At the moment, I’m working between 12 and 16 hours a day. A fairly typical day has me arriving at work about 8:30am and getting get home around 10pm. Weekends I usually average about 6-8 hours a day. I haven’t been to the gym in months and I haven’t cooked a meal in months. It’s not a very healthy (or cheap) way to live.
We are currently in Week 9 of the semester and I have lectures prepared for tomorrow. Tomorrow when I’m not lecturing, I’ll prepare lectures for Wednesday and labs for Friday. On Thursday, I’ll prepare Friday’s lectures. On the weekend, I’ll make the two tests my students just sat and the assignment they handed in two weeks ago.
With a bit of luck, things will improve.
At any rate, I only have 3 and a half weeks left to survive this semester. And never again will I redesign two courses at once.

Next they advice the wannabe apologist never to agree to debate terms that leave the bible out of the discussion. They liken this to a soldier agreeing to fight without weapons or body armour, a tacit admission that in fact there is no evidence for creation to be found outside the bible.

The main body of the article details how creationists should argue with evolutionists by reinterpreting any facts in a way that is consistent with the bible, giving a few examples of how to do they. It laments the fact that some christians have been led away from young earth creationism by blindly accepting secular interpretations of evidence rather than reinterpreting everything in the light of the bible. “If only they would start with the presupposition that God’s Word is true, they would find that they could then correctly interpret the evidence of the present and show overwhelmingly that observational science repeatedly confirms such interpretations.”

They finish with a summary of the process of
“The next time evolutionists use what seem to be convincing facts for evolution, try to determine the presuppositions they have used to interpret these facts. Then, beginning with the big picture of history from the Bible, look at the same facts through these biblical glasses and interpret them differently. Next, using the real science of the present that an evolutionist also uses, see if that science, when properly understood, confirms (by being consistent with) the interpretation based on the Bible. You will find over and over again that the Bible is confirmed by real science.”

Or, put another way:
1. Evolutionists present some facts
2. Get the bible
3. Using the bible, reinterpret the facts in a way that is consistent with the bible
4. Show that the reinterpreted facts are consistent with the bible
5. Conclude that the bible is true

Nowhere did they actually provide any proof of creation whatsoever.

Here are my current system spec:

• Cheap mid-tower black case with blue LED case fan
• Pentium 4 CPU, 3.0Ghz with Zalman AlCu Blue LED flower CPU fan
• CoolerMaster Real Power 450W power supply (with blue LED)
• 1GB RAM
• 2x 160GB Seagate Barracuda HDD
• GeForce FX5200 GPU with 128MB
• Leadtek WinFast PVR2000 Tv Tuner Card
• CD Writer
• DVD Writer

It’s not bad for my normal everyday stuff (30+ browsing tabs, multiple msn windows, a couple of notepad instances, maybe a Word or Excel or MS Money or so), but sometimes has trouble playing higher quality videos and some games, and it takes ages to compile a Visual Studio application. Plus, it’s too noisy to sleep in the same room with it on.

I have upgraded my monitor to a Dell UltraSharp 22inch already, and have awesome Altec Lansing speakers and a Microsoft Natural Multimedia Keyboard, so basically all I need is a completely new box. The only thing in the new system that I would consider keeping is the power supply, DVD writer and perhaps the TV tuner card. Everything else needs an upgrade. However, I’m probably going to sell it, so it will be easier to leave it intact and buy an entirely new system.

My primary considerations are that I want a PC that is quiet and fast. Even though I upgraded my current CPU fan, power supply and case fan with quietness in mind, the cheap case with lack of soft hard drive mounting means that there is quite a bit of vibration noise. Now that I have the computer in my bedroom, quietness is a priority.

Obviously, price is also a factor. I was kinda hoping for around about $1200 or so, no more than that. However, my first wishlist was significantly higher than that…

Higher-spec system (with indicative pricing from PriceSpy):

• Antec P182 Quiet ATX Mid Tower Case, Black ($300)
• Zalman ZM500-HP, Ultra-Quiet, 500W ATX PSU, Active PFC, SLI Ready modular Power Supply ($140)
• Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0Ghz, 1333Mhz FSB, Socket 775 ($340)
• Asus P5Q SE/R Motherboard, Socket 775, 1600MHz FSB, 4xDIMM DDR2, PCIe-16, 3xPCI, 2xPCIe-1, 12xUSB2, Audio, ATA, RAID, ATX ($200)
• Gigabyte GV-NX96T512HP NVidia GeForce 9600GT Heat Pipe Turbo Force 512MB DDR3 PCI-E ($260)
• G.Skill 2×2GB DDR2-1066 8500 ($135)
• Western Digital VelociRaptor WD1500HLFS Hard Disk Drive, 150GB, 10000rpm, 16384KB Cache, SATA-2 ($335)
• Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EACS Hard Disk Drive, 1000GB, 7200rpm, 16384KB Cache, SATA-2 ($200)
• Asus DRW-20B1LT DVD Writer, DVD 16R/20W/8RW, CD 40R/48W/32RW, Internal, SATA, Black, Retail, LightScribe ($45)

Total cost: $1,955

Lower-spec system (with indicative pricing from PriceSpy):

• Antec SOLO Quiet ATX Mid Tower Case, Silver/Black ($160)
• Antec NeoPower 500, 500W ATX PSU, Active PFC, SLI Ready, Gun Metal Grey, Retail ($130)
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ 3.0 GHz, Socket AM2, Retail pack with fan ($195)
• Gigabyte GA-MA770-DS3 Motherboard, Socket AM2+, 2000MHz FSB, 4xDIMM, DDR2, PCIe-16, 2xPCI, 4xPCIe-1, 10xUSB2 ($155)
• Galaxy GF9600GT Silent Heatpipe with XTREME Tuner Video Card, GeForce 9600 GT, 512MB, DDR3, PCIe-16, TV out, DVI, HDTV, SLI ready, Silent Heatpipe ($209)
• Corsair XMS2, TWIN2X4096-6400C5, 2×2GB, DDR2-800, PC2-6400, CL5, DIMM ($122)
• Western Digital VelociRaptor WD750HLFS Hard Disk Drive, 75GB, 10000rpm, 16384KB Cache, SATA-2 ($235)
• [No second hard drive - will keep my old 160GB for now and upgrade later]
• Asus DRW-20B1LT DVD Writer, DVD 16R/20W/8RW, CD 40R/48W/32RW, Internal, SATA, Black, Retail, LightScribe ($45)

Total Cost: $1,251

I know the 10,000rpm VelociRaptor drive is a bit pricey, but by all accounts, having a fast drive as a boot drive makes a huge difference. It doesn’t actually need to be big as it will just house the OS and apps, all data will be on a second drive, so my compromise is a smaller drive rather than switch to a cheaper 7,200rmp drive.

As an alternative to building my own, I can get a Dell Inspiron Desktop with the Intel E8400 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB Ram, 250GB HDD, DVD burner & ATI Radeon HD 4670 512MB GPU for about $1400. It comes with an unnecessary version of Vista, and I’d want to put a VelociRaptor drive in it for an extra $230.

Does anyone who knows something about this want to comment on these systems?  Are my specs OK?  Which things should I compromise on and which should I go with the higher spec? Is the Intel really $200 better than AMD? Should I bother building my own at all?

On iPredict.co.nz, I made money from the following positions:

• Short sold the Maori party vote (at 4%)
• Short sold National gaining an outright majority
• Short sold Winston Peters returning to parliament
• Bought National Prime Minister

But today, I came across this quote from John Key in NBR which really annoys me:

“I’ve had nine years of being told what lightbulb I can screw into the house, what shower I can take, what food I can eat, what things I can do, what thoughts I am allowed to have.“

None of this is true.  Not one bit.

• Lightbulbs.  There is no law about what lightbulbs John Key could use for the past nine years.  There have always been consumer regulations about energy efficiency for all sorts of things – the stars on fridges for example.  All that’s happened is there is a plan to raise the standard on lightbulbs.
• Showers.  For the past nine years there have been no laws governing what showers John Key can take.  Unless you count that he probably wouldn’t be allowed to walk into a ladies shower block, but I doubt that’s what he means.  I assume he’s referring to the Greens’ plan to have low-flow showerheads installed in newly built houses.  How is this a problem?  The Consumers’ Institute has been recommending people switch to them for years as it saves a lot of money with no noticable impact on shower quality.
• Food.  If anyone has ben telling John Key what food he can eat for the past nine years, it wasn’t Helen Clark.  The government does have food safety regulations, which most people generally consider to be a good thing.  It means for instance that he can’t choose to eat milk powder with melamine or spinach with E. coli.   As far as I know, National has not been arguing that food safety regulations are a bad thing, nor do they have any policies to repeal our food safety laws.
• Things.  Yes, there are certain things that John Key can’t do.  He can’t murder people, steal, beat people up and various other things that are against the law in this country.  The only thing I can think of that he can’t do now that he perhaps could nine years ago is smack his kids.  But National voted for that law also and has no plans to repeal it.  Rather than being fewer things he can do, John Key can now do more things than he could nine years ago.  He can now sell his sexual services, and he can now enter a Civil union with a man.  Or not – it’s an option, not a requirement. 
• Thoughts.  This is just blatent ridiculous scaremongering.

Now, I don’t know whether John Key actually believes this.  If he truly thinks that the Labour government for the past nine years have been telling him what lightbulbs to use, shower pressure to have, what to eat, do and think then he doesn’t have a very firm grasp on reality.  If on the other hand he doesn’t really believe this then he is just lying in order to gain votes by stoking fear.  Playing on and inflating people’s fears is the most vile form of dishonesty.    Either way, I don’t want to vote for him.

A quench isn’t a completely unexpected event, and there are systems in place to try to prevent them (at least, to prevent them happening too often). The worst case is that the magnet has to be replaced and possibly repairs to the cooling systems to be made. They have about 40 spare magnets, so it isn’t too big a deal, but it does take a lot of time because it means the affected sectors have to be warmed up, people go in to do the work and then it all has to be cooled down again.

The LHC is an amazing piece of machinery, with lots of interrelated systems, including many safety systems to protect the LHC from itself.

The Big Picture has some more amazing pictures of the LHC.

During the return voyage, the manufacturers of the Lunar Module, Grumman Aerospace were involved in using a prototype of the module to test out various things for the astronauts to try. After they were safely home, Grumman Aerospace sent an invoice to the makers of the Command Module, North American Aerospace for the service of ‘towing’ the crippled Command Module back from the moon:

It’s pretty hard to read, so here’s a summary of the invoice items:

1. Towing, $4.00 first mile, $1.00 each additional mile, Trouble call, fast service.
2. Battery Charge (road call + $.05 ???) customer’s jumper cables
3. oxygen at $10.00/lb
4. sleeping accommodations for 2, no TV, prepaid air-conditioned, with radio, modified American plan, with view (contract NAS-9-1100)
5. Additional guest in room at $8.00/night. (1) Check out no later than noon Fri. 4/17/70, accommodations not guaranteed beyond that time
6. water (no charge)
7. Personalized “trip-tik”, including all no charge transfers, baggage handling, and gratuities

All up they charged $312,421.24 (after allowing a 20% early payment discount and a 2% cash discount).

After North American Rockwell’s auditor looked it over, their official response was to remind Grumman that Rockwell hadn’t yet been paid for towing the first two lunar modules to the moon

Source: Michael Grabois

I’ve always been a bit casual about friendships. People come into my life and then drift out again, and I usually let that happen, without making much of an effort to keep in touch. Nearly two years ago one of my closest friends died after a long battle with breast cancer. Losing her is obviously irreversible, but has made me realise that the loss of my other friendships is not. It’s such a waste to let a friendship die needlessly.

Democritus said "Life is not worth living for the man who has not even one good friend."
I’d turn that around and say that if a person has even one good, true friendship, theirs must be a good life.
I am lucky enough to have several such good friends in my life. Even though I don’t know how to find the words to say so, I truly do appreciate these friendships. To have such good friends, I know I must really have done something right with my life.

Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods. -Artistotle

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather is one of those things that give value to survival. -C. S. Lewis

I am extremely lucky to have (and to have had) such good friends in my life.

I was kicked out of my apartment. My landlords sold at auction, losing very close to $100,000 in the process. I’ve currently packed up all my stuff and stashed it at my brother’s place, and I’ve moved back in with my family on Waiheke to save some money.

Since I hate moving so much, I’d really like to buy a place this time. Also, I’ve had such good luck with landlords in the past that I can’t realistically expect it to continue. Even though I earn (I think) a fairly decent salary, I’m almost completely priced out of the housing market in Auckland. There are a few places I can afford but I really don’t want to live in them (Manurewa, Clendon) or that are just too far away to be feasible (Papakura, Pukekohe).

I’ve been looking at units in the Mt Wellington/Panmure/Ellerslie area (I can’t afford an actual house in this area), but most of them are not really places I’d want to live. For instance, I’d quite like to have a deck/garden where I can have a BBQ, but many of these places have just a shared lawn that doubles as extra carparking for everyone. I’m also not a big fan of having a carport miles away from the unit, or a situation where everyone coming and going from the other units has to drive or walk past mine to get to theirs.

My second choice is to look for a place out west – Massey, Royal Heights, West Harbour. At the very bottom of the market there are some actual houses that I could possibly just afford. They aren’t flash – basically kitset type houses with flimsy fibro-cement cladding, but they are sufficiently old that they are unlikely to leak. They’re usually three bedroom and most places have a garage and at least room for a deck or patio. I’ll probably end up having to rent out one or two rooms for a while to try and get the mortgage paid off.

I’m still busy saving up a deposit so I won’t really be able to buy anything until the end of the year, but I’m starting to tentatively look for places now.

I know they’re just jokes, but I think that our tacit acceptance of the stereotypes underlying the jokes is no laughing matter.

These jokes are based on stereotypes. The male stereotype is that men are stupid but straightforward and only interested in sex. The female stereotype is that women are incomprehensible and insecure, withhold sex to manipulate and are only good if they shut up and cater to a man’s every whim (especially sexual whims). You have to know these stereotypes to even comprehend the joke at all.

The racist jokes in Part 3 are also based on stereotypes. Jews are penny pinching misers, Asians can’t drive, Mexicans are lazy, dirty thieves and black people are all criminals who should be put to work or put to death.

I originally set out to find racist jokes to contrast with the sexist jokes. My argument was going to be that the humour in both derives from stereotypes, and to ask how come people still find the sexist jokes funny and worthy of sharing, but would never laugh at or forward those racist jokes.

However, I think it’s more complicated that that. Humour comes from many places. Some humour is funny precisely because it is shocking, and offends our standards of decency. The racist jokes can be funny because it is just so preposterous to believe that someone could actually hold those opinions and give those answers.

So, it’s entirely possible that you found all those jokes funny, but I’ll bet you were more shocked by the racist ones than you were by the sexist jokes. You just don’t see or hear jokes like that very often these days.

However, things can also be funny because we see truth in them. I’ve heard a lot of people chuckle at some of the sexist jokes and say ‘hahaha, that’s so true’. I doubt anyone I know would say that about the racist jokes. But some people would.

One of the places where I found a whole bunch of these jokes was on the discussion forums for a large white supremacist organisation in the US. On the discussion forum, people linked to these jokes along with comments about how true various aspects of the stereotypes were and shared anecdotes and stories to back up and reinforce how true those stereotypes were. These people do seriously think that all people who don’t have white skin do not deserve to live, and they would be more than happy to create gas chambers and man the firing squads.

I find those people truly scary, and knowing that they seriously see these jokes as reflections of truth makes the humour completely vanish for me. I actually started feeling physically sick when I was culling the lists of jokes on these sites. The level of bigotry and hatred is just appalling.

So, it was the exposure to neo-nazi racial prejudice that killed the humour of the racist jokes for me. But what about the sexist jokes? While writing about this, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is my recent exposure to people who actually believe (or profess to believe) in these sexist stereotypes that has killed the humour for me.

OK, first of all, to head off those who want to argue that the stereotypes are in fact true, I will concede that yes, there are physiological differences between men and women. Men have more testosterone so they do on average have a higher sex drive. Men and women are socialised differently and so different personality traits are reinforced more in one gender than the other. However, I do not believe that this makes either gender superior to the other in any sense. It certainly doesn’t give members of one gender different rights to members of the other. And finally, I think these are average differences and I think the average trends are overpowered by the noise of individual variation. We’re all just people.

Various male friends have hassled me by invoking the female stereotypes of being less logical, less intelligent, always changing their minds, loving shopping, being unable to read maps and so on. However, I tended to assume that because they were so intelligent, they obviously knew it was false and were just saying stuff that was clearly wrong and inflammatory to get a reaction from me.

However, more recently, I’ve come across other people saying the same things, and the context, and matter-of-fact way it comes up leads me to think they actually do really believe in those stereotypes. And I think that must have been what has killed my sense of humour towards the sexist jokes. They’re funny as satire, but as reflections of actual beliefs, they’re just sad.

I wonder about what the appropriate response should be when I receive something like this. On one hand, if I make a big deal about it, and point out that the stereotypes are false and that this shouldn’t be acceptable, surely I am being a killjoy. I’ve ‘lost my sense of humour’, and I ’shouldn’t take things so seriously’, and it’s just a joke so I should ‘lighten up’.

But my problem is that it seems that the more these things are circulated, the more the stereotypes are reinforced and become normalised and widespread in society. If something is repeated often enough, it tends to become regarded as established fact, especially by people who aren’t given to deep analysis. Even if I don’t forward them myself, if I stay silent about one when I receive it, I’m allowing the social reinforcement to occur unchecked.

So instead then, I should speak up. I should point out that I think that these jokes are based on completely false stereotypes. I should tell people that I don’t think it’s a good idea to reinforce these false stereotypes. I should tell people not to be silent when sexist and racist stereotypes are invoked.

And I guess that is the entire point of this series of posts.