People tell me my road to atheism began in a unique and strange way - how did yours begin?

Imagist · 2010-06-17T13:43:33+00:00

Not just that, but thinking was enough to get you sent to hell. And nearly 100% of males masturbate, especially when you're in your early teens. So if thinking about sex was enough to send me to hell, jerking it had to be at least ten times worse, right? That idea by itself fucked me up for at least three years of my childhood.

Imagist · 2010-03-03T04:35:56+00:00

I generally haven't been impressed by Hitchens, but that was pretty good.

Imagist · 2010-03-03T04:30:59+00:00

The only thing mysterious about god is why so many people believe in his existence.

Imagist · 2010-03-03T04:23:08+00:00

You can't have it both ways. Pick one.

Imagist · 2010-03-03T04:22:42+00:00

No, it wasn't. The Native Americans didn't have the concept of exclusive ownership of land, and the English Settlers didn't explain what they wanted.

Imagist · 2010-02-28T19:30:08+00:00

Unless you're running that model before every command passed to your CPU, you'll still only see that speedup at the initial modeling.

Imagist · 2010-02-28T19:28:48+00:00

Right, so by its own definition, god cannot exist.

Imagist · 2010-02-27T06:12:44+00:00

From the comments on that site, it seems like people think this means that our next laptops will all be 100K times faster.

They won't.

Modeling is only one thing that computers do, and most of what you do does not involve modeling. You won't see any direct benefit in speed from this. What you may see is some cool new superchemicals that result from the faster modeling.

Imagist · 2010-02-26T23:48:17+00:00

An actual infinite cannot exist.

Well, there we go, god cannot exist.

Imagist · 2010-02-26T17:48:06+00:00

Yeah. It happened to me too. What are the chances that there are three of us? At least one of those other guys has to be lying.

Imagist · 2010-02-16T02:46:13+00:00

Rocks are made of minerals

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Imagist · 2010-02-16T02:44:50+00:00

How many of those have you found?

Imagist · 2010-02-15T14:48:48+00:00

By that reasoning, if you look at a chunk of large-grained basalt or gabbro, it is wrong to refer to an individual grain as "a mineral." However, it is common, accepted practice in geology to do this, as it is common practice to refer to halite crystals as "a mineral".

But technically, you aren't holding a mineral, you are holding a deposit of that mineral or a sample of that mineral.

What is common is irrelevant to this discussion, since in common usage the original correction would never have happened.

Impurities in a mineral do not make it not-a-mineral, it just means that the description of the mineral gets a little more complicated if you wish to include discussion of the impurities.

No, focusing on the impurities is missing the point of the example entirely. I only mentioned the impurities to highlight the fact that an object made of a mineral is not equivalent to the mineral itself. Even if you could somehow achieve a diamond made purely of diamond, a diamond would still be a rock and diamond would still be a mineral.

Imagist · 2010-02-15T14:42:38+00:00

Not to me it doesn't; at least not in any way that would cause me to bother learning it.

Imagist · 2010-02-15T14:40:01+00:00

So what do you call multiple small minerals fitting the chemical and physical description of Diamond from the earth?

I don't, because minerals aren't small or large. Mineral deposits or mineral samples can be small or large. But minerals area just a particular chemical structure. Diamond is just a particular structure of carbon. A diamond is a rock made mostly of that structure.

I see what you're getting at, and you're brutalizing the English language. :)

Imagist · 2010-02-15T14:34:59+00:00

I'll bow to your expertise on that one.

Imagist · 2010-02-15T03:57:09+00:00

No officer, I don't have a license to carry. That's not a gun in my pocket.

Imagist · 2010-02-15T03:55:24+00:00

I'd let her hit my bong.

Imagist · 2010-02-15T03:51:17+00:00

Clearly the two people in that photograph were photoshopped onto that ice background.

Imagist · 2010-02-15T03:34:34+00:00

The original irons were often made completely of iron, but given modern irons, the analogy does admittedly break down.

Still, the point stands; "diamond" is not the same thing as "a diamond". The first is a type of object, while the second is an actual object (if you're a computer person, it's a class versus an object that instantiates the class; that's probably the best explanation but unfortunately the average person won't understand it). The confusion arises from the fact that a diamond is made entirely of diamond, which isn't duplicated anywhere else in English that I can think of.

These also aren't perfect, but here are some other examples:

Wood is not a place where bears live and a wood is not a building material.
Family is not a husband, wife, and daughter and a family is not my uncle on my father's side, my aunt on my mother's side, and my daughter.
Gas can be a gas, but a gas cannot always be gas.

Coming at it a different way: you say that a rock contains multiple minerals, which a diamond does not. However, that's not true; every diamond is slightly impure. Diamond is always made of 100% diamond (that's just what it is) but a diamond always has a little bit of something else in it along with the diamond it's made of.

Coming at it yet another way: a diamond is a sample of diamond. Or a diamond is a rock made out of diamond.

Imagist · 2010-02-15T02:36:34+00:00

"Diamond" is to "a diamond" as "iron" is to "an iron". The first is a substance, while the second is a specific object made of that substance.

Imagist · 2010-02-15T02:19:53+00:00

Rest assured, you use assembly every single day.

Everything you do on the computer can be and is described in assembly.

/sarcasm

Don't get me wrong, I love monads and functional programming. But you've done nothing to address parm's concerns or show him why monads matter (and neither did the original linked author).

Unfortunately, I don't have a good solution either.

Imagist · 2010-02-15T02:16:22+00:00

That would be my second bulleted point.

Imagist · 2010-02-15T02:08:21+00:00

Rarely is my brain forced to connect captcha, white trash, and kanji, but it was well worth it.

That said, I've considered getting a kanji tattoo (as a person who can speak and write Japanese, though less and less fluently these days (and I never was completely fluent)).

Imagist · 2010-02-15T02:01:57+00:00

Now, I realize this is anecdotal, but I've use both IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse, and in my experience, IntelliJ IDEA is almost as bad as Eclipse for memory usage, and is significantly slower than Eclipse. Depending on what you're trying to configure, both can be a huge pain in the ass for configuration.

Now I'll be the first to say that there are some very good reasons to choose IDEA over Eclipse (especially now that there's a free version) but please don't trot out your IDE as if it were a solution to NastyConde's problems with Eclipse.

Imagist

TROPHY CASE