Daniel’s Blog

Merry Christmas 2008 to every one of you.

For those of you who aren’t Christian, please take some time to think about 2008 and think about the forthcoming year 2009…. because Christmas is truly about the turning of the year, the beginnings of new things for you.

For those of you who are Christian, I hope you’ve had a good Midnight Mass/Eucharist/Communion/Service (if you celebrate that in your denomination). Let the symbolic birth of Jesus be a spiritual refreshment within us, and a time to think about new beginnings in our day-to-day life.

Merry Christmas, and Many Blessings. May the light shine on us all.

Daniel

(Let’s note that it’s also Sol Invictus Day, Yule (in some understandings) and the Feast of Saint Anastasia of Sirmium (on the Roman Catholic Calendar))

There exists such people who overly promote a certain religion, whether that be Christianity, Islam or something else. These are the Evangelicals of this religion. You’ll find them in the street advocating their religion, and saying that if you don’t share their faith then some nasty things will happen to you whether that’s in this life or some other. I think that if you want to believe that then fine, but you shouldn’t scare people into believing the same thing as you.

There also exists another kind of person, which is becoming increasingly more common in recent years. These people believe that there is no God (i.e. they are atheist), and they are sometimes pretty extreme about it… often saying things like “if you are religious, then that will eventually lead to pain”.

Surely, this kind of atheism is just as bad as the evangelical religious belief?

It’s really got to me recently, because…

If I see a Christian Street Preacher, then I sometimes stop and talk to him/her, and congratulate them on their spirituality… but then I’ll defend other peoples views (including the atheist and humanist point of view), as everybody has the right to believe in what they want to believe as long as it isn’t hurting themselves or anyone else. I personally have a different understanding of spirituality, religion and the universe to what the Christian Street Preacher has.

When I talk to an atheist extremist, I will also congratulate them on being firm in their understanding of the universe. But I will defend the spiritual and religious way of living, even the ones that I may not agree with. Once again, this is because I feel that everybody has the right to believe in what they want to as long as it isn’t hurting themselves or others.

This hatred is definitely not healthy, whether it’s from a “theist” or an “atheist”. The fact is we are all human, and we have some kind of connection with nature… so instead of arguing all the time, lets just get on with life and try not to hurt people (mentally, physically, spiritually or in any other way).

Bah, seriously irritates me….

(rant over… feel much better now)

I’m now, officially, half way through (ish) my Masters in Machine Learning and Data Mining at the University of Bristol… and I’ve got a decision to make very soon.

When I started my MSc I thought “yeah, I’ll do the MSc and then go straight onto a PhD“. It has now come to the time when I need to decide if I do want to go straight onto a PhD, and if so in which area. I’ve already seen one of my Professors about it, who would be happy to supervise me as long as I have an interesting idea to research and I get a reasonable grade for my MSc…. so that’s not an issue.

The problem that I am having is that, although I really really would love to do a PhD, I do really really want to have a normal and stable lifestyle… which is very hard to have while doing a PhD in addition to only getting the very minimalistic funding that a studentship provides. Which means that there is the proper full-time working again.

There are lots of options, and at the moment the more favourable one is working for one or two years (at least) after the MSc and then doing a PhD later on in life (for instance, if I start it in two years time I’ll be 26 and should still have finished it before I’m 30).

If I did start the PhD from next year, which isn’t necessarily favourable at this precise moment, I would be in one (or a couple) of the following fields:

• Logic Programming (particularly ILP).
• Semantics (Description Logic and/or the Semantic Web) and/or Pragmatics (potentially the Pragmatic Web).
• Natural Language Processing.
• Artificial Intelligence applied to the Study of the Humanities/Society and Liberal Arts.
• Computational Imagination.
• Can computers attain wisdom? Or tap into Sophia? (Artificial Wisdom / Artificial Spiritual Wisdom).

So much to think about. If you’d like to contact me about anything I’ve written in this blog post (or elsewhere), then please do get in touch. I’m always happy to hear from people, and discuss things in detail.

Many many thanks for reading, and so many thanks for those who have and will be supporting me through my decisions.

Daniel

Well I’ve done it. Upgraded to 2.7, which was easy because my Fantastico panel allowed me to do it quicker than the stuff I was playing about with yesterday!

Anyways, am just trying out the new post editor. Quite nice!

I’m thinking about upgrading this blog. It’s currently running using the Wordpress 2.3.3 engine, and so I’m finally thinking about upgrading it to the latest Wordpress (version 2.7).

I’m in the process of updating a test blog to 2.7, in order to test that my theme doesn’t break. If I do update this blog then it’ll probably be this weekend or next week, I’ll let you know how it goes! (But there may be some down time if something goes wrong, so if you come back and see the blog down then you know why )

Cheers,

Daniel

Random thought:

If the Google Docs system interfaced directly with your hard drive (but still through the browser, potentially running locally) would you use it over OpenOffice / Microsoft Office?

I think it might be quite good. I’ve used Google Docs quite a lot recently, but find it a bit of a nuisance the files aren’t directly on my hard drive.

I’d be interested in hearing other peoples views.