Bullet Points for a Wednesday Morning [Snowpocalypse Edition]

daniel on Dec 9th 2009

  • Some things are just too long to fit on Twitter. Ironically, not this point, but still.
  • I love how all the commercial radio stations have this dramatic music for snowfall coverage. We’re Canadians, ladies. We’ve seen hundreds of these “winter storms”.< We're not going to fall apart when the first snowflake hits us. By the way, this is how you know commercial news people aren't really in the business of news anymore: If they're seeking to dramatize snow, then they're in the business of entertainment. Or maybe the business of stupidity. This is why I listen to CBC Radio 1.
  • Mark Trapgillistagenstein posted this article about fossils in some place in the US. Now, I understand there’s a legitimate debate going on in Christianity between the creationists, the don’t-know-ers, and the full-on evolutionists. But this doesn’t excuse the lack of basic scientific knowledge that seems so frighteningly rife in Christian circles. Look what one creationist says in the article: “Secular scientists stumble over the complexities of the natural world and continue to adjust the age of Earth to fit their theories.” My jaw is still on the floor from this ignorant, anti-science, anti-intellectual bit of absolute tripe. I’m hoping that the guy was trying to say something else and the whole thing just came out wrong. But still:
    1. Scientists don’t adjust the age of the earth to fit their theories, exactly. Their theories are built on evidence of how old the earth actually is. To represent this as if every time some scientist takes a long hot shower and has a great idea he’ll malevolently adjust the age of the earth on a whim? That’s the height of disingenuity. Come on, even creationists have had to say that the earth looks really, really old (and come up with great reasons why God would make an old-looking earth to trick the heathen scientists into being a little more heathen).
    2. It’s called the scientific method, stupid! That little process whereby we understand at least to some degree the basic structure of the universe? The process upon which all modern technology stands? Yeah, that one. Let’s not act like adjusting theories to fit evidence (and then adjusting the age of the earth to fit the theory based on the evidence) is some strange new innovation that no-one’s heard of yet.
    3. You call trying to understand complexity “stumbling” over it? Okay! If we must play word games, then creationists stumble over the imperfections in design that a perfect Creator apparently caused. There are some stunningly stupid things about the human body that creationism just overlooks. Sure, there’s complexity that is easily solved by the addition of a Six-Day Creator into the mix, but there’s also a lot of bio-sloppiness going that makes that same Creator look just a bit daft. So which one is it? You can’t have both.
  • So I need snow tires. The tires on my car aren’t bad, but they aren’t amazing either. They’re just… all-seasons. I don’t even know why they call them all-seasons. Marketing. They should call them death-in-winters.
  • Since I bought Laura a huge-ass ring for Christmas (to celebrate 2.5ish years), I also got myself an iPod touch. Really, really cool device. I hope it paves the way for a plethora of similar mobile devices with even better features. For instance, better screens, better touch controls, better predictive typing, better multi-application switching support, etc.

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Bullet points for a Thursday morning.

daniel on Sep 6th 2007

  • I feel like I just can’t get anything done at work. I can’t make promises to customers more than two days in the future, because I’m not really in control of production. If anything, I make suggestions and those higher up than me decide to ignore them. Honestly, it’s incredibly depressing, and I’m beginning to wonder why I keep trying; it’d be a lot easier and probably a lot better if I didn’t. Because if I can, every day, just, almost get what I need to get done done, I’ll never get any help. I’ll just get a snowballing workload. I’ll be my own Katamari Damacy, except at the end of the day I won’t be creating new stars. I’ll be the hollowed, burnt-out husk of one.
  • I have to say that technology has taught me at least a few lessons. In view of the price drop on iPhones yesterday, in view of any version of Windows’ security and functionality before at least two service packs, and in view of the data one can lose using alpha software, I have learned that Early adopters are idiots. Sadly, early adoption is something of an internal mechanism, a natural function that can hardly be denied. Or you could put it this way: I’m an idiot, too.
  • I’ll end my sentences with prepositions if I bloody well please, thank you and please come again.
  • Don’t assume that anyone you know is pronouncing a Japanese word or phrase properly. According to my research, there’s about a 92% chance a Japanese person would laugh at them. Politely. On the inside.
  • I like the taste of creamer. I hate myself for this.
  • Interesting thought here. According to classical evolutionary biology (forgive me for accepting the premise for a moment), there is no over-arching design in evolution, there is no God meddling in the process, there is only survival of the fittest. But then, there’s no such thing of survival of the fittest, is there? It doesn’t really matter if a method of adaptation is optimal or not, only that it sucks the least. So maybe it should be Survival of the Least Awful, eh? The point is this: evolution isn’t a linear progression and you can’t say something is “better” in any real sense because it is more complex. Also, evolution can’t be said in any meaningful sense to select for truth. (Consider how your eye vibrates, for instance, and the images it ignores, it simply deletes in those moments; consider how very little of actual reality we can see with our eyes, all the spectrum that’s simply invisible to us; consider that there’s little reason that there aren’t ten senses and we’ve only evolved into five.) In that sense, we could, technically, be living in a dream world that doesn’t actually represent reality, if that dream world somehow gave humans an evolutionary advantage. What does this all mean? Well, let me put it this way: if evolution doesn’t select for truth, merely for adequacy, and your brain is a product of that process, how can you say evolution is true, since it’s a product of said possibly faulty brains? Thus you can reasonably say that classical evolution is self-defeating; any evolutionist that trusts his own reasoning tacitly believes at least some sort of a guiding force
  • With that out of my head, I can finally get back to my sea of paperwork. Yay!

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