drl2Blog

That Carl Sagan Autotune

Oct 052009

I have a limited tolerance for the current trend in running every sound byte in existence through an autotune filter. So when I first saw that somebody had spliced together some clips from Cosmos and set them to music, I was less than enthused; I listened anyway, and my initial impression was “Carl Sagan autotuned sounds like Kermit the Frog talking into a spinning fan.”

But the thing started popping up everywhere, so I gave it another listen. And another. And another. And then some more. I’m listening to it now.

So just in case anyone who frequents atheist-oriented blogs hasn’t seen it yet:

The sky calls to us
If we do not destroy ourselves
We will one day venture to the stars

A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise
A morning filled with 400 billion suns
The rising of the milky way

In the face of this reality, all the gods and spirits, myths and legends of mankind are nothing. And that’s a wonderful thought.

Happy International Blasphemy Day!

Atheism and Religion No Responses »

Sep 302009

Today while you’re singing Heresy Carols around your Blasphemy Tree and waiting for the arrival of Heathen Claus with his bag full of graven images, don’t forget to take the time to reflect that Bullshit is the Reason for the Season.

JesusYMCA

muhammed_cartoon

Why we speak out, inspirational edition

Atheism and Religion No Responses »

Sep 232009

Robert Green Ingersoll was a 19th century attorney, politician, and orator, and the best known proponent of agnosticism in an era when Americans would flock to public debates and lectures, and education and understanding had not yet become tools of the vile secularist lib’rul conspiracy. For a while now I’ve been meaning to learn more about his life and his writings, but this has been relegated to my “things to eventually get around to” list.

This morning, though, while blog-surfing on a slow day at work, I came across a bit of Ingersoll’s writing which I thought was important enough to share even though it’s already making the rounds via other blogs (you know, the kind people actually read!):

When I became convinced that the universe is natural-that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light, and all the bolts, and bars, and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world-not even in infinite space.

I was free-free to think, to express my thoughts-free to live to my own ideal-free to use all my faculties, all my senses-free to spread imagination’s wings-free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope-free to judge and determine for myself-free to reject all ignorant and cruel creeds, all the “inspired” books that savages have produced, and all the barbarous legends of the past-free from popes and priests-free from all the “called” and “set apart”-free from sanctified mistakes and holy lies-free from the fear of eternal pain-free from the winged monsters of the night-free from devils, ghosts, and gods.

For the first time I was free. There were no prohibited places in all the realms of thought-no air, no space, where fancy could not spread her painted wings-no chains for my limbs-no lashes for my back-no fires for my flesh-no master’s frown or threat-no following another’s steps-no need to bow, or cringe, or crawl, or utter lying words. I was free. I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously, faced all worlds.

And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love to all the heroes, the thinkers who gave their lives for the liberty of hand and brain-for the freedom of labor and thought-to those who proudly mounted scaffold’s stairs-to those whose flesh was scarred and torn-to those by fire consumed-to all the wise, the good, the brave of every land, whose thoughts and deeds have given freedom to the sons of men. And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they had held, and hold it high, that light might conquer darkness still.

Conservagelicals as village idiots

Atheism and Religion, Politics No Responses »

Sep 172009

Frank Schaeffer, whose recent article I talked about in my last post, showed up on Rachel Maddow’s show with this to say:

Why we speak out

Atheism and Religion, Politics No Responses »

Sep 142009

For those (and you know who you are!) who might opine that atheists should just shut up, or who might bring up the old canard that goes something like, “If you don’t believe in God, why are you so afraid of him?”, I offer, in reply, this article by Frank Schaeffer:

As a former Religious Right leader, who was raised (and home-schooled by my Evangelical-leader parents, Francis and Edith Schaeffer) in the movement, let me explain just why the ordinary rules of decency don’t apply to the right these days.

He goes on to talk about the home schooling and private Christian schooling movements that took off in the 50s:

In the early 1970s the evangelicals like my late father and James Dobson decided that the our society had fallen so far “away from God” and so far from “America’s Christian history” that it was time to metaphorically decamp to not just another country but to another planet:. In other words virtually unnoticed by the media and mainstream political operatives, a big chunk of American society seceded from the union in all but name.
[...]
Hating the USA became next to godliness.

He quotes evangelical leaders to reveal a theocratic agenda – non-Christians shouldn’t be allowed to vote in this supposed “covenanted Christian nation”, and “The Christian goal for the world is the universal development of Biblical theocratic republics, in which every area of life is redeemed and placed under the Lordship of Jesus Christ and the rule of God’s law.”

Whether the world wants it or not, one would assume, and even if said goal has to be achieved at gunpoint.

The fact of the matter is we now know what the experiment in raising children outside of the American mainstream means. It means that there’s a whole subculture within American culture that mistrusts facts precisely because they are facts. They glory an alternative view of not just politics but of reality.

Those damned facts must be tools of Satan, because they’re always rearing their ugly heads to contradict our faith.

Most chilling is Schaeffer’s insistence that this movement, though it has suffered a tremendous loss of political power in the last few years, is still going strong and working tirelessly to incrementally, gradually influence every aspect of our society.

There’s no arguing with such people and no winning against them using mere elections. They are not playing by American rules. Their idea of winning is not fair elections but Armageddon.

Got that? When we hell-bound militant godless heathen speak up about why we’re hell-bound militant godless heathen, it’s these people – and often their more moderate enablers – we’re railing against.

The hazards of multitasking

Gaming, Programming No Responses »

Aug 112009

Sunday afternoon I was writing some code on a work machine while logged into Lord of the Rings Online looking to get a group together to run some team-oriented in-game quests, and this usually involves just kind of hanging out for a while and pasting an occasional message into a “looking for group” type channel until something turns up.

I use a great little utility called Synergy to share a single keyboard and mouse across multiple machines; I can change which machine I’m interacting with by dragging the mouse pointer offscreen to make it jump to the other side. It also allows the cut-and-paste of text between boxes. This is a very convenient arrangement, but I’ve found an inherent danger: mis-pasting. When I compiled and ran the application I was working on, I was surprised to see the following:

Dangers of Multitasking

I really want to like Linux, but…

Technology No Responses »

Aug 062009

… every time I’ve installed it on a machine, it’s been a let-down.

I have an “old” (4-5 years) laptop (Athlon XP 2500 with 3 gig s of RAM, using the nVidia 440 series display, if that makes any difference) that’s been running its original Windows XP install since I bought it. For the most part it sits next the monitor for my main desktop PC and is used these days to watch DVDs or streaming video from Netflix or Hulu, or for some light web surfing now & then – tasks that it has always been adequate to perform.

So for whatever reason I got it into my head that it would be a good idea to take this perfectly functional machine and wipe it to install Linux. Though my success with various Linux incarnations of this open-source OS in the past has been, shall we say, limited – there always seemed to be some piece of hardware for which I couldn’t find adequate support, or some piece of software I wanted to be able to run, but couldn’t – I figured it wouldn’t hurt to take the plunge, because I could always re-install XP if it didn’t work.

So I grabbed the latest Ubuntu 9.04 release and it installed flawlessly. Installed a utility called Synergy to allow me to share mouse & keyboard across multiple machines, and it worked flawlessly once I set all the machines involved to fixed IP addresses, because the Linux and Windows boxes didn’t seem to want to recognize each others’ presence any other way.

Next I downloaded the Boxee media center, which I remembered reading on LifeHacker had support for streaming Netflix movies… what I didn’t remember, though, was that it only had this support on non-Linux platforms, and in fact there’s currently no way to view netflix streams on Linux at all except possibly through some kind of Windows virtual machine setup – which kind of defeats the purpose. Boxee crashed out to the desktop most of the time anyway.

Next I tried to watch Hulu, and it worked fine, except that with headphones plugged in, sound was coming through both the speakers and the headphones. I had to Google for a solution to this (ticking a checkbox in the sound control panel to enable automatic headphone detection), and this is a minor quibble, but it seems like something that should be set by default.

Sound problem resolved, I clicked “view full screen” on the Hulu page – and bye-bye browser window. So Hulu only works if I keep it running in a small window.

“Surely they’ve gotten DVD playback right,” I thought.

Not quite.

In order to watch pretty much any commercial DVD, I had to track down a quasi-legal driver to decrypt the contents. This is, of course, not at all the fault of the open source community, but rather of the greed of the film industry, but it’s still a stumbling block in the acceptance of an alternative desktop OS.

Decryption installed, I popped in a commercial CD, and was able to watch it right up to the FBI warning – at which point the player locked up. Several other DVDs did better – I didn’t watch them all the way through, but at least I could get into the movie itself and navigate around.

So, as has happened every time I’ve installed Linux, it’s just not up to the task for which I’d hoped to use it. I suppose it would be ideal if I needed an Apache server, but, for the moment, I don’t.

For my next trick, I’m going to grab the Windows 7 RTM through my employer’s MSDN subscription and see how that works on the old laptop. Most likely I’ll end up back on XP.

If the public health care option is too expensive…

Atheism and Religion, Politics No Responses »

Jul 292009

… it might be due at least in part to the need to cover the rising incidence of teen pregnancy and STDs under the auspices of the Bush/Republican/right-wing/holier-than-thou “abstinence only” sex education programs.

Yes, it seems that in 2005, just about the time when effects of the Bush-era policies of enforced ignorance might start to be seen, there was a sharp reversal of a long downward trend in the very kinds of teen issues that sex ed classes are supposed to help prevent:

According to the CDC, birth rates among teenagers aged 15 or older had been in decline since 1991 but are up sharply in more than half of American states since 2005. The study also revealed that the number of teenage females with syphilis has risen by nearly half after a significant decrease while a two-decade fall in the gonorrhea infection rate is being reversed. The number of Aids cases in adolescent boys has nearly doubled.

The report becomes more interesting when we take a look at where in the country the biggest upswings in these statistics have happened:

The CDC says that southern states, where there is often the greatest emphasis on abstinence and religion, tend to have the highest rates of teenage pregnancy and STDs.

Now of course correlation is not proof of causation. Just because teens seem more likely to have unprotected nookie in communities where “sex before marriage makes the baby Jesus cry” is deemed a superior alternative to… oh, let’s call it… “reality” – doesn’t mean they’re boinking in large numbers simply because they’re uninformed. But those who might tout the effectiveness or righteousness or whatever of the ignorance-only plan need to give us some evidence that it actually works, and based on this study, that’s clearly not the case.

“Oh”, one might argue, if one was an evangelical nutcase, “the problem is that our abstinence-only efforts aren’t widespread enough to counter the effects of our sinful society!” And, in fact, that’s exactly the argument being made against these statistics:

Kristi Hamrick, a spokeswoman for American Values, which describes itself as a supporter of traditional marriage and “against liberal education and cultural forces”, said the abstinence message is overwhelmed by a culture obsessed with sex.

If there was some truth to this statement, wouldn’t we expect to see significantly higher pregnancy and STD numbers outside Sarah Palin’s “real America”? You know, all those cities packed with them thar commie-lovin’ godless islamo-fascist America-hatin’ inneleck’shul libruls, those places where Christianity is illegal and gay sex is mandated by law and the president isn’t really a Kenyan spy bent on dictatorship?

Aren’t those the folks God is supposed to be punishing with AIDS?

It's Christmas in July!

Politics No Responses »

Jul 122009

One wingnut far-right radio personality/blogger has suggested that Sarah Palin may plan to form an independent conservative political party to “take this nation back from the liberals which now control both parties” (no, I’m not making that up), and the article has been linked to by Palin’s Facebook page and the web site of her political action committee.

If true, this is the first action Palin has taken on the public stage of which I wholeheartedly approve. Go for it, Sarah! The best thing you could possibly do for this country is to split off the batshit insane portion of the Republican party from the (considerably smaller) straitjacket-optional faction and let the BIP and the GOP bludgeon each other into political oblivion to give the rest of us more time to try to elect leaders with both brains and spines (a rare combination).

Right ways and wrong ways

Atheism and Religion, Politics No Responses »

Jul 102009

Right way to express disapproval of a culture, tradtion, religion, etc:
Orally or in writing in an appropriate venue, inviting discussion and criticism, and using the interplay as means to refine or revise your argument.

Wrong way:
Murder practitioners of the offending creed. Human beings can sink to some very low depths in the name of glorified tribalism, and the deliberate murder of a pregnant woman and her husband simply because you don’t like the implications of her clothing is a few fathoms down on that scale. (Not so bad as, for instance, killing and/or displacing millions through a misguided invasion of an entire country, just to pick a theoretical example, but a horrible crime nonetheless.)

Muslims are justified in their outrage, in this case, both over the crime itself and the tepid media response to it. They are correct in saying that had a Muslim attacked a member of some other ethnic or religious group, news tickers on every TV news network would have reported the killing over and over at the bottom of the screen during the 24 hour Michael Jackson coverage.

Based on recent history, though, it should be pointed out to the more radical among the Muslim community: justifiable outrage is not an excuse to riot in the streets. Do that and you’re just lending credence to the lunatic fringe that might be inclined to support this man’s actions. Do that and you continue to perpetuate a justifiable-outrage circle-jerk that will keep on begetting violence and distrust on both sides long after you’ve gone off to meet your version of the invisible sky wizard. (Besides, it’s not as if the guy drew a picture of Mohammed or something…)

I should also point out that this man’s vile actions and the seeming lack of western interest in said actions are in no way a repudiation or validation of your repressive, misogynistic traditions. Your head scarves and burqas are the symptoms of a belief system in which women are little more than property, subject to beatings and execution if they, willingly or not, step outside the narrow, puritanical set of behaviors you have defined for them.