December 23, 2009 – 8:56 pm
So yeah, religion.
Recently I met a creationist and very keen to promote his beliefs he was. I could spend many hours on this post but I’m not going to because the first argument he presented is so misinformed. When your argument is “the bible says so” you need to make sure it actually does.
The statement was that the Earth is 6000 years old. This is based on the James Ussher’s chronology in the 17th century. Considerable scholarship was required in this endeavour and chronology was considered an important question at the time. Indeed Sir Isaac Newton addresses much the same question in The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms. Ussher proposes a date of 4004 BC. He derived this value by considering three ages – the early times (which the bible gives lineage and ages for each male descendent); the early age of kings (the bible only gives reign of kings); and the late age of kings (which is derived by comparing events in the bible with other culture’s records).
Fifty years later, in annotated versions of the King James bible, Usher’s date began to be added to Genesis as the age of the Earth. It isn’t actually in the book of Genesis.
The early age is based on the Hebrew bible’s description of the lineage of Adam which differs from the Septuagint by 1500 years. That’s a considerable potential margin of error.
Regardless of its accuracy – if the statement is “the bible says so” that cannot extend to annotations.
December 21, 2009 – 11:32 am
Three of my favourites, courtesy of Subnormality – 1, 2 and 3.
December 21, 2009 – 2:37 am
When I was younger, I couldn’t have cared less about education. I didn’t like school and accordingly education could whistle.
As I got into my late teens, I discovered that if a subject interested me I could study it and study it to a greater depth than was required to pass exams. I enjoyed university, working alongside others with similar interests and broadening my knowledge.
Now in my thirties, I have been studying for a degree in a named subject and have lost sight of the pleasure of learning. I’m not interested in every aspect of the current degree I am studying (B49). In particular, I have found a great deal of the Java development a pointless chore. Don’t get me wrong – I have nothing against Java. It just seems to have been a lot of learning with no tangible results, I mean I haven’t really developed anything.
I’ve been looking over the Open University’s prospectus for 2010. I think I might want to try something I’m interested in – so am considering a Certificate in Legal Studies or a Certificate in French. Then again, Mandarin Chinese might be interesting.
Is it a good idea to step out of an ascribed program at this stage though? Who knows and who cares. Learning should be fun.
November 22, 2009 – 4:56 pm
Windows software tends to abstract any kind of technicality from the user, except when it comes to ripping. For some reason, this requires a myriad dropdowns. I’m computer literate and I struggle.
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November 21, 2009 – 3:42 pm
I’ve been away from Ubuntu for a while and just installed Xubuntu 9.10 on an Acer Aspire One. While editing some of the files, I remembered that pressing the cursor keys in insert mode inserts characters.
This is because of vi compatible mode and is easily redressed by adding “set nocompatible” in “~/.vimrc”. I understood from this page that this was the default but I might be misreading. It seems to be a peculiarity of Ubuntu, I didn’t notice this in RHEL, Arch or Fedora (three distributions I use fairly regularly).
Is this an indicator that vim is not perhaps as popular in Ubuntu? I notice that most times I see a guide online it will suggest using gedit, even if invoked from the terminal. Perhaps, as I’m not au fait with Debian, our lineage prefers the compatible mode.
I’m sure its not important and we all have our preferences for editors but I do like vim and wish that this behavior was default. One of the paradoxes with OSS, GNU/Linux in particular, is the freedom afforded allowing us to configure our environments in whatever fashion we prefer creates a diversity that is difficult to train new users, especially between distributions.
