BTW: Aquaria

A while ago I mentioned a great-looking new shareware game coming out, called Aquaria. Well, it’s out now, I’ve played the demo, I plan to buy it (birthday present to myself?), it’s great. Go get it!

The bad news? Only out for PC at the moment. Mac version will be out shortly; it’s unclear whether there will be a version for x86-based GNU/Linux systems, but I couldn’t get it to work under Wine—it might yet, perhaps, with a bit more tinkering… but on my laptop running Ubuntu 7.10 (“Gutsy Gibbon”), the framerate was something like a frame per second-or-two. 😕

Update: Apparently, it does work with the latest versions of Wine from the official Wine repositories (as opposed to the ones that ship for Ubuntu). Good news. 🙂

The Golden Compass

So, I read The Golden Compass last week. I would invite any Christians who have been convinced by current propoganda that it is designed to convince everyone of the truths of atheistic thought, to do the same. It’s simply not there.

I can’t comment on the rest of the series—indeed, I’m told that God dies in the second book, or something, so perhaps the series, as a whole, promotes anti-religious thought. However, there was very, very little—if any—in the actual book, The Golden Compass.

To be honest, I wasn’t particularly impressed by the book, though I suspect it probably makes a good movie (plan to take the kids to see it soon). I do kind of want to see what happens next, though, so I’ll probably read the rest of the series anyway. I suspect that it may improve as it goes along. It’s not on a literary par with C.S. Lewis, though, that’s for sure.

The whole current fuss in the Christian community over this book is just ridiculous. It’s Harry Potter all over again, only with even less basis. Heh, I remember one anti-Potter site I was directed to a couple years ago decrying Potter’s flagrant rebellion against his guardian Aunt and Uncle. Yeah… sneaking out to get some food while you’ve been punished with a week locked in your room without food, and crying foul when your guardians heap absurd insults to your parents… I’m pretty sure those are justified, to any sane human being.

There were two things that drew me to the Potter series… the second was that, once I checked it out, it was damn good writing. The degree to which the abusiveness of his Aunt and Uncle were exaggerated to the point of hilarity, reminded me a good deal of Roald Dahl, particularly James and the Giant Peach. And, there was a lot in them for adults to enjoy, as well as for older children. AFAICT, Pullman has nothing on Rowling, at least when it comes to writing kids’ books.

But the first thing that drew me to it, of course, was all the mindless hype surrounding it in the Christian (my) community. While I was a Christian, I certainly was capable of thinking for myself, and had definitely learned to spot mindless hyperbole by that point, so I was curious as to whether there was any basis for the accusations. There was little, of course: the only thing that could really be said against it was that, of course, it featured sorcery. If you’re going to cry foul for that, though, you’d better through out your Narnia as well, as it featured sorcery plentifully—in fact, one sorceror was a friend of Aslan’s, so what do you do with that?

The Desire for Truth

Quote from DagoodS’ blog entry today; it echos my own case. Emphasis on the last sentence is mine.

In retrospect, I now realize my God-belief was NOT at the core of my being. It was NOT the very center. What was more important to me was the answer to the question: What actually is? If it was the Christian God; good. If it was some other God: not-so-good, but doable. If it was no God; bad, but if that is what actually is then there is no use crying about it. As key as God-belief was, there was something even deeper—something that could trump that God-belief to the point of no longer believing in a God—the desire for what is actual reality.

Source Code to MULTICS Released!

Seen on Slashdot. MIT has released the source code for the MULTICS operating system, ancestor to UNIX and its derivatives such as GNU, Linux, Minix, and the various BSDs.

MULTICS was born in the days when the concept of time-sharing was the big new thing. Before time-sharing operating systems came on the scene, computers and their operating software were designed to run one program at a time. At that time, computers tended to be big hulking machines that (together with the necessary air-conditioning equipment) filled entire rooms. Since different users couldn’t interact with the computer at the same time, users typically weren’t allowed to interact directly with the computer at all. Instead, users submitted “jobs” for the computers to perform, to system operators who would arrange for the jobs to be run in a “batch”, and then at some point the user would come to fetch the printed output from the job they had submitted. Naturally, this could be very frustrating for users who would submit a program to be run, only to discover hours later that a small bug in their code had prevented it from doing its job.

Time-sharing was born out of the observations that: (1) direct, interactive use of a computer was a far less-frustrating experience than the batch-processing style of non-interactive computer use; and (2) a very large portion of the time spent interacting with a computer is actually wasted on the computer sitting idly, waiting for further input from the user. System designers reasoned that the “idle time” from one user could be put to good use in servicing the requests of another user, and thus time-sharing was born. Of course, it was no time at all until companies began to sell access time on time-sharing machines to users who were willing to pay for a few hours’ access to a mainframe via a terminal.

The legacy of time-sharing is seen today, even in computer systems designed primarily for single-user-at-a-time use, in such technologies as what is usually termed multitasking or multiprocessing (fifteen years ago, these concepts were a really big deal, as most personal computer systems lacked them; now, they are an essential—and assumed—part of every major operating system). The fact that modern machines can host multiple different network services (such as web, ftp, mail and the like) to potentially hundreds of users at a time, is due to earlier developments of time-sharing.

Overweight → Lower Risk of Death!

A couple years ago, researchers were puzzled to find that people who are overweight are less likely to die than people who are either skinny, obese, or at a normal weight.

After further research, we now know why. While, as we’ve known for quite a long time, people who are at above-normal weight are at increased risks for deaths from diabetes, cancer or heart disease, these risks are not increased sufficiently to compensate for the significantly reduced risk of death from diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, infections, and lung disease!

So, in your face, skinny people! 😀

…Oh, except… at ~270 lbs on a 5’11” frame, my Body Mass Index of 38 would classify me as obese, not overweight. 😕 Ah, well, at least if I start dieting and getting regular exercise, I don’t have quite as far to shoot for any more! 🙂

How Human DNA Lost A Pair Of Chromosomes

A short but fascinating video discussing how we know that one of the 23 pairs of chromosomes that make up the human genome resulted from the fusion of what had previously been, and still remains so in other modern primates, two pairs of chromosomes, and how this provides evidence for a common ancestry between humans and other primates.

Did you know?

Albus Dumbledore is a homosexual. Guess that pretty much nails the coffin shut as far as fundamentalist Christians are concerned… Plus, all the many people who apparently can’t distinguish between homosexuality and pedophilia are going to raise all sorts of questions about what Dumbledore’s real interests in Harry Potter might have been.

Note that this information isn’t revealed in the Harry Potter books themselves, though it sheds a new light on some information in the final book. It’s simply one of those factoids that the author kept tucked away in her brain, and used to keep her world consistent. The article notes that when she found a reference in one of the movie scripts to a past, female love interest of Dumbledore’s, she sent a note to the director to set things straight.