awaretek

There are things in our skies and in the seas that we do not understand.

Actually, despite our scientific progress, we sometimes forget how much we do not know. Most of the matter in our universe is called dark matter because we do not know what it is. Most of the energy is called dark energy for the same reason. Even for the forms of matter and energy that we have scientific theories for, we don’t know why those theories work. We can predict outcomes using quantum theories, relativity theory and the Standard Model of particle physics, but we don’t know why those mathematical methods work, nor where they come from.

Now let’s speculate, what happens if we make contact with advanced alien beings with a civilization far more advanced than our own. What sort of philosophy might they have? It would be interesting to find out whether such beings would have any religious or spiritual beliefs, and if so what kind, or would they be atheists. What if the aliens turn out to be not only atheists but to view our religions as primitive superstitions.

Perhaps any such aliens will be so far outside our beliefs and philosophies as to be incomprehensible. They may not be physical beings but maybe instead made up of energy, information or spirit, or something more exotic that we can barely discern.

Our oceans and our skies are big places. There could be willful, organized, intelligent configurations that are nothing at all like what we might expect or would even notice.

Perhaps our saints and prophets have given us the best guidance in such matters. We might be dealing with powers and principalities, angels and demons, or other things that are nor dreamed of in our philosophies.

Jesus said that he had sheep that are not of this fold. Maybe he meant people in other parts of the world, other religious traditions, or even on other worlds. Maybe he meant angels or spirits. We don’t know. Maybe we should keep our minds open.

What do you think?

There are things in our skies and in the seas that we do not understand.

Actually, despite our scientific progress, we sometimes forget how much we do not know. Most of the matter in our universe is called dark matter because we do not know what it is. Most of the energy is called dark energy for the same reason. Even for the forms of matter and energy that we have scientific theories for, we don’t know why those theories work. We can predict outcomes using quantum theories, relativity theory and the Standard Model of particle physics, but we don’t know why those mathematical methods work, nor where they come from.

Now let’s speculate, what happens if we make contact with advanced alien beings with a civilization far more advanced than our own. What sort of philosophy might they have? It would be interesting to find out whether such beings would have any religious or spiritual beliefs, and if so what kind, or would they be atheists. What if the aliens turn out to be not only atheists but to view our religions as primitive superstitions.

Perhaps any such aliens will be so far outside our beliefs and philosophies as to be incomprehensible. They may not be physical beings but maybe instead made up of energy, information or spirit, or something more exotic that we can barely discern.

Our oceans and our skies are big places. There could be willful, organized, intelligent configurations that are nothing at all like what we might expect or would even notice.

Perhaps our saints and prophets have given us the best guidance in such matters. We might be dealing with powers and principalities, angels and demons, or other things that are nor dreamed of in our philosophies.

Jesus said that he had sheep that are not of this fold. Maybe he meant people in other parts of the world, other religious traditions, or even on other worlds. Maybe he meant angels or spirits. We don’t know. Maybe we should keep our minds open.

What do you think?

I don't think your suggestions would work very well as stated. However, I hope soemthing will be in Python 3.5 to add a second string type that helps make it easier to port old libraries to Python 3 AND helps make it easier to use Python 3 in use cases that are currently more complicated than they need be.

Practicality bearts purity.

I wish the core developers would do two things:

1. Add a new string type to Python 3 that mimics the old Python 2 str type (ASCI)

2. Backport the usefull new features from Python 3 to Python 2.

If they don't do these things, then obviously some group will fork Python 2.7 and 20 years from now, there will still be far more people using Python 2.x than Python 3.x.

Anyone who bought into Microsoft's Proprietary .Net platform deserves what's happening to them now. Anyone who buys into Microsoft's Windows 8, Windows RT, Windows Phone 8 ninsense is just plain braindead.

But some people never learn :-)

Microsoft abused me for years. They had a monopoly, I had to use Windows and Office ( I still do at work for many things).

Now , thank god almighty, I have choices. They will have to do a lot better than Windows 8 to rope me back into the corral.

Metro and Windows 8 might be good enough if introduced by any other company. Microsoft is not any other company.

I am not a ludite nor a nutjob. I have real work to do and am forced to use Microsoft products. But I will roast in hell before I give them any benefit of the doubt. Ever.

I hate Microsoft.

This is a fine, fine product and community.

There's Python411 at http://www.awaretek.com/python

Listen to the full podcast exploring this subject at http://www.awaretek.com/python/index.html

Ok, it really is a good book, accessible to any programmer, even if you don't already know Python. I find natural language to be fascinating and this book is thought provoking. It covers symbolic logic, the lambda calculus, statistical techniques of speech recognition, and offers very practical and clear Python code snippets to show how to use the NLTK. I was too lazy to write a review but I did record my thoughts in the podcast at href="http://www.awaretek.com/python