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A few days ago, somebody asked me why I didn’t follow any religion. The reason is, because most religions are nuts. Seriously, they don’t make sense. Let me just pull some quotes from today’s news articles.
First off if you’re upset that the pope called your religion “spread by the sword,” then the following response doesn’t really help your case
“you and the West are doomed as you can see from the defeat in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya and elsewhere. … We will break up the cross, spill the liquor and impose head tax, then the only thing acceptable is a conversion (to Islam) or (killed by) the sword.”
In essence, you just validated his statements. This isn’t a shot against muslims.. Just the person who issued that statement.
Now, let’s look at the evolution debate. My favorite quote has to be this one:
“We are objecting to the message that the fossil exhibits represent the scientific evidence of human evolution, They do not. Human evolution is still a theory and this cannot be called as evidence.”
Umm… fossils aren’t evidence of evolution? Care to explain that one? The very fact that intelligent design can be called a theory is a major reason I can’t give accrediation to religion. It’s not a “theory” if it’s only based on faith. Yes I know the bible says it… but the bible itself is only based on faith. There’s no facts backing that up either.
The problem with the “theory” is that it says that complexity can only come from imposed order… which applies fine to the earth, but a postulate of the theory is that anything that imposes order must also be complex… thus must also come from imposed order. So the theory of intelligent design itself dictates that God must have been intelligently created. And that contradicts your bible.
The world would be such a great place if we didn’t have religion.
September 18th, 2006
I just have to say that Sept 19th is national talk like a pirate day… so spread the word.
Has anybody read about this yet? It seems some belgium news sites are mad at google for sending them traffic. The uproar is about what’s called “deep linking”.. that is, linking to a particular page of a website instead of it’s homepage.
While there’s always been controvery about this, it’s frankly a very moronic stance to take. Sure it causes users to bypass some parts of your site (including ads), but deep linking sends highly targeted users to the parts of websites that they’re most interested in. Other companies spend a combined 3-5 billion / year paying SEO companies to do this for the yet the newspaper sites try to fight it when somebody sends them traffic for free.
If you don’t want somebody to link to something, you have alternatives to prevent it. You can not put it online in the first place, write some mod_security rules, or get clever with your .htaccess file. If you don’t want search engines to cache your site (as is the case here) then it’s up to you, the site owner, to say so in both your meta tags and your robots.txt file.
It’s cases like this that re-affirm neither the courts, nor the newspaper industry understand just what the internet is or even what search engines are for that matter. Maybe they’re still upset that their Sunday editions won’t fit through the standard internet tube. Senator Stevens, I’d like to hear your input on this.
September 18th, 2006
Just when I thought I was beginning to have a little more faith in humanity, something like This comes along to destroy it all.
Apparantley, this lady has been paying $29 every 3 months to rent a rotary phone from the phone company for over 20 years. Sure she’s an idiot, but that’s not the bad part. The shocking part is that according to the phone company, there’s over 750,000 other people still renting phones. I didn’t even know rotary phones still existed.
At last check, one could get a phone for $10. Why on earth would anybody need to rent a phone? I can’t even see how somebody would go to rent-a-center and rent an entertainment center or coffee table.
I can understand the phone company’s position of “if they’re willing to pay for it, we’ll charge them” but it’s going to be a PR nightmare for them.
September 17th, 2006
Anybody remember that episode of Cheers where Cliff meets his long lost dad? I watched it last night, and I want to run a hypothetical by the readers of this blog. Sort of a, what would you do in this situation. I thought about it last night before falling asleep, and I wasn’t sure what I’d do. Everybody Comment. It’s no fun if you don’t.
I’m gonna change it a bit though.. here goes
Imagine your father, who you haven’t seen in a long time, suddenly comes back into your life. You spend time together and have a great time. You end up wishing you’d have known your dad better and long to spend more time with him.
Now, your dad tells you he’s leaving the country tomorrow and he’s never coming back. You learn that he’s made millions through illegal means, and he’s leaving to avoid prosecution.
He’s invited you to come with him. You’ll be rich, be able to afford anything you want to buy, AND be able to live with your dad. Let’s assume you don’t have a wife or kids or anything yet to tie you down.
What would you do? Would you go live in paradise never having to work again? Would the way his money was acquired bother you? Would you turn your father in to the police before he left? How would you handle this situation?
September 15th, 2006
Perhaps the only thing that my intro to psychology teacher taught me wsa that correlation does not equal causation. That is to say, just because too things are related doesn’t mean that one causes the other. In Fact, she hammered it in so well that I even did a Previous Post about health and gambling correlates.
A good example of this is the Flying Spaghetti Monster graphic of number of pirates vs global temperatures.
That’s why this story claiming that Alcohol use helps boost income needs to be taken with a grain of salt and some lime.
While it may be true that those who drink more earn more, it’s probably not that they earn more because they drink. What’s most likely happening here is that people who earn more have more disposable income to spend at places like bars.
What do you think is the proper relationship here? That people who drink more are better employees and make more money… or that people who make more money spend more of it at bars?
Ingore this link to my Technorati Profile. They somehow require it to start spidering this blog.
September 14th, 2006
Yesterday I talked about books that I think shouldn’t be banned at all. That got me thinking of some of the other good books I’ve read before, and I figured I should list them here. I didn’t just include good books though, I also included short stories and plays that I think are good as well.
Bolesławiec death of a salesman is a classic play by Arthur Miller about national values and the american dream (or if you think small scale, one family’s struggles)
We already covered to kill a mockingbird
no exit is an existentialist play by Sartre. It starts out with a man arriving in Hell… You can find this one free online somewhere, a must read
the stranger is a novel by another existentialist, Albert Camus. It details the interesting take on life that Merssault (a man who didn’t cry at his mom’s funeral) seems to have.
1984 & Animal Farm have so many comparisons to what’s going on in this country right now that every American should be forced to read it.
leningen vs the ants is a short story about a man saving his farm from ants. At one point he digs a moat and the ants simply keep marching into it until they fill it up and cross on the dead bodies of other ants. China could do this to the US if they wanted.
cat on a hot tin roof is a tennessee williams play about mendacity, or as big daddy describes it “Liars and Lying”. I did a research paper on this in school.
the great gatsby was also mentioned earlier so I won’t get into it.
the chocolate war is probably one of the most banned books in America. It’s about high school kids and starts out with one taking a picture of another masturbating.
the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime is a british novel told from the point of view of a 15 year old with a mental problem (like rainman) who’s trying to figure out why his neighbor’s dog is dead.
henderson the rain king is the basis for the counting crows song, and is about a millionaire who goes to africa and joins a tribe.
The Pearl is a short story about a villager who finds a pearl and all the evil it brings upon his simple life.
Internet Slang Dictionary is my book. Buy it
If we have to mention shakespeare, the following plays get my vote:
King Lear, MacBeth, Hamlet, Oedipus
That’s a pretty big list. Sometime this weekend I’ll list the non-fiction books that everybody should read.
Did I miss any? Let me know, leave your reccomendations in the comments.
September 14th, 2006
Google is celebrating our freedom to read with their addition of Banned Books to Google Book Search. (yet they still haven’t added Internet Slang Dictionary)
Take a look at the list though… I remember distinctly reading over half of these books in high school and college. To Kill a MockingBird is still one of my favorite all time books. If you haven’t read it, now’s a good time.
1984, The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, and The Sun Also Rises (along with some non banned books like The Stranger and Death of a Salesman) helped shape the very person I am. Without these books my mind wouldn’t be open to the things it is today.
To ban the books on this list is a travesty. None of these books deserved to be banned, they deserve to be mandatory reading for all Americans; 1984 especially.
How many of these books have you read? I Myself have read 9 (and seen 2 movies). Do you think any of them deserve to be banned? Let me know in the comments.
September 13th, 2006
Wait, stop. What’s that on the right? Yes.. dotCULT now has an RSS Feed!! That’s what I’m writing about with this update. It’s a great time to tell you about something new.
My Newest site: FeedButton.com.
(See the button on the right)
I got tired of seeing sites with a ton of little “add this to google, yahoo, etc” buttons on the side so I created FeedButton. It’s a way to simplify that, without worrying about updating. Go ahead, try it out and let me know what you think.
A future non-beta release will include better customization and stats on who’s adding your feed! Stats are being collected now, so when we roll them out you won’t lose any data.
September 11th, 2006
In an attempt to protect children from internet predators, the house of representatives passed the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) last month by a vote of 410-15. While many representatives will surely use this bill a stepping stone to the upcoming elections, it’s unlikely that the bill will actually protect children from online predators.
The new legislation effectively bans social networking sites, chat, instant messaging, and blogs from any schools or libraries that take federal money. Blogs, short for web logs, are sites that feature articles and comments that can be written by anybody. The theory behind the DOPA act is that preventing children from accessing places where predators hang out will keep them safe.
Critics of the bill claim that banning access from schools and libraries will only make students more vulnerable to online predators. They argue that instead of sheltering students from the internet resources would be better spent educating children on how to stay safe on the web. Critics cite MySpace’s large popularity as well as the age old “students are more attracted to things that are prohibited” argument.
As Michigan representative John Dingell (D) says “So now we are on the floor with a piece of legislation poorly thought out, with an abundance of surprises, which carries with it that curious smell of partisanship and panic, but which is not going to address the problems. This is a piece of legislation which is going to be notorious for its ineffectiveness and, of course, for its political benefits to some of the members hereabout.”
The only un-arguable benefit of the DOPA is the fact that it will ensure more class time is spent on educational issues. (it’s rather hard to argue that MySpace and chat rooms offer constructive classroom material.) Some educators however feel that this is a job best left up to the schools, not the federal government.
Some Michigan librarians are also concerned about blocking potential educational material found on blogs, as well as extremely vague language describing “social networking sites”. Under the bill’s definition sites like Amazon.com that allow user comments could qualify as “social networks” and thus would be banned from libraries and schools.
See, I can write newspaper style too!!
September 11th, 2006
I don’t understand what all the Hype About Facebook is all about. (If you haven’t figured out what’s going on… click one of those links)
So let me get this straight. If I post a picture of me hitting the bong in my underwear and talk about my sexual exploits on the internet for all my friends to see, that’s ok. But alert them immediately and say “hey, Ryan posted some new shit”, and that’s bad? How is that a privacy concern? It doesn’t make any sense
RSS is a good thing, not a bad thing. If you don’t want people to know what you post the second you post it, don’t post it.
It’s not a privacy issue if you posted it to the internet for everybody to see. Kids, you need to understand this: If you can even think of 1 person now or in the future that you don’t want to see something, don’t post it to the internet anywhere.
If anything, this facebook “mishap” alerted these people to the sensitivity of the material they’re posting online. That’s a good thing.
note: I know I talk about RSS being good and dotCULT doesn’t yet have RSS… don’t worry it’s coming. I haven’t coded a backend yet. I’m still doing these posts directly into the database via SQLyog.
September 8th, 2006
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