The random ramblings of Micah Cowan. Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer…
As a documentarian I happily place my fate and faith in reality. It is my caretaker, the provider of subjects, themes, experiences – all endowed with the power of truth and the romance of discovery. And the closer I adhere to reality the more honest and authentic my tales. After all, the knowledge of the real world is exactly what we need to better understand and therefore possibly to love one another. It’s my way of making the world a better place.
Well, here are some updates regarding that. The movie was indeed released in Japan last year, but it was not directed by Hayao Miyazaki, as I had expected; it was actually directed by his eldest son, Goro. I’ll note that it took roughly half the time (8½ months) to complete as Spirited Away or Howl’s Moving Castle did (16-17 months), and this is Goro’s first-ever animation production. Combining these things with the fact that Goro probably (hopefully?) lacks the obsessive personality of his father, I have some small doubts as to whether its quality will hold up to those pieces. Still, his initial artwork was impressive enough to win the approval of the head animators of Evangeleon and the Lupin series, and it’s still been made by the excellent Studio Ghibli animators, so it ought to be better than anything we tend to see produced over here.
More depressingly, though, is that the movie’s FAQ mentions that the US won’t see a release of this movie until at least 2009. Why? Because the SciFi Channel still has the movie rights to the series thanks to their crappy miniseries, which had been a disappointment to Le Guin. So that would make a new reason to hate that miniseries (and I’ve never read the books, so I can only imagine how incensed the fan base must be!).
Digg posted a link to this article at SciAm: 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense. It gives a pretty reasonable list of some of the top claims made by proponents of “Scientific Creationism” and some very good answers to them. Many of the items on this list are similar to what I’ve seen on the alt.talk origins FAQ.
Reading something like this is just so sad. The UK’s Daily Mail reports on a 14-year-old, pregnant girl, Kizzy Neal, who reveals that “having a baby is now regarded as ‘fashionable’ among schoolgirls.”
When my friends see my bump they say they wish they could have a baby, then three weeks later they’re pregnant and don’t know what to do.
In a related article, the Daily Mail reported last October that pregnant teens were taking up smoking in the hopes of producing babies with lower birth-weight which would then lessen the pain of childbirth.
I discovered this story through Digg, which linked to a “re-reporting” article on FOX News instead of to the original at the Daily Mail. I believe I also discovered the October article via Digg back when it was reported.
I just discovered this totally fine-looking 2D game coming soon for the PC from an independant group of developers. The game is called “Aquaria”, and appears to feature a blue-elf who does a lot of swimming, and apparently can toss fireballs (underwater?) and stuff. I don’t really know much about it yet, but the trailer looks friggin’ awesome. Here’s the YouTube version, but you can get videos with a bit more clarity at the developer’s website.
I found out about this project from a Digg post from a few days ago that I saved away (I was at work) and finally got around to checking out.
(Seen on Digg.) A British pianist’s masterful renditions of classical piano works have turned out to be fantastic hoaxes. She, and her husband who produced the albums, was passing off entire albums from other artists as her own performances. You can read the story at New Scientist; and the detailed, but entirely accessible, and totally damning, analysis at Pristine Classical.
Apparently, they used existing recordings, and tweaked the speed by a miniscule amount (so the timing could come out different), and adjusted the EQ and stereo balance. Despite all of these precautions, they were still found out through an automatic algorithm when a fan inserted their CD and discovered that iTunes automatically detected the disc as a different (the original) performer’s work!
Well, I finally completed a little toy project I’d been working on, off and on, for a while.
It’s a program written in PostScript that generates random mazes. You can try it out, and a random maze will be generated to a PDF file which you will see (if you have Adobe Acrobat Reader or some other PDF viewer). I have another version which produces six mazes to a page. The original PostScript version (which you can download, or see a syntax-highlighted version of) can be configured to print an arbitrary number of mazes to a page, and was written using the Test-Driven Development paradigm (so it includes a fairly complete set of regression tests).
I wrote it after I read the source code to the program “Amazing”, written in BASIC, which was presented in a book I used to read when I was a kid, to try things out on my TRS-80 or in Microsoft BASIC on my Macintosh Plus.
I dug up the source code again while I was searching for code to simple, text-based games that I could use as means to teach the C programming language to newbies. The example from the BASIC Computer Games book was rather illegible, and I spent a weekend deciphering it so I could understand the underlying algorithm. In the process, I ended up finding a couple bugs in the progress, such as the occasional omission of the maze exit point, or generating unreachable locations in the maze. I wish now that I’d found the original version of the program, which is much more readable. I think David Ahl’s version from the book must have been written to conserve absolutely as much space as possible, at the expense of comprehensibility.
Kamberly LaVene Cowan was born 2007 Feb 7, at 7:18 pm PST. She weighed 7 lbs 11 oz (yup, like the convenience store), and measured 19 inches. And she’s cute!
(Sorry, not gonna post pics here; I have a thing against posting photos of my kids to the internet.)
The following is an excerpt from a delightfully insightful article posted by DagoodS at his blog, “Thoughts from a Sandwich.” The article is entitled “So Your Friend Is Deconverting…”, and gives advice to Christians how to interact with and converse with friends who are leaving Christianity.
How much water can you fit in a one-gallon bucket? No matter how much you pour and pour, the most you can fit is one gallon. After that, all the pouring in the world makes no difference—no more water is going to fit.
After interacting with theists on-line, your friend the deconvert has certain buckets that are full. You saying it again will make no difference. The following buckets are full:
“You really know there is a God.”
“You hate answering to authority, so you hate God.”
“You want to be God.”
“The wisdom of the world is foolishness.”
“You were never saved in the first place.”
Frankly, deconverts have heard those phrases time and time (and time) again. He knows you think it. He knows that it these are truths that are so grounded in your being they make “2 + 2 = 4” possibly more inaccurate. But he doesn’t need to hear it again.
Interestingly, you can still get the point across, but in the form of a question, rather than an accusation. Instead of saying, “You really know there is a God” you could say, “When you were a Christian, you thought Romans 1 was divinely inspired. As you know, it indicates that all humans know there is a God. How did you deal with that?”
You may not like the answer. But it comes across so much nicer in question form, rather than indictment form.
He knows you cannot fathom the concept that another person can believe, to the very core of their being, there is no God. He knows that you must question his sincerity in saying that. But rather than blurt it out, keep it to yourself. If he calls himself a former Christian, there is not a single ounce of harm to agree.
Yes, you have a duty to speak truth. Yes, you will choke on the words that state he was a Christian. But do you really want to argue “truth” with someone that you are convinced is lying to themselves? What is the gain? Let it go.
Valerie Tarico wrote the following comment to my article, Bursting the Bubble; my response ended up being extremely lengthy, so I decided to post it as a separate article instead.
Valerie Tarico writes:
I once spent a week reading testimonials at exChristian.net. Almost always, the re-calc that allowed someone to shed Christian beliefs was triggered by some kind of emotional discomfort. The discomfort could be anything from being molested by a pastor or rejected by a snobby youth group to a grinding discomfort with the hypocrisy in the church or family. Sometimes it was a very personal life crisis or sometimes a believer couldn’t ignore the suffering in the world around them.
And yet you seem to have made the transition without a clear emotional trigger. So I’m curious what opened up the possibility of reconsidering your beliefs.
Hi Valerie, thank you very much for taking the time to comment on this post.
You are right that the shedding of Christian faith appears to be very commonly tied to some sort of emotional trigger. After I first announced my change in beliefs, it took my Dad (who, as I’ve already said in the original article, is a completely devoted pastor, and also a rare example of the very best sort of Christian) a while to recover sufficiently to even be able to write a response to me about it (as this comment from my Mom suggests). When he was able to write to me, he wrote that, essentially, he did not believe that it was any of the intellectual difficulties that I had described that were the root cause of my decision to leave the faith, but that it was issues of the heart, that had caused me to desire intellectual justifications for decisions I already wished to make, or had secretly–secret perhaps even to myself–already made.
Of course, I cannot prove him wrong; for who can judge my heart and mind, unless they know it thoroughly? One can’t even know his or her own heart and mind with that much certainty, that they can claim to have proved such a statement to be false, even to themselves–I know from my own experience that the heart often can be very persuasive in directing the mind to whatever conclusions are desired. I have only my own memory to serve as testimony–and that only to myself, and perhaps those who actually witnessed my anguish and despair, such as my wife Sara. The memory of arduously wrestling to reconcile the problems I could not resolve in the Bible, with my own experiences as a Christian, my love for many aspects of the faith, and my indescribably strong desire to continue in what was safe, what just “felt” true, and what had been the most defining aspect of my life for 28 years–this is mine alone, and I cannot haul it out to display for others to see and bear witness to. Read the rest of this entry »
A year ago I posted that Studio Ghibli was doing another of their legendary animations for 2006, to be based on Ursula K Le Guin’s The Earthsea Cycle series of books. Studio Ghibli is famous for producing very excellent animations, usually under the masterful direction of Hayao Miyazaki, including Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away.
Well, I finally completed a little toy project I’d been working on, off and on, for a while.