What "other place" did that information come from? Just curious.
My friend Stuart is employed at Ball Aerospace. He has a very technical mind and an obvious grasp of science. He is not a believer as am I, and yet we amicably agree on scientific progress while disagreeing on Christian thought, belief, and influence. We have an understanding. I never try and convert him, and he never tries to de-convert me.
One of Stuarts hobbies is engaging in arguments with members of the flat-earth society. Despite skillfully arguing every scientific law and consensual methodology of the space program with them, they simply refuse to consider certain parts of his arguments. He finds the whole exercise exasperating yet oddly entertaining.
Despite skillfully arguing every scientific law and consensual methodology of the space program with them, they simply refuse to consider certain parts of his arguments. He finds the whole exercise exasperating yet oddly entertaining.
In my debunking days, I talked to plenty of 9/11 truthers and creationists who claimed there was "no evidence" that terrorists carried out the 9/11 attacks or that species evolve; and they dismissed literally every data point anyone presented, on whatever basis they found convenient, and treated it as if it didn't constitute evidence in any way. Not just that we had different ways of interpreting and emphasizing information, mind you, but that there was "no evidence" that had ever been presented. It became clear that this wasn't a legitimate attempt to understand recent political events or natural history, or to reach mutual understanding with others. It was about baiting an opponent, making them jump through hoops, and then handwaving away anything they presented and insulting them for their credulity. The entire "dialogue" was about the conspiracist venting his contempt for others and lording his superiority over them.
So I can't help but think that the "no evidence" New Atheist is working the same bad-faith exercise. There's nothing someone could type in a Facebook thread that would ever convince the atheist to live a religious life; but instead of admitting that he has his mind made up, he demands evidence from his online foes and, rather than talk about how his interpretation differs from the religious person's, dismisses literally each and every data point as not constituting evidence of anything other than his opponent's credulity and stupidity.
Asking questions is a noble pursuit. But if you've already decided that no answer will ever satisfy you, how sincere and fair-minded are we supposed to think your quest truly is?
As we're all well aware, the World Congress on Religious Truth has been meeting for the past few years to resolve all the differences and contradictions between the world's religions. Remarkably, all religions are participating, and by all accounts they've made remarkable progress and are expected to announce their findings soon.
Of great interest is one particular disagreement between Christianity and Islam. Based upon the Bible Christianity believes Jesus is the son of God, while based upon the Quran Islam believes that Allah could never have a son.
I'm sure we're all looking forward to the Congress's final report which should result in a single world wide religion where everyone believes the same thing and religious disputes become a thing of the past.
For some reason, the YouTube algorithm recommended to me this film from 2016. It's by Brian Keith Dalton, AKA "Mr. Deity", Phat's favorite ex-Mormon and alumnus of PragerU ("Go Devils!"); The Bourne Again Identity:
It was fun seeing Lucy in front of the camera again.
Share and enjoy!
ABE:
Synopsis (spoiler avoidance attempted) --
A couple take in a stranger with amnesia whose identity seems tied to a crucifix he was wearing when they found him. He remembers nothing about religion so they try to explain it to him, but nothing they tell him makes any sense.
It reminds me of a short story I found a couple decades ago on a British atheist site. Here's a synopsis of it from memory, though maybe one of our British members might know where to find it:
quote:A traveling preacher stumbles upon a village where nobody had ever heard of religion before, let alone Christianity. So he starts preaching to them and they all crowd around him eager to learn and listening intently. But nothing he tells them makes any sense, so they keep interrupting him with questions, pleading with him to please explain -- they sincerely want to understand what he's teaching them. But he keeps finding that he is unable to answer their questions and that once he started thinking about their questions himself even he couldn't understand what he was saying. The story ends with him fleeing the village (and the loss of his willful ignorance) with the villagers following him sincerely pleaing with him to answer their questions.
Now a bit of geek humor, though that requires a little background information.
Unix is a copyrighted computer operating system, though the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) is not copyrighted since it was given to UC Berkeley before the copyright. Then later Linus Tovald developed an open source version, the Linux kernel, under the GNU Project.
My understanding is that Linux got around the Unix copyright using the same "virgin programmer" reverse-engineering trick that led to the Phoenix Technologies cloning of the IBM PC BIOS (which enabled the massive IBM-clone industry). Basically, you hire one programmer to use the copyrighted source code (IBM literally distributed a copy of the BIOS source code with their first PCs; I had a copy at work) in order to write a specification for that code describing all the inputs, outputs, and processing. That programmer is now tainted so he's removed from the project, but then you get an untainted (AKA "virgin") programmer who has never seen the copyrighted source to use the spec in order to write code that would do the same things as the original. This process was reenacted in the first season of Halt and Catch Fire.
Unix comes with a library of utility programs that the user can use to perform various tasks through a user interface known as a shell (since it comprises an outer software layer encapsulating the OS kernel -- basically, you talk to the shell, the shell talks to the kernel, the kernel replies to the shell and the shell replies to you). Originally, shells would be command-line interpreters (CLI) that you worked with through your teletype terminal (called a "tty" in Unix/Linux) connected to the computer. Veteran PC users will recognize MS-DOS as that system's shell (and indeed the configuration files (¿CONFIG.SYS?; it's been a few decades) had a "SHELL=" line where you could specify a different shell (eg, "DR-DOS")).
Perhaps UNIX' most common CLI shell was written by one Stephen Bourne in 1979 ( so it predates both the 1980 book and 1988 TV movie with Richard Chamberlain, "The Bourne Identity"). Called the "Bourne shell", it is invoked through its file name, sh for "shell". Other shells would base their names on "sh" like the C shell (csh), Korn shell (ksh), secure shell (ssh).
Because of copyright considerations, utility names in Linux had to be changed slightly, often by prefixing them with "g" for GNU; eg, the C compiler (cc) became gcc. The same happened to sh which became bash for "the Bourne Again Shell".
That's the punchline: bash stands for "Bourne Again Shell".
Since I code on a Mac I use zsh, where the zsh stands for Zhong Shao, a Yale professor who was at the time a teaching assistant at Princeton. zsh is the first letter of Zhong followed by the first two letters of Shao.
zsh is a Unix shell, not Linux, but it works fine. There were a few missing functions I like that it didn't have or that it implemented differently than I like so I wrote my own scripts for them. zsh is fine and I never notice that I'm not using csh (my first favorite shell) or bash.
What took a while to get used to is that history is shared across all active shells.
zsh is a Unix shell, not Linux, but it works fine.
Apple is not my community (except for my iPod Nano), but from what I have read the kernel for Macs starting with OS X (ten) was BSD Unix (Berkeley Software Distribution) or at least based on BSD. Unix itself ended up being copyrighted, but BSD was still free.
Analogous to how speciation starts, Unix and BSD have started diverging. This would show up as new utilities (such as shells) would appear in one but not in the other, but mostly it appears as differences in how the utilities were used, such as differences in the command switches (AKA "command options"; ie, the options for a command which appear with a hyphen in Unix/Linux (eg, gcc -v to get the version of gcc) or with a slash in MS-DOS (eg, dir /s to include the directory listing of subdirectories)).
Indeed, in The Cuckoo's Egg Cliff Stoll working in the UC Berkeley computer center was able to determine that the hacker was coming in from the outside (it turned out from Germany, which also explained why he would come in at such weird hours) because he was using AT&T Unix syntax instead of BSD syntax which UC Berkeley was using as well as everybody at UC Berkeley.
The story was the subject of the 03 October 1990 episode of NOVA, "The KGB, the Computer, and Me", which is on YouTube:
PS
I always liked that opening title for NOVA which depicts a star going nova.
Indeed, in The Cuckoo's Egg Cliff Stoll working in the UC Berkeley computer center...
One of the great reads - when I got rid of a lot of books a while back, I kept only the ones that were good reference books or that I thought I might read again, and that was one of ones I kept. Thanks for the YouTube video.
That book is also going into my keep pile. Though my favorite part was Stoll's oral exams for his PhD Astronomy in which he's asked "Why is the sky blue?" and it takes him two to three hours to answer that question completely.
It was in the book and not the NOVA episode that he mentioned the clue that this was an outsider because his syntax was not the native BSD.
Since it had been quite a while, I watched that NOVA episode again right after posting Message 1437. I'm going to watch it again a decade or so from now with my grandsons, mainly to show them what computers used to be like.
One of the comments for that video mentioned a German movie about the hackers in this case: 23 – Nichts ist so wie es scheint ("23 - Nothing is what it seems", 1998). It appears to be the first movie for the star, August Diehl, who in Inglourious Basterds played the SS Major in the tavern who catches Fassbender's character using our distinctly non-German hand gesture for "three". His character in 23 is supposed to be obsessed with that number, so it's interesting that in the NOVA story he always logs into Cliff Stoll's computer as terminal tt23 -- to my knowledge, a user logging into a system has no control over which device he connects through.
Professor, geology, Whatsamatta U Evolution - Changes in the environment, caused by the interactions of the components of the environment.
"Do not meddle in the affairs of cats, for they are subtle and will piss on your computer." - Bruce Graham
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." - John Kenneth Galbraith
"Yesterday on Fox News, commentator Glenn Beck said that he believes President Obama is a racist. To be fair, every time you watch Glenn Beck, it does get a little easier to hate white people." - Conan O'Brien
"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." - John Kenneth Galbraith
It says something about the qualities of our current president that the best argument anyone has made in his defense is that he didn't know what he was talking about. - Paul Krugman (as stolen from Chiroptera's signature)
"My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes" - Ronald Reagan (1984)
"I know a little about a lot of things, and a lot about a few things, but I'm highly ignorant about everything." - Moose
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