Saddam Hussein Executed

I don’t know how I feel about this. Obviously I have no sympathy for Saddam Hussein. He got what he deserved and he probably deserved much worse. Still, it is brutal and bizarre and it doesn’t quite sit right with me.

http://www.lolife.com/michaelcycle.mov

This is a QuickTime movie of the first robot I made with my new Lego Mindstorms NXT system that I got for Christmas. (My lovely wife knows I like to get fun toys for Christmas, bless her.)

The overall mobility and steerability are pretty good on this. The center of gravity is a little too high. If I mounted the controller underneath it would be more stable. Right now it just avoids obstacles with the subsonic and touch sensors.

…and the outtakes…

This always pisses me off. It pisses me off no matter who is offended. In this case it is the Catholics who are offended over the play “The Pope and the Witch”.

You don’t have to like or approve of all art. Nor do you have to attribute evil motives to those that perform art. Art is art. It is meant to provoke emotions, not all of them positive. Art portrays sometimes unpopular or offensive things. It gets people thinking and talking.

It is fact that the history of the Catholic church is sordid. There were very corrupt and evil times in its long history. It seems to me a fairly compelling topic, artistically speaking, to play with the darker moments of the Catholic church. Obviously, the Catholic church has done a lot of good in the world, too.

It’s art. There is good art and bad art, there is offensive art and non-offensive art. These conversations are good and I do agree that the Catholic church protesteth too much over this play.

This is pretty funny.

Someone started this Blasphemy Challenge where people post to YouTube saying they deny the existence of the Holy Spirit, damning them to hell, I guess, according to some hack view of the Bible. I think it’s pretty funny. It’s like when I was like 8 years old and my friend Mark used to flip off God.

The creationists at Uncommon Descent are worried about this:

Spiritual matters aside, I want to draw attention to the potential psychological ramifications of committing such an act as the challenge requires. As long as the person remains an atheist (or at least a non-Christian), I see no problems. However, what if he or she were to come to believe later in life that Christianity is true and that he or she had committed a sin for which no forgiveness can be attained and for which the penalty is eternity in hell?

First of all, it’s pretty funny that they want to “leave spiritual matters aside” while they discuss eternal damnation. I guess he means that the person will be burdened with the knowledge that they are damned to hell no matter what they do.

But what I think is so ridiculous about this is that the very premise is that God is so petty that he would damn a person to hell for all eternity because of some words they said. To me it’s like if my son says “I hate you, Dad” (which he has never said). Do you think I would take my son seriously? Of course not, children say, think and believe dumb things sometime.

If there is a God, and he/she created the entire fucking universe, I am less than a child by comparison. Posting a video to freaking YouTube claiming there is no God would hardly offend such a being, unless, of course, he/she is a complete fuckwit.

The humanization of God is one of the things I object to the most strongly. Just imagine for a second the power necessary to transcend the universe, to create matter and energy, stars and galaxies and to be the master of everything, everywhere, ever. Are you gonna get pissed off at children who post that they don’t like you on the fucking Internet?

Come on…

Here’s a given: there will be governments and citizenry of other countries who we won’t like. There will be those who don’t like us, too. We will have enemies of various types, political, ideological, territorial. We can’t make everyone do exactly what we want. The very idea of democracy is the will of the people. Sometimes what the people want isn’t what we, the USA wants. Some people are downright crooks and bullies, too, don’t get me wrong. But we know, it’s a fact, we will live in a world with “enemies”.

So how do we deal with those enemies? We have diplomatic, economic, social and military tactics we can use. The Right always talks about how they won’t take military options off the table. Fine. In return we should never take diplomatic options off the table. As JFK said, we should never negotiate out of fear but neither should we fear to negotiate.

Why not talk to Iran? Why not talk to Syria? Talking isn’t promising anything. Options are not taken away. It’s talk. We have this retarded attitude that “strength” is my way or the highway. That’s bullshit. The best way to get rid of an enemy is to turn them into a friend.

Again, I’ll stress, there are, at times, regimes that can’t be legitimized by diplomatic actions. Iran does not fall into that category. Yeah, they hate us, so what? We gotta live in a world with them. I’m not afraid of that. We don’t have to be pussies. We can be tough assholes in the negotiation. But we should always be willing to talk.

Pseudoscience is embraced, it might be argued, in exact proportion as real science is misunderstood…Religions are often the state-protected nurseries of pseudoscience.

From The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan.

He goes on to say that religion need not be involved in the propagation of pseudoscience — it happens anyway, naturally, just based on the fact that we can’t know science if we are not taught science. It’s not innate knowledge. The subtitle of Sagan’s book quoted above is “Science as a candle in the dark.” This is the point that is so important and so rarely comprehended: science has given us SO much. We live like kings because of science. The scientific method is one of the greatest inventions of humankind and it has paid ridiculous rewards to humanity.

Science is not the answer to everything but nor is it ever our enemy.

Carl Sagan Blog-a-thon

Free Josh Wolf

This kid is not a danger to society. At least he should be out on bail. Someone has a gigantic stick up their ass about this case and they should be fired. This is ridiculous.

First of all, let me say that I think everyone can and should celebrate their holidays however they want. Go nuts.

Second, to me, Christmas is a secular holiday. Rudolf, Santa, Christmas trees and Christmas lights, presents — all of it is fun stuff for children and adults alike and it has largely nothing to do with Christ. Even when I was a devote Christian (ok, maybe “devote” is a bit of an over-statement) I did not really associate Christmas with Christ. Even then I saw it as a bunch of mythology. Humans have celebrated the return of the sun for millennia. Traditions where you get together with family are fun whatever the reason.

Like I said, if Christmas is some big, profound religious holiday for you, fine, great, whatever. For most of us, it’s not. It’s secular.

I don’t believe in Christ, but I take no offense if people say Merry Christmas or have Christmas trees or any of that crap. I think most non-Christians have no problem with any of that. So the so-called war on christmas is a non-issue, in my opinion.

In fact, I think the secularization of Christmas is a good thing. Who says you can’t put little colored lights on your house if you are a pagan, a Jew or an atheist? In fact, I have a Christmas tree and little colors lights on my house this year because my son thinks they are pretty.

So Christians, go nuts. Merry Christmas us until you are blue in the face. The rest of us, enjoy yourself in whatever manner you choose. To me, it’s all about the pretty little colors lights.

You don’t have to be Christian to acknowledge that the Bible is the source of America’s values…America derives its laws from its Constitution. It derives its values from the Bible.

That’s our retarded friend Dennis Prager again.

This is completely false. For some reason, Christians and Jews like to believe that is the case. It’s not. The Bible is full of all sorts of stuff, some of which is the antithesis of American values. Some of it is in accordance with American values. You can basically get the Bible to agree with anything you want if you look hard enough.

I agree that historically speaking, our founders were theists. I also believe that they could foresee the troubles that were unavoidable if the government they formed was denominational.

America is made up of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindu, atheists and lots of other ideological bents. It is not helpful nor correct to claim that Christians and Jews embody the moral basis for America.

We live in a secular country. This was a brilliant idea by our founders. We shouldn’t let guys like Pranger trick us into thinking otherwise. I am a moral person and my values are shared by most Americans. I do not believe in the Bible. This is not a contradiction.