Virtual Illusions

I updated the page on Amatsu-Mikaboshi in my efforts to increase the quality and completeness of the pages on the Shinto/Japanese kami.

Uncategorized

At lunch, among six logically minded non-theists, we had a discussion on the three omnis (omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent). I enjoy these discussions and I haven’t had one in a while.

This discussion really centered on the idea of omnipotence and whether it really means all powerful or if actually just means really powerful. Ultimately it comes down to the question of whether an omnipotent being/force can do logically inconsistent things.

I argued that for omnipotence to mean all powerful, logical inconsistency must be possible. My co-worker’s argument was that since he couldn’t imagine a square circle or divergent realities between different perceptive agents within a logically consistent framework, therefore omnipotence didn’t include the ability to create logically inconsistency.

Phrased that way, which of course is not exactly how he phrased it, it is clearly an argument from personal incredulity. An argument from personal incredulity is logical fallacy it is sometimes called an argument by lack of imagination.

Of course it was a fruitless discussion because any of these sorts of discussions are ultimately about the meaning of words. To me the idea of omnipotence means the ability to do all things not merely things which are humanly conceivable. The limitation of human conception becomes considerable when dealing with concepts of the infinite.

Unless there is way to break the premise or definition problem on what omnipotence means it is no different that people saying “Is to”, “Is not”, etc. ad infinitum and calling it fruitful discussion.

But it remains an entertaining way to spend a lunch.

Philosophy/Religion

So it looks like I’ve been neglecting this blog so recently after having made an effor to make regular posts. In actuallity that might be correct but I haven’t been ignoring the website just the blog part and since updating both parts tends to the pull from the same pool of time…

I’ve updated and expanded:

• Amaterasu
• Susanoo
• Tsukuyomi
• Izanagi
• Izanami

I’m also working on a page about the Nephilim which I hope will be clean and complete enough to post soon.

On the gaming front I really want to give SotC a run in a mostly unmodifed form to see how works as a whole before I strip it for parts. To that end I’m considering a Nephilim Song 1924 (although a late ’30s with the rise of the Nazi’s would also be good). However although history hasn’t diverged in 1924 between Nephilim Song and real history, magic does exist in Nephilim Song and SotC doesn’t really cover magic very well.

Based on what’s out there on the Internet I’ve put together a rough sketech of a SotC magic system that works within the constraints of the Nephilim Song meta-physics.

Gaming, Kami

A recent blog meme is something along the lines of ten things I’ve done you probably haven’t. I find this difficult because I rarely think anything interesting happens in my life. But I figure I’ll give it a try. For this definition of “you”, I’ll be using average American, I don’t know how that correlates with people who read this blog.

1. Explored the archtypical ruins of the Aztec and Mayans (Tikal and Machu Picchu)
2. Lived a 18 months in foreign countries (Guatamala, Equador and Peru, six months in each).
3. I was denied baptism by the Catholic Church (not sure it counts as doing something, but I’m listing it.).
4. Wrote my own role playing game.
5. Rolled a car over and crawled away.
6. Been thanked by name on a message board as someone announced they were an atheist.
7. Run a webserver out of my house since 1996.
8. Worked with a database with over 1 billion rows.
9. Lost 45 pounds (I’m up 10 pounds from that now, but still).
10. Got a letter to the editor published in the Washington Post.

Life

I recently received an offensive and wildly inaccurate email about immigration. I took the time to respond to it rather than ignore it and thought I’d share it with my close person friend the Internet.

The following email was forwarded to me (formatting was scrambled but this is my bet guess of its intended format):

This is a subject close to my heart. Do you know that we have adult students at the school where I teach who are not US citizens and who get the PELL grant, which is a federal grant (no pay back required) plus other federal grants to go to school? One student from the Dominican Republic told me that she didn’t want me to find a job for her after she finished my program, because she was getting housing from our housing
department and she was getting PELL grant which paid for her total tuition and books, plus money left over. She was looking into WAIT which gives students a CREDIT CARD for gas to come to school, and into CARIBE which is a special program for immigrants and it pays for child care and all sorts of needs while they go to school or training. The one student I just mentioned told me she was not going to be a US citizen because she plans to return to the Dominican Republic someday and that she “loves HER country.” I asked her if she felt guilty taking what the US is giving her and then not even bothering to become a citizen and she told me that it doesn’t bother her, because that is what the money is there for!

I asked the CARIBE administration about their program and if you ARE a US citizen, you don’t qualify for their program. And all the while, I am working a full day, my son-in-law works more than 60 hours a week, and everyone in my family works and pays for our education.

Something is wrong here. … Right?

I am sorry but after hearing they want to sing the National Anthem in Spanish - enough is enough. Nowhere did they sing it in Italian, Polish, Irish (Celtic), German or any other language because of immigration. It was written by Francis Scott Key and should be sung word for word the way it was written The news broadcasts even gave the translation — not even close.

Sorry if this offends anyone but this is MY COUNTRY - IF IT IS YOUR COUNTRY SPEAK UP — please pass this along.

I am not against immigration — just come through like everyone else. Get a sponsor; have a place to lay your head; have a job; pay your taxes and live by the rules –AND LEARN THE LANGUAGE as all other immigrants have in the past — and GOD BLESS AMERICA!

PART OF THE PROBLEM

Think about this: If you don’t want to forward this for fear of offending someone — YOU’RE PART OF THE PROBLEM! It is Time for America to Speak up

If you agree — pass this along, if you don’t agree — delete it!

Yep, I passed it on !

Since writing my response I also researched Pell grants and confirmed they require legal status, congruent with my belief that the immigrant in question has refugee status. Also keep in mind that the PELL grant caps out at about $5k/year so no one is really sitting pretty on a Pell grant. Also a Pell grant only applies to educational costs.

Although it probably needs more polish, this is my response (I feel like I need some phrases in all caps to scream back):

Someone who disagrees should not silently delete this, they should respond and enter into a dialog. Of course most of the facts of this idealogical screed are unverifiable by intent, but we can discover some things.

According to the Internet Caribe stands for Career Recruitment and Instruction in Basic English. So when the author (whoever that is) screams that immigrants should learn the language, this is a program to do exactly that. As it happens it is only available to immigrants who have been given refuge or asylum status. So it isn’t surprising that this person would like to return to their country if they could do so safely.

So to be clear this “horrible” person described in the screed is not an illegal immigrant but actually a legal immigrant here under refugee or asylum status. So when they say they are all for legal immigration they are lying.

The refugee status explains the access to the pell grants and all the other assistance granted a refugee to this country. Many of these programs trigger negative consequences for the recipient if they start
making money or are not sufficiently a full time student. I do not know if that applies in this case because I don’t think I can trust as unbiased most of the information provided.

Are you aware that as part of our foreign policy each year the federal government assists students from all over the world to come to the united states and become educated in American schools. We don’t do this out of the goodness of our heart. We do it so that they return to their country and spread our culture or at the very least a tolerance of American attitudes.

My sister-in-law is one of them and because of the program they can not return to the United States for any length of time for another six months despite the fact that she married my brother and now have a child who is a U.S. citizen.

As for singing the National Anthem in Spanish, I am proud of them. I am glad that someone believes that the anthem isn’t a hollow symbol but is meaningful enough in their lives that they would like to make it part of themselves.

For a symbol to have meaning it needs to periodically be reinvented. Jimi Hendrix reinvented that very same symbol while on acid in the ’60s. Someone is making the effort to make a symbol of America accessible to more people. They are doing America a boon, not a disservice.

By the way it was translated into German in 1861, Yiddish in the 1940’s as well as French, Samoan and Latin. Francis Scott Key wrote it as a poem and he had nothing to do with turning it into a song (the tune is a British drinking song). It wasn’t our national anthem until 1931 and can’t even be construed as a defacto anthem until 1916 at the earliest. Things change, that isn’t always bad.

Immigration is a complicated issue. Recent studies in Virginia indicated that immigrant entrepreneurship ended up generating millions of dollars of revenue in excess of the cost of services to immigrants.

Our immigration system is fundamentally broken, the defacto compromise that has been brokered over the years is that if you make it into the country and keep your head down and work low wage jobs we will turn out heads and provide opportunities to your children.

Recently it has been suggested that we need to normalize immigration. This includes expelling people who arrived in the United States before their first memory, kids who arrived here before their third birthday and are now graduating high school or college. This is their cultural home and they’ve never known anything else.

However even if it was just, expelling 12,000,000 people is logistically impossible in any reasonable time frame. If you did expel that many people we don’t have spare capable workforce to replace them. I don’t mean that business would have to pay more, I’m all for that, I mean the actual physical people with minimal physical and social skills (keep in mind they are replacing people who may not speak English, so I do mean minimal) do not exist.

I do take offense at the email, I don’t think it is anything more than undisguised bigotry. This may be your country but it is mine as well and I’d prefer a rational policy towards immigration that deals with the actual needs and pressures on this country rather than some idealogical kick out every one who isn’t a “real” American for some value of “American.”

Culture, Justice, Politics

So the problem is you have wordpress installed and you want to respond to multiple domain names, but you don’t have a complete list of domain names which the user may use. In other words you wnat wordpress to work with *.domainname.tld. If you do nothing you will get an error like the following.

Warning: main(/etc/wordpress/config-hostname.domainname.tld.php) [function.main]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /etc/wordpress/wp-config.php on line 6

Fatal error: main() [function.require]: Failed opening required '/etc/wordpress/config-hostname.domainname.tld.php' (include_path='.:/usr/share/php:/usr/local/share/php/php-openid-1.2.3/') in /etc/wordpress/wp-config.php on line

One way to get this working is to edit wp-config.php which should be in the root of you wordpress directory. There is a line:

require_once('/etc/wordpress/config-'.strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']).’.php’);

Which loads a config file based on the url the clients entered which is fine if you’ve been absolutely consistent in using or not using a hostname when talking about your domain (and no one as added or removed one over the years without asking). Assuming that isn’t true you would like to accept www.doaminname.tld, domainname.tld, actualhostname.domainname.tld, etc. You can create a bunch of symbolic links, or if you only have one website on ther server you can simply change the above line to:

require_once('/etc/wordpress/config-www.domainname.tld.php');

That should use the same config file regardless of what url the user used.

Tech

My mother has a large collection of photos that she likes to keep organized by date and such. The software she uses to do the organization doesn’t have any sort of auto-categorization features. Mostly I’m talking about breaking out photo uploads by date of photo. Something really fancy might do some clustering on the time stamps to break out different events for a cluster of photos in the morning and another for a second cluster in the evening.

All that aside I’ve been thinking about writing her something, but it would have to be a mom ui, not my preferred command line interface. Which is all a long winded intro so I can post a link I don’t want to lose track of that points to a discussion covering the currently available windows solutions so I can check if any of them do a good enough job already.

http://lifehacker.com/345277/namexif-batch-renames-digital-photos-by-date

Tech

I put up the files for zombieFind and documented the process of getting it working. Check it out at:

zombieFind

Tech

This is what it is like everytime I visit my parents:

Christmas Back Home

Holiday, Life

I was discussing prisons over lunch with some co-workers and came up with two ideas which seem interesting and certainly couldn’t hurt our prison problem.

First as a qualification to become a warden at a prison an applicant would need to have served some time in jail. Selecting and finding these people may be difficult, ideally they would have served and then gone on to become contributing members of society. But they would have to choose to step back into a prison, which seems like it would difficult even if you are doing it on the other side of the cell door. My suggestions below may make this easier.

Having wardens with prisoner experience would make sure the agency keeping order in prisons remembered that the prisoners were human and still had the potential for a successful civilized life. They would also know what parts are the most de-humanizing and thus stand in the way of a rehabilitation process. They’d also know how prison culture works and may be able to nudge it without heavy handed techniques.

The second and much larger change would be create a matriculation process. Create a number of levels, each independently housed, which a prisoner would be expected to move through during their time in jail. Each level affording more freedoms and demanding more responsibility from the prisoner. At each level the prisoner is incentivized to get to the next level and greater freedoms and privacy, but also have the risk of stepping out of line and being sent back down to a previous level.

Getting to higher levels isn’t just about not breaking the rules it is about conforming to what we expect out of a contributing member of middle class society. There are social, moral linguistic and even dress norms that are expected to be adhered to at least in public. I’m not suggesting that prisoners have to become something they aren’t but they need to become adept at donning the guise or respectability which will serve them in job interviews and holding down jobs once they are released.

With luck, at higher levels the prison environment should be very similar to a boarding school. Prisoners should be attending classes, either in tradecraft or a two or four year degree. At some point prisoners should function in a “cash” economy (in quotes because actual cash may or may not be in the hands of prisoners).

They should hold down and get paid for jobs which can be accomplished from prison. A call center comes immediately to mind (though anything being outsourced can likely be done by prisoners who can’t leave the prison yet). Once they are paid for their work, they will be gradually ramped up to paying for going market rates for room and board and they will start being able to make choices on how to spend their money on different accommodations and benefits (pay more for a larger room, a better dinner occasionally or save it for later uses).

Prisoners aren’t just released all at once, there would be levels where the prisoner is aided in finding employment outside the prison and is allowed to travel on their own to these jobs but is expected to return to the facility for room and board. There would a be a number of slow incremental steps weening the prisoner away from the facility until they could stand productively on their own two feet (even then the prison system should always stand prepared to lend aid and advice when requested/required).

Which such a matriculation system a judge could assign a prisoner to a particular level as they are sentenced for a major crime and when they finish the program their sentence has been served. This may take longer or shorter depending on whether the prisoner embraces or fights the process.

It was an interesting enough idea that I thought I’d present it to the Internet.

This would serve well for prisoners who committed crimes primarily due to their economic or cultural roots, however, a true sociopath or drug kingpin would easily pass through the system without necessarily changing or growing. I’m not sure how the system should be adjusted to handle this.

Related Items:

• 1% Incarceration
• Death Penalty

Culture, Justice