Older blog entries for cmiller (starting at number 36)

I liked the "fuzzy" border on ayan's scanned slides so much that I abandoned ImageMagic for my image processing, and wrote a Gimp plugin that resizes a JPEG to fit into a given square bounding box, creates a [crisp or fuzzy] [20]-pixel [black] border, and annotates the bottom left corner with some arbitrary [text] in [light-grey]. (Options are bracketed items with the defaults listed.) Oddly, it seems quicker, at 3200 MHz-seconds, than ImageMagick did. Maybe I'm comparing apples to antelopes, though.

tk's Baloney Debunking idea is hard to implement. People believe wierd things, for myriad of reasons, and I think it's folly to think anyone can address a significant fraction of them. Still, as long as one pushes the oddball metaideas to a higher, less specific node in a topic tree, it should be easier. "Don't believe Man has visited Luna? First, click _here_ if you're a Solipsist. Et c." So, tk, got a Wiki tree free? Let's give it a try!

Being good at Science and being good at public-relations rarely exists in the same person. In recent memory, only a very few people have stood against the populist anti-science tide. Richard Feynman, physicist, and Carl Sagan, cosmologist, are among the greatest thinkers and Science publicists of the last 50 years, and they have been dead for many years now.

Yesterday, Monday, one of the last great publicists of reason and science, Stephen Jay Gould, died in his home of cancer. Gould, a palentologist, evolutionary biologist, professor at Harvard, and author, was instrumental in helping keep pseudoscience out of public schools' Science cirricula.

Recently, I was in the toy section of a department store. While looking for a copy of Pente, I encountered a girl of about nine years who was vigorously shaking a "Magic 8-Ball" and peering into the little window. My presence broke her attention to the sphere and she walked to me and asked (in broken English) if the ball really foretold the future. I was too flabbergasted to answer.

Requiescat in pace, Gould. I'm sure I won't sleep as well, without you in the world.

I'm afraid that Man isn't birthing scientists at the rate we're losing them. Please help do something about it. Take the time to read to a kid when they're really young, help with homework when they're older, and always, always, always insist on the rationality of the Universe.

aeden: It's common, these days. I'm getting a few bounced emails a week about it. Come the Revolution, the author will be first up against the wall.

ME and I went to see "Star Wars: Bring in the Clowns" yesterday. 'Sokay. I especially liked it when Saruman says "Join me or die!" and started whoopin' ass with his voodoo hands.

(set! hottie-list (cons "Natalie Portman" hottie-list))

kholmes (and other theists who don't understand atheism), the words "believe in" connote sloppy thinking. There are (at least) two distinct ideas that the words "believe in" mean, and when users of those words find themselves stuck in a contradiction, they flip meanings and thoroughly confuse themselves.

One meaning of "believe in Foo" means "to trust Foo to behave in a certain (and presumably expected) way." One might "believe in Johnny" to score a winning hit in a baseball game. It presumes Johnny exists, of course.

The other meaning of "believe in" means "to believe exists", as in "I don't believe in the Easter Bunny." It has nothing to with whether one thinks that the Easter Bunny's imaginary actions would be virtuous.

kholmes, expressing discontent with the idea of how gods behave does not an atheist make. You're not an atheist until you say "I believe there are no beings that fit the definition of gods". [And, I believe the word you're trying to use is "disillusionment" -- to be free of enchantment -- instead of "disallutionation" (not a word).]

Now, if you think gods are irreconcilable with whatever's at the end of your reference to "pure evil", then you're on your way to becoming atheist. I'm just pointing out that unhappiness is not enough.

Hope has no effect on Truth.

And, you're right that atheism isn't a full philosophy. Theists may believe that gods have absolute control over Universe, which means that they can stub off their philosophical growth while pointing to celestial fiat. Being an atheist is harder, because one must think about all areas of philosophy and come to conclusions regarding metaphysics, epistimology, ethics, and politics. I've done it, so I might be able to help, if you want it.

badvogato's drivel about "God's eyes" and livestock are still useless doubletalk. He seems to be saying that a god won't care that you're atheist, because you were born. I hope that helps you more than it helped me.

photography: I finally uploaded some images from out of Mary Ellen's camera. ayan got a negative scanner yesterday, so my stacks and stacks of negatives and slides are really taunting me, now. I did write a script to scale, border, annotate, and do comment-insertion into my JPEGs. ImageMagick is pretty cool.

Mary Ellen ("ME" hereinafter) was fairly sheltered before she met me. She had a prejudice against "wierd" things like Sci-Fi or Fantasy fiction, having only been exposed to bad sci-fi, like Star Trek. I met her in college, where, among other things, she was in a sorority -- and as a rule, sorority girls don't like Robert Heinlein or Arthur Clark. I went about changing that by introducing her to Card's _Ender's Game_, and then to Jordan's Wheel of Time.

One day, ME was clutching her soon-to-be-purchased copy of _Path of Daggers_ as we walked to the bookstore's cashier. ME plopped down the book and smiled sheepishly at the girl behind the counter, seeming to hope that the cashier wouldn't notice that this was decidedly not a very "girly" book for ME to have. The girl smiled back, scanned the book, looked at ME (who was wearing an old sorority tee) and asked, ``Are you two going to the Psi Phi convention in Atlanta, this weekend?''

ME was horror-stricken! This girl seemed to be involved in some greek organization, and was tactfully implying a great distain for ME's choice of literature! ME tried to recover by concentrating on her ignorance of whatever sorority or fraternity the girl was talking about: ``I was Kappa Delta, not, uh, Psi Phi, is it?''

The cashier looked completely confused, so I interrupted by telling her that no, alas we were busy.

We collected our books and walked out, and then I explained: ``Dear, she was talking about a Sci-Fi con, as in Science Fiction convention.''

ME, stopped abruptly and stood in shocked silence, and then wailed ``Chad! You turned me into a nerd!''

I walked back, kissed her, and she read most of the book that night, after I went to sleep.

jlbec's entry was insightful. I'm more disgusted by the abstract reasons that such a conflict exists. Living in the US' "bible-belt", I'm often subjected to bromides asserting the "power of faith." Such conflicts as exist in Israel or existed in Kosovo are the only way "faith" seems to affect events in reality. Unprovable ideas exist only in the mind of the believer. When two sets of arbitrary ideas conflict, there can be no tests to decide which is right. The only possible resolution to such conflicting ideas is the destruction of one of the minds. When the scientific method cannot be brought to bear, the disputing parties must fall back to using a club.

Yes, faith is very powerful. This is not a virtue.

As for suicide bombers, the death they cause (other than their own) is tragic, but I'm reminded of the book Contact in which the protagonist says that some behavior ``is an especially good idea, because it tends to destroy any genetic disposition towards fanaticism.'' Of course, Ellie was talking about a celibate clergy, but it applies just as well to idiots with TNT in their pants.

As a side note, Mary Ellen suggests that celibacy is the reason behind the Catholic preisthood's recent PR debacle with pedophilia. I think it's more of a property of personalities willing to ignore reason and most social conventions in the way they act.

Here's a quiz: In the past decade or so, how many Catholic preists have been removed from service because of compelling allegations of pedophilia?

a) 0 - 20
b) 21 - 200
c) more than 200 .

Answer: You don't want to know.

raph: "Alan Matheson" is such a cool name. I recently got married, and the topic of children and their names has arisen a few times. Though I don't necessarily like the trend, children have increasingly been named with what are traditionally surnames. Anyway, I proposed a few names of people I respect a lot: Turing, Tesla, or Euler. My wife: "'Oiler!' Aiigh, no!" Needless to say, if I want to have much of a chance of naming a kid, I'll have to arrange it when my wife is sedated from birthing.

I made some excellent progress on circular last night. Man, it feels good to be programming in Scheme. It's almost like the first few years of learning to program.

Mulad: For the first hundred years or so, the USA's motto was E Pluribus Unum. It's okay to scratch the religious text from paper money, as long as it's obviously not fraudulent alteration.

I'm picking up circular again, to work on. Maybe I'll actually get it to do something, finally.

fxn: 'mutt' does what you want a mail client to do, wrt settings based on recipient. Research its "send-hook" and hooks in general.

Mulad: The reason you won't see X 4.2.0 for a few weeks isn't because branden's busy. It's because Debian's releasing, and 4.2.0 isn't worthy (meaning "well-tested") of release. X has to work, and currently it does. The display on your laptop will be slow (but functional), at least until Woody is pushed to Stable and Testing is unfrozen. Sorry. It's better to work really well for most people and only fairly well for the rest than to have it work really well for most people and possibly not at all for some.

sye: please don't use CSS tricks to imbed images in diary entries. Advogato doesn't have an IMG tag for a reason. I'm afraid that a newbie will run with the idea, and ruin recentlog for a few days. (I used it tastefully, I think, on my personal page, but it's usually abused.)

job hunting

If I get the job for which I applied yesterday, it will be the mother of all ironies. I don't expect it, to tell the truth.