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Friday, February 04, 2005
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I haven't heard about this before, but they're doing a good interview now on The News Hour about the Top Ten Underreported Humanitarian Stories. Literally millions of people are starving to death, being sold into slavery, and fearful of their lives for no good reason. But of course, none of that is as important to Americans as the trials of Scott Peterson or Michael Jackson, or whether gays want to get married or not.
4:12:09 PM 
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Actor Zach Braff Scrubs In: "From the comedy Scrubs actor Zach Braff and producer-creator Bill Lawrence. Braff plays medical resident John 'J.D.' Dorian. Lawrence previously worked on Spin City. Braff made his feature film writing and directing debut with Garden State which opened last fall. It's now out on DVD. (This interview was originally broadcast on Oct. 4, 2004.)"
(Via NPR's Fresh Air from WHYY.)
3:48:26 PM
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Does Bush Understand His Own Proposal?: "I choked on this graf from today's Washington Post piece about Bush's Social Security roadshow:"
(Via The New Republic Weblogs.)
According to this piece, the line Bush is using, saying that we would be able to pass along our investments to our heirs is not really true. Most people will purchase annuities with this money, and annuities expire when you die, leaving the insurance companies with the money -- that's how the insurance companies make money. So is Bush ignorant, shading the truth, or outright lying?
2:58:10 PM
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From The Raving Atheist:
This classic dialogue from last night’s Happy Days 30th anniversary special got a big laugh: Fonzie: 'My new girlfriend is a virgin.' Richie: 'How do you know?' Fonzie: 'She told me.' Richie: 'How do you know she's telling the truth?' Fonzie: 'Virgins don't lie!'
Which, as he says, nicely sums up thousands of years of theology, and makes the point I was trying to make in my earlier post today.
2:33:10 PM
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MySQL Triggers Tryout: "MySQL 5.0 promises trigger support. What will it look like? How will it work? Peter Gulutzan takes MySQL triggers for a test-drive."
(Via O'Reilly Network ONJava.com.)
Good piece; triggers will be a big addition to MySQL, and I'm looking forward to running version 5.0 to try them out. However, there's a fascinating paragraph at the end of this piece that is cause for concern: "REMINDER: MySQL functions have severe limitations. For example, they can't SELECT from a table. Trigger activations are like function calls and are subject to the same limitations." This is somewhat distressing, both in regard to triggers and functions in general. No selects? This really seems to affect their utility! It's probably time to have another look at PostgresSQL.
10:23:06 AM
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Twice in the last month I've had to do major surgery on Gary's new Dell to help get rid of spyware, trojans, and all sorts of nastiness. I've been meaning to post about this for a while, but Mark Morford does a much better job that I could. I have the feeling that using Windows these days is a more miserable experience than most of us know. Read Morford, and go buy a Mac.
9:40:24 AM
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Last night we caught Dr. Ralph Stanley's usual early-February show at Berkeley's Freight and Salvage, and a fine show it was. Ralph has slowed a bit in the last few years. Last night he sang only about half a dozen songs, leaving most of the singing duties to other band members including, alas, his son. Though II is in many ways a fine singer, he's not the charismatic wonder his father, even at 77 and with a few inches off the step, is. The Clinch Mountain Boys, as always, were in fine form. The show, which has varied little in past years, was a bit different last night. There was no intermission, and Ralph omitted his customary tribute to his late brother Carter. I missed some Stanley standards, such as Rank Strangers, Little Maggie, Man of Constant Sorrow. Still, it's a pleasure to see this band; bluegrass is always, to me, so much more interesting to see live than it is just to listen on record.
9:29:45 AM
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There were some new claims about the Shroud of Turin this week, and CSICOP takes a dim view of them. One thing that's always puzzled me about this sort of thing is why the religious always grasp so strongly at straws that supposedly prove their beliefs. Isn't faith alone supposed to be enough? The problem, for believers, I think, is that if you start grasping at the straws of scientific or historic "proof" for their beliefs, then when those proofs fail, what happens to the belief? It's the "god of the gaps" situation -- if you see god in the gaps in human knowledge, as those gaps get closed up as we learn more, then god get smaller and smaller. So you fight human knowledge. This seems spiritually bankrupt; if we were created by a god, then we were given the ability to know things and learn things, but we're not supposed to use this ability lest it damage our faith.
When I read stuff like this:
I believe that the world was created in six days less than ten thousand years ago. I do not believe this because I looked at the facts and decided they point in this direction. I believe this because the first two chapters of Genesis say that it was, and Jesus said that the Old Testament is the authoritative word of God, and I believe everything that Jesus tells me. It's really just as simple as that. I feel no need to nuance my belief in this fact to make it look more agreeable to the science of the day, through day-age schemes or framework hypotheses or anything else. At the end of the day, we all have to decide who we're going to believe, and when given the choice between God and man, I'll choose God.
The circular reasoning is amazing. You may as well say, "I believe in the bible because the bible tells me to." Instead of looking at the world around us, we're supposed to believe in some book. At least this guy's honest, and knows that if you dig into the facts then the religion falls apart, and admits that it's pointless to try to frame the discussion with regard to facts, " As long as we agree to the naturalist terms of the debate, we will fail to overcome this objection. There is no way to neutrally examine the facts on the table and come to a common conclusion, because there is that one other fact that will not, indeed cannot be agreed on by both sides, and that one fact fundamentally alters the interpretation of every other fact."
9:20:57 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Steve Michel.
Last update: 3/1/2005; 8:48:04 AM.
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