Dan Q

Tag: religion

Dinosaur Adventure Land

ON DINOSAUR ADVENTURE LAND

This is the strangest thing I’ve seen so far this week, and I’m a diggdot reader. Dinosaur Adventure Land (site navigation requires JavaScript) is a dinosaur-themed education park with all the usual things – fossils, a “back in time” ride, huge plastic dinosaurs: you get the idea – that you’d expect a theme park with it’s name to have. But there’s a twist.

Dinosaur Adventure Land is run by Kent E. Hovind. Mr.Hovind (I shan’t call him “Dr.” until he gets a real doctorate) believes the world to be less than six thousand years old. He believes this because it’s what he interprets the bible as telling him.

At his theme park, having learned about how different dinosaurs lived and hunted, he reveals to his guests that dinosaurs and humans at one point lived alongside one another. The mass extinctions evidently didn’t affect humans too badly, in his mind, but he also claims that some dinosaurs continued to live amongst us well into the 20th century. This explains, he says, occurances like bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster.

You can read Mr. Hovind’s theories for yourself, if you can’t be bothered to get his DVD (although I might – it’s uncopyrighted so perhaps I can download a copy). Here are some of my favourite crackpot theories from his mind:

  • Continental drift is a myth. Despite heaps of evidence to the contrary, including modern-day observations of plate techtonics, Mr. Hovind attempts to refute the existence of continental drift. If you point out to him that the continents are an awfully convenient shape, then, he’ll point out that “what the geologists don’t tell you is that very similar fossils are found on opposite sides of the ocean, suggesting a world-wide flood.” He fails to spot that this could also be evidence that the continents were joined when the life forms died and fossils formed, and later seperated.
  • The Earth’s magnetic field is static. Magnetic anomolies among the continental ridges, while provide evidence for geomagnetic reversal (a theory almost universally-accepted by geologists), do not exist or are insignificant, he claims.
  • All of the mammoths were killed almost instantly. Hovind teaches us that we’ve found many deceased mammoths, all standing up and with evidence that they died very quickly, and claims that this is evidence for his “great flood” theory (which I’ll mention later). He’s wrong, by the way – we’ve not found many intact mammoths and I can’t find any evidence that any were found standing up (the one he usually mentions, the Berezovka Mammoth, may well have died from drowning, but certainly wasn’t standing up). He also carefully skirts around the fact that dinosaurs’ (which, according to his theories, would have lived at the same time as mammoths) bones are found buried in a way (different depths, carbon dating, etc.) that would suggest that they lived over a huge period of time and did not all die out in an instant.
  • So what killed all these extinct species? A great flood! And not just any great flood: a comet hit the Earth, we’re told. A huge comet entered the solar system and (for some reason he doesn’t really clarify) began to break apart. Lots of chunks of water ice (recent evidence from probes like Deep Impact suggest that comets contain far less water ice than was previously thought, containing far more dust and rock and ices of other gases, like methane). The craters on the moon, Mars and other planets were caused by this immense icy meteor, as were the rings around Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune (wow; this really is a huge comet). The comet seperated further in the Earth’s atmosphere, and fell as snow… curiously, the ice particles became statically charged in the Earth’s atmosphere which caused them to be attracted towards the Earth’s magnetic poles, which is why they are icier today than other parts of the Earth – which makes no sense whatsoever. The melting snow created filled in the huge valleys that are now the oceans (presumabley there wasn’t very much water on Earth before this happened).
  • More evidence for a great flood! Mr. Hovind takes pretty much every bit of evidence for an “old Earth” and twists it with a huge dose of imagination in order to attempt to turn it into evidence for his “young Earth.” Fossils of sea creatures found in the Himalayas have been accepted (through biological analysis, carbon dating, and the techtonic record) to have been pushed up there when the Indian techtonic plate crashed (very slowly, but it’s very heavy!) into South Asia. Mr. Hovind, however, explains that the only way you could possibly get seashells up Everest would be with a great flood “washing” them up there. He uses the bible to demonstrate the infallability of the bible a few times to help demonstrate the correctness of his theory.

He goes on to “disprove” coal formation, which is also amusing reading, but the whole thing remains kind-of alarming to me when I think about the fact that people genuinely believe this stuff.

ON MENTAL MODELS AND STAGNATION

When we are confronted by evidence that contradicts our model of the way things are, we are confused. We can amalgamate this new evidence and relieve the confusion in one of two ways. The first way, which is the most comfortable, is to assume that our existing model (what we already believe) is correct and take the extra evidence as an exception to the rule. The second way, which is harder, is to adapt the model to fit the new evidence. Which one is more correct depends upon the situation, but something that is certainly true is that it is far more difficult to retrospectively adapt a model (where your model has been hard-set by, for example, years of belief in it) than it is to adapt a model which is less-strongly held.

Let’s have a simple example: a woman has a son who, on a particular occassion, gets into trouble at school. Her mental model includes predicates like “My son is a good boy,” and so this new evidence challenges that belief. Odds are good that she will extend her model with an exception, such as “…except when he plays with [scapegoat],” or even “…except that one time.” This is probably correct, and her model is refined with this “bolt-on” extra clause. If she continues to be bombarded by evidence, she is likely to have to change her model to accomodate it, eventually changing her original ideas: “My son is not a good boy.”

Retrospectively changing ideas is very hard: the human brain doesn’t seem to feel as comfortable with it. Suppose you had firmly believed that there was a deity who cared about you and would grant you a place in it’s heaven if you lived your life in accordance with a certain set of rules and traditions. Then suppose something somehow managed to persuade you that this deity probably didn’t exist at all. Changing your mental model to something new, contradicting yourself, and saying “I have been wrong for the last 20 years,” or whatever, isn’t an easy thing to do, so people don’t like to do it.

What people will sometimes do is to maintain their model with an ever-growing string of complicated and intertwined exceptions, making themselves into an apologetic for their cause. “God doesn’t condone homosexuality, because Leviticus 18:22 and Deuteronomy 23:17-18 forbid it! Oh; but don’t mind Leviticus 11:12 and Deuteronomy 14:10 – of course God doesn’t mind us eating shellfish in this day and age.”

Everybody does this: not just the theists. But it scares me that we seem to be seeing an increase in this kind of thinking from theists worldwide, and while it’s probably better than them taking their thousands-of-years-old holy books as literal and following them to the letter, it sets a bad precedent. If they can justify making exceptions to the rules they don’t like, it follows that they will eventually adapt their models, internally, to say “It is okay to change our models to fit our needs and still believe that we aren’t hypocrites.” It’s happening now to many people all over the world, and it disappoints me.

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God’s Debris

Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) has released as a free e-book God’s Debris, a short fray into religion and philosophy. I’ve read several of Scott Adam’s books before. Most of these have been comic books – compilations of Dilbert strips. Others have been his interesting, satirical books on office life and tongue-in-cheek guides to survival in cube farms. God’s Debris is somewhat different. It is a work of fiction which centres on the conversation between two individuals with, at least to begin with, radically different views on the nature of God and the universe. The elder of the two, the self-defined “Avatar”, talks little of his beliefs, instead choosing to speak widely and knowledgeably of facts he is privy to: facts based on assumed premises such as free will and, in a roundabout way, creationism. The younger – the protagonist and a blatant representation of “the majority” – is a non-commital monotheist who has neglected to put more than a modicum of thought into his beliefs. Like most of the monotheists I know, I guess. And, sadly, many of the atheists. The two talk about the nature of the universe through a series of short, well-written chapters, loaded with comprehensive analogies but with a significant amount of “thinker material” if the reader cares to delve deeper. The book is designed as a thought experiment, and has moderate success. Spoiler Warning – what follows is a discussion about some of the significant points of the book – if you’re going to read it (it doesn’t take long: I read the whole thing in just over an hour) then go read it and come back here later. Or to jump to the conclusion of my micro-review, scroll down until you reach the “end of spoilers” section. I’ve had a closer look at the chapters of the book:

  • Introduction (Introduction, The Package, The Old Man) – the story is set-up well, quite obviously as a work of fiction. Several mentions are made to thought processes of the individual and behaviour in accordance with society’s rules, which will be referenced later. The writing style of the introductory chapters, like the rest of the book, is charming and welcoming, and approachable on many different levels. The deliveryman and the Avatar – the two characters in the story – are introduced, and the latter is done so with an air of mystery which I feel is possibly unbefitting of the status (“level 5”) he later declares. Probability, which forms a major part of the story and of the Avatar’s beliefs, is introduced through a coin-flip metaphor, but, again, the level of mystery and suspense induced is perhaps too much for a small, easy-reading volume such as this one.
  • Free Will and Determinism in Omnipotence (Your Free Will, God’s Free Will, Science, Where Is Free Will Located?) – The concept of free will is introduced; that is, that a thinking organism can have control over it’s own activities, and the discussion turns to that of determinism: if there is a single entity in the universe which truly knows everything, including the future, then there is no free will for any entity, but there can be an illusion of free will. As a determinist, I have no problem with this statement, which is presented as being bold and world-changing, however Adams seems to try to present it as something shocking; perhaps to cater to readers who may not have entirely followed the free will vs. determinism thought train through. However, the characters then go on to dismiss the idea of universal determinism, without further discussion, which left me feeling somewhat cheated. Thankfully I carried on reading regardless, drawn on by the excellent writing style, because (as you’ll see below) I found the book very enjoyable despite the fact that the author seems almost to expect that the reader will agree with him on basic premises like the existence of free will. These chapters go on to discuss God, the soul, etc. in a way that, for a moment, made me fear that the novel was going to continue to use these “woolly” terms to avoid having to talk about any real philosophical, moral, or religious issues at all! However, I was proven to be, again thankfully, mistaken…
  • Facets of Belief, and Religious Incompatibility (Genuine Belief, Road Maps, Delusion Generator) – The Avatar and the deliveryman go on to discuss the value of religion and where it comes from (again, of course, in the belief set of the Avatar), in what turns out to be a well thought-out couple of chapters. Analogies are drawn which let the reader begin to think about religious teachings and their place in our world, which are referenced wonderfully by the later chapter Curious Bees. Several well-written chapters. The nature of abstraction and the need for mental models through which to understand the world is touched upon, although not in a terribly detailed manner.
  • Understanding God, and The Avatar’s Beliefs (Reincarnation, UFOs, and God, God’s Motivation, God’s Debris, God’s Consciousness, Physics of God Dust) – At long last, the Avatar goes in to detail about the nature of the universe as he understands it: that there is/was (the temporal difference is subtle) an omnipotent God, and the only possible thing that an all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful God could be motivated to do is to bring about It’s own destruction (Adams repeatedly uses “He” when referring to God, which irks me slightly, but not enough to count against his book). The Avatar’s reasoning is this: that for such an entity, any other course of action or inaction is entirely pointless, as there is no motivation to do so. There is no motivation to do so because all possible other states can be conceived already, and, through their conception, they exist (that they exist as “thoughts” is irrelevant, because the perception of the universe as we experience it can not be demonstrated to be more than a thought belonging to some deity with a wandering mind). As a result, the Avatar reasons, the only experience different to universal omnipotence for a universally omnipotent entity is to cause Itself to become something that is not omnipotent: the Avatar believes that this is what the universe is – the remains of a God that destroyed itself.This line of reasoning doesn’t sit well with me. Wouldn’t an entity with ultimate power and knowledge in an (obviously) determinist reality equally be able to appreciate the results of even such an operation? And if not, It has demonstrated Itself to be subject to rules such as “existence”. As I see it, if there is an omnipotent entity, It has a form which resides outside of the rules of existence, which leads us back to the original conundrum that It would not be motivated to do anything at all, and it would be entirely undetectable in any form anyway. I’m far more comfortable believing in one of two God scenarios. The first is, as hinted above, of an omnipotent God of which the universe as we understand it is a fleeting figment of It’s perception. The second is of a non-omnipotent God, of the type that most theists seem to believe in (even if they think they don’t). A non-omnipotent, or, shall we say, flawed, God could have a great deal of motivation to do anything, including “working in mysterious ways”, creating a universe, talking to mortals, etc. As Adams says, it is an imperfect existence that causes motivation to act. And in every religious text I’ve read, the descriptions of God point to a belief in a non-perfect deity. In any case, I’m babbling, and the conflict between my beliefs and that of the Avatar do not make the story any less good. But from this point on, it’s important to realise that the majority of my interest in the book came from the same source as my interest in other people’s beliefs in general: that I’m fascinated by religion and belief systems.
  • Free Will Revisited (Free Will of a Penny) – Now within the context of the Avatar’s viewpoint, we revisit the idea of free will, and apply the idea that the probability in the universe (alongside matter/energy, part of the remnants/being of God) is universal in scope, and that it is as valid to say that humans have free will as it is to say that a penny has free will to determine what side it lands on when it is tossed. The analogy is perhaps un-necessary, but, like some earlier examples, it would illustrate the author’s point in a way that is approachable to anybody.Surprisingly, these ideas are not put forward with the “shock value” that it felt some of the earlier ideas were supposed to: the writing style is changed in order to present the information more fluidly. I, for one, found this more readable, but I’m interested to hear how other readers found it – presumably we’re supposed to face the revelations of the previous chapters as facts for the purposes of understanding these ones. Which is fine.
  • Evolution, Skepticism, And ESP (Evolution, Skeptics’ Disease, ESP and Luck, ESP and Pattern Recognition) – What follows are the best-written chapters in the book. The Avatar and the deliveryman discuss skepticism and how inexplicable phenomena – such as extra-sensory perception (ESP) – fit in to the Avatar’s model of the universe. Some wide and varied explanations tease the reader with ideas that invite further thought and comment. ESP is described as the result of probability on the mind, or perhaps as the acute perception of forces elsewhere. Having already discussed gravity and magnetism, earlier, we are reminded that every thought is characterised by physical transformations in the brain – chemicals, electrical impulses, matter changes – which, of course, exert fields such as gravity into the universe. As a result, like it or not, thoughts do travel through the air, although this isn’t in a form that might be recognisable as a thought.
  • Light (Light) – A quick examination and hurried explanation of the more confusing points of general relativity follows. Those of a physics disposition or even a physics interest may find this a little patronising, but a point is made at the end, by way of excessive analogy. One is left wondering to what degree Adams – or, at least, his fictional Avatar character – understands some of the more interesting properties of light (such as that it is affected by gravity, or that it’s speed is not necessarily constant), and this casts a shadow of doubt across other things he’s stated as fact. Nonetheless, an interesting chapter.
  • Curious Bees (Curious Bees) – Using a great analogy involving bees looking through the different colours of stained glass window of a church, the Avatar talks about the nature of religion. Superficially, the chapter is similar to Road Maps, but goes into greater detail about the Avatar’s belief in the necessity of human models by which to understand the world. It’s also a lovely bit of writing.
  • Willpower (Willpower) – A further examination of free will and relativity, this time from the perspective of humans. Issues of the subjectivity of morality are hinted at, but not at a level that would excite a philosopher. The chapter uses some interesting metaphors, but if you’ve read books on philosophical morality before, you won’t find anything new here.
  • Prelude To The War (Holy Lands and Fighting God) – The Avatar incites a discussion with the deliveryman about the nature of religious artefacts and their irrelevance, and hints at the purpose of an Avatar – to facilitate improved communication between intelligent individual entities in order to get closer to the state of understanding of the God from which all probability originally came. It is implied that the Avatar believes this to be “the great plan” of where the universe is headed, and it makes fascinating reading, despite my inability to facilitate his beliefs. Later, it is implied that there is to be an important war, fuelled by religion, and I’m left wondering why Adams didn’t take the obvious opportunity to make reference to this idea before, during – for example – Curious Bees. Or maybe he did and I just didn’t notice.
  • Relationships (Relationships) – The Avatar dispenses some general advice on living life in a way that improves the value of the lives of others, and, by proxy, yourself. This doesn’t really feel like it belongs in this book, but is good reading nonetheless, particularly if you’ve had any formal training in skills like active listening.
  • Affirmations (Affirmations) – In another ‘aside’, the value of human thought and determination is explored. This ties in more closely with the rest of the story than Relationships did, talking again about ideas of probability and of noticing the results you want to notice (the same kinds of phenomena that cause superstitions to be reinforced). Good reading, but, like Relationships, you’re not sure why.
  • Fifth Level (Fifth Level) – In a slightly pompous way that feels unbefitting of it’s own definition, the Avatar declares himself to have reached the fifth level of consciousness, the level at which God’s nature can begin to be understood. In order to try to alleviate the tension caused by this revelation, the Avatar explains the importance of other levels, with particular reference to the most influential political and religious leaders, who are typically of lower levels (as it is valuable for them to be able to close their minds to particular outside ideas). The whole chapter’s a little woolly around the edges, but prepares the reader well for the final revelations.
  • The Religious War (Going Home, After The War) – It is implied that in the years that follow there is a great religious war of the kind alluded to by the old Avatar. Now the former deliveryman is the new Avatar, and he himself is old, having survived the religious war (who’s build-up is described, over several chapters, in terms that are chilling when explored in reference to the political climate of today’s real world). It’s suggested that the Avatar is responsible for ensuring that the war ends peacefully, as part of a longer-running plan to reunite the many distributed facets of humanity into the “great plan” of a re-assembled God, but other suggestions are hinted at, too.

End of spoilers – if you skipped the bit above, it’s safe to start reading again here. The book is an interesting one, with some well-presented ideas (behind a little bit too much woolly thinking). I’d have no problem with recommending it to anybody with an interest in religion, or to anybody who needs their theism or atheism challenged. However, if you’ve explored an interest in philosophy or religion before, you’re unlikely to find much that is new or that can excite you in this book, except for the story it wraps inside it. The book takes a very direct route to it’s destination without exploring any of the alternative beliefs: for example, I disagreed entirely with one of the earlier premises, but the story as told by the protagonists left no room for dispute, and just pushed onwards towards it’s inevitable conclusion. This made little difference to me: I was reading it because I enjoy trying to understand the beliefs of other people – even fictional ones – but I can see how it could infuriate people who don’t expect their beliefs to be dismissed at the drop of a hat. On the other hand, it’ll only take you a few hours (at a maximum) to read it, and it’s free, so go download God’s Debris and make an afternoon of it. I’ll be delighted to discuss in finer detail the book with anybody who’s read it.

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Bush On ‘Intelligent Design’

Bush approves of ‘Intelligent Design’, we hear, a theory that’s gaining popularity amongst some Christian groups as a competitive scientific approach to the theory of natural selection. It specifies that while evolution has occured, it was guided by an intelligent force.

But the thing that it’s fans repeatedly fail to notice is that it isn’t a demonstrable scientific theory. To be considered as a scientific theory, it has to be impirically demonstrable, at least in theory, to be false. Evolutionary Theory can be proven false, because theories of evolution state that they could be proven false by the discovery of any single species who’s history can not be explained by it’s own terms. Intelligent Design’s “fail” demand is that it is proven to be incorrect for every species. Just like theories that both “God exists” and “God does not exist”, Intelligent Design can not be proven false, and therefore is untestable and unscientific!

I have no problem with the existance of a theory of intelligent design: in fact, I’m honestly surprised it’s taken so long to get a foothold, as it is a great theological explanation for the way species have been (so far) proven to be while maintaining creationistic ideas… but it is not, by definition a ‘scientific theory’.

It’s been a long day.

On the up-side, Egg have stopped writing to me to tell me I am over my credit limit and instead, today, wrote to me to tell me they were bored of telling me I was over my credit limit and so they have increased said limit. Go Egg!

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Amused Me This Monday Morning

Two things of a religious nature that amused me this morning:

The Rapture Index – what happens if you take the models used to predict global stock exchange behaviour and apply them to biblical prophecy about “the last days”. It’s funny, right up until you realise that they’re absolutely serious. Pretty site, though.

How To Tell If Your Child Is A Goth (and therefore worshipping Satan and in great danger!) – hilariously bad, scary how the fundamentalist Christians find these things to blame for the world’s evils and to find Satan in. I particularly love the fact that you can tell that you have “strayed from the path of the Lord” by what breakfast cereal you eat. I originally lifted the entry from Faye‘s blog, but as she’s made it “friends only” I can’t link to it from here. Archived copy.

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A.I. For Deluded Nutcases

Some goon (sorry: Californian counsellor) has patented Inductive Inference Affective Language Analyzer Simulating Artificial Intelligence (including the Ten Ethical Laws Of Robotics). It’s nothing but unintelligible babble, interspersed by (inaccurate) references to artificial intelligence theory. The author (who also writes a book on family values with a distinct evangelic slant, from which most of the text of the patent seems to be taken) appears to know nothing about A.I. or computer science. In addition, I find his suggestion that ‘wooly’ and ‘vague’ rules and ‘commandments’ are sensible choices for A.I. safeguards –

While a meaningful future artificial intelligence may be more than capable of understanding rules set out in a way that a human might like to express it – indeed, for some machine intelligences (artificial or not) this capacity to understand human speech and expressions could be a very useful feature – this is not the level at which safeguards should be implemented.

While I appreciate the need for ‘safeguards’ (the need is that humans would not feel safe without them, as even early machine intelligences – having been built for a specific purpose – will be in many ways superior to their human creators and therefore be perceived as a threat to them), I do not feel that a safeguard which depends on the machine already being fully functional would be even remotely effective. Instead, such safeguards should be implemented at a far lower and fundamental level.

For an example of this, think of the safety procedures that are built into modern aircraft. An aeroplane is a sophisticated and powerful piece of machinery with some carefully-designed artificial intelligence algorithms pre-programmed into it, such as the autopilot and autoland features, the collision avoidance system, and the fuel regulators. Other, less sophisticated decision-making programs include the air pressure regulators and the turbulence indicators.

If the cabin pressure drops, an automatic system causes oxygen masks to drop from the overhead compartment. But this is not the only way to cause this to happen – the pilot also has a button for this purpose. On many ‘planes, in the event of a wing fire, the corresponding engine will be switched off – but this decision can be overridden by a human operator. These systems are all exhibiting high-level decision-making behaviour: rules programmed in to the existing systems. But these are, in the end, a second level safeguard to the low-level decision-making that prompts the pilot to press the button that drops the masks or keeps the engine on. These overrides are the most fundamental and must crucial safeguards in a modern aircraft: the means to physically cause or prevent the behaviour of the A.I..

Let’s go back to our ‘robots’ – imagine a future not unlike that expressed in films like Blade Runner or I, Robot, in which humanoid robotic servants assist humans with many menial tasks. Suppose, for whatever reason (malice, malfunction, or whatever), a robot attacks a human – the first level of safeguard (and the only one suggested by both films and by the author of the “Ten Ethical Laws“) would be that the human could demand that the robot desist. This would probably be a voice command: “Stop!”. But of course, this is like the aeroplane that ‘decides’ to turn off a burning engine – we already know that something has ‘gone wrong’ in the AI unit: the same machine that has to process the speech, ‘stop’. How do we know that this will be correctly understood, particularly if we already know that there has been a malfunction? If the command fails to work, the human’s only likely chance for survival would be to initialise the second, low-level safeguard – probably a reset switch or “big red button”.

You see: the rules that the author proposes are unsubstantial, vauge, and open to misinterpretation – just like the human’s cry for the robot to stop, above. The safeguards he proposes are no more effective than asking humans to be nice to one another is to preventing crime.

Whether or not it is ethical to give intelligent entities ‘off’ buttons is, of course, another question entirely.

Additional: On further reading, it looks as if the author of the document recently saw “I, Robot” and decided that his own neo-Christian viewpoint could be applied to artificial intelligences: which, of course, it could, but there is no reason to believe that it would be any more effective on any useful artificial intelligence than it would be on any useful ‘real’ intelligence.

God [humour]

[this post was damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has not been possible to recover it; a partial recovery was made on 13 October 2018]

[missing picture]

Well; I’m glad he cleared that up for us.

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Christians Should Be Banned From The Internet

[this post was lost during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004; it was partially recovered on 21st March 2012]

If you’re going to spend (at an absolute minimum – and probably closer to four times the amount) $350 on a series of banner advertisements promoting your service, to be displayed inside a popular ad-sponsored piece of software, you’ll check your spelling, right? Right? Look at this:

[this image has been lost]

Sometimes I really do feel that Christians should be banned from the internet. They should certainly be disallowed from writing web pages – other than the Christians, I’ve never seen a group of people who have – within their own group – broken every single rule of good web site design. Well… except if you consider GeoCities-users a group of their own.

As if this page, which scrolls on and on, haslarge numbers of images linked from other sites, and using a (badly) tiled background image, isn’t bad enough, I’ve seen:

  • This GeoCities monstrosity, with a stupid amount of animated GIFs, annoying applets, and platform-dependent code (including an embedded… [the rest of this post has been lost]

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Orange Gives Me 80p For No Apparent Reason

Today, Orange sent me a text message apologising for charging me for two picture messages earlier this year, and have apparently credited me 80p as a gesture of compensation. The Register reports that this has happened to others, too, but I can’t help but feel that Orange’s mistake is even larger than they thought it was – I never received these picture messages in the first place!

I’m tempted to call them and complain that I didn’t ever receive the two picture messages for which I’m having my money refunded, but as I’m not even sure that I was charged for them, either (can’t see it on my bill), I’ll probably lose me free 80p if I do. Decisions, decisions.

In other news, comment-heavy discussion on the difference between Christianity and Islam on Alec’s LiveJournal [link updated to use Web Archive, which still holds a copy]. Take a look.

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Avatar Diary

Went to church with Alecia and Richard. There’s a weird experience for me. Tasted the new flavour of Juicefuls from Brewsters while I was in town – Strawberry flavour. They’re just as addictive as all the other flavours. Though I had intended to use the remainder of the day to finish tidying my room (the end of a mammoth task) and doing homework which is due later this week, I was instead distracted and played on Civilization II, watched TV, and other such mind-expanding activities. Went to bed in the wee small hours, after updating the Castle with my latest Åvatar Diary accounts.

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Avatar Diary

Maths in the morning. How is it that the first lesson in a new module always makes so much more sense than any other one? Went home for lunch in my three-hour break, returning for Psychology. Watched a video on “Eyewitness Testimony”. We’ve seen the same one three times now. Alecia took the second half of the lesson to preach to us – usally the kind of activity for Monday’s Psychology lessons – and persuaded Richard and me to come with her to church on Sunday. Promised I’d go, and I think I’ve persuaded Rik too, as well (even though he let her down on the Carol Service). “You can’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it,” I told him, with my usual democratic tact.

Couldn’t sleep again tonight – same as last night – watched TV until about 4:30am…

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