Thursday, February 23, 2012

How-to: write a mIRC games scores file.

I dealt with a lot to get such things to work well, and I highly recommend the way I did my scores to anybody. Which is to say tokenized strings in a flatfile to be accessed with a /filter command. Unless mIRC at somepoint gets mySQL this will be the best way to do things. A well placed filter command can pretty much access anything and in a fast enough time frame for a game. And it scales well enough to use.

In Tat's Trivia you can see the var commands. Namely setvar, readvar, getvar, gttok, tvartoks. These each do specific things.

Below the fold is a rather long breakdown of everything about how this stuff works. And why you should use this method.


Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Mysteries of size, solving lesser mysteries with greater ones.

We cannot solve the mystery of missing socks by involving elves. While it could plausibly be the right answer the mystery of the socks is a lesser mystery than the mystery of elves. So unless there is some overwhelming evidence in favor of elves, we should rationally reject it.

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

The atheist's wager...

Have you ever thought about what you'll say if you're wrong. If you're brought be before Allah and he asks where his Partners are? Where is this Jesus and this Holy Spirit you attributed to him? Before he casts you down into the pits of hell? Hm?

In truth, any God who sends people to eternal torture for failing to believe the exact right thing, when that right thing seems to be clearly wrong, is an evil God. According to the Bible, Gandhi is burning in hell forever for not believing this stuff. Any God that evil shouldn't be worshiped, it should be despised. Either there's justice in the universe or there isn't. The Christian God is petty and pompous and evil if he really just wants you to believe nonsense for bad reasons.

Betting that there's an evil God who sends people to be tortured based on beliefs is a bad bet. You're better off being a good person, believing true things, and helping your fellow people. If there's a God to reward you, great, bonus. If there isn't, then doing good is it's own reward.

I'm getting good at this...

More and more I'm regularly dropping wit filled pithy bombs. For example the following about how atheist children are to be pitied because their parents are "nuts".

Yes. Their children won't know of the great sacrifice that God made when he fixed the universe with blood. It's quite harrowing because only his own blood had enough magic to do it. So he gave himself a body and killed it. And if you believe this, and you revel in the blood sacrifice that God made to God by God of God for God's creations to fix God's flaws and their crimes against God, you can go to a magical land of bliss forever and ever. And if you don't regardless how good you are, you will burn forever in hell fire and torture, like Gandhi does. Because "atheism is completely nuts" but Christianity that's perfectly logical!

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Scales of the Universe.

So rare are such things that just playing with them helps you to understand so well the size of things.
http://thisfile.me/Flash/Other/scale_of_universe_enhanced.swf

This thing is always so awesome.

Wolfram Alpha and Minecraft triangulation.

Running a Wolfram Alpha prompt on "intersection of line through (-250,-1556) and through (-241,-1546) and line through (-32,-198) and through (-22,-198)" will solve the location of the stronghold in your particular world.

intersection of line through (StartX0,StartZ0) and through (EndX0,EndZ0) and line through (StartX1,StartZ1) and through (EndX1,EndZ1)

I had to tell the wolfram people to fix it. Somehow it neglected to actually solve it. But, now it's golden.

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Problem of Animal Suffering, Fine Tuned Evolution, and Divine Hidiness

Yes. How amazing is it that God chooses to make the universe exactly like it needs to be in order for us to form naturally without God needing to exist. In the case of nature, God tortures animals endlessly to sell the rouse of his non-existence. -- If there were no God, only natural forces could be at work and, you see, evolution requires that this be the case. Maximized suffering tends to be a required byproduct of a struggle for survival which is the engine of evolution. So God tortures animals endlessly so as to better hide from rational people and to better trick them into reasonable unbelief, and thereby into hell where he has them tortured forever.