Some old chestnuts

[peterbirks]

David Suchet was on Desert Island Discs this morning. He's obviously a nice man, and his tale of living on a boat for nine years with the love of his life (his wife -- don't you just hate those people who fall in love at first sight and it works for the rest of their lives? I mean, do they have to rub our faces in our own failure to achieve this quite so often?) was touching and inspiring.

But then we got onto that old favourite, faith. Suchet's justification was one of the standard sophistries, that the alternative (there being no God) was too depressing. Logically, this maps to the statement "I have faith in God because it makes me feel better", which is a fair enough reason to have faith in God, but is not any justification for the truth or not of the hypothesis.

But, I can live with that. I understand it. I know many people who believe in God and this is one of the most frequent justifications I come across.

What I find hard to cope with was Suchet's subsequent assertion that this was "a hard path". FFS, it's the easy path. Living with the belief that this is all there is (that famous alternative that Suchet finds "too horrible to contemplate") — that's the "hard path". Does he think that atheists revel in their atheism? Does he think that its "easy" to face the horrors of the world with the knowledge that "that is all there is" with calm equanimity? Trust me, it isn't. Every day, not having a faith to act as a support for you as you witness yet another piece of evidence that humanity (and life) sucks, is an indomitable strain. That, indeed, is the hard path.

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On the "find things to cheer Pete up in the absence of a God, a life, or anything else" front, it does look as if I might have a functioning sink back in the kitchen by the end of the day. Well, here's hoping. It was v nice to have the washing machine back online last night. Apparently in the replumbing it got its MacAddress changed.

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Comments

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

No, that change occurred on the builder's watch -- haven't we spent enough time explaining that The Problem Is Windows? And it's MAC address (Media Access Control, since you're so picky about having the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers spelled out); it has nothing to do with Apple, and it certainly doesn't derive from some poxy Scottish surname.

RFCs, btw, are "Requests For Comment." Which, in technical jargon, means that they are the authoritative source for whichever addressing system, protocol, or plain dippy idea they cover. Obviously. There's a good historical reason for this, but otherwise it's SNAFU. You will be even more delighted to know that those who quote them invariably (with me as the exception) have never read them.

To you who are without God, without a desirable upstairs window (I believe the First Amendment to the Ten Commandments has something quite stringent to say about coveting views of your neighbour's roof terrace), and without hope: I bring this little ray of sunshine into your life.

You're welcome.

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

How do you know it isn't an Apple washing machine?

OK, Media Access Control address. I shall remember that. I certainly won't remember what IEEE stands for.

Hint when using acronyms. Do not use ones that oher people have snaffled first either as abbreviations or designations. It will only lead to confusion.

Unless, of course, confusion is the aim. Which, being IT, I presume it is.

PJ

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

Because you'm nart in Zummerzet.

(I had to check what IEEE stood for, and I was once a member. As you can imagine, they're not too strict on qualifications -- fifty bucks and a postes restantes will do.)

I have taken your sage advice to heart. Next time I reinvent the Internet, it will doubtless save heartache for millions.

Sorry about all the gibberish, anyhow. You won't necessarily credit it, but education was the aim; not confusion.

Then again, having attended U Kent (Cant) in the 1970s, it's entirely plausible that the two are synonymous to you. (Small and already repentant joke: please don't hit me.)

Branching off slightly, acronyms are an interesting field. IBM set the gold standard (I believe, the IGS) by mandating a holy hand-grenade number of three letters. I've always believed that this has something to do with college fraternities, because otherwise it makes no sense at all.

Technoslaves (many of whom departed IBM for juicier pastures) followed suit. Throughout most of the 1970s and 1980s, IT companies insisted on triple-letter acronyms. Oddly, not in the airline industry, which was an early adopter of massive IT (see the Sabre reservations system, which was actually worth more than the airline that owned it: the relevant acronym here is APARS™. It stands for Automated Postal Air-Res System, which is fascinating, because I spent five years of my life and never had a clue what it meant.)

VISA, being a huge consumer of all things IBM when it started in the 1960s, took this one stage further. VISA, as you no doubt know, is a recursive acronym: it stands for "VISA International Service Association." I can't resist adding that its founding father was a man called Dee Hock. Hum.

VISA, what with being recursive and all, took the view that the first letter of the acronym had to be 'V'. Quite reasonable. VISA, what with being Big-Blue-headed and all, took the view that there are only two letters left for the rest of the acronym.

VISA is big. VISA is huge. VISA is International.

(Did I mention that it's also a Service Association? No, Well, that's a topic for another pointless discursion at some unspecified later point.)

26x26 ain't much of a Gaussian Field (I'm tired of this -- look that one up). You're a poker player: do da math.

Anyway, back before Y2K, we ran out, which is where I came up with the acronym MFDV, based largely on the principles of the Hebraic alphabet: you have to guess the intervening vowels. Pretty much all the users were middle-aged women on the help desk, and they had to type it in to access the primary resource screen. What it actually stands for ... you know, I've forgotten what it actually stands for. I came up with some plausible explanation for management; which wasn't M'FD'V'.

I understand that VISA has since abandoned the practice in favour of massively expressive, 1.5Gig URLs, which are all the rage these days.

And what happened to APARS? I don't hear you ask. That one was interesting, too. I spent five years at VISA working with a test system on the mainframe (rather a good one, in fact) called VPARS. How could this be a VISA system? I thought. It has the requisite V-ness, but waaaay too many other letters. What could it possibly mean?

Turns out it didn't mean anything at all. They'd just taken the APARS system and tweaked it so that it ran credit card authorisations instead of airline reservations. (Both worked on TPF, but I can sense I'm losing you here, if indeed you still have the will to live at this point.)

The odd thing is: even though the acronym was insane, and totally against Company Protocol, the actual system was hugely useful. That's pretty rare for internal systems at VISA.

Cheering Master Birks Up, Part Two (or CMBU-2) will address the strange metamorphosis of VISA from humongous financial powerhouse to wannabe dotCom. The name "Inovant," and I did type that correctly, may well feature.

Anyway, I've shot me wad on acronyms. Cheer up and straighten out. The poker tables await.

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

1) Remember that acronyms are not TLAs (the latter being "three-letter abbreviations). Laser is an acronym, Visa is an acronym, even MAC (your Mac) is an acronym), but IBM is not, unless if is pronounced iBuhM, which I don't think it is.

2) I suspect that the airline industry abandoned the three-letter rule when it had to rename the intercontinental ballistic missile (the IBM) the ICBM, just to keep IBM happy.

3) 26 x 26 = 30 x 22, + 4 x 4. or 660 + 16 or 676. This simple mathematical trick is rare in that, when I was younger, it actually impressed girls. You just said that you could square any two-figure number faster than they could work it out on a calculator. And, after a while, you could.

I actually practised this, in my late teens, with three-figure numbers and four-figure numbers, although I never got my speed on the latter down to less than a couple of minutes.

Three figures weren't that difficult at the lower levels. 148 for example is 150 x 146 + 4, which is 14,600 + 7,300 + 4, which is 21,904. As long as you kept the fact in your head that it would be five figures below around 320 (300 x 340, + 400, or 102,400), and six figures above it, then you were ok.

And I worry about bad beats. Mr Ward just saw an expected value of about $160,000 turn into $50,000 (or perhaps it was pounds sterling) when his Queens ran into tens. 110K bad beats are a bit of a bummer.

PJ

[andy-ward-uk.livejournal.com]

Not quite that bad. It was for average chips 3 ways, so about (200 + 100 + 50) / 3 = $117K, a $67K beat. And you didn't see / haven't mentioned the beats I was shipping on people in the semi-final.

As for the absence of God, I find it quite liberating. You're not being judged, you're not being punished for all eternity for picking your nose in church or whatever and you're not distracted from the only life you have by fixating on what comes next. IMO of course ...

Andy.

[jaybee66.livejournal.com]

So, you are a miserable old git who hates it when others have blind faith that helps them get through the drudgery of life.

Day after day you preach the blind faith that we must borrow billions to pay off other borrowed billions and take out billions in cheap loans and wait for the new age of billions of billionaires.

You have faith too. Misplaced but you have it.

Your God is Mamon, the malevolent one.

Some treasure a bible, which offers hope. You treasure promissory notes, which enslaves you in a failed system.

Just a figment

[geoffchall.livejournal.com]

You've made James up haven't you Pete? Or perhaps even more insidious, he's an alter-ego of which your normal conscious self is unaware.

Re: Just a figment

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Darn, rumbled. Clearly that last post was a step too far, and went far beyond any possibility of "JayBee" being a real person.

PJ

Re: Just a figment

[jaybee66.livejournal.com]

Just pointing out that everyone has faith in something.

And your faith's are dependent on just as many "what ifs" as anyone else's faith.

Good luck but each day that passes has yet another report stating that your dogma is as old as the Garden of Gethsemane.

Re: Just a figment

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

You really do write some bollocks, James. Stop ascribing beliefs to me about which you know fuck all.

PJ

Re: Just a figment

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Oh, and don't call my beloved Gracie fat. You'll get Jan onto you, and then you'd know what a punch in the face was.

PJ

Re: Just a figment

[jaybee66.livejournal.com]

You know as much about religion too. :b