Disqus - Latest Comments for arensb

Re: Now that I think about it, "Lick Astley" would be a great porn star name. AND IT'S MINE.

arensb — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 00:37:18 -0000

So then you could say "You got Lick LOLled!"

Re: sahbapasta

arensb — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 06:43:00 -0000

Its also a quote writen in the defense of gay rights :)

Re: Object Oriented Programming in JavaScript

arensb — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:11:36 -0000

This doesn't seem to be true. If "B.prototype.constructor = B" is commented out in your code, "b instanceof B" still returns true.

Re: AnonNewsWire - WhyWeProtest: WhyWeMarbleCake

arensb — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 03:23:05 -0000

Faggots. http://img.4chan.org/b/res/116310045.html

Re: AnonNewsWire - WhyWeProtest: WhyWeMarbleCake

arensb — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 03:32:07 -0000

/popcorn

Re: AnonNewsWire - WhyWeProtest: WhyWeMarbleCake

arensb — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 03:54:08 -0000

WTG CHANOLOGY

Re: why believe in a god?

arensb — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:24:09 -0000

I am happy for ’science’ to ‘test’ my God.

Great. Could you please tell us what you mean by "God", and how a universe that contains that entity differs from one that doesn't?

Also, you mentioned moral absolutes to which actions can be compared to see whether they're good or not. Could you please name some of those? I don't think I've ever seen a list.

Thanks,

Re: why believe in a god?

arensb — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:35:06 -0000

I'm confused: on one hand, you say that God is the being that created the universe, so presumably God is the Big Bang. On the other hand, you say that God is love. But the universe existed for a long time before there were any living beings, let alone love. How is that possible? And besides, why worship an emotion or an expansion of space?

You also dodged my question about scientific investigation by arguing over technicalities of whether God is in the universe, or intersecting it, or what. The real question is, what objective difference does it make whether God exists or not? Or to put it another way, what observation would, if it happened, lead you to conclude that God does not exist?

Re: why believe in a god?

arensb — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:49:12 -0000

Dan King:

I don’t understand how being a creator and being love are in conflict with each other.

I do not understand why you think that love cannot exist before people do.

Love is an emotion. Which is to say, it's a (very complex) set of mental patterns; in a meat brain such as ours, that means that it's a (hugely complex) pattern of electrical and chemical interactions between molecules. Which means that you can't have love before there's a brain to be in love. Software can't run until there's hardware to run it on.

Love doesn't create anything. It's an emotion. It doesn't have hands or tools. Now, a person who feels love might build something (a man might build a house for his son because he loves him) but the man and his love are not the same thing.

So either "God is love" contradicts "God is a creator", or else there's more to it that you haven't mentioned.

You limit your understanding to what you can see and measure. I know that there is more to it than that.

Okay, how do you know?

To to answer “what difference does it make”? Bertrand Russell (an atheist) said ...

For purposes of this discussion, I don't care what Bertrand Russell thought. What I care about is what you think. But since you quoted him approvingly, I'll assume that you agree with him.

So what you're saying, then, is that if God does not exist, then
- Life has no purpose, and
- Everything is random chance, and
- People don't have control over what they do (because
- human behavior is "just" a chemical reaction to outside stimuli)

I don't know how to evaluate the statement "Life has a/no purpose". If I decide what I want to do with my life, does that mean that my life has a purpose?

The statement "Everything is random chance" is trivially false, of course. When I drop a ball, its motion is not random; I have a very good idea of where it'll go: along a path described by Newton's laws of motion.

Similarly, the statement "[everything you do] is all just a “chemical” reaction to other outside stimuli" is also false: how you or I react to external stimuli is in large part determined by inner factors (and by "inner" I mean "inside our skin"). A trivial example is that when a coworker invites me to lunch, I don't automatically answer yes or no. My answer depends in part on whether I'm hungry, or cranky, or busy, and so forth. (You may want to read Daniel Dennett's "Elbow Room: the Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting" for a deeper exploration of this topic.)

But okay, maybe I'm picking at nits, and what you really meant to say was if there are no gods, then everything we see and do, from falling raindrops to galactic arms and self-sacrificing altruism in the name of love of country, is "merely" interaction between bits of ordinary matter -- protons, electrons, photons, etc. doing the things that protons, electrons, etc. do. (I put "merely" in scare-quotes because of course we're talking about incomprehensibly-large numbers of particles and layer upon layer of interaction, resulting in massive amounts of complexity.)

You say that there's more than that. Fair enough. Show me this "more", this missing factor.

To go back to your Flatland example: I spent years trying to imagine a fourth spatial dimension, with no success. I've seen two- and three-dimensional projections of four-dimensional objects, and they don't help. So yes, if you and I were Flatlanders looking at two circles joining into a figure-eight, then a shrinking blob, I would be unable to imagine a torus in the same way that I could imagine a circle or other two-dimensional object.

But that's beside the point. What I'm asking is, show me the two circles. Once you've done that, show me why I should believe that they're part of a three-dimensional object.

And to your final question, I don’t think that there is anything that could lead me to conclude that God does not exist.

If that's true, then God, as you define it, has no effect on the universe whatsoever; and that God is indistinguishable from a nonexistent god.

It also means that you could be wrong about the existence of God, and would have no way of knowing.

(Sorry for going on at such length. Terseness is not my forte.)

Re: why believe in a god?

arensb — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:23:23 -0000

I would almost respond with ‘everything’ shows me this.

I think I see where you're coming from. The world is a wondrous place, and it's easy to see intentionality and design in it. But then again, I also see faces in clouds, shapes in tea leaves, and "hot hand" in games of chance. But I also realize that those things aren't actually there. They're illusions caused by the way my eyes, brain, etc. work.

So I try to stay cognizant of my limitations and find objective ways of distinguishing between illusion and reality.

your responses are filled with inconsistencies.

Sorry, I don't see them. Could you please point them out?

You disagree with my assessment on behavioral psychology

I don't think I did. Perhaps one of us has misunderstood the other.

Rather, I think you used the fallacy of adverse consequences: it's unpleasant to think that, as Fight Club put it, "you are the same decaying organic matter as everything else", therefore it isn't true.

I tend to avoid discussions about free will (which is, I think, where this part of the conversation is going) because "free will" is maddeningly hard to define. Either that, or a not particularly useful concept.

while you have not outrightly stated this, you seem to support the idea of evolution

There's no tactful way to say this, so I'll be blunt: living beings have evolved over the past few billion years. If you don't think so, then you're wrong. Most likely because you don't know what the evidence for evolution is, or realize just how overwhelming it is.

Furthermore, our current theories (explanations for the known facts) are pretty darn good, in the sense of explaining what we see, predicting results of future experiments, guiding medical research, and so on.

Berkeley has a pretty good site about it, if you want to learn more.

I am quite happy in my life, and feel like I am a productive contribution to the world around me. I strive to impact the world in a positve way. And in the end if I am wrong about God, then I am okay with that.

I'm sure you are. And I try to change the world for the better, in whatever small way I can. Where we (seem to) differ is that I care whether my beliefs are true.

However, I am perplexed by your unwillingness to ask the question, “what if there’s more?”

I don't think I'm unwilling to ask that question. In fact, that's what I've been trying to do: imagine different types of "more" and work out what the consequences are.

For instance, we can posit a god that:
- Knows what it would take to convince me that it exists, and
- Is capable of doing whatever it is that would convince me, and
- Wants me to believe in it.

If such a god existed, it would be both capable and motivated to convince me that it exists, and I would believe. But I don't. Ergo, such a god doesn't exist.

We can also posit God as a conscious, intelligent being outside of our univers that started the whole thing running, then left the universe alone. Such a god would be undetectable, since it doesn't interact with the universe or affect it in any way. Such a god can be neither proven nor disproven.

As a third possibility, I can define "god" as my coffee cup. I can see it, feel it, drink coffee from it, and so forth, so there is lots of evidence that it exists. So that type of god exists.

Meanwhile, you presented two parts of a definition -- that God created the universe, and that God is love -- which look incompatible, and haven't attempted to resolve this problem.

Furthermore, as I look around, I see no consensus among believers as to what "God" is. Some think God is a magic man in the sky, others say it's the entirety of the universe. Many just refer to a nebulous "higher power" and leave it at that. Some say there are many gods, others say there's only one. You'd think that if God were real, there'd be some kind of consensus, probably even an FAQ.

(You might be tempted to use the analogy of the blind men and the elephant, but I don't buy it: given that people have been studying this for thousands of years, you'd think by now they would've figured out where the rope-like part meets the tree trunk-like part, and how the two fit together.)

Re: why believe in a god?

arensb — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 23:54:02 -0000

And as I've said above, love is an emotion, and emotions don't have hands or tools with which to create.

Did you mean to say that God is a person who feels love?

Re: why believe in a god?

arensb — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 11:50:06 -0000

I'm not trying to back you into any corners. It's just that you said originally that you'd be happy for science to test your god (as would I), and I've been trying to get you to provide details as to how this could be done.

The first step should be to define what you mean by the word "God", but you've been reluctant to provide any details. In other words, if at some point I run across an entity X, how can I find out whether X is what you mean by the word "God"?

You also keep saying that "there is more", but won't say what this "more" is.

Plus, you've implied that you don't care whether your beliefs are true or not, as long as you're comfortable with them. That doesn't seem like a very good way to live, to me.

And yes, you're welcome to comment at my site. As a rule, I only delete actual spam. The most popular posts (judging by comment count) seem to be the ones about Kent Hovind, but perhaps Alvin Plantinga is more your speed.

Re: 2007/03/23/crowdrules/

arensb — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 23:06:22 -0000

Anybody can do voting better than YouTube. Looks like somebody finally has.

Re: Bye Bye Wicked Creek | Morphisat's Blog

arensb — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:48:03 -0000

Wicked creek died because TCF kicked out their WIcked Creek security force (Zenith Affinity) who handled about 90% of all invasions. Why was that was done? Well, you should ask TCF.

I'm sorry that you got screwed as a bystander. You really should give 0.0 another shot in a different area that's politically stable (relatively speaking. :) ).

Disclaimer: I'm a bit biased because I was a fresh recruit to a ZAF corporation at the time that this happened. 8-( So my foray into 0.0 was also heavily disrupted from the get go as well.

Re: Your healthcare privacy is dying and why you’ll kill it

arensb — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:47:18 -0000

I have issues with depression and anxiety. There is no way in hell I would post about this publicly, with my real name. Why? Because in this age of so-called great technology, we still are living in the Dark Ages, when it comes to attitudes about certain health conditions. For example, addiction has now been proven to be a physical disease, rooted in biochemistry and genetics, but the vast majority of people still ignorantly believe that it is a moral deficiency. A lot of people even still consider addicts to be subhuman, not worthy of compassion. So -- even though we are fairly advanced technologically, we are still pretty primitive in our social development. For that reason, I don't think it's a good idea to go public on health issues.

Re: Odds N Evens (OnE): Checks and Balances

arensb — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 17:12:53 -0000

Whilst I enjoy your great sense of humor and connection between 2 disparate news events in varied fields, I think these types of posts dwindle your writing creativity atleast a tad.

If I am estimating this right, it takes time and efforts to collect these events to link them together and publish it for the single digits to tens of comments you may receive on this blog. But take for instance your creativity and satisfaction you may get from your nostalgic posts or even others like the parenting posts. Do you derive the same sense of satisfaction from those? Agreed, they may garner even fewer comments. but as a writer, what are your feelings? I realize this could be the classic creator's dilemma much like the action movie vs award winning movie.

Having known you and followed your blog for the larger part of the years it has been alive, I know you are capable of great writing with diverse insight on multitudes of fields. Simply re-weaving news from other sources in a punchy tone is not doing full justice to your writing talent as much as it is to your comic timing is what I feel. You start seeing more and more of Obama, Apple or other catchy puns.

Sorry if I said anything wrong and please don't take it negatively.

Re: Paul Allen's Kiha avoids limelight, but looks to raise big bucks

arensb — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 10:29:00 -0000

Paul Allen companies = Paul's toys.

Paul wanted a small computer, so began FlipStart. Paul wanted video toys for Charter, so began Digeo.

Paul wants some cool mobile venture so he can talk with the mobile movers-and-shakers, so begins Kiha.

Re: C++: the Ugly Useful Programming Language

arensb — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 15:49:31 -0000

I think this article betrays a lack of commercial development experience on the part of the author. Especially this:

Many of the "C++ replacements" are not designed for the last purpose; they are designed for ... less serious applications, such as in-house database front-ends. There are very few proper applications, especially commercial applications, written in Java or C#, simply because they are not as fast as any program which actually runs on your computer.

IMO, this paragraph blew any credibility you had waaay out of the water. You actually make some decent points in the rest of the article, but that's just too big a whopper.

Firstly: "There are very few... commercial applications written in Java or C#"? Seriously, what planet are you living on? I don't think it's the same one I'm on!

Secondly, you seem to imply that applications not written in C++, or those that do not get "straight to the metal" are somehow "less serious" or not "proper" applications, which I think shows, at best, a lack of experience with other languages and their applications, and, at worst, blind prejudice.

Is C++ somehow superior, because people use it for systems programming instead of those those "database front-ends"? No. If anything, it simply means C++ is inferior for programming database front ends! Sure you *could* do it in C++, but most people need to knock up those database front-ends, and do it quickly, and easily, without in-depth knowledge of a powerful language like C++, and all that mucking about with pointers, exceptions, templates, compilation, manual memory management, etc. Writing good, bug-free C++ apps is *hard* and time-consuming. Doing so quickly with minimal training is beyond most people. In most applications, the language needs to just get out of the way and let somebody do their job. C++ is, IMO, a very "in your face" language. (Java doesn't get off lightly there either.)

Use the right tool for the job. C++ is something of a Swiss-Army knife, but that doesn't make it 'superior' to any other language that is domain-specific, or otherwise limited in scope. Ever heard the phrase "Jack-of-all trades, master of none?". The vast majority of people are not doing systems-level programming, or time-critical stuff, so C++ probably isn't the right tool for them.

Most commercial applications will sacrifice "bare metal" coding and performance (and all the difficulty that entails) for fast development, robustness, fewer bugs per line of code, reliability, readability, flexibility, ease-of-use, scalability, concurrency, maintainability, cheaper developers, productivity, affordability, and many other qualities. Otherwise we wouldn't have the proliferation of languages, and the current massive trend for Java and C# development that we see today. Oh, except you didn't seem to know about that. ;)

Re: Ask Us! Error 411?

arensb — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 16:00:08 -0000

I took mine apart, shook it gently. A few pieces of fuzz/dirt/solder came out. Put it back together and it appears to be working now. Hasn't error'ed in the past two hours...

Re: Molotov Cocktail Thrown at McCain Sign- Could be "Change"!

arensb — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 23:11:19 -0000

4th of July, a week or two after I graduated high school I was celebrating with my own home made fireworks... dry ice + 2 liter coke bottle + water. I was arrested and charged with a similar crime "manufacture and possession of explosive device". end of the day I was convicted with the felony and was sentenced to 4 months. I think what I did was mostly harmless while what these guys did was not. but interesting the charge is the same. will be interesting to see what their sentence is.

Re: Oops, I Did It Again

arensb — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 12:39:28 -0000

Your Atom/RSS feeds are broken again.

Re: Oops, I Did It Again

arensb — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 15:42:12 -0000

I'm using Firefox v.3.0.5 and if I do a "View Source" on the Hypothetical Labs RSS feed, I see:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"
    xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
    xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
    xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
    xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
    >

<channel>

Firefox refuses to parse the above as a valid RSS feed. Compare the above with the RSS feed from Hacker News (which Firefox does parse as a valid RSS feed):

<rss version="2.0"><channel>