Tat's Trivia Bot, v. 3.65

Tat's Trivia Bot 3.7

Latest Version: Tat's Trivia 3.69

Download: Tat's Trivia Bot, 3.65

Update: 3.66
A version for every day of the year.

It mostly adds a couple hooks for awards, namely on Champ, TeamAnswer, and TeamVictory


I also added a command /trivia.team.credit

This is to allow one to give points to the entire team (the will transliterate from *) points. Apparently some people don't want to play on teams if the only points you get are individual. That seems reasonable, and I'll make it able to be fixed by you folks on an individual basis. So for pretty much everybody save Brett this version will do nothing for you.

(Fixed odd oversight with 3.61 included)

Grey's Anatomy Quote

“It’s awful, it’s tense and it’s cold and it’s dangerous, it feels like defusing a bomb, in an haunted house, that’s built on a minefield, and there are bears everywhere, and the bears have knives. You have to tame them, or you will die, we will all die. Their hate will destroy this hospital and then the whole planet. I am counting on you Bailey… We’re all counting on you.”

—	Callie Torres -8x21

Into the breech...

Wow this is a boring slog.

Apparently the rule about creationists taking twice as long to refute as they take to make a claim presents us with a divergent series and thus an exchange which expands at about 2^n.

>>You also accuse the studies shown of not taking this into account. However, you then provide no evidence and no data to back that up.

You posted the studies. Do they show tectonic forces being taken into account? We're discussing the study you posted. I'm pointing out something it fails to note. Does it fail to note the massive amount of salt loss?

http://orgs.usd.edu/esci/age/content/failed_scientific_clocks/ocean_salinity.html 

It continues like this for 15000 words. Literally, I did a word count. 15623 in total. Below the fold.

The RSS feed is stuck/broken. You need to actually visit to see new posts.

I mean if somebody is hook line and sinker stuck in cargo cult science. How do they ever free themselves? If they suppose that all the pieces fit together even if they had to glue the thing together with God and hope. How does one rend themselves away from such thinking?


Arguing with BaseSixForty on Youtube, it seems pretty intractable. Apparently the oceans level of salt needs to be overflowing with salt if the earth is old. But there's really only a finite amount of the stuff and it cycles around. The salt from the land typically was once salt from the ocean that was taken away by tectonic forces as salt today is taken away. And independently geologists have found that the level of salt in the ocean has been static. It has not changed. 


Also the Earth Magnetic Field is getting exponentially weaker. Because Barnes at one point made that argument based on 200 years of data. Better readings have found that the field fluctuates all the time and often even reverses every 80k years or so. And that's bipole strength rather than overall field strength. So Barnes got swept aside. So then Humphreys comes along and says that the Earth Magnetic Field is getting exponentially weaker without even Barne's evidence of reading 200 years of data and extrapolating from that exponential decay (the line even better fits linear if you read the data and ignore that there's way more data now). Because such and such and such, but now with zero evidence rather than one point of horrible evidence.

It's rather sad. It's like somebody who knows astrology so well they can tell you  calculate the meaning and signs other than your sun sign and figure out how things work. It's getting really really good at something really really foolish.

BaseSixForty: "The first is the issue of tectonic activity. You claim that this is the major player in removing salts from the ocean. You also accuse the studies shown of not taking this into account. However, you then provide no evidence and no data to back that up. ... Both are rather strong propositions to make without evidence or data. If you think it would be relevant, then provide the evidence to either support or refute the argument."

Tatarize: "The study excludes what geologists say is taking up the vast majority of salts. The problem here is the study says they've accounted for "all" the outputs. And that's just not true, or really even that possible. The fact that they missed what geologists have pointed to as the biggest player is a serious flaw. But, worse than that is the steady state of the salinity. It doesn't matter one jot what the magnitude of the various inputs and outputs might be if the overall effect is no change. Which was the more important point. Regardless of the actual values (See Pinet 1993 and various other estimates of the magnitude if you really care), the point obviously fails if geologists are right. For the last 100 million years the salt level in the ocean has been static, which I'll address shortly."

Unfortunately, you have once again simply made a claim, with no support. You claimed that tectonic activity is the major player in removing salts from the ocean. You claimed that this is what geologists have pointed to as the biggest player. However, you have provided no evidence, as I asked. You have made the claim, but have provided no support. If tectonic activity is responsible for removing vast amounts of salt from the oceans, then provide data. Provide measurements. Provide support. If there isn't any actual data, then provide evidence of the mechanism with approximations for why it should balance things out. Quite frankly, you can talk all you want about such a mechanism, but if it actually exists, then back it up. Don't just sit there and say it exists - show it exists. Honestly, for someone who seems to put such a huge weight upon the methods of science as supporting beliefs, I'm shocked at your double standard to refuse to provide any evidence for your claims but still cling to them as absolute fact.


BaseSixForty: "The second issue seems to be the issue of a steady state of salinity levels."

Tatarize: "http://www.clays.org/journal/archive/volume%208/8-1-203.pdf Paleosalinities is an actual bit of science. Goldschmit determined the relationships needed to directly calculate the salt levels in the ocean over time. They have remained steady. They have been steady and therefore cannot be used as a clock."

This is unfortunately circular reasoning again. All the Goldschmidt's paper really claims (as his conclusion at point number 5 shows) is that the paleosalinities of the sedimentary rock layers at the times they were laid down show no real change in salinity levels. I won't even dispute that. I'll grant you that just for the sake of your argument. Unfortunately, the conclusion uses the assumption that those rock layers are hundreds of millions of years old, and then extrapolates that to show that ocean salinity levels haven't changed over millions of years. But as mentioned, that's circular reasoning. Those sedimentary rock layers aren't actually hundreds of millions of years old - they are only a few thousand years old. As such, all Goldschmidt's data really shows is that the salinity of the ocean hasn't changed significantly in the last few thousand years - a perfectly acceptable conclusion for a creationist.

Arizona to teach the Bible. Bad Move Religious People.

Arizona passes a law to require schools to add a specific elective. Namely, The Bible.

I don't think this will end well for the religious folks pushing this for two reasons. 1) Secular education must be secular, you cannot use such a class to preach. So you must learn facts about the Bible. The facts about the Bible do not put the Bible in a good light. 2) Students might read the Bible. The Bible does not put the Bible in a good light. People tend to think the Bible is full of peace and wisdom; these people have not read the Bible.

The World of Religion

Evidence and surprise.

Evidence typically conforms to Bayes theorem. And as such you really can have bad evidence and good evidence and you can rather clearly measure the quality of the evidence. Typically based on the surprise factor. If the thing in question should be true vs. false. How surprising is this particular bit information.

If Christianity is true, how surprising should it be that it supposes a demigod whose blood sacrifice propitiates the alpha-male human-anger emotions of the creator of the entire universe for wrongdoings of human ancestors in a middle-eastern creation story, rather than the particular humans in question. Is this what we should expect as the actual way the real universe actually works? No. It's certifiably insane.

If Christianity is false, how surprising should it be? Well, it isn't. It was first practiced in areas with newly found pagan influences where demigods and their wacky adventures were commonplace, where blood sacrifice to appease an angry God were common. That the sins of the father were given to their children, that one could atone for the sins of another allowing the guilty to go free, that a human sacrifice was the best kind of sacrifice, that the creator of the universe wanted things killed for him. And such a system that allows for god donning a baby suit and sacrificing himself to himself to appease himself, wouldn't shock the mind of anybody and would be expected of the creator of the universe. If somebody around that time invented a religion, it would be a lot like Christianity.

The story of Christianity, the claims that it makes, are remarkably good evidence that it's false.

Defining the supernatural.

Sometimes things are awesome. This is being added to my list of awesomethings.

http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2007/01/defining-supernatural.html

I rarely thought I could be more of a Carrier fanboi but he's done some fantastic stuff.

Upon being told I am blind to Jesus...

The problem is that looking objectively at all the evidence is the same as being blind to it all. There's no difference between the evidence for Christianity, and the evidence we'd expect to see if Christianity is false. After all, we can agree that other religions are false religions, and all of them have testimonials and first person experiences. So if Christianity were false, we'd expect it to have exactly what you claim it has. Being blind and being in a room with absolutely no light at all are very similar experiences.

There's no serious difference between Christianity and what we can agree are false other religions. Which is to say that Christianity has no evidence in its favor and considering things like blood sacrifice, and demigod adventures, the sins of ancestors, and fairy tales which are found in Christianity but should not be found in a true religion. Because they make no sense as a matter of reality, God no more needs a dying and rising savior son to be blood sacrificed to himself for propitiation for the sins of the ancestors than God needs a spaceship made of string cheese, but these are things we should expect of a religion that was invented in a mix of cultures obsessed with primitive blood sacrifice and that was hugely in love with the wacky adventures of the sons of gods.

We have no reason to suppose Christianity is any more true than any of the agreed upon false religions, and we have many reasons to suppose that it was simply invented by people between 1800-2000 years ago or so.

Garden of Eden, and the need for Jesus.

There are very serious problem with the story of Christianity, namely it doesn't really make any sense. With regard to Eden, why the hell are you going to put your talking/tempting snake anywhere near your magical tree or your humans not suppose to eat your magical tree? Why not plant your magical trees significantly far from your humans, like on the other side of the planet, or get this, don't even keep magical trees around at all (it's not like you need knowledge or life as God). It's not like I keep my lizard poison and my lizards in the same terrarium.

And to think, to fix this mistake God needed magical blood but only his own blood had enough magic to do it so he gave himself a body and killed it. Why did God need a magical dying and rising savior child? Well, much like propitiation by blood it was the style at the time. It isn't as if the universe would *actually* exist like this, that'd be insanely stupid. But, this is *exactly* what we would expect to come out of that region if they made up a religion. If you combine Judaism of the time with Paganism you pretty much end up with Christianity. The Jews liked them some blood sacrifice and the most popular motif in Pagan myth was the son of God and his wacky adventures. Give yourself broad appeal by adapting these much beloved plot points and you have a successful religion. However if you think about it, God no more needs magical blood than a spaceship and no more needs a dying and rising savior God-Child than the oxygen carrying molecules of a few terrestrial critters on this one dinky planet.

None of this makes sense if Christianity is true, but we should almost expect it if Christianity is false. If Christianity didn't exist, it would almost inevitably end up with some other group making up exactly such a story, so much so that the origins of Christianity are almost certain. It would be weird if somebody didn't try to mix Jewish mysticism with Pagan demigods.

Girl With A Pearl Earring

There is something absolutely brilliant about this kind of commentary.

Shorter Creationist

Basically I'll be doing some "Shorter" synopsis posts on creationist stuff I bother to read. I might as well have em. Today we have:

  Scientists Find No Genetic Evidence For Evolution

Next, Mathematicians will find no multipliable evidence for numbers.

Shorter Creationist: A decade ago scientists realized Molecular genomics was harder than they hoped, therefore their entire field is wrong and God exists.

Need to move data...

Data moving will take like 10 hours.
Start the move.
Go to bed.
Wake up to find Windows has been waiting with baited breath for 9 and a half hours to know whether I want to move Thumbs.db too?

This stuff wouldn't be so silly but Windows made thumbs.db. It's a windows file. It consists of thumbnails of pictures in the directory that would not be there if they moved. *sigh*

Inventing On Principle

That's a pretty good principle to have. I daresay there's a few places I could see it being hugely useful.

http://vimeo.com/36579366

A Plothole Nailed to a Stick.

Sometimes when you're in the zone, in this case responding to somebody on Amazon who seems intent on offering TAG as some kind of knockdown to Naturalism. Because if one can equivocate the meaning of "exist", one can somehow create a large enough hole to shove a god into.

It seems rather strange to follow a religion grounded in the primitive notion of blood sacrifice in a society that understands the utter silliness of propitiation by blood. That the creator of the entire universe needed blood to fix the universe and sate his own anger and allow violations of his own rules so much that he donned a baby suit and sacrificed himself to himself, because only He in human form had enough magic in his blood to accomplish this task. And rather than ever look and address these rather terrible shortcomings which, are well marked in The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails, you attempt to squabble over your strawman versions of naturalist ontology, as if wrongly conflating physically exists with transcendentally exists or morally exists will suddenly make one forget you worship a plot hole nailed to a stick.

The Bible in a Nutshell

Atheist Pig

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.

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.

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!