Linux
Dear Linux, I’m trying my best to love you, but it’s just not working…
More Windows XP Themes
As an addition to my earlier post on Windows XP Color Schemes, I’ve found a few other themes. The first is the Windows XP Royale Noir theme. The other is the Windows XP Zune theme. Both look cool, and make for an interesting change to boring blue, silver and green.
Liberty and Encryption
I love technology, and frequently visit tech-centric websites such as LifeHacker and gHacks. I eventually had to re-format my hard drive once and start with a fresh installation of Windows XP, so full of programs my PC was. One particular program that caught my attention was TrueCrypt.
Windows XP Color Schemes
If you’re using the standard ‘XP Style’ theme (technically known as Luna,) you only have three options for Color Schemes: Default (blue), Olive Green and Silver. If you’re not sure how to get to these options, right-click the desktop (directly onto it where no application windows are in the way,) then select the appearance tab.
How Does the Google Ranking System Work?
I would really like to know. I take an interest in “optimising” my website so that my posts rank highly for particular search terms. I use WordPress to manage my blog so I thought that might help my ranking. I use a URL structure that I read helps the search engines find relevant posts (I cannot remember where.) The URL structure is http://tjwoodlock/blog/[Post Title]. I use the All in One SEO Plugin and the Google XML Sitemaps Plugin.
Related Posts and Highlighted Comments
I’ve added two more improvements to my site. I followed Nick Bohle‘s tutorials for adding related posts to The Morning After theme and adding highlighted comments to The Morning After theme. I prefer a ‘bullet points’ style for my related posts list but unfortunately I do not know how to code it.
Tags Implementation
I have managed to implement tags support in the Morning After theme (including a tag cloud) using Nick Bohle‘s tutorial. Just remember to delete the space between “<” and “?php” in the code!
Faith and God
I suppose I’ve never really properly understood the concept of faith as it is used within Christianity. I’m sure there are sophisticated definitions of the term but here I’m focusing on what I understand some to be saying. This may or may not be representative of the ‘correct’ understanding.
I’ll describe a scenario. A person goes before a preacher and says that they want their broken toe healed. The preacher claims that if they have ‘faith’ that God will work a miracle then their toe could be healed. Others in the room are encouraged to have faith as well. The problem I have is determining who exactly these individuals have ‘faith’ in. Is it faith in themselves that they have properly determined the prescriptions for a miracle and satisfied those prescriptions? If so then that appears to me to be nothing but false confidence. They are essentially saying “I don’t know if a miracle will occur but I will chose to conclude with confidence (‘great faith’) that one will occur.”
Figure One
I’ve summarised this in Figure One. I’ve diagrammed the other possibility in Figure Two.
Figure Two
In Figure Two I’ve shown another understanding of the term ‘faith’, faith that God’s will will be done. It seems unusual to suggest that people require faith that a perfectly powerful being has the power to achieve it’s desired end. Another possibility is that faith is being used to mean faith that God has chosen to desire a given outcome, and outcome you also desire, but then it’s not at all clear how that could affect the outcome. If God desires it, it will be done regardless of the faith that humans have in it.
I am not saying that I have thought of all the possibilities, rather that I cannot see how some people who claim to have faith in God for a given miracle are not simply having faith that they’ve determined what they need to do in order for God to make a miracle and faith that they’ve done it or that they greatly desire an outcome and are to remain confident of it occurring in spite of the fact that they are really not sure.
I believe that some elements of Roman Catholicism (Thomism) have a different concept of faith and I’m sure that within Orthodoxy and Protestantism there are similarly sophisticated definitions that may make more sense.
Google SketchUp
Here are a couple of pictures of a tower I designed. I’m still in the process of learning SketchUp so it’s a pretty simple design.
Still, it shows what a fairly untalented artist like myself can produce with the right equipment. Pretty cool.
Representing Arguments
After completing the Teaching Company series Argumentation: The Study of Effective Reasoning (which I recommend) I learnt to diagram arguments as follows:
However, after purchasing the program Rationale (which I also recommend) I learnt to diagram arguments in this way:
I have combined them in this manner:
As you can see, the evidence forms one premise and the warrant forms another. The evidence and warrant are claims in themselves and can be supported by supplementary arguments.
Obviously these diagrams are not comprehensive, as there are many co-premises in any argument that are unlikely to ever me disputed (such as ’cause precedes effect’, ‘the world is real and intelligible’ etc.)
If both parties to a dispute agree with the basic framework of the argument, though, unnecessary argument can be avoided.
