Huckabee, evolution, God, and the great quest for truth

Not to rain on the parade, but don't you think this is a little short-sighted? It's great that he's standing up for what he believes, and he did give a strong testimony of his beliefs in God on national television, but I can't ignore the fact that he is ignoring the facts!

The creation (by God) is a fact. It doesn't need proving, probably can't be proven to the satisfaction of discrete scientific observation, but is a fact nonetheless that I believe in. I think the creation makes sense, and the probabilities without a God present don't leave much room for our existence. That's not what I'm contesting, and anyone who discounts the creation of the world (and the universe) by God is ignorant and probably doesn't want to know the real truth anyway.

Evolution is also a fact. I like to think of myself as a scientist. Some people don't believe in empirical observation and scientific thought over religion, but I say that if God uses them then they're good for me too! In the end, to be like God, we'll all need to use our brains and depend on our own rational thought as an epistemological basis for all our actions. I think that becoming a God is to have a discerning ability to make correct choices and a large enough knowledge base to know they are correct. In God's case, this covers the domain of all truth, which is the very thing that makes God all-powerful. His knowledge includes physics, chemistry, genetics, mathematics, and every other domain known and unknown to man. He lives by a higher law, because he is acquainted with a higher law. God created the universe based on higher laws of physics than man has yet comprehended, and his power comes from his obedience to those laws, just as an airplane defies the law of gravity by obeying laws of aerodynamics and fluid dynamics.

Evolution and God don't contradict each other at all. Evolution does not mandate that we descend from primates as suggested by the senator and a host of other people. Evolution occurs today and can be verified scientifically. God used evolution as another tool in the creation process. Don't fight against the truth, or you'll have the whole universe fighting back!

If the senator had said something along the lines of, "I believe that evolution fits perfectly into the creation story. God's not an idiot, and I don't believe that He would use a shovel if He had heavy machinery at his disposal. God used evolution as a tool in the creation process, and although I can't give you the exact details of how that worked, someday God will be able to give them to me and I will use them to design my own worlds."

If he'd said that, would I have been the only one to vote for him? Maybe. How unfortunate.

The Wealthy Ogre of Capitalism

Isn't it nice to have a punching bag we can all beat up a little bit when we're in a bad mood? When you realize your potential for earning money has a cap on it, it's kind of nice to blame other people for the fact that you're not a millionaire.

I vote for Walmart. What a terrible company. They have so much money and influence, they can afford to be our punching bag. In fact, if companies like Walmart didn't exist, we would all have a better chance at earning money, so in a way it's Walmart's fault that we're poor.

...I hereby decree that anyone who agrees with the sentiments expressed in the above paragraphs is wrong. Very, very wrong, and incredibly ignorant of reality.

It's interesting, though, the way that everyone seems to believe that if you have money, you are automatically a bad person, even an immoral person. I see nothing wrong with money. I hope to be extremely rich, and I'm pointedly ignoring the phrase "filthy rich" because I don't think there's anything filthy about it. I think that my being rich will be a sign of the highest ideals I can hold, those of production, work, ingenuity, and integrity. Being rich is moral, not immoral.

"So you think that money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?"

I might add that Paul did not say that money was the root of all evil. What Paul wanted Timothy to understand was that loving money is the root of evil. I do not love money, I love the activity that brings me money: engineering, invention, work, providing a service or product for people who need it. When immorality and the root of all evil creep in is at the moment that one's love for money overrules his ability to live morally, to create by his mind and let others create by theirs. I do not think that Walmart, thus far, has violated this code of conduct. I have seen a company which provides products at a lower cost to people who need them, a company who brings together a variety of products into one marketplace. It is ingenious and deserves to make lots of money.

"Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think."

Well, so lots of people like to say that Walmart is not contributing to the "common good." Whatever that means. Lots of people like to say that Walmart could stand to pay their employees more money, to offer them better benefits. I say, if people keep working there, they are valuing their time at the amount that Walmart has offered them, so it obviously is enough. Many people think that Walmart destroys smaller companies. I don't refute that; I only refute that destroying other companies is an immoral or unethical practice. It simply means that Walmart's ingenuity and helpfulness to the world exceed that of the other companies. "When 'the common good' of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of *some* men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals."

All the controversy about Walmart is just a sign that people don't understand that the most important part of capitalism is that the best man (or the best company) wins; the best company takes home the most money. The only unethical thing would be to try to govern in any way how much a company is allowed to earn, how much a company is allowed to produce. Every man has access to the world, and to his own ideas. If one man has a better idea than another, it just means he can use the resources provided by the world in a more efficient way than the man with the lesser ideas. I find it incredibly repulsive that the government would meddle in business affairs. I can't believe that the government would start its own little companies, instead of allowing privatization of industry to proceed naturally!

"Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think."

"Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others."

"Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen."

Well, I'll let this issue rest, for now. I strongly oppose anyone who opposes big business. It is a sign that we are truly capitalistic and that man is truly noble.

"There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil."

Sanction of the victim: professors

"Some boys go to college and eventually succeed in getting out. Others go to college and never succeed in getting out. The latter are called professors."
        -H.L. Mencken

I think that some of the smartest people I have ever met are professors.

Wait. I need to clarify. Many of the dumbest people I've ever met were professors. In fact, I believe the absolute dumbest man I ever ran across was a professor at the university where I study.

Anyway, there are some smart guys in there, too. Some of the greatest inventions have come about because some professor at a university somewhere spent long nights working on a problem with his graduate students. Some of our conveniences exist because a professor somewhere, or maybe a graduate student, had an itch to make some cool idea happen. By the way, "graduate student" is another way to say "slave." A graduate student is nothing more than a very smart person who is being paid the same as if he was working as a waiter, but is in fact working as a highly skilled engineer, designer, or analyst. A university is a business just as much as any other business you've ever heard of; they just try to hide it a little bit. And their low-level employees, the ones who do the grunt work and keep the company running, but get paid the least, are graduate students.

So anyway, I think that professors really get a raw deal. Most professors probably don't break a $100,000/yr paycheck. Don't get me wrong, that's lots of money. If you design something really great in a university setting, though, you usually don't end up getting the same compensation you could get in a business setting.

Imagine if Bill Gates had been a professor at a university when he created Windows. Imagine that Windows was a university-funded project, something basically owned by the university. Imagine that Windows ended up being just as popular as it is today, but Bill Gates didn't get the company and all that jazz. Instead, he kept getting a $200,000 paycheck every year. Doesn't that seem about equal to you? The amazing thing is that Bill Gates took a chance on his vision, on his own great idea, and made so much money that he can compete with royal families or the Rockefeller family, who have been amassing money for generations. Gates has more than them, and he did it in his own life time. That last observation is a page in the book of my buddy Rob Beck, but I thought it was insightful so I included it.

Well, this is the main reason that academia was never very appealing to me. The return that you get for really great research just seems really limited: you get to fly to a conference, watch a bunch of other really smart dudes talk about their projects, tell them about your own, and have job security.

Job Security. For some reason it's really important to have job security. I guess if you're not a risk-taker, and you just forget to leave school, you become a professor. I guess that taking the initial risk, doing research with no income for a while, is where the big money comes in. I lost my job a few months ago, and I admit that I was scared, because I didn't have another job lined up. I was terrified. But I think that anyone with a decent set of skills and some work ethic can find a job that at least pays the rent and provides food to eat.

Anyway, the reason I say "sanction of the victim" is because any of those guys could go do his own work somewhere and make a ton of money, but they all allow the University to push them around. They become the victims, but only because they are afraid to make major changes to their surroundings. They are the victims, but not at gunpoint. They are the victims because they choose to be. They sanction their own victim-hood! It's really sad, but at least we as a society get some cool stuff out of it, like the TLB in your L2 cache. I don't sanction taking from a man that which is most intimately his - his inventions, ideas, and creations - but if he throws it at me willingly, I don't sanction wasting it either.

To learn more about the whole "sanction of the victim" thing, I recommend reading a book or two by Ayn Rand. I just learned the other day that "Ayn" is not pronounced "Anne," but it's actually like the word "eye" with an 'n' on the end of it. Start with The Fountainhead, and then read Atlas Shrugged. Or, if you're a real book lover, start with "We the Living," then go to the other two.

I would only be a professor if I didn't care at all about money. I think I can make much more money being an entrepreneur than a professor. If you are doing it because you love it or because it is your life-long dream, that's respectable, but don't let the university push you around.

Don't support the machine, man!

Requisite Number One: Computer Literacy

I am currently employed by a company that provides web hosting for several small companies and a few large companies nationwide. We have multiple website builders for our clients to use. They are very simple and very easy to use.

Lately, I've noticed that a lot of the people using our services are not at all qualified to operate a web-based company. I'm talking about people who don't know what email is. People who can't find the start button. People that think their monitor is a "computer." Yes, I am talking about the computer illiterate.

I do not like to consider myself discriminatory against the computer illiterate. In fact, I have several friends who are quite incompetent when it comes to the basic operations of a computer. I do think that people should be able to do a few basic things. It's like cars; you don't have to know how to build a whole engine to survive in life, but it can be useful to know what the basic parts are and how they work.

If you are a 90-year old lady who has never touched a computer before, let me give you some advice: do NOT start an internet company.

UTA gets a point

The other day I was late coming out my door on the way to the bus stop. I catch the bus to work. Even though I wasn't at a stop or even on the road where the bus was traveling, the driver somehow noticed me and stopped mid-road to let me get in. That's pretty cool.

Virginia Tech: Regulation vs. Protection

I particularly enjoyed an article which I read at the Atlasphere, a site meant to unite admirers of Ayn Rand and her literature. It makes some good points about the pros of allowing people with weapons permits to carry guns on university campuses. I can't figure out what is so different about a campus from the rest of the world, or why law-abiding citizens would be under a different law on a campus.

Gun 'Free' Zones Get Students Killed

I just have one additional point to make. Why didn't those students who were being killed rush the killer while he was reloading, tackle him, and save some lives? If they knew they would die anyway, they could at least increase the probability of life by rushing him with 20 guys.

Not to appear insensitive, of course.

This is a case of government regulation vs. government protection. The government should not regulate our lives. At all. The government should protect. And in this case, by regulating the lives of college students and faculty, the government removed invaluable protection, thus failing in its primary responsibility and wrongly assuming another. I hope we can learn from this mistake.

Senator Leahy rocks

I just ran across this video. I think it is worth the time to watch the whole thing. The idiot who posted it put some crappy guitar music on at the beginning which is way louder than the rest of the video. Kill your speakers, then turn them up slowly once the Senator's face shows up.

SEN. LEAHY Says And AG Gonzales Agrees Rendtition & Torture Has

Why Windows is so Expensive: Vista

As a continuation of the post Why windows is so expensive, let me tell you about two problems I had with Windows Vista this week. Let me first say that I personally do not use Vista, even though I have a free copy of Vista because I am a developer. I mostly run suse, but I do know my way around a windows box.

In the last week, I have had two friends come to me with problems which they could not solve.

The first problem was with networking: Vista and XP weren't playing nice with eachother. File and Internet Sharing doesn't seem to do anything when you enable it. The solution to the problem was nasty, to say the least. It involved updating and changing software on both computers, hacking registry values, and opening a few crucial ports between the machines. The part about this that confuses me is that both XP and Vista were written by the same company! I could understand if there were problems between two different operating systems, written by two different companies; Microsoft has access to Windows XP, right? If I were trying to sell software that was supposed to be able to share files with XP, and you bought it, and it didn't work, would you keep it? I would return the software and demand a refund. It's like buying an edible rock from a street-salesman who mysteriously vanishes and leaves you wishing you could regain your $200.

The inability to install firefox. Do you think....do you think that Microsoft did this on purpose? Well, the solution involved deleting files, ending processes, and clicking that stupid continue confirmation box like 50 times. It was fun in the same way that slamming your face into a cement wall is fun. I've done them both, but I only did one of them on purpose. Can you guess which?

As a sidenote, I do have a dual boot system for those few things that you can only do on Windows - sigh - like a few select video games. For some reason, when I boot windows, it comes up with an error message entitled "error": "The selected action could not be performed." There is no error number, no clue as to which dll or executable blew it this time, just the vague error message. And then, the dubious OK button. I don't think it's OK, and so I don't want to click it, but the X in the corner is grayed out, so windows forces me to conform to its aberrancy every time I run it.

I used to try to remember how to fix all my windows wtfs, and then I learned that masterful solution, the end-all to all Windows problems: insert the Suse disk and seek nirvana.

Busing our way to bankrupcy: whatever happened to capitalism?

I lived in Guatemala for two years as a missionary for the LDS church. During that time, my means of travel was mostly on buses like the one below. This didn't bother me at all; I enjoyed riding on the buses. I enjoyed being among the people, and feeling like I was one of them. I enjoyed talking to them as I rode with them. I couldn't find my own decent picture (or one I took) of one of the buses, so I borrowed this one from the web:

My first ride in one of these buses scared me and made me quite sick. It wasn't quite like the public transit I have used in my home town of Salt Lake City. First of all, the bus does not have air conditioning or a heater; it is either very cold or very hot inside. Secondly, the buses are much more crowded. I couldn't believe how many people they had fit into our bus. I thought there was no way they could possibly squeeze more people on, but we kept stopping, picking up people standing on the side of the road. Finally, the bus driver seemed bent on driving like a maniac. On the curvy mountain roads of Guatemala, my head started to spin as we raced past other buses. Later, it donned on me that the drivers go so fast to get in front of the other buses. It's simple capitalism to get to the passengers before the competitors. Over the two years, I became accustomed to the Guatemalan bus system.

Upon my return to the states, I again began using the buses as my primary means of transportation. I was rather unenchanted with their approach to transportation. Mass transit in Utah is unreliable, uncourteous, and overall quite disappointing.

There follows a table of my gripes with the Utah Transit Authority and the accompanying solutions as determined by hard-working Guatemalan bus drivers.

UTA	Guatemala
UTA buses arrive late to the stop. If you say you're going to be at the stop at a given time, I expect you to be there at that time or within 3 minutes of it.	Guatemalan buses do not have scheduled route times. They travel as quickly as possible to each destination. Whoever's waiting on the side of the road gets on the bus.
UTA buses arrive early to the stop, then leave early. I can't tell you how many times I have watched the bus pull away from the stop, and I have looked at the time and noticed they are two minutes early. Those two minutes mean the difference between getting somewhere on time and standing around waiting for a half hour. If they are going to have a schedule, they should be stringent about leaving neither before nor after the scheduled times.	Since Guatemalan buses don't have schedules, they can't leave early. However, since the buses are owned privately, they run a little bit more often. Also, if you are close enough to see the bus, and you wave your arms a little, it will wait for you.
UTA bike racks: 2 bikes, and that's all. If the rack is full, you can wait for the next bus or ride your bike wherever you're going. The bus can have two dudes on it, each of which has a bike, and be completely empty besides that, and you'll be refused entrance, even though there is plenty of room for your bike	Guatemalan buses carry things on top. You can carry live chickens, bicycles, luggage, desks, or anything else with you on the bus.
Next stop in fifteen miles. There are literally buses that don't have stops for fifteen miles. That's great if you don't want to stop in between, but if you do, you're just out of luck. Or, if you are standing on the road somewhere in between, and one of those buses goes by, you're not getting on it.	Buses in Guatemala don't have stops. They stop when you wave your arm at them. They let you off when you yell "BAJA!" and they do it all very quickly. Guatemalan buses get places quickly, even though they make lots of stops.
About half the bus drivers are old dudes who drive like 4.2 mph the whole time. Cars are passing you like you're standing still, and the driver is going so slow that a little jog would be faster.	Capitalism drives these guys to fly. If you get a reputation of being slow, you lose business. If you pass the other buses and get more customers, the other guy loses business. Buses are fast in Guatemala, not slow.
The UTA is funded by taxes and by stealing money from college students. That's right, every student at the University of Utah pays upwards of $60 each semester straight to the UTA. It's disguised as a "transportation supplementary fee" or something, and written on a big list of fees, so most students don't know about it. Whether you ride the bus every day or never, the fee is the same. Whether the bus is completely empty or completely full, it still runs every route. It is poorly managed and seems a little bit too far away from capitalism for my liking.	In Guatemala, every person on the bus pays the same price, and if no one is on the bus, the bus makes no money. It is completely capitalistic, and the prices are reasonable, since you have someone to compete with. The system is very well done.

Basically, my conclusion is that buses in Guatemala are motivated by a true return, while buses in Utah are a leech on society. It might pose a problem for some people if the bus system in Utah were completely capitalistic like the one in Guatemala, but I think that if the bus were more reliable and reasonable, many more people would ride it, especially with today's gas prices. This reminds me of the way the government controls the space program and purposefully stints the privatization of the space industry. The government doesn't have any business regulating the way we live our lives. Its true purpose is to protect us from ills and menacing entities, not to run empty buses through our towns and waste all our money.

Why Windows is so expensive

Today I think I finally understood why Windows is so expensive. A few people have suggested that it is superior to other operating systems, and well worth the price.

So for some stuff at work, I needed my windows logon to be something other than "Administrator," and so I created a new user "nsmith" with administrator priveleges. Here's what Windows did in response:

1. The Administrator user disappeared. I can no longer log on as Administrator.

2. I lost all the stuff that was on my desktop. I could see the desktop folder from the Administrator, but not access it.

3. Every file the Administrator user ever created has become read only. So, all the code I was writing cannot be modified. Yes, I could copy everything into a different part of the hard drive, but by then I would be wasting 100+ GB of space.

Here was my solution:

1. Uncheck the read-only box on all folders in my entire hard drive. As soon as you close the properties dialog and open it again, they are read only again. If you have the properties window open and the box unchecked, you can delete files, but only if you do so one by one. You cannot modify them.

2. Attempt to access my hard drive using cygwin. I could not start cygwin because I was not allowed to write into the folder where the logs are stored!

3. Ask everyone at the lab if they know how to fix the problem. They don't.

4. Dig around in microsoft's documentation for an hour or two. No luck.

5. Dig around in the properties folders for a few hours of various folders. No luck.

And finally,

6. Open the properties page for my hard drive, find a place in the securities tab where I can change the owner of the files, and change it to my new user.

7. Wait for twenty minutes while windows changes the permissions of every file.

8. Attempt to access files. Files are read only and belong to Administrator.

hmm...

9. Insert Suse, Ubuntu, or any other Linux CD

10. Move on with my life!

So, that's probably why Windows costs so much. The same thing could have been fixed quickly and easily with a few calls to chmod and chown, but that has to be done in a terminal. Windows is so expensive because it's so easy to use!

Confusing the matter

Isn't it interesting that, over 50 years after Rosa Park's refusal to give up her seat on a bus, racism is still rampant in nearly every college today?

I went to a scholarship fair a few weeks ago at my school. I wasn't surprised that almost all of the scholarships that were available had nothing to do with merit or acheivement. If you are a Latin woman studying engineering, you have many more scholarship options than a white male in the same program. I have nothing against women or latins, but I do not have anything against men or white people either, so why the selectivity? It seems like the only applicable gauge of scholarship worthiness should be acheivement and personal merit. Otherwise, a very gifted student with a high potential might not get financial help which I believe he deserves more than a less gifted student. As a consequence, his potential might actually be lowered, since he will have to devote a larger chunk of time to earning money to buy food, instead of the academic pursuits which might be of more use to him - and society! - in the long run.

Of course, many people will refute my claims with arguments that it is more difficult for a black man to get into college than for a white man, or that there are less women in the engineering students than males, so the University must provide means for these "minorities" to have an "equal" opportunity. I wonder, isn't it racist to make blanket statements about a race, like "it is harder for black men to get into college"? Is it sexist to say that less women choose to study engineering? Is it convenient for you to call it sexist, or is it convenient for you to call it equality? Terminology aside, it's no secret that high school is free (and ridiculously easy) everywhere in our entire country. Any student who does well in high school is showing his merit as a student. Any student has the opportunity to do well. Students with bad grades chose to get bad grades. So, I believe it is immoral to give scholarships based on race or gender, since anyone capable of graduating from college is also capable of graduating from high school. The only pre-requisite to doing well in high school is the ability to read.

My ideal college wouldn't include any information about "minorities" in their recruitment information. On the "about" page at the university where I study, a prominent section of the page is devoted to "Student Demographics." Why would I care how many kids at my school are from India, and how many are from California? I don't care. Some day a school somewhere will get a clue, and their recruitment information will be something closer to, "We only recruit students whose current acheivements match our high level of excellence." I would rather study in a school where every student is qualified to study in a university, even if they are all of the same race, than a place where stupidity abounds, but there is a nice distribution between gender and ethnicity.

Maybe I'll write more on this later, but for now, content yourselves with two articles by Thomas Sowell: Supreme Farce and The New "Yellow Peril"

First post

I'm just sitting doing computer vision homework in the lab, and of course I am sick of doing homework so I found a distraction. That's about it for now. More later!