Rosio Pavoris a blog

I’ve touched on this before, but I didn’t give it as much attention as it deserved the last time. The fine-tuned universe argument states, simply, that there are a number of cosmological constants which are fine-tuned to allow for life to develop; if they were anything else, life wouldn’t be possible at all, and the odds of them having the values they have are extremely small. Therefore, God exists.
(Well, or some form of creator, anyway.)

There are several assumptions implicit in this. Let’s spell them out.

1. The cosmological constants could be any other value.
2. The cosmological constants are such that the universe is very hospitable to our kind of life.
3. Our kind of life is the only kind possible.
4. There is only one universe.
5. God or some form of creator is the only possible explanation, or at least the most plausible one.

Whether or not the cosmological constants involved could be a different value is open to debate, but it seems pretty likely they could be. Whether they could be any other value is a different matter entirely, and the range in which they could vary might not be as wide as all that. Still, we’ll give them this point.

The second assumption, though, should be obviously preposterous to anyone who stops to think about it. Let’s break it into two further parts: first, the claim that our universe is suited to develop life, and secondly, the claim that, that life having come into existence, it’s a hospitable place for that life to continue to exist.

It’s true that there are some physical constants that are pretty vital to life as we know it. Most of them have no bearing on life one way or the other, but that, of course, is just a minor detail. Apparently.
Either way, life as we know it requires a star, a planet close enough to it to have liquid water but far enough not to fry in its radiation, and perhaps another large body nearby to catch most stray asteroids in the neighborhood (in our case, Jupiter, and our moon). If they get as far as this, usually defenders of the fine-tuned universe point out how wonderfully fortuitous our set-up in our solar system is, and that even that cannot be the product of chance, conveniently failing to point out that not having the asteroids in the first place would be a much better set-up, and perhaps a little less radiation would be nice as well. Either way.
There’s nothing to suggest Earth is unique, or even particularly rare, so perhaps there is other life in our universe (Fermi paradox aside). Perhaps it really is supremely suited to developing life.

It sure seems to suck at keeping it alive once it gets going, though. An obvious point is the fact that the vast majority of the locations in the universe just cannot support our kind of life at all. Freezing cold almost everywhere, scorching heat almost everywhere else, killer radiation throughout (even the cosmic background radiation is enough to kill you in hours), complete lack of breatheable air, &c.
Sticking to planets, then? There seems to be a shortage of habitable planets as well. In our solar system, we have one, and we can only live on the vulnerable surface. Mars might be an option, given some creative terraforming, but out of the box, it doesn’t work.
Staying on a single planet isn’t really an option, from a survival-of-the-species standpoint. Asteroids are an obvious concern. Jupiter helps, and so does the moon, but there have been several close calls already (some not-very-close-but-still uncomfortable ones in recent history, a much closer one a while ago (though there’s an obvious explanation), and a lot of frighteningly destructive ones even further back). And of course, there are things like wandering black holes and the threat of nearby stars going supernova, among many other things. And don’t forget that eventually, our own sun will become a red giant, swallowing up the Earth in the process.
If a creator wanted life to develop in this environment, he must have been a sadist.

I’ve been careful to say “our kind of life” rather than just “life”. This leads us to the next assumption, which, incidentally, is also the reason the fine-tuned universe is often called an argument from lack of imagination: there is no reason whatsoever to believe that our kind of carbon-and-water-based life is the only life possible.
Even within the constraints of our physical constants, that doesn’t seem to be the case; why would you assume that if you vary those constants, any other system couldn’t possibly contain life, if perhaps in a rather different form than we’re used to?
It’s this part of the claim that led to the Douglas Adams quote I used last time:

[I]magine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’

This is a form of the weak anthropic principle, which (roughly) states that conditions observed in the universe must be such as to allow the observer to exist. On its own, this may seem like circular reasoning, but it leads us neatly into the next bit.

Is there only one universe?
String theory, of course, disagrees. It (along with some other hypotheses) predicts a large number of parallel universes (that is, a multiverse), each of which could have its own set of physical constants. In this case, a fine-tuned universe wouldn’t just not be evidence of a creator, but it’d be completely inevitable.
And of course, there’s that other theory that says black holes a universe’s way of reproducing, which would essentially subject whole universes to Darwinian selection, but I don’t know enough about that to talk about its validity, I’m afraid.

The last claim is, of course, the most important one: God did it.
As always with these kinds of cop-outs, this raises more questions than it answers. The most obvious one, of course, is “Where did this God come from?”
There can be no coherent answer to this that has anything even resembling evidence to back it up.

It’s just another retreat of the God of the Gaps, and in light of “new” developments in quantum physics, it’s looking like he won’t be able to hide there for much longer.

Half-hour interview, for the BBC, because it’s easier than writing something interesting myself.
It keeps amazing me people continue to claim he’s rude or hateful. Crawley comes off as more of a twat than he probably is, but he asks some of the remarkably dim-witted questions many religious people have been asking, some of which Dawkins hadn’t really addressed explicitly before, perhaps.
Either way, the way Dawkins dealt with the fine-tuned universe claim is somewhat disappointing. What he says is correct and technically sufficient, but not nearly as crushing as it could be. Remind me to write about that in the near future. I’ve touched on it before, but I didn’t think I needed to go into detail. Apparently I was wrong.

(Via RichardDawkins.net.)

I went to class today, which was mostly a waste of time.
The OS/Networks practicum consisted of putting three computers (with fresh Windows 2003 installs) in a local domain, and creating user accounts and setting up permissions and whatnot. Would’ve been done in ten minutes had it not been for the incompetence of my teammates.
OO-Programming was spent getting annoyed at an IRC triviabot and the general ignorance of the people in my class, and I skipped English to go shopping~

I went to the Acco to get Darwin’s Origin of Species in English, since the Fnac didn’t have it, but it turns out the Acco didn’t have it either.
It did have God Als Misvatting, which is the Dutch translation of Dawkins’ The God Delusion, so I bought that for my mom.

I also bought A Devil’s Chaplain, also by Dawkins. I already own that in Dutch, but I can’t read Dutch. Now I just need River Out of Eden and The Ancestor’s Tale, and I’ll have all of his books.

I also bought Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape, which I’d meant to buy before I wrote that neoteny post. My mom seems pretty excited about it.

I also bought John D. Barrow’s The Infinite Book, for no real reason. It looked interesting, and I don’t have enough stuff about mathematics.

For a similar reason, I also bought Stephen Hawking’s God Created the Integers, which seems to be about the history of mathematics from Euclid to Turing, including both biographies and actual mathematics. It’s 1160 pages. Whoever decided to release this as a single paperback needs to be kicked.
It’s also damaged, but it was the only copy left and the contents on its own are definitely worth the 25.65 € I paid for it.

So yeah. With those added to the stack, I think I have about thirty books to read. I’d like to say I’m going to stop buying new ones for a while, but as long as I have money left, that’s not going to happen.

My ears hurt, but less than last night, and my throat hurts, which it didn’t last night. My face is full of snot. Our thermometer is broken, so my mom is erring on the side of not-trusting-me and making me go to class tomorrow.
I may die! D:

I can’t focus on complicated or creative things because of painkillers and whatnot, so I’ve been doing a lot of random math problems lately. Ramanujan was an amateur~

I think I’m running out of animal pictures. I might have to switch to porn soon. That should get us through another few centuries.

This has been all over pretty much every blog I read, but it bears repeating, especially since it was on the news here, in fucking Belgium.

Jesus: Tales from the Crypt
In a new documentary, Producer Cameron and his director, Simcha Jacobovici, make the starting claim that Jesus wasn’t resurrected –the cornerstone of Christian faith– and that his burial cave was discovered near Jerusalem. And, get this, Jesus sired a son with Mary Magdelene.

Spelling errors aside, apparently, 27 years ago, a tomb was found with ten caskets in it. For whatever reason, it took two decades for people to decipher the names on them, and apparently they were Jesua, son of Joseph, Mary, Mary, Mathew, Jofa and Judah, son of Jesua.
Also apparently, James Cameron (of Titanic fame) used DNA tests, archaeological evidence, and Biblical studies to confirm that this was the Jesus of the NT.

Did you get all that? Let’s go through it claim by claim.

The tomb they’re talking about is the Talpiot Tomb.
It’s obviously not the first Jesus tomb to be found (or even the first near Talpiot), but it might be the largest. Of course, just how the son of a pauper carpenter could afford a family tomb large enough to house ten is an open question as well.

Next, the names. Even assuming that’s what the caskets actually say (why it would have taken twenty years to decipher the names is beyond me, but whatever), the significance of finding a tomb of a Jesus, son of Joseph next to that of a Mary dating back to that general period ranks slightly below finding a grave marker of a John Smith next to a Beth in terms of unlikeliness.

It doesn’t even look like they got the names right, but that’s probably because Cameron wanted to look erudite. Why he’d bill Jesus as “Jeshua” (rather than the more correct Yehoshua or Yeshua; he was in the Bible as Iesous) but Mary and Mary as Mary and Mary rather than as Maryam and Maryam I’m not sure.
I’m not sure who he thinks Jofa is, or why “Mathew” (Matthew in English, Mattay in Hebrew; Luke originally called him Levi, but then changed his mind) would be buried with Jesus.

Giving Cameron the benefit of the doubt on that count, let’s move on.
Apparently he used DNA tests, archaeological evidence, and Biblical studies to confirm that this was the Biblical Jesus.

“Biblical studies,” first of all. Because the Bible clearly backs up any of the claims Cameron is making. Even if it did, the Bible isn’t a historical work. It’s a collection of fairytales.
We’ve been over this before, though.

“Archaeological evidence.” I’d be thoroughly surprised if there had been a second find corroborating the first one, but without more information, this is hard to mock. Still.

Finally, the most amusing one. “DNA evidence.”
I’m not saying it pretty unlikely for DNA to survive for two thousand years outside of cryogenics. I’m really not. I’m also not saying it’s next to impossible that it would survive active decomposition of the body over the course of two millenia. I’m not even saying that if any DNA could be retrieved, it wouldn’t be enough, and it certainly wouldn’t be undamaged enough, to perform any kind of DNA tests.
I could be saying any of this, and I’d be right.

Instead, I’m just going to point out the obvious: even if you somehow managed to retrieve some DNA from those caskets, you’d need DNA to compare it to in order to establish the identity of the people it came from. This could be another DNA sample from the same person, or a DNA sample from a close relative, if you just want to establish they’re related to that person.
Since Jesus’ father was the only thing that would genetically distinguish him from the hundreds of thousands of other Jews in the region (assuming his paternity claim was true), guess what this means?

Personally, I think the fact that James Cameron somehow managed to obtain a DNA sample from God himself is a slightly bigger deal than the fact that some tomb has been found near Jerusalem.

Edit: Apparently all he did was confirm that the “Jeshua” and a “Mary” aren’t directly related on the mother’s side, using mitochondrial DNA. Conclusive evidence, right there.

(This post won’t interest you if you aren’t Flemish or Dutch.)

In 1991, Samson & Gert released “Tien Miljoen”. I’m sure you remember the chorus:

Had je tien miljoen wat zou jij dan doen
een feestje bouwen en je geld op doen?
Ik kocht liters limonade, honderd kilo chocolade
om aan iedereen uit te delen!

Had je tien miljoen wat zou jij dan doen
een feestje bouwen en je geld op doen?
‘k Zou een kermis laten maken,
en ik schreeuwde van de daken,
kom maar allemaal met me spelen!

In it, they discussed what they’d do if they had 10 million (Belgian francs, presumably). A funfair and a party with lemonade and a hundred kilos of chocolate seemed to be the conclusion.
Now, almost sixteen years later, Gert Verhulst has amassed rather more than 10 million, and someone decided to take him up on that promise.

The fair already exists in the form of Plopsaland (which I maintain was more fun when it was still Meli-Park). Keeping it open for free could be quite expensive, but it isn’t without precedent. Chocolade Jacques (now part of Callebaut) offered to provide the chocolate for free, and lemonade isn’t exactly expensive.

And indeed, in January, Gert agreed!

This makes me happy.

(If you wanted to go, you’re too late. The thousand available spots filled up really quickly (and 500 of them went to handicapped kids, apparently), and at any rate, this story is a month old. I just heard about it, and I wanted to share it anyway.)

(Via Pharyngula.)

If I was getting better, I’m not anymore. Going to class was a mistake.
Walking to class in the rain is annoying. The heat being out didn’t help. People opening windows for no apparent reason should be illegal.

Spent the afternoon in bed. Not going to class tomorrow.
Don’t expect too many blog posts. Wooh drugs.

Dude reinvents radix sort, news at 11. How did Slashdot ever get to its current level of popularity?
I still prefer the ID sort.

Anyway, too diseased slash depressed for real content, so here’s memery.

Your Dominant Intelligence is Linguistic Intelligence

You are excellent with words and language. You explain yourself well. An elegant speaker, you can converse well with anyone on the fly. You are also good at remembering information and convicing someone of your point of view. A master of creative phrasing and unique words, you enjoy expanding your vocabulary. You would make a fantastic poet, journalist, writer, teacher, lawyer, politician, or translator.

Edit to add:

You Are a Chocolate Cake

Fun, comforting, and friendly. You are a true classic, and while you’re not super cutting edge, you’re high quality. People love your company – and have even been known to get addicted to you.

(Stolen from Terras.)

I wrote an RSS feed for the Muffins! updates thing for no particular reason, but for some reason, it doesn’t work.
I strongly suspect this isn’t my fault, since even the w3c validator thinks it’s completely valid, but since it refuses to work as either a Live bookmark (in Firefox) or a standard feed in Thunderbird, I can’t exactly leave it at that.

If someone with more experience than I have could look at that and tell me what’s wrong with it, I’d be eternally grateful. ;.;

(It took me a while to figure out I needed header('Content-type: text/xml; charset=utf-8', true), and even longer to figure out what, exactly, an RFC-822 date format was (using D, d M Y H:i:s e), but at least those were troubleshootable problems.)

Stolen from echomikeromeo, because I can~
Put your MP3 player on shuffle, write down the first lines of the first twenty-five songs that come up, and then have people guess which songs they are.
I also went through and made sure there’s only one song per artist, and no songs that aren’t in English, because my music library is odd that way.

Read the rest of this entry »

It should be legal to kick people who insist on going to work when they’re sick in a contagious way in the throat. I’m made of bad cold, and I know exactly who gave it to me: the woman sitting across from me in the train yesterday morning. She was coughing all the way to Leuven. If I’d been able to get up and leave, I would have, but the corridors were packed and moving wasn’t an option.

Seriously, people, if you’re sick, stay the fuck home. You may think it shows professional integrity to go to work, but really, it doesn’t.
I’m not saying this for the sake of your health. I’m saying it for the sake of mine.

Given the number of people on that train, she probably infected at least 30-40 people, and thereby lowered the quality of their lives in a direct way. I don’t understand why this should be legal, but punching someone in the nose isn’t.
It’s not like Belgium doesn’t have laws that both compell and allow employers to be very lenient with sick leave.

Anyway, just complaining.
Apparently our king is sick as well, and he missed King Harald V of Norway’s 70th birthday party because of it. He sent Prince Philippe and his wife, though.

(La prochaine fois, je mettrais ma cagoule.)

It’s always worth keeping in mind just what “security” means. It’s not a state a country can be in; it’s the state of mind of its citizens.
When you look at it in that light, the complete inaction in any meaningful way of the DoHS starts to make a lot more sense.

The US is a fear-based society. Relax, people. The terrorist threat is only slightly more real to the average American than the Jewish threat was to the average German in the 1930s.
That’s not to say that counter-terrorism isn’t a valid on-going (but not all-consuming) project. It’s just not worth panicking over.

(I fail at graphics, obviously. I apologise. It got the point across, no?)

I (mostly) finished Jeffrey Friedl’s Mastering Regular Expressions, which, as I said, is an O’Reilly book. Surprisingly, it’s about regular expressions.
(It may seem odd to review an O’Reilly book, since they’re usually basically textbooks, and not something you’d want to read for fun, but I really enjoyed this one.)

Regular expressions (or regexes), first of all, are versatile expressions you can use to find a certain pattern in a text. You could, for example, specify that you’re looking for a word that starts with a capital Q and has three vowels after it, or scan a text for instances for the word “penis”. Naturally, most tools using regular expressions will also allow you to manipulate said text in flexible ways.
I knew what regular expressions were before I started reading, and I kind of knew what the syntax looked like but not really. I kind of worried this book would be aimed at people who already pretty much knew what they were doing, but it’s actually a great beginner’s guide as well.

The first two chapters describe the basics of the general syntax: which characters are special, what character classes are, how alternation works, &c. It explains everything with clear examples, and has occasional tests for the reader (with the answers provided on the next page).
The tool of choice in the first chapter is egrep, because it’s sufficient to explain the basics. In the second chapter, he uses Perl, and demonstrates some ways in which the regex syntax differs from egrep.

The third chapter talks about even more languages, including PHP, Java, .NET, Tcl, and so on. It has comprehensive lists of metacharacters and how they differ for each flavor of regular expression. The first two chapters were written as a story, but this is clearly more of a reference work.

The fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters talk about these regular expressions are actually dealt with. The first three chapters deal entirely with syntax, which will allow you to write regexes that work, but the next three focus on the engines, which lets you write regexes that work efficiently and elegantly, which, of course, is quite important when you’re dealing with something that can use such a huge amount of system resources.

The final four chapters deal with regexes in the context of popular programming languages; specifically, Perl, Java, .NET, and PHP.

All in all, this seems to be a really good book. Both complete nubies and more experienced users will find this useful, and regular expressions really are an incredibly useful tool.
While it’s true that if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, in this case, until you have the hammer, you don’t even realise how many nails there are. I’m surprised I actually managed to get anything done without regular expressions before.

Incidentally, this book inspired me to write this WordPress plugin as well. I wrote it when I was halfway into chapter 2, to give you an idea of how quickly you can pick up something that looks so complicated at first glance.

It’s a handful of homeschoolers with too much time on their hands. At this point, it’s 99% people making fun of them anyway.
Stop linking it. It’s not even funny.

I did this blog worth meme thing before, but I didn’t expect that big a jump in value in that little time.
That’s $7,903.56 in a month and a half. According to Global Rich List, that kind of income would put me in the top .69% richest segment of the world. (You are the 41,617,434 richest person in the world!)

In unrelated news, I’ve decided I love flash memory. I think I’ll get another USB stick and fill it with software and MP3s, so the KHL (actually quite decent) computer hardware isn’t going to waste on their poorly configured, heavily crippled set-up.

In even more unrelated news, I’m watching this terrible documentary on historic Western Islam. Apparently I’m notoriously anti-Christian, but that woman’s attempts to blame all evil in the world on Catholicism (and all good in the world on Islam) annoy even me.
She mostly seems to be doing the thing many New Age movements are doing with their revisionist elevating of pre-Christian cultures (be they European paganism or Eastern mysticism), only she’s doing it with her own private version of Islam. It’s pathetic and disgusting.
I’m not sure why I’m linking that, since I wouldn’t advise watching it. I guess I’ll take apart her more obnoxious mistakes at some point in the future, perhaps.

From here:

A CARELESS mistake by Microsoft programmers has revealed that special access codes prepared by the US National Security Agency have been secretly built into Windows. The NSA access system is built into every version of the Windows operating system now in use, except early releases of Windows 95 (and its predecessors). The discovery comes close on the heels of the revelations earlier this year that another US software giant, Lotus, had built an NSA “help information” [local] trapdoor into its Notes system, and that security functions on other software systems had been deliberately crippled.

This seems to be a repost. Google returns articles on the topic dating as far back at 1999, so presumably this was discovered in 1997, and Wikipedia claims the Lotus thing happened in 1997, which would put the first discovery of this thing in 1995, so it’s entirely possible this problem was both short-lived and mostly contained to versions of Windows so old nobody uses them anymore at this point, if it was a problem at all.
The bit about Windows 2000 makes it seem like an update to the older article, but Windows 2000 came out seven years ago as well.

Reposting it now, especially without context or date, mostly seems intended to dissuade people from switching to Vista. There are plenty of valid reasons not to “upgrade”, so bringing up a decade-old possibly-moot argument seems lazy.

Either way, it’s intriguing. Does anyone have more information on this?

French is the only language rap sounds good in.
(It’s funnier if you speak French, of course, but it’s not necessary. There’s a translation here, if you’re interested.)

(Via Cornu.)

When I was in the Fnac today, I noticed that in their tiny science section, on the same shelf as Richard Dawkins’ books (right next to them, in fact, even though they should’ve been further to the right to be properly alphabetically sorted), there were a few copies of this book:

“Schitterend Ongeluk of Sporen van Ontwerp?”, to the people who don’t speak Dutch, means “Magnificent Accident or Traces of Design?”. Yes, it’s about Intelligent Design creationism. And no, it’s not critical of it.
If the title is any indication, it just repeats the old canard that evolution happens by pure chance. No doubt the hurricane-in-a-scrapyard analogy is in there somewhere as well.

So why do I care? People write about ID and creationism all the time, don’t they?
Well, no, they don’t. Not in (most of) Europe, anyway. Creationism really is overwhelmingly a US-specific problem.

The main writer, Cees Dekker, is a Dutch teacher at the Technical University of Delft. It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that he isn’t a biologist: he’s a physicist and an engineer. He does apparently specialise in molecular biophysics, though. (The other two authors aren’t even on Wikipedia; not even the Dutch version.)
The Netherlands does have a notoriously backward Bible Belt (de Bijbelgordel; still nothing compared to the US Bible Belt, of course), and while neither Delft nor Dekker’s native Groningen are in it, if any European country had to produce something like this, I’m not too surprised it would be the Netherlands. Other suitable candidates include the UK and the Mediterranean countries.

The fact that the Fnac would think the book is important enough to import is worrying, but again, not too surprising considering the very alarming thing Dutchiepedia told me:

Voor de publicatie van dit boek had Maria van der Hoeven, Nederlands minister van Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschap een gesprek met Cees Dekker, en schreef in haar weblog naar aanleiding hiervan onder meer: “Als we erin slagen om wetenschappers van verschillende geloofsrichtingen met elkaar te verbinden, kan het [Intelligent design] uiteindelijk misschien zelfs wel worden toegepast op scholen en in lessen.” Maria van der Hoeven beoogde daarmee een debat over intelligent design te laten voeren tussen wetenschappers en het onderwijsveld. Naar aanleiding van de betreffende tekst op de weblog werden zelfs Kamervragen gesteld.

Translated: Maria van der Hoeven, the former Dutch Minister of Education, Culture, and Science, talked to Dekker, and wrote on her blog, among other things: “If we succeed in connecting scientists of various religious traditions, it [Intelligent Design] may eventually even be applied in schools and in classes.”
Apparently the blog entry generated some commotion, and she further clarified her position later on, confirming that she was indeed saying what she was saying.
Van der Hoeven is a member of the Christen Democratisch Appèl, which is (not surprisingly) a Christian Democratic party (like Belgium’s CD&V; also like the CD&V, it’s centrist-conservative). It’s also the Netherlands’ majority party, and it’s actually quite moderate. Van der Hoeven herself is Catholic, though of course the Vatican’s stance on evolution changes with the wind.

Van der Hoeven was predictably and fortunately shouted down, but it’s still quite frightening that it could come to this as nearby as Dutchieland.
Add to that most of the comments on this post, and the future of the Netherlands (and, by extension, Belgium) isn’t looking too promising. I don’t want to have to move to Sweden.

At least Van der Hoeven has been replaced with Ronald Plasterk now, who is a molecular geneticist, an atheist, and a vocal opponent of ID creationism.

(If you speak Dutch, there’s a good review of Schitterend Ongeluk here.)