I demand that somebody actually make this movie.

Incredibly awesome refutation of the Blind Watchmaker 'argument'

The intro is kind of long. But holy crap is this cool.

This guy is about 5% hilarious and 95% fucktarded. However, he seems to be successful at getting his shit published and promoted on TV and over radio. This elevates his status from "obnoxious but harmless asshole" to "serious impediment to advancement of the human race." As a proponent of the advancement of humanity, it is my sincere hope that persons falling into the latter category find clever means of accidentally pruning themselves from the human family tree. Perhaps he could get hit by a car? It would be all the funnier if the driver is a woman. Of course, he would undoubtedly point out that this is proof positive that all women should be banned from driving, because obviously, that one couldn't control the vehicle and caused a fatal accident. Oh, wait, no he wouldn't, because he would be dead.

And it probably wouldn't be an accident, but merely an example of excellent driving that exemplifies the automobile's secondary usage model, e.g., a tool for imparting monumental impulse energies to the ribcages of one's enemies.

AHAHAHAHAHAAHA


I find this all the more amusing for the fact that exactly four-fifths of the people I know by the name "Shadow" are complete utter douchebags.

Oddly, the other one is pretty fucking cool, but hey, that's statistics for you.

As of this afternoon, I have two shiny new gold teeth.

They feel quite strange.

link stolen from vanbeast:

HOLY. FUCKING. SHIT.

Root canal is tomorrow. Endodontist does not provide nitrous, so I'll be on triazolam again. I'm a lot more nervous going into this than the last time. The last time I didn't know what it was. I've always considered purging memories to be somewhat analogous to suicide - absolutely unthinkable. So I find the thought of willingly taking a medicine that causes amnesia a bit scary and quite a lot distasteful.

On the other hand, I also find a bit distasteful and quite a lot scary the thought of being very lucid and aware while someone rips to shreds a bundle of active nerve fibers of unrivaled sensitivity with a tiny hand drill.

Tags: god was a terrible engineer
Current Music: Espers - Black is the Color
Current Mood: opiated

A ridiculously small Turing machine has been proven Universal (and someone won a $25,000 prize in the process)

Much of the theoretical treatment of this discovery is beyond my comprehension as I have never undertaken any studies of cellular automata. However, the important bits I grasp. And what I grasp is that this might possibly be one of the more important discoveries of the coming century, though I doubt it will see practical application for a decade or more. When we accidentally unleash doom on us all build amazing things from autonomous nanotechnological robots, this will probably be the computational model they end up using.

With what little of the description I understand, I could probably in only thirty minutes, right now, with the components I have in my basement desk drawer, build a universal computer that, given enough memory, could perform any possible computation, and therefore, run any program ever written, assuming you were willing to take the time to write the base layer code. Granted, that would probably involve hand-coding a few terabytes if you wanted to run something like Windows. But the fact that it is possible is amazing.

More amazing, is that this machine, which can be so briefly and completely described, is probably capable of running the holy grail of operating systems - a human mind. All that is required is that you take the time to write the emulation layer. Too bad that would probably take you a few million years :) So have no fear that this will make any near-term headway toward answering any great questions of the Mind: Soul vs. Program variety.

Old Glory Insurance

Best insurance policy ever.

I got calls from the dentist and the endodontist today. After summing the revised estimates from each, it looks like this is going to cost me about $3800 out of pocket instead of $1800 as originally thought.

That number would be a whole lot less depressing if I actually had that much money. Since I don't, I get to both drain my savings account down to zero and go on a monthly financial fuckage schedule payment plan. Hurray! Another bill!