Random thought of the day
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@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
@Zerosquare said in Random thought of the day:
@Atazhaia said in Random thought of the day:
@kazitor said in Random thought of the day:
If a TV aerial fell off, how effective an antenna would the remaining cable from the roof serve as?
Considering that this is pretty much what happened to me this winter: Very uneffective. Works about as well as not having any aerial/cable plugged into the TV at all.
Yes. Antenna cables are not supposed to act as antennas. Otherwise they'd gather/generate interference (depending on whether you're emitting or receiving).
So if you strip the insulation off the antenna cable, would it then become an antenna itself?
Essentially. A poor one that's literally just a thin wire, but it will work better than with the insulation indeed.
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@djls45 Actually, our emotions are a prime form of illogic. As is general intelligence. That's even mutable - high and genuine stress can lower your intelligence (and raise your illogicity) by one standard deviation. If we were modeled after God to the mental degree you're talking about, that means he can have illogical things like selfishness, pride, stress-based unintelligence, and so forth. Meanwhile, you are one to talk about destroying possibility of scientific inquiry, communication, and knowledge when you are the one in this discussion championing religion.
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@pie_flavor said in Random thought of the day:
@djls45 Actually, our emotions are a prime form of illogic. As is general intelligence. That's even mutable - high and genuine stress can lower your intelligence (and raise your illogicity) by one standard deviation.
"Here's a bunch of stuff that is also illogical!"
Soooo..... what then? Are you trying to say that we can't reason logically anyways?
I'm not sure what you're trying to get at here.If we were modeled after God to the mental degree you're talking about, that means he can have illogical things like selfishness, pride, stress-based unintelligence, and so forth.
No, you forget that we are limited and corrupted beings. A model is only partly like the thing that it models. Even if we were not corrupted, we are still finite. Only something limited in the way we are can have these sorts of flaws, because modelling something infinite into a finite scale is going to lose a lot in the reduction.
Meanwhile, you are one to talk about destroying possibility of scientific inquiry, communication, and knowledge when you are the one in this discussion championing religion.
No, I'm championing theism, which is just fine with scientific inquiry, communication, and knowledge. In fact, as a general philosophy of existence, theism offers arguments in favor of each of those.
I'm also curious as to what exactly you mean by religion.
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@pie_flavor said in Random thought of the day:
If we were modeled after God to the mental degree you're talking about, that means he can have illogical things like selfishness, pride, stress-based unintelligence, and so forth.
It would be easier to explain how that's not the case if Christians didn't also claim He's omnipotent.
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@Gąska It would be easy to explain a lot of things if Christians didn't claim the contrary </
>Anyway, for those not keeping up: this started with an innocuous joke by @Gąska back at post 970, until @djls45 celebrated the 210th post with some much-needed proselytism 13 days later.
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Why do they call them deadlines if they move around all the time?
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@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
What are we supposed to think of that level of fickleness?
The same thing I think of all the pedo-clowns in the Vatican.
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@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
@Jaloopa said in Random thought of the day:
@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
If our sense of fairness, justice, and goodness is ultimately based in and on God's (and I believe it is), then trying to say that God is unjust or unfair (and implying by that that He is bad) is a logically untenable position to hold
If an idea of God is unjust or unfair (which I believe yours is) then trying to say our sense of fairness, justice, and goodness is ultimately based in and on it is a logically untenable position to hold
What do you mean by unjust or unfair? What standard are you using to make that judgment?
My own standards.
To pre-empt your next question: are they universal? Obviously not, or we wouldn't be having this discussion, anywhere.
Does that mean they don't exist? Obviously they do, otherwise I wouldn't be disagreeing with yours/your god's.For example, one of the least controversial "commandments" might be "you shall not kill" (which never prevented Christian warfare, though). Sounds good. Then we have the death of the firstborns as the tenth plague. Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi, I guess? Anyways, how is that considered fair?
Just one example of how your god is generally unjust, because my definition of just isn't "whatever god says it is."
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@djls45 sounds like a variation of the ontological argument to me, which also proves that unicorns exist.
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@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
@Zerosquare said in Random thought of the day:
@Atazhaia said in Random thought of the day:
@kazitor said in Random thought of the day:
If a TV aerial fell off, how effective an antenna would the remaining cable from the roof serve as?
Considering that this is pretty much what happened to me this winter: Very uneffective. Works about as well as not having any aerial/cable plugged into the TV at all.
Yes. Antenna cables are not supposed to act as antennas. Otherwise they'd gather/generate interference (depending on whether you're emitting or receiving).
So if you strip the insulation off the antenna cable, would it then become an antenna itself?
If you stripped the conductive shield off it would. In fact coax leaks energy anyway, there are always return currents in the shield and the shield isn't a solid thing (except in rigid coax) it's a woven mesh.
People even take advantage of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_feeder Essentially it's a coax cable with intentional damage to the shield.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Random thought of the day:
Essentially. A poor one that's literally just a thin wire, but it will work better than with the insulation indeed.
For it to work, you'd have to remove the outer shielding copper too:
At this point, you'd indeed be left with a single wire with a random orientation and impedance. It may work if you're lucky and you're close enough to the transmitter.
EDIT:
ed by @Cursorkeys
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@topspin said in Random thought of the day:
@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
What are we supposed to think of that level of fickleness?
The same thing I think of all the pedo-clowns in the Vatican.
Uh, "DEUS VULT"?
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@djls45 I've read the explanation of what that means probably right here, and I still
.
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@topspin said in Random thought of the day:
@djls45 I've read the explanation of what that means probably right here, and I still
."God wills [it]."
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@djls45 Because it works the same way if you replace "a god that exists is greater than a god that doesn't" with "a unicorn yadda yadda".
Besides the obvious unicorns, RationalWiki mentions this SMBC comic:
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@topspin said in Random thought of the day:
@djls45 Because it works the same way if you replace "a god that exists is greater than a god that doesn't" with "a unicorn yadda yadda".
Besides the obvious unicorns, RationalWiki mentions this SMBC comic:
Ah, I see. Well, I don't actually, because that substitution trades something that exists outside the universe for something that could only exist within the universe. It trades something non-physical (super-physical?) for something physical.
Also, from here:
“Are you saying that just because I can think of a really good thing in my mind then it must also exist in reality?” Actually, no. You’ve misunderstood the argument.
...
You can’t actually think of God as not existing. When you do that you are not really thinking about God.
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@Kian said in Random thought of the day:
I just realized why the way OOP is generally taught (or at least, how it was taught to me) always bothered me.
Normally, they use examples such as a parent Animal class which is inherited by Cat and Dog, or Shape with Circle and Square. In common speech, when we think of categories, we think of the more general thing containing the more specific things. The specific being a more constrained form of the general. But in OOP taxonomies it's the other way around. The parent is the more constrained thing, and the child expands on what the parent can do, as well as providing specific implementations of the common behavior.
In common speech, the general category is the union of all the specific things it contains, so we can say that animals can fly, swim and walk because different things in the category display those behaviors, but in programming it's the opposite. The general thing only shows the intersection of the behaviors of all the things that inherit from it, and it excludes any behavior that is not shared. And professors rarely explain this very important detail, which is why students write such horrible inheritance diagrams.
Wasn't ever able to put this discrepancy in words until just now.
Necro-reply, but I just found a good real world example and remembered this.
.NET has the interfaces ICollection and IReadOnlyCollection. In OOP terms, ICollection would be a subclass of IReadOnlyCollection, because it does everything it can and more (anything that deals with ReadOnlyCollections can substitute a collection just fine).
In intuitive terms, however, most people would think of ReadOnlyCollection as a special case of Collection with some restrictions added. If you had to separately implement both, you'd probably start with collection and then just remove the modifying methods and you'd get the other one.
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@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
@topspin said in Random thought of the day:
@djls45 Because it works the same way if you replace "a god that exists is greater than a god that doesn't" with "a unicorn yadda yadda".
Besides the obvious unicorns, RationalWiki mentions this SMBC comic:
Ah, I see. Well, I don't actually, because that substitution trades something that exists outside the universe for something that could only exist within the universe. It trades something non-physical (super-physical?) for something physical.
Fine, replace arbitrary unicorn with Invisible-Pink Unicorn, the non-physical creator of the world.
Also, from here:
“Are you saying that just because I can think of a really good thing in my mind then it must also exist in reality?” Actually, no. You’ve misunderstood the argument.
...
You can’t actually think of God as not existing. When you do that you are not really thinking about God.You can't actually think of unicorns as not existing. When you do that you're not really thinking about unicorns.
The ontological argument is the most non-sensical, non-convincing argument ever. If I ever met god in person, we'd have a good chuckle about it together.
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@anonymous234 You might find this article interesting:
Using a C example, getting this correct is why an
int*implicitly converts to aconst int*, but aint**doesn't implicitly convert to aconst int**.
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@anonymous234 said in Random thought of the day:
@Kian said in Random thought of the day:
I just realized why the way OOP is generally taught (or at least, how it was taught to me) always bothered me.
Normally, they use examples such as a parent Animal class which is inherited by Cat and Dog, or Shape with Circle and Square. In common speech, when we think of categories, we think of the more general thing containing the more specific things. The specific being a more constrained form of the general. But in OOP taxonomies it's the other way around. The parent is the more constrained thing, and the child expands on what the parent can do, as well as providing specific implementations of the common behavior.
In common speech, the general category is the union of all the specific things it contains, so we can say that animals can fly, swim and walk because different things in the category display those behaviors, but in programming it's the opposite. The general thing only shows the intersection of the behaviors of all the things that inherit from it, and it excludes any behavior that is not shared. And professors rarely explain this very important detail, which is why students write such horrible inheritance diagrams.
Wasn't ever able to put this discrepancy in words until just now.
Necro-reply, but I just found a good real world example and remembered this.
.NET has the interfaces ICollection and IReadOnlyCollection. In OOP terms, ICollection would be a subclass of IReadOnlyCollection, because it does everything it can and more (anything that deals with ReadOnlyCollections can substitute a collection just fine).
Well, as long as your
IReadOnlyCollectioncan still change... which it can in .Net...
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@Cursorkeys said in Random thought of the day:
If you stripped the conductive shield off it would. In fact coax leaks energy anyway
Assuming the antenna lead is coax. Older TV antennas were commonly fed with balanced twin-lead — two parallel wires with (in theory) exactly equal but opposite current. Any interference in or out would affect both wires equally, with negligible effect. In this case, cutting one of the wires would have the desired effect. Or even better, cut the insulation that keeps the two wires parallel, and spread the wires into a T with the parallel wires forming the I part of the T. This is called a dipole antenna.
It also helps if you cut/strip the cable so the remaining wire is the right fraction of a wavelength of the desired signal frequency, or close to it, but it's not strictly necessary. It just absorbs (or radiates, in the case of a transmitter) more efficiently.
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@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
Thus, by the law of non-contradiction, we must assume that the initial assumption of that argument is false — God cannot lie.
I'd reframe that as "there does not exist a God who can lie" as you have a rather large unspoken assumption running through that line of thought
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@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
If He is inconsistent, then He must be illogical. If He is illogical, then by extension, our thoughts – being derived from His – are also illogical. And if our thoughts are illogical, then any conclusion we make is logically suspect.
Ok, lets run with that.
@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
But we do know that we can think logically, and we do know that we can communicate meaningfully, and we do know that we can learn and know things outside our own experiences. Thus, by the law of non-contradiction, we must assume that the initial assumption of that argument is false — God cannot lie.
Foul! That sounds like reasoning.
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@topspin said in Random thought of the day:
@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
@topspin said in Random thought of the day:
@djls45 Because it works the same way if you replace "a god that exists is greater than a god that doesn't" with "a unicorn yadda yadda".
Besides the obvious unicorns, RationalWiki mentions this SMBC comic:
Ah, I see. Well, I don't actually, because that substitution trades something that exists outside the universe for something that could only exist within the universe. It trades something non-physical (super-physical?) for something physical.
Fine, replace arbitrary unicorn with Invisible-Pink Unicorn, the non-physical creator of the world.
Then you've just come up with a different name for God. But if that epithet is supposed to be descriptive, then it's contradictory and nonsensical. (Invisible and pink? A non-physical horse with a single, straight horn coming out of its forehead?)
Also, from here:
“Are you saying that just because I can think of a really good thing in my mind then it must also exist in reality?” Actually, no. You’ve misunderstood the argument.
...
You can’t actually think of God as not existing. When you do that you are not really thinking about God.You can't actually think of unicorns as not existing. When you do that you're not really thinking about unicorns.
The ontological argument is the most non-sensical, non-convincing argument ever. If I ever met god in person, we'd have a good chuckle about it together.
The argument really only applies to the most fundamental basis for existence, by whatever term you wish to refer to such an entity. In other words, you cannot think of the thing on which everything depends as a thing that itself does not exist. For example, if you're a solipsist, you can't really think that you yourself don't exist. If you're a monotheist, you can't really think that God doesn't exist. If you're a Naturalist, you can't really think that Nature doesn't exist.
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@HardwareGeek said in Random thought of the day:
It also helps if you cut/strip the cable so the remaining wire is the right fraction of a wavelength of the desired signal frequency, or close to it, but it's not strictly necessary. It just absorbs (or radiates, in the case of a transmitter) more efficiently.
That was going to be my next question. :)
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@Jaloopa said in Random thought of the day:
@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
Thus, by the law of non-contradiction, we must assume that the initial assumption of that argument is false — God cannot lie.
I'd reframe that as "there does not exist a God who can lie" as you have a rather large unspoken assumption running through that line of thought
Sure, except that God in this case does not include polytheistic deities, since those are still part of some sort of system that encloses them – a Nature, so to speak.
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@Zecc said in Random thought of the day:
@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
If He is inconsistent, then He must be illogical. If He is illogical, then by extension, our thoughts – being derived from His – are also illogical. And if our thoughts are illogical, then any conclusion we make is logically suspect.
Ok, lets run with that.
@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
But we do know that we can think logically, and we do know that we can communicate meaningfully, and we do know that we can learn and know things outside our own experiences. Thus, by the law of non-contradiction, we must assume that the initial assumption of that argument is false — God cannot lie.
Foul! That sounds like reasoning.That's exactly the point! The first part used reasoning to show that we can't actually use reasoning. The second part uses reasoning to show that we think that reasoning works, and the only way that it could is if the first part is inaccurate. We can't prove that there are no such things as proofs, but we also can't prove that there are such things as proofs, either. So in order to be able to use proofs, we have to make the initial assumption that allows proofs to be things that exist.
Yes, that's even more reasoning, but trying to convince someone of something requires it. Otherwise, anything could be stated to be true, and no one could give any objection that would be meaningful to its claim.
And yes, that's yet more reasoning, but what alternatives could you possibly offer?
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@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
But if that epithet is supposed to be descriptive, then it's contradictory and nonsensical.
It's supposed to reflect a contradictory god, so that's entirely on purpose. It's obviously pink, but you can't see that with your limited perception.
@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
For example, if you're a solipsist, you can't really think that you yourself don't exist. If you're a monotheist, you can't really think that God doesn't exist. If you're a Naturalist, you can't really think that Nature doesn't exist.
So you already need to be a monotheist to begin with for this argument to work, making it completely circular.
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Theologians have been coming up with excuses for centuries, people, you won't achieve anything here.
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Can we please Jeff this religious conversation out of Random Thought Of The Day
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@dcon said in Random thought of the day:
Can we please Jeff this religious conversation out of Random Thought Of The Day
I would if I could.
New feature request: Allow users to propose moving a conversation to another thread, subject to the approval of all other involved users and/or a moderator.
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@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
New feature request: Allow users to propose moving a conversation to another thread
We already do. Just look at the post above yours.
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@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
@dcon said in Random thought of the day:
Can we please Jeff this religious conversation out of Random Thought Of The Day
I would if I could.
New feature request: Allow users to propose moving a conversation to another thread, subject to the approval of all other involved users and/or a moderatorget the
off its knees.FTFY
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@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
Why do they call them deadlines if they move around all the time?
I like to say "I love deadlines. I love the swooshing sound they make as they fly by". Can't remember where I stole it though.
Managers usually give me a mild stink eye when I say it.
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@Carnage said in Random thought of the day:
I like to say "I love deadlines. I love the swooshing sound they make as they fly by". Can't remember where I stole it though
Douglas Adams
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@djls45 said in Random thought of the day:
@dcon said in Random thought of the day:
Can we please Jeff this religious conversation out of Random Thought Of The Day
I would if I could.
New feature request: Allow users to propose moving a conversation to another thread, subject to the approval of all other involved users and/or a moderator.That's called flagging, but normal users aren't e privy to the request box.
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@Jaloopa said in Random thought of the day:
@Carnage said in Random thought of the day:
I like to say "I love deadlines. I love the swooshing sound they make as they fly by". Can't remember where I stole it though
Douglas Adams
It sounds like it could be a Scott Adams thing, though, too.
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Processors and operating systems are just implementation details for programming languages.
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If "repeat" means "do again", does "peat" mean "do for the first time"?
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@topspin said in Random thought of the day:
If "repeat" means "do again"
In French, repeat is "répéter".
But "péter" means "to fart"
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@anonymous234 said in Random thought of the day:
Processors and operating systems are just implementation details for programming languages.
Programming languages are just application details for operating systems.
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@dkf
They are all just implementation details for the user
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User is just a peripheral that gets activated when I issue a keyboard input read request.
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@Applied-Mediocrity
So you finished that electro-shock keyboard?
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@Luhmann No one could resist my klickety-klack with stereo speakers to amplify the typing noise and not one, but
threemake it five RGB diode sets for each key. It does need a separate power brick pulling about 300 watts from the wall. And I might have forgot to properly ground it...No one could resist... ehehehe.
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The day we move away from flat design will be... a relief.
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@Zecc said in Random thought of the day:
The day we move away from flat design will be... a relief.
The Bas Jokes thread is
Covariance and contravariance (computer science) - Wikipedia
