Messages

271

Science / Re: The History of the Earth

« on: September 04, 2012, 10:37:00 PM »

The earth WAS created in seven days. It took another 4.5 billion years to pile the fossil record onto it and prepare it for God's supreme achievement: Cats.

272

Science / Re: Higgs boson: God Particle.

« on: July 13, 2012, 08:50:32 PM »

Written by Mark Twain in 1909, when the Theory of Relativity was brand new and Quantum Mechanics had not yet been described:

The Creator sat upon the throne, thinking. Behind him stretched the illimitable continent of heaven, steeped in a glory of light and color; before him rose the black night of Space, like a wall. His mighty bulk towered rugged and mountain-like into the zenith, and His divine head blazed there like a distant sun. At His feet stood three colossal figures, diminished to extinction, almost, by contrast -- archangels -- their heads level with His ankle-bone.
When the Creator had finished thinking, He said, "I have thought. Behold!"

He lifted His hand, and from it burst a fountain-spray of fire, a million stupendous suns, which clove the blackness and soared, away and away and away, diminishing in magnitude and intensity as they pierced the far frontiers of Space, until at last they were but as diamond nailheads sparkling under the domed vast roof of the universe.

At the end of an hour the Grand Council was dismissed.

They left the Presence impressed and thoughtful, and retired to a private place, where they might talk with freedom. None of the three seemed to want to begin, though all wanted somebody to do it. Each was burning to discuss the great event, but would prefer not to commit himself till he should know how the others regarded it. So there was some aimless and halting conversation about matters of no consequence, and this dragged tediously along, arriving nowhere, until at last the archangel Satan gathered his courage together -- of which he had a very good supply -- and broke ground. He said: "We know what we are here to talk about, my lords, and we may as well put pretense aside, and begin. If this is the opinion of the Council -- "

"It is, it is!" said Gabriel and Michael, gratefully interrupting.

"Very well, then, let us proceed. We have witnessed a wonderful thing; as to that, we are necessarily agreed. As to the value of it -- if it has any -- that is a matter which does not personally concern us. We can have as many opinions about it as we like, and that is our limit. We have no vote. I think Space was well enough, just as it was, and useful, too. Cold and dark -- a restful place, now and then, after a season of the overdelicate climate and trying splendors of heaven. But these are details of no considerable moment; the new feature, the immense feature, is -- what, gentlemen?"

"The invention and introduction of automatic, unsupervised, self-regulating law for the government of those myriads of whirling and racing suns and worlds!"

"That is it!" said Satan. "You perceive that it is a stupendous idea. Nothing approaching it has been evolved from the Master Intellect before. Law -- Automatic Law -- exact and unvarying Law -- requiring no watching, no correcting, no readjusting while the eternities endure! He said those countless vast bodies would plunge through the wastes of Space ages and ages, at unimaginable speed, around stupendous orbits, yet never collide, and never lengthen nor shorten their orbital periods by so much as the hundredth part of a second in two thousand years! That is the new miracle, and the greatest of all -- Automatic Law! And He gave it a name -- the LAW OF NATURE -- and said Natural Law is the LAW OF GOD -- interchangeable names for one and the same thing."

"Yes," said Michael, "and He said He would establish Natural Law -- the Law of God -- throughout His dominions, and its authority should be supreme and inviolable."

"Also," said Gabriel, "He said He would by and by create animals, and place them, likewise, under the authority of that Law."

"Yes," said Satan, "I heard Him, but did not understand. What is animals, Gabriel?"

"Ah, how should I know? How should any of us know? It is a new word."

[Interval of three centuries, celestial time -- the equivalent of a hundred million years, earthly time. Enter a Messenger-Angel.]

"My lords, He is making animals. Will it please you to come and see?"

They went, they saw, and were perplexed. Deeply perplexed -- and the Creator noticed it, and said, "Ask. I will answer."

"Divine One," said Satan, making obeisance, "what are they for?"

"They are an experiment in Morals and Conduct. Observe them, and be instructed."

There were thousands of them. They were full of activities. Busy, all busy -- mainly in persecuting each other. Satan remarked -- after examining one of them through a powerful microscope: "This large beast is killing weaker animals, Divine One."

"The tiger -- yes. The law of his nature is ferocity. The law of his nature is the Law of God. He cannot disobey it."

"Then in obeying it he commits no offense, Divine One?"

"No, he is blameless."

"This other creature, here, is timid, Divine One, and suffers death without resisting."

"The rabbit -- yes. He is without courage. It is the law of his nature -- the Law of God. He must obey it."

"Then he cannot honorably be required to go counter to his nature and resist, Divine One?"

"No. No creature can be honorably required to go counter to the law of his nature -- the Law of God."

After a long time and many questions, Satan said, "The spider kills the fly, and eats it; the bird kills the spider and eats it; the wildcat kills the goose; the -- well, they all kill each other. It is murder all along the line. Here are countless multitudes of creatures, and they all kill, kill, kill, they are all murderers. And they are not to blame, Divine One?"

"They are not to blame. It is the law of their nature. And always the law of nature is the Law of God. Now -- observe -- behold! A new creature -- and the masterpiece -- Man!"

Men, women, children, they came swarming in flocks, in droves, in millions.

"What shall you do with them, Divine One?"

"Put into each individual, in differing shades and degrees, all the various Moral Qualities, in mass, that have been distributed, a single distinguishing characteristic at a time, among the nonspeaking animal world -- courage, cowardice, ferocity, gentleness, fairness, justice, cunning, treachery, magnanimity, cruelty, malice, malignity, lust, mercy, pity, purity, selfishness, sweetness, honor, love, hate, baseness, nobility, loyalty, falsity, veracity, untruthfulness -- each human being shall have all of these in him, and they will constitute his nature. In some, there will be high and fine characteristics which will submerge the evil ones, and those will be called good men; in others the evil characteristics will have dominion, and those will be called bad men. Observe -- behold -- they vanish!"

"Whither are they gone, Divine One?"

"To the earth -- they and all their fellow animals."

"What is the earth?"

"A small globe I made, a time, two times and a half ago. You saw it, but did not notice it in the explosion of worlds and suns that sprayed from my hand. Man is an experiment, the other animals are another experiment. Time will show whether they were worth the trouble. The exhibition is over; you may take your leave, my lords."

Several days passed by.

This stands for a long stretch of (our) time, since in heaven a day is as a thousand years.

Satan had been making admiring remarks about certain of the Creator's sparkling industries -- remarks which, being read between the lines, were sarcasms. He had made them confidentially to his safe friends the other archangels, but they had been overheard by some ordinary angels and reported at Headquarters.

He was ordered into banishment for a day -- the celestial day. It was a punishment he was used to, on account of his too flexible tongue. Formerly he had been deported into Space, there being nowhither else to send him, and had flapped tediously around there in the eternal night and the Arctic chill; but now it occurred to him to push on and hunt up the earth and see how the Human-Race experiment was coming along.

By and by he wrote home -- very privately -- to St. Michael and St. Gabriel about it.

273

Tech Junkie Lounge / Re: Valve Employee Handbook (2012)

« on: June 13, 2012, 04:16:47 PM »

Sounds like management by consensus. The project that gets the resources is the one that engages the majority of or the most skilled team members. The members engage the difficulties along with the successes or the easy stuff for the greater good of the project. I wonder what happens in project phase II.

For the unenlightened:

The Six Phases of a Project

I. Wild Enthusiasm

II. Disillusionment

III. Panic

IV. Quest for the Guilty

V.  Punishment of the Innocent

VI. Praise and Awards for the Non-participants

274

Religion, and the Changing Moral Zeitgeist / Re: Harry Potter and other myths

« on: June 09, 2012, 08:11:52 AM »

From my point of view, faith is not a virtue.  Faith is an abdication of reason and a suppression of one's critical faculties of the kind that allows people to believe things on bad evidence, such as the claims of noted fraudster Joseph Smith about seer stones and golden plates and the Garden of Eden being located in western Missouri.

Anyone who's been to Missouri knows Eden isn't there. 

275

/dev/random / Re: What is the most money you have won at a Casino?

« on: June 09, 2012, 08:05:47 AM »

According to Wikipedia the expected value on any bet is a loss of 5.3 cents for every dollar played. A perfect example of the take your winnings and run philosophy. The payoff on red or black is 1:1 but the odds are 1.111:1 against you. The zeros are the house advantage. The house has a 5.26% advantage, which is pretty high. Single numbers pay off 35:1 but the odds against winning are 37:1. I've never played roulette for money but I've watched it many times. The action is interesting and it's interesting to see the way people bet. The only consistent thing about it though is the house is always sweeping up the chips.

276

weapons / Re: Could not exec cfg when map starts

« on: June 09, 2012, 12:12:08 AM »

So if I understand, R1Q2 is trying to run a config file based on the map name, but because that config file doesn't exist on my computer, I get the message "Couldn't exec xxxxx.cfg". Learn something new every day.

poser

Precisely.

277

/dev/random / Re: What is the most money you have won at a Casino?

« on: June 09, 2012, 12:10:29 AM »

Actually, the best odds in the house is craps, where the house has zero advantage on some bets and only about 1.4% on average on pass/don't pass. You can reduce the house advantage but never eliminate it because you can't bet odds (0% advantage) without a pass/don't pass bet just to play the game but the Odds bet can pay as high as 2:1 on a point of 4 or 10. As in all casino games, the longer you play, the better for the house.

Best win: $240
Worst loss: $400

278

/dev/random / Re: Software patens ever work?

« on: May 09, 2012, 07:04:22 PM »

UNIX came out of Bell Labs but they weren't a software company. UNIX was for running telephone switches. They had a narrow focus on their tools so they missed the market completely. It also lacked the pretty GUI and still suffers from cryptic commands to do common functions.

IIRC, in 1997, SCO UNIX for the 80186/80286 was $495 in a huge box set of some 5 boxes and manuals when MS-DOS was $135 in a single box. A huge blunder for SCO, they could have swept the desktop clean of Microsoft forever if they hadn't been so damned proud of a package they didn't even write themselves.

Several of my friends had HP9000's running HP's version of UNIX III called HP/UX.

279

Science / Re: Evidence of water having flowed on Mars

« on: May 08, 2012, 05:13:34 PM »

All this stuff about ozone. Ozone is just O₃ as opposed to molecular Oxygen which is O₂. Since "more is better" we should develop new ways to generate MORE Ozone so we can all breathe better, more O₃ means that fresh smell of a summer thunderstorm every day instead of that foul stuff called O₂. We should have a crash program to create nuclear powered Ozone generators on the antarctic coast to reinforce the ozone layer and make the antarctic smell "summer fresh". That'll fix the global warming thing once and for all.

280

Politics / Re: Principal Created ‘Suzy’ Facebook Page To Snoop On Students

« on: May 08, 2012, 04:49:29 PM »

Isn't creating a false profile a violation of FB terms and conditions of use? I wonder if FB can now sue the principal and the school district.

281

/dev/random / Re: Hot bitches

« on: May 08, 2012, 04:41:05 PM »

Now overlay that chart with actual human penis length and circumference plot.

282

/dev/random / Re: Get The Picture #10

« on: April 30, 2012, 06:22:42 PM »

Hat guy: OK now, just stick your hand in here, all the way up to your elbow until you feel the clog.
Blue Shirt: Should I be wearing gloves for this?
Hat guy: Naw, your gonna get shit all over yourself either way.

283

Politics / Re: Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail

« on: April 28, 2012, 05:32:06 PM »

You have to go into the FDIC records to find out what happened to Sun Trust. When banks become insolvent the FDIC steps in and finds a bank to buy it. If FDIC picks BofA to be the buyer, they just step in and become the new owners. This incest arises because FDIC doesn't want to pay off the depositors, they coerce the neighbor banks to buy the failing one. Now the coerced bank has the liabilities and the failing assets.

(Remember, deposits are liabilities to banks, assets are loans.) When assets aren't paying back, the bank becomes insolvent. They owe more to depositors than they have money to pay.

The result is FDIC can't 'punish' BofA too much, they need them to keep buying smaller banks that were caught up in the frenzy of the bubble and which aren't too big to fail.

Result: BofA, propped up by the FED, becomes even bigger and more corrupt.

Regulation has failed.

284

Jokes / Re: Funny articles

« on: April 11, 2012, 05:38:25 PM »

psycho ex

Not really funny but painful to read.

What's interesting to infer from this story is that he was sitting "innocently" at his computer when she broke in to hit him on the head where upon his scrotum was immediately available for her to grab. There is no description of where his pants were or why his scrotum was exposed to her grasp. Methinks he was not so innocently sitting at his computer. Or perhaps they are both nudists?

285

Jokes / Re: Did you know... [Curiosities]

« on: April 03, 2012, 07:15:12 PM »

China has a one-child policy, regardless of the sex of the child. I believe the rural farmers are exempt but still limited. There have been reports of female babies being euthanized since the preference is for males to take over the family farm. Even so, China has a serious population growth problem.