Tuesday 29 June 2010

Religion and other delusions

God has been given various attributes I've outlined a few below and their dissection and logical conclusion of his inability to exist

perfect
Immutable (the belief that God cannot change)
free
omnipotence (unlimited power)
transcendent (the concept of being entirely above the created universe)
all-loving
omniscient (capacity to know everything infinitely)
omnipresent (present everywhere at the same time)
the creator of the universe


1. If God exists, then he is perfect.
2. If God exists, then he is the creator of the universe.
3. A perfect being can have no needs or wants.
4. If any being created the universe, then he must have had some need or want.
5. Therefore, it is impossible for a perfect being to be the creator of the universe (from 3 and 4).
6. Hence, it is impossible for God to exist (from 1, 2, and 5).

1. If God exists, then he is perfect.
2. If God exists, then he is the creator of the universe.
3. If a being is perfect, then whatever he creates must be perfect.
4. But the universe is not perfect.
5. Therefore, it is impossible for a perfect being to be the creator of the universe (from 3 and 4).
6. Hence, it is impossible for God to exist (from 1, 2, and 5).

1. If God exists, then he is immutable.
2. If God exists, then he is the creator of the universe.
3. An immutable being cannot at one time have an intention and then at a later time not have that intention.
4. For any being to create anything, prior to the creation he must have had the intention to create it, but at a later time, after the creation, no longer have the intention to create it.
5. Thus, it is impossible for an immutable being to have created anything (from 3 and 4).
6. Therefore, it is impossible for God to exist (from 1, 2, and 5)

1. If God exists, then he is immutable.
2. If God exists, then he is omniscient.
3. An immutable being cannot know different things at different times.
4. To be omniscient, a being would need to know propositions about the past and future.
5. But what is past and what is future keep changing.
6. Thus, in order to know propositions about the past and future, a being would need to know different things at different times (from 5).
7. It follows that, to be omniscient, a being would need to know different things at different times (from 4 and 6).
8. Hence, it is impossible for an immutable being to be omniscient (from 3 and 7).
9. Therefore, it is impossible for God to exist (from 1, 2, and 8).


1. If God exists, then he is immutable.
2. If God exists, then he is all-loving.
3. An immutable being cannot be affected by events.
4. To be all-loving, it must be possible for a being to be affected by events.
5. Hence, it is impossible for an immutable being to be all-loving (from 3 and 4).
6. Therefore, it is impossible for God to exist (from 1, 2, and 5).

1. If God exists, then he is transcendent (i.e., outside space and time).
2. If God exists, then he is omnipresent.
3. To be transcendent, a being cannot exist anywhere in space.
4. To be omnipresent, a being must exist everywhere in space.
5. Hence, it is impossible for a transcendent being to be omnipresent (from 3 and 4).
6. Therefore, it is impossible for God to exist (from 1, 2, and 5).


and the real killer is :-

1. If God exists, then he is omniscient.
2. If God exists, then he is free.
3. An omniscient being must know exactly what actions he will and will not do in the future.
4. If one knows that he will do an action, then it is impossible for him not to do it, and if one knows that he will not do an action, then it is impossible for him to do it.
5. Thus, whatever an omniscient being does, he must do, and whatever he does not do, he cannot do (from 3 and 4).
6. To be free requires having options open, which means having the ability to act contrary to the way one actually acts.
7. So, if one is free, then he does not have to do what he actually does, and he is able to do things that he does not actually do (from 6).
8. Hence, it is impossible for an omniscient being to be free (from 5 and 7).
9. Therefore he cannot be omnipotent (from 4,5,6)
10. Therefore, it is impossible for God to exist (from 1, 2, and 8,9).


and of course if all else fails use Occam's Razor

Oh and a new feature on my blog is searchable text just right click and highlight with your mouse the word or words you want to search then a box pops up and click search.... very useful ....

unlike religion....

Friday 25 June 2010

Suicide Blackspot

It's official the country lane that skirts our house has it seems become a place for Pheasants to "off" themselves spectacularly, or more fittingly.....the Dignitas of Carmarthen for game birds.......we've had two in as many weeks splatter themselves all over the pot holed road in full view of our bedroom, which I have to say isn't nice when you look out in the morning....

We went to the beach yesterday Telpyn point just past Marros, fun was had by all, we had a BBQ on the beach, and removed all of our rubbish because I personally cannot stand people who leave beer cans and bottles and any other rubbish on the beach, it spoils it for others.....FOMO boy had a strop on the way back because he was asked to carry a bag up the hill... which we found hilarious....He's going to learn eventually that strops don't work in the slightest with either me or Andrea.... Freya got absolutely filthy because she thought rolling about in the shale at the top of the beach was great fun..... but we all enjoyed it....

We did witness a bit of weirdness on the beach ... namely a rather overweight woman wandering around the beach, the weird thing was she walked around like the living dead with her arms straight down the side of her body.......she must have done about five circuits and then when the tide came in she wandered out into the surf up to her chest IN HER DRESS !!! and continued walking around in the sea a bit like an aimless Dalek .... strange

Today we have a BBQ planned at our house with a few good friends... I will most probably be the Chef..... as usual... probably because I don't incinerate the food and thus far nobody has died from food poisoning.... Andrea has just nipped out for her run and should be back in about an hour or so .... not sure how many miles it is, no doubt her Garmin Forerunner will tell the tale when she gets back.... She's starting her training for the Snowdonia Marathon in October in the next few days.... So I'll probably get my wife back just after October by my calculations......



Thursday 17 June 2010

I killed the lawnmower yesterday

it's very old and very tired, so old in fact the blade housing has holes in it where stones have been flung through its paper thin rusting body..... but it still works.. or it did until I went over stone/root and it bent a bit of metal up inside the blade housing and consequently stopped the beast dead.....

So I took it down to the workshop and tipped it on its side got the grinder and started grinding off the offending bit of bent metal... it was too thick to bend out of the way .....when "Woof" it caught fire right under the carburettor ....

I can see you all tutting now saying I should have emptied the petrol tank before I started with the sparks everywhere.... well I actually did think ahead and I did empty the fuel from the tank and this is where it got considerably worse very quickly ...

Prior to grinding it I thought "hmmmm I'll have to empty the petrol tank, just in case !!....which I did and mopped up what I'd spilt with a large rag ... because it's not easy emptying a lawnmower fuel tank..... I then moved away from the area (very large workshop plenty of space) I'd accidentally spilled the petrol on and started grinding

Cue Quentin Tarantino style cut back to burning carburettor...I flicked the lawn mower onto it's wheels by this time the flames were about a foot high...and despite several attempts to smother the flames .....it just didn't work....then the fuel line melted and they got about 3 feet high.... so I rushed across to where I emptied the fuel out and picked up THE RAG ....instinctively thinking I could stuff this under the gap where it's getting air to smother the flames.... YUP the rag burst into flames quite vigorously as I was holding it..... it still had petrol on it (Duhhhh....of course) so now I had two fires, luckily I didn't throw the rag towards the ice cream tub half full of petrol or I would have had 3 fires to deal with ..... (Don't panic Mr Mannering.....)

It was at this point a stunned Andrea arrived home to find me desperately trying to smother a burning lawn mower....she noticed the billowing black smoke no doubt coming from the workshop....so lets recap one burning mower and a large rag on fire several metres away.... my attempts to smother simply wasn't happening little did I know that by turning the mower on it's side I had filled the foam air filter with the remaining petrol from the carb....

it wasn't going out in a hurry....

I knew the only way to get it out would be to remove the air filter with it's top screw but I honestly didn't fancy barbecuing my hands and arms.... so to shouts of "What the hell are you doing ?" I raced past my confused wife seeing no real need to explain what I was doing because it was pretty damn obvious by that time......and into the house (which is a good 30 metres away up the iron stairs out into the yard then down the driveway) .... I had got to the stage now where despite all the warnings about water and petrol on fire never the two should you mix.... I'd run out of options

even the kids were joining in gleefully filling sand buckets for the beach with water....

thankfully a single pan of water put it out immediately without spreading the fire any further.... we cleared the area after I had made sure it wasn't smouldering away and had tea while the smoke dispersed.....

I had to replace the carb and petrol tank and the air filter (thankfully we had an even older Briggs and Stratton mower which I robbed the parts off) and it's now working again despite being thoroughly cooked by me... although I'll have to setup it's idle speed because currently it thinks it's entered a formula 1 race...... any faster and it would be a hover mower.....

Pretty much a normal day at our house....

Wednesday 9 June 2010

Patrick Stewart vs James Corden



First off I've seen most of this awards ceremony and James Corden was an arse... he frequently used the people who came up onto the stage as the butt of his jokes..... and I think Patrick just brought him down a peg or two..... lets face it he's a knight of the realm, a distinguished Shakespearian actor and a star of many films....

James Corden on the other hand has accomplished .... ohhh let me see .... ahh yes....."Gavin and Stacy" which brought him to the public eye...... he is nowhere near the altitude of Patrick Stewart and simply never will be.... Patrick was probably incensed by his attitude as I would have been in his shoes......if you're getting paid to do something at least have the common decency to look like you want to be there and don't try to insult people to get a laugh.... and yes .... tuck your shirt in nobody wants to see your expansive muffin top....


Good on you Patrick !!! there is no excuse for bad manners ..... and you didn't die on stage.... you made James Corden look utterly stupid.... as he so rightly deserved.... it is he who went down like a Messerschmitt in flames

not you :)

Patrick Stewart wasn't there to be funny whereas James Corden was (meant to be)... it's a shame that James Corden had such an Titanic and epic fail in the humour department..... his one liners were about as funny as drowning kittens..... there is a fine line between being stupid and rude........ or funny.... I guess two out of three isn't bad..... he should just stick to being funny in future

Saturday 5 June 2010

iPod 5.5 video 30GB

Well my iPod coughed and died again.... probably because Freya had been using it as a hammer to bash some toy or other (with it switched on).... I tried everything to revive it...

From firing up Linux and using gparted and disk utility, reformatting it with foreign file systems, running badblocks on it, you name it I ran it.... I even loaded DOS USB drivers via the ASPI interface and tried to run Spinrite on it but it still failed....

Then I went into the iPod diagnostics (reset followed by holding down rewind and select whilst it was booting) .... I went into the IO area and looked at the smart data which said it had :-

Retracts = 86
Reallocs = 371
Pending sectors = 151
power on hours = 1127
start stops = 10703

so obviously (to me at least) it knew it had bad blocks but it hadn't remapped them, the difficulty was telling the hard drive where it's bad blocks were .... I have to admit I stumbled across it by accident, you can't "really" access the iPod at such a low level because the operating system "thinks" it's only 7.1 GB so obviously the firmware on the iPod does some fancy remapping of the disk surface via the partition....

Ahhh I thought.... the iPod firmware must look after bad sectors simply by mapping them out at filesystem level not hardware level.... so each time you format your iPod you must lose this bad block map, hence why you always get back to square one each time you restore your iPod... so I experimented and tried to sync the iPod several times.... each time I rebooted the iPod (after it failed) and looked at the diagnostic smart data.... low and behold each time I did this the Reallocs went up and the pending sectors went down....I repeated this until the iPod started syncing without failing....

My iPod is now syncing happily after remapping the bad area(s) on the disk (automatically I might add) ... once it's finished I'll recover the iPod again and see if the bad blocks stay remapped... Well..... I like to prove a theory rather than take it as gospel

Thursday 3 June 2010

London

We took a short break to London and decided to use the underground and other public transport.... and basically do all the cheesy touristy things tourists do..... my feet very nearly fell off several times.... I have no idea how many miles we walked.... but I have to say we enjoyed it immensely ....

The weather was good for the first day and we went walkabout to Covent Garden and generally bimbled about until it was time to go back to the Hotel ......then on the second day it was raining for pretty much all of it so we decided to do the natural history museum.... we didn't get to see the Dinosaur collection other than Dippy in the front part of the museum but he was pretty impressive on his own..... this was because it was raining outside and it was half term.... so half of the nations kids descended on the museum at once....

We emerged from the restaurant they have in the museum and were surrounded by screaming kids....... making headway through the place was pretty unpleasant in parts.... more like rush hour on one of the tube stations than a nice quiet museum....needless to say the queue for the Dinosaur exhibition was immense with a half hour wait at least endlessly winding back and forth like a snake in the neat zig zag lanes... at this point FOMO boy was getting bored and Freya was starting to get Glaswegian... to the executive decision was made to leave....

But still, it was enjoyable and we took a fair few photographs whilst there.... although my poor camera didn't cope too well with the lighting in there and the flash was almost completely pointless.... so after the rain stopped enough to venture out we decided to navigate over to the London Eye with Andrea's dog eared and trusty map of London.....

Well it had to be done.... and once there it was surprisingly quick to get on .... I was expecting at least an hour or so wait but no .... we got on very quickly we probably waited less than 20 minutes....... I'd recommend you do the 4D experience before the "flight" .... (prepare to get wet and watch out for that first seagull ......)

It has some really stunning views over London unfortunately the thick glass of the capsule (designed to stop idiots from trying to jump through it.....) took something away from the photographs.... I think they are starting to get a little hazy with UV light so it gives your photographs a sort of washed out colour.... although to the naked eye they look quiet clear.... weird..... I suppose it simply could have been pollution .... who knows.... either way it was a stunning view....

We then polished off the day with a visit to the Rainforest Cafe.... I'd recommend this place if you have kids .... Freya and Andrew loved it .... it's hard to describe unless you've been but it's worth every (expensive) penny....and the meal was delicious ... always a bonus :)

On the last day we all went to the swimming pool in the morning at the Hotel and had a swim and a jacuzzi a bit of steam room and Sauna.... then checked out ... all in all a brilliant way to top off the short break ....we took time out to meet up with my sister Christine in Trafalgar Square (Andrew's favourite place) .... I think Trafalgar Square blew FOMO boy away by the sheer size of it and he particularly liked the Lions.... although the second time he tried to sit on them the sun had been shining for most of the morning and short trousers and red hot bronze got him off the Lion much quicker than he got on it..... (first lesson in conduction of heat)

We sat in the square had a beer and a chat for a while then we all went off to St James Park for a picnic..... and got mobbed by pigeons and squirrels .... Christine had to be in work by 4pm so we idled away our time wandering about until it was time to catch our train at Paddington.... albeit a bit too much time idled away....


We missed it !!! ..... but got the next one and hit Carmarthen station around midnight... I think I was the only one awake at that point.....

an absolutely brilliant time....but tiring.....we packed a lot more than that into the three days there but it would have made intensely boring reading.... in fact I'm surprised you've got this far !!!!

describing a break/holiday ..... is almost as bad as somebody whipping out a thick photo album of their camping holiday in Scunthorpe complete with train spotting pictures ..... :)