Photos, ramblings, whatever

At the zoo

quick.dudley@gmail.com (Jeremy List) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:35:00 +0000

Today I went to the zoo with my mother's cousin. We both arrived with full camera batteries which didn't last the full day. He had a spare, I just had to get as much mileage as I could by periodically resting my camera and giving the battery chemicals a chance to react. If you click the black box you'll see a video, containing some footage and some stills. (On another note, similar black boxes on this blog are also videos, although I also upload most of my videos to youtube, it's easier for my Chinese friends if I host everything here)
Here are more still shots. You can get them in their original quality by clicking them.

Otters

Tiger

Giraffe

Baboon

Red Panda

Lemur

I forgot what this is

Chimpanzees

Campbell Island Teals

Kea.

Tuatara video

quick.dudley@gmail.com (Jeremy List) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:50:00 +0000

It must be getting warmer: the tuatara are actually moving this much!

Jobseeking

quick.dudley@gmail.com (Jeremy List) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:56:00 +0000

I am now looking for a job for the summer holidays (as well as preparing for my exams) Should you know anyone looking for a short-term programmer, please refer them to my cv.

dog video

quick.dudley@gmail.com (Jeremy List) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 02:43:00 +0000

A video I wanted to show to my girlfriend.
It's my family dog shutting a door.

My exam timetable

quick.dudley@gmail.com (Jeremy List) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 05:28:00 +0000

Just in case you want to cheer/pray for me.
They start on the 30th of October and finish on the 10th of November.

Chinese Dinner

quick.dudley@gmail.com (Jeremy List) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 09:22:00 +0000

Last night our Chinese class and lecturers had dinner together. Unfortunately our lecturer from Nanjing is finishing her contract and going home early next year, so it was a slightly sad occasion even though we were having a great time.

I told you so

quick.dudley@gmail.com (Jeremy List) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:57:00 +0000

If you ignore the advice in my previous post then this
will happen to you.

Just to clarify, I don't think this particular accident was caused by people going straight ahead from a right turning lane because there are only two lanes on that road. But I still think you should always drive in the correct lane. It actually happened just outside my house and slightly delayed my arrival home (I live in that forest you can see to the right).

Road rage. Well kind-of.

quick.dudley@gmail.com (Jeremy List) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 08:01:00 +0000

On my way to university each day I turn right from Featherston Street into Whitmore Street. To begin with I clearly signal that I want to move into the nearest lane which allows me to turn Right, and then change lane when it's safe. The light is usually red when I reach the intersection so I wait. Then I turn right. Almost inevitably there's some idiot in the right-turn-only lane wanting to go straight ahead, getting angry, blasting their horn, and swearing at me.
I just want to say to everyone who drives like that: you have no right to be in control of a vehicle. The turning lanes on Featherston Street are clearly marked so you have no excuse for being in the wrong lane! Please destroy your drivers license and sell your car because you are a danger to everyone on the road!

So busy

quick.dudley@gmail.com (Jeremy List) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 09:05:00 +0000

Today is Saturday, so I finally had a chance to take things relatively easy. I had a lot of deadlines on Friday and even more next week. Some of what I'm learning at university is getting really interesting. In MATH161 we're doing graph theory, and I've thought of a starting point for a possible shorter proof of the 4-colour theorem. In Chinese we just learned the past tense and subordinate clauses.
I've still been taking pictures of tuatara.

I even saw the boy tuatara!

one year

quick.dudley@gmail.com (Jeremy List) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:33:00 +0000

In 3 weeks I'll have been with my girlfriend for a year. So I drew this lotus for her.

Tomorrow I will cut off the tatty edges of the paper I used (not visible in this scan) and send the picture to her.

1+1=。。。

quick.dudley@gmail.com (Jeremy List) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 10:05:00 +0000

A new pigeon has arrived at my place and seems to be romantically involved with my landlady's pigeon. Now my landlady doesn't want to be overrun with baby pigeons, so she's giving out less pigeon food in the hope that one of the pigeons will go elsewhere. I'm thinking the pigeons might not be that smart, and preventing the baby pigeon invasion may involve eating a few eggs.

HST repaired

quick.dudley@gmail.com (Jeremy List) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 11:11:00 +0000

I hadn't been following the news on this, but apparently the hubble space telescope has been repaired and is once again taking amazing pictures. The official site is here.

You can look at them yourself. I'm also going to pick out a couple of favourites.

Refuting someone

quick.dudley@gmail.com (Jeremy List) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 05:44:00 +0000

Well I found out my worldview falls under the definition of theistic evolution (it did before, but I hadn't given it all the thought I needed). Theistic evolution is in fact the worldview held by the majority of Christians throughout the world, so I'm definitely not alone.
Anyway, I just thought I'd refute someone else's article speaking against the way I see the world. His article can be found at http://creation.com/10-dangers-of-theistic-evolution.
His article takes the form of 10 "dangers" of the theistic evolution worldview. I'll present my arguments regarding each one in the same order as he's presented them.

1: Misrepresentation of the nature of God
The basic issue here is that evolution depends on the death of countless unsuccessful organisms in order to promote the successful ones. And it's assumed that death, suffering, etc could not have taken place prior to the original sin. The problem here is that the first sin mentioned in the bible is not the eating of the forbidden fruit but the deciept of the serpent. Therefore even in the literal account, sin had already entered the world before the fall of man.

2: God becomes a God of the gaps
Here, the article's author presumes that in accepting evolutionary theism, we reduce the role of God in our view of creation. This is plain naive and a blatant misrepresentation of the theistic evolutionist worldview. I don't just say "God did it" when I don't know how something happened: I believe God is part of how the universe works, even the parts we CAN explain!

3: Denial of central biblical teachings
For his third objection, the article's author essentially denies the gospels and presents the first chapter of Genesis as the core foundation of the bible. He obviously hasn't read the bible: he hasn't even read the second chapter of Genesis, which gives a completely different creation story. Obviously, if a literal interpretation of those chapters is self-contradictory, then they were never intended to be taken literally!

4: Loss of the way for finding God
Here he pretends that theistic evolution denies the existence of sin. He's completely wrong. Only one group of people doesn't believe that many of the world's problems are caused directly or indirectly by human greed (commonly recognised as a sin). We call those people sociopaths.

5: The doctrine of God's incarnation is undermined
No it isn't. There is no logical contradiction. None at all.

6: The biblical basis of Jesus' work of redemption is mythologized
Once again, the article's author is asserting a logical contradiction when none is present. Finding a few quotes which on first reading appear to support one's reading does not prove that one has an understanding of the quote's source, or that the quote's source is in agreement with one's conclusion. Claiming that Adam is the basis for Jesus' work completely undermines the gospel of Christ, and denies all responsibility for one's own sin.

7: Loss of biblical chronology
If chronology was so important for the biblical authors, they would have written everything in chronological order. They didn't. The author claims the age of the earth can be estimated from the genealogies of the bible: that is in fact a bald-faced lie. It ignores the number of biblical personnages who are given multiple contradictory genealogies which cannot be reconciled within a literalistic interpretation. In short, a literalistic interpretation is reliant on an extremely limited knowlege of biblical text.

8: Loss of creation concepts
Here the article's author is merely restating his belief that a literal interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis (even though he hasn't read the second chapter) is the only reason for the bible's existence.

9: Misrepresentation of reality
My rebuttal is in the author's own dishonesty and misrepresentation of his own religion.

10: Missing the purpose
Unlike the author of that article I know that the whole idea behind christianity is that the life and death of Jesus bridged the divide between God and creation. John 3:16 says "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life". Unlike the author of the article I'm refuting my belief actually motivates me to read the bible instead of just assuming what someone else says about it is actually true.
For all that: I cannot believe that God is inconsistent enough to save the apostle Thomas (who refused to believe in Christ's resurrection without hard evidence) yet refuse to save Richard Dawkins, whose sin is no greater, but who will most likely die without seeing hard evidence. Humans are inconsistent, human expression of God's inspiration is inconsistent (and I believe often at odds with the source of the inspiration), but the God I believe in is not inconsistent.

Faith

quick.dudley@gmail.com (Jeremy List) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 11:53:00 +0000

Well where to begin...
I suppose it started with exploring the link between climate change denial and Christian fundamentalism. I suppose this process I've been going through was triggered by the realisation that people calling themselves Christians are telling bald-faced lies to further their own political agenda for their own short-term gain and complete disregard for the rest of humanity and even their own descendants. How can someone who claims to take the bible literally show such disregard for the 9th commandment. But it's not just deciept, people are already losing their lives in areas where the climate no longer supports agriculture!
Well I'm not sure how but thinking about the corrupt morals of supposed Christians somehow got me thinking about my own worldview, why I believe as I do, and whether I should continue in the same beliefs.
Here's what I came up with, in roughly the order I came up with it:

Theory of evolution is pretty much correct. I did have a doubt regarding evolution of different karyotypes but Chilocorus stigma was kind enough to resolve it for me. Oh, and I've actually done experiments proving most of the other aspects of evolution, albeit with fruit flies (their short lifespan helps).

Life can probably arise spontaneously within the framework of this universe. This hasn't actually been proven, but enough aspects of abiogenesis have been proven that it's not much of a stretch.

However, I haven't stopped believing in God, although I have changed some of my beliefs regarding him. I believe his behaviour is perfectly consistent. That consistence, combined with his omnipresence, mean that it is logically impossible to distinguish whatever "interventions" he may involve himself in from regular laws of physics. Therefore, one would EXPECT all his actions to be explainable through naturalism: the laws derived in naturalism are derived FROM his actions!
I do not believe that God is a person, although I'd say he at least has something like whatever you call that thing that hears when you think in words. I suppose it's called consciousness, but what I mean has nothing to do with the ability to think.
Well, I haven't just modified my beliefs about God slightly. I actually lost most of my original reasons for believing him and found a few new ones. I could try and explain the new reasons, but I really can't. It was neither through logic nor against it. I could go on about it for weeks and not explain it any better than that.

Two weeks break ending

quick.dudley@gmail.com (Jeremy List) — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 06:44:00 +0000

My 2 week break from university is almost over. But one of the highlights isn't until tomorrow. Four or so friends and I are getting together to eat wonton soup and watch a Chinese movie (preferably Liang Zhu, but we'll settle for something else if that's not available)

I meant to blog this earlier: two weeks ago I went to my friend's book launch. It's a great little poetry book called "Wit of the staircase".

Saradha Koirala (author and friend) reading one of her poems.

Paradox

quick.dudley@gmail.com (Jeremy List) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 10:43:00 +0000

A little something I thought up when I was 17. I'd assumed it would be much more challenging and expensive to make than it would actually be in reality so I never tried. I'd been thinking it would involve an extremely long iron bar, not knowing that microwave frequency oscillators exist. Unfortunately I currently have neither the money nor the free time to build this, but would have definitely done so in the past had I known how easily it could have been done.
The reason this is interesting is: the laws of physics contradict each other regarding what will actually happen if such a device is actually switched on!
I don't know which law will be disproven but I have a hunch it will be the first law of thermodynamics.

Pidgey

quick.dudley@gmail.com (Jeremy List) — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 06:43:00 +0000

While my landlady has been away I've been feeding her pigeon. I hadn't seen any sign of him for a few days and was worried a cat might have got him, but he's back and seems cheerful enough. He was especially glad that I gave him peanuts.

Another tuatara picture

quick.dudley@gmail.com (Jeremy List) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 10:58:00 +0000

I still consider it a great privilege to share a university with such creatures.

in case you hadn't noticed...

quick.dudley@gmail.com (Jeremy List) — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:22:00 +0000

my girlfriend is extremely pretty!

fire

quick.dudley@gmail.com (Jeremy List) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 10:39:00 +0000

Apparently there was a fire in the university on Friday. I was on my way out as fire engines were arriving, and I could see smoke, but I have no idea where the fire was and everything seemed to be cleared up by Monday.
As you can see, we have two sides of the road in New Zealand: left and wrong.

Today I went on a wild goose chase up to the top of the cotton building going to a tutorial that had been canceled. On the bright side, the view was beautiful and I have preserved a sample for you in digital form.

New semester

quick.dudley@gmail.com (Jeremy List) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:31:00 +0000

On Monday I'm going back to university with a new set of classes. They are as follows:

COMP206: Program and Data Structures
COMP311: User Interface Design
CHIN102: Chinese Language 1B
MATH161: Discrete Mathematics and Logic

I also have my results for the previous semester.

CHIN101 (Chinese Language 1A) A
COMP205 (Software engineering) A-
STAT193 (Stats for Nat & Soc Sciences) flunked, trying again next year

I know where I went wrong with stats. In the beginning I was doing well enough to get a B, but something rather traumatic happened outside of study and for a little while I was slipping behind in all my classes. I quickly caught up with my other classes but with stats I just got exponentially further behind. So with my next attempt I'll get more help if that starts to happen, and make sure I spend all the time I need on that paper.

What I think of the referendumb

quick.dudley@gmail.com (Jeremy List) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:38:00 +0000

In the real referendum, I will be voting yes!
For the benefit of foreign readers: there's a referendum coming up in New Zealand with the question "Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offense in New Zealand" I think the question is a contradiction of itself but I want to vote differently from the idiots that posed it.

Machine learning

quick.dudley@gmail.com (Jeremy List) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:37:00 +0000

I've already mentioned to a couple of people that I'm working on a machine learning algorithm. Tonight I managed to find the bug that made it do things it knew wasn't good (or rather, the bug that made it divide how good it thought something was by the number of times it had happened) and it now passes the first two unit tests I wrote for it. Passing the first one is less impressive though because all it tests for is that the algorithm tries all its options before picking a favorite, but the second test involves it actually learning.
If you would like to play with it, here is the download location. Currently I don't have anything as fancy as a configure script (that's a future feature), but the eclipse project files included are able to build it automatically provided you have the vala compiler installed in /usr/bin/valac.
libHector-0.0.1.tar.bz2
This archive contains full source and linux i386 binary.

Current features:

Novel input motivated reinforcement learning system
Rapid convergence to optimum behaviour for low dimensional input

Future features will include:

A means of hierachially organising modules (for increased scalability and generalising)
Increased ability to learn from sequences of events (partly using the hierarchal arrangement)
Working memory

New fractal

quick.dudley@gmail.com (Jeremy List) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 14:03:00 +0000

Well, while keeping my mind nimble for the software engineering exam on Monday I've found a new fractal. It's the same algorithm as the Mandelbrot set, but using tessarines instead of the usual complex numbers.
I've written an applet for viewing the fractal. Left-click zooms in, right click resets to original zoom.

--update:
It turns out the method described above merely produces a computationally expensive square. The fractal on display above is a very pretty algebra mistake which I don't seem to be able to make again.

New letterbox

quick.dudley@gmail.com (Jeremy List) — Tue, 12 May 2009 03:13:00 +0000

I have a new letterbox which I made myself. It even gets mail, although that's because someone wrote the wrong address when they wrote to someone else.

Oh, and last weekend I visited my parents, fixed their computer, and photographed the cat. I'll be looking after the house and pets when they go away for the weekend after next, so I can photograph the cat and dog even more!