Speed test

A cool little online tool for measuring your latency, upload and download speeds. Seems to be pretty accurate when you use the local test server.

Speedtest.net

Drinking Tea Is Better For Health Than Plain Water

Well apparently drinking three cups of tea a day is good for you. :|

Read more at www.medicalnewstoday.co...

Gaim Problems

There's an updated version of Gaim 2.0beta for any one who's found that it started to crash in the last couple of weeks.

 

Gaim 2.0b3.1

The other option, for those slightly more daring, would be the latest SVN build of gaim 2.0 which can be found here. I've been using it with out problems for a last few months none the less use at your own risk, it is not supported.

Confusion and delusion: What do we know?

Note: This may make not logical sense. It is also likely that if it does, some philosopher somewhere sometime has likely explained it better. But any way I hope you can get some idea of what I'm thinking from it.

 

One of the problems with human kind is that we are unable to easily consider the unknown. We can not usually comprehend that there are possibilities beyond those that our current understanding can suggest or predict. We can not predict what will or may happen in the future or know for truth what true limitations exist because we lack the knowledge to see what could be.

Thus it was once thought the earth was the center of the universe and the logic of that time was used to support that. Thus some today think that AI or other computational problems can't be solved because our current "provable theories" declare or suggest they can't.

We limit our selves by what we know. It looks to me that we actually "know" nothing and believe everything. We do not necessarily "know something" we believe we "know something". Thus we can not say something is completely impossible because we lack the knowledge to "know" that which might allow it. What we can say though in some things is "that with the knowledge we have now that appears impossible". Within the limitations of our "knowledge/belief" we produce logic to prove our limitations.

We are within the system and part of it and thus limited. Only a truly independent observer who is beyond the system and not reliant on the system can know the "true" limitations.

Our limitations thus limit us and our capabilities until an exception someone or something appears that looks at or allows us to look at the system in a different way and thus opens up our eyes to a new set of limitations.

Proofs only prove that with our current "knowledge/understandings/beliefs" something is or isn't possible.

We exist in a universe of potentially limitless possibilities, yet we believe it to be limited to what we can understand, we do this with out absolute knowledge. Not that I think it possible that we will ever be able to prove that we have absolute knowledge. We lack absolute knowledge of our own lives after all, we can not remember everything we have done and every thought and motivation.

Science I think is a continuation of revolutions, changes that modify the way we see and understand that which exists or may exist, each revolution built upon in a million minor steps, as we seek to refine and extend our knowledge to the potential limits of each revolution.

We may consider our selves advanced but we cannot even conceive that which will come next.

A truly static society is one that is dying, the death may take time but if the society remains static it will die eventually.

 

We live with our comforting delusions of knowledge as with out we would likely go insane, we seem to be wired to need to know. Thus we create false certainties to maintain our sanity and sentience for with out them we can not function and that which cannot function dies.

 

Thus evolution duels with the truth of reality.

 

Perhaps this is why I like Si-Fi. For in Si-Fi to a degree we escape the limitations of our knowledge. The author takes something that we "know/believe" is impossible and utilises it to generate a world or universe with differing limitations from our current view point, opening up new vistas for us to consider.

 

 

This was originally written at about 4am in the morning, it still makes sense to me for the most part but if it's abit to hard to follow the jumps between some sections, well then blame it on the time.

Nature of God or Gods?

What do people think about the nature of God or Gods? Can other Gods exist?

In someway's I think they do, or at least once enough people start believing in one they become nigh on impossible to disprove (at least to the believers) assuming they haven't been assigned any clearly impossible actions or attributes.
As if enough people believe there belief will start to influence others actions, in a manner similar to how Christ's teaching affected us, and once enough people are effected it starts to affect the culture.

Also I think when people start to believe and enough in a certain culture do then statistically improbable effects will start to be taken as miracles. People who pray will start to think their prayers are answered as they them selves think up ways of solving problems they were praying about or something happens that fits what they were praying for.

You see it a bit in the Christian church, "all glory to God", and the believe that anything that happens somewhat easier than expect or things that don't work out are due to the will of God. If something goes right well then it was clearly God's will and if something doesn't happen then it was also Gods will.

The problem here I think is that people seeking prove of the existence of God simply start to assign the thanks or blame to anything that happens to God. This also allows them to avoid having to feel as much responsibility if things go wrong I think.

This may just be the outpourings of an overly cynical mind but I hope not.

Ghost in the shell | Free Software Magazine

An interesting look at the use of Avatars on the net. Touches on them in Sifi and in current use. Well worth a read if you spend a decent amount of time online.

Read more at www.freesoftwaremagazin...

eonsim's User Page - Last.fm

I've been started to use lastfm a bit to track my music tastes and see if it can come up with stuff similar to that I already like. One of the amusing things is that it attempts to recommend a list of "Neighbors" last week after mainly listening to a lot of the "One Dark Summer" sampler with some anime sound track it came up with a decent list of Neighbours. However a weekend of listening to something completely different (Enya and some Tchaikovsky) with just a bit of "ODS" and anime tracks has resulted in all my neighbors disappearing :)

Read more at www.last.fm/user/eonsim...

Chibi no Nothing: Ergo Proxy - The Allegory of the Cave an Anime Blog

An interesting look at Ergo Proxy linking elements of the story to Plato’s Allegory of the cave.

Read more at chibinonothing.blogspot...

No Greater Love Than This

 What do you think is a greater love?

To die for someone you don't know, or to do something you completely and utterly believe damns you for all eternity to save/protect someone/one's you don't know.

Note: Using damn as in eternal damnation

Thinking about, thinking about, God

(quick note I'm using "it" in the gender neutral sense rather than "it is an object")

In the last couple of years I've started to notice something, when I think about what God is or maybe that's started to worry me in someways. I've started to realise that I don't care if God's almighty, all-powerful, perfect and all that extra stuff. Instead I pray that God is simply powerful enough to do what it promised, that God is merciful above all else. That God is just but not humanly so, justice without personal bias, justice that is not bound by laws, rules and regulations but justice that is bound by mercy. A God who could welcome those who had damned them selves by their actions to save others, as well as those that had followed it's ways, and those who had attempted to follow it's ways yet not quite managed, as well as those who had followed other ways well still attempting to do that which is right.

I pray that the God I believe in sees freewill as humankind's greatest gift, that seeks to know and love us because we are aware. On a slight tangent I really don't like it when speakers say we should surrender our freewill to God, to become as I see it God bots, sure very few people if manage it, but I just do not like the idea, as as I see it freewill and the sentience that goes with it are our greatest gifts that which distinguishes us from animals. How could God thus justify taking away the thing that makes us us. Some might say that our soul is what makes us, us but you can't even prove the existence of it and to me it seems most likely our "soul" is our freewill and sentience linked to our memories. You might say giving up our freewill to God allows it to protect us and stops us doing that which is wrong/sinful which maybe true but it is hardly good! If there are no consequences and no bad actions how do you learn what is good and bad? Trying to raise a child would not work if you stopped them from ever doing anything painful or damaging, as experience is the best and most profound teacher.

I pray that my God is one who does not have a list of "sins" as such but one who has a list of things that damage us. On a tangent again what is sin? I tend to think it is actions that damage us in some way shape or form, the few things that I'd consider evil are actions that damage, destroy or limit the freewill of others, within the restriction that some ideas and actions that others chose must be limited because they'd effect the freewill of others.

When I then, think these things that I hope and believe God is, I begin to worry what if he isn't? And is this me a simple human attempting to impose my ideas of what is right on God, a being that is most likely much greater than us? Are such thought's evil or sinful/harmful?

This confuses and worry's me as on a similar note my personal believe have already taken a good look at most of Genesis and discarded that is irrelevant and unlikely to be true.

Virtual Gig's

For you music geek's who've not yet noticed, it sounds like virtual gigs are starting to take off with bands "playing/streaming" live gig's over Second life one of the largest online virtual worlds.

 

For more info have a look at this article.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/Internet/0,71...

 

(post by Windows Live Writer, it works surprisingly well)

A new lifeform?

An interesting article has turned up on Noble Intent the Ars Technica Science blog about a type of infectious cancer. It appears from recent research that all cases of the cancer may have come from two individuals and thus the cancer cells are now able to live separately from there original host as a parasitic organism in the species. Raising an interesting question as to if they are thus classifiable as a separate lifeform.

 

Any way for more details have a look at the post Catching Cancer.

Sharpest Manmade Thing

Rather cool image of the tip of a tungsten needle.

Read more at www.aip.org/png/2006/26...

The trouble with rounding floating point numbers

A rather interesting look at some common problems with using floating point number in computer programing. The article suggests that failure to correctly deal with this in software design may have been responisble for the failure of some of the recent space probes along with numerous other things.Apart from that it's an interesting look at how computers deal with floating point values.

Read more at www.regdeveloper.co.uk/...

Virtual desktops and PC Geekery

Any one who's stuck using a Windows PC and missing virtual desktop support may find this little app Virtual Dimensions useful. It's a surprisingly robust implementation of Virtual desktops for windows, a lot lot better than the Microsoft powertoys implementation. Well worth looking at if your screens are getting a bit full.

Also I'm slowly been getting Linux back up and running on my laptop (Mandriva Cooker 32bit). It's quite impressive the amount of process thats occurred in the Linux world since I last installed Linux about 18months ago on the laptop. NTFS (ie Windows XP) Read and Write support (www.linux-ntfs.org/), native wireless drivers (bcm43xx.berlios.de), Eye candy Mac OSX style(which I've yet to setup), automatic detection and handling of CPU throttling, Beagle desktop search (http://beagle-project.org/) which appears to be better than google desktop.

Of course there are still some issues such as 3d acceleration via the ATI drivers and suspend to RAM issues.
None the less it's nice to be playing around in gnome a bit again. Once the ntfs support becomes stable and I can set up Thunderbird and Firefox to share there Linux and windows profiles I'll seriously consider moving to Linux as my main desktop, at least until I want to play a game then it'll be straight back to windows I'm afraid.