521–530 of 539 posts
https://www.amazon.com/Difficult-Conversations-Discuss-What-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you like about it?
Well, it is a hard read, but in short - it offers a curious interpretation of your personal experience of the world, suggesting that you are the only being, reality is manufactured by you (or in other words, you and reality are the same thing), that mind is something external to you, that you were not born but rather you were and the idea of you being born was a construct that you conjured later. Also, the living sta…
First and foremost: The Bible. Not the watered down "everybody goes to heaven" theology that most people subscribe to, but rather an evidence based approach that uses the Bible to interpret itself as it was designed to do. Secondarily, this book saved my life in the sense that it helped me understand my depression, a clinical depression so deep that my psychologist had never seen such a thing previously: Get Out of Y…
I agree. I would also add continues to change my life. I read the Bible every day and am constantly amazed how relevant ancient wisdom is today. In recent years teaching from Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament taught me how to understand my work. There is such a lot of nonsense on HN and the net about success. So many are pursuing a pipe dream. Below helped me to work hard, enjoy what I have, and not be concerned abou…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're not driving far enough to the conclusion of what you're saying. If there is no afterlife, then eventually there will be nobody left in the world, in which case nothing that anyone had ever done or said would have really mattered.
I completely disagree. Scan this thread for my thought experiment about the pill that wipes your memory back to the state it was 30 days ago. I haven't overlooked the point you are making. > If there is no afterlife, then eventually there will be nobody left in the world, Whether or not there is an afterlife, it is inevitable that the earth will become uninhabitable. It seems far more likely that humans will die off…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that there is a huge difference between literal and dynamic translations of the text. That being said, I was recommended "New Age Bible Versions" before and was not impressed, I read through the first several chapters and compared the accusations to the other translations actual text and found most of them to be blatantly false. False as in, her charts said the other translations used words they did not use.…
I'll have to look into that further. I wasn't aware of there being discrepancies between her book and the sources she used. I wonder if it's related to some of the newer translations being constantly updated. For example, the NKJV has been revised since it was originally printed. Here's a short example showing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zD_r3_aCvsw Another book similar to Riplinger's is "Corruptions in the N…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not a bible expert, but the old testament in particular has books that are effectively 'legal' (rather than theological) in nature. The kind of thing you quote here is likely from that kind of book (and typically the kind of thing quoted in TV shows needing to show how 'silly are the things Christians believe in'). If you put it in that context, then it's not that much sillier than stuff like "Owning a pet lobster in…
>it's not that much sillier than stuff like "Owning a pet lobster in Maine is illegal when that lobster is pregnant" kind of laws. (true law btw) I agree about the old testament, but this is only silly when taken out of context. Long before I got into network security I worked in the Maine Lobster industry shoveling bait (which is half-rotten fish mixed with salt, lobsters love it!) into buckets and weighing/storing…
Yes, this is kinda the point. It's the Chesterton's Fence argument. Before mocking something which appears silly, try to find out the reason it was created in the first place. Maybe there was good reason, maybe that reason still holds, maybe it doesn't.
Cellular Automata Machines: A New Environment for Modeling Published April 1987 by MIT Press. ISBN: 9780262200608. http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cellular-automata-machines http://books.google.com/books?id=HBlJzrBKUTEC&printsec=front... http://www.researchgate.net/publication/44522568_Cellular_au... https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM...
On this tangent, I want to recommend the Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker. Rucker did a lot of work on cellular automata in his day.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14468834
Rudy Rucker writes about his CAM-6 in the CelLab manual:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/chap5.html
Computer science is still so new that many of the people at the cutting edge have come from other fields. Though Toffoli holds degrees in physics and computer science, Bennett's Ph.D. is in physical chemistry. And twenty-nine year old Margolus is still a graduate student in physics, his dissertation delayed by the work of inventing, with Toffoli, the CAM-6 Cellular Automaton Machine.
After watching the CAM in operation at Margolus's office, I am sure the thing will be a hit. Just as the Moog synthesizer changed the sound of music, cellular automata will change the look of video.
I tell this to Toffoli and Margolus, and they look unconcerned. What they care most deeply about is science, about Edward Fredkin's vision of explaining the world in terms of cellular automata and information mechanics. Margolus talks about computer hackers, and how a successful program is called “a good hack.” As the unbelievably bizarre cellular automata images flash by on his screen, Margolus leans back in his chair and smiles slyly. And then he tells me his conception of the world we live in.
“The universe is a good hack.”
[...]
Margolus and Toffoli's CAM-6 board was finally coming into production around then, and I got the Department to order one. The company making the boards was Systems Concepts of San Francisco; I think they cost $1500. We put our order in, and I started phoning Systems Concepts up and asking them when I was going to get my board. By then I'd gotten a copy of Margolus and Toffoli's book, Cellular Automata Machines, and I was itching to start playing with the board. And still it didn't come. Finally I told System Concepts that SJSU was going to have to cancel the purchase order. The next week they sent the board. By now it was August, 1987.
The packaging of the board was kind of incredible. It came naked, all by itself, in a plastic bag in a small box of styrofoam peanuts. No cables, no software, no documentation. Just a three inch by twelve inch rectangle of plastic—actually two rectangles one on top of the other—completely covered with computer chips. There were two sockets at one end. I called Systems Concepts again, and they sent me a few pages of documentation. You were supposed to put a cable running your graphics card's output into the CAM-6 board, and then plug your monitor cable into the CAM-6's other socket. No, Systems Concepts didn't have any cables, they were waiting for a special kind of cable from Asia. So Steve Ware, one of the SJSU Math&CS Department techs, made me a cable. All I needed then was the software to drive the board, and as soon as I phoned Toffoli he sent me a copy.
Starting to write programs for the CAM-6 took a little bit of time because the language it uses is Forth. This is an offbeat computer language that uses reverse Polish notation. Once you get used to it, Forth is very clean and nice, but it makes you worry about things you shouldn't really have to worry about. But, hey, if I needed to know Forth to see cellular automata, then by God I'd know Forth. I picked it up fast and spent the next four or five months hacking the CAM-6.
The big turning point came in October, when I was invited to Hackers 3.0, the 1987 edition of the great annual Hackers' conference held at a camp near Saratoga, CA. I got invited thanks to James Blinn, a graphics wizard who also happens to be a fan of my science fiction books. As a relative novice to computing, I felt a little diffident showing up at Hackers, but everyone there was really nice. It was like, “Come on in! The more the merrier! We're having fun, yeeeeee-haw!”
I brought my AT along with the CAM-6 in it, and did demos all night long. People were blown away by the images, though not too many of them sounded like they were ready to a) cough up $1500, b) beg Systems Concepts for delivery, and c) learn Forth in order to use a CAM-6 themselves. A bunch of the hackers made me take the board out of my computer and let them look at it. Not knowing too much about hardware, I'd imagined all along that the CAM-6 had some special processors on it. But the hackers informed me that all it really had was a few latches and a lot of fast RAM memory chips.
"Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" - sort of like an autobiography of Richard Feynman but from recordings of some conversations. I'm a scientist and this resonated with me a lot. "The Game" - very immature and sophomoric book. I was given this book by an acquaintance who was also geeky like me. I was painfully shy of girls until grad school, and this book gave me much needed confidence to talk to the opposite gender.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're not driving far enough to the conclusion of what you're saying. If there is no afterlife, then eventually there will be nobody left in the world, in which case nothing that anyone had ever done or said would have really mattered.
I completely disagree. Scan this thread for my thought experiment about the pill that wipes your memory back to the state it was 30 days ago. I haven't overlooked the point you are making. > If there is no afterlife, then eventually there will be nobody left in the world, Whether or not there is an afterlife, it is inevitable that the earth will become uninhabitable. It seems far more likely that humans will die off…
Also, all animals have souls according to Catholicism, and so do plants. The distinct thing about humans is that we have rational souls. But the soul is the form of any living thing.
Torturing an animal is wrong because it does harm to God's creation for no legitimate purpose. A theist doesn't have any problem explaining this - it's the atheist/materialist who does.
"Mastering Regular Expressions" by Jeffrey Friedl. While reading Dreamweaver 3 Bible I became intrigued by the Find And Replace options which included regular expressions. At the end of the chapter was a reference to Friel's classic and I found a copy in a local London library. That led me to "Programming Perl" by Larry Wall and the beginning of my career as a developer. The O'Reilly Perl collection is unsurpassed to…
This was my first real "programming" book, and my first O'Reilly animal book and it changed the course of my life in a real and tangible sense. I read it cover to cover and did all off the exercises, and then moved right on to Learning Perl. To this day, I watch people struggle with regexes or dismiss them, but I'm done finding what they were looking for before they can finish complaining.