I attended my father’s funeral today. What I remember most about my dad is that I never had any doubt that he loved me. I knew that nothing I could ever do or could ever fail to do would take away that love. I wish all children could have such a relationship with their fathers.
This funny video exaggerates Aspergian traits to an absurd level with humorous results. Also, I’ve sometimes remembered this video and toned down the expression of my Aspergian tendencies when I’ve started to engage in some of the Aspergian behaviors that annoy neurotypicals.
While researching Columbia University’s CVN program, I came across this faculty member’s web page which had this funny guide to engineers.
The Android Robot, downloaded from <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Android_robot.svg> courtesy of Google.com via the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license
When I first tried to test an Android app I’ve been developing on Amazon.com’s marvelous Kindle Fire tablet, I couldn’t get Eclipse, which was running on Ubuntu, to connect to the tablet. A quick Google search told me that it should work and I even found directions on how to make it work. Frustratingly, none of the directions I found and followed got Eclipse and the tablet talking to each other. The two began talking with each other only after I created a new set of directions from elements of others’ directions. This is what I did.
1. I added the “adb” program to my system path variable by editing my “~/.bashrc” file. There are multiple ways to do this and I leave it up to my readers to choose the best way for their systems.
2. On the Kindle Fire I went into Settings and I then toggled “Allow Installation of Applications From Unknown Sources” on the Device screen to “Yes”.
WARNING: Copying and pasting from the web to the text editor seems to mess up quotation marks when editing files in steps 3 and 4. Also, copying and pasting from my text editor to my blog editor messes up quotation marks. The quotation marks in the lines in steps 3 and 4 are wrong as they appear. You should type them in your text editor yourself to avoid problems.
3. I added “0x1949” and “0x0006”, on separate lines without the quotes, to the file named “~/.android/adb_usb.ini”.
4. I added “SUBSYSTEM==”usb”,SYSFS{idVendor}==”1949″,MODE=”0666″, GROUP=”plugdev””, minus the outermost quotation marks, to the file “/etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules”. This file didn’t exist for me, so I created it.
5. I used CHMOD to make the file “51-android.rules” accessible from other accounts on my system.
6. I rebooted. NOTE: I had to completely shutdown and reboot my PC to make things work. A hot reboot wasn’t sufficient for me.
7. I made sure everything worked by debugging my app on the tablet from inside Eclipse.
I hope these directions spare my readers the frustration I experienced.
Galileo facing the Roman Inquisition, painting by Cristiano Banti
I see the Galileo affair more as a conflict between politicians and science than a conflict between science and religion because I consider the Catholic Church of Galileo’s time to be a political institution, not a religious organization. I should point out that the modern Catholic Church is, in my opinion, a religious, mostly beneficial and benevolent entity that should not be confused with the Catholic Church of Galileo’s time. The negative things I’m about to write regarding Galileo’s Catholic Church don’t apply to the modern Catholic Church.
A politician is
One who seeks personal or partisan gain, often by scheming and maneuvering
Members of the Catholic Church achieved enormous power and wealth by persuading the public that the Church held the only keys to Heaven. Two examples are:
In order to preserve and expand this power, the Catholic Church had to scheme and maneuver to keep the population believing that the Church held the only keys to Heaven. The main charge that the Catholic Church leveled against Galileo was heresy. By advocating a heliocentric theory, Galileo was publicly disputing a position held by the Catholic Church. The Church could not allow any of its teachings to be disputed. If the people began to doubt the Catholic Church’s geocentric theories, then the people may begin to doubt other positions of the Church. The politicians of the Catholic Church had to suppress Galileo’s heliocentric theories and any other theories that differed from official Catholic opinions, lest the Church lose its perceived exclusivity in controlling access to Heaven and, consequently, its wealth and power. The Catholic Church of Galileo’s time schemed and maneuvered for personal gain, just as would be expected of a political organization.
While reading a very interesting website about one of Allied Radio’s most popular products, I came across a humorous guide to marketing terminology. Although this guide is meant as a joke, I think it too often comes too close to being the truth.
Galileo facing the Roman Inquisition, painting by Cristiano Banti
Galileo’s heliocentric ideas conflicted with the Catholic Church’s erroneous interpretation of certain Bible verses and, due to the absence of a wall between religious and scientific investigations, these misinterpretations caused errors in Catholic scientists’ scientific investigations. I’ll explain the misinterpretations before detailing how they tripped up the Catholic scientists.
“5 The sun also rises, and the sun goes down,
And hastens to the place where it arose. “
Ecclesiastes describes the writer’s experience of searching for life meaning in the physical world and not finding it until he looks beyond physical reality. Accordingly, much of Ecclesiastes describes the author’s experiences and perceptions. This particular verse describes the repetitive nature of author’s physical existence and is not meant to describe the physical movement of the Sun.
30 Tremble before Him, all the earth.
The world also is firmly established,
It shall not be moved.
This verse isn’t describing the structure of the solar system. Instead, it is part of a longer passage proclaiming God’s sovereignty over all that he has created. Here, “world” doesn’t mean the Earth. “World” means the universe.
Humans are fallible, both in their scientific investigations and in their religious investigations. It only makes sense to try to isolate investigations from each other to prevent mistakes in one from causing mistakes in the other. Attempting to preserve consistency with misinterpretations of Scripture during the Galileo affair, Catholic scientists clung to scientific models that were inconsistent with the observed evidence. If they had erected a wall between their religious and scientific investigations, they would have made better progress towards learning the structure of the Sol system.
Although the Galileo affair, is often cited as an example of conflict between science and religion, I see it more as a conflict between politicians and science. I’ll explain that in part 2 of this series. The actions and the words of the of the people involved also illustrate the importance of maintaining a wall between one’s religious and scientific investigations and that is what I’ll focus on in part 1.
aspergerite 
