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A bad time to be using Windows?

admin — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 21:03:40 +0000

This may be a coincidence but I have seen four independent Windows virus infections this year when I had seen none since about 2004. What’s going on?

Swindon – The hub of UK space activity.

admin — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 06:42:22 +0000

I have nothing against Swindon. I love their crazy round-abouts and the Oasis leisure center but I can’t help feeling that the announcement on April 1st that the UK Space Agency will be based in Swindon is a jape…

From wikipedia… The UK Space Agency is a United Kingdom government agency responsible for its space programme. It was established on 1 April 2010 to replace the British National Space Centre and took over responsibility for government policy and key budgets for space and representing the UK in all negotiations on space matters. It “[brings] together all UK civil space activities under one single management”. It is initially operating from the existing BNSC headquarters in Swindon.

Animal Translate – Google April Fools?

admin — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 15:10:18 +0000

Birthday present from Tatsuya and Kazue

admin — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 22:56:10 +0000

My very own 4-bit computer… Thanks guys

Amazing potty video (via Kung-Fu Grippe)

admin — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:00:42 +0000

Miley Cyrus Really Really Can’t Sing

admin — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 15:45:20 +0000

I don’t know much about Miley Cyrus except that she is the daughter of dodgy 90s country rock singer Bill-Ray… Oh and she is famous as the star of something called Hannah Montanna? I heard about this video on No Agenda and had trouble tracking it down as there appears to be a possibly over-dubbed version that comes to the top of a search for “Miley Cyrus today show”.

This is the one that litterally made be cry with laughter on a London bus:

And this is the one that comes first in the search results:

Clearly one of them has been tampered with…

Check box that functions as an IQ test

admin — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:05:03 +0000

Look at the description of what this check box does. It is a double negative – would be clearer if they said ‘tick this box to receive these details’. I daren’t read the privacy policy. My brain might hurt.

Confuse-a-cat Ltd

admin — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:34:01 +0000

Hmmm. I seem to have confused my Leopard into thinking that NeoOffice is actually Firefox. Or that Firefox is actually NeoOffice. Eitherway, a reboot fixed it

Confuse-a-cat

Wilhelm Reich – A proper nutcase

admin — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 22:59:38 +0000

I was listening to No Agenda (podcast) the other day and they touched on the topic of Wilhelm Reich. This guy sounds like a proper pseudo-science nutcase who blessed the world with such concepts as Orgone energy and cloudbusting. Not so much ’standing on the shoulders of giants’ as chucking out the mass of accumulated knowledge and starting again, making it up as you go along. Genius or crackpot?

The Wikipedia artical is well worth a read.

Campbell’s Wager

admin — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 22:49:24 +0000

Watching University Challenge on the Beeb tonight, there was a question about Pascal’s Wager which reminded me of an almost exactly opposite philosophy I have been developing over the last twelve years or so. Pascal’s posed that even though the existance of God cannot be disproved, a person should believe in God as doing so has everything to gain and nothing to lose. Bascially, a life times false belief in a God is better than eternal damnation. After a weekly debate with some Jehovas wittnesses that bothered me every Sunday when I was studying for my final exams, I was frustrated by the fact that every argument I made about life the universe and everything was followed by a ‘God made it that way’ sort of argument. I finally got to the point of asking ‘if the existance of everything in the universe is because God put it there, what put God there in the first place?’. There was no answer to this and they gave up admitting that you just ‘have to have faith’. Ha!

Since that early success of logic over dogma, I have come up with what I am going to call “Campbell’s Wager”. That is: if there are so many religions in the world with incongruent beliefs (mono/polytheistic etc. etc.) then they cannot all be right… but they can all be wrong. In the absence of evidence to support one religion over another, the odds are that they are all wrong.

And that is why I am a happy atheist

Blaise Pascal (left), James Campbell (right)