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| 12:29am 12/09/2008 |
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I still exist :o
This is a long interview with the philosopher Dan Dennett on Charlie Rose. I like this interview quite a bit.
I think Dennett's approach to athiesm is a lot more compelling to people-who-arent-already-athiests than the typical Dawkins arguement. I've watched a lot of Dawkins videos and, while his arguements are good and correct and everything, I usually didnt find them very compelling the first time I watched them. He's in some ways like a math professor trying to explain something by showing the proof. Yes, he's correct, but its not always the best way to explain things to the uninitiated.
Dawkins has a few logical arguements he typically makes about god, but he's an evolutionary biologist, and he rightly spends a lot of his time talking about science. He talks about why we don't need god to explain life, or anything at all for that matter. He explains evidences for evolution like how, when you look at the genomes of the animal families and what we think the evolutionary paths are, the DNA agrees exactly, there is a smooth continuity of how much DNA they share between evolutionary kin.
But your average person isn't an evolutionary biologist. Science has come to rely on a "chain of authority"; no human scientist these days has a long enough lifespan to be an expert in everything; so in order to do just about any worthwhile science today, they have to take for granted (to some degree) the work of those who came before. They may not be able to derive a given equation but they use it with confidence because it came from a source they trust.
You and I, we don't KNOW for certain that the DNA of species is a smooth contiuum. Dawkins says they are, and we at some point just have to decide whether we believe him or not. He could site sources; he can point to peer-reviewed work and explain how you might replicate the experiments to duplicate the results. But eventually we simply have to decide whether or not we trust this chain of authority.
The strength of Dennett's arguements are that they require no such trust. They are self-evident to anyone who has listened.
There are many excellent parts of this video, but the key part that made me post is as follows. In one of Dennett's TED talks, he said that he agreed with Rick Warren that humans had a hard-wired compulsion to believe in god, but that he believed there was a biological, explainable basis for it. But he did not, in that talk, explain what he believed that mechanism was. He does in this video however, even though its presented as a bit of a side-point, to me it was somewhat profound. It is:
Humans have an evolutionary imperative of treating things as agents. Technically speaking, the most accurate way to predict what another person (or animal/preditor/prey) is going to do is model that creature as the basic machinery that constitute it. But we aren't able to do this; so we approximate. We approximate by modelling them as agents with motivations and goals. We endow our models with motivations and goals similar to our own and those of any living creature trying to survive. Both because its what we are familiar with/able to actually do, and also because its basically accurate and extremely evolutionarily useful.
This modelling more or less works well when dealing with humans and other animals. But this impulse to assign agenthood to things has a tendancy to misfire, and really, it does it all the time. We treat things as agents that really arent. We do it to computers, to cars, to stuffed animals. We do it to the weather, to Karma, to basically any seemingly random event that we struggle to explain, we model it as if it was a willful agent with some motivation and goal.
And ultimately, we do it to god. God is our assigning-of-agenthood to - basically the universe? The unknown? Everything we can't explain. To our daily fortunes and luck. To the good things and bad that happen to us. Yes, we absolutely are hardwired to try to understand these things, to do that by treating the unknown as agents, and that results in us creating an agent responsible for life and existence itself. That agent; that need to assign human motivations to the unknown, is what we perceive as god.
Dawkins and other scientists removed the need for god to exist in order to explain the world around us. Yet still we believed in god. Dennett explains WHY we believe in god. And when the magic is removed from that so completely, I think its completely devastating to the remaining belief in god. I think its compelling to anyone who is even remotely actually listening. You don't have to believe Dawkins about the fossil record or the mechanisms for evolving a human eye. You don't have to trust carbon dating mechanisms. You merely have to think about a time you have done this subconsciously, as really every single human has. That time your computer crashed and your gut reaction is wondering whether it is TRYING to piss you off, before your higher consciousness reminded you that this is silly and computers aren't willfully trying to do anything, other than to precisely follow the instructions of those who programmed it. Or the time that perfect-storm of unhappy events hit you all at once, and you wondered what karmic forces were at work, even if just in the corner of your mind.
I'm sure its obvious to some; everything is obvious in hindsight on the internet. But I had not heard this explained so plainly why it is that so much of the human population all believe in some god even if they can't agree on what its name is. It explains why we give god such human characteristics, in spite of the fact that if any intelligence did design our universe with the laws of quantum mechanics and such, its mind must surely be quite alien. Its not complex, it's not hard to understand, and thats what makes it so very powerful.
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| 08:02pm 22/01/2006 |
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As I was laying in bed and waiting for sleep yesterday, I had a weird thought. I'm not necessarily saying I believe this is actually true as a matter of policy, but it's a fun thought experiment.
I was considering the extent to which some people will go to rationalize their belief system, sometimes in the face of quite a lot of evidence to the contrary. If we consider that the brain is a big network, that as we learn some things we build new things that we learn on top of other things we already know, and build maps of how things relate to each other.
If the things on the bottom, the base things that we believe, and which other things are built on top of are knocked out from under us, our network, our understanding of the world is thrown into chaos. A mental breakdown. In a survival mode, one cannot afford to have a mental breakdown. If your mental capacity is seriously diminished for an extended period of time, your chance of survival is also seriously diminished.
If you accept this, then a rabid dogmatic clinging to those base beliefs and irrational denial of anything that challenges those beliefs - sure, the phrase 'defense mechanism' is probably accurate, but I don't think it's psychology connotations really apply here, I'd say a better word is to call it an evolutionary survival trait.
We can deal with small change. We constantly make small revisions, and we can drastically remap our worldview if we do it one step at a time. But if you do it all at once you risk wiping out too much of your mental map of the way of things are and having it all come crashing down. |
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| Poop |
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| 09:10pm 14/11/2005 |
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I work in a laboratory. Laboratories that study things from humans. Humans are sometimes disgusting.
We do a lot of urinalysis. Thats cool. Urine is sterile anyway, who cares. Its commonly part of a standard safety profile.
We have one other test, fortunately not many studies use it, but it's out there: FOB or Fecal Occult Blood. That is, we're looking for blood in your poo.
How do we get your poo? Good question! There's this special magic card. You poo, then smear your shit on this card. Then you mail it to us. And we run it through our ... poo-analyzing machine.
We occasionally have some pretty entertaining lab comments entered into our database, and the FOB comments are like the best.
"TOO MUCH SAMPLE APPLIED TO CARD"
"SPECIMEN TOO THICK"
and my personal favorite:
"SPECIMEN SUBMITTED ON TISSUE, NO FOB CARD RECEIVED"
Yep, someone took a shit, wiped their ass, and mailed us the tissue. Hooray! |
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| The information age is full of misinformation |
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| 10:32pm 30/10/2005 |
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So I'm watching TV, moderately intoxicated.
On the History Channel, there is a scare/shock show about a hypothetical avian flu "the new Plague" doomsday scenario. While avian flu may not be 100% bullshit, the reality is that there have been _0_ cases of avian flu transmitted human-to-human.
On the Travel Channel, there is some ghost/seance crap show complete with night-vision effects.
On the Discovery Channel, there is "The Science of Vampires."
On the internet, and in the real world, the news sites are all so incestuous, it just takes one news outlet to run a false story, and it will be echoed among countless "reputable" news sources - after all, the original "reputable" news source ran it, that's all the fact checking that's really needed, right?
In the information age, misinformation moves just as fast as the other kind.
Meanwhile, skeptics are viewed as cold and soulless, and people who correct others' mistakes are viewed as egotistical, pedantic, and judgemental.
Oh well. At least I have beer.
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I bought a tiny digital camera. It's a Nikon Coolpix 4600. I still have my old Olympus camera, and it works fine and great, but its so big that I never take it anywhere. This camera is tiny and flat when the lens is retracted, so I can shove it in my pocket, and its cheap enough I don't have to worry about it. In terms of megapixels its fancier than my Olympus, although clearly the lens on my Olympus is slightly higher quality, the Nikon is good enough for all intents and purposes. It also has some features nicer than my Olympus, like, actually remembering the resolution I set it to previously even after I turn it off, and this "blur warning" feature where it warns you after you snap something if it turned out blurry. Probably the single most frustrating thing on my Olympus was taking a cool picture that looked great on the LCD and then downloading it and finding it came out hella blurry.
I've been playing emulated Castlevania: SotN in epsxe and it is utterly rad. I own it for Saturn, in Japanese, but I've never played the PSX/english version before.
Now I'm going to bed. zzz |
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| 11:00pm 03/09/2005 |
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I WILL MAKE THE SPACE MMOG GAME.
YOU WILL PLAY THE SPACE MMOG GAME.
WE WILL PLAY THE SPACE MMOG GAME TOGETHER.
...
The above was a stupid amount of work. But the main point is to learn, and I'm doing that. So yay.
I originally wrote a MD2 model loader. I had some problems with that, so I decided to write a new model loader for the MilkShape3D model format (.MS3D). That solved my backface culling problems. The final annoyance to get this very simple screen to render was that my skin was like, weird and backwards.
The problem turned out to be completely rediculous. It is basically thus.
A) .BMPs are usually stored upside down. WHY I DONT KNOW. THIS IS STUPID THING #1.
B) THE OPENGL AUX BMP LOADER DOESN'T SEEM TO KNOW THIS. THIS IS STUPID THING #2.
I solved the problem by flipping the bmp upside down.
*sigh* Guess I should set this up as a real engine now and pull in Corona and all that.
Anyway awesomeness will be forthcoming! |
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| 06:59pm 03/08/2005 |
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I bought a PSP. This is the first "playstation*" I have ever owned. I have given in to Sony... but only to stick it to the man!
All is right in the world. |
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| 06:16pm 30/04/2005 |
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Hi, my name is vecna, and I think I need professional help.
So my life has more or less consisted of work, and World of Warcraft lately. Damn tatsumi to hell.
So my dream last night should have come as no surprise. Basically, the first part of the dream was ... about work. I was at work, doing database juju. And then, I was like, I should go to the store and get something to snack on. So I exit the building, and now I am like.. in WoW. I must fight my way across the Stanglethorn Vale wilderness to get to the snack shop, and of course, fighting across the wilderness is much easier than any building in WoW, so once I got to the shop I had to carefully pulls mobs out of it until I could reach the place with the Snickers. I grabbed my Snickers, and then went back to work, and did more database juju.
Someone please help me :( |
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| Interesting Easter. |
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| 08:05pm 27/03/2005 |
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mood:  sick music: Opeth - To Bid You Farewell
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Hi.
1) I'm sick. Being sick sucks.
2) I got a kitty! pics!. If my kitty is any indication of what kind of parent I'd be, I don't think I need to worry about spoiling my kids. He's adorable, but omg I want to smack him around sometimes. Sometimes, I sing him cheerful songs about grinding up his body into dogfood. He likes it and purrs contentedly. (this originally started out as singing Opeth to him while he was sleeping on my lap while listening to Opeth working on the computer)
3) My anarchy online character is now level 209 :/
4) So, I went to church today. Because you know, it's Easter, and thats what you do. Actually I wouldn't have normally, but I went with my parents and later spend most of the day at their place and got me a nice meal and all that. Anyway, for background you need to understand that from the ages of [0,18) I spent about 99% of my Sundays in church (barring when I was sick or if we were on vacation or something). I have been to church a number of scattered times since I basically gave up on the whole "believing in god" thing, and you know, it wasn't that weird, even though I didn't really believe, it was still a familiar environment and I felt comfortable enough there. But the last time I was there in this case was last christmas, and a lot has happened since then.
Mainly, that it is to say I've been watching a lot of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! (Season 3 starts April 25!), reading the Penn & Teller Forums, The Straight Dope, James Randi's site, and had a elevated number of conversations with Grue recently about topics relating to such things - about how we as a society are actively encouraging stupidity and gullability and a lack of accountability.
I want to get into that more, but first I want to convey a little story. I recently watched this movie, you may or may not have heard of it, What the bleep do we know? (What the bleep kind of retarded name is that anyway?) The first I heard of the movie was a full-page ad that was taken out in Entertainment Weekly. About a week after that, I got a direct-mailer postcard type thing informing me that it had just come out on DVD and that I shouldn't miss this opportunity to own it! Its clearly billed as at least partially a thing based on science, and I like science, so I checked it out. It seemed interesting enough, and in that Discovery-channel sort of way, interestingly scientific and stuff, but it's not. It has nothing to do with science. It's essentially a movie created by, as far as I can tell, some sort of cult that makes quantum physics the medium of their religion. I quote from one part of the movie:
"I wake up in the morning, and I consciously create my day the way I want it to happen. Now, sometimes, because my mind is examining all the things that I need to get done, it takes me a little bit to settle down, and get to the point, of where I'm actually intentionally creating my day. But here's the thing."
"When I create my day, and out of nowhere, little things happen that are so unexplainable, I know that they are the process or the result of my creation. And the more I do that, the more I build a neural net, in my brain, that I accept that that's possible. Gives me the power and the incentive to do it the next day."
"So, if we're consciously designing our destiny, if we're consciously, from a spiritual standpoint, throwing in what the idea that our thoughts can affect our reality or affect our life, because reality equals life. Then, I have this little pact that I have when I create my day."
"I say, I'm taking this time to create my day, and I'm infecting the Quantum Field. Now, if it is in fact, the observer's watching me the whole time that I'm doing this, and there is a spiritual aspect to myself. Then, show me a sign today, that you paid attention to any one of these things that I created, and bring them in a way that I won't expect."
"So, I'm as surprised as the- as the- at my ability to be able to experience these things, and make it so that I have no doubt that its come from you. And so, I live my life, in a sense, all day long, thinking about being a genius, or thinking about being the glory and the power of God, or thinking about being Unconditional Love."
Yes, this is a movie about science. Really. Trust us. There is no quackery here to be found. So as I approached the end the shennanigans got so thick that I concluded this had to be produced by like, Scientologists or something. Well it wasn't Scientologists. It is apparently instead produced by members of the Ramtha School of Enlightenment. Who is Ramtha?
One of the great enigmas that scientists have studied in the last decade is Ramtha, a mystic, philosopher, master teacher and hierophant. His partnership with American woman JZ Knight, his channel, still baffles scholars. Results of their studies point to a decidedly non-local phenomenon and were presented at a conference titled “In Search of the Self – The Role of Consciousness in the Construction of Reality” on February 8 and 9, 1997. At this gathering scholars from faculties of Quantum Physics, Parapsychology, Anthropology, Sociology and Theology who had studied Knight for two years, presented their findings.
Using a sophisticated polygraph, noted parapsychologists Ian Wickramasekera and Stanley Krippner of Saybrook Graduate School repeatedly observed that while JZ Knight is channeling Ramtha, the readings of her brain-wave activity shift to delta, and that the lower cerebellum operates her body which talks, walks, eats, drinks and dances while Ramtha teaches – about the mystery of mind over matter.
Through a coherent system of thought that unifies scientific knowledge with esoteric knowledge of spirit, his students study biology, neurophysiology, neurochemistry and quantum physics. Like Bohm he declares that consciousness is the ground of all being. In his own lifetime 35,000 years ago he learned to separate his consciousness from his body, raise its frequency and eventually take it with him. He has been one of the few human beings to become an eyewitness to the seen, and, the unseen.
Wow, a sophisticated polygraph was used! Scientists must indeed be baffled if this woman "JZ Knight" can fool a polygraph! Clearly she must acutally be channeling a man that lived 35,000 years ago who learned how to ascend to a higher plane of existence.
Listen, I'll grant that quantum physics is very weird and has lots of weird interpretations. But these people are using this weirdness as a blanket justification for whatever whacky religion they want to conjure up. And hey, thats cool, but don't call it fucking science, and don't dossy it up as if it is scientific, because not everyone watches a movie like this and immediately afterward goes to google to find stuff like this, and some people might actually mistake this propaganda for information or even a reasonable interpretation of current scientific views of quantum mechanics. I'll end my rant about this movie with this review and debunking of the movie by a real doctor.
So, let me get back to the story about going to church. The two are related. So, I went to church after these recent experiences, and for the first time the place seemed completely alien and hostile to me - even though I'd been there many times since I had lost my belief, this time was the first time I had really understood why allowing, tolerating, condoning such wasteful superstitions is dangerous. I saw three children get baptized today, and of course after each there was a raucous applaused - I wonder if there could be any 'positive reinforcement' here going on that might encourage kids to get baptized? Interestingly, during the sermon he mentioned that "some of the hardest people to reach are people that grew up in church and never made the faith their own." I wonder why that might be? If god is so omnipotetent, loving, and great, someone who spent their childhood in a church environment ought to be the most devout. Of course, the reality is that the church is made up of humans, and like the rest of humanity, some are good, some are bad, most are inbetween, most are broken in their own unique ways. The cruelness that can take place in a church, as well as the things that seem to be miracles, are all the acts of hu-mans. This church is a pretty "good" church and there are some wonderful people in it that do wonderful things for each other, is it hard to believe that people might attribute this to the works of god? But we should give ourselves more credit for the good, and take more responsibility for the bad.
I heard so many of the same refrains that I've seen brought up recently in things like Bullshit!. The Bullshit ep "12-Steppin'" targetted AA and mentioned this crap about how "we must admit that we are powerless over alcohol, and must surrender the problem to a higher power". The same thing about how "humans can never be happy unless they are existing within god's will" in this sermon. Humans are flawed, but ultimately there is no one but ourselves that is responsible for our actions. Advocating this "we are powerless to be better than what we are, we cannot better ourselves, we must turn ourselves over to god" belief is dangerous. If you have a problem in your life, praying to god about it ain't gonna do dick. You are exactly the only person who can fix it. We are violating #12 on Ben Stein's awesome 12 steps to ruin American enterprise thingy and we do it in this country in a major way. Not only do we elevate what amounts to voodoo to an equal footing with science, but we shy away from science that may offend certain people's certain voodoo beliefs, and skepticism and critical thinking are not seen as virtues.
So, meh. My cold medicine is kicking in now, so I guess this is a good time to shut up. Kitty falling asleep on my lap. Time for zzz's. |
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| Hi. |
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| 01:11pm 06/02/2005 |
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So, I'm still here!
The past month or two has been pretty weird. I would joke with Grue that every two hours I would flip a coin to determine manic/depressive state. The reality is that it was quite annoying. It's started to warm up a bit tho, in the 50's this weekend, I went out and did a bit of hiking and I already feel a lot better. I hate the winter cause you just want to stay inside all day and then you get all insane from .. staying inside all day.
Yesterday I was out shopping, and at Circuit City I saw Goodness given Form in action which briefly made me wonder if god did, in fact, exist. Ever since my 21" Trinitron CRT that weighed like 80 pounds died about 2 months ago I've been kinda idly thinking about getting a new monitor, but the CRT/LCD debate made it hard for me to spend any decent amount of cash. I didn't really want a CRT but I didnt feel like LCDs had "made it" yet. This monitor changed my mind. It was $1k at circuity city, + a $100 mail in rebate, so $900 - I had decided to buy it right then and there as an impulse buy, but they were out of stock! I went to best buy who also had the same monitor on display, but it was also out of stock. So I went home, dejected, and found it for $819 on mwave. It should get here on Wednesday! It also rotates vertically!
For you hu-mans who enjoy music, you should listen to Vomitron! Fair warning, it might melt your face off.
I have been watching a lot of DS9 lately (courtesy of aen's awesome ftp!), and it is... a lot better than I remember it being. I probably only watched the first season when it was actually new. I am used to Voyager which was an unforgivable abomination of scifi and Enterprise which was fairly mediocre, DS9 was actually pretty interesting. I do appreciate the way that, like B5, it doesnt revolve around the central characters (Sisko, etc) quite so much as, say, the same super-crew of ST:TNG saving the day every day. The interesting goodness from DS9 comes by and large from the supporting characters, Quark, Garrak, Dukat, etc - and DS9 deserves credit for being able to run with that and LET them be interesting and developed.
I have been reading up on Longhorn a bit and I have to say I am actually fairly, dare I say, excited. I really, really like .NET and the way that Longhorn is so tightly integrated with .NET is going to do miracles for developers, and I think that's really going to turn into some miracles for the end-user. The notion that so much of Longhorn will, itself, be managed code also suggests hightened levels of stability and security (if not having a light memory footprint).
Going somewhat hand in hand with my enthusiasm for Longhorn is my slightly increasing faith that I might really have something on my hands with the project-still-needing-a-better-name that is currently called Starbase. Recent versions of SAS have chosen to tightly integrate with Java, which probably makes sense considering that SAS is highly crossplatform and that, frankly, Windows is not its strongest environment - but ultimately I think that choosing to align with Java rather than .NET may be a mistake that I can capitalize on. My recent toying with SAS9 on windows has left me with the impression that they really kinda forced a project that has longstandingly had a interface that is different from core Windows UI concepts, but quite well thought out in its own terms, into Windows and the result is something that leaves both users expecting a Windows-like interface AS WELL AS users familiar with UNIX SAS wondering wtf is going on. So, despite SAS's generally immense resources, 30+years of headstart, and considerable technical expertise, I do see some chinks in their armor that makes room for a niche. I see Starbase's advantages thusly:
- While SAS does everything and has in-house specific solutions that cover many, many specific needs of the many fields that it serves, it is a bit too complex, runs on too many platforms, and is too massive to be effectively very user-expandable. Frankly, writing SAS code requires a similar level of experience that writing C# or VB.NET code does, and with our whole platform being written in .NET and being heavily based around expandibility and plugins, it will actually be feasible for people to write up custom solutions (procs, etc) that serve their needs to compensate for the fact that I wont be able to do everything myself, and these custom solutions may fit them better than what SAS comes up with that has to fit a much wider audience.
- Similarly, SAS/AF can do a lot of stuff but again, it requires just as much ability as writing UI's in C#, as well as specific training, which is both fairly costly as well as time consuming, for SAS/AF that will not be generalizable or portable to anything else. Being able to leverage Winforms with some various helper classes makes just as much sense for data access, if not more, than writing SAS/AF applications, especially when you can integrate them all directly into the IDE.
- I imagine a mature starbase running on longhorn, and I get some kind of mental erection. I think about running hardware-accelerated 3D visualizations with Avalon. I think about integrating with the MONAD shell, or, dear god, a Longhorn sidebar "tile" dock that's basically a window to a session. Integration with ASP.NET makes a lot more sense, also, than WebAF. I dont really know much about Indigo, but I bet I could do sexy things with that, too. The sorts of jobs you could do by mixing starbase framework with MONAD scripts titilates the mind.
Well, anyway. That's enough rambling. Maybe next time I'll replace rambling with actual coolness.
PS. WHERE IS MIKO??? |
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| 05:23pm 04/01/2005 |
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This guy knows how to rock out with his cock out. As someone who can only purport to "play guitar" when it's in quotation marks, I am envious. You should overcome your lazyness to click if the phrases "castlevania 3 clockwork", "guitar", or "rocking" mean anything to you.
I can't believe its 2005. I don't think I like, did anything in 2004. Shit. |
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| 02:15pm 23/12/2004 |
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Just finished watching JMS's series on Showtime, Jeremiah. I have decided that JMS has a problem wherein season 1 of every show he works on is slow moving 'getting to know the characters' stuff that ends up getting the show cancelled. Problem with Jeremiah is that there were really only two main characters, in season 1 at least. It was very slow, except for a handful of episodes in which it moved very fast.
Season 2 was full on JMS constant-plotty-movement goodness though, and while its ending didn't resolve everything, it was a lot better than the Season 4 ending of Farscape. If you dont know anything about the show, it basically occurs 15 years after a virus wipes out all the adults on the entire planet, leaving only orphaned children to grow up in the shadows of fallen civilization. In season 2, Sean Astin plays a guy named Mister Smith, whos gimmick is that god talks to him. At first it seemed really lame. He'd be all like "God told me to wait for you here. He says you're late." And I'm like uh huh you know whats also late MY FIST PUNCHING YOUR FACE.
But I should have had faith. It turns out, you can do a lot more interesting things with what amounts to a modern-day prophet, and he turned out to be one of my favorite characters in the series. I can't really reveal any of those cool things, because then if you watched it you'd already know and that would suck. But JMS handled putting a man who claims he hears god's voice - but who is also himself still just a man - in a world of a whole lot of anger-at-god utterly fearlessly. At the least, it's good TV.
It's hella snowed in here. Radiskull hate snow! I got up this morning for work. Went out to the parking lot, and there was an SUV spinning his tires in futulity just trying to get out of his parking space, let alone the parking lot or on the road. I came back in and talked to Grue for a while, we exchanged status on each other's genitals, and about 15 minutes later I decided to walk to work. The SUV was still trying to get out. I ended up leaving a bit before noon, as there were only about 5 people left there, because we were not going to receive any samples that day, and I wanted to get out in case it started snowing again.
I find it comforting to read about crazy stupid laws passed in places that aren't the US.
In other Scifi news, this is crazy and/or awesome. I haven't decided which yet.
Uhm thats it for now. I'm working on a new rant. I'll post that next time! |
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| 11:07am 04/12/2004 |
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Similar feelings to Hahn's latest post. I will put it more breifly though: I am tired of sucking. Instead, I want to rock.
Work goes fairly well, but outside of work, my life has been at a complete standstill. My life is really almost no better than it was a year ago, and also virtually no different.
I have been somewhat fascinated by the saga of this screensaver that Lycos Europe released (which has since been pulled) that basically allowed you to volunteer to be part of a DDoS attack against servers that originate spam. I thought it was a brilliant idea, but there was lots of naysers at the time saying how it was probably illegal and also how it was a immoral and a bunch of other stuff. Now that it has been pulled (and existing screensavers have become nonfunctional), they are all patting themselves on the back at how they saw this coming.
I can kind of see how it might have been illegal, and I'm pretty sure that the threat of legal action was what made Lycos pull the screensaver and not "because they realized it was wrong." Although I think that if the url's that they bumped had been modified instead to contain short advertisements instead, that a case could be made that they were legal because, since they spammed us first, clearly a "business relationship" exists and it would be a legitimate advertisement. :D
Let me also point out that about 100 spams a day make it THROUGH spamassassin and into my inbox. Checking my spam folder on vrpg right now, stuff that spamassassin has blocked, I find 2,838 spams in roughly the last 3 weeks, using 59 megs presently.
This effectively amounts to a DDOS attack on my mail account. Even with 'only' 100 spams a day making it through spamassassin, I still regularly end up deleting legit emails accidentally because I'm in such a hurry to delete all the spam. It means my normal mail account is virtually useless. They have spammed a resource until it is no longer a resource.
Now, I just don't understand the mindset of the naysayers who were happy to see this screensaver fail. The "CAN-SPAM" law passed by the US has been affectionately called the "You-can-spam" act. It is clear that we have no legal recourse to spam, and that our government has no interest in creating legal recourse. Microsoft's Sender-ID and some of the similar ideas by non-MS vendors are ok ideas but face massive adoptions and technical challenges. Furthermore, legal solutions ARE challenging, because there is business mail that is legit and that I do want. The "ok where a business relationship exists" rule is a reasonable one, except that its been ripped wide open to mean, "ok whenever we freaking want."
Filter's haven't worked because spam is constantly adjusted in order to defeat filters. Blacklists and whitelists clearly don't work because of "collateral damage". Essentially, until last week, it seemed like the war against spam had just been completely lost. There were no viable methods that anyone had to fight it.
I'd like to also point out to the naysayers that spam is NOT just an annoyance. It is quite actually dangerous, between phishing scams and identity theft, to people who do actually buy drugs like viagra or propecia or whatever from these places and get dangerous, improperly made drugs. Not everyone knows better - if no one were buying things from them, spammers would not keep spamming. Its easy for the technologically savvy people to say it's just an annoyance but it has very real, very serious dangers. Therefore there IS a moral imperitive to fight it.
So when Lycos comes out with this scheme that DDoSs the websites of spammers, aiming to hit them in their pocketbooks, kill their webservers so that people can't order things from them, etc, all these self-righteous bastards saying that it's vigilante justice and illegal and that it causes too much collateral damage (bullshit! It only targets the servers of the most major spam distributors. If that also effects sites hosted by co-locs or ISPs that turn a blind eye to the spamming going on at their servers, well gee I'd just have to break down in tears now wouldn't I?) and blah blah blah. The thing is it WORKED. It brought those websites down. The _very swift_ reaction to the screensaver tells me they got a lot of cease and desists or somesuch right away, and why? Because it was a real threat to the spammers.
Listen to some of these asshats on slashdot:
"On top of that, this action gave bad guys ammunition. They are now pretty much able to make a case that other legitamate users are using similar tactics as they are. The screensaver turned end user's computers into bots!"
I won't bother to point out the immense logical fallacies going on with this guys first point, but the last sentence is rediculous. Spammers that use trojans to turn user's computers into spam-bots is nothing at all like people that actively go and download and install whos SOLE PURPOSE is to DDoS spammers. One's malware, the other is not. As far as using "similar tactics", we have been left with no choice because the CAN-SPAM act essentially amounts to the government saying "we're aware of the problem and we decline to do anything about it." Vigilante justice is, in this case, the only kind of justice that is applicable because the government doesnt consider it a crime. And yet, implicit in your arguement is the admission that what the spammers are doing is wrong. We are doing to them exactly what they are doing to us, somehow its ok for them and not for us? This is no different than when Dave Barry put the phone number for an office at the American Telemarker Association in one of his articles, it's just automated! :D
"In fact I would even go as far as to say Lycos are worse than spammers in principle - spammers don't target individuals they mail everyone they can find, and separate spam groups don't collaborate to fill your box, they are all independently adding their contribution. Vigilantes often make mistakes and because of their revenge attitude their punishment is often worse than the original crime."
omfg. Wow, you're right, the spammers don't MEAN to fill my inbox and make it completely unusuable and sell me dangerous products. And clearly these DDoS attacks against spammers are worse than the millions of dollars in fraud that spam enables.
Anyway. I just found the mentality of these people amazing, which is why I posted about it.
One good idea in that slashdot thread was to essentially bump the whole thing up a notch. Bots that would automatically place bad orders at spam sites, eg, using invalid CC numbers that pass the valid-cc-number-checksum thing. Really muck up their machinations. To further limit the legal liability, it was suggested to make this a plugin to mail programs, so that it basically retaliated to spam that you actually got (thus, a business relationship existed).
It doesn't have to completely stop spam. All it has to do is impact their bottom line, such that spam eventually ceases to be financially attractive. |
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Read 8 - Post |
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| 09:54pm 10/11/2004 |
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Well, some stuff happened.
My 21" trinitron is now dead. God rest its soul. I now have only one monitor, like that episode of TNG when Q was stripped of his powers and forced to become a mortal. Eventually I shall return to my proper place of godhood, but not for a little while because all my money is earmarked for other things. My next monitor will be an LCD, I think, and I don't mean to buy a crappy one. Guess I better get back to work on "Starbase" (a successor after a fashion to MiniStat... but different) so I have hopes of additional moneys.
I finally found a cool park. It costs $5/yr and is ~15-20 minutes away instead of costing $50/yr and being ~40minutes away. Too bad I found it now when its getting all supercold and wintery and crap.
Venture Brothers is awesome and you should watch it. Kay?
Also awesome is the new Battlestar Galactica. Really quite superb. The series manages to maintain the same level of utter depression that the miniseries had. Starting with episode 3, Richard Hatch, the Captain Apollo in the original series, has a guest-starring role as a political prisoner of sorts. His role puts him in kind of nemesis role opposite the new Apollo. As of the 3rd episode there are like 45,000 humans left alive in the universe. They have the running tally on a little whiteboard. Thats how screwed they are. Its fantastic.
Simultaneously, the vastly inferior Enterprise has recruited Brent Spiner (Data) for a recurring guest star in season 4. If it was a ploy for more ratings, it worked on me at least. The show is improving, I think, slowly. The Eugenics wars stuff is pretty cool, and Brent's role is interesting. I still maintain that its a crime against humanity that this is the only scifi thats in HDTV - and one of the reasons I haven't got an HDTV yet.
The news has been very interesting this last week. I am 'cautiously optimistic' that the future might not suck. Quite so much. Maybe. |
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Read 3 - Post |
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| 10:24pm 01/11/2004 |
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I need a new hobby.
I've been majorly superbored. Not like "I'm bored tonight." or "I'm bored recently." I've been superbored for like, the last 2 years. But recently its come to a head. I have a few 4-day weekends coming up soon, and it occurs to me I have no idea what I will do with myself for four whole days. Outside of the project tentatively-titled StarBase, I have no like... thing going on. I should probably work on VERGE more but motivational issues abound. Besides I've been doing that since 1997. Cut me some slack ;_; I played Anarchy Online tonight for a few hours... I probably wont be able to bring myself to log in again for at least 2 weeks. Interest level = 0.
So I need a new hobby. Suggestions? Should I take guitar lessons? Skydiving? Heroin? Manwhoring?
One of the things that bothered me since moving to Cincinnati is that there's like no cool parks at all nearby. There is the Cincinnati Nature Center which my parents go to a lot- but it has a yearly fee and, more importantly, is at least half an hour each way from my apartment, so I'd never actually go there. In Missouri you couldn't throw a rock without hitting a conservation area. In Columbia, there were several way cooler places within 20 minutes, off the top of my head there was Devil's Icebox and Rocky Fingers Lake, plus in the "within 5 minutes" category is a park whos name I can't remember - I took this picture there and it was 2 minutes away from a superwalmart. In St.Louis there were many, Jefferson Barracks park I went to all the time, Beetree Park too, as well as Cliff Cave park that I also went to all the time in highschool, and was also the cave that we journeyed forth into at the first VERGEcon! Try as I may, I can't seem to find the coolness in Cincinnati that I had in St.Louis - I imagine that, sans the park issue, Cinci does have the coolness but damn if I can find it. It probably doesnt help that I dont even have a phone book / yellowpages.
On another topic, I swear to jesus we have daylight savings completely backwards. On Friday I was trying to figure when the time switched exactly and which direction, and I had logically deduced that we would lose an hour. I leaped to this conclusion on the basis that we must organize our daylight savings system with the purpose in mind of saving daylight. Instead we gained an hour, and instead of getting dark at 7, now it gets dark at 6. I realize that this is "coming back from daylight savings" and now we're on standard time but I didn't realize that involved screwing over an entire half a year. We should just stay on daylight savings year round. I think its hit me worse now because now I'm working fulltime; before, during highschool school or college, I'd still always have plenty of daylight when I was free to do things no matter how early it got dark. As it is now I am either staring at a dark sky or the inside of my cube. People talk about 'Seasonal Affectedness Disorder' where you get the winter blues, I say that you don't have to have a god damned disorder to be depressed because if you are not at work it is by definition dark outside.
Here is a Rockin Tune. Its from a DoD contest for castlevania3 Clockwork. All the entries are here. I'm pretty sure this one is by the Goat. |
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Read 2 - Post |
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| Stuff |
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| 10:57am 17/10/2004 |
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Tribes: Vengeance is easily the coolest game I've played this year. So, ironically, if you go to say, the gamefaqs board for the game, all you will hear is people whining about how disappointed they are. They are primarily complaining, of course, because they are comparing it to the 11 games before it in the Tribes universe, and primarily vs Tribes 1 and 2.
Now, I played Tribes 2. The path that lead me to buying Tribes Vengeance all started with Zelda: Wind Waker oddly enough (which is probably the best game I played last year. I had a drug-induced vision of how cool it would be to make an MMOG that was like Wind Waker, in the sense that it would be largely oceanic with various islands you could visit and explore. My vision was basically to have a MMOG that was a cross between Wind Waker, Giants and Planetside- and MMOG. There are many analogs between space games and an ocean game, but being oceanic solves many problems in letting the game be interesting and fun without being insanely unrealistic. And no matter how unrealistic you make a space game, the "getting from point A to B" is always pretty boring, especially in a MMOG. The only game to really succeed in making that part fun was Freelancer.
So anyway, I also got the notion in my head that such a MMOG could be commercially viable, and due to its nature, would require less resources to make than a normal MMOG, becuase large parts of it would be ocean, and simple generated/molded heightmaps creating the islands. I got the idea that I could make it using the Torque Engine, which is a game engine that comes with full source you can buy for $100, and you dont have to upgrade your license unless you have more than $250,000 in sales, at which point, upgrading the license wouldn't be so bad. The Torque engine is, you guessed it, originally the Tribes 2 engine. I tried the Torque Engine demo but it was a bit sparse, I wanted to see what the engine was really capable of so I picked up Tribes 2.
Here's the thing about Tribes 1 and 2. There really is no single player mode. Its basically a multiplayer game. People kept telling me how cool the Tribes universe and backstory was, but I just didn't get it. Its a MULTIPLAYER GAME. Theres extraordinarily little plot going on here. Except that 0wnj00_22 says I'm a f4gg0r. Well damn, that IS a startling revelation.
In short I wasnt really THAT impressed with Tribes 2. But then I saw Tribes Vengeance had released a demo and figured that the game might be more impressive with some updated graphics and stuff. I checked out the demo and it was kinda fun. Eventually I bought Tribes Vengeance just because I figured the multiplayer would be fun.
The multiplayer IS fun, but omg. The single player in this game is pretty freakin extraordinary for a game series that prides itself on not having single player. In fact its downright fantastic. The gameplay itself is VERY fun, the most pure joy to be had in a FPS since Giants. Theres something about having a jetpack thats just innately awesome, aside from adding a new dimension to the normal circle-strafe/bunny-hop routine in most FPS games. Another thing I like about the gameplay is that there is no "1 weapon", theres not a single weapon thats a good idea in every situation, and theres not really any weapon that doesnt require some skill to use. Basically theres no "DOOM rocket launcher" equivalent in the game.
There's a shotgun-like gun, inflicts large damage on hitting, almost instant to its target, medium range, and infinite ammo- one caveat, it uses your energy reserves as ammo, the same energy reserves that power your jetpack, making it harder for you to make your escape or to be evasive. There's a chaingun, also medium range, limited ammo- its strength is in hitting a very evasive enemy that you're having a hard time nailing with with a big gun in one shot, but you have to keep your target on him for several seconds to kill someone, and hope that in that time he doesnt get a fix on you with - a bigger gun. Theres the Spinfusor, which is most like a quake-type rocket launcher- long distance, slow moving, good splash damage radius. This is really want you WANT to hit people with, but since this is a game where everyone has a jetpack, its extremely hard to hit someone thats flying around. You tend to aim for their vicinity when they're landing and try to get them with splash damage. Then theres some other stuff, grappling hook, grenade launchers and mortars, which have limited situational use, grenade launchers and mortars are primarily useful if you want to keep someone away from a given area. Theres a cool disc weapon thats like a shield when in your hand, and then you can launch it like a UT razorjack kinda. There's also a laser-sniper thing (which gives away your position since its a laser).
Another cool balance option in the game is that theres light, middle, and heavy armor. The sniper gun for instance can only be used by light armor. A light armor with a speed pack and a sniper rifle makes for a pretty cool hit-and-run sniping package, but you have limited ammo and very little protection. Heavy armor is the only thing that can use mortars, and you have about 3x the hp of a light armor, but you move slow and you're damn big, easy to hit.
The multiplayer is base-oriented. There's scanners, turrets, portable turrets, portable repairers, inventory stations, and a whole host of vehicles. Well, all of that is present in the singleplayer as well. There's just not a thing cooler than singleplayer missions where you start out as a gunner on an airship, softening up a huge enemy base as much as possible, trying to take out turrets and what not, and then landing, running around in light armor sniping people in their base, taking over their turrets, infiltrating, and finally assassinating someone. aww yeah.
But the coolest thing about the single player, aside from being extremely fun in terms of raw gameplay, is the 12-15 hour campaign of plotty goodness. It basically tells the story from the perspective of 3 or 4 characters that you alternate controlling, and by jumping around between past and present. Its very effective. In one scenario, you are trying to free some prisoners from a base with 2 characters. You split up at the beginning, and first you play as 1 character, then you do the same scenario as the other character. How fast you accomplish your objectives in the first run effects how tough of a time you'll have in the second run.
The plot is really pretty awesome as far as FPS go. In one of my favorite missions, you're an 8 year old girl - a princess at that - unarmed obviously, when your palace is assaulted, and theres soldiers every where, attacking other soldiers, and also trying to kill you and your family. At first you have to survive by evading, running through airducts and crap, eventually you find yourself a 1-person aerial assault fighter and you kick some major ass. you eventually have to abandon that though, and then you have to survive using a grappling hook and eventually you're able to pull off a jetpack from a dead soldier and use that to finally escape. Fast forward to that girl in her 20s, and you find a very angry, and lethal woman. ^_^
So anyway, Tribes Vengeance is awesome. Don't let anyone tell you that its retarded or dumbed down because they made "skiing" an actual game mechanic instead of just an exploit of the game physics where you're 'micro-jumping'.
Aside from Tribes, this is also the coolest thing ever. |
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Read 4 - Post |
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| Breaking the political silence |
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| 07:06pm 09/09/2004 |
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I hate politics. But I'm going to break my self-imposed political silence and rant briefly.
Kerry is a retard of mammoth proportions.
Those of you that know me even moderately are saying "Dude, you're like mr. republican man. Of course you're going to say that."
No, no, for real. I decided long ago to vote for the libertarian candidate this election. Many months ago, I had not really believed it would make any difference who won. I couldn't decide who I preferred. I couldn't pick a lesser of two evils, they both seemed pretty much equally evil. The country was fucked no matter what. Well, that last part is still true.
I had not until very recently decided I actually would prefer a Bush win over Kerry. Moreover, many months ago if you asked me, I thought it would be quite challenging for the democrats to lose the election. They seem to be managing quite well, however. Many months ago, every day on the news was a new story about how Iraq was spiraling out of control, how the economy was in bad shape, gas prices were skyrocketing with no end in sight, and how Bush was AWOL and how republicans wanted to ban gay marriage.
Now, Iraqs sovereignty has been transfered, and while its still to a degree a quagmire, the Iraqis are taking more responsibility for their own freedom, and moreover, recent terrorist events in Israel and Russia (such as the absolute abomination that was the school hostage situation) have reminded us that terrorism is real and DOES need to be fought, and is more than just the fact that we all cringe whenever we hear the phrase "nine-eleven" due to how overplayed its become, and is not only aimed at America due to our foreign policy. Well, Bush still wants to ban gay marriage, but as a matter of practicality, that will never happen. No democrat will support it, and I'd say that less than half of republicans would vote for it. As for the economy, I get slightly ticked at hearing democrat puppets TELL US how bad off we are and how "the American people will vote for Kerry, because we're NOT doing so well!" Jobless economic recovery? Net job loss? That sounds pretty bad. But WHAT PART OF 5.4% UNEMPLOYMENT RATE DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND? Shit, we should be so lucky. By any historical standard, that is excellent, and by any international standard, well, it beats the crap out of Germany and Japan in any case. Sure things could always be better, but you're going to have to find someone less informed to sell your economic sob story to. And also, someone that's unemployed ... and votes. Gas prices are fairly flat and well, I know one surefire way to bring gas prices way down. Eliminate the motherfucking gasoline excise taxes. And maybe stop blocking any form of domestic oil exploration. And now, through an absolutely astounding twist of PR, its not Bush who's on the defensive about his military record.
All of this could be overcome by Kerry. If he only had a platform. If he, as a candidate, had decided to define himself in some way other than as a questionable war hero, and, as simply the alternative to Bush. I mean, thats true. He IS the alternative to Bush. But he hasn't given anyone a single goddamned reason to vote FOR him, only reasons to want Bush out of office. He has defined himself entirely by making himself "what Bush isn't", and not in any capacity by what HE offers as a candidate.
I watch a lot of news. And I read a lot of news online as well. I really can't name a single platform of Kerrys. What does he want to do when he's president? Well, he wants to ... not be Bush. I think he wants to be Bill Clinton when he grows up.
I can name several Bush policies easily offhand. He wants to privatize social security. He wants to ban gay marriage - I don't agree with it, but I can name it as something he's running on. He wants to reform medical liability. He wants to make his tax cuts permanent.
What's Kerry's stance on Iraq? Well... he seems to be... against it, I guess. Not in any specific way. But whatever it is Bush has been doing, its "W.", its wrong. Great slogan, ass.
Let me give you a suggestion, Mr.Kerry. Next time you say, "Privatizing social security is W! Its wrong!", STOP FOR ONE SECOND AND FOLLOW THAT THOUGHT UP WITH HOW _YOU_ WOULD FIX SOCIAL SECURITY. .... Oh thats right. Your platform is to keep it exactly as is, status quo. In other words, you don't have a platform.
The short of it is I don't think Kerry bothered coming up with any platform. He didn't expect to need one. He thought he could enter the election simply as the alternative to Bush and win. Hell, many months ago, I thought he'd be right. I certainly didn't expect things to improve the way they have. Who saw it coming? And Swiftboat ads... Well, who knows what Kerry actually did in Vietnam, I don't really know or care, but it brought to the discussion the fact that Kerry is a massive douchebag. It really highlighted the discussion of how he handled himself when he came back from Vietnam, and to me, thats what kind of made me actively dislike the man. Before, I thought he was just terminally boring.
Bush has succeeded in getting his vision to America. You may not agree with it, but odds are you know what it is. Chances are you've heard the phrase "ownership society" - in my view, a truly worthy goal, especially as it pertains to the 10th commandment of my bible. Kerry has stepped out into the ring and said, "Vote for me, I'm not George Bush." He banked on the negative image that the public seemed to have of Bush, but the problem with that strategy is that it leaves the ball in Bush's court, if Bush can improve his image, as the RNC seemed to be pretty succesful at doing, then Kerry is up a creek. He has less than 8 weeks to come up with a platform and get it across to the voters, and also, to learn how to be likeable. One final reason I don't like Kerry: His way of responding to Bush's campaign, to swiftboat ads, the whole process - its been "victim mentality". We have enough victim mentality in this nation, it makes me sick enough as is, victim mentality does NOT make a good trait for a president.
On flipflopping on Iraq, one columnist says: "If you don't have a serious position on the most serious issue facing the country today, you are not a serious candidate."
Oh oh sorry one last gripe: Democrat footsoldiers do themselves no favors by suggesting that Cheney or any other republican are cowards for seeking deferments. It does not ingratiate yourself to any voter that did the same or anyone who can relate to having not wanted to go to vietnam. People like, oh, Idunno, lets say Bill Clinton. STFU. |
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Read 23 - Post |
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| Weekend Update |
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| 09:48pm 25/07/2004 |
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I accomplished two main things this weekend.
First, I cleaned my bathroom. I wouldn't normally say something like this as if it were an accomplishment, but in this case, it is. I'd been putting it off for over two months, I had 6-8 spiders in the bathroom as well as a number of lesser insect carcases (from the spiders, you see), and the sludge in my shower was approaching sentience. So it took me like 3 hours but the whole damn thing is sparkly clean. But I had to buy a new shower curtain. My old one was gross beyond belief.
Second, I finally suceeded in recording something and not wanting to slit my wrists in the process. I recorded this rendition of the song 'The Dave D Taylor Blues', aka D_DDTBLU.MID, from DOOM2 (Tricks and Traps). Its still pretty amateur sounding, but you can at least tell what I was going for. I got a lot better at working with Renoise and Audition and learned some cool runs to play on the guitar in the process. The only way to improve is practice, right? Guess I'll keep doing it.
I also went to this company picnic thing today, at the Coney Island Theme Park (not the actual Coney Island). It was kind of a wash. It rained, it was cold. There was some food. That's about the extent of it. Didn't see the girl I was sorta hoping to see. Oh well.
I have decided that my car is damn awesome. I've learned to adjust to its slightly different way of driving and it's just gotten more fun to drive. My old car really preferred to be in the 2 - 3.5k rpm range, while this car really likes to be in the 3 - 5k rpm range, so I've had to adjust my shifting a bit, but now its hella rad to the max.
Really need to get the next VERGE build done so I can reformat my damn computer and get rid of this virus that Norton is amusingly unable to remove.
kbye |
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vecna's journal
