Archive for the ‘Random’ Category

There’s A Reason The Metro Is Free

Th1sWasATriumph
Th1sWasATriumph
Tue Jun 01, 2010 5:55 pm by Th1sWasATriumph

Most of you will have realised that I get the vast majority of my newsing from free London rag The Metro, distributed around the Underground every morning in order to allow bleary-eyed businessmen to further realise that the world is falling gracelessly towards the sun. I don’t think the Metro is a bad little paper, really; the quality of writing is generally good, and it catches stories earlier than other papers you might come across in the day. And you’ll find articles of comparable quality on the same subjects in “real” newspapers.

However, you develop an unfair bias of a newspaper when you peruse it mainly to find new nonsense to write about in your blog. You ignore all rational articles about politics\current affairs\crossbows to the face and concentrate only on articles that guarantee a spout of vitriol frothy enough to incur a transparent sense of self-righteousness. And as a result, your perception is that the chosen paper exists only to print stories about religion, druids and the supernatural. Unfair, since the Metro regularly dishes out reasonably informative articles about modern science and astronomy.

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Lisa, I Would Like To Buy Your Rock

Th1sWasATriumph
Th1sWasATriumph
Tue May 25, 2010 5:35 pm by Th1sWasATriumph

It goes like this:

[Item] or [practice] nullifies or negates the effects, presence, activity or consequences of [entity], [energy], or [phenomenon]. How can you tell? Because absolutely nothing is happening, and so the [item] or [practice] is a legitimate success. This stone keeps away bears. You can tell because you don’t see any bears around here . . . yes, this stone IS for sale. How expensive? Completely. (more…)

A Hitherto Unheeded Level Of Tact

Th1sWasATriumph
Th1sWasATriumph
Tue Mar 09, 2010 6:40 pm by Th1sWasATriumph

Usually I refrain from pouncing on superstitious or irrational beliefs for entirely selfish reason. If a woman mentions an interest in astrology, I’m more than likely to tone down or censor entirely any strident protests along the lines of ”You what? ” unless I have no superficial manly interest in her at all. For the record, it would take a brick wall in a dress before I stopped wanting to make with the penis.

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Another pointless evolution program

rabbitpirate
rabbitpirate
Sun Jan 17, 2010 2:12 pm by rabbitpirate

So I get bored easily and seeing I have no life to speak of I end up writing pointless programs that demonstrate arbitrary points of evolutionary theory that only people who don’t understand it actually argue with in the first place. The first program I wrote, which attempted to show how mutation and natural selection could make a “bug” better suited to its environment, garnered a number of great comments as well as some helpful constructive criticism and as such my initial plan was to go back and rewrite that program taking those issues into account. However I ended up doing away with that idea and starting completely from scratch.

The most common complaint about the original program was that it took too long to run. Even sped up to run at around a generation a second it could still take a number of minutes to get anything approaching a definitive result. As such when I started writing this new program I put considerable thought into this issue and, well how can I put this, decided to ignore it completely. This new program is, I am afraid to say, a good bit slower than the last one. In fact it can at times take several hours to run, which believe me makes bug testing it a real pain. On top of that both selection and reproduction work differently in this program and as such there is no simulated predation or mating in this one. Yes people that’s right. I have written a sequel that is vastly longer than the original and which contains no sex or violence. Clearly I must be mad!

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Panspermia, Which Is Sperm In A Pan

Th1sWasATriumph
Th1sWasATriumph
Mon Jan 11, 2010 10:19 pm by Th1sWasATriumph

I’m a great fan of sperm in a pan. However, I’m also a fan of panspermia, if you can be a “fan” of a scientific hypothesis. I suppose I like the additional romantic element that panspermia brings to hypothetical speculation on abiogenesis and the origin of life. If that makes me unscientific, well, that’s because I’m not a scientist and took my degree in Wordification and Filmazement. 

Panspermia describes the possibility that life on Earth was seeded, catalysed or in some way influenced by material entering its ecosystem from space. And what with various organic compounds being discovered in the chilly depths of space, far beyond the reach of human hands, it’s a hypothesis that is, at the very least, plausible.

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Getting Woo for Christmas

rabbitpirate
rabbitpirate
Wed Dec 30, 2009 6:00 pm by rabbitpirate

As the vast majority of the readers of this blog are skeptics I have a question for you all. What do you do if a well meaning relative, who honestly doesn’t know any better and who is very excited about it, gives you woo for Christmas? There you are, Christmas day, sitting with your family. You are handed a lovingly wrapped present by an exuberant relative who smiles at you with excitement and proclaims that “when I saw this I immediately thought of you, I just know you will love it.” Full of anticipation you tear off the wrapping paper to find ear candles/homeopathic remedies/a magnetic healing bracelet/a book by Deepak Chopra. What do you do?

Now of course your immediate reaction is to lie through your teeth. You love it, it is just what you were looking for, you have always wanted one. Anything but tell your loved one that, not only have they got you something that you don’t like, they have been taken in by a steaming pile of horse hockey. You can only hope it didn’t cost them too much money.

But of course the problem doesn’t end there. Once you have convinced them that you do actually like your vouchers of a free Reiki session what do you do then? Do you just throw it out or try and pass it off to someone else? But what happens when your relative turns up and asks how you are getting on with it? Maybe they have got you something that they expect you to display in some way, what then? Do you hang the unicorn power mural on the wall to show your relative that your do in fact like it? Or do you make up some excuse as to why you can’t do so?

Or are you all just completely honest and just tell them the truth from the start? I’d be interested in your thoughts, not that I got a present like this, no sir.

And now for something completely different

rabbitpirate
rabbitpirate
Tue Nov 10, 2009 7:02 pm by rabbitpirate

Ok firstly, seriously people am I the only person posting on this blog at the moment? I mean one more post and the entire first page will be nothing but posts from me and I’m pretty sure our readers don’t want to just be hearing from me all the time.

Secondly I have to acknowledge that there is a very good chance, judging from the reactions of people I know, that no one else is going to find this as remotely cool, interesting or hypnotic as I do. I completely expect that many of the comments on this one will be along the lines of “erm ok then” or the ever popular “WTF!”

So a while back, inspired by similar things from the likes of CDK007 and Thunderf00t, I decided to try and write a little program that would visually demonstrate the principles of evolution by natural selection. I know, my life really is that exciting. I decided to create a little population of computerised bugs and by simply applying selection pressure to them show how they could evolve over the generations to be better suited to their environment. The main difference, between my program and those of the afore mentioned YouTubers, is that I wanted to make my version interactive so that people could play around with it to their hearts content. With that in mind I made a whole host of changes to the original version of the program I had written before so that it is now possible to play around with a number of different selection pressures and change the environment in which the bugs live at will. Finally I made the decision to share it with the rabid horde here at the League of Reason. So with no further ado, and with some trepidation, I give you:

Bug Evolver 2.0

For more details of exactly what is going on in this program check below the fold.

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Speaker’s Corner

Th1sWasATriumph
Th1sWasATriumph
Wed Sep 16, 2009 12:06 pm by Th1sWasATriumph

Some of you may have heard of Speaker’s Corner, in Londonbox – an area of Hyde Park where, for over 100 years, people have turned up (generally on Sundays) to speak their brains about whatever they feel is important. The majority of this consists of religious nutbarness, as you might expect, but with a smattering of political, social and ecological viewpoints.

You’re not protected by law, as many people seem to think – but police do tend to steer clear, so as long as you don’t try to wash the colour off a black man or anything similarly importunate you’re probably ok.

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