Tuesday Tuesday

Hockey

The Senators are winning as I write this. I have the game on the radio, being a non-TV-using phillistine.

I was reading today about the deliberations of the CRTC and how the networks want to push additional fees onto the carriers (or possibly vice versa, I tend to get the two blood-sucking organizations confused sometimes). Inevitably this will be passed along to the consumer. Makes me happy not to bother with cable. Even if you're not inclined to just download everything, TV on DVD all by itself is a perfectly satisfactory replacement for cable television (or digital, or whatever).

Distribution is not a sustainable business model, and no amount of regulation can change that in the long term.

Xmas Tree

The xmas tree that we ordered arrived today. The UPS people were nice enough to park it by the back patio door, out of the rain and out of sight. That just could be the fastest turn-around on the shipping of a giant xmas tree ever.

Of course, I still hate UPS with every fiber of my being. It'll take more than this to win back my affections, you heartless, mendacious fiends.

Richard Dawkins

In The God Delusion, Dawkins touches upon the evolutionary purpose of religion -- since religious concepts seem to be ubiquitous across cultural lines and throughout history, there must be a reason for it. He speculates that religion is not in itself an evolutionary product, but rather is an unexpected side-effect of traits which are the product of evolution (or more to the point, an exploitation of traits which are the product of evolution).

He speculates that it is an outgrowth of the tendency of human beings, particularily while young, to take seriously what their elders tell them without asking questions. This unquestioning credulity has obvious survival advantages, and it's not hard to see how a persistent meme like religion could exploit this tendency for its own purposes.

This would also tend to follow given that religion correlates strongly with low IQ and lack of education.

Obviously religion has other benefits, mostly in the area of cultural integration of new members of society -- religion is a way of binding young humans into the society and culture into which they are born, reinforcing social structure and the integrity of the polity, in addition to reinforcing behaviour and outlook from which the society is oriented to benefit. But you'd expect there to be some prevalent characteristic of human beings which has an intrinsic value which religion exploits to achieve its ubiquity and protected position, and I think Dawkins might be on to something on that point.

If we ever encounter intelligent non-terrestrial life, I would expect that they won't have any concept of religion, if indeed it is based strongly on human evolutionary history and our own particularily fucked up perspective on the world. It wouldn't surprise me if they would view it as a society-wide mental aberration. Makes me want to write a science fiction story about how the alien cultures we encounter all refer to us as the People who Believe in False Things. I would expect that even the discovery that mankind, alone among sentient life, has a concept of religion, would do little to blunt the enthusiasm of the unthinking religious hordes. They'd probably take it as evidence that they're special.

Vampire Pseudocode

We had a discussion today about how vampiric destruction works in Vampire: tES. The incomparable Prime, geek to his heart, summed it up with pseudocode. I sorta want to email White Wolf and ask them why they can't just explain it like this on their website, because seriously, that would be so much easier.

This is exactly why Prime is the man.

FOR ALL normal dmg
IF blood > 0 THEN
blood = blood - 1
ELSE
SET wounded = 1
END IF
END FOR

FOR ALL aggro dmg
IF wounded THEN
blood = blood - 1
ELSE
SET wounded = 1
END IF
END FOR

IF wounded AND (blood < 0) THEN
DESTROY vampire
ELSE IF wounded AND (blood >= 0) THEN
TORPOR
END IF