Sun 31 May 2009 5:37 AM
Why AOL Sucks
I got a raise in December, so like a good consumer I bought a new Dell.
On my old Dell, I had the last version of Winamp prior to AOL purchasing it - with automatic updates turned off. The install file for that version of Winamp got lost in the great Windows Re-Installing of '08. So, last night (um, last night ws sometime back in January and this post has been sitting in limbo since because MARVIN couldn't serve files to outside visitors) I downloaded the latest version of Winamp 5 from their website and installed it.
There is a demo.mp3 that installs with Winamp for the purposes of a) being cool and b) testing that your install completed successfully.
demo.mp3 pre-AOL
demo.mp3 post-AOL
AOL sucks.
On my old Dell, I had the last version of Winamp prior to AOL purchasing it - with automatic updates turned off. The install file for that version of Winamp got lost in the great Windows Re-Installing of '08. So, last night (um, last night ws sometime back in January and this post has been sitting in limbo since because MARVIN couldn't serve files to outside visitors) I downloaded the latest version of Winamp 5 from their website and installed it.
There is a demo.mp3 that installs with Winamp for the purposes of a) being cool and b) testing that your install completed successfully.
demo.mp3 pre-AOL
demo.mp3 post-AOL
AOL sucks.
Sun 31 May 2009 5:07 AM
Anglo-hexon
Anglo-hexon.net is back up on port 88.
Thu 7 May 2009 2:15 AM
Excerpts from 'Letter to a Christian Nation' by Sam Harris
Really, isn't this getting tiresome? How much discussion is really required about imaginary friends not existing? A lot apparently.
From pp 30-32:
"But let us assume, for the moment, that every three-day-old embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern. Embryos at this stage occassionally split, becoming separate people (identical twins). Is this a case of one soul splitting into two? Two embryos sometimes fuse into a single individual, called a chimera. You or someone you know may have developed in this way. No doubt theologians are struggling even now to determine what becomes of the extra human soul in such a case.
Isn't it time we admitted that this arithmetic of souls does not make any sense? The naive idea of souls in a Petri dish is intellectually indefensible. It is also morally indefensible, given that it now stands in the way of some of the most promising research in the history of medicine. Your beliefs about the human soul are, at this very moment, prolinging the scarcely endurable misery of tens of millions of human beings.
You believe that "life starts at the moment of conception". You believe that there are souls in each of these blastocysts and that the interests of one soul--the soul of a little girl with burns over 75 percent of her body, say--cannot trump the interests of another soul, even if that sou happens to live inside a Petri dish. Given the accommodations we have made to faith-based irrationality in our public discourse, it is often suggested, even by advocates of stem-cell research, that your position on this matter has some degree of moral legitimacy. It does not. Your resistance to embryonic stem-cell research is, at best, uninformed. There is, in fact, no moral reason for our federal government's unwillingness to fund this work....
The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics. The link between religion and "morality"--so regularly proclaimed and so seldom demonstrated--is fully belied here, as it is where religious dogma supersedes moral reasoning and genuine compassion."
From pp 39-42:
"Christians like yourself invariably declare that monsters like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Kim Il Sung spring from the womb of atheism. While it is true that such men are sometimes enemies of organized religion, they are never especially rational. In fact, their public pronouncements are often delusional: on subjects as diverse as race, economics, national identity, the march of history, and the moral dangers of intellectualism. The problem with such tyrants is not that they reject the dogma of religion, but that they embrace other life-destroying myths. Most become the center of a quasi-religious personality cult, requiring the continual use of propaganda for its maintenance...
Auschwitz, the Soviet gulags, and the killing fields of Cambodia are not examples of what happens to people when they become too reasonable. To the contrary, these horrors testify to the danges of political and racial dogmatism. It is time that Christians like yourself stop pretending that a rational rejection of your faith entails the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma."
From pp 50-52:
"Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture, and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of six billion human beings. The same statistics also suggest that this girl's parents believe--as you believe--that an all-powerful and all-loving God is watching over them and their family. Are they right to believe this? Is it good that they believe this?
No.
The entirety of atheism is contained in this response. Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, "atheism is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a "non-astrologer" or a "non-alchemist".... An atheist is simply a person who believes that the 260 million Americans (87 percent of the population) claiming to "never doubt the existence of God" should be obliged to present evidence for his existence--and, indeed, for his benevolence, given the relentless destruction of innocent human beings we witness in the world each day."
From p 91:
"This letter is the product of failure--the failure of the many brilliant attacks upon religion that preceded it, the failure of our schools to announce the death of God in a way that each generation can understand, the failure of the media to criticize the abject religious certainties of our public figures--failures great and small that have kept almost every society on this earth muddling over God and despising those who muddle differently.
Nonbelievers like myself stand beside you, dumbstruck by the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living. But we stand dumbstruck by you as well--by your denial of tangible reality, by the suffering you create in service to your religious myths, and by your attachment to an imaginary God. This letter has been an expression of that amazement--and, perhaps, of a little hope."
From pp 30-32:
"But let us assume, for the moment, that every three-day-old embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern. Embryos at this stage occassionally split, becoming separate people (identical twins). Is this a case of one soul splitting into two? Two embryos sometimes fuse into a single individual, called a chimera. You or someone you know may have developed in this way. No doubt theologians are struggling even now to determine what becomes of the extra human soul in such a case.
Isn't it time we admitted that this arithmetic of souls does not make any sense? The naive idea of souls in a Petri dish is intellectually indefensible. It is also morally indefensible, given that it now stands in the way of some of the most promising research in the history of medicine. Your beliefs about the human soul are, at this very moment, prolinging the scarcely endurable misery of tens of millions of human beings.
You believe that "life starts at the moment of conception". You believe that there are souls in each of these blastocysts and that the interests of one soul--the soul of a little girl with burns over 75 percent of her body, say--cannot trump the interests of another soul, even if that sou happens to live inside a Petri dish. Given the accommodations we have made to faith-based irrationality in our public discourse, it is often suggested, even by advocates of stem-cell research, that your position on this matter has some degree of moral legitimacy. It does not. Your resistance to embryonic stem-cell research is, at best, uninformed. There is, in fact, no moral reason for our federal government's unwillingness to fund this work....
The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics. The link between religion and "morality"--so regularly proclaimed and so seldom demonstrated--is fully belied here, as it is where religious dogma supersedes moral reasoning and genuine compassion."
From pp 39-42:
"Christians like yourself invariably declare that monsters like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Kim Il Sung spring from the womb of atheism. While it is true that such men are sometimes enemies of organized religion, they are never especially rational. In fact, their public pronouncements are often delusional: on subjects as diverse as race, economics, national identity, the march of history, and the moral dangers of intellectualism. The problem with such tyrants is not that they reject the dogma of religion, but that they embrace other life-destroying myths. Most become the center of a quasi-religious personality cult, requiring the continual use of propaganda for its maintenance...
Auschwitz, the Soviet gulags, and the killing fields of Cambodia are not examples of what happens to people when they become too reasonable. To the contrary, these horrors testify to the danges of political and racial dogmatism. It is time that Christians like yourself stop pretending that a rational rejection of your faith entails the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma."
From pp 50-52:
"Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture, and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of six billion human beings. The same statistics also suggest that this girl's parents believe--as you believe--that an all-powerful and all-loving God is watching over them and their family. Are they right to believe this? Is it good that they believe this?
No.
The entirety of atheism is contained in this response. Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, "atheism is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a "non-astrologer" or a "non-alchemist".... An atheist is simply a person who believes that the 260 million Americans (87 percent of the population) claiming to "never doubt the existence of God" should be obliged to present evidence for his existence--and, indeed, for his benevolence, given the relentless destruction of innocent human beings we witness in the world each day."
From p 91:
"This letter is the product of failure--the failure of the many brilliant attacks upon religion that preceded it, the failure of our schools to announce the death of God in a way that each generation can understand, the failure of the media to criticize the abject religious certainties of our public figures--failures great and small that have kept almost every society on this earth muddling over God and despising those who muddle differently.
Nonbelievers like myself stand beside you, dumbstruck by the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living. But we stand dumbstruck by you as well--by your denial of tangible reality, by the suffering you create in service to your religious myths, and by your attachment to an imaginary God. This letter has been an expression of that amazement--and, perhaps, of a little hope."
Mon 4 May 2009 10:02 PM
American Trappist Ale?
This raises an interesting question, if there were a Trappist monastery/brewery in the USA, what would their beers taste like? My most recently bottled batch of homebrew might be an example of such a beer. I brewed a Belgian style single and then dry-hopped it with Saaz hops for an interesting combination of banana, clove, and hops. More than an excuse to promote my own beermaking endeavors, I think my point is to say, I think it's cool to acknowledge beer styles are historical entities and to imagine from time to time how the styles would be different if they had evolved in a different place and time.
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