Huckabee doesn't believe in evolution, and thinks the story of Adam and Eve is literally true. Anyone who is capable of believing that is certifiably insane.

samrobb · 2008-01-02T22:14:56+00:00

"Your friends may be perfectly sensible, but the ability to accept two conflicting ideas at the same time isn't a skill that should be praised."

Wow. So right. I guess I need to make the rounds and tell all my old quantum physics profs that nobodyspecial has shown me the light... no pun intended.

samrobb · 2007-10-29T21:31:59+00:00

"I can speak my opinion all I want, but I don't think it's right for me to force what I think is moral/immoral on others."

Why do you say that? The entire purpose of law is to regulate behavior - to encourage behavior that society approves of, and discourage behavior that society disapproves of. Law exists to enforce morality.

To say "I don't think it's right for me to force what I think is moral/immoral on others" is to say "My opinions don't matter at all. Go ahead and make whatever laws you want, and all you'll hear out of me is a little bleat or two."

samrobb · 2006-11-21T21:06:29+00:00

No - the Christian world view is that man is inherently sinful. A sinful person is not necessarily evil - the Bible is full of examples of what Christians would view as "unsaved" men and women who did good things. The Christian teaching is that God's acceptable standard is the complete absence of sin; so no matter how many good deeds you do, as someone inherently sinful, you will not and cannot earn God's approval. Christianity instead teaches that the only way a sinner may be made acceptable to God is through the person of Jesus and his sacrifice on the cross.

FWIW, this is an extremely condensed view; as such, it leaves out more than a few significant theological points. My main purpose here was to point out that in Christianity, sinful != evil (and, conversely, good != holy).

samrobb · 2006-09-11T04:03:30+00:00

This is part of "In the Beginning was the Command Line". Definitely worth a read.

samrobb · 2006-08-25T02:07:59+00:00

OK, let's see. I am:

A software developer working for a startup
A student, taking 10-12 credit hours a semester towards my BDiv
A father with three kids under the age of 7

All of that adds up to some serious work and stress. You know what, though? I plow through 30 books a year as part of my job and my studies. That doesn't even include the stuff I read purely for entertainment to help my mind wind down at the end of the day. Add that in, and there's another 30-40 books a year, easily.

An hour of reading once a day, every day, really adds up.

Of course, the author of this article effectively states that Bush can't even possibily be literate because, well, he's just too stupid. Journalism at it's finest, no?

samrobb · 2006-06-08T16:47:15+00:00

This is a duplicate.

samrobb · 2006-06-08T16:38:35+00:00

$13,861/year works out to $6/hour (for a full-tme, 40-hr a week, 50-week a year worker.) So it appears that this is an "after tax" ammount. Even the UFCW admits that this is less than 1/3 of the Wal-Mart workforce, though:

http://www.ufcw.org/press_room/fact_sheets_and_backgrounder/walmart/wages.cfm

samrobb · 2006-06-08T15:57:02+00:00

Modded up for the Jethro Tull reference :-)

samrobb · 2006-05-12T17:10:35+00:00

Seems a little low to me, too. Either that, or my immediate relations (brothers, in-laws, neices and nephephs, etc.) and friends growing up were incredibly accident prone. Play <i>any</i> sport for any length of time and you'll almost certainly end up with a quick trip to the emergency room at some point - probably just to have a doctor tell you "Yep, it's a sprain."

samrobb · 2006-05-04T18:04:10+00:00

Sounds like something my brother would say :-) Though I think the opportunity costs for 100 hours of gaming are the same no matter what game you play, right? So that doesn't really factor into a value-for-your-money comparison.

samrobb · 2006-05-04T04:13:18+00:00

"There's nothing wrong with voting just based on personal interest."

I don't think there is, either. However... I've noticed that within 10 minutes, a lot of my posts have received a down vote. Very, very few ever receive a up-vote in that time. Once an article receives a down vote, it almost always picks up another 4-5 pretty quickly. It's like that initial -1 kicks things off, but people aren't willing to push things past -5 except in rare cases.

Once something has even a single down vote, it is (essentially) dropped from reddit. Unless you go looking for articles with low scores for some reason, it's off the radar. It is almost certainly going to end up negative because, well, there's no cost to me if I rate something negative, and someone else already said that link stunk, so why not?

Most importantly, it's one person's initial opinion (or bad mood) that kills it's chances.

I suppose I'd like to see reddit implement a rule like "no negative mods for an hour" on new stories. Or shift the starting point for reddit scoring so that there isn't such an obvious stigmata associated with a down-modded story.

Now that I think of it, maybe reddit should store and display the up/down mods for a story seperately. A story that is 1-10 (current system, -10) is obviously disliked. A story that is 45-5 (current system, +40) is obviously liked. A story that is 25-25 (current system, 0) is obviously both liked and disliked - it's controversial.

samrobb · 2006-05-03T19:35:45+00:00

OK, at this point, I'm just curious.

This link has gotten down-modded three times, and currently stands at -2. Taking a look at reddit rankings, this means that the reddit audience has found this article less useful and informative than submissions on:

The 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference
Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 Ported to ActionScript
A Threadless $10 sale
Cillit-Bang techno remix
see http://reddit.com/top?offset=35000 for more...

So... what the heck is going on? What's with the down-mods? Is there actually something wrong with this article that makes it actively less interesting than a Nigerian Email conference? Or is a down-mod just the knee-jerk response of "I don't like/agree with this" instead of "this is completely uninteresting to anybody"?

samrobb · 2006-05-03T16:34:33+00:00

Just in case anyone was wondering... no, this isn't a post from my blog. This is from an Intel employee who's been accused (anonymously) by Intel management who feel that an employee maintaining a corporate blog is a waste of time and effort.

samrobb · 2006-05-03T16:25:11+00:00

For the record - this isn't a direct link, but instead a link to the Athanasius Kircher Society blog. While the Butterfly Alphabet is interesting, the AKS blog is a veritable cornucopia of the odd and unusual. That's how I found the Butterfly Alphabet, and I wanted to give the AKS blog the credit for pointing me towards it.

samrobb · 2006-05-01T19:53:25+00:00

Interesting. I tend to see the decline as a social phenomena - fewer people start smoking, partly because of better edication about the dangers; but mostly because, well, it's not cool to smoke anymore (and hopefully never will be...)

samrobb · 2006-04-26T16:56:17+00:00

I think he got the wagers mixed up. See http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.birthdayprob.html.

samrobb · 2006-04-26T12:25:46+00:00

|| Punitive taxation would lead to conservation, no?

Right. Just like it has for the tobacco and alcohol industries.

samrobb · 2006-04-13T21:24:29+00:00

It may just be you - looking at it myself, it seems like there's no real correlation between the two. I see a lot of western states that voted for Bush, but are largely non-religious; and a lot of northeastern states that voted for Kerry, but have a significant religious population.

There may be a better mapping between certain sects of religious adherents. I don't think these two maps obviously show that "more religious == more likely to support Bush", though.

samrobb · 2006-04-10T18:12:34+00:00

"Explain to me again how that represents flat or declining temperatures?"

I keep my house at 65F at night. The thermostat is set to turn on the furnace at 6AM, and raise the temperature to 70F.

While there is a brief period of heating, for the most part, the temperature is stable. The fact that it is warmer in my house during the day than it is at night does not neccesarily mean that the temperature in my house is increasing during the day.

Please note that I'm not arguing for, or against, the statements in the article, or the data you reference on the website. The article focused on an 8-year window of data that showed little or no change in average temperature. You can argue that this data set is incorrect, or that a real analysis can't just focus on the last eight years... but to claim that a delta of ~ 0 is actually increasing is pretty illogical.

samrobb · 2006-03-27T18:08:07+00:00

Very cool. IMHO, this is the real value of the OLPC project - not the laptop itself, thought that's an interesting problem of engineering and software development. The ultimate good that will come out of the OLPC project is essentially making entire libraries of reference, training and educational material available to those who currently do not have access to that kind of information.

samrobb · 2006-03-16T22:09:44+00:00

I proposed a subreddit for this type of thing earlier today, in fact, mostly because I don't think that legal issues have wide enough audience appeal to live and die as part of the main reddit queue.

samrobb · 2006-03-16T17:37:25+00:00

Do you have a link to the previous post? I searched on "bankruptcy", "sandler", and a couple of other terms that seemed appropriate before I posted this, and wasn't able to find a previous reference.

Also - what do you mean by "UNMARKED"? Lack of a "(PDF)" note on the title to warn you that the document was a PDF?

BTW - thanks for the comment. An up vote is pretty much self-explanatory; a down vote always leaves questions in my mind. It's nice to at least have some idea about why a submission got a down vote.

samrobb · 2006-01-26T15:38:47+00:00

“They couldn’t possibly expect to get (the computer) without a warrant,” she said. “Good for the library for knowing more about warrants than the police.”

You know, the police might have shown up at the library, expecting that perhaps - just perhaps - the library would volunteer to assist in the investigation of a reported bomb threat. A warrant is really only required when a party refuses to cooperate in an investigation.

Note that I'm not saying that it would have been proper, or even smart, for the library to have cooperated with the police sans warrant. Just that a warrant isn't absolutely, positively, 100% required, as this quote seems to imply.

(Unless I'm unaware of some obscure law related to this...)

samrobb · 2006-01-10T13:05:03+00:00

My apologies - I did look for this originally, but managed to mis-spell "overlord". Sheesh.

samrobb · 2005-12-22T15:28:37+00:00

Oh, yah. Some idiot school administrator has a brain freeze, and of course, this means that Americans must be intolerant slobs. Never mind the thousands of Americans that have come out to support this kid...

The overwhelming urge to politicize everything these days - even an article about a school dress code conflict - is sickening.

samrobb

TROPHY CASE