books at bofh.com writes: > >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. :) Not in the sense we're discussing. There are solid, real-world, observable, measurable, reasons for preferences among the things on those lists. And, unlike god, there aren't people questioning the very existence of emacs. -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net / http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/ John Dyer-Bennet 1915-2002 Memorial Site http://john.dyer-bennet.net Dragaera mailing lists, see http://dragaera.info