Tuesday, November 24, 2009

My Magnum Nopus

Instead of writing the grand rebuttal I kept planning on doing, I just went on Facebook and debated religion on a person to person basis with even more random strangers. Now, I may have learned something, because I was doing some thinking along the way, it's just that I usually don't remember specific details about what I learned doing almost anything. Regardless, I think I wrote some nice paragraphs :/. I tried my hand at writing a personal counter to Pascal's Wager, completely without citation to all of my sources of thought (although the wiki on the Wager was significant). Amateur, yes. I may post it some other time, when it's more refined; it was built in response to a specific person, and so the writing needs to be generalized more.

I began writing that paragraph at the end of November, stopped, and then resumed now. Not much has changed between now and then, although I should probably make it a very rare occurrence to only write once every four months. Anyway, Science Online '10 is approaching, and although it isn't nearly as amusing to say as Science Online '09, I can hardly wait. If the ethics and management woven into science, and all their wonderful problems, is interesting to you, then it may be worth at least reading about what's been done at the conferences wherever the site is found. Although one can't now get into the coming conference, there's probably going to be another in '11, just in case you would be interested. The current site for information anyway is http://www.scienceonline2010.com/, and Bora Zivcovic's Blog Around the Clock will have information about the conference afterward, for in case I either didn't post this or one doesn't feel like going back and finding out.

Next, the LHC has apparently done not one, but two test sets while I wasn't watching. The latter broke the world record for highest energy collision of particles (yay) and neither of them broke the LHC (yay!). Clearly, I should have been watching at least a month ago.

And now, for the completely random portion of my posts that happens some percentage of the time, I only just found out about Time Cube. This followed from searching the meaning online of the expression 'not even wrong,' where I found there was a Wikipedia entry for it. That article linked both to 'wronger than wrong' and Time Cube. I'm now glad I have both contemplated both various ways in which one can be wrong, and what it means to truly be bat shit fucking crazy. I mean, I try to keep swearing out of here, because I at least pay lip service to civility and careful debate*, not to mention not making huge assumptions and as of yet unfounded statements about anything or anyone. On the other hand, I couldn't bring myself to actually analyze this writing personally, or not use a string of words I've found somewhat hilarious for maybe a week now. If you wish, you may visit timecube.com to see what I've seen (I checked the first sixth of the page, then scrolled to a random portion about 3/5 of the way down).



*First, I now plan on putting significant and larger streams of thought bracket enclosures in footnotes, where I should have :/. Next, I went backspace instead of Ctrl-X, then forgot to use Undo until right about now instead of wishing I hadn't accidentally removed this information from myself. What can I say, I hate retyping things, especially when it wasn't important :D.