Pascal’s wager?

On Faith: Sam Harris: The Empty Wager

While Pascal deserves his reputation as a brilliant mathematician, his wager was never more than a cute (and false) analogy. Like many cute ideas in philosophy, it is easily remembered and often repeated, and this has lent it an undeserved air of profundity. If the wager were valid, it could be used to justify any belief system (no matter how ludicrous) as a “good bet.” Muslims could use it to support the claim that Jesus was not divine (the Koran states that anyone who believes in the divinity of Jesus will wind up in hell); Buddhists could use it to support the doctrine of karma and rebirth; and the editors of TIME could use it to persuade the world that anyone who reads Newsweek is destined for a fiery damnation.

But the greatest problem with the wager—and it is a problem that infects religious thinking generally—is its suggestion that a rational person can knowingly will himself to believe a proposition for which he has no evidence. A person can profess any creed he likes, of course, but to really believe something, he must also believe that the belief under consideration is true. To believe that there is a God, for instance, is to believe that you are not just fooling yourself; it is to believe that you stand in some relation to God’s existence such that, if He didn’t exist, you wouldn’t believe in him. How does Pascal’s wager fit into this scheme? It doesn’t.

Correspondent’s Diary from Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe | A rogue state with charm

ROBERT MUGABE glowers as I walk into the arrivals hall at Harare International. His official stare through his trademark spectacles—part sneer, part aloof school teacher—can seem comical. There’s something about the president, those Elton John glasses, the camp flicking of his wrists, the moustache that recalls both Chaplin and Hitler, that makes him as much a caricature as a real man.

Fun Chinese translations to go.

After an anti-spitting campaign and a toilet modernisation drive, the
Olympic clean-up of Beijing is spreading to the city’s badly translated
English signs and menus, which is likely to mean fewer perplexed
visitors but less fun for expatriates. A crackdown on poor English could
mark the end for “pubic toilets”, “racist parks” and entreaties for
people to “show mercy to the slender grass”. Orders to “Beware Safety”
and “No Shit” face a similar fate, as does a notorious caution about wet
floors: “The slippery are very crafty.”

more here ..
 

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Google Earth

http://www.ushmm.org/googleearth/

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has joined with Google in an unprecedented online mapping initiative. Crisis in Darfur enables more than 200 million Google Earth users worldwide to visualize and better understand the genocide currently unfolding in Darfur, Sudan. The Museum has assembled content—photographs, data, and eyewitness testimony—from a number of sources that are brought together for the first time in Google Earth.

Pope ‘did not help girls abused by Florence priest’

“How much suffering there is in the world!” Pope Benedict XVI lamented
in his Easter sermon yesterday, naming Darfur, Iraq, Somalia, the Congo,
Lebanon and other trouble spots around the globe. But there was no space
in his list for the abused women of the parish of Regina della Pace
(“Queen of Peace”) on the outskirts of Florence. For more than three
years, these women have been trying to persuade the Church to take
vigorous action against a parish priest whom they say persuaded them to
have sex with him when they were minors, and continued to do so
regularly for years. Confronted by their testimony, the church
authorities first transferred the priest to another parish, and then out
of the diocese. But he remains a priest, and has received only token
punishment. In the United States, failure to take firm action against
abusive priests left the Church in Boston with a legacy of bitter
mistrust and legal bills totalling more than $150m (£76m). In Italy,
however, it would appear that the lessons have not been learnt.

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article2434945.ece

Prison vs. Work | Single Grain

• IN PRISON: You spend the majority of your time in a 10X10 cell. AT WORK: You spend the majority of your time in an 8X8 cubicle.
• IN PRISON: You get three meals a day. AT WORK: You get a break for one meal and you have to pay for it.
• IN PRISON: You get time off for good behaviour. AT WORK: You get more work for good behaviour.
• IN PRISON: The guard locks and unlocks all the doors for you. AT WORK: You must often carry a security card and open all the doors for yourself.
• IN PRISON: You can watch TV and play games. AT WORK: You could get fired for watching TV and playing games.
• IN PRISON: You get your own toilet. AT WORK: You have to share the toilet with some people who pee on the seat.
• IN PRISON: They allow your family and friends to visit. AT WORK: You aren’t even supposed to speak to your family.
• IN PRISON: All expenses are paid by the taxpayers with no work required. AT WORK: you get to pay all your expenses to go to work, and they deduct taxes from your salary to pay for prisoners.
• IN PRISON: You spend most of your life inside bars wanting to get out. AT WORK: You spend most of your time wanting to get out and go inside bars.
• IN PRISON: You must deal with sadistic wardens. AT WORK: They are called managers.

Original source

Monica Goodling, One of 150 Pat Robertson Cadres in the Bush Administration

How to hijack a nation without them even knowing.

Goodling’s involvement in Attorneygate is not the only aspect of her role in the Bush administration that bears examination. Her membership in a cadre of 150 graduates of Pat Robertson’s Regent University currently serving in the administration is another, equally revealing component of the White House’s political program. Goodling earned her law degree from Regent, an institution founded by Robertson “to produce Christian leaders who will make a difference, who will change the world.” Helping to purge politically disloyal federal prosecutors is just one way Goodling has helped fulfill Robertson’s revolutionary goals.

I personally would want no part of Robertson’s changes to the world, a world where his god strikes down people with tsunami’s because of homosexuality; maybe he’d bring back stoning for working on the Sabbath.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20070330/cm_huffpost/044588

ctrl-alt-del Sheer Genius

 At last someone else who can’t stand the lol, omg, roflol, blrb brlb brlb brigade … Thank you Tim Buckley!

30 Boxes – first impressions

30 boxes seemed to be doing clever things with ajax before google calendar and appear to be a bit more than the usual yawn (yet another web2 nice-to-have). Coming to 30 boxes recently from Google calendar I am probably less impressed than I should be but 30 boxes does have a couple of very strong things going for it. 30boxes does tagging, we like tagging, tagging is essential for those of us obsessed with GTD. 30Boxes also has a very clean, uncluttered interface and nice simple actions for sharing information and managing tasks. There are some pretty nifty ajaxy views of your data and I really like the roll-over pop-ups of all my tasks. 30Boxes does not seem to suffer from the bloat of Google calendar and works in all browsers (shame on you Google!) which means I can now have my favourite calendar in Opera without the ‘this browser is too stupid’ message. 30Boxes also won the web-calendar award in PC magazine knocking the Google behemoth into second place.

However the feeling I’m getting from the net lately is a bit of a David and Goliath story gone wrong. Like any large corporate offering, people jump ship because the new thing is from an Apple, a Google or a Microsoft leaving the little guy abandoned, copied and not a little peeved. I like 30 boxes, I like their brave claim to do anything Google does and do it better. I’ll certainly try it for a bit and see how it goes, if anyone has had any success stories with 30Boxes or thinks it is just another yawn, please let me know.  Read some of the buzz about 30Boxes here.

p.s. I’d like to see the whole shared calendar thing in 30 boxes … hint hint!

Autumn cleaning

I have spent a better part of the Easter weekend spring cleaning – well, I guess with me living in the southern hemisphere I should rather use the term ‘autumn cleaning’. At times like these I am utterly gob-smacked by how much crap I have collected over the last year or two – folders of statements and papers I have not looked at since the day they were filed, items of clothing that have not made it on the comfortable or favourite list, old computer disks and video tapes, kitchenware and gifts still in their original wrapping – all items to clutter up my life. I don’t consider myself a hoarder; on the contrary with my father being a veritable human hamster I have an aversion to boxing and keeping the unnecessary but it still inevitably slips past you, a truely universal unstoppable force.

So there is a huge pile of things going to child welfare and the salvation army; with impending country moving looming on the near horizon I need to be that little bit extra ruthless as containers are only so big and I have a LOT of stuff.

Filipinos crucify and whip themselves on Good Friday

What a lovely religious ritual – I hope the kids get to watch!

More than a dozen Filipinos were nailed to crosses and scores more whipped their backs into a bloody pulp on Friday in a gory ritual to mark the death of Jesus Christ. The voluntary crucifixions in the northern Philippines were the most extreme displays of religious devotion in this mainly Catholic country, where millions are praying and fasting ahead of the Easter weekend. In the small village of Cutud, about 80km north of Manila, seven men cried out as nails the size of pencils were driven into their hands and feet before they were hoisted up in the scorching heat.

Link…

update (04-10) : Photoblog about the crucifixion’s.

Why I’ll choose gmail

Here is a little preview from yahoo mail.  Don’t you love all the bright coloured advertising?  This folks is what not to do to your loyal subscriber base.

Where IT streamlining doesn’t work

A few years ago, when I needed to sort out a query with my bank, I’d phone the branch number and speak to a person.  This person was able to put me in touch with the correct authority to help me with my problem.  The thing is that this way of doing things is so old-school – actually phoning somewhere and speaking to a person – it needs improvement, it needs to be streamlined, it needs a technological solution.

When Standard Bank decentralised their telephone numbers recently they put in the wizzy solution and here is my experience with progress.

Old school

1. Phone bank
2. Speak to a receptionist
3. Speak to the right person

time taken 3 minutes

After Technological Intervention

1. Phone Call center
2. Navigate through endless dial-options
3. Get put in a queue that "is sorry to inform you of the high call volumes"
4. Finally speak to a person to be told you need to be transferred to the people who can put you through to the branch
5. Go to another queue also with high call volumes
6. Speak to a person who has access to the branch number and can transfer you
7. Get put in a third queue – YIP, high call volumes
8. Speak to the person you want

time taken 23 minutes

Don’t you love progress.

How to remove Vista from a dual boot system

Requirements: Vista and XP dual booted.

Do the following:

1. Boot into XP
2. Put your VISTA disk in the drive
3. click start, click run
4. type the following: drive:\boot\bootsect.exe /nt52 ALL /force (where drive is the drive letter of your CD/DVD)
5. restart when finished
6. Dance around the room with happiness that the scourge of VISTA has left for good.

hasta la VISTA baby

Vista is gone, it’s nag will bother me no more nor will it’s failures to run my critical software.

I know I waxed lyrical when I first installed it, touted it’s eye-candy prettiness but then I started using it and was mortified by what I experience.

Initially I couldn’t get the majority of my critical software to work; I couldn’t even get it to run Microsoft software or support Microsoft hardware. It didn’t like my Microsoft webcam and would blue-screen every time I had in incoming skype call. I couldn’t run Microsoft’s own development tools like Visual Studio and my other software all broke like bad pre-alpha software – either spilling their guts and memory all over the place or failing silently and miserably. I trolled the Internet looking for a way to disable the crippling Vista nag and I succeeded; however I was completely unprepared for the crippling nag to warn me I’d turned off the first crippling nag!

The most annoying thing for me was that with every new piece of software I placed on the pc, VISTA would run slower and slower until it crawled along like a geriatric tortoise in tar. The tech podcasts and websites are now calling for 4 gig of RAM and hybrid hard-drives (not too my knowledge commercially available yet) to make VISTA run properly. What’s the point? For a little eye candy? The debate is still raging about whether VISTA adds any real security benefit and it’s live applications are a joke. Microsofts antivirus came in stone last in a recent poll failing miserably to stop viruses or malware.

Vista is probably the worst of all operating systems out at the moment. It klunks along like an over-skinned over-worked version of XP which won’t run properly and lacks all the elegance and finesse of mac os or the breadth of application of XP. All I can say is thank god I didn’t spend my hard earned cash on this product; the only down side is I don’t have a vista box and dvd to burn at my next barbecue.

 

I will therefore continue to run, in order of preference:

1. ubuntu linux

2. Windows XP

 

My next computer will most likely be a mac.