Thanks Russian Cameras.

I love that you exist. Thank you Russian cameras.

Why can't heaven speak?

Why can't dead people in heaven talk to people on Earth. Nothing would put a person on the straight and narrow for Christ faster than a talk with their dead grandmother in heaven. It's no more compulsory than a talk with a living grandmother. But, oh so much better. Why then is there no communications?

Given Christianity this would serve God's purposes, ad hoc reasons must be given as they are pulled from one's ass.

Given atheism the answer is obvious (dead people are dead).

So atheism provides what amounts to a free explained phenomenon simply as a side effect. But, Christianity needs to make up something new to explain that problem.

This is evidence for atheism and evidence against Christianity.

Javascript

I've done a reasonable amount of java script coding lately implementing turtle graphics and lsystem as well as other projects and I must admit since the early 2000s the language has become dare I say, elegant. I don't know if that kind of evolution is possible for many languages but really it's no where near as horrible and trick ridden as I recall. Where you'd code it for IE because everything else would take code IE could take but if you coded for another browser it would go wonky and object. It was a pain. Now, it's actually a really pretty language, tossing functions around like variables and calling them and having variables properly react like what you'd want them to be.

Quote: Gandhi

Truth never damages a cause that is just. – Mohandas K. Gandhi

Yes, but can't we still just accept it as plausible?

That's not how plausible works. I could say that I don't think that life on this process began with chemicals and random time like all the scientists doing real work on the subject actually think. But I think humans from the distant future traveled back in time and created this planet and invented the life on it.

Would you argue that is plausible and credible and open? Do you think there being no evidence against it or for it, is a mark in it's favor?

The answer really should be no. I can with enough special pleading make the claim that the moon is made out of green cheese something for which there is no evidence against. We know the density of the moon, well the cheese just happens to be very dense. We've been to the surface and found rocks, because it has rocks on the surface. If I explain away every objection with another bit of story I can get it to the point where we should find no evidence against the proposition of our moon being made out of green cheese in some kind of special way that makes it outwardly appear to be made out of rock.

Should we then say there's no evidence against the theory and at the very least we should consider it plausible and credible?

The actual answer is no. Evidence is largely defined by Bayes Theorem, and there are a few variables there for how ad hoc the hypothesis is and how much additional stuff you need to accept it and how good the alternative hypotheses actually are.

This is the case with Hameroff's theory. We should not consider it plausible or credible because it is stupid. It is trying to explain away a robust observation that our consciousness actually becomes aware of decisions our brains have made half a second later. It invokes utter crap that physicists and neuroscientists scoff in an attempt to explain these observations away. But, really we should just accept that those observations are true. The moon just happens to look exactly like it's made out of rock because it's made out of rocks. And our gap junctions have chemicals and only get triggered by chemicals and our brains consist of neurons firing in patterns because that's what we are, neurons firing in patterns. The truth isn't something that needs to be explained away with exotic explanations, it can actually just be true.

So, no. The fact that it's really absurd is actually considerable evidence against it. And the fact that the alternative is that what we see is what we get, and that explanation explains all the data that needs explaining suffices to say that a theory that needs to make thoughts exist in quantum fields and magically travel backwards in time, can go ahead and be discarded as wrong.

You may not solve the mystery of missing socks by involving elves. Elves are a greater mystery than missing socks. Socks go missing. You don't need to explain how because of QM they fell out of the universe and traveled forward in time and we'll end up getting them back. They really can just get lost. Brains really can just be a skullfull of neurons and chemicals. And the moon really can just be rock.

Hameroff and Penrose, nonsense²

Largely, this is cut and pasted from my reply to somebody on youtube about Hameroff and Penrose's idiotic theories about consciousness. It's really hard to explain how stupid they are but I fell I did a pretty good plain English explanation. And my blog is largely for myself, with the exception of the Trivia Bot parts that actually do a public service. But, I wouldn't want to lose such a nice reply so I put it here, where I could search and cite and rehash it in the future if it ever comes up.

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There's no evidence that particles that pop out of this universe likely by colliding with anti-particles or generally just doing so went into another universe. We just know that at the very very tiny spacetime is broiling with fun pops in and out of spacetime. There's very little to suggest there are any other universes involved or that this carries any information.

There are a series of experiments which have rather firmly established that what we are consciously aware of lags behind by about half a second. We can hit a baseball with a baseball bat but the actual decision isn't made consciously, but rather the conscious mind is informed of it later, and fills it in.

We've also done a lot of experiments with split brain patients and confabulation. Where a person is sat down, they are told via a message on their left side textually to stand up. They stand up. And are asked vocally why they stood up. The standing up was decided by the right brain, but the left brain is being asked to answer the question and they will wax poetic about how they were cold and left a jacket in the car or about how the chair isn't comfortable.

There's also an experiment where a person is shown two small pictures of people and asked who is more attractive. After they make the decision, the pictures are switched with a little slight of hand magic trick and they are further asked why they chose that picture (the one they didn't actually pick). They will explain the decision at length.

We know this stuff happens in the brain. But, then Hammeroff and Penrose don't think it does. It's not a quirky weird thing about the brain that consciousness is informed later and confabulates the answers as to why it made that decision. No. What happens according to them. Is that your conscious decision from the future magically travels back in time half a second through the quantum field and something about gap junctions to have actually made that decision that it could not have made.

This isn't some amazing truth they've stumbled on that means that atheists are really bad at their jobs, they are actually trying to argue that the Emperor has cloths on even though he's walking around naked. When you get passed the fancy buzz words and the physics you realize the physics has the richness of the particles and the quantum mechanics and all they have is a lot of made up stuff about how Quantum Mechanics therefore Consciousness is real rather than made up. Even though there is absolutely no indicator whatsoever that it's either needed or real.

I wouldn't really go out of your way to blame ego, or insist that he's proved souls existed because he proposed a theory you don't possess the acumen to poke holes in or the desire to do so. It's really nonsense. The universe is not a massive conspiracy to get your thoughts into your brain half a second early.

Coining a New Word: Hypothetica

Hypothetica: like estoricia or Americana, are those things of the esoteric or American. For example, "maybe there were swarms of bees and that's why he hid in that hole." or "maybe if there were a meteor heading towards Earth" those hypothetical things are hypothetica.

Colorblindness and Maximally Distinct Color Palettes.

While I did bother to do a lot of legwork and effort to determine which colors are maximally distant the issue of color blindness was always on my mind. While you can push the list of distinct colors to a couple dozens (read left to right, top to bottom).

http://www.colblindor.com/2009/01/19/colorblind-colors-of-confusion/

It seems that given color blindness, you'd really be better off mixing in a few things other than just colors. While you could just use a static lookup list, which is likely the best for color distinction, you might want to consider if there's a better way to do that same thing with aspects that are more distinct to more people, like dashed lines, thicker lines, candicaned lines, marquee text made to fit a line, etc.

You get about four or five really distinct colors for those with lower gamuts of colors. And while my list is still really awesome. You might want to rethink your entire idea to use colors.

With a cause of justice, your enemies are easy to spot.

When your cause is justice, you can easily spot your enemies. They are the people who say they are your enemies and the people who say they are your friends and give you friendly advice that is aptly summed up as telling you to "Shut Up."

Richard Carrier Skepticon V

Very worth watching.

Tat's Trivia Bot v. 3.66

Tat's Trivia Bot 3.7

Update: Latest Tat's Trivia Bot 3.69

Download: Tat's Trivia Bot, 3.66


The only thing this version really does is yell at you for not having your trivia directory correct. The previous version would simply die without yelling at you. This confused people considering the update in the later version of mIRC to move your mIRC directory from the program files directory to somewhere in your user applications directory. There's no real substantive changes beyond making it properly tell you your directory is wrong and blocking. But, this is apparently worthwhile because several of my very infrequent comments are, I believe, due to that quirk.

Wishes about Reality

I wish to live in a world where reality isn't a political issue. But, sadly I live in reality where reality is a political issue and I accept that, because it is, regrettably, true.

SSnot official election prediction.

Obama wins with 332 Electoral Votes. Florida goes blue. Without Florida it's 303 which is also quite likely. But, I'ma go optimism. And statistics.

Stealing disqualification from the jaws of victory.

I really wish skeptics would stop insisting that religious claims can't be tested. They commonly are tested. We test the claims that God did it, with regard to things as far reaching as lightning to diseases. Saying that we can't test such things is to say that we aren't winning, and we haven't been winning for hundreds of years. It's to declare that the games never happened and you are not allowed to play because you aren't sciencey enough. For goodness sakes they have been playing for a very long time, it just doesn't look like it because it's been a massive shutout. They've successfully used religion to explain a total of 0 things. But they have attempted to use religion to explain just about every mystery that came down the pike ever.

Oh there's something you don't understand? God does because God is busy doing it. Um, we solved this it's actually a neat previously unknown natural phenomenon. This has always been the case over thousands and millions of examples. It's saying that two horses that have raced together a million times and always, each and every time, my horse has won. And their horse has never won, and you want me to accept that the race doesn't count because their horse is blind or something. That because it isn't a fair fight and they keep getting slaughtered that I should just nullify the scores and give a wink and a nod to people endorsing the scientific equivalent of magic.

It's a strange illusion but overwhelming and utterly universal evidence looks strangely like no evidence at all. Take life after death for example. Is this some great mystery that we should continue to explore and offer platitudes about not understanding or it being ununderstandable? Well, no. We've got massive amounts of evidence as to what consciousness is and generally how it works and it's a process of neurons in the brain, neurons which rot away and stop functioning. We've made a massive number of observations and nobody has reported something without a brain being conscious or anything that has consciousness not also having a brain. Skullfulls of neurons are overwhelmingly likely to be the way to arrive at consciousness. And even if we could design computers to have consciousness, they would do so by doing what brains do. This overwhelming web of evidence is overwhelming not non-existent. You don't get to say nobody knows when I have every observation anybody has ever made about consciousness on my side and they have jack squat to support their assertions.

One could assemble a pretty good argument just from the evidence and the claims. For example, why can't the dead conscious people who are aware and still exist within the beliefs of religion not talk to the living. I mean if a dead mother told her child that hell was real and heaven was real and don't make that mistake you're making, it would be a powerful thing. If the dead could communicate with the living pretty much everybody would accept the one true religion. Under my beliefs the reason why the dead cannot communicate is taken for granted, they are dead. Being material and having that material stop functioning right precludes communication and a meeting of minds because one of the minds no longer exists. Under religion, there's no theological reason why it shouldn't happen, in fact, it likely never occurred to many of them at all. I'm sure they could make something up, but it would be made up, my understanding of the world takes it as a given. There is no direct path from when you die, your consciousness persists which precludes communication. There is a direct path from when you die, you are dead, which not only explains that but necessarily predicts it.

If a different outcome could render you wrong, you do not get any credit. If a plane crash kills everybody but one single child and you'd declare that an act of God. Then when a plane crashes and kills only that one child and nobody else, you should stop and note that your religion only explains that first data set and given the second data set you must reevaluate your understanding of the universe. -- Oddly that never happens. If science is right about things, and religion is wrong about things. Don't try to declare it a draw because after all maybe some different religion could theoretically be right or at least moot and untestable. It doesn't help. They lost. And sure being unable to play and losing both score zero points, but they aren't the same thing. They could have scored as many points as they earned, they just didn't earn any.

Statistical explanations and the 2nd Presidential Debate

After the 2nd presidential debate, I was watching the MSNBC discussion and Al Sharpton made the point that the area had a lot of African Americans but only one African American was there to ask questions. Earlier this campaign cycle Mitt Romney in one poll scored a 0 with African Americans. In a poll they found absolutely no African Americans who supported Romney. It's quite rare. But, also very relevant. The makeup of the audience of the town hall there is "undecided" voters, who are uncommitted and from the local area. That's a massive bias in the numbers. That demographic isn't the wishy-washy with support. Hence the appearance of white-washing.

iPS wins Nobel Prize. Yay.

Actually there's a contest on PZ's blog to guess this, really it's a yearly link to the place that actually runs the guesses, and I keep overestimating the turn around time on Nobel Prizes. Last year I even posted that Perlmutter was too soon as I guessed that guy who invented LEDs. And I was pretty sure that  Shinya Yamanaka was a few years off. Perlmutter won last year and Yamanaka just won.

He made a reset switch for cells. You can now make a skin cell into a stem cell. America might have figured it out first, but we were prevented from doing stem cell research, during the Bush years.  And that's how you figure this stuff out. You look at the stuff doing the stuff and see if you can force it to do that stuff.

Happy Blasphemy Day

Remember folks, it's a victimless crime.

Anti-blur

One of the odd bits in graphics are some of the functions being consistently lossy. One might well think that blur and sharpen are polar opposites of each other, that one could somehow apply a blur and then unblur it. But, that's not really true. The way the functions work is by applying a specific convolution to every pixel. For example a box blur is: .1, .1, .1 .1, .1, .1 .1, .1, .1 It has 9 parts and each of those parts is divided up and dispersed to the adjacent pixels. So it averages the color there with all the colors of the colors next to it to arrive at the new color for the pixel. The sharpen function: -0.1, -0.1f, -0.1, -0.1, 1.8, -0.1, -0.1, -0.1, -0.1 Which is to say the center pixel is made 80% brighter and all the adjacent pixels lose ten percent of that pixel's color. The functions do not need to add up to 1, but if they don't the image either gets brighter or darker overall. This is sort of the inverse of the former except that because of spreading it can well lose detail as the color migrates around.


 Using this original image.

Let's see a couple things.   Sharpened.

Sharpened and Blurred

 Anti-Blurred
As a fun quirk, I tried to solve the image for blurring. Finding an image which would best look like the original image after being blurred. Which is, I believe, going to be an np problem. As one path precludes other paths, and your likely going to run through the problem with some approximation. In fact, it might be possible to apply such an algorithm to a color quantized image sans blurring with implied blur and render images which are data sparse and solvable to something approximating the original image. Like a blur-implied gif image. The anti-blurred image approximation (finding the optimal might well be np-impossible, or rather knowing that it's the optimal when you have it).

Anti-Blurred Image Blurred

 When we apply a box blur to the image we get the above.

There may be some merit to the idea, but it might need some better encoding methods. As is this takes the same amount of data to display the blur-implied image than the original image. But, it may well have some methods therein to allow for pretty effective color mixing from a reduced subset of colors.

Thomas Babington Macaulay (Quotes)

To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?
Horatius, st. 27.

Color Distribution Methodology

Getting independent colors which are maximally dissimilar from all previous colors is a fairly common problem. The standard suggested algorithm is to subdivide the most significant differences in colors and then pattern them. I thought this was the case too. So much so that I solved the problem because I thought it would be very useful (and it might). Generally this required two minor breakthroughs understanding how to encode maximally significant differences in colors through binary (flip the ends), which I went through a lot of struggle to get to including my anti-gray codes and derivation algorithm and proof (intersperced gray codes with an additional zero anywhere in it and flipped will maximize hamming distance). And secondly understanding the patterning such that I could derive any value without iteration of the previous values.

Well, looking at the results, it quickly seems that they aren't that great.



Largely there are issues with greens being pretty close even when their RGB values are far, and the patterns constantly making what turn out to be slight variations of your standard pure colors RGB and CYM. You start clashing rather quickly.


The better solution is computationally much more difficult. And generally sort of cheating. You do the hard work. You run through every color you can represent in RGB (16,77,216 of them) and run a heavy duty color distance routine, likely CIE-Lab 2000, then you go in there and manually choose the colors. And then use this as a master list and just read from the list. The standard solution starts picking some greens that look pretty much like the previous greens after like 20. And you should be able to get like 50 colors or so which are visually distinct from one another. Perhaps with pruning of the list by hand.

Using 20k guesses (rather than brute forcing 16-million) I produced this after an hour or so.



There's likely not much left to gain brute forcing the algorithm, but I did (for a smaller value 64) and came out with this.



Which manages to out perform the heck out of the dividing algorithm and could just be read by a standard list. There might be some enhancements to be achieved by converting away from finding maximally good results initially which may cost the overall result to become pareto optimal. Or employ something like k-mean clustering in LabDE2000 colorspace (not really defined as a colorspace but pretty much is exactly that) to better maximize the list. Or goodness forbid collect data by humans voting (it's how the color spaces came about, that and math to approximate that data). Although, this would need to be done in somewhat controlled systems because human eyes are excessively sensitive to conditions. Some colors look similar on a black background when they wouldn't on a white background. Which could maybe be randomized to average out or find colors that do this less than others. It wouldn't be too hard to define a list or two which specifically address this question, because programmatically the question of which colors seem very distinct from a set of previously distinct colors has nothing really to do with computers but humans and how they perceive color, and the ability to approximate this has everything to do with humans and not that much to do with programming.

Observations which have been noted before.
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001JS

There are some good color dictionaries out there. But, I'm not convinced there are much more optimal solutions. And it turns out the algorithms needed are much better at making color dictionaries than they would be generating colors on the fly. And since we're dealing with 64 colors max, we're much better doing that.