Blog: Articles from July 2007

Windows Vista does not like the adapter that I bought with my dance mat, so I ordered a new adapter online (thanks Laura!) that’s better. It arrived last week and I got my dance mat working, which means I can now play StepMania! Plus I bought an RF modulator to hook up my computer to the big TV upstairs (because the TV is too old and has no S-video port!). This morning I went to play some StepMania and discovered that I had to move my dance mat closer to the TV. This is not because I have poor eyesight (which I do) or I couldn’t hear the music (which I could). No, it’s because where the mat was originally positioned, if I jumped my head would hit the ceiling fan. h34r:

So much for that. I’m tall, and the ceiling is low, which means I need to be more careful!

In other news, I‘ve started tinkering with OOP in PHP. I’ve often had trouble grasping OOP, but I finally wrapped my head around some aspects thanks to PHP 101: The Bear Necessities. Several concepts continue to elude me, so I‘m hoping that I never have to use them. I’ll figure it all out one day… .

My code benefits from this change. It’s good timing too, since the PHP group has announced that it will be ending support for PHP 4 at the end of this year. So I’m packing my bags and moving to PHP 5! This means that I‘ve stopped working on VSNS Lemon 3.3. Instead, I’m coding VSNS Lemon 4.0! It will be recoded from scratch using OOP to make it faster and more flexible. Most of it’s done except for the layout and a few little functions. VSNS Lemon 4 will have all of the features I promised in v3.3 too except probably AJAX editing, which I’m increasingly feeling is a bad idea. However, there will be a primitive search engine, live comment previews, and a few other goodies in there.

Vanilla Guestbook will get a PHP 5 makeover sometime after. It is less of a priority since my guestbook isn’t an essential part of my site, whereas this blog is basically the only new content on this site. Maybe that will change someday. But not today! I must go to bed.

Many people, especially religious pundits who want to knock “cold, logical science” down a few notches, claim that science is as faith-based as religion. I would tend to agree. Those who disagree argue that science relies on painstaking experimental method and proof to back up its theories—which is true, but only to a certain extent. When it comes to the things that science just can’t determine (or at least hasn’t determined yet), we depend utterly on faith.

A specific example of why scientists are illogical, however, is evident: the afterlife (or lack thereof). When you die, if any of the major religions are correct, you proceed to some sort of afterlife. If you‘re an atheist, you believe (mmm, sounds faith-based) that there is no afterlife. Or at least, there’s no afterlife with God in it.

But here’s the clincher: if a “God” does exist, then you are screwed—at least according to those religions again, since the non-believer infidels usually enjoy a fate such as being “consigned to suffer the flames of Hell for all eternity”. Nicer religions stick them in limbo or some such dimension like that. What it comes down to is: believers prosper, non-believers don‘t.

So, logically, doesn’t it make more sense to believe in God? Hedge your bets. If God doesn’t exist, like you initially thought, but you’ve pretended God exists all your life, then you lose nothing. You don’t exist anymore, so you won’t be around to figure that out. On the other hand, if God does exist, you lose nothing, because you’ve spent your life believing in God. Win-win.

I realize that this oversimplifies it. You do have a good probability of choosing the wrong religion in particular; I‘m not saying that this is a no-risk prospect. I also realize that this is not an original idea (I believe that I first heard it from Pascal, but his mind was warped by others anyway).

So those scientists who are atheists claim that they don’t believe in God because there’s no proof God exists—it’s not logical to believe in something without proof, eh? There’s some religious scientists too, who think science and religion can co-exist peacefully, and I tend to agree with them. It is not a one or the other type of argument, and I wish that polarized extremists would stop attempting to reduce it down to such.

Life just isn’t that simple. Deal with it.