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July 3rd, 2008
06:33 pm - Careful with your infinities.
Fundie proof of God.
The crux of this argument is that there cannot have been an infinite amount of time in the past, because you cannot count from infinitely far back up to now, therefore if there was an infinite amount of time in the past, we would never have reached the present.
Setting aside current scientific theories about time being a function of perception, here's a little mathematical proof of something.
Let two numbers a, b ∈ Q (the set of rational numbers) such that a < b.
The definition of a rational number is that it can be expressed as v/w where v, w ∈ Z and w≠0.
Therefore, let c, d, e, f ∈ Z such that c/d = a and e/f = b.
Find g, h ∈ Z such that gd = hf.
Let i = gd = hf. i ∈ Z because g, d, h, f ∈ Z.
Thus c/d = gc/i and e/f = he/i.
A new number j that is halfway between a and b is therefore ((gc + he)/2)/i.
This simplifies to (gc + he)/2i.
Because g, c, h, e ∈ Z, (gc + he) ∈ Z. Because i ∈ Z, 2i ∈ Z.
Therefore, a < j < b, and j ∈ Q.
Because a and b were arbitrary, we can use universal generalisation to get: ∀x∈Q∀y∈Q(x<y→∃z∈Q(x<z∧z<y)).
What does this prove? It proves that the set of all rational numbers is dense, meaning that no matter what two rational numbers you choose (as long as they are not equal), you can find another rational number between them. This, by extension, means there are an infinite number of rational numbers in any given range. If it's impossible to get to this time from a time infinitely far in the past, then it's also impossible to count from 2 to 3, because there are an infinite number of rational numbers in between them. Just for fun, let's prove that it is possible to count from two to three, by mathematical induction.
Base case
i0=2.
Inductive step
in=in-1+1.
Therefore i1=3. Whoa, that was easy.
I do imagine that most people who see this won't understand it. That's okay, all I really wanted to say is: beware of any argument that relies on infinity.
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July 2nd, 2008
03:54 pm - Video game violence: some perspective, please.
Human civilisation has a history of violent entertainment. Currently, it's violent video games. Previously, it was violent movies which - while still not real - are far more realistic and lack the interactivity of video games which may cause a sublimating effect on violent impulses: Dr. Cheryl Olson, co-author of Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do was quoted on gamepolitics.com as saying "boys told us repeatedly in focus groups that they enjoying taking the bad guy role in a video game specifically because they don’t want to behave that way in real life".
Stage plays are the natural precursor to movies, and while the violence in those may be far more representative and less naturalistic, the "live" quality of it arguably makes it far more immediate and visceral. But, again, it's still not real. Not real like blood-sports such as bullfighting and hunting for sport, or cock- or dogfighting. But hey, it's "only animals" that get harmed in those cases, isn't it? Not like the good old days when a good hanging (preceded by being pulled behind a horse-cart and combined with evisceration) was a public spectacle that many enjoyed seeing. But even that's a bit tame - how entertaining is it to watch a criminal die when you could be watching people fight for their lives as in the gladiatorial combat of Ancient Rome?
Violent video games are the least violent violent entertainment we as a civilisation have ever had. Subscribing to the "games as folk-devil" ideology is as moronic and knuckleheaded as those that cheer when the so-called-witch goes up in flames.
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June 21st, 2008
01:12 pm
Calling attention to ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) imomus' entry titled 'Revisiting Aberdeen University thirty years on'. I know I link to Momus' blogs a lot, but I thought some people on my flist might actually be somewhat interested in this one :P
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June 19th, 2008
01:09 am - Dear fundies...
When you want to make a stand for "traditional family values" and oppose gay marriage, make sure you choose an appropriate passage from the Bible to justify your views. This means reading your own fucking book.
You do not get to use the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah to oppose gay marriage. God smote Sodom and Gomorrah because the people of those towns tried to rape the angels. The fact that such rape was homosexual is incidental.
But really, in defence of "traditional family values", you give us a story where the 'hero' offered up his daughters for gang-rape and then later, after the gang had refused, unwittingly got them pregnant in an orgy of drunken incest¹? That's your idea of "traditional family values", is it? No fucking thanks.
1. Supposedly it was the daughters' idea, and Lot was too drunk to know about it — well, after a horny mob had decided you weren't good enough for them, wouldn't you be desperate?
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June 12th, 2008
03:29 pm - MIDI support in Linux (using a Creative sound card)
It's harder than it really should be to find information on how to get Linux to play midi files. You might well ask "Why would I want to play midi files? They're shit!" And you'd be right, but just in case anyone does want to listen to them, here is some information that I've managed to glean from various sources.
This information applies to sound cards that use an emu10kx chip. I think these are Creative cards - I'm not sure if any other cards use that chip. This includes emu10k1 models (SoundBlaster Live! series) and emu10k2 models (Audigy series, though Linux will list it as emu10k1. Don't worry about it.) It might also be useful for older AWE32 and AWE64 cards. I don't know if it will be useful for X-Fi cards (which use an emu20k1 chip).
( Geekery )
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June 1st, 2008
10:34 pm - More logic
So I was looking around on the internet at fallacies, and found an example of the Relativist Fallacy which seems appropriate to the example I used for my last post on logic.
Jill: "Look at this, Bill. I read that people who do not get enough exercise tend to be unhealthy."
Bill: "That may be true for you, but it is not true for me."
But is this really a Relativist Fallacy? Disregarding what we know about the world (as what we're talking about here is the logical structure of the argument, not the facts behind the argument), it seems pretty poorly worded to hold up as an example. "People who do not get enough exercise tend to be unhealthy" is the premise being refuted here. To say that that is true for one person and not for another is, of course, not merely fallacious but downright silly, since the premise makes a categorical statement. However, in the wording "tend to", there is an implication that not everybody who does not exercise is unhealthy, but most are. So wouldn't, then, the response "that's not true for me" be read, not as a statement that categorical premises can somehow not hold for certain people, but as a statement that the speaker is a member of the minority implied by "tend to" in the original premise?
My normal approach kind of fails here, since I don't have the logical tools to represent 'most' or 'tend to', and even if I did, the relationship between the English sentences and their symbolic counterparts is ambiguous at best.
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May 29th, 2008
02:19 am - This is a beautiful view.
As much as I am against forum moderation in general, there are some bottomless pits of stupidity that really need to be shut up. And I'm not even a member of the forums I screencapped that image from.
However, Sam may wish to peruse some of the results of this Google search to see what I'm on about. This thread, in particular, is pretty gold.
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May 28th, 2008
11:43 pm - Does anyone know what the fallacy here is called?
Suppose you have a formula ¬∀x¬(fat(x)→healthy(x)).
Now someone tries to disprove it by showing that ¬∀x(fat(x)→healthy(x)).
This is clearly a False Dilemma fallacy, because it ignores the fact that ¬∀x¬(fat(x)→healthy(x)) means ∃x(fat(x)→healthy(x)), NOT ∀x(fat(x)→healthy(x)), whereas ¬∀x(fat(x)→healthy(x)) means ∃x¬(fat(x)→healthy(x)), and provided there is more than one person in the world, ∃x(fat(x)→healthy(x))∧∃x¬(fat(x)→healthy(x)) is not a contradiction.
However it seems to me that it should be a special case of the False Dilemma, because the dilemma is not merely in asserting that there are only two possibilities when there are actually more, but in fact that false dilemma comes from an ignorance of the relationship between universality and existentiality. So if it is a special case, does it have a special name?
Anyone?
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May 23rd, 2008
02:10 am - More of round two's random thoughts
- It's pretty cool that yesterday's xkcd made use of md5 hashing and was posted on the same day as my exam for the course which also covered md5 hashing. Unfortunately the exam itself didn't cover md5.
- Speaking of yesterday's xkcd, I really like this geohashing idea, enough that I've added a page for Aberdeen to the xkcd geohashing wiki. Watch as the only people geeky enough to turn up are people I already know from my course XD Today's geohash drops me into the North Sea, but the thing about using md5 hashing is that tomorrow, even in the hugely unlikely event that there's no difference in the Dow opening, at least the date will be slightly different, so the message digest will be substantially different and the location won't be anywhere near what it is today. Just hope that Saturday's isn't in the sea.
- My bank has charged me £35 for a failed payment at the beginning of this month which wasn't even my fault. A standing order is supposed to come into my account at the end of each month, though this month the other bank fucked up and it went in a week late. What really bothers me, though, is that the charge is 700% of the failed payment. This isn't quite as bad as earlier in the year, when I had to pay overdraft charges of over 1100% of the actual overdraft, but it's still really fucking ridiculous.
- "No matter what one's personal preferences are, separation of church and state by the federal government violates the First Amendment of our Bill of Rights and is both discriminatory and unconstitutional." --joe_christian, Liberty News Forum. Any readers may supply their own WTF's now.
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May 21st, 2008
01:55 am - Random thoughts round 2
I have an exam tomorrow at noon in the Old Senate Room. I don't like that room. It's quite nice but just something about it makes it hard for me to concentrate. But anyway, procrastination! It seems like not too long ago at all I was doing this for my previous exams in January.
- I think I want this.
- Sometimes, when people don't like you, it really is because you're a horrible person and not because they are.
- Never do a course where the word 'serialization' means two completely different things, and although the course does contain the concepts of 'locks' and 'keys', the locks and keys have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.
- I have very little to say. I fail at procrastination, but on the plus side I did manage to get all the reading I meant to do done.
- I am in love, and it feels so much better than any combination of punctuation and mathematical symbols can communicate. But I'll try anyway ^_^
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May 14th, 2008
01:06 am - Old tracks for training.
In December of 2005, magnakai posted a track titled 'As Unfortunate As That Is, Uncle Vinny, My Pile Of Ice Cream Far Outweighs Yours'. I downloaded it, fucked about with is a bit and then forgot about it. As I was looking about on my hard disk last night, however, I discovered the records of my torrid fornication with this track, so may I present to you:-
Jodi Warren - As Unfortunate As That Is, Uncle Vinny, My Pile Of Ice Cream Far Outweighs Yours (Lazy Gosling Remix) (320kbps mp3, 4.8MB)
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May 12th, 2008
02:40 pm - There She Is!!
August 2006, May 2008, what's the difference? Well, apart from 21 months.
Anyway, There She Is!! Step 3: Doki & Nabi will finally be online on the 30th, with advance screenings at the Seoul International Cartoon and Animation Festival on the 22nd and the 24th. I won't be able to make it to SICAF, and neither will you, but I just thought I'd share.
Seemingly it's taken so long because the creator, amalloc, got a proper job.
For those who haven't seen parts 1 and 2, or want to see them again: There She Is!! and There She Is!! Step 2: Cake Dance.
Yay!
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May 11th, 2008
11:56 am - An open letter to the ex.
[This is a response to palmer's post from last night, since she banned me from commenting on it. I don't have to do this, but as much as it doesn't really bother me, I hate to see her doing this to herself. She probably won't read this, but frankly that's her loss.]
( Just in case you haven't had enough drama. )
So that's that, then. My only regret is not listening to selen_aria sooner. But if I had done that, I might not be where I am now, so even that's not a true regret.
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May 5th, 2008
02:35 am - 5.5% I WANT HER ASS
So I did musickum's last fm omi/mmt thing which helpfully developed a summary of my music taste (the 'mmt' part) based on what people have tagged the stuff I listen to.
1. electronic: 12.03%
2. indie: 6.09%
3. symphonic metal: 5.64%
4. indie pop: 5.58%
5. I WANT HER ASS: 5.51%
6. ebm: 5.50%
7. industrial: 5.29%
8. Power metal: 4.99%
9. singer-songwriter: 4.27%
10. metal: 3.95%
11. rock: 2.33% ( And mores )
Of course, it is possible to ignore tags (and it would be nice to be able to combine them: If I listen to 1.53% synthpop and 0.84% synth pop, doesn't that really mean I listen to 2.37% synthpop?) but for one thing I don't want to exclude 5.5% of what I listen to, and for another thing, I rather enjoy having I WANT HER ASS at #5.
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May 4th, 2008
02:44 am - :')
I have said it before. I will say it again. Best song ever.
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May 2nd, 2008
02:33 pm - Transplant
I've been thinking about what Momus has to say about recontextualisation. He presents it as something a bit edgy, a bit progressive, and ties it to the post-copyright, post-materialist crowd. And fair enough, some of it is, but does the concept of recontextualisation of art as art fall only into that domain? Isn't something as simple as having a song playing in the background of a movie an example of reappropriation/recontextualisation in theory? And is that really on the same level as an internet installation which presents other people's work in new ways?
It seems to me that the recontextualisation concept can be divided into constructive and non-constructive recontextualisation, although I don't know if those terms are appropriate, since I really don't know where the line of demarcation is.
This video recontextualises (or perhaps decontextualises, which can be just as interesting) a multi-screen ljweb youtube installation that Momus made about a year ago to accompany his cover of Ryuichi Sakamoto's Thatness and Thereness. And it's beautiful.
The icon I'm using to accompany this post is a recontextualisation of Yuri Norstein's Ёжик в Тумане and it's not quite so beautiful, but still maintains some validity in and of itself.
But the aforementioned example of playing a song in the background of a movie is not quite the same. It is a recontextualisation of art in art, but it plays a supporting role; the recontextualisation itself is not the end-product. This would be what I would call non-constructive recontextualisation. It's not bad, I suppose, but it does make it hard to blanket enthuse about recontextualisation culture.
Perhaps this point is a trivial argument over semantics, though.
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April 11th, 2008
05:52 pm - While we're going legal...
Digital content delivery music stores. I love them. I haven't bought a new CD in ages. But needless to say, some are good and some are bad, so here's a round-up of the ones I've used.
( Read more... )
In related news, did you hear about how Sony BMG got busted for piracy? Yes, the company that's been at the forefront of preventing music piracy using means of more-than-dubious legality (and certainly ethically unsound) was caught using software it had acquired illegally.Sony BMG is no stranger to piracy. As one of the most vocal supporters of the RIAA and IFPI antipiracy efforts, the company has some experience hunting down and punishing consumers who don't pay for its products. The company is getting some experience on the other side of the table, however, now that it's being sued for software piracy.
PointDev, a French software company that makes Windows administration tools, received a call from a Sony BMG IT employee for support. After Sony BMG supplied a pirated license code for Ideal Migration, one of PointDev's products, the software maker was able to mandate a seizure of Sony BMG's assets. The subsequent raid revealed that software was illegally installed on four of Sony BMG's servers. The Business Software Alliance, however, believes that up to 47 percent of the software installed on Sony BMG's computers could be pirated.
These are some pretty serious—not to mention ironic—allegations against a company that's gone so far as to install malware on consumers' computers in the name of preventing piracy.
While PointDev is claiming €300,000 (over $475,000) in damages in its suit against Sony BMG, Agustoni Paul-Henry, PointDev's CEO, says (from a Google translation of a French report) that this is more about principle than money: "We are forced to watch every week if key software pirates are not [sic] on the Internet. We are a small company of six employees. Instead of trying to protect us, we could spend this time to develop ourselves."
Paul-Henry thinks Sony BMG's piracy of PointDev's products is the fault of more than just a single employee (again, translated): "I think piracy is linked to the policy of a company. If the employee has the necessary funding to buy the software he needs, he will. If this is not the case, he will find alternative ways, as the work must be done in one way or another."
Certainly, one wonders what led to Sony BMG to steal PointDev's product in the first place. It's a safe bet that the company can afford to pay for the necessary licenses, which leaves sheer laziness as the most likely culprit. In any event, it's absolutely inexcusable for a company that has been at the forefront of the antipiracy fight, going so far as to surreptitiously install rootkits on its customers' PCs.
Source: arstechnica.com
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April 10th, 2008
09:30 pm - Underpants time!
I'm going to be honest here, I'm not particularly well-endowed. I haven't gone out comparing my rad chilies with every (or indeed any) other man's, but let's say in terms of size I am distinctly average. This is important, because I've been concerned about something about which people seem to have stayed largely quiet for too long.
I am sick of being sold underwear designed by a woman who labours under the misguided belief that what men really want from their underwear is the ego boost of feeling like their package is too big. I can't believe this actually needs to be said, but the most important aspect of underwear is that it actually fucking fits. It's not much use finding underwear into which I can squeeze (if you'll pardon the inappropriate word-choice) my generative organ if it's five fucking inches too big around the waist. The line between support and constriction isn't even that fine. In fact, it's hard to miss, but somehow you consistently manage to spectacularly fail in finding it. Not everyone is as pickledicky as the kind of man that dates underwear designers, so quit taking out your frustration on the rest of us and give us some clothes that we can actually wear. Clothes that we can actually wear that aren't gay.
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April 6th, 2008
08:15 pm - Tiny things that bother me #23532
Part of me really wishes that the naming of the tracks on Laibach's Volk had been more consistent. Track 2 is titled America, but to be consistent with Germania, Anglia and Francia, it probably should have been titled Columbia. I can see that that may cause problems of confusion with the South American nation of Colombia, which is a shame, because now it's inconsistent. Similarly, Italia arguably should have been called Romania, but Romania is, of course, a completely different country in modernity.
Speaking of country names, for a long time I've wondered whether the Gaelic name for Scotland, Alba, was related to Albania. This is apparently unclear, although Scotland was called Albania in the High Medieval period. I do also know that the ancient name for the Alps was Albia. This, apparently, is related to the name of Albania.
There are conflicting views about this relationship. Etymonline says that the romantic name for England 'Albion' is:- sometimes said to be from the non-I.E. base *alb "mountain," which may have produced L. Alpes "Alps" and Alba, an Ir. name for "Scotland." But more likely from L. albus "white", which would be an apt description of the chalk cliffs of the island's southern coast. This is of course inaccurate: Alba is not the Irish name for Scotland — that would be Albain, while Alba is the Scottish name for Scotland (though the two are obviously related). However, despite that, it does suggest that the word Alba is related to the name of the Alps, which in turn is, according to the Wikipedia article on Albania possibly related to the name of Albania. Another Wikipedia article, however, suggests that the name Alba (or rather, Albania in the High Medieval sense of referring to Scotland) is not related to the name of the Alps, and in fact means 'Land of the Rising Sun' (which is also what the kanji used to denote Japan literally means, but I won't go to suggesting they might be related :P)
One aspect of the confusion is that etymonline says that the root *alb- ("mountain") is not Indo-European, and the root *albho- (or at least the Latin albus, which came from *albho- "white") is. Other sources, however, including the Wikipedia article on Albion, claim that that name came from a proto-Indo-European root denoting both "white" and "mountain". Furthermore, this page on the Ligurian region of Italy in fact suggests that the name of the Alps is not from the root *alb-:- The oronym [of Alpes] has a good etymology if a Liguro-Sicanian language stratum is assumed. In fact, it may derived from the IE root *albho- 'white', in the specific meaning of 'clear', i.e., 'not covered by woods', referred to the higher parts of the mountains. Still today the Italian appellative alpe refers to the pasture lands in the highlands. Notice that for Strabo, the ancient name of the Alpes was Albia, i.e., a name preserving the original *bh>b. Even assuming that 'Albania' is related to 'Alps', there is already plenty of confusion. Albania, may, however, be named for the Illyrian tribe of the Albani, who lived in what is now known as Albania. That's fair enough, and all seems very likely, although why they were called the Albani might in fact be related to the root of 'Alps' after all.
So, no answer today, but it's certainly an interesting thing to look into.
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