The final insult

Holy crap this take home final is really really really hard.

I have a week to do it...might actually take the entire week! O_o

Cookie cutter

It's so nice to not have to study quantum mechanics...

Thinking of re-starting the World of Warcraft account, though probably not till after I take this final. Might roll a rogue character. Haven't decided yet. Thinking of respeccing to 33/28 arcane/fire for my mage, too...

Penultimation

My quantum mechanics class ended early. Apparently he just ran out of stuff to teach us, so today was our final lecture (and it only lasted about 15 minutes)...so we're done. Sort of anticlimatic, really.

We go in on Tuesday morning to pick up the take-home final, and then we have a week to do it. This is a huge relief for me...I don't have to cram for this thing! I can do pretty much anything he'd care to throw at me if I've got a week to do it. I'm not sure where I really stand in this class...I ended up getting a 90 on the second test, so if he counts that first horrible exam, my average, including my homework grade, is about a 65...which is a mid-C according to his odd grading scale. If he doesn't count it, then I've got a pretty high A. Either way, I'm definitely passing, and I'm basically guaranteed a passing grade thanks to the final being take-home! (And after I turn that sucker in I'm headed down to Atlanta to have the most extravagant meal at Pappasito's Cantina that you can possibly imagine...)

My research project still isn't finished, but hopefully Jake will get back to me soon with the news that my analysis and routines basically work fine, and all that's left is to assemble the paper.

So, I'm basically done...my protracted undergraduate years are finally at an end. This summer I'm gonna chill a lot, play a lot of video games, and then go on a long, one-way road trip to California in July. Lookin' forward to it!

Ding!

Going up!

The latest news on Bigelow Aerospace's commercial space station plans. Genesis is still in orbit, Genesis II, set to launch later this month, is in the pipes, and Sundancer, which will be launched in 2010, will have a human crew.

The Genesis I, which is still orbiting, will be followed by a series of larger and more sophisticated vessels -- with a first functioning space complex by 2013 and a set of three complexes by 2017, Bigelow said.

Awesome.

Another one!

Got a letter from UC San Diego today...apparently I've been accepted into their program. This is odd because it took so long, and because they're not offering to interview me...the letter is simply an unconditional acceptance. If they had sent this sooner, I would have seriously considered their program, but I'm set on going to UC San Francisco now (which is a better school for what I want to do anyway, although UCSD is not much worse), so it's a moot point.

Also had my second quantum mechanics test today. I'm pretty sure I aced it! I discussed the test afterwards with some other folks from the class, and I can't identify a single mistake I made. Unless I made some careless error (and I double-checked my work, since I finished early), I may have actually gotten a perfect score!

OMG Madagascar doesn't really exist!

I was late for work this morning. This is odd, since I woke up when I usually do, spent as much time sitting around yawning as I usually do, and traffic was no worse than it usually was. I didn't even feel like I was all that unlucky with the lights this morning. But somehow, I was about 10 minutes late. Not really sure what happened there.

Something I found out indirectly (that is, via the facebook hotline...) some time ago is that my ex-girlfriend Kara has become an atheist. Not just an atheist, I found out when I had an actual conversation with her a couple of days ago, but a militant atheist, with a particularly strong animus towards Southern fundamentalism. Didn't get much detail about it at the time, but I sent her some kind of obnoxious little message along the lines of "ZOMG WTF WHO R U AND WUT HAVE U DONE WITH KARA LOLOLOL?!1??/"

Kara and I dated back when we were both freshmen in college -- which, by my lengthy college standards, is a good long while. We broke up almost exactly 6 years ago. (We have intermittently kept in touch since then, mostly online, but I haven't actually seen her in years.) I remember our relationship as being a ghastly failure, primarily because of our extreme differences in religious belief: she was a hardcore Christian fundamentalist, and I was perched atop the fence between agnostic and atheist, as I am now. Since this put us at odds on just about...well, every conceivable subject, our relationship went downhill pretty fast.

Over the past month or so, I've been reading this blogalogue between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan (whose blog, The Daily Dish, I read regularly), on the nature of faith and religious belief, and whether or not being a religious moderate makes any sense at all. It's an interesting debate, although most of it has spun off onto related tangents. Here's a paragraph that neatly distills the essence of the discussion:

There appears to be no principled separation between religious moderation and religious fundamentalism other than a facility for (and an inclination to) doubt. But how much doubt is too much? Why not doubt the whole shebang, as I do? The pope seems to believe many things which you doubt. Do you have reason to believe that the pope is mistaken about the true doctrine of Christianity, or do you just not like the social consequences of some of his beliefs? Can you justify the intermediate position you've taken with respect to Catholicism in terms of truth and falsity (rather than consolation and its lack)? And if you disagree that the truth of an idea can be neatly separated from its consolations, what does the phrase "wishful thinking" mean to you?

For the most part, I'd say that Sam appears to be cleaning Andrew's clock, but they are still in the process of writing, so it wouldn't do to make a final judgement too soon. But here's a different, but related, point that I thought was germane, especially with regard to Sam's stance, and Kara's recent de-conversion: Does being a militant atheist make any sense at all?

Since speaking (well, typing) with Kara a few days ago, I've been giving this a fair amount of thought. I've always described myself as an open-minded agnostic, and, when it comes down to it, an atheist, as well. The logic behind is goes something like: I do not know whether or not there is a god. Therefore I am not actively believing in a god. Therefore I am an atheist, sort of by default. I've read all sorts of arguments that attempt to show why there must (or must not) be a god, and I've found them all very unconvincing (it would not be charitable to call them 'laughable,' I suppose). I think militant atheists are a peculiar breed, and the zealous ones befuddle me. What are you being zealous about? Your lack of belief? And you think everyone else ought to share this lack of belief? Well, it's odd, that's all I'm saying.

But not necessarily wrong, just because it's odd. And being zealous about a negative belief is not that unusual, when you think about it: suppose you thought up a conclusive disproof of the theory of relativity. Wouldn't you be eager to share this with the world? (Well, perhaps you wouldn't. I would, though, being of a scientific mindset.) Or suppose you found good reason to believe that Madagascar did not exist? If you started sharing the news, would you be regarded with disdain as a 'militant amadagascarist'?

So, I guess, in this sense, there's nothing weirder about being a militant atheist than a militant arelativist, or a militant amadagascarist, which are both logical or illogical exactly to the extent to which their arguments make sense. To date, I haven't seen a militant atheist make a particularly conclusive case (to wit, you can't prove a negative, so any such case would have to revolve around negations...so the argument would be sort of a protracted siege, at best. This doesn't mean it couldn't be done, however, and there are certainly negations one could imagine that could make the hypothetical militant atheist's case much more persuasive than it currently is), but this doesn't mean that one could never be made, or that the attempt to make one is in any special sense silly, or worthy of condemnation out-of-hand. (Well, someone who's spent their life studying the theory of relativity, only to have the rug pulled out from under them, would understandably be pretty defensive, too.) It's probably also worth pointing out that there is quite a lot of evidence in favor of Madagascar actually existing, and of the theory of relativity being correct, so the analogy fails somewhat at this point.

So the answer, as far as I can tell, should be: It could make sense to be a militant atheist, but only if you have a real case for it. If you, like most atheists, are just saying, There sure seems to be a lack of evidence that god exists, then you probably ought to be what philosophers call a 'weak atheist.'