Dragaera

Damiano's Lute

books at bofh.com books at bofh.com
Tue Nov 26 22:14:33 PST 2002

>The obsessive need to know "answers" to meaningless "questions" is
>(and should be recognized as) a personality disorder.  We'll
>eventually learn to treat it, and root out the memes that lead to it.
>My need to believe in goals, order, and a direction to evolution (for
>example) impose no obligation on the universe to actually work that
>way.

One of the things that struck me when looking at MIT's OpenCourseWare
stuff (http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html) was the course on Quantum Mechanics.
(http://ocw.mit.edu/5/5.61/f01/index.html).  Now most of this was clearly
out of my league, with my engineering math, thankfully, well behind me.
BUT, the interesting thing to me (and the portion relevant to this
conversation) was the discovery that many things (at least on the quantum
level) are not deterministic, but instead probablistic (sp).  This is a 
fundamental difference that makes things very difficult for people who 
believe in logic and order.  (It turns out I'm one of these people, ah
the interesting connundrum).

I also do not believe that DDB is not religious.  I will offer
as inflamatory examples requests for discussions on the following
subjects by him:

1) List headers should have the list address set as reply-to
2) Vi is better than Emacs
3) Ksh is the best shell
4) Sendmail is clearly superior to qmail
5) HTML is necessary for effective email communications
...
These are clearly religious issues.  :)

-Jot