For info, there have been some new plugins activated on this site. The first changes the default setting of WordPress which adds a “rel=nofollow” tag to the URLs of people who leave comments. After following a bit of a debate on this, I fell into the camp which thought it was better to let google (et al) follow links to people who take the time comment. As a result of this, any random, pointless, comments which appear to be nothing more than link generators will be manually deleted and the IP address blacklisted. The second plug in allows you to edit your comment for a short while (3 mins) after you post it. If the comment is held in the moderation queue, you must make any edits before you refresh the page or change URL. Let me know what you think.
Author Archives: ATGW
Evolution – Humour or Crank?
Once more, the Great Tuatatis has guided me to some more erratic websites (I suspect I actually found it as a link on someone else’s blog, but unfortunately I cant remember who to tip my hat to, sorry).
Anyway, however it happened, on the phs1966.com blog, there is a post called “Can we really call evolution science.” It is a short post, so I will copy it here in full: Continue reading
Misuse of Email Addresses
Quite some time ago, thanks to the wonder of Magazine Cover Disks, I installed Concept Draw MINDMAP personal edition 4. If you need to make mind maps and the like, this is reasonably good software and certainly worth the price (i.e. free). Part of the installation process required me to register with concept draw, and provide them with an email address.
Being a naturally paranoid fool, who always assumes the worst, I used the services of Gishpuppy to create a one-off email address for this registration, which automatically forwarded emails to my main account. If you haven’t already done so, I cant suggest strongly enough the advantages of going to the site, registering and getting the plugin (if you use FF / IE) to allow you to “Gish It” every time you are asked for an email address.
Basically what happens, is you give gishpuppy some keywords and a domain which you want to use the email address on, then it creates the address for you. As an example, if your key words were whydontyou it may create the email address whydontyou.4ry@gishpuppy.com. You give out this email address and when anything is sent to it, it gets forwarded to your real account. It is a great way of testing the water with some services.
Anyway, as I said I created the GishPuppy address and registered. Everything was fine for a few months, but for the last five or six weeks, I am getting a deluge of spam emails to that address. Now, I know I have never used this address anywhere other than the ConceptDraw registration. Today I got an email from a site admin saying that there had been a massive amount of spam from my email address (the Gish one) and suggesting I check the firewall to see if I have been hacked.
Now, as I see it, one of two things has happened. Gishpuppy has compromised my email address to spammers, or Concept Draw have. If it had been Gishpuppy, why would they only give up one email address? I have dozens registered with Gish (I use them every time I have to register somewhere so I can filter the return emails), and none of the others get spam emails.
Sadly, I can only draw one conclusion from this and it certainly ensures I wont buy anything from Concept Draw in the future. To give them the benefit of the doubt, I have tried email Concept Draw to explain I felt emails were being misused but, oddly, I have had no response.
Atheist Pride
During a few spare minutes I had today, the Great Toutatis guided me to technorati where I found a link to a blog called “Bible Study for Atheists.” This blog (from Vast Left) is pretty good reading. It is witty enough to entertain and certainly worth a visit. On reading it, I found the shards of a bit of a debate between Vast Left and a blogger called El Borak.
From what I read (and please correct me if I get this wrong), Vast Left made a post “poking fun” at Genesis and El Borak responded with:
Of course, it’s not even a study per se. Rather it’s simply a chance to poke fun and play number games. (read original)
I might be misreading the tone, but this strikes me there has been a sense of humour bypass here. Of course it isn’t a study per se — although I am not sure if El Borak means study in the “Bible Study” sense where a load of Christians sit round and re-affirm each others ideas, or a study in the scientific sense. (Hint: I am poking fun).
Now, broadly speaking, El Borak is actually fairly reasonable and presents his arguments well. I am not sure I want to get involved in the overall debate, so I will not pass comment on that “per se.” One sentence which did leap out at me, though, was: (emphasis mine)
I know I should not expect more from self-proclaimed Atheists, and that’s the problem. I truly don’t.
This is interesting. I am not interested in the attempt at a snide dig, to be honest I don’t expect anything else from any theists (self proclaimed or otherwise), they just don’t know any better. What did interest me was the use of the term “self proclaimed.” I am some what confused as to what it was meant to imply.
Normally, when you see the term “self proclaimed” it tends to imply the following word is a dubious boast. Is this meant to mean that El Borak doubts Vast Left is really an atheist until there is some corroborating evidence? From it’s use it could also be read to mean El Borak is amazed anyone could have the front to actually admit they are an an Atheist, or he could simply doubt anyone is really an Atheist.
I am confused. (extra entertainment can be found from the comments on El Borak’s page, Huckelberry is worth a chuckle)
SatNav & PDA Advice wanted
I will keep this short and sweet for now. I am considering buying a satnav GPS device and, from initial research I think I would like a PDA version, rather than the more “normal” car mounted satnav system.
Obviously, as a poor blogger (feel free to donate 🙂 ) I am aiming for the cheapest one possible, but I still want to avoid a total lemon. Does anyone have any suggestions / comments on the topic? Ideally, I want one which is relatively easy to add new maps to (North America would be useful but not straight away).
Would a SatNav be better (more cost effective) than a PDA? While I feel I would like a PDA, I will admit I am not sure the extra functions will get used. The main reason for the purchase is to be able to navigate to remote places, I am not sure that being able to write a spreadsheet when I am there will be that valuable. Also, if I go for a PDA, would getting one with WiFi be worth it? It strikes me that a PDA without WiFi would be pretty pointless, the trivial task of bluetoothing data from my phone to PC is annoying, so I can only assume it would be worse with a PDA.
In a perfect world, I would be able to get the system for under £150, but I suspect that is massively over-optimistic, especially if I want a WiFi PDA. I have seen the MIO P550 PDA, which seems to have everything I want, for around £220 — does anyone know if it is worthwhile? Is there a Linux GPS PDA with WiFI? That would probably tick every one of the boxes as far as my buying wishes went 🙂
Now Rails Hates Me
Previously, I have complained how Linux (and the Linux Gods) truly hated me and went out of its way to make my life miserable. Even repeated sacrifices of Windows and Apples didn’t help until, like a Miracle sent from Tux, I came across PCLinuxOS. This has been wonderful. It works with all my hardware and is really easy to use.
There is one small problem. Since I mentioned Toutatis in the last post, the Linux God Tux seems to have passed the message on to the Rails God to make my life hell once more.
PCLinuxOS is still brilliant. It works really well. It came with Ruby installed (version 1.8.5) and installing ruby gems (0.9.2) was a walk in the park. The problems started when I got all clever and issued:
gem install rails –include-dependencies
The first time, I got an error message saying it could not find rails in any repository, second time it seemed to run ok. Sadly, despite getting messages telling me rails-1.2.3 is properly installed, I can’t get it to run. I get various error messages, depending on what obscure task I am trying to do (eg. “rails demo” produces errors about not having the 1.2.3 version, and needing to edit environment.rb to reflect the actual version…).
This creates a bit of a quandry. I can download (in fact I already downloaded it) the Rails CD version of PCLinuxOS, but I like this installation. It is set up to my preferences. I have spent time tweaking it and installing firefox extensions (for example). The thought of re-installing just to get rails running is nauseating. However, one of the reasons I wanted Linux was to do Ruby / Rails development in a way which matched the deployment server.
Choices, choices… I think it is time for some more sacrifices… Maybe some coffee beans will do the trick for Ruby, no idea for Rails…
Royal Marine, Royal Navy, Publish and Be Damned
 (Update: It seems this has been added to Digg)
I am not sure why I have strayed into current affairs as a topic for debate here, but I promise this will be the last blog post I make on this topic (for a while at least…). Previously, I have ranted about the supposed “outrage” over the 15 sailors and marines held hostage by Iran being allowed to sell their stories, and about them wrongly being called cowards or a disgrace.
For people outside the UK, this may come across as little more than a parochial spat and, to be honest, I am amazed there is so little going on in the world that this is actually headline news. Again, today, I have spent most of the day listening to the radio. This is never a good thing, and especially so when I spend time listening to the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2 (he gets callers to call in on current affairs topics). I am also very aware that they will screen callers to ensure the cranks get more air time than they deserve.
Knowing all this doesn’t stop the idiocy and bigotry winding me up though. (Again, this is long so most is below the fold)
Continue reading
Royal Marines, Cissies, Disgrace
Oddly, there have been numerous visits to this site from people using Google to search for terms such as “Royal Marines a Disgrace” and “Royal Marine Cissies.” According to firestats, most of these are from Americans.
This is a shame. It simply reinforces my ideas that people are already very, very polarised about the behaviour of the 15 sailors and marines. As I have said previously, the actions the 15 took were the right thing to do at the time. It is very easy for people from the comfort of an armchair in Washington (good old GeoMapLookup 🙂 ) to cast doubts on their actions. It is harder to accept the fact that these people were put in a very, very difficult situation and one in which surrender was the best option. Even people who have been taken prisoner in the past should know better. The fact other service personnel are criticising them is a sad indictment on the Armed Forces. Continue reading
Poor Sailors and Marines
Today’s radio news headlined with the supposed “outrage” that the 15 sailors and marines detained by the Iranians were being allowed to be paid for for their press reviews. Apparently The Sun newspaper (no, I will not post a URL to them…) has offered them a “six figure sum” [*] for their stories. From the breakfast radio news, this has caused outrage. People like Bob Stewart, Tim Collins and numerous other people were being mentioned as “outraged” over this decision by the MOD. The BBC news website had a lead article titled “Iran stories sale criticism grows” which explained the Head of the Army has banned all Soldiers from selling their stories following the Navy personnel being allowed to make some money off the story. Different media outlets have similar stories — all pretty much saying the same thing. The TV news had vox pop interviews with people in the street, mostly saying they “thought it was wrong for them to sell their story.”
The sheer barefaced hypocrisy, tinged with basic madness, of all this amazes me. I am (almost) at a loss for which parts of the nonsense to start with… Continue reading
Sunny Easter
Thanks to the wonders of Global Warming, the rainy, miserable (obviously offset by Chocolate) Easter weekends of my childhood really are a thing of the past. On Saturday I went out to Stourhead (National Trust property) and the weather was fantastic. Just so you don’t think I am lying, here are some photos:
As you can see the weather was brilliant. Shame about the polar bears though.
On a more serious note, it amazes me that anyone can deny climate change. Just goes to show how much people can cling to a belief… One of the other reasons to make this post was to try out a geocode plugin I have recently installed. Let me know what you think.
Undesigned Universe – Downloads
Over on Nullifidian’s blog, he has posted some links to where you can DL some good MP4s:
The Undesigned Universe is a series of three lectures (9-11 January 2007 at Princeton University) from Peter Ward, Professor of Biology and Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington.
If you haven’t already done so, go there and download them.
Crazies Who Comment
No, not the kind, sane, rational people who comment here! My post on “Writing from Ignorance” was largely based on having read the paper edition of the Guardian today. Out of curiosity I visited the online version to see what sort of comments people came up with. Wow. For a while, I had felt I was being harsh towards Marina Hyde and had tried to give her the benefit of the doubt. Not so some of the people who commented.
Now, there are zillions of comments and I read very few of them — mainly the first and last as I find that is the best way to get a feel for the debate when there are loads of comments. Here the majority of insane posts come from people claiming to be Americans. I truly hope they are either lying through their teeth or they do not present a representative sample. Some blasts of wisdom are: Continue reading
Writing from Ignorance
The false authority fallacy is one which rears it’s ugly head on a regular basis. I used to labour under the suspicion that this was more a problem for the right wing extremists, religious zealots on the like. Sadly, I have had my eyes opened somewhat.
In the most basic form, the false authority fallacy is most often invoked when a person, an expert in one field, is used to provide expert testimony in an unrelated field. We get it on a regular basis in the UK news (and I assume this is a global phenomenon), when (for example) Surgeons from the GMC pass opinion on anti-crime legislation. They may be wonderful surgeons, but what do they know about criminology or social control? Note: They may also be excellent criminologist or sociologists — but this is not something which can be assumed by their status as a surgeon. This fallacy happens all over — although they understand the grief, what special insight do the parents of murdered children have into law? — and it often manifests itself in a variety of mutated forms (Creationists are specialists at this). Recently, I have seen a new variation.
Atheist Programmers
Can anyone tell me why so many programmers, software engineers, web designers and the like are devout theists? I spend a fair amount of my time searching the web for things like plugins, new themes and web design inspiration. Oddly, during these searches much more than half of the sites I come across are overt, campaigning theists. I dont mean they belong to people who “believe” but they are sites with blatant “I love God” type statements all over them. This also leads me to wonder what the other 40% of sites are run by — are Atheists such a minority in IT?
As a recent example, I found an interesting looking plugin (Post Information) which was a good few months old, so I thought I would go to the main blog to see if it was still in use (it doesn’t seem to be) or there was any info on it (there doesn’t seem to be).
However, on the main blog is a vast array of pages with text like:
Jesus Christ has a special place in the unfolding of history. History has a special place for Jesus. In fact, all of history is for Him (Colossians 1:16). He is not just a man nor is He just another religious leader.
Now, I am not going to turn this blog post into a simple anti-Theist post with loads of snide remarks. The person who made this blog did not force me to visit, they did not trick me into visiting, and they are not trying (as far as I saw) to pass of nonsensical woo as science. However, I am curious.
This is certainly not the first time it has happened, in fact it is almost the norm now to visit the home page for a plugin or similar and find lots of “I love Jesus” type messages. I have yet to come across a page which says “I am an atheist.” Is this a sign that designers (programmers etc) are more inclined to be theists? Is this a sign that theists make better programmers? Is this a sign that Atheists are simply more relaxed about their lack of beliefs?
Personally I think it is more the case that Atheists have no need to harp on about their imaginary friends and as a result, they simply don’t. Even if every site I come across which doesn’t have a “I heart Jesus” type thing is an Atheist, there are still a LOT of theists out there…
New Plugins, New Theme
Short, administrative, comment for now. We have added some new plugins (for example the “sphere” one you can see at the bottom of most posts) and will be trialling a new theme over the next few days. Please let us know what you think – your feedback is always welcome.