Christopher Hitchens interviewed

This is part one of an interview with Christopher Hitchens about his cancer diagnosis and his life.

After watching this, I have an even higher opinion of him than I already had. He's really grown to be one of my (few) heroes. He sticks to his principles and to what he's done and said throughout his career. You may not agree with him on every subject (I certainly don't), but you've got to give him credit for that.

Also, the way he's facing his impeding death is admirable. He claims not to be afraid and I am tempted to believe him. I hope that when it's my turn, I will show similar courage.

Power balance scam

So these highly popular power balance bracelets have failed double blind tests and it can be shown that the company selling them uses very simple tricks to make people think they work (that is, they never do "tests" with the bracelet first, thus the subject is warmed up and knows what's coming when the bracelet comes into play).

Obviously the company and it's well payed marketing tools deny what the study has found. No surprise there.

What I do find surprising, not for the first time, is that we need a damn scientific study to expose such a thing as a scam. Honestly, is our species really that retarded? A piece of rubber with a "hologram" is supposed to make you better at sports. Really?

This goes to show that we really ought to teach our kids more clear thinking and skepticism. This is not rocket science. People should not fall for such obvious crap.

Netbook operating system

So a little while ago, I bought an ASUS eee pc 1005px for studying. It really turned out to be a neat little device. It looks great, is quiet, but reasonably powerful (in netbook terms), yet very light and has excellent battery life. The trackpad and keyboard feel very good and I even prefer them over those on my notebook. I instantly fell in love with it.

There was just on big problem: Windows 7

Image via Wikipedia

Honestly, I think 7 was a major upgrade to previous Windows versions on desktops. But whoever had the idea that it also belongs on netbooks is a fucking moron. It's sluggish and slow and takes ages to boot. Who wants that? On a mobile device such as a netbook, I want a fast operating system tailored to operate on it. It need not offer fancy graphical effects and much in terms of software apart from a webbrowser, word processing and social applications such as an email client and instant messaging.


So I went on to search the perfect netbook operating system. Let me tell you straight ahead: I did not find it. But I found some interesting options and one that was already remarkably close to it.

Image by Andrew Currie via FlickrThe first thing I tried was Ubuntu maverick merkaat netbook remix with it's then just recently released Unity interface. This wasn't the first time I used Ubuntu and I was familiar with previous versions, so my expectations were high (given I think Ubuntu is a really nice OS). Boy, this was a major let-down.

They really made a big fuzz about this new interface, praising the new vertical application dock you see on the image to the left and proclaimed that Ubuntu Unity was perfect for netbooks. What I found was that the dock is slow and awkward to handle. What's worse is that there is no way to customize it at all (the gnome panel on the top is locked,too) and you can not hide it. I mean, are you kidding me? Netbooks typically only provide a screen resolution of 1024x786. On pretty much every website I got horizontal scroll bars with this thing. It's just silly. I really can't figure out how they though this would work and didn't spot this very obvious flaw beforehand (actually, I guess they never bothered to boot Ubuntu maverick on a netbook).

I then switched over to the tradintional gnome desktop and heavily modified it to my needs. That seemed to be a fairly good solution, but I just ended up with a normal Ubuntu and nothing specifically made for netbooks.

Image by Andrew Currie via Flickr

So after a while of using Ubuntu, I wen back to searching. I found MeeGo, an OS made for mobile devices, that offered different interfaces for mobile phones, netbooks and more. It is really a nice system and I did actually like it. It looks very different from traditional systems, very much suited for netbooks (or tablets), has social networking integrated into it, as well as instant messaging etc.

The problem was that it didn't run properly on my netbook and the wireless refused to work. MeeGo is still fairly young and it seems my device just isn't fully supported yet. I will keep an eye on future releases and maybe if they turn out to work properly, I will definitely give it a (longer) try. For now, there were just way too many bugs for me to keep it.

I also found out about the upcoming google chrome OS and the whole idea of a cloud operating system sounded really nice to me. While searching the web for more information, I stumbled across jolicloud, which is just that.

Image via Wikipedia

Jolicloud is based on Ubuntu and used a modified version of Ubuntu's netbook remix in earlier versions. The current version, though, features a very unique interface, written in html5. Yes, hml5. It actually runs in a google chrome window. It's stunningly fast, slim and really perfect for netbooks. You get a nice appstore, a social stream (that I don't find very useful at the moment, for you can only see what apps people like and nothing else), an overlay for the file system that has cloud storages build into it (though in the preview version I use, these are still very buggy. Hopefully, the soon to be released final version will fix that) and access to a settings tab.

What's  really interesting is that many apps from the store are basically just links to websites that open in new chrome windows without any of the chrome interface visible. Unlike google chrome OS, though, you are not only limited to such applications, but can also choose from locally installed ones, such as open office. Your login is shared over all devices you run jolicloud on and apps will be synchronized between them automatically.

Unlike MeeGo, or Ubuntu netbook remix, jolicloud does not restrict you a lot. If you need to, you have access to all of the underlying ubuntu functionality, which I found really useful.

So yeah, I am right now very much in love with jolicloud and am looking forward to future version (as I mentioned, version 1.1 is soon to be released) and would encourage everyone to take a look. If you happen to know of any other promising OS for netbooks, drop me a message.

God hates sports : Pharyngula

God hates sports : Pharyngula

A Scottish football referee got fired because he made a joke about the pope and some Catholic ass hat got pissy and made a complaint.

Just so it will potentially reach more people:

Everybody who happens to read this, send the picture to the right to these mail addresses, which belong to the Scottish catholic church:

mail@scmo.org info@scottishfa.co.uk

php blogger RSS signature generator

I wanted to generate a signature from my blogger RSS feed. I was googling for some website that offers such a service, but the only solution I found was less than bad.

So I decided to write my own php script. It makes extensive use of GD and magpieRSS.

Here is the result:

Pretty neat, eh? It's highly customizable,too.

If you want to download and use the script yourself, here is the link:

DOWNLOAD

If you like it, drop me a comment :-)

Catholic attention whoring

Have you noticed that the catholic clergy have a habit (though other prominent theists are no better) of randomly and for no apparent reason lashing out against atheists? Out of nowhere, you hear that some cardinal, or bishop spouts some crazy lies about atheists on the media, proclaiming us to be evil, purposeless, fearful or what have you.

It strikes me when they do this as both attention whoring and trying to distract from their own hideous deeds.

Well, it happened again.

So what does "good" Cardinal Pell have to say?

THE lives of people without faith have ''nothing beyond the constructs they confect to cover the abyss'

Oh really? I always thought this was exactly the case with theists, too. It's just that we're aware of it.

A minority of people, usually people without religion, are frightened by the future, 

The vast majority of atheists I've come to known are happy, positive people with no fear of the future beyond the ordinary whatsoever; and what a hypocritical statement to make from a leader of a death cult who teaches that we're all evil sinners, who're probably going to burn for all eternity. Quite a positive outlook, eh?

He goes on to spout his worthless opinion about education:

We should not create an ''ideological apartheid'' between faith and reason, Cardinal Pell said.

Sorry, but faith is as far apart from reason as possible by definition.

Oh and we get our treat of Hitler,too:

Image by Marion Doss via Flickr

Cardinal Pell said education was not enough to create a civilised society, that faith was necessary too. He cited the example of 20th century Germany, which he said was the best educated society in the world when Hitler became leader. 

Also, they were for the most part fucking devout catholics you lying scumbag. Next try.

I really do not want to become a programmer

As I've previously mentioned, I am a student of business informatics. As such, one of the many options for a future job would be to become a programmer. I definitely do not want that, I have just figured out.

I am currently working as a research assistant and am heavily involved in a programming project, developing a php frontend for a java powered application. I've just spend the entire day + a large portion of the night debugging my code (as the underlying java layer had been heavily modified). I am seriously unnerved - and slightly drunk.

Honestly, I can't see myself do this for the rest of my life - especially not since ordinary software developers are rather badly paid. Programming can be fun and rewarding, but I'd prefer to keep it as a hobby, than do it for a living.

On a more positive note: I managed to modify the blogger template I use and am starting to warm up to this place. There really is a good chance that I will manage to keep blogging this time and not just let the blog die (as I did on 2 previous incarnations of this).

Anyway, off to bed I go!

Why I am a strong atheist

I consider myself a strong atheist. That means, not only do I lack belief in gods, I make the positive statement "there are no gods".

Here are my reasons for that:

First of all, we need a workable definition of what a god is. Unfortunately, the religious themselves can't seem to quite agree on that.

Image via WikipediaGods range from good to evil, from dumb to all-knowing, from omnipotent-to barely above humans etc. Even within one particular religion, ideas on how to define god(s) differ significantly. So I wondered, is there any attribute that seems to be essential to all gods? Then it struck me: worship. A god a
pparently is an entity that deserves worship (in the eyes of it's worshippers).

I then went on to ask myself "What makes an entity worthy of worship to you?". The answer is rather simple. I do not think that being powerful, or a creator makes you a candidate straight ahead. If anything, if there was indeed a creator to the universe that could still influence it after having created it, this creator would be responsible for caring properly for it's creation, just like parents are responsible for their children.

I`d say it's rather apparent that no such creator exists, given all the misery and unnecessary suffering in this world. Christians would of course beg to differ, but spending a bad weekend in hell in order to free humanity from the curse you yourself inflicted upon them isn't exactly my idea of acting responsibly.

No, an entity that I would worship would need to be sufficiently powerful and willing to stop all of the useless suffering from catastrophe, disease and what have you in this world. Taking a quick looks at the news, no such being has as of yet showed up.

Therefore I feel quite comfortable to consider myself a strong atheist. Whether the entities that other people worship exist or not is an entirely different matter - so far I have seen no evidence for any of them. Even if one of them was proven to be real, I would not consider it a god.

Christopher Hitchens and Tony Blair - Munk Debates

This is part one of the debate between Christopher Hitchens and Tony Blair. You may want to skip to part 2, though, if you want to start watching the actual debate and not this very lengthy introduction.

Hitchens was brilliant, as usual, or dare I say, that his latest performances were among his best, despite (or because?) his battling cancer and probably facing impeding death? He was as witty and spot on as I expected him to be.

Blair, on the other hand, performed almost embarassingly bad.

First of all, I consider him a really nice chap. He seems to be a genuinely good person and without a doubt, is not your rabid, fundamentalist lunatic, of the kind you usually get opposed to Hitchens. It's sort of refreshing to see Hitch debate someone who you don't instantly dislike, someone who does not try to bury his opponent in a big pile of lies and logical fallacies, but engages in an honest discussion. There lies the problem, though,too.

Image via Wikipedia

What Blair was basically saying throughout the whole debate was something to the effect of:

"O well, look. Religion has really caused loads of suffering and death and, yeah, you can't really prove any of it is true and real. But come one, there are also a few examples of people doing good in the name of faith and after all, that's what it's all about, not some silly bronce-age myths that no one takes seriously. Right... right?"

You needn't imagine the slightly embarassed look he ought to have on his face while making this sort of argument. It was right there.

Really, one always had the feeling that Blair was absolutely aware of the fact of how utterly ridiculous this line of thinking is and that he really had no case. He tried to strip religion off all the mythical baggage and pretend it was essentially all about doing good and being ethical. Hitchens at some point jokingly remarked that Blair would prefer his theists largely not practising. Blair's eyes seemed to agree.

Formal introduction

So what is this all about, you may wonder, if you happen to have stumbled across this blog, as unlikely as it seems.

My name is Michael, I'm a 24 years old student of business informatics from Germany. I am into technology, science, climging, web-design, fantasy novels and online gaming. Nothing out of the ordinary, I guess, expect that I am also an atheist. 

Not only that, but also do I consider myself an anti-theist. Why you ask? Belief in god(s) not only is irrational and not supported by any evidence whatsoever, it is also dangerous. Over the past centuries, religion has thoroughly fucked up countless people and nations. It brought death and despair, unimanginable suffering,all in the name of higher powers that do not seem to care enough to actually show themselves, expect of course, in the fantasies of the intellectually retarded and con-artists trying to get into your pockets.

Yes, I know there are theists doing good in the name of their particular religion, but honestly - good people will always find reason to do good, with or without god (or they aren't actually good, but just trying to get a ticket to heaven). Without religion, scumbags such as the pope would have no means to justify their despicable acts and words and I have no doubt that good Ratzinger would have long faced prosecution if he were only the leader of an international child abuse ring.

I despise religion, for good reason, I guess; and thus, I have created this blog not only to blog about the nice things in life, but also those that are sickening me to the core. I created it as my personal sanctuary where I can let off steam in ways I probably couldn't on forums (I am an active member of about.com agnosticism/atheism and rationalscepticism.com).

So, why the name "state of flabbergastedness"? Once upon a time, I googled the word "flabbergasted", and stumbled across this piece of woo. Fairly harmless, I guess. The phrase "state of flabbergastedness" just stuck in my head and after all, flabbergasted has become my number 1 favourite English word. It just has this certain, cool sound and look, therefore, to be honest, I just tried to find a way to incorporate it into the blog title.

Right now, I just use a minimalist blog-design I found somewhere on the internet, but before long, I plan on creating my own. No clue when exactly, though, because right now I'm drowning in work.