I don’t think there’s any mainstream religion out there that doesn’t assume the existence of a soul, nor that there is anyone out there who would need the explanation of what is meant by it. Still, I’d say that the soul is nothing but a fancy name for consciousness. And that definitely doesn’t have to be something breathed into us by some higher spiritual existence. Even less does it have to be something unique to humans, however painful that is to certain people to hear. Remember that only a few hundred years ago (and I daresay deep within even today), “civilized people” still refused to consider others humans just because the color of their skin.
A nuke
I had a really interesting dream this morning. I’ll only describe one part of it that I clearly remember.
A button was pressed, and a nuke was launched from a space station at New York City. My point of view stuck with the bomb, so “I” zoomed across the atmosphere, and then above the NYC harbor, the warhead went boom. First I saw a tiny fireball, then the next thing I knew was that the shockwave pushed me not only under the water, but I could see the seabed get torn up around me as the blast evaporated everything. Then my viewpoint started riding the waves across the city, and I could see buildings getting blown apart around me…
It was quite the experience.
That ugly catch 22
There’s a reason that arguments about religion often turn into completely meaningless battles of empty words. Such arguments in general are based on standard logic and follow the scientific method of drawing conclusions based on a set of axioms and trying to find inconsistencies.
The big problem of a scientist trying to argue with a strictly religious Christian, for example, on an equal footing is that their sets of axioms are different. Sure, they are same for the most of it – one could maybe even say that the scientific axioms are a subset of the Christian ones. That is because the first and foremost axiom of a strict Christian is the absoluteness of God.
On religion
I don’t think that following a religion is a bad thing, that it should be reprimanded, nor do I claim that there are no higher spiritual beings. Religion is a very important pillar of culture and civilization, a fundamental part of mankind’s history. It provides an explanation for things there used to be no clear explanation for before, and while I don’t think that this function of it is as relevant in this age and day when science is capable of explaining phenomenon without involving divine beings (and please note that William of Ockham, the man who’s famous for stating that all theories should be kept as simple as possible, was a Christian monk), I also think that religion can and does provide moral guidelines and a spiritual respite, something that science can not and is not supposed to do.
Packets, part 2
Yesterday I thought I sorted out the problem with assembling complete responses from packets, but that was quickly disproved by weird errors showing up only in certain situations, but in those situations always.
Packets
There was this one problem I just couldn’t tackle until now while coding my KC helper app: packets kept getting messed up. The whole design is based on opening a general-purpose socket with Python, and listening to all traffic to and from the KC game server. I based my code on a sniffer script I found on the net, tweaking it to my needs.
Drivebuntu
The other day I wrote about how much trouble Microsoft has with branding, inspired by their last blunder with SkyOne Drive. But the other day as I was looking around in my system (running Ubuntu), I realized that MS might’ve just made the matters worse by picking the name One Drive.
9001 hours in Paint GIMP
KanColle Bridge 0.7
KanColle Bridge is a smart little Python app for your Ubuntu that can help you with a bunch of stuff related to your beloved shipdaughters. Work in progress.
