Change is in the air

Well chaps it looks like our Father above has got some new plans in store for me this chapter, as well as my sugar-muffin-of-honey-oats-and-banana-cupcake-of-love. This more or less boils down to me beginning school next year in preparation for going into ministry in academia which God is calling me into by several different means.

All that to say, wish me well.

Imminent Demise

I've been doing a lot of vector art recently, so I wanted to get away from that for a while and create something freehand; something that had a more rough-around-the-edges look and feel.

The above print is the result, and the background alone represents about 2 hours worth of work (never again). This print in particular is very detailed, so as usual, click to see the full-size, high resolution version.

Verificationism

I just wanted to move this hopeful discussion from Angel's blog to mine so as to generate some content in this desert among other things.

Basically Ruthie wants to say that only things like the hard sciences are objective and that everything else (philosophy, ethics, etc.) is subjective.

Now I've got a problem with this because it sounds like something out of A.J. Ayer and his "Language, Truth, and Logic" with its direct promotion of Logical Positivism. The problem I see with affirming something like that is that Verificationism is dead - mainly because it's self refuting, for instance by saying that all that you can know to be objectively true is what you can observe by the five senses would put you in the rather odd position of not being able to verify that statement itself with the five senses in which case you couldn't know that it was true.

But you also wanted to throw mathematics in with the hard sciences (I suppose those are what you're referring to by 'science' and not the humanities for instance) and I'd have a problem with that as well since I lean towards being a Fictionalist with respect to mathematics and not a Platonist, that is I don't see mathematical discourse as being ontologically committing - but we can leave that one out if you want and just stick to that first point, it seems to be more important anyway - what will you bring?

All in

Pirate kings are kings too.

The Devil's Dictionary

I was recently made aware of a book called "The Devil's Dictionary" which is a collection of definitions for common words that were written and published in The New York Times by American writer Ambrose Bierce between 1881 - 1906.

It's more or less the cynic's guide to life, abundant with snark, sarcasm, and great ego. I've included some of my favorite entries below:

Happy Birthday Jus

Here it is - two days late, but still bright and shiny in black on this white backdrop. May it be full of warm and fuzzy fun (especially come Christmas) world without end.

Amen.

Google Chrome

I had mixed feelings upon first hearing the news of the launch of Chrome, the latest web browser from Google.

Being a web developer, I wasn't thrilled at the prospect of having to conduct cross compatibility tests on yet another platform. So the first thing I did after installing Chrome (a 30 second process), was visit my network of websites and see if anything was broken or displaying incorrectly on the new browser. To my delight, I have yet to see any incompatibilities, and I've noticed a great deal of new features and improvements.

The first thing that struck me was the simplicity of the browser. It's obvious that the user interface designers wanted to maximize screen real estate while still providing a seamless and feature rich, browsing experience. So far, they appear to have been successful on that front, as I have at least 60 vertical pixels of additional viewing space within Chrome, compared to Firefox and IE.

Another thing that impressed me was the speed at which Chrome loads websites, especially ones that are very JavaScript heavy (like this one). Apparently this is due to their new JavaScript engine, called V8, which is supposed to enhance Web application performance by handling multiple processes, each with its own memory and copy of global data structures. In short, it's fast.

I'm not going to detail every feature of Chrome, but it seems like Google has once again attempted to reinvent the wheel, and in the time I've played around with it I've noticed a number of improvements on very standard stuff like the address bar, default home page, embedded tools etc.

It can't be easy trying to break into such a battle hardened market, especially when you are pitting yourself against a giant like Microsoft with a 70% market share. But I have a sneaking suspicion that Google hasn't exhausted all their good fortune just yet, and I hold to the hopes that Chrome proves to be massively successful and a great boost to my languid Google stock.

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