever.” < Whoa! Stiff competition in that category! #
“@AMaskedAvenger: Something wonderful will happen today!”< Something wonderful happens EVERY day. Also something crappy. #itsabigworld #
Really puzzled about all the recent LinkedIn and Facebook invitations from people who work at Sun Microsystems. Didn't they get the memo? #
“@russnelson: it's also going to have to decide when NOT to pay for your health care” <And for-profit lowest-bid insurance companies don't? #
"Today has been set aside to honor the victims of the Tucson massacre. And Sarah Palin has apparently decided she's one of them," – TPM #
Setting up a new cert for my zone. The openssl CSR generation dialog sucks – or at least GoDaddy dislikes the result. #
Anyone referring to the BALANCE of violent rhetoric is simply disingenuous. There is no balance. http://t.co/wonDo40 via @NewYorker #
Forceful+erudite refutation of the idea that the cobbled-together Nativity story has any historical basis whatsoever. http://t.co/SfnQl8s #
Correlation is not causation, but pleading pure coincidence would be absurd. http://t.co/S49HMwS via @Telegraph #
“@russnelson: .@geoffarnold and video games cause violence, too. Wait, there's no proof for THAT either, is there?” < That's an argument?! #

The week's twitterings – 2011-01-09

Just watched Chelsea v Aston Villa. As the commentator said, this is the kind of game that captures just why we watch the Premier League… #
Brilliant piece in the Atlantic by Garrett Epps on the constitutional aspects of Health Care Reform suits http://t.co/Fx0GqnY via @AddThis #
OK, I'm no longer a CA earthquake virgin. That M4.1 (13 miles ESE of San Jose) at 4:10pm was a nice shakeup. #

Slicing off probocis to spite visage (AA style)

I’m starting to pull together plans for a business trip. The idea is that I’ll go to the Boston area for a meeting, fly on a couple of days later to Bangalore, then back home to San Francisco. A typical multi-city trip, reminiscent of my days at Sun. Naturally, I begin by visiting the travel sites: Yahoo Travel (powered in part by Expedia) and Orbitz. History suggests that the best schedule will probably involve multiple carriers….
But there’s a problem: each site offers only a few choices. After a moment, I realize that I’m not seeing anything from American Airlines (and precious little from their oneWorld partners). AA has decided not to play ball with the Internet travel sites, and they’ve reciprocated.
Fine: let me try the American website. This is a disaster. (Somebody teach AA about user interface design, quick!) How about their partners in crime, British Airways? That’s even worse: do they really expect me to do SFO-BOS via LHR?!
American may think that it makes sense to try to pull travellers from the aggregator sites to their own website, but doing this means giving up on the multiple city, multiple carrier market. I always though that this was one of the most profitable segments in the airline business. Maybe there are too few of us for American to worry about, but alienating business customers seems monumentally stupid.

Acting on one's beliefs

Over at CommonSenseAtheism, Luke just posted the following question:

Imagine you have a blue pill and a red pill, and you must swallow one of them right now and not the other.
If you take the red pill, you will die immediately. If there is an afterlife, all your sins will be pardoned and you will spend eternity there. If there isn’t an afterlife, you will just be dead.
If you take the blue pill, you will live a long, happy, and fulfilling life on Earth. You won’t die early of illness or injury. You will be an asset to society. But if there is an afterlife, you will not partake in it when you die. When you die you will cease to exist, even if there is an afterlife for everyone else.
Which pill will you choose?

Yes, I know that it’s contrived. And yes, believers will reject it in various ways; one approach is to argue that only a deity could implement this, and their deity would never do so. And one can also view this as a kind of “reverse Pascal’s Wager”, and reasonable people agree that the Wager is a crock.
But I still think it’s a usefully provocative thought-experiment. Obviously non-believers will all take the blue pill, but how about the rest of you?

The week's twitterings – 2011-01-02

Good grief! England bowls out Aussies for 98, finishes day 1 of the Melbourne test on 157-0! #australiancollapse #ashes looking safe #
Pedophile priests, emergency hospital care: will the Catholic Church ever accept that it is subject to the law? http://nyti.ms/e35P2C #
Went to see "The KIng's Speech" this afternoon. Wonderful movie! Off to Carmel/Monterey tomorrow for a couple of days. #
Book of the moment: Sarah Bakewell's "How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer" #
Just test drove a Hyundai Genesis Coupe 3.8. Remember RWD? Wow! Tomorrow I'll try the 2.0T; see if the extra 96 BHP is worth the money. #
I just got a $5 credit for movies and TV shows @amazonvideo. Click http://amzn.to/hh8gTP to get yours. #get5 #
Just finished a wonderful book: "The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England" by Ian Mortimer. Great perspective on 14th century England. #
Day 2 of car shopping: test drive Genesis Coupe 2.0T. Then compare with 3.8. Last day of the year: should be a good time to make a deal! #