There's such a thing as Fundamentalist Atheism, and this is distressing. Doesn't it defeat the point of being free of "violent, and conservatively-bound" religions to hate another only for their creed? I've heard the sentiment that only atheists can be rational, supposedly because belief in anything beyond proof is a sign of inferior cognitive functions.

Additionally, the tendency to speak hate on religious organizations without understanding the reasons they are flawed distresses me. I spoke to a friend recently about Scientology after becoming aware that he was unaware of Anonymous or the Church of Scientology protests. His stance was that Scientology is wrong simply because "[Scientology] is crazies" that it's a religion. No mention of people's lives destroyed, or how the Church took legal action against L. Ron Hubbard for selling his books at less than their asking price.

Though I wouldn't necessarily expect someone who despises all religion to draw a distinction between the act of following a religion and the actions of a Church, I'd hoped he'd at least realize the problem with belief without reason. I won't claim that everyone must be completely rational at all times to be taken seriously—quite the contrary. However, I don't like seeing violence backed by foolishness. *

My biases aside, the argument that everything about or produced by someone is wrong purely due to their beliefs or lack thereof, reeks ad hominem fallacy. Worse is committing without question and defending without thought. Regardless of ones ability to pronounce latin properly on demand, the inability to see ones own self as fallible is dreadful indeed. No matter the speaker—myself included—this I concede.


* If you want a small-scale example: My friend threatened to punch my laptop screen for reflecting a small section of the Internet upon its surface. For a larger-scale example, plus greed, see some of the later Crusades. Not even Christians were spared!

I made a pledge that I would blog about a woman in science today, but I've been lazy and haven't researched anyone. I have papers to write and projects to complete, so I'll keep it concise.

Today, I will remove what misconceptions I can about Ada Lovelace. This is primarily aimed at those who haven't read up on the Countess of Lovelace and founder of computer programming and code algorithms.

Misconception 0: "Ada Lovelace is Charles Babbage's Daughter."

I can't begin to describe how utterly wrong that statement is. Augusta Ada Byron is her given name. She did not learn about the analytical engine at her father's knee. and she did not marry Lord Byron for his title (eww). That I had a conversation with someone that necessitated this clarification is appalling, and the sexist tone was fairly clear.

Whether Ada considered the nobility of her later husband before marrying him isn't a terribly heavy point. I believe they were of similar caste. It wasn't controversial at the time, nor out of the ordinary to marry within the court. It wasn't an incestuous relationship.

Misconception 1: "Ada's brilliance with numbers and logic can be attributed to her father, Lord Byron, or to Charles Babbage"

This is also very false. Lord George Byron and Ada's mother, Annabella, separated while Ada was still fairly young. Ada's upbringing is more akin to that of an only child raised by a single mother, than it is to the "daddy's girl" image I've heard supposed. While Lord Byron—as a poet—may have contributed some genes related to abstract thought, her intense interest in the maths and sciences may well have been influenced by her mother's desire to distance her from her father. Ada developed great prowess in mathematics, in her own right, and was already well-established upon meeting her contemporary, Charles Babbage.

That's all the time I have for now. I hope you enjoyed this and learned something.

Rowan DEC

Visit this group

We're aspiring to become the leading digital entertainment creation group on Rowan campus, while having lots of fun making things.

LoudTweets seem to be working nicely. Yay. Posted manually. Effort given. Sleep now.

Sorry for not updating in such a long time. I'm considering using Loud Twitter or something similar if I ever find a means to update BrightKite more often.

My flanks are a little sore today. I'm not sure if that's from the exercise of lifting my legs when I go places or from using my buttocks so much.

P.S. The title is from a large reservoir of unmatched Google queries in the xkcd blag for December 3rd.

To make a long story short: Get your prostate checked early or you may need laser surgery on your testicles. I'm uninjured, but there's a story to go with this moral, and I'll be sure to have my prostate checked before it's too late.
( (?creepy) guy in a lavatory: (details) )

So Shady says to me today, "these people are killing each other." Out of the blue after we reviewed his McCain joke. Not realising the topic had changed, I ask which people. He replies, "these skrulls," as he gestures vaguely toward Steve's lawn.

Skrulls in the yard? No, surely not! I proceed to attempt to help his pronunciation of the word squirrels while explaining what a skrull is, and why that's clearly not what he means. I think he's vastly improved his enunciation, and we had a good laugh.

( Interested )

So I've gotten the house ready, and all but one housemate has moved in. Which, aside from joy and relief, means I get to stop putting off doing other things that need and|or want doing.

This weekend was fun. I saw the family and we went to my sister's friend's wedding. It was a nice ceremony, we all had a delicious dinner, and I danced my feet off at the reception. There were all kinds of songs both new and old, but quite danceable all the same.

As we left, mom enlisted me to carry one of the floral centerpieces as per tradition. They were a fragrant bunch, including lilies. Since I carried the centerpiece I didn't have my hands free to take my wedding favor on the way out.

Dad chose two "red gentlemen" wedding favors (choices were ladies, pink gentlemen, and red gentlemen) for himself and myself. The "ladies" favor (not favour, I'm kicking the habit) contained a neat fan. As it turned out, the two "red gentlemen" favors actually contained two pink ties. I had a good laugh about that.

Well I'd love to stick around and blog, but a good friend is in town and I shouldn't keep him waiting.

P.S. I miss my hair. Waiting for it to grow long and fluffy.

At the moment I'd like my inexpensive e-book/document reader design to see the light of day. Honestly, this sort of thing should be transparent by now. Everyone should have access to books, and so many of the e-book readers that have come out, (after my original design mind you), have been so expensive that only owners of even more expensive gadgets have them.

There are so many classic books, short-articles, finished works, sheets of music and many other things that need not be reprinted and copied in large quantities. Plenty of e-book makers are adding all kinds of neat features that require an infrastructure not present in every country. I wonder if anyone is working on making gadgets that just work wherever, and whoever uses them.

I like the feel of real paper as much as anyone else. And e-books and e-documents don't need to replace that completely. There are a number of applications in which paper is used a lot and need not be. For example, almost all kinds of typed documents.

Also having a very simple version of something often overcomplicated will make it easier to make things like automatic (musical) score page-flippers without any mechanical parts.

Otakon was awesome for so very many reasons. I met awesome people and had new experiences and enjoyed myself immensely.

Among the awesomeness were some great yet accessible makers-of-neat-things. For example, Anath Panagariya and Mohammad F. Haque (aka Hawk) of Applegeeks* fame, <protected> "Del" Borovich who has been making awesome illustrations as long as I've doodled randomly, Brion Foulke of Flipside, and """christie and the zombies"""(?fact-check in order), and a number of people I hadn't heard of, but happy checked out later.

I'll continue to update with more details later.

* Damn the risks! I would have brought my Powerbook if I'd known Hawk would be there. A little spice on the back would really complete that fogeybox.

(My house is no longer water-logged. Detail updates have begun. )

So. I've finally gotten around to reading every xkcd including those I read before. Now I don't have to worry about inadvertently "copying" Randall in my stick doodlings.

...

Alt-text: Yes. This was a real fear for me when I discovered xkcd.

    Though I've been rather vocal about my opposition to this bill something I read this morning spurred me to thought. After reading an article which I can't seem to find by an author I-would-cite-if-I-could-find this morning, many of the chips came together and I realized why there is legitimate support for passing the bill. The author points out (angrily?) that if the new bill is passed, any remedies for violations will be limited to the amount normally paid to use work.
    Don't get me wrong. I understand that it makes complete sense for remedies to be higher when an artist has to go out of his|her way to sue the violator, pay for legal fees, et cetera just to be paid. On the other side of this matter, however, if a user legitimately can't find the original creator, and after much deliberation includes the work, properly cited and attributed, serious legal action shouldn't really be necessary. A simple howdy-do should technically suffice.
    In other words: I don't believe it's right for open thievery to be legal, but at the same time someone who properly cites an artist, legitimately wants to pay the artist, but can't find them, shouldn't be paying out the ass for promoting someone they admire. Large reparations only make sense if the user of the work deliberately leaves out the author, "re-authors" the work, or is deliberately difficult to contact by the creator of a work they use.
    Granted, I'm biased on this particular topic. Most of any art I put anywhere I register Creative Commons: attribution, non-commercial. I'm not living off of making artwork or taking photographs like some people. If anyone likes my work enough to use it somewhere, I want my name there, and if they like it so much they want to put it in a commercial product, I want to hear about it first. That's reasonable enough for me, but I understand that it might not be for others.
    
[EDIT: I never found that article again, and I don't think it actually matters in this case. I don't really use it other than to mention that I read it, and that it states the restrictions on reparations. Information that is conceivably available elsewhere. ]

First off, this is inspired by a post by a fellow I'm assuming prefers to be known as Brent Roos.  It's an excellent tutorial for installing Flock on Ubuntu, and I only decided to make this tutorial after noticing a couple different steps required for installation on Xubuntu. 

As of today, there still isn't a .deb for Flock, the very excellent browser that I'm using to post this very blog, so you'll want to download the archive from the flock homepage.  As of this writing the file is flock-1.1.1.en-US.linux-i686.tar.gz

Now open up a Terminal and browse to where you've downloaded the archive (it may well be the Desktop)
cd Desktop

Now proceed to unpack it into the desired location; I'll use the /opt location since it's good for this purpose.

sudo tar -C /opt -xzvf flock-*.linux-i686.tar.gz

Now we make a symbolic link in the common user binaries directory:

sudo ln -s /opt/flock/flock /usr/bin/flock-browser

But wait! Why did I add the -browser to the end of that link file, you may ask.  Well you can try it without, but if you do you'll find that the command flock already exists in /usr/bin.  It's a command from the util-linux-ng package that's installed on a default Xubuntu installation, so far as I can tell. 

Before we can use Flock we need to satisfy a dependency.  Xubuntu, in keeping only to the absolutely necessary, doesn't include libstdc++5 in a base install.  Since Flock needs this, let's install it:
(If you know for certain that you've already installed this package you can skip it, though it really won't hurt anything.)
<code> sudo aptitude install libstdc++5 </code>

Now let's make a menu entry for Flock(We like to use our GUI don't we!):
sudo mousepad /usr/share/applications/Flock.desktop

Mousepad will very nicely remind you of the danger associated with editing as root.  Add the following to the file:
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Flock
Exec=flock-browser
Comment=Flock Web Browser
GenericName=Flock Web Browser
Icon=/opt/flock/icons/mozicon128.png
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Network;Application;


Save your file, and close the sudo enabled Mousepad.  Wait a couple seconds, and check your menu; Flock will be there waiting for you under Applications> Network> Flock. Enjoy!

Just in case you decide you need to uninstall Flock the following undoes what I've done above:
sudo rm /usr/bin/flock-browser
sudo rm /usr/share/applications/Flock.desktop
sudo rm -rf /opt/flock

(XFCE will update the menu for you.)

and removing the archive to save space, (especially if you are indeed uninstalling Flock).
rm ~/Desktop/flock-*.linux-i686.tar.gz

This should work for any distribution, AFAIK, but if it doesn't please let me know and I'll be happy to add and credit your solutions, or help you through getting Flock working on your distribution.  If Flock isn't starting from your menu, and you followed my above instructions, please type <code> flock-browser </code> into a Terminal and let me know what comes out.  Finally, if you use Mac OS X or Windows, there's a Flock for you, too.  Happy blogging!

The following utilizes summary, and vagueness to protect the identities of the innocent.

( long entry )

Please put any related comments on the title post under here. I'll probably add a link to between these at some point and clean up grammar or similar later. Thank you. I welcome anyone to post and to let others know about this little project of mine.

Other thoughts:
Hmm I didn't request people read other's comments to be sure I don't have to rifle through pages of the same verse over and over, but I hopefully won't have to worry about that but will probably add that right now...

Now I have my own opinions on this, but suspending those I'd like to take an opportunity for some research. Since bible study (including related history) and language study are hobbies of mine which I really don't get as much time to do as I'd like to*. For much the same reason, and in the interest of an efficient yet comprehensive study I'd like anyone who has a verse, or multiple consecutive verses, from a bible that has been generally interpreted and cited as proving homosexuality to be sinful to quote and cite those below including the version (King James Version, New International Version, New King James Version, La Biblia de las Américas, etc) since wording will often affect interpretation as well as a very brief explanation of the interpretation (i.e. the logic involved). I'm not here to prove anyone wrong, though I've recently found a misinterpretation among peers based on a change in a words meaning after the time of the translation, and this is primarily how I'll go about researching various interpretations. I'm doing this mostly for my own curiosity; I will however try to come to some conclusions from this study. Note that I don't claim any kind of religious authority and I won't tell others what to believe or that they should take my conclusions as absolute fact.

Now, I know this is a really loaded topic, but I'd ask that only those who have a post fitting the above request comment on this particular thread. I'll open another thread for any other comments, so use that instead. (I'd also link the two now, and may do so in the future, but it's two AM here, and I forget how) I apologize in advance to any of those who didn't understand the above and start a lengthy discussion below, as I will have to delete their misplaced posts to keep this organized. If you see someone else already posted a verse you wished to post up here, please either post any additional interpretation or expand on it under their comment rather than make multiple references under the main heading. Also, please put separate verses separately unless they must work together for one interpretation to make sense.

* Sometimes I even consider changing majors >,>.

UPDATE: Someone aparently is doing this already. Here's a link.
http://www.bibble.org/gay/religious/bible_blabber.html

( an overlong comment )
This has gotten so far from the original topic, that I must stop it, and eat some lunch. I might come back to this and re-think everything and such, but knowing me, I might not have time.

My current favored music store is the semi-local Borders. Mostly for the little kiosks used to demo CDs before buying them. Sure, you can listen to the little clips for a cd you put under the scanner. After that, hit the extras button, and try the random play. I heard the better part of a cd by an artist I have renewed respect for.
I don't mean to be drip support for borders, but I think this feature really does have merit. Saves me a lot of trouble, since I like to hear my music before buying it.
( In other news. . . )