Posts by BenWilson
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Can I make a skirt out of my degree?
If you're really serious you should be able to use just the crest. If it's like Auckland's one, you'll have tiny writing there that people will have to get close up to read, with something really apt, like "Ingenio et Labore".
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"Strumpet" really looks lonely without "Brazen" beside it.
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Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink… We're more popular than Jesus now—I don't know which will go first, rock and roll or Christianity."
I'm not sure which is more annoying - acting like Jesus was the son of God, or some musician. The massive scale rituals we enact to that effect definitely rival Christians for loudness. Last time I looked, Duran Duran had the Guinness Record for the loudest crowd at a concert.
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Allow me to point out that the idea that "all men prefer large breasts" is, in fact, a myth -- or a combination of myth and widely held assumption.
I, for one, would like smaller breasts. Or at least more ripped ones.
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In very late 1999, I had a bet with the most senior programmer at the firm I was at that despite all the testing they had done for the millennium bug, that there would still be at least one. He was adamant that there would not be because they had gone over every program with a fine tooth comb for years, spent millions trying to find the bugs, and had fixed all the ones they found. All the evidence suggested that there was no bug.
I won. There was a bug, not at all serious, but still....
Y2K was the perfect scam, trading on religious fear in many ways. Yes, because it's significance derives from the birth of Christ, but also because it was a perfect Pascal's Bet scenario.
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152,000 attendees? It's going to be like lotto tomorrow. As in, I'll have about a 1 in 18 million chance of seeing anyone participating, but if I do, it will make my day!
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In the name of science, burn those bras!
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Then again, absence of proof is not proof of absence. William Cowper. He was a poet, and as Bjork said 'you can't trust a poet'.
Yes, as a principle for enabling the possibility of God, it sounds weak. When applied to some other domain, like my business, it's Gospel. The absence of proof of a bug is not proof of the absence of a bug. Indeed, it's near impossible to prove the absence of bugs*, and the corollary is that bugs almost certainly exist. Try using Occam's Razor as a way of showing there's no bugs in a program, and it won't fly.
Which is why I think that ideas like Occam's Razor betray an inherent bias that people often struggle to see. It's so built in to their understanding of science that they can't see that it's basically an aesthetic choice, not a rational one, in the end.
*Yes, I'm well aware that programs can be "proved correct" (and also aware that piss-all programs ever are). But that transfers the problem to finding bugs in the proof.
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andin, indeed. Roger's starting to make me feel like an enabler. It probably hasn't come through that clearly in what I'm saying that I generally think Atheists are actually right, what they believe is the most likely hypothesis. But there's what you believe, and how you go about using that, which set up important distinctions within sweeping belief groups. To tar everyone 'religious' with the same intolerant brush can be hypocritical. But definitely a lot of religious people are highly intolerant. I don't have any stories in my life like the one about the Jehovah's Witness outcast with respect to Atheists oppressing their children.
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Probably because they're too busy disrespecting the sabbath or something.
Pointedly sleeping in.
I will give that even the most vociferous Atheist, hell bent on getting you thinking really hard about something they think it's a waste of the world's time to think about, is nowhere near as annoying as proselytizing Christians, and the odds of them actually oppressing anyone on grounds of their beliefs is pretty bloody slim. You can usually get an Atheist to piss off by saying you agree with them. Christians are far too accustomed to calling this bluff.
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