Jp's Lab

The 9/11 conspiracy THEY don't want you to know about

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 05:54:04 GMT

In the days and years since the terrible tragedy of 9/11, a wealth of misinformation, disinformation, and clever plots have cropepd up. There is a curious correspondance between this all - it is a clever dance of control. Friends, BYONDers, internet-people, there is a conspiracy afoot!

Those who hold to the 'conventional' view of 9/11 would tell you that it was quite simple! Apparently, the American government just happened to have set up bombs in just the right spots to demolish the Twin Towers when they were exploded - despite no eye-witness reports of these "bombs", and not a single shred of evidence that such a 'controlled demolition' could take place! There are no similarly-structured buildings in the entire world that have been destroyed in one of these 'controlled demolitions' the man would like you to believe occurred.

They would have you believe that four planes just mysteriously 'happened' to vanish, along with all their passengers - as if the American government could have the competence to fake such a thing! They would have you believe that all the wreckage around the Pentagon and the Towers just happened to fall in such a way that it looked like plane parts.

I am not a believer in coincidences. All these 'happenings' are quite convincing - the offical story is a lie. The Twin Towers were not 'demolished' by some sort of 'government conspiracy' - no, you have been misled! A conspiracy at the very highest levels, the ones who control all of your life with an iron hand while still remaining too inept to protect themselves against any idiot blogger with a crazy opinion, the secret New World Order! It was all a conspiracy by Islamic fanatics!

The officials would have you believe that there is no such thing. That Islamic fanatics mean you no harm at all. They cover up all of the abundant evidence demonstrating the ill-will of these people with their disinformation!

I'm not going to tell you what the evidence is - if you're really interested, you can find it out on your own. But the unspecified and vaguely-referenced assertions I make are valid and a strong argument - I have the burden of proof, I'm afraid. You must prove that there couldn't possibly be a Islamic fundamentalist conspiracy before I'll even begin to examine my assumptions or evidence. Also, any 'contradictory' evidence you find is disinformation that actually provides evidence for my claim. Unless it's evidence that supports my claims, in which case it's probably a brave whistleblower.

Just remember, when you stare into that mosque in the last momements of your free life:

I told you so.

Awesome!

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 02:09:24 GMT

Looks like Labour has won the Australian election. They're not exactly who I'd like in government, but they're better than the Liberals by a long way.

This is based on predictions from the groups covering the election, but I think they're solid enough to guess by now where things are going. They're all predicting that Labour has won ~78 seats - they need 76 to form govenment. They're mostly tipping the Liberals to have 55 or so. There's about 15 seats that are currently in doubt, some of which have had nearly no votes counted.

I'm expecting Labour to win, and will be disappointed if they don't.

For those who are confused, the Liberals are, in fact, the right-wing Australian party, and Labour are a left-wing party that arose out of worker's unions.

A group called the "Christian Democratic Party" are getting far too many votes, though. They've gotten something like 4% in some seats!

EDIT: 81 - 58 with 2 held by minor parties/independents and 9 in doubt.

Religion and Rationality.

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 18:34:22 GMT

The original post can be found here, and the forum post by Knifo (If it hasn't been deleted yet) is here

Let us begin.

Vex begins with the caveat that anyone who takes their holy book literally is being just a bit unscientific - I'd have to agree with him there. In the interests of defining the limits of debate, I'm not talking about fundies. That would make it too easy. I'm fairly sure we can all agree that someone who thinks God made all life in six days six-thousand or so years ago is a nutcase.

But he then goes on to propose, essentially, NOMA - non-overlapping magisteria. Science answers "how" things happen - i.e., Newton's laws of motion, Einstein's theory of relativity, all the other mechanics behind the universe - and religion answers "why" things happen - What's the purpose to life? Why am I here? and so forth.

I'd put forward that there are several immediate and obvious problems with NOMA:
- Science doesn't answer the 'why' questions because there is no way to answer the 'why' questions. Any answer to them is inherently unfalsifiable - and not the kind of unfalsifiable where it's an argument so incredibly watertight you can't help but agree with it, the kind where it's impossible to test. That takes it beyond the realms of scientific testing. Religions are answering the questions, sure, but there's no way to tell whether they have good answers or not. They are, essentially, guessing. It's clearly irrational to provide an answer when there is absolutely no way you can check your answer, no way you can even argue for your answer (Interestingly enough, if a hypothesis is unfalsifiable, you inherently cannot find evidence for it).

- Some religious claims are scientific questions, and thus fall afoul of scientific testing. God in its most general is unfalsifiable, and therefore outside science - more specific gods make claims about reality that can be tested - it's easy enough to see if there's a gigantic palace on the top of Mount Olympus in our modern world, for example, and the nonexistence of such a structure casts some doubt on the existence of the greek gods. The Christian god is very much testable - even if you remove all the miracles from someone's conception of the Christian god, there are still testable properties - because the Christian god is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, and there are some properties we would expect to see in a universe with a God possessing those three properties. Basically, you can make Problem of Evil arguments about God - as chains of deductive logic, these arguments are testable.

- This explanation may run afoul of god-of-the-gaps, and all the problems associated with that. What is not a scientific question today may well become testable in the future, and religion will then be 'answering questions' that science can test.

- NOMA can only stand if religious figures do not make claims about reality - if they do, they're running into scientifically testable ground. No religion does that. "You can pray, but it won't make a difference, because that would be scientifically testable"?

In short, I consider NOMA untenable.

Vex then goes on to use a horrible, horrible argument - Thomas Aquinas' First Efficient Cause. In short:

- The universe exists.
- The universe had a beginning
- Something does not come from nothing
- The universe could not come from nothing.
- Therefore, God created the universe.

That's simplifying a little - look at Vex's post to see his version of the argument, or look around on Wikipedia for more.

First Efficient Cause is quite possibly one of the first arguments for God ever put forward by man (Although there was a hilarious quote that ended up on FSTDT that was essentially point logic - it wasn't even circular logic. Circular logic has to go somewhere).

The problem is that it uses special pleading - the universe requires some sort of event to kick it off, but God does not. The justification for this is normally to claim that God is special somehow - that he/she/it is, by definition, not contingent on anything. This rather misses the point - you can substitute any noncontingent item as the 'first efficient cause'. Why pick God when there are so many others? Why can't the Big Bang be noncontingent? Why must the universe be contingent? There's no real reason. This is, incidentally, one of those god-of-the-gaps situations - there's no reason why this couldn't be scientifically testable in the future.

Vex then goes on to misunderstand evolution and science slightly. For starters, 'theory' in the scientific world does not mean questionable. 'theory' is the pinnacle. Consider the 'theory' of relativity. Scientists don't talk about the 'fact' of relativity, because 'fact' isn't a descriptive term.

And saying that evolution is becoming 'less theory and more fact' rather misses that it's been the accepted explanation for over a century. Because it's right, at its most basic. The driving force may change over time (Indeed, there has been recent scientific discussion about punctuated equilibrium and neutral genetic drift), but what could be called the 'law' of evolution - species split and diverge into other species over time - remains constant.

A theory is, quite simply, an explanation that ties together multiple phenomena, is well-evidenced, and stands the test of time. See this and this.

The distinction between a law and a theory is simple - laws are simple mathematical relationships. Theories explain laws. For example, the four laws of thermodynamics are simple and mathematical. They are explained by atom theory as the statistical behaviour of large groups of molecules in a gas.

He then goes on to ask how abiogenesis occurred (That is, how life arose from non-life). This particular part of science is, as far as I am aware, not as well developed as evolutionary theory (Which does not concern abiogenesis - evolution is only about the frequencies of alleles in populations over time). However, there are still scientific descriptions of abiogenesis, full of impressive sounding words that you're unlikely to understand unless you have a grounding in molecular biology. Quite frankly, when it comes to God, abiogenesis has no need of that hypothesis.

His free-will stuff is also pretty bad. I am a determinist - I do not think that the laws of physics allow for free will. But the illusion of free will is easy-peasy. Evolution could come up with that. Evolution could come up with a lot of things - it's an incredibly powerful mechanism.

Vex's list of 'valid questions to which God is a reasonable answer', is, in short, not really any such thing.

I would hold that there is nothing to which God is a reasonable answer - saying that xyz is true because of an unfalsifiable being is just bad philosophy - there is no way to rationally justify an unfalsifible concept, because it's unfalsifiable. It is consistent with all universes. The 'answer' adds no knowledge - it does not add to thought one iota. It's a non-answer - a fake answer - a stopgap until we can investigate the question more thoroughly.

There is no rational reason to believe that god, in general, exists. In that sense, belief is irrational. To the extent that modern religions have no evidence behind them (And I would conclude that they do not, Lee Strobel be damned), then belief in them is irrational too.

Keep in mind that I'm only talking about belief in terms of truth of the concept - if it could be demonstrated that benefits accrue to societies and individuals if you believe in some religion X, there is a rational reason to believe in X. There is still not a rational reason to believe it's true, however, assuming that there are reasonable scientific explanations of the benefits.

Religions are irrational in a second way - they are based on faith. All of them. Pretty much by definition, faith is religion.

Faith doesn't have evidence. Faith doesn't respect evidence. Faith is all about believing in something no matter what. If the evidence is against you, and you continue to believe, your faith is that much stronger.

Faith is clearly irrational. Rationality is about considering the evidence and constructing chains of deductive logic. Faith is raw belief. Faith is practically the antithesis of rationality. In that sense, religions are irrational too.

And yes, love is irrational too, because I know that one's going to come up. Just because it's irrational doesn't mean it's bad.

But religion is bad, though.

So there.

Computer dead: Processor held for questioning

Sat, 29 Sep 2007 00:45:51 GMT

I'm not sure if I brought this up recently, but I recently built myself a nice new computer - I was getting tired of running things on my pokey old P3 Celeron. Plus, it'd stopped booting.

So, lovely little computer - Core 2 E6850, 8800GTX, Asus P5K Deluxe, some nice Corsair RAM.

Last night, it shut off in the middle of a game (KOTOR, to be precise). Wouldn't boot up after that.

A bit of poking around has revealed that disconnecting the processor power cable causes some difference in its behaviour - it gets far enough for the motherboard to beep at me about the processor not working. Conclusion: something in the processor is shorted such that the motherboard or power supply shuts down when I try to boot. Bummer.

Fortunately, I haven't overclocked anything, and the processor was certainly within the thermal specifications. It was also bought ~two months ago. So it's still under warranty.

Sigh.

The Atheist's Guild opens.

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 19:34:29 GMT

Whenever there's some sort of religious argument on BYOND, I'm regularly accused of being part of some sort of 'atheist mafia', a group of dedicated nonbelievers, spreading heresy and blasphemy where'er we go, and attacking hapless Christians (It's almost always a Christian) en masse when we can.

If I'm going to get this accusation regularly, it may as well be true. Ish.

To that end, I open a social BYOND guild - this isn't for games at all.

This. is. ATHEISMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!

Want to highlight a particularly hilarious pronouncement by some puffed-up fundy? Do it here.

Want to engage in reasoned discussion over some sort of religious (or any, really) topic? Do it here.

Want to be part of some sort of evil atheist conspiracy? Do it here.

Don't think you can't post on the forums if you're not a nontheist of some form - the arguments section would get a little boring if it was just weak atheists versus strong atheists all the time.

So, yeah. Try and make it not a flop. Please?

Jp is 18

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 18:09:29 GMT

Yup, I am now legally an adult in my state of residence (South Australia).

I can now legally drink, smoke, gamble, and vote. And probably some other stuff I can't remember. I could legally breed a year ago, so that's not one of 'em.

Anyway: Whoo birthday!

Idea: Fixing rips

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 04:34:52 GMT

WARNING: NOT A RELIGION POST.

Yeah, hard to believe isn't it?

Anyway, there's an idea I've been batting around for a while internally - get a hold of the Naruto source code various Naruto games use (WOTS?), and fix it up. Get rid of all the various stupid errors, make it a good, robust program.

Then let the rippers at it. Basically, I'm hoping to spread good programming practices through the ripping community by giving them a good example.

Potential pros and cons:

Cons:
- Someone wrote WOTS. It's a double-slap in the face if, not only does your source code get released by a semi-respected member of the community (Well, I'd like to think so), but they also 'correct' it.

- Rippers don't actually look at the source code, so it might not be the best way to spread good programming practice.

- I may be driven insane.

- I don't know how I would distribute it. I imagine BYOND moderators would look poorly upon me using my webspace to host the file (If a moderator could actually confirm this for me, that would be nice).

- I also don't know how I'd get my hands on this source code in the first place.

Pros:
- At least the rips are less buggy.

- May improve the programming ability of newbies to the language

- Gives forum-goers a resource to provide to people asking for 'the naruto code'.

Basically, I want to know what you think of the idea. Is it impractical? Excellent? Morally iffy?

The real Skarmbliss

Wed, 16 May 2007 07:50:20 GMT

What's that? Jp plays Pokemon?

Yeah, I'm a geek. Regardless, I came up with an amusing idea for a team, recently. Just bear with me, it's not actual Skarmbliss. But there's certainly a lot of bliss. And a lot more Skarmory.

Skarmory@Leftovers
Nature: Jolly
EVs: 252 Speed, 252 HP, 4 Special Defence
Whirlwind
Spikes
Drill Peck
Roost

Bog-standard Skarmory, with a minor Diamond/Pearl twist. Next!

Skarmory@Brightpowder
Nature: Careful
EVs: 252 Special Defence, 252 HP, 4 Speed
Double Team
Substitute
Roost
Drill Peck

The best I could do to beat Special sweepers. I'm not sure if Double Team applies to Substitute, but even if it doesn't, it should help outlast them. You can't attack, but you don't need to much. Why? Well...

Skarmory@Leftovers
Nature: Jolly
EVs: 252 Speed, 252 HP, 4 Defence
Toxic
Protect
Curse
Roost

Another physical wall. Buff up and spread around the poison-love. No attacking moves means it's slightly dangerous, but it's worth it for the extra nuisance of Curse/Roost/Protect/Curse/Roost/Protect

Skarmory@Leftovers
Nature: Jolly
EVs: 252 Speed, 252 HP, 4 Defence
Spikes
Stealth Rock
Whirlwind
Aerial Ace

Spikes AND Stealth Rock? What's not to like? Pity Skarm can't learn Toxic Spikes.

Skarmory@Leftovers
Nature: Jolly
EVs: 252 Speed, 252 Attack, 4 HP
Drill Peck
Swords Dance
Roost
Steel Wing

A physical-sweeper-Skarm. Useful for when they're out of fire/electric/ice moves.

Skarmory@Leftovers
Nature: Careful
EVs: 252 HP, 252 Defence, 4 Special Defence
Sand Attack
Double Team
Protect
Drill Peck

Another physical wall, also another dealer-with-special-sweepers.

Basically, the entire team is designed to stall the other team out while they die of poison. And if they switch, they take a fair quantity of damage. Skarm can out-stall most stallers. Especially with things like the Sub/Double Team/Roost Skarm or the Sand Attack/Double Team/Protect Skarm.

Alternatively, see it as a way of annoying your opponent so much they leave before they finish you off. ;)

Also, note that the rules you're working under have to not ban multiples of a pokemon and multiple items.

Evolution doesn't cause mass murder

Fri, 04 May 2007 20:39:34 GMT

WARNING: RELIGION POST

Of course, posts like this were always coming. Whenever some tragedy happens, the fundamentalists always point at the teaching of evolution, or the 'banning' of prayer.

They're wrong.

From the speech quoted in the blog post:
> The first recorded act of violence was when Cain slew his brother Abel out in the field.

Errrr, no. The Bible is about as literally true as the Lord of the Rings, and contains substantially less internal consistency. There is no corroborating evidence for most of the old AND new testaments, even the events that would show up in the archaeological record. Surely there would be some evidence of the Exodus? Surely even one person contemporary with Jesus would have written about him?

There isn't any of that. Any. There's a long-held urban myth that there's a dead army stuck at the bottom of the Red Sea, but it's wrong. Josephus was almost certainly an interpolation - your best historical evidence for Jesus consists of something written by Tacitus - roughly 300 years after Jesus was supposed to have shaken up the entire region of Judea. Even bits of the bible suggest that he didn't actually exist - bits of Paul imply a 'heavenly' Jesus, whose crucifixion and resurrection occurred in some spiritual plane, rather then on Earth.

Really, until there's a shred of evidence for the biblical accounts, I'd trust them about as far as I'd trust Kent Hovind.

> In the days that followed the Columbine tragedy, I was amazed at how quickly fingers began to be pointed at groups such as the NRA.

I'd point the finger at a lack of gun control. If the NRA contributes to that (which it does) then there's some extent to which they are partially to blame. They're not completely to blame, of course. Someone sold those kids guns. And someone pulled the triggers. And those who let the Columbine kids be bullied day in and day out are partially to blame, as well.

Gun control is at least one factor in the prevention of this sort of thing - it's not the only factor, of course, as there are countries without significant gun control that very rarely have this sort of thing happen. But it's certainly significant - there has not been a single mass shooting in Australia in the past decade. There are other factors at play here - Australia has roughly a fifteenth of the American population, a much lower population density, a smaller gap between rich and poor, and less poverty in general. But what's another significant change? You can't legally buy semiautomatic pistols or rifles in Australia. Nor can you buy pump-action shotguns. You can get guns - farmers often have them, but not many other people do.

In America, where closing the divide between rich and poor, raising the standard of living, and reducing the population density is difficult, gun control is a relatively easy way to try and combat this sort of activity. It should be applied.

> I am here today to declare that Columbine! was not just a tragedy -- it was a spiritual event that should be forcing us to look at where the real blame lies! Much of the blame lies here in this room. Much of the blame lies behind the pointing fingers of the accusers themselves.

And some conservatives accuse people like me of laying blame at the wrong point.

> You've stripped away our heritage, You've outlawed simple prayer

Heh. No.

It's a common thread among fundamentalists that they should be allowed to be the cultural default. They cry havoc when they're prevented from essentially forcing their religion on people. This is another example of this.

What is outlawed in America - rightfully so - is teacher-led required school prayer. Basically, you can't have an official, school-sponsored prayer session. Students are perfectly allowed to pray in their own time. They can form groups that get together to pray if they wish. They can even tell other students that they should join in praying with them. And that's okay too.

Note that prayer isn't outlawed. It's forcing people to pray that's outlawed.

> Spiritual presences were present within our educational systems for most of our nation's history. Many of our major colleges began as theological seminaries. This is a historical fact. What has happened to us as a nation? We have refused to honor God, and in so doing, we open the doors to hatred and violence.

No no no no no, a thousand times, NO!

All religion does is confirm your in-built prejudices. If you're a well-rounded moral individual, like IainPeregrine, you use the parts of your religion that justify being good and moral. If you're Hitler, you use parts of religion to justify killing six million Jews. If you're Fred Phelps, you use your religion to justify discrimination against people on the basis of who they like.

Religion does not, in any way, shape, or form make a person more moral. Evidence? Well, lessee here.

How much do you know about the demographics of prison populations in America? For starters, roughly 0.4% or so of inmates would describe themselves as atheists. Roughly 10% of America is irreligious, and I've heard 2.3% as the figure for atheism.

Christianity, however, is represented in proportion to its population. The US is roughly 70-80% Christian, and the percentage of the US prison population that identifies as Christian? Roughly 70-80%.

What's my point? Atheism is under-represented in prisons, relative to their proportion of the population.

In other words, less atheists are criminals.

That doesn't imply that atheists are any more moral then religious people - there are some other demographic factors to take into account. For one, atheism is correlated with wealth and level of education. That is, atheists are, in general, better educated and wealthier then average (I don't think atheism causes better education and more wealth, however. :P). Wealth and level of education are inversely proportional to criminality - that is, the population of criminals, on the whole, is less wealthy then average and is less educated then average. That can skew the results significantly. It's still a startling statistic.

> Eric and Dylan would not have been stopped by me tal detectors. No amount of gun laws can stop someone who spends months planning this type of massacre.

I actually agree with this sentiment, but don't quite follow through in the same way. Gun control can certainly contain the damage to some extent, but it's absolutely impossible to stop the lone lunatic without turning society into 1984.

Of course, if you start treating the social causes of events like this - i.e., large gap between rich and poor, low standard of living for the majority, high population density, bullying - you can start to reduce their occurrence.

> The real villain lies within our own hearts. "As my son Craig lay under that table in the school library and saw his two friends murdered before his very eyes, he did not hesitate to pray in school. I defy any law or politician to deny him that right!

Once again - he was perfectly allowed to pray under that table. I would be shocked at any law or politician that tried to deny students the right to pray. The ACLU would be more then shocked, they'd take legal action.

But note the straw man - this person thinks that stopping teachers from forcing students to pray, preventing an official endorsement of one religion over another is the same as preventing students praying at all. That's clearly false.

> Do what the media did not - - let the < FONT color=black> nation hear this man's speech. Please send this out to everyone you can.

Interestingly enough, I couldn't find this speech anywhere. I browsed through wikipedia a bit, and I found the man fingered as the speaker. His views as presented on the Wiki seemed a lot less stupid and fundy - although there were some disturbing elements where he insisted his daughter was 'martyred' - as far as I'm aware, there wasn't a religious motivation to Columbine. There was a link to his website with a speech he gave to Congress in November 2006, but it was dead. There was a link to a white house page with a transcript of a special meeting on school safety which had the son of the man in question giving a similar speech, but I couldn't find the original version of this one.

Maybe I should note something - The Virginia Tech shooting compared himself to Jesus in one of the videos he sent off. Sounds like it was inspired by secularism to me!

And dare I point out that scoring cheap political points off of such a tragedy is, well, not very nice? Can't you just mourn so many deaths without needing to throw blame at this politician's policies and so forth?

NIN-Bruce_Almighty then proceeded to demonstrate his ignorance of evolution in the comments, and then disabled commenting on the blog post (Which would be why I'm blogging about it rather then using the comments). Popisfizzy did an admirable job arguing with him. Here's my take:

> also just takeing a good look around shows that there is atleast some form of supreme being(s) as there are some (too many) animals that evolution simply cannot account for, thus the creation model holds more water

That's N-B_A's first mention of evolution - Pop had just pointed out that there are lots of different versions of God, and lots of different beliefs regarding him/her/it/they. As well as lacks of belief. And then stated that due to this, he refused to send it out to anyone. N-B_A alleged that Pop's atheism is wrong using the 'design' argument, as above.

Design went out with Paley, dear Bruce. Evolution has a wealth of evidence for it, and no credible alternative. Natural selection has a few credible competitors, but they all operate within the frame of evolution. Scientists didn't just make up evolution on the spot. Darwin came up with it after decades of study and investigation into various things. Scientists took it and ran with it because it made sense, and they've since refined it well beyond what Darwin had. And in the process, they've demonstrated time and time again that it is the best explanation of the diversity of species we have.

> oh? there exists a clam like creature who has an optic nerve as a human.

I couldn't actually find this one on the index of creationist claims, but I'd have to ask N-B_A to provide a suitable reference for it. I've never heard that particular claim before, and it sounds like the sort of urban legend that gets passed around by creationists selectively quoting some reference, and the claim getting passed around as common knowledge.

Note that Answers in Genesis, Kent Hovind, or the Discovery Institute are about as far from a valid reference as you can get without getting a typewriter and a chimpanzee. They would, however, be useful for trying to trace the claim.

> a beatle who uses explosions to drive away predators (something that couldnt have evolved because the bug would have blown itself to death before evolution could have taken over)

This is a common claim. It's wrong. See here and here. Note the many references to scientific papers, allowing you to follow this up, if you wish.

> the monkey, need i explain this one?

...I don't know what he's getting at here. I see no problem with the splitting-off of monkeys from apes. (Or, as I think he's getting at, the latter splitting off of humans and apes. Not that we got very far).

If so, it should be noted that humans did not, in fact, evolve from monkeys. No, what happened is that a species of ape-like humans (or human-like apes?) split off into two different lines in the tree of life - forming apes and humans. This is a common misunderstanding of evolution - that x 'turns into' y, rather then them having a common ancestor - and would be the reason you often get arguments like "If humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes?"

> pig, the flesh, and basic bone densities, some of which are different from humans but closer then that of a monkey/ape/whatever

I have no idea what N-B_A is getting at here. If he clarified, I could possibly attempt an answer. Otherwise, I just don't know what he's claiming.

If he's claiming that the density of pig flesh and bone is close to that of monkeys and apes - that it's more similar to that of monkeys and apes then human flesh and bone - then what he's saying isn't actually a problem for evolution. Bone and flesh densities change, and aren't really all that stationary over different species. And pigs are surprisingly close to apes/monkeys/humans in the evolutionary tree.

This claim is also startlingly general. I would suggest that it comes from an urban myth, once again.

> also, if we had infact evolved from another simpler life form we would have found evidence of it in geologic record... there isnt one btw (this i checked several times) however there are a few animals that closly resemble humans but have been identified as neither a missing link nor a pre-evolution stage to... well ANYTHING

The final nail in the coffin for N-B_A.

The fossil record is full of evidence for evolution. If N-B_A doubts me, he can consider the list at Talk.Origins. I mean, seriously, there are whales with vestigial legs. If that's not evidence for evolution, what is?

NIN-Bruce_Almighty?

You're wrong.

BYONDDoc

Sun, 08 Apr 2007 18:19:10 GMT

I'm doing a fair few CS subjects at Uni, which is only appropriate, because I'm doing a software engineering degree. Most of my CS subjects to date use Java as their language of choice (With two exceptions - Computer Systems uses DLX assembly, and Numerical Methods uses MATLAB).

Now, I'm not Java's biggest fan. In fact, I'm on the Crispy side - Java is slow, crufty, and the Java Way encourages the proliferation of objects.

But there is one thing I think is quite nice about Java, and something that should be ported to BYOND - specifically, the Javadoc tool. There's a variant available in some other languages - Python, for example, has a similar utility called Pythondoc.

I want BYONDdoc.

What should BYONDdoc do? It should read through DM source, and construct the object tree, including variables, procs, and verbs. While doing this, it should search for special comments that indicate what follows is documentation for the below type, proc, verb, or variable, and store this information in the tree.

Finally, it should generate a (or a series of) HTML pages summarising the object tree with the documentation included.

For example:

mob
    //@type - Type used for all basic 'creatures' in the game
    creature
        var
            //@var - The current health of the creature
            health
            //@var - The maximum health of the creature
            maxhealth

That would generate a HTML file that would contain this information:

creature
Path: /mob/creature

Type used for all basic 'creatures' in the game

Variables:
health - The current health of the creature
maxhealth - the maximum health of the creature

Now, this isn't a particularly useful example, because the 'documentation' comments are blindingly obvious. But this can be useful for documenting other things, and should make it a lot easier for BYOND programmers to document their libraries, and their games. I'm a frequent offender on this count - I don't think any of my libraries have decent documentation.

I know I'd use it if I had a utility like this available (Or even if, wonder of wonders, it was included in the IDE)

I'd write it myself, but I don't think I have the knowledge. I can't come up with an algorithm to parse source code for the object tree in all cases. It generally falls down at use of braces and slashes, or worst, parent_type. I could write one where you had to put everything in the comment:

//@type creature, /mob, blah blah blah

But that's a lot uglier then what I originally had in mind.

Anyone more experienced feel like making something like this?