The Atheist Blogger

Dear Mr. Oktar,

I hereby present Tiktaalik, a “intermediate-form fossil” as you call it, illustrating the evolution of fish into reptiles.

Apparently worth £4,400,000,000,000

If you need to get in contact with me in order to send me the money, you can do so here.

Kind Regards,

Adrian Hayter

This morning some friends of mine came over and started talking about weird séance-type stuff, which got me interested. One of my friends (Hay) suggested we hold one and use a Ouija board, just for fun. My other friend (Laura) didn’t think we should mess with stuff like this, and refused for it to take place in her house, so I suggested the most godless house in the area…mine. So we’ve invited a few other “spiritualist” people, including another friend (Ayten) who goes to have psychic readings (or “cold readings” as they are known to rational people) a few times a year.

As for the board, we plan to make one using a large whiteboard, and simply have a small glass as the pointer. The internet has a large number of websites telling us what to do, so it’s full steam ahead from here. My prediction? If everyone keeps to the pact “not to push the glass”, then we will be sat for an hour with absolutely nothing happening. If someone does push the glass, we’ll be in for a bit of fun. As the official skeptic of the evening, I won’t be breaking the pact. I might take some pictures if it’s worth it.

Has anyone else dabbled in the occult, if only just for fun? If so, have you got any suggestions or stories to share?

Tomorrow I officially start my second year of Computer Science with Information Security here at Royal Holloway, University of London. My timetable is actually a lot smaller than last years, but that probably means the workload is just going to be piled on top of us!

Monday

11:00 – 12:00 Object-oriented software engineering

13:00 – 16:00 Robotics Lab

Tuesday

12:00 – 13:00 Robotics

16:00 – 17:00 Object-oriented software engineering

Wednesday

10:00 – 11:00 Robotics

11:00 – 12:00 Algorithms & Complexity

Thursday

10:00 – 11:00 Algorithms & Complexity

11:00 – 12:00 Object-oriented software engineering

14:00 – 15:00 Information Security

Friday

09:00 – 11:00 Information Security

11:00 – 12:00 Algorithms & Complexity

So all in all, quite a good timetable for a first term. Friday mornings will be annoying, but at least I have an early finish. That said, I do not even want to think about the homework we’re going to get.

On 1st October, a load of our students are going to a “Microsoft Student Day” where we will be subjected to brainwashing Micro$oft propaganda interesting lectures on technology, as well as a speech from the devil himself Steve Balmer. Suffice to say, I will be sitting there with Gentoo Linux running on my laptop whilst Mr Balmer tries to answer my question about why anyone would actually purchase a Microsoft Surface computer.

Google apparently turned 10 today, and GNU (Gnu Is Not Unix) turned 25. Google is of course the future of the web, and GNU is the future of computing. Steven Fry has this to say of GNU:

For those who want to try the world of GNU, I suggest Ubuntu as a first choice.

Update: Chicken Girl is also 25! Go read her blog and wish her a happy birthday :D

In this post I was planning to talk about the answers that Lindsey Kirth gave to questions people asked about Mormonism. However, in light of the response the article got on Friendly Atheist (where it was published) it seems that she has pretty much deleted everything she ever wrote for the site. Hemant posted some thoughts on the the posts made by Lindsey, claiming

I think it was courageous of her to try explaining Mormonism from an insider’s perspective — knowing full well that her beliefs would be thoroughly challenged by readers. Judging from some of the comments, though, many of you didn’t want any part of that dialogue. And some of you are just plain rude.

Yes it was very courageous of her to try and explain Mormonism to a bunch of atheists, but it is really rude to point out obvious flaws in her reasoning? I’m looking back through the archived comments I have in my feedreader still, and I see only a bunch of people challenging the absurdities Lindsey was espousing. Of course, my comments only go back so far, and it is possible that I wasn’t able to cache them all. However, I would say most people were still eager to be part of the dialogue, and a few were asking more questions.

Something that didn’t help Lindsey was the amount of ex-Mormon atheists that found the thread, and who promptly dismissed her arguments that “Mormons don’t practice polygamy” or that Mormonism wasn’t originally racist. The history of Mormonism, like that of Scientology, has been revealed on the internet on many websites. The Skeptics Annotated Book of Mormon has a long list of examples of intolerance, making the argument that the Book of Mormon was simply the ravings of Joseph Smith even more clear.