Software Patenting Is Like…

..copyrighting the copyright symbol

Re: Malaria and the Lessons from Non-Anthropocentrism

This is a reply to: This Post

An all knowing, almighty God is not going to wait for human beings to invent DDT to stop 2 deaths per minute from malaria and then do nothing about it when somebody bans DDT with an argument from ignorance. If he so loved that world that he was willing to sent his own son to set things right here on Earth, I bet he can do a lot more to stop malaria.

Bart D. Ehrman is an undercover Christian

It  is my  own paranoia.  Here
are  things  I remember  about
him that is suspicious:

1. He has  a suspicious way of
defining his  worldview on the
media. e.g. On Colbert Show he
calls  himself  agnostic  with
a  very  weird body  language.
On   further  questioning   by
Colbert  he  said  in  a  more
awkward   manner   he  is   an
atheist-without-balls, so that
people  would assume  that the
weird   body  language   while
talking about  his agnosticism
was  because he  was a  closet
atheist.   But  I   think  the
second  cover  up act  was  to
prevent  from  people  finding
out his real world view, which
is  in  fact  pro-  Christian.
If  he  is   lying  about  his
agnosticism/atheism, I  bet he
justifies   his  pretense   by
resorting  to something  along
the lines  of how he  is doing
it  for  the final  good  i.e.
win more  souls for  christ OR
defame atheism.

2. On the Infidel Guy podcast,
he  got into  a little  debate
with  the   host  and  claimed
that  the New  Testament jesus
was   historical.  He   argued
this  in  a way  that  sounded
very  much  like  a  Christian
apologist  i.e.   by  shifting
the  argument to  whether Paul
really  wrote   the  Galatians
(Paul claims he  met James the
brother of Jesus). But in fact
host  was  asking whether  the
gospel legends  of Jesus where
historical.

3.  In   his  book  Misquoting
Jesus,  he  gives  tools  that
can   be  used   by  Christian
apologists    against   claims
made   by   atheists   against
Christianity. For  example, he
says  verses  that deny  equal
rights  for  women  (which  is
used  by  us  atheists  as  an
example  of  lack of  morality
in  the  New Testament)  where
added later by scribes who had
different  agenda and  was not
part of the  original text. It
is easy  to see  how Christian
apologists will later use this
argument  from   an  "atheist"
in  their  favor claiming  the
original text of New Testament
was   divinely  inspired.   In
conclusion,  he  is making  it
easy for the  opposite side by
working  from  within. I  know
this is plainly paranoia.

Science

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed”? Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.”

Too Many Things To Do

1. Find the real mechanism behind protein folding. There has to be one because they always fold into the same shape. Consider quantum tunneling.
2. Write a general purpose compiler that generates initial states of a cellular automata. And possibly let it pick the best cellular automata.
3. Simulate 1. with 2. and generate a database of all proteins in earthly biology, with potential to translate non-existent genes in a few seconds.
4. Sell the database to pharmaceutical companies.
5. Work on protein-protein interaction, and genotype-to-phenotype simulations in the same way.
6. Keep churning out new better medicines faster than other pharmaceuticals.
7. End human suffering.
8. Meanwhile, fund a massive counter apologetics program to transform current religions into ones that are conducive to scientific progress.

Update: Reading this list after a few minutes gives me different perspectieves: 1. that of a foolishly arrogant ambitious dreamer whom everyone would silently enjoy watching dig his own hole. 2. given humanity’s pretentions and delibrate ignorance, I don’t think the human condition is worth improving. It would have been better if they remained scared of falling off the edge of their planet, and burned their women for victimless crimes.

Kernel Development Parable

What happens if:

1. Bob is more or less responsible for a big chunk of the kernel, e.g. the scheduler.

2. Torvalds knows Bob, and knows that Bob is employed by Redhat to work on the scheduler.

3. Alice writes a new improved scheduler which has the potential to replace the old one.

Now, how does Torvalds react? It would be hard to tell Bob that he’s no longer in charge of the scheduler. Bob’s job might be on the line – why would Redhat keep paying Bob if he suddenly had a lot less work to do? Maybe Torvalds met Bob a few times and had a beer with him, making it even harder to replace his work because it becomes personal. Torvalds could harm Bob’s career.

Surely this makes it hard to become a big new contributor? All the existing contributors already know each other and they won’t want to dump eachother’s work.

“A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage”

Suppose (I’m following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you.  Surely you’d want to check it out, see for yourself.  There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

“Show me,” you say.  I lead you to my garage.  You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle — but no dragon.

“Where’s the dragon?” you ask.

“Oh, she’s right here,” I reply, waving vaguely.  “I neglected to mention that she’s an invisible dragon.”

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon’s footprints.

“Good idea,” I say, “but this dragon floats in the air.”

Then you’ll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

“Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless.”

You’ll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

“Good idea, but she’s an incorporeal dragon and the paint won’t stick.”  And so on.  I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won’t work.

Now, what’s the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all?  If there’s no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists?  Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true.  Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder.  What I’m asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.  The only thing you’ve really learned from my insistence that there’s a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head.  You’d wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me.  The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind.  But then, why am I taking it so seriously?  Maybe I need help.  At the least, maybe I’ve seriously underestimated human fallibility.  Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded.  So you don’t outright reject the notion that there’s a fire-breathing dragon in my garage.  You merely put it on hold.  Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you’re prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you.  Surely it’s unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative — merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of “not proved.”

Imagine that things had gone otherwise.  The dragon is invisible, all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch.  Your infrared detector reads off-scale.  The spray paint reveals a jagged crest bobbing in the air before you.  No matter how skeptical you might have been about the existence of dragons — to say nothing about invisible ones — you must now acknowledge that there’s something here, and that in a preliminary way it’s consistent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon.

Now another scenario: Suppose it’s not just me.  Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you’re pretty sure don’t know each other, all tell you that they have dragons in their garages — but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive.  All of us admit we’re disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence.  None of us is a lunatic.  We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on.  I’d rather it not be true, I tell you.  But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren’t myths at all.

Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported.  But they’re never made when a skeptic is looking.  An alternative explanation presents itself.  On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked.  Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burnt finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon’s fiery breath.  But again, other possibilities exist.  We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons.  Such “evidence” — no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it — is far from compelling.  Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.

Lying for Jesus

Comment 6. was a rebuttal to the argument in Comment 7 AFTER I read Comment 7. contents on Jim J’s blog.

But somehow the anonymous Comment 7. crops up much later to make it look like rebuttal to Comment 6.

BTW Jim J has 2 blogs (1, 2) publishing almost the same content in parallel. It is quite interesting that Comment 7. link points to the copy I did not comment on and therefore, for a passing by visitor, it appears as thought I was not aware of Comment 7 argument although I was making a rebuttal against it.There by it grants an upper rational ground for the Comment 7 argument.

One thing I’ve learnt from this is that Christians can be shrewd, and politically minded with a very subtle disregard for truth. They justify their lies for Jesus with Mark 9:42.

See Comments. I was having a bad day when I wrote this post. Thats why it is plainly absurd paranoia.

eval is foul play

I think the eval function is the root of all foul play in LISP. If not for eval LISPers wouldn’t be so arrogant. I mean, any fool can think of self implementable language if there is an eval in it.

Sooner or later, somebody is got to implement LISP somewhere on something material.. it can’t just exist out there in nothingness implementing itself in an infinite regress. If everything in LISP can be implemented in terms of something else in LISP, what is LISP? Is it God or something?!!

Jesus! this LISP language is blowing my philosophical side of my brain out bit by bit.