Update:  I know Akismet does a great job with comment spam, but even when I enabled comments without registration, I still got spam users

The only remaining issue is that there is a small gap between the blinds and the doors, so a little light leaks in.  I can’t attach velcro to the fabric, since then it won’t roll up cleanly, so I’m going to have to find some clips that I can attach after I lower the blinds.

If there is no God, if the universe is the result of random chance, e.g., a quantum fluctuation gone wild, then sentience is surely a curse, because it lets us delude ourselves into seeking, assigning, and even trying to create meaning where there is none. Living in delusion is a sign of insanity. Unfortunately, reality pokes through the cracks in our delusions and this dissonance causes misery. So we are insane, but not the happy kind.

If living in delusion isn’t the right approach, what should we do instead? We could scream defiance into the abyss, but why bother? We are less than nothing on the scale of the universe. Suicide appears to be the only solution. If there is no God, then death is oblivion. It ends the suffering with no negative consequences.

Of course, this is not a palatable solution for most people, but that is because we are slaves to the double helix: we evolved to survive and reproduce. We fight to stay alive as long as possible, no matter how much it hurts. Clearly, this is not rational, if we do not have a soul. Should it not be considered a crime to have sentient offspring, since they are doomed to suffer?

But life is not all suffering. There is happiness and beauty, too. If there is no God, however, then it, too, is meaningless, and our craving for it is no different from that of a person addicted to cocaine.

Personally, I consider Atheism to be too bleak. I struggle with my belief in God, because I do not know how to reconcile all the dissonance, but I prefer it over suicide. To be honest, I fear the rub.

A while back, somebody in management, who used to be technical, tried to explain that, while doing it is all well and good, it’s even better to get other people to do it for you. My internal reaction was, No thanks! That’s my worst nightmare! and I immediately dismissed it.

Today, I sat in a design review meeting that was scheduled for one hour, but ran over to two, and I was in a really bad mood afterwards. I asked myself, How can my architect colleagues stand to do this all day, every day?

Then it hit me: For many people, coding is just a job. If you’re not passionate about it, and you can earn more doing something else, why not move up?

Of course, I’m hardly the first person to realize this or blog about it, but then I connected it with my reaction to the programmer-turned-manager: For those of us who can see the beauty in code, moving up to a position that takes us away from the coding is a fate worse than death.

If this sounds like utter nonsense, consider the possibility that maybe you just can’t see the beauty in code. Please don’t take offense. I can’t look at a painting and tell you if it’s great. I can’t look at a building and tell you if the architecture is great. I can’t listen to a symphony and tell you if it’s great. I can’t look at a business plan and tell you if it’s great. But I can study a piece of code or the design of a user interface and tell you if it’s great. And this quest for greatness keeps me going. I refuse to settle for second rate, no matter how many iterations it takes. Forcing me to do something else for a living would be like taking a fish out of water.

The claim that we would be unnecessary if God existed assumes that we can comprehend God’s motives — that He operates either the way we do or at least in ways that we can imagine — but, by definition, that is not God the Creator of the Universe. God defies rationality because, by definition, He transcends anything we can describe.

Rationality is basically the application of the scientific method to everything we experience. For it to work, experiences must be reproducible. Religions experiences, however, are notorious for being irreproducible. This does not mean they are not real, only that it is difficult or impossible to apply the scientific method. If there actually is a higher plane of existence with one Intelligence or multiple intelligences that help or interfere on our plane, then there is no reason why they should play along with our attempts to understand them. They probably look at us the way we look at ants, so our science cannot find them.

Of course, history is littered with examples of tunnel vision rationality. The earth seems completely solid, so it took a long time for plate tectonics to be accepted. Newtonian mechanics worked so well that everybody had a lot of trouble believing Einstein’s theory of Relativity. (Einstein received the Nobel Prize in Physics for the explanation of the photoelectric effect, not for Relativity.) Einstein himself fought against quantum mechanics and the existence of black holes.

Two hundred years from now, today’s theories will surely also be viewed as incomplete or even obsolete. The people who will be remembered in the future for advancing mankind’s understanding will be those who dug deeper, not those who were satisfied with the existing theories. In the case of spirituality, it does seem awfully difficult to find a place to start, but people do have unexplained experiences, even after you weed out the crackpots. Personally, I believe that God has spoken to me, guided me, and answered prayers. Shouldn’t we at least try to investigate, rather than dismissing it as pure nonsense or overactive imagination?

Of course, we might not like what we discover. The more we learn about the brain, the more what I call me appears to be merely chemistry. There are many famous examples of radical personality shifts due to localized damage in one part or another of the brain. Psychoactive drugs can achieve the same effects.

What, then, is the soul? Will there be anything left after we fully understand the brain? Is the point of developing character to create a particular wiring pattern in the brain that something on a higher plane of existence can copy to a different substrate, thereby providing life after death? Nobody knows, but it would certainly be interesting to find out.

    public void setDebug(String debugInfo)
    {
        this.debug = debug;
    }

It happens to be in Java, but it would fail equally well in C++. It ought have been a compile error, but since it wasn’t, it took me a long time to notice the problem. It’s not on my list of issues to watch out for, because it’s supposed to be the compiler’s job.

This is yet another reason to always use a unique prefix for member variables. (The primary reason, of course, is to make the code easier for humans to parse.)

Unfortunately, maintaining consistency can be very tiresome. Checking every file every time you open it is annoying and error prone. Embeddable options like emacs’ indent-tabs-mode are widely supported by editors, but they must be placed in every file, and many projects do not use them.

I think I have finally found a nice way to handle this in Code Crusader. Like all decent editors, it supports both a global preference for tabs/spaces and the ability to override this for individual files. When a file is opened, Code Crusader can check if the indentation consistently matches the global preference. If there is a mix of spaces and tabs, then make whitespace visible. If more than 50% of the lines are the opposite of the global preference, automatically override the global preference.

Once this is implemented (in the upcoming release), my personal projects can continue to use tabs, while any file that uses only spaces will automatically stay consistent, and a file that has a mix of spaces and tabs will be highlighted for cleaning.