The life, Universe and Everything

42,

Simple isn't it?

Ah!! well you wish!!!!
Unfortunately it isn't that simple, or may be it is but the consequences are equally more complex. Regardless all the three terms are mere specializations of one fundamental concept. Existence!!

Existence is so fundamentally integrated with,... well everything, that we take it for granted. In my opinion the concept of existence is the most ignored, but the greatest features of the known Universe. I could never understand why anything has to exists. All the entire history, sciences, literature, applied threads, mythology, psychology .... you name it, deals with a fundamental assumption of existence. The very basic fundamental of any theory, a 'proof', is all about existence. We prove it or we move ahead. No theory is orthogonal to existence.
Even the religious theories , the most crappy ones as far as theories go, might i add, can't get free from that fundamental fact of life. They all start and end with existence. Hell having a start and an end (even if you prove that the end won't be possible) is necessary and sufficient part of the existence assumption.

So what my challenge to you is..... find a existence wise orthogonal theory.... I scratched my head for a long time and haven't been able to do it so far.....

And yes this post is _very_ crappy... don't worry about it too much.... i _am_ crappy weird guy.... 

Changing sides....

Yes it finally happened !!! i outcasted myself ( no no i still do use emacs).

I recently installed Ubuntu Hoary on my notebook, with an intent of upgrading it to kubuntu and then migrating all my knoppix configs to it. But after spending few days in gnome, i am now an experimental convert. I always said KDE doesn't feel right, and i keep struggling to get it the way just i like it. Don't take me wrong... its not the KDE's lack of functionality or configurability thats a problem here. Its just that i can't find the right combo that i like. It just doesn't satisfy me. It gives all the bells and whistles and a lot more, but still that empty feeling creeps in.
But with GNOME i started feeling home right from the beginning. The fact that adding few applets is the only thing i have changed in the whole desktop setup is a good testimonial to the right things the GNOME usability group is doing. I think all  the research and effort that went into creating the ui guidelines has finally paid off. In the end the clean and simple usability that has won my appreciation.
I am going to stick with gnome for a while now...
For some reason i just feel this is not going to be a short lived affair.

Miracles and god

Why do people give existance of miracles as a proof of existance of god?
In my view that should be exactly opposite....

Had god existed no one would need a miracle.
Assuming gods existance, offhand i could think of only two uses for miracles,
1. To leave a proof that god exists.
2. To remedy a mistake.

here 'god' means any entity that created and maintains the universe including the laws on which it runs.

I couldn't think of anything else..... (any takers?)
But even these two are mute. Had god existed there would be no need of proof. It wouldn't matter if miracles happened. God could have just embedded his existance into the very fabric of universe and then no one would have had wondered.

The second one is probably a tough one to refute... but i did it. But before falsifying it let me explain the concept in detail first.
The miracles (if at all present ) are a way to patch things up. To defy the underlying rules and just get things done. Sort of like using 'gotos' and 'break' statements in 'c'. But case study of any such situation, be it in software or any other descipline in the engineering, has shown that such a patch up either results in deteroiration of the system, and thus is known to be a _bad_ practise. Or it gets accepted in the fundamentals as a only known solution and the next generation of the engineers just start taking it for granted.
So if god used miracles as a way to patch things up (may be cause he felt lazy and didn't fix the real bug), the miracles will be actually the bad things happening to us.. (sort of like granting everyone's wish, turned out to be a disastor in the movie "all mighty") or it won't be a miracle anymore, but just a practicle solution that never was found before, and will be explained in very short time and won't remain a miracle anymore.

So basically if god existed, he would in no way require or allow for miracles. So when people talk about miracles happening, they are actually arguing that god does not exists, not the other way round.

[LIGHT BULB]: Whosh i am so clever!, now i am going to attempt to prove that "black is actually white", but let me have a motion to convert all the zebra crossings into yellow/red bands first.