March 2004 Archives
Dear The British Public,
You suck. To rank Only Fools and Horses, a sitcom that provides the canonical definition of an outstayed welcome, above Blackadder just demonstrates your total failure of taste or discernment in things comedic. Giving it more votes than One Foot in the Grave, Yes Minister, and Fawlty Towers combined proves conclusively that you are idiots and comedy is dead. Please destroy your televisions immediately.
Thanks,
Chris
No weblog I know has picked up this story from the news sites yet, but it deserves an audience -- it's quite remarkable.
Three people have been arrested after winning more than £1m at an exclusive central London casino.
Two men and a woman won the money playing roulette at the Ritz Casino club in Piccadilly on 16 March.
Two men and a woman... hmm... do you think it could be...?
Seriously, though, here's what we know. The suspects walked into an exclusive club in London and on two separate nights earlier this month they walked away from the roulette table £1.2 million (in total) richer.
But it gets far more interesting. The Guardian has an interesting article about the suspected method behind this heist.
In short, the gang are believed to have used laser measuring devices and concealed computers to calculate the spin of the wheel and trajectory of the ball, and predict where the ball was likely to fall.
Let's go over that again. Someone used data collected optically from covert hand-held devices to calculate the likely outcome of an ostensibly chaotic system in faster than real time. This isn't just clever -- if true, it's genius. It's practically science fiction.
Now most of this is just conjecture at this point... a journalist joining the dots, as the details have not yet been fully revealed. But Scotland Yard have at least confirmed that they're examining a gadget in a mobile phone, and the principles in question have been proven effective before -- albeit in a lab. So it's not idle speculation... it really does look plausible that this scheme was the one employed by the suspects. Doesn't it sound like the plot of a great caper movie? And it's not over yet -- as discussed in the Guardian article, the legalities of this case are anything but clear-cut, so the suspects might walk away, not having broken any law.
For me, there's something hard to define about the act of ripping off a casino that makes it sound like the most glamourous, exciting, and sympathetic kind of crime. Maybe we like to see gambling institutions -- who make a business out of putting people into debt -- get a taste of their own medicine once in a while. Maybe a long line of charming fictional scoundrels in our entertainment media have created a romanticised archetype which we can't help but think of when we read stories like this one. And stories about those who outsmart the system have always been popular. But whatever the reasons, and against my better judgment, there's certainly a large part of me that hopes these three slick swindlers get away with it.
(Cowboy Bebop image from Cartoon Party)
Chris (Lambert) just showed me the response he has written to my post yesterday about spirituality. It's not directly related but I'm linking to it here because I really think anyone who participated in the earlier multiple-blog discussion ought to read it.
Arguments against theism usually take the form of factual objections: logical flaws in arguments, errors within religious texts, or contradictions between somebody's particular belief system and the observable world. But although a debate on any other subject would be won or lost on strength of factual argument, this does not apply to arguments about religion. This is because for most committed theists, there exists something inherently more important than evidence: faith, and for many of them it's clear that no amount of evidence could ever exist that would lead them to reconsider their worldview. In the minds of strong believers, their beliefs are completely unfalsifiable, and no factual argument, however well presented, will ever have any effect.
I hope this doesn't sound disparaging so far; I'm trying to express this objectively. But a note to the faithful in the audience: bear in mind that in some of the following paragraphs in particular I'm only referring to a subset of believers, so please don't assume I'm generalising; that's not my intention.
I actually find it fascinating to observe. After 11/9, the American religious right paraded an unremarkable cross-shaped piece of debris at Ground Zero as evidence of the existence and intervention of their god, while conveniently ignoring the horrific implications of their trust in a deity who would do nothing to stop a terrorist attack and save 3,000 lives -- but would play Lego with the rubble. Given an opportunity, many theists will see any suitable phenomenon or occurrence as evidence that supports their faith. But a worldview that includes faith as the highest form of 'knowledge' requires that anything that might contradict these beliefs can not be accepted; it must be dismissed, whether through alternative explanations however implausible, by fallacy or ad hominem, or just through simple denial. This is not always the case, of course; sometimes, the argument they are faced with is genuinely weak, and a solid defence can be made by the believer. But by maintaining over time the selective process of tending towards accepting any piece of evidence in support of their faith while tending towards not giving due consideration to any evidence against, the security of a believer's faith is ensured -- a cycle of reinforcement.
Many non-theists, as well as adherents of religions like Buddhism that encourage critical inquiry, find this dogmatism difficult to understand. Personally, I believe it can even be dangerous. I think that when somebody makes something unverifiable into their most important source of 'truth', they impair their ability to think critically or test a premise -- important skills in every part of life.
I try not to get angry on the occasions that theists use poor logic, bad attitude, or weak judgment in defence of their religious opinions. Almost always, they're actually neither poor thinkers nor disagreeable individuals, and would not even consider using weak logic or gratuitous insult in any other conversational context. I believe it's unintentional; when faith is permitted to transcend everything, then there is no option but to dismiss any challenge to faith. And the worst parts of human nature are sometimes exposed in doing so.
Or in summary, don't attempt to seriously debate someone who believes that their opinion is unfalsifiable; it's a lose-lose situation. (Straightforward, yes, but it's taken me an absurdly long time to figure this out.)
But back to the point of the post:
Chris (Lambert)'s personal argument for why he doesn't believe is quite different to the familiar ones. He does not attempt to debate the truth or falsehood of religion, arguing that it is completely irrelevant, because he has no need or desire for any supernatural influence to be exerted on his life. Chris thinks that mankind's strongest trait is its ability to withstand difficulty, and maintains a solid independence. "I will get myself through life and I take great pride in that." A fiercely humanistic position to be sure.
Chris doesn't have comments working because he hasn't written that part of the code yet, but until that facility's working, I'm sure he'll read any comments left here. If you haven't already, check out his words.
You may find this entry uninteresting. You will definitely find it long.
This week in this neck of the blogosphere, everybody's talking about their gods.
Anyone who knows me at all will already know that I do not believe in good or evil spirits, karma, divine intervention, or other comforting ideas. Some people (though nobody I know personally) would form judgments about my moral integrity based purely on the facts in the previous sentence. But in reality, these statements imply precisely nothing about my personal ethics. For the record, I believe in absolute personal responsibility, in upholding a high standard of behaviour towards others, and in the potential for every human being to be an instrument of change for the better; and although I may sometimes act in contrast to them (I'm broken, after all), these beliefs are held no less deeply than those of a person of faith (sometimes perhaps even more deeply, since I've never heard of anyone suffering a 'crisis of ethics').
But I didn't start writing this response to argue about religion, because aside from being a futile act, it would mean ignoring the interesting part of the conversation. Both x3ja and MaW talked about experiencing intense, deeply emotional events that they attribute to their respective gods. MaW even implied that atheists might not be biologically susceptible to this kind of experience.
So, in an attempt to find some common ground, here's my contribution to the discussion.
It's taken over 2 days, required the stripping down to chassis of two old PCs, and needed about 25 install attempts to get everything working, but I finally have my own fully functional Debian Linux machine.
And in all honesty, I had more fun doing it than I've had in the last year of using Win2K (which I do actually like as an OS, but it just doesn't give you anything to do). I always assumed that overexposure was to blame for my declining enthusiasm for computing lately. Maybe it was just Microsoft.
Blame jimbo for this:
Test your font geek and movie geek credentials in one quiz, with Movie Alphabet Game 1! Some are easy (if you can't get N then you've no business being on the net) and some are frustrating (what the hell is X?). I got 20/26 with minimal help, but I've started to cheat on the last few.
And when you're bored of that, try Game 2 -- it's harder than diamonds. I'm on 10/26 and stuck fast.
Post your scores!
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