Category Archives: life

atheism

May 19, 2012 3:48 pm 6 Comments

I’ve been an atheist most of my life, and I find it very strange when people don’t understand.

So, this article will try to explain why I am an atheist.

First, we need to define what a “god” is. Incredibly, this first step annoys some people! When I ask people what they mean by “god”, they say things like “well, you know…” (no, I don’t), or “what do you mean?” (was I not clear?).

Let’s define a god based on the most common christian beliefs:

Each one of these criteria is incredibly unlikely.

Seven Day Creation

The first one, “Can create a whole universe in 7 days right down to animals” is easily disproved.

By simply looking at the night sky, measuring the distance of stars and how the further stars are from us, the more their light is shifted to the red, we can measure the age of the universe pretty confidently to about 13.75 billion years.

That’s not 7 days. And if the religious apologists reply by starting “well when the bible says ‘days’, what it means is …” – stop right there. If the bible said “days”, then the bible meant “days”. Otherwise the bible is incorrect.

Self-creation

Next, we have “can create itself”.

Obviously, it is possible for something to come from nothing. This is self-evident.

Things that exist either existed forever, or they came into being from nothing.

The idea that everything that exists has always existed was believed for a very long time, but it causes a load of unanswered questions, such as why, after an eternity of existence, everything is not either compressed to a single un-moving point, or spread out to a completely uniform volume.

The idea that things can come from nothing causes a few questions as well, such as “how?”.

Combining the two, modern science shows that something can come from nothing, through a quantum effect called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and yet the sum total energy still equals zero. In other words, the universe is both eternal, and yet its material can have emerged a set length of time ago.

On the religious side, Christianity does not believe in an eternal universe. If the universe is eternal, it does not need a creator, and therefore there is no need for a god.

Christianity believes that something can be intentionally created from nothing. They say that God created himself from nothing (example 1), and then created the universe from nothing (example 2).

So, based on two explanations of how things can come from nothing, we have a choice of which to believe.

Choice 1:

  1. God intentionally created God from nothing.
  2. God then created the universe from nothing.

Choice 2:

  1. The universe emerged naturally from nothing.

Occam’s Razor suggests that when given the choice between two explanations, you should choose the one that is the least complex.

Even if there were no God, the universe would have created itself from nothing anyway. Quantum mechanics ensure this.

We do not need to invoke a god to create a universe.

Creation of Life

According to the bible, God simply created life one day. As simple as that.

And then after all of the animals were created, a human male was created. From clay.

And then a human female was created. From the male’s rib.

Compare that to the idea of evolution, where simple molecular reactions “evolve” over time through competition to eventually become the hugely diverse life-forms that cover the planet today.

I don’t even know why I need to explain this one. Seriously – created from clay? And a rib?

Evolution is the only viable explanation for life and its huge variety.

Everything else is fairy-tales.

Selectively Infinite Caring

Priests say that “God loves us, every one”, and then they claim that you will go to hell if you don’t worship him.

As an aside: in 1999, Pope John Paul II changed the Catholic church’s stance on Hell, demoting it from an actual place to a mere state of being. This changed 2000 years of supposedly infallible truth that Hell was a place.

I guess “infallible” doesn’t mean the same thing to me as it does to them.

Anyway – apparently, God sees everything and knows everything, and cares for all of his children, but only those that worship Jesus.

This means that, if the christian God exists, then every person that has never heard of Jesus, or that doesn’t believe he is the son of God, will be punished eternally.

Yeah… right.

Personally, if I created a universe (for example, a computerised simulation), I really don’t care about the individuals. I might find the civilisations interesting, but the individuals are not interesting.

Similarly, for someone studying ants does not find any individual ant interesting, but the colony would be fascinating. Even if they do focus on an individual ant, it’s not that specific ant that they are interested in, but the type of ant it is (soldier, queen, worker).

And even if any individual was interesting, why is their belief somehow a criteria for whether they should be rewarded or not?

Summary

Well, there it is.

So, I don’t believe in gods for the simple reason that I don’t see any compelling evidence that gods (of any type) exist.

Filed Under: life, philosophy

This year’s Féile Oriel sucked

May 5, 2012 5:54 pm Leave a Comment

Féile Oriel this year is crap, in my opinion. We went into town today to see what was going on.

The Market House had a few violins in it. Well, my house has a few violins as well. There were two interesting violins. One had a long neck and only one string. I imagine it’s played something like the Chinese erhu. I asked what it was. The guys that were managing the exhibition didn’t know. I then spotted a violin that had a very interesting shape for its top plate – there was a deep scoop just inside the arches. I asked why that was. I was told “I don’t know – they’re just different”.

We were looking forward to the “try it out” shop that they’d had last year, where the owner of a local instrument shop would bring a load of things into a vacant shop and let visitors come in and try them out. We were then told that it wouldn’t be on this year.

So, I asked Bronwyn if the website had said anything about what’s on. She said no, that there /were/ some things mentioned, but generally things that you have to pay into.

We found some music finally outside the Westenra hotel. Boann had a great time dancing.

Then we noticed there was a session going on inside the hotel and went in, in the hope that we could sit down for a few minutes with a coke or lemonade and listen. The musicians were all in the reception area, where we couldn’t stand and listen as that’s where people come in and out. So i took the kids in to the seated area. We couldn’t hear the musicians at all from there – just some football that was on a TV. the kids wanted some food, so we got sandwiches and then went home.

I then checked the website, and found that Bronwyn was right:

- under Musical Events, it mentions /one/ thing on today and /one/ thing on tomorrow, and doesn’t give a time for either.
- There is a link for Sessions, and the link is to a broken page.
- under Other Activities, there’s a busking competition mentioned. well, my guess is that there won’t be any winners this year, because there weren’t any buskers that I could see!

All-in-all, the day sucked.

Filed Under: life, music

immortality and the multi-verse

August 17, 2011 6:41 pm Leave a Comment

Hello kiddies – it’s madness time!

Don’t worry – these are just idle thoughts. I’m not going over the hill into the twilight zone.

The science madness

A number of ideas in recent (last 100 years) physics revolve around the idea that there are multiple universes, or that the same universe keeps splitting into separate universes every time a quantum decision must be made.

As far as I know, these ideas are not testable, but a lot of physicists think that a multi-verse is the simplest solution to a lot of questions, and as Occam’s Razor says, the simplest solution is usually the right one.

The idea that’s bandied about most often is that the universe splits every time a choice is made, so that both choices actually happen – one in one universe, and the other in another universe.

This has the effect that every possible configuration of the universe’s contents exists at some point. In other words, “in an infinite universe, anything is possible“.

What this means, is that at any point in your life where you had to make a decision – get on the plane, talk to the girl, take the job – a version of you exists for every possible decision.

Personally, I don’t believe that the universe splits at each decision – it seems a bit silly. But, I do believe that in infinite time and space, if the “big bang” can happen once, it can happen again, and each time, it just has to be the tiniest bit different, so in effect, there is a universe somewhere for every single moment of this one’s existence, which differs in just one respect. A consequence of this is that even if the universe doesn’t physically divide at each decision, a universe exists for each decision anyway, so it’s as if it happened anyway.

What is you?

In a lot of those universes, a version of you exists. For all purposes, it is you. It has your memories, is built of exactly the same molecules, and lives in a world exactly like yours.

You can ignore all of the universes that don’t have a you in them (and there are an infinite number of those!), because if you paraphrase the anthropic principle, you realise that they really don’t matter – the only universes you could ever experience are those that you exist in (history is written by the victors. In other words, your present you is only possible because all of the failed “you”s are dead and therefore can be written out of history).

In each of these universes, you had a load of different experiences – you lived, died, were rich, poor, etc., which is interesting to think about intellectually (Remember all those times that you wish you’d done something different? Well, you did in at least one other universe.), but not very useful to dwell on, because that’s them, and you’re more interested in you.

You.

I’m writing this post because I’ve survived some interesting things in the past – self-harming during my late teens, standing on the edge of a 5-storey building pissing off the edge while totally drunk, all the narrow misses while skateboarding, getting beaten to a pulp a number of times, breaking my skull when I was 2.

Every one of those events had an alternative where things went the other way. But I’m here right now, which means that in this universe, I’ve survived.

The fact that you’re reading this is very interesting. You have survived all of the events of your past, and have gotten to this point.

What is “you”? The grammar-nazi in me complains about that sentence, but I mean it that way.

“You” is the sum of experiences that makes up your identity – your “soul”.

Here’s an interesting question: when you go to sleep at night, and you don’t dream, there are a few hours during which you are essentially dead to the world. What if you were transported at this point to another universe during those hours which was exactly the same – when you woke up, it would be as if you simply continued living from the previous day in the previous universe and you would be none-the-wiser.

The multi-verse idea says that this happens all the time, that every moment that you experience could very possibly be in a totally different universe that has been rebuilt from scratch.

Quantum immortality

Now we get to the freaky shit.

What if an accident were to happen right now – a meteorite drops through your ceiling, or a microwave explodes, or your partner slips in the middle of knitting and impales you.

In some universes, you would die, and in some, the event would be narrowly missed (and in some, not occur at all).

The important thing to note is that the only “you” that would experience the event is the “you” that survived. You may be damaged by the event, but you would survive and live another day (otherwise, you would not, and that universe can be ignored).

Please dwell on that thought – the only possible you that is reading this article is a you that has survived all previous experiences, but as a consequence of this crazy logic, you will also survive all future events as well.

Let’s look at the logic again:

  • There are an infinite number of universes.
  • There are an infinite number of universes that have “you”s living in them.
  • Every time there is the slightest chance that you would survive an event, there are an infinite number of universes in which you do survive that event.

A very weird consequence of this is that you, the you that is reading this, will never die. Every time an event happens that might lead to your death – a choice you made, a decision someone else made, a natural accident – there are infinite universes in which that event does not happen, and so “you” survive.

No-one else, though

Unfortunately, because of the probabilistic nature of physics, everyone else will die in time. Yes, there are an infinite number of universes in which your loved ones will survive with you, which there are many “bigger” infinities in which they die, and those win out.

This is another mind-bender, because it makes everything very subjective.

From my point of view, I am immortal, and you will eventually die, but that’s because my own experience leads me through a different set of infinities where I am the immortal one.

Every other person that exists has their own set of infinities as well that leads them to immortality.

Conclusion

Well – that’s my moment of madness concluded for today.

In short – shit will happen, but you’ll get over it, a million million times over the next load of centuries.

Filed Under: areyoumad, life, philosophy

more music scams…

July 18, 2010 9:46 am 3 Comments

last year, I wrote about some scams where people claimed to be looking for music lessons for their son or daughter.

So far, I have not had one single student for guitar come to me through email or the Internet. Every single request has been a scam.

Here is an example email I received today from andrewbarton67@yahoo.com (Andrew Barton):

Hello,

I’m Andrea Barton during my search for a Music Instrument Lessons teacher that would always take my Daughter (Gwyn) and I found your advert.Your advert looks great and it is very okay to me since you specialize in the area I am seeking for her. My daughter will be coming to your Country before the middle of July for 2 Months. She is just 15yrs Old, a beginner, I want you to help me teach her music during her stay in the Country because i will not want her to less busy, i want her to engage in something to keep her busy during her stay.

So, kindly let me know your charges cost per week in order for me to arrange for the payment before she travels down to your country.I would also like to know if there is any Text Book you will recommend for her as a beginner so that she will be reading privately at home after the lesson during her stay.

Please Advise back on;

(1) Your charges per 1 hour twice a week for 2 Months?

(2) The Day and time you will be available to teach her During the week?

(3) Tuition address?

I will be looking forward to read from you soonest.

Best Regards.

There are a few things about this which should immediately strike anyone:

  • People don’t usually mis-spell their own name. Is it Andrea (in the text) or Andrew (in the email address)?
  • There is no mention of what instrument the girl is supposed to be learning. Guitar? Piano? Didgeridoo?
  • The weird capitalisation says to me that translation software has been used, and only for some specific words. I can imagine a template that goes something like this: “I’m ________ during my search for a ________________ teacher that would always take my ________ (____) and I found your advert”. Every one of the blanked out words was inserted with capital letters.
  • There’s a lot of talk about countries – “your Country”, “the Country”, “down to your country”. This person obviously does not know what country I am in, yet knows that his/her daughter will be coming to it?
  • As for that, “My daughter will be coming to your Country before the middle of July for 2 Months.” The email arrived at 2 in the morning today. It’s the 18th of July. A real request for upcoming lessons would surely arrive weeks or months before the trip had already started?

There is a quirky little urge in me to take this as far as I can. However, I’m also not made of time, so I won’t bother.

So here’s the warning: NEVER trust an email from anyone you don’t know.

Here’s how this would pan out if I took it seriously:

  1. We agree price and dates.
  2. They send a cheque and urge me to cash it. I go to the bank and do so.
  3. I suddenly receive an urgent email saying there’s been an error and they sent me too much, and to please send back the extra money.
  4. Of course, that involves me writing and sending a cheque of my own.
  5. They then cash my cheque.
  6. Their cheque then bounces….
  7. The student never turns up.

So don’t be an idiot. Either throw these email in the spam directory (or delete it), or have fun trying to get the guy to do ridiculous things, but never take it seriously.

Btw: here’s an example of this same exact person being a bit over enthusiastic with the attempts – 9 copy/paste messages, with two separate daughters, Rita and Marsha – this guy should probably have got the kids lessons when they were younger…

Filed Under: fraud, guitar, music, piano

piano grade 2 results arrived

June 19, 2010 2:26 pm 1 Comment

I did the grade 2 exam three weeks ago. The results just arrived: “successfully passed in the second grade examination in Pianoforte with first class honours”

Cool, I’ll shove that certificate up on the piano next to last year’s one.

I’m going for grade 3 in September. Was meant to do grade 2 a few months ago, but couldn’t find anywhere close that would do the examination. The nearest was in Louth, but that’s too far to walk.

Here are the examiner’s notes:

Max Marks Requirements Examiner’s Comments Marks Awarded
15 Scales & Arpeggios Very good. Good choice of speed but make sure you keep it nice and steady! Very good tone. 13
10 Sight Readng Very good. Mind the counting 9
10 Ear Tests Very good. 9
5 Theory Excellent. 5
20 First Piece Sonatina in G: You caught the mood well. Nice fluent performance. Good phrasing, tone, dynamics and technique. 18
20 Second Piece Waltz: Another lovely performance. Very good balance in left hand melody. Great attention to detail. Very enjoyable! 19
20 Third Piece Samba: Excellent rhythm throughout. Very good range of dynamics and good use of arm weight. Good control throughout. Well done! 18
Total/Additional Comments: Congratulations! Keep up the excellent work! 91

As you can guess, I’m pretty happy about this!

I’m hoping the keep up the high marks for the next exam. My teacher says my pieces for that exam are already at “pass” level, so three more months of practice can only improve that!

I’m hoping to have enough money next month (royalties from my last book) to afford a new piano and a camera, so may be able to stick some tunes online soon.

Filed Under: life, music, piano

what I'm up to

May 3, 2010 11:54 am 2 Comments

As usual, I’m behind on stuff.

I just submitted chapter 3 of my upcoming book “CMS Design with PHP and jQuery”, and chapter 4 was due to be complete and sent two days ago.

My clavichord project stalled when the cumulative number of mistakes made it incredibly unlikely I’ll complete it in a usable fashion.

In work, I’m behind on a pretty large online-store project, but in that case I’m okay with it – I wasn’t slacking; things are just very busy at the moment.

My piano playing has also stalled – I’ve been trying to learn The Heart Asks Its Pleasure First for the last month. I’m stuck on the final page, where the left hand is all over the place and the right has an intricate tune to play. Its all in my head, but I just can’t play it smoothly. Thinking of putting that on the back-burner and going onto Bach’s 2-part inventions instead.

upcoming

Packt have asked me to review Expert PHP5 Tools. Looking forward to it. It’s got some stuff in it which I’ve read about but never tried. Including: UML design of applications, incorporating tests into subversion submissions, and automated documentation of source (among other things).

My piano teacher found an examiner who will be testing in Monaghan next month, so I’ll finally be able to get grade 2 out of the way. I’ve been practicing grade 2 and 3 tunes for months. Playing 6 tunes every day before I do anything else has been reducing th amount of time I have for the rest of my practice, so I’ll be glad to get this one passed as well.

I’m trying to push myself to get the current book finished as soon as possible. This is difficult as writing a CMS is a much more complex job than writing a cookbook of techniques. The chapter I just finished had 40 pages in it. By the 40th page of the previous book I was already into chapter 3. Chapter 2 wasn’t much smaller either!

When this book is finished, I’ll be starting a new one, on building a clavichord as cheaply as possible. Because I failed with the current one, but learned quite a lot from it, I feel I’ll get it right this time, and would like to document it as I go. There’s a lot of math involved in building a clavichord, and I think I may even get a good programming application out of it!

After that, I’m thinking of starting up contact juggling again, and completing the book, this time with videos.

When I get the time, I’d also like to get back into building robots. I think the gardening robot is a bit beyond me at the moment (involves some very complex AI), but I thought I’d try build a digger bot. You tell it what you want dug, where to put the debris, etc., and it gets to work.

Filed Under: book, clavichord, javascript, jquery, life, music, packt, php, piano, programming, web development, webme

ToDo

March 22, 2010 10:51 am 1 Comment

List of things off the top of my head that I want to do:

  • write a book. already had a non-fiction book published, but I’d love to have an interesting an compelling original fiction idea to write about. I’m working on a second non-fiction book at the moment.
  • master a martial art. I have a green belt in Bujinkan Taijutsu (ninja stuff, to the layman), but that’s from ten years ago – found a Genbukan teacher only a few days ago so I’ll be starting that up soon (again, ninja stuff).
  • learn maths. A lot of the stuff I do involves guessing numbers or measuring. it’d be nice to be able to come up with formulas to generate optimal solutions.
  • learn electronics. what /is/ electricity? what’s the difference between voltage and amperage? who knows… I’d like to.
  • create a robot gardener. not just a remote-control lawn-mower. one that knows what to cut, what to destroy, that can prune bushes, till the earth, basically everything that a real gardener does.
  • rejuvenate, or download to a computer, whichever is possible first. science fiction, eh? you wait and see…
  • create an instrument. I’m just finishing off a clavichord at the moment. when that’s done, I think I’ll build another one, based on all the things I learned from the first. followed by a spinet, a harpsichord, a dulcimer, and who knows what else.
  • learn to play an instrument. I’m going for grades 2 and 3 in September for piano. I can play guitar pretty well, but would love to find a classical teacher.
  • write a computer game. I have an idea, based on Dungeon Keeper, for a massively multiplayer game. maybe I’ll do it through facebook…
  • write programs to:
    • take a photo of a sudoku puzzle and solve it. already wrote the solver.
    • take a photo of some sheet music and play it.
    • show some sheet music on screen, compare to what you’re playing on a MIDI keyboard, and mark your effort.
    • input all the songs you can play on guitar/keyboard. based on the lists of thousands of people, rate all these songs by difficulty, to let you know what you should be able to learn next.
    • input a job and your location. have other people near you auction themselves to do the job for you. or vice versa: input your location, and find all jobs within walking distance to you where you can do an odd job for some extra cash (nearly there: http://oddjobs4locals.com).
    • takes a photo and recognises objects in it (partly done)
    • based on above, but can also be corrected and will learn from the corrections (also partly done)
  • stop being damned depressed all the time.

There’s probably a load of other stuff, but that’s all I’ve got at the moment!

Filed Under: areyoumad, book, clavichord, games, guitar, life, music, neural networks, notation viewer, packt, php, piano, programming, robotic gardening, web development

what's up!

January 27, 2010 10:35 am 1 Comment

Short run-down of what I’m doing lately: nothing.

Less short: I’m trying to get work out the door, get a good run at some personal projects, pass grade 2 piano, get organised, and generally improve my lot.

None of this is working. I think the “get organised” bit is the most important, as it will help the rest of it fall into place.

I usually only post about web-development-related topics here, as that’s the only subject where I feel I can contribute something new and interesting, so I tend to not talk about other stuff. But sometimes, rattling off the current state of the head is good for clearing it.

In work, I can’t really complain – we have a number of largish projects which are slowly creeping towards completion. The hardest thing about them is getting information from the clients, and then a week or two later being told that half the information is not required. I guess my main complaint at work is the inexorably slow completion rate.

On the personal projects side:

There are still a number of small bugs in KFM 1.4, and either I don’t have the time to get to them, or there is no enough information to recreate the bug and the submitter doesn’t give me access to their copy so I can’t see it from their side.

KFM 2 has been halted for a while – the idea is huge, but I simply don’t have the time, and no-one is clambering for it. I’ll get to it when I have time, but I might have to approach it by evolving KFM 1.x into meeting what I wanted, instead of the original goal of building KFM 2 from scratch.

I started a new project, OddJobs4Locals two weeks back, and got a good two-day run at it, then time got ahead of me again. I think this will be a good one, when I can complete it. Useful for students, people with a little spare time, or simply people that just want to make a little extra cash. Not yet working, but it will be soon, I hope… This is doubly interesting to me, as it is done purely through AJAX, so it will be easy to do a smart-phone client or a desktop client when the time comes.

I’m in the back/forth stage of working with Packt publishing to see if they want me to do a second book (the first one has no bad reviews at all). We’ve mostly agreed on a table of contents, and I’m just trying to get the time to combine a few of the smaller chapters together.

On the piano, I’ve been ready for the grade 2 exam since November, and am still waiting to see if there will be an exam near me any time soon – I hate the effort that goes into travelling (I have a family, and no car). I was hoping to do a grade every 6 months. It looks like this might not be possible, despite me being ready for it… The tunes I’m doing for it are Beethoven’s Sonatina in G Major, a waltz by Bela Bartok, and Boys And Girls Come Out To Samba, by Terence Greaves – by the way, I don’t like those videos; there are no dynamics in any of them, and I can hear a number of mistakes as well. No video apparently of the Terence Greaves one.

As for organisation… well I guess I’d better start working with Mantis again.

My lot will have to wait – I’ve a load of work to get done before it can improve.

Meh. Depression taking hold again.

Filed Under: ajax, areyoumad, book, depression, general, kfm, life, music, packt, php, piano, programming, web development

blasphemy!

January 2, 2010 12:27 am 3 Comments

“Jesus is the only son of God, and if you don’t follow him, you will not be getting through the gates into Heaven”.

Anything wrong with that? Yes – it’s blasphemous, to just about every religion on Earth which is not Christian.

And so, Dermot Ahern, in his infinite wisdom, has just made the central tenet of the religion of one third of the entire planet illegal.

Well done, sir. Fucking genius idea, that.

How about this one then – “Jesus is not the son of God”. Now I’m blaspheming against Christianity.

There’s absolutely no way to win against this except to be completely silent and never discuss what you believe with anyone at all. And that means it wasn’t just Christianity that the idiot has made illegal to speak about, but all religions.

By the way, I’m an atheist. I believe in thinking about what is “true”, and in discussing it with people that are interested, and in not pushing my own beliefs on others.

I hear the door knocking – the thought police are here to take me away. Pray for me…

Filed Under: areyoumad, life, philosophy

php.ie slowly upgrading

December 7, 2009 10:49 pm 3 Comments

It’s been a while since I wrote anything vaguely technical. I guess it’s because I like to write only when there’s something new to say, and usually only if I have some new code to give away.

No new code today, but I can describe the recent work on php.ie (I’m the secretary of the Irish PHP Users’ Group).

So firstly, it was basically a static/brochure site for about a year, until we installed WebME (written by me!) as the CMS and created a skin for it so there’s only a tiny design difference. If you want to try out WebME, then download the SVN version from the google code site, or create a test site here (uses a really old version of WebME – you’re better off using the SVN version).

Then, I started rewriting the right panel. Beforehand, it displayed recent twitter messages, but they’re not often put out so it was a bit of a wasted space.

The panel now uses a WebME widget which displays recent Twitter messages, emails from the mailing list, and posts from the forum.

Over the next few days, I’ll be adding a new News section to the site, and the message widget will be able to show new articles from planet php.ie and new jobs from the jobs page.

I’m currently reading through Ken’s linux.ie todo list to see what I can appropriate for php.ie for its ongoing development.

Big thanks go to Michele and the team at blacknight for hosting the site.

Oh! Just a reminder, buy my book! JQuery 1.3 with PHP – hasn’t been reviewed by anyone yet, as far as I know, but my own opinion is that it is worth having on your shelf if you are a PHP developer that wants to step into jQuery.

Filed Under: book, linux, php, programming, web development, webme, webworks
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