Bodoni Tag

I'm not sure how I found this, but I did: Bodoni Tag

A cool little story, with a twist at the end.

The Evangelical Atheist - God is a Dick

The Evangelical Atheist - God is a Dick

The "God is a Dick" series by I Am over at the Evangelical Atheist is one of the best critiques of the depravity of the biblical "god" I've read.

Everyone, no matter what their delusion (or "faith", if that makes you feel better), should read these stories, if only to realise that children need to be protected from the filth in the bible.

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.

I've just been looking for material on The Shadow. I've managed to find a fan novelisation of the 1994 film staring Alec Baldwin which looks promising and I already have a copy Dark Horse's book featuring The Ghost and The Shadow. I'm going to try and find the film on DVD as it was absolutely fantastic and I much prefer it to the original mythos (what I know of it).

Aggravation

I've just finished the second assignment for the data mining course I'm doing this semester. The one thing I got out of it is a strong desire to avoid R.

There is something about that language and system that just rubs me the wrong way. I have no idea how the type system (such as it is) works and any such understanding would be of little value (as it is dynamic anyway). I cannot understand how someone managed to write a libxml wrapper that is harder to use than the C library.

To make matters a little better, the ESS (Emacs Speaks Statistics) package makes editing R code and interacting with the R interpreter easy, though emacs started acting peculiarly after I installed it.

All in all, R is (in my opinion, by my standards and for my purposes) something to be avoided.

A List of Things to be Read

There are a few topics that I'm interested in reading about, but haven't got any books on yet. This post will serve as a repository of these topics (so that I don't forget about any of them).

• Conceptual Mathematics: A First Introduction to Categories is on category theory (Jon Cohen recommended it to me)
• Sets for Mathematics does sets (of which I have only an informal understanding)

More will be added as the need arises.

Yet Another Book Purchase or This Time, It's Maths

Recent Data Mining lectures have been looking at the Apriori Principle. The discussion of a set-theoretic framework within which to consider data mining (more specifically, market basket analysis) prompted me to have a look in the maths section of the Coop Bookshop for a book on the topic.

I came out with a copy of Introduction to Lattices and Order. What [little] I've read of it so far is very well written.

The bad news is that I need to get back into reading so that I can write the literature review and background sections of my thesis without screwing anything up or misrepresenting anything too badly. I have a feeling that it's going to be a long time before I finish up the 17 books I've got bookmarks in.

Pharyngula::Is this elitism?

Pharyngula::Is this elitism?
If so, I'm guilty too.

The Existance of Time

A while ago, I watched the annual Burton and Garran Hall public speaking competition. One of the speakers presented an argument that "the structure and perception of time are invalid." This post will describe the argument made (in more or less broad strokes as suit my purposes) and some objections to it.

The analysis of temporality and related phenomena has always been a mainstay of modal logic. The study of objects and their properties, on the other hand, is usually studied in first order logic or some other logic with quantification. The study of objects and their properties over time has yielded a number of logics and philosophies each of which has a different goal. Here we consider a fairly naive quantified temporal logic that is capable of considering non-existent objects (such as Sherlock Holmes and a flying pig).

If we consider such a logic, it becomes clear that the argument the speaker presented conflated two concepts:

• the existence of an objects; and
• the existence of a state (or set of states).

The former is a statement made of an object (that it exists), possibly indexed by some particular time, like "now" or "250 million years ago". The later is a statement made of a state, or set of states: an instant in time. That instants, or periods, of time are not objects ought to be obvious - objects are temporally located and have some degree of persistence and identity through time (though the exact nature of these properties may be disputed).

Thought I have not seen any other informal arguments against "time," I imagine that conflations and confusions might be common. This is, perhaps, an argument in favour of the adoption of a more formal approach...

Jane Austen

I've just started reading Mansfield Park by Jane Austen. I got an etext from the eBooks@Adelaide collection of free web books at the University of Adelaide Library.

It's a great resource for anyone interested in the classics (I've put their editions of Austen's and the Brontë sisters' books on my to-read queue).

Open Letter

Open Letter

An open letter to the Kansas School Board asking them to give "equal time" to Flying Spaghetti Monster-ism in their new science curriculum. They have numerous testimonials by persons qualified to make them (whereas Intelligent Design has none), lots of evidence (well, more then ID has anyway) and some truly inspirational art depicting Him and His Noodly Appendage.

RAmen.