--- /dev/null
+---
+postid: 034
+title: The inevitable transition back into religiousness
+date: February 7, 2015
+author: Lucian Mogoșanu
+tags: asphalt
+---
+
+The phenomenon we know today as "religion" can be accurately described as a set
+of sets of teachings which comprise both ideology and philosophy (and maybe
+more?), boiling down to the assumption that some form of God exists. Many [have
+challenged][closed-world] this core principle and, more importantly, many have
+in the end found it irrelevant to the existence of humankind, as the more
+pragmatic ones have found it more useful to use experiment, and in the end
+science and its own set of principles, instead of deducting arguments from God.
+This is undeniably a starting point for ongoing evolution and also that from
+which the rather useless[^1] "science versus religion" debate had sprung.
+
+So science not being in any *real* antithesis with religion, it hasn't and
+shall never replace it. People are not becoming less religious and more
+scientous, but they have become less religious in the past century, a century
+in which they have replaced religiousness-as-worship with [something
+else][post-religion]. This isn't in any way "good", nor is it in any way "bad",
+especially if we relate these two notions to Christian morals; religiousness
+simply happens, or it doesn't, and we, or rather I believe it's important to
+observe this.
+
+Religion-as-worship is however inextricably linked to religion-as-superstition.
+Now, superstition is a very peculiar phenomenon related to the inductive
+(feedback) learning mechanisms that brains are supposedly implementing: if a
+given event is repeated enough times in a given context, then we
+(unconsciously!) learn to link the event and the context even when no real
+relationship exists between the two. Religion can therefore be easily explained
+in a given framework: "I want to live (conservation instinct), therefore God",
+reasons the primitive mind. Of course, in comparison to the systematic and
+arduous approach proposed by science, which can take centuries, as every
+complex evolutionary process does, this has the advantage of providing fast
+results, but also the major disadvantage of being half-baked at best. I will
+let the reader draw further conclusions on this.
+
+And now is finally the right time to delve into the actual context: after
+transitioning from religion to [post-religion][post-religion] in only two
+generations or so, humanity will go, or rather is presently going through some
+rough times. Not because of "pollution", "global warming", "animal cruelty",
+"[not enough girls in IT][political-correctness]" and other such possibly false
+problems[^2]. No, there are other issues which are more important, of which I
+shall remind only one:
+
+Global food scarcity. The idea here is that we're seven billion souls and
+growing in a fixed period of time $\delta t$, while the quantity of food is
+growing at a smaller pace in the same $\delta t$. Of course, westerners like to
+think that we're "the master race" and that our industrialized processes are so
+streamlined that this will never fail (note: for the western world), that is,
+until this will blow up straight in our faces. No doubt, this is one of the
+main underlying causes of war today and nothing will impede some lunatic from
+commiting genocide in order to "balance the odds". That can only mean that
+rough times, or rather "dark ages" are coming, and in these dark times people
+will be more and more susceptible to irrational arguments.
+
+And this is when, as I, the prophet, envision that the world, or at least the
+western world, will fall back again into sheer religiousness. This has happened
+before and can, and I say that it will happen again, although that might be
+some time after I drop dead. It's just the cyclic nature of history.
+
+I find it hard to believe that Christianity will have any success this time,
+though. In those dark times, someone will have to come up with a more
+"enlightened" religion in order to appeal to the irrational, but more rational
+than two thousand years ago mind. And again, this might be some time after my
+children drop dead.
+
+Of course, this is an unscientifical claim, since I can't verify it. If you're
+from the future and reading this, you will however know whether I was right or
+not.
+
+[^1]: One can believe in God and be a good scientist; also, one can refuse to
+believe in God and be a lousy human being in general. Setting up an "us versus
+them" environment isn't in any way constructive, unless we deliberately intend
+to cause a war... which might be constructive from a point of view, namely that
+in which by "constructive" we mean "destructive". Which isn't to say that
+destruction is not necessary at times.
+
+[^2]: Or maybe the fact that we create such false problems is precisely one of
+the things that have led us to this sad state of affairs. No, it's not
+"ironical", it's simply dumb, because it's detracted us from the real problems
+of humanity, as cognitive dissonance usually does.
+
+[closed-world]: /posts/y00/008-religion-and-the-closed-world-assumption.html
+[post-religion]: /posts/y00/018-on-post-religion.html
+[political-correctness]: /posts/y01/02e-on-the-inherent-harmfulness-of-political-correctness.html
--- /dev/null
+---
+postid: 035
+title: With our balls clean
+excerpt: Or how Homo sapiens survived in the dark ages of the first personal computers.
+date: February 14, 2015
+author: Lucian Mogoșanu
+tags: asphalt, tech
+---
+
+The following is a loose translation of a short story published about four
+years ago on the [old blog][bricks]. The title is a pun on a famous Romanian
+communist movie called "[Cu mâinile curate][imdb]", which doesn't seem to have
+an English translation, so I'll ask you to take it with a pinch of salt. The
+translation of the text itself is also not without its flaws, but I believe it
+has some historical value, which is how this writing has found its place here.
+
+I'm not sure how many people have pondered this, but life was [not at
+all][daimonz] impossible before Google, the Internets and all that other
+balderdash most of us enjoy nowadays during morning coffee and as a replacement
+for evening reading... not to mention all the stuff happening in between the
+two, some of them outright outrageous.
+
+Given that I quite vaguely remember those olden times[^1], but also because I
+haven't had the chance to put on paper the story of how I've ended up here and
+now, I feel compelled to extend the post on [Trilema][trilema] as much as I
+can. Allow me to unwind the tape to the times before personal computers were a
+thing, when the guys at UPB were designing, and the guys at ICE Felix were
+producing so-called "[home computers][hc]"[^2].
+
+<span class="imgleft"><a href="/uploads/2015/02/basic-book.jpg"> <img
+class="thumb" src="/uploads/2015/02/basic-book-thumb.jpg"
+title="Microelectronica interactivă."/></a></span>
+It was about 1992 when I had one of those at home, specifically a HC90. Well,
+said computers aren't much different from a simple keyboard, which actually had
+embedded the whole hardware except the display and storage. Their trademark was
+their shell, no more and no less than a BASIC interpreter, while saving and
+loading data was done using magnetic tape, so that loading a game took quite
+some time, as I couldn't do much else given my age and the thing's performance
+-- especially the former. I was just beginning to learn reading then, so one of
+my first readings comprised two green BASIC volumes[^3], which taught simple
+problems such as drawing primitive shapes on the screen and performing various
+computations. So that's how I spent my first computing years, mostly in front
+of a black and white tube-based Snagov TV.
+
+PCs appeared in my life relatively early, some time around the year 1995. My
+folks' workplaces already had 80486s with turbo buttons which set the frequency
+from 33 to 66MHz. That was also the first time I saw how 5-and-a-quarter inch
+floppy disks looked, and a bit later I got to play Prehistorik and Lotus III --
+quite a while after playing the first Lotus Esprit on the HC -- in front of a
+monitor with a radiation filter, on the computers we had at school.
+
+<span class="imgright"><a href="/uploads/2015/02/hc-85.jpg"> <img
+class="thumb" src="/uploads/2015/02/hc-85-thumb.jpg"
+title="Microelectronica interactivă."/></a></span>
+Then in 1997 my folks bought me my first grinder[^4], and only I know how much
+I stood cleaning those mouse balls that were of dubious origin to say the
+least, and of course, the dust from the CPU cooler. I clearly remember how 16MB
+of RAM weren't enough for Carmageddon, so I bugged my dad to buy another 16.
+Then desktop PCs evolved pretty fast in the following years, so I got a Pentium
+with MMX[^5] and then a Pentium II, III and IV in six years or so. My last
+Pentium desktop was a Pentium D that I only changed this year with a Haswell,
+although I've been through a few laptops, most notably the Sandy Bridge i5
+ThinkPad X220[^6]. Finally, as far as servers go, I've always kept the Bricks
+as well as The Tar Pit on a home server, currently an older 45nm Xeon on an HP
+board that does its job well enough for my needs[^7].
+
+I don't have that much to tell about peripherals. I went through a shitload of
+Winmodems, one worse than the other, while I cursed most of the old graphics
+boards from Intel for not allowing me to admire Lara Croft in the wholeness of
+her nudity, at least until I got my first Riva TNT2, which sadly burned during
+an intense Quake 3 match; nowadays it often smells of burning while I play The
+Witcher 2 on a GTX 760, but the card holds its horses pretty well. Other than
+that, I've had the privilege of wearing out a HP LaserJet 4 and then a 5 that
+actually talked PostScript, which you usually see in an office running as a
+standalone server. I don't see anything of the sorts nowadays, but maybe I'm
+just nostalgic.
+
+Of course, I could spend days chattering about this whole tech yadda: my first
+overclocking was a step away from frying a CPU; back in the days when CRTs
+were still the best monitors I had a 17-inch EIZO that was perfect for any type
+of graphics processing, from photo editing to modelling, and so on and so
+forth. I managed to get my hands on some of the lowest-end hardware and a only
+a few pieces that were simply awesome at their time. And that's how I got past
+Y2K with my balls clean, same as I'll go past Y2038[^8] and whatever's gonna
+come next.
+
+[^1]: That is, about twenty years ago, give or take a few.
+
+[^2]: In all fairness, the computers in question were Amstrad ZX Spectrum
+ripoffs in almost every respect, from the CPU to the actual motherboard design.
+Heck, [they say][roms] that even the operating system was illegally copied,
+'cause no one gave, or gives, a damn about copyright in communist countries.
+
+[^3]: L. Dumitrașcu, *Învățăm microelectronica interactivă*, translated as
+*Learning interactive microelectronics*, or better yet, *Learning
+microelectronics interactively*. Some [bookstores][dumitrascu] still claim to
+sell it, although I doubt they're in stock anymore; I'll probably donate my
+copies to a museum at some point.
+
+[^4]: It certainly sounded like one, to be honest...
+
+[^5]: What they call SSE nowadays.
+
+[^6]: In terms of quality, that's nowhere near the ThinkPads IBM used to make.
+Also, X220 was probably the last sane build of its series, given that now they
+tend to make it more and more like an "ultrabook". No thanks, if I wanted a
+MacBook I'd get one of those, not a more expensive knock-off.
+
+[^7]: Amusingly enough, at the time when I wrote the initial article I was
+boasting the IBM Pentium III server that meanwhile went dead and buried after
+about ten years of variable workloads. Also meanwhile, Intel started making
+processors that you can safely run without cooking scrambled eggs on them; oh
+well, that's history for you.
+
+[^8]: I doubt there'll be many 32-bit systems running ten years from now, let
+alone in 2038.
+
+[bricks]: http://lucian.mogosanu.ro/bricks/cu-bilele-curate/
+[imdb]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068431/
+[daimonz]: https://twitter.com/daimonz/status/37150108445310976
+[trilema]: http://trilema.com/2011/vechituri-sau-viata-dinainte-de-y2k/
+[hc]: http://www.interface1.net/zx/clones/hc85.html
+[roms]: http://www.shadowmagic.org.uk/spectrum/roms.html
+[dumitrascu]: http://www.librarie.net/p/38941/Invatam-microelectronica-interactiva-Totul-despre-Basic-conversatii-sinteze-Liviu-Dumitrascu
projects / thetarpit.git / commitdiff
