Sabayon: the cutest, free Operating System

Long gone are the days of meddling w/ the frame buffer in Debian. Today, I've settled on a Gentoo-based distribution called Sabayon.

Disclaimer: this post does in no regards say that a distribution is better than any other; I'm not looking for a flame-war, I'm just stating my own personal opinion on what lead me to use the distro I use today.

It's true that when I used Ubuntu I didn't have the knowledge I have now, but it felt to me like compiling (eg. pulling all of the dependencies for a package was quite a hard thing to do, since the source packages were separate), that was the reason why I starting looking for an alternative. Of course I came across Gentoo, which is basically a compiloaddict. The problem with Gentoo was that in order to compile big packages, openoffice (before it became "libre"), kde, wine, firefox, etc, you needed time and a lot of CPU cycles. So although I felt that Gentoo came really close to what I wanted in a distro: few default packages, up-to-date, complete control over the system eg. the ability to customize everything, easily, etc; it simply wasn't worth all the wait for them (the packages) to compile. Also Gentoo didn't work out of the box, which although I didn't have no complaint over was still an extra step in making a fully functional system.

A lot of the distros I tried satisfied many, but not all of what I wanted:

Fedora and SuSE for example were packed with new packages, worked out of the box, but they felt bloated as they had a lot of packages installed by default. Many of them I had no interest in (bluetooth manager), but others such as SELinux started automatically and that meant reading documentation about how it worked and how to configure it.

Slackware on the other hand, although seemed good at first, didn't supply new packages.

So, after looking on distrowatch.com for my next distro to try out, I came across Sabayon:

Sabayon Linux is a Gentoo-based distribution which follows the works-out-of-the-box philosophy, aiming to give the user a wide number of applications that are ready for use and a self-configured operating system. Sabayon offers the user an easy-to-use workspace with a captivating look, good hardware detection and a large number of up-to-date software packages installed by default, with additional software available from a repository. Sabayon is available in several flavors featuring respectively the KDE, GNOME, LXDE, Xfce and Enlightenment desktop environments.

Wait... works-out-of-the-box, up-to-date software, Gentoo-based? Yes, It was all that I needed... it was perfect
Since then I've been happily using it and I would gladly recommend it to anyone who knows the difference between "du" and "df".


Now to talk about why I think Sabayon is awesome:
1. A lot of precompiled packages, that are fairly up-to-date, but more importantly not installed by default.
2. Gentoo-based: with a little bit of care and attention you can emerge the latest packages with no problems
3. Looks awesome! KDE 4.6.1 ftw, and I think the update window was of about one week after the official release, so not a lot of waiting.
4. works out of the box, just slam the livedvd in and you're set to go!


The first two points are the most important for me and even though you may find a bit outdated packages in the repository (binary packages), as was the case for dev-util/qt-creator-1.3.1 , you can simply emerge the latest version. You have to be careful about NOT emerging the dependencies also (use the binary packages to satisfy them). That way when the new version is available in the repo, you simply unmerge it and install it normally.


So far I've got nothing to complain about, the community's great, they've got forum, wiki, bugtracker, irc, mailing lists etc, so you'll never be short of finding help if you have a problem. It doesn't have a lot of 'distro'-specific packages (coubuntugh cough) and it works! it simply works great and it allows you to modify whatever you please. Just... don't go cursing if you... "accidentally your xorg" ^_^">

Not "red pill OR blue pill" but more like "red pill and MIGHT've been blue pill"

In my previous article I covered, from my point of view, the subject of free will. After rereading it, I became aware of some of the logic faults it contained and decided to give the matter a bit more thought.

This concept is always bugging me because it seems that we are constantly constrained by the decisions we "make". Somebody even suggested that my logic basically implies destiny, well I don't believe in destiny, because of the effects of quantum mechanics. Still, I came to realize that we are not far from the concept of predeterminism.

Now I am an atheist and that means that I don't believe in concepts like "souls"; also, I consider human beings and living organisms in general to be nothing more than extremely complex systems but which are undoubtedly ruled by both the cause and effect principle and in some cases random outcomes. In other words I don't see the fundamental difference between a human and something as a bunch of rocks reacting to the changes in environment, and also at the same time, influencing some changes on their own (except of course for the level of complexity). This I admit might be a weak link in my argument.

Now let's look at a simple event A that occurs in the present and then determines a event in the future (event B).

If we know what the effects for event A are we can predict event be occurring in the future. Now let's say event A is something you hear; event B is something you do. Now since B is caused by A, we can not say B was done out of free will.

One might argue that we can not predict with certainty anything. True, but when are we not at the mercy of a quantum outcome? Consider the example of choosing between two colors: red or blue (no... of course it has nothing to do with the title, no...). Your neurons start firing and, for the sake of simplicity let's say that there is one (let's call it P) that is connected to two other neurons: R and B (or "B and R" if you like, depends on your taste). If P fires a signal to R then you choose red, to B, you choose blue. The neuron that P will fire a signal to is influenced by quantum mechanics (random). But notice how your decision isn't actually made by "you" but by the outcome of that random event.

Ok, as with a lot of what I write: first I the idea pops into my head, I think about it, I write about it, then I decide to google it and see many more who had the same idea way before me. Still, it feels good knowing that I came to the same conclusions without knowing about those people.

In regards to this post, the subject I found out is called Incompatibilism it's also linked to Hard determinism as well. a

Still, I'm not done talking about this free will thing, as will see in a future post (sorry, had to make this reference to determinism)

Red pill or blue pill

I remembered last night a topic that I forgot to cover here, more precisely the subject of free will.

It occurred to me a while back, when somebody mentioned the fact that since our minds are defined by the synapses our neurons make and since the synapses are to some extent *semi-random events we can't have free will.
*semi-random as in predictable to a certain degree, like 95% chances that will happen 4% chances this will happen and 1% complete randomness.

The way I see it, quite the opposite's true. But first, let me get a thing straight: here, "free will" means one's ability to make decisions "as wished", or in other words, nobody should be able to tell with complete certainty what decision one will make in any given situation. Note that I'm NOT referring to free will as the right to do anything we wish.

If we consider the semi-randomness of our thoughts, then free will is possible. If however, our brains behave in classical terms, as in governed by the 'cause-effect' law, then we are deterministic. You could then think that a human brain could be simulated by a Touring Machine (more simply, it could be simulated by a computer). But a Touring Machine is defined as a set of states and a law of transition that transforms one state into another. It can not have, by definition, free will.

Now presume we act in the same way and it's pretty easy to see why we would do this if you believe in evolution: we'll always choose the option which gives us the greatest benefits at the moment of decision. You may quickly dismay that by arguing that people can do sacrifices, but if you think about it, the comfort they gain knowing they made some sacrifice and that a loved one / friend will be happy is greater than if they wouldn't have done nothing (in that case, guilt would be the main cause of discomfort).

If we also think our neurons of acting according to strict rules; as in if neurons A and B are connected to C and a rule such as if A and B don't fire then C doesn't fire also; A fires B doesn't fire then C fires; A doesn't fire B fires then C fires; A and B both fire then C doesn't fire (C acts as an "exclusive or" for A and B). Note that this is just an example of a rule, in reality they are probably way more complex but still remain strict.

Based on these two, evolution and strict neuron-firing rules, one can conclude that we behave deterministically. This means that there can exist a person / entity which can figure out what we'll do in any situation (presume it has complete knowledge of the way our brain is wired), then this entity can predict what course of action we will take in any circumstances. Then, because our course of action becomes known beforehand, we cannot have free will.

Now as I've said, this argument rests on basically on two assumptions, that we always chose the most profitable alternative and that our neurons don't fire at random or semi-random, because if they would, there may be the possibility of an alternative choice which isn't considered by our mind, and that missed alternative is a random one, thus the first assumption will yield different results, even if our brains are in the same 'states'.

This was a little far-fetched scenario, because not even I don't think the second assumption is true.
But here comes the shocker:
Even if our neurons fire in semi-random patterns, it's true that nobody will be able to predict how we will act. But our feeling that we are in charge of our actions becomes an illusion. In fact I've failed to find an example in which this is NOT one.

Let's presume you have a choice of choosing one of two pills, one blue, one red (this doesn't have to do anything with the Matrix movie). What happens when you take the decision? Your neurons start firing and by a random or semi-random chance you get to pick blue (even if my first assumption is true, the decision will be influenced by some neuron randomness). Now truth be told, you could have just as well picked the red one. So the problem is that you didn't pick blue because you wanted but because chance made you pick it. This has led me to believe that free will is just an illusion, and that we are forever confined in our minds, just spectators to what our sense organs tell us is happening around us, with no power to change the inevitable course of randomness.

Wowzer, now that was bit of a fine ending if you ask me. In anycase, that's the conclusion I've came to, hopefully, somebody will prove me wrong, but until then I can only say that I'm just going to sit back and see what this body of mine will do heh.

The Atheist's Riddle - attempt to solve

Longtime no write... oh well, here I go again:
This time, it's about something I read a long time ago and namely The Atheist's Riddle. To put it simply it states that information can only be created by a conscious entity and since DNA is also information (genetic one), it MUST have been created and not spontaneously/randomly appear. Here are two examples of it, the first is the original one I received on an email and that got me thinking, the second one is just another restatement of it I found on the net.

"Messages, languages and coded information never,

ever come from anything else besides a mind.
No one has ever produced a single example of a message 
that did not come from a mind.

Nature can create fascinating patterns - snowflakes,
sand dunes, crystals, stalagmites and stalactites.  Tornados 
and turbulence and cloud formations.

But non-living things cannot create language. They
*cannot* create codes.  Rocks cannot think and they
cannot talk.  And they cannot create information.

And the second:

Proof that DNA was designed by a mind:
1. DNA is not merely a molecule with a pattern; it is a code, a language, and an information storage mechanism. 2. All codes we know the origin of are created by a conscious mind.
3. Therefore DNA was designed by a mind, and language and information are proof of the action of a Superintelligence.

This has kept itself on the back of my mind for I guess around an year since I first received the email with it.
In that time, I came up however with two possible theories to explain it:

My first attempt was based on the interesting property of DNA (and RNA for that matter) that is to replicate. I thought that given the right conditions you can obtain a molecule that is stable and that can interact with other matter around it, creating copies of itself. This consumes work and thus the molecule would probably have to unbind some part of it in order to have energy to make the replication. It could then reform itself to it's complete state by re-assimilating the missing part using some sort of external energy (solar, geothermal, etc).
Problem with this theory is that after you get enough copies of this molecule, nothing happens so then I though that maybe it could sustain modifications and still retain it's properties, then you could have something very similar to RNA.
Still, it requires the chance to have spontaneous creation of the first molecule, but it's pretty decent as a first explanation of the riddle.

My second attempt was a few days ago, when I asked myself "what is information?". The riddle states that
"[rocks] cannot create information". But as it turns out information can spontaneously appear in nature, even more often than you might think about. This is based on a definition of information I came up with:

A region in space that has an entropy value different than the rest of it's surroundings.

Note that I do NOT know if it is a correct definition, but it seems that everything that has a lower/higher entropy contains some sort information.

Oh, I'm assuming you know what entropy is, if not I strongly recommend you look it up on the internet, but in case you prefer to continue reading, entropy is basically a measurement of how much something is disorganized. So, for example a row of soldiers has a lower entropy (is more organized) than a crowd of people.

The key is to note that information in this form occurs very often in nature, take for example a tornado it leaves a mark on the terrain it traversed, it obeys the first law of thermodynamics, as it does work (spins) in order to leave a mark on the ground. That mark is information: information that a tornado passed, it contains maybe the side and speed of it. Now there may be a big step from tornadoes to the creation of life, but I've shown that there nature is capable of producing information. This information could take form in RNA (though I admit it's a big leap) or DNA

Don't you just hate...

... the number of days in a week? I mean have you ever though of doing something twice a week with equal time intervals between each day? Or maybe three times a week or four times. It's impossible, now my question is why choose 7 days to determine a weekly cycle? Those early Christians didn't put much thought in prime numbers because if they did, they would've recognized it as a prime and chose a different one. The Sumerians were much smarter, they used multiples of 12 (actually it was a hexadecimal base): think about it: 60 = 5 * 12 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 12 months in a year, (almost) 360 = 60 * 60 days in a year.
The cool thing about 12 is that a lot of divisors. You can divide it equally by 2, 3, 4, and 6. Giving you lots of options to partition your week. So, if you ask me, God should have created the Earth in 12 days

... when you are tired and want to go to sleep, but you can't because you're anxious about something and finally when you fall asleep you have one of those weird dreams in which you stumble and have a sensation of falling and then wake up, with your whole body twitching?

... (this one only applies of you generally read science magazines) articles that always give an introduction to subjects a little more advanced like 'special relativity' or 'uncertainty principle' but it's always the same thing you heard time and time again. People that read that kind of stuff, generally know what those subjects are and if they didn't they would search the Internet, find out and then return. You don't need to introduce things like what causes earthquakes each time you have an earthquake-related article for example.

Are we not alone?

For a long time I thought that aliens could have not visited us due to the immense distances between star systems.
Yesterday however, I started thinking about the twin paradox and realized that it could be used to send creatures from one star system to another and have them travel the distance in a very short time. This idea crossed my mind a long time ago, but now, after reading a bit on my favourite 'book', Wikipedia do I see that I was in fact correct.

Ever heard of the "Twin Paradox"? It's a famous example of special relativity: say you have 2 identical twins both 20 years old. One stays on Earth (let's call him Andrew) and the other (named Benjamin) flies in a space-ship close to the speed of light. When he returns to Earth, from his point of view, 5 years later, he finds that his brother aged 60 years. Now how is this possible? During the trip Andrew aged only 5 years, while his twin 60. The interesting part is actually managed to cover in 5 years a distance that light would have traversed in say 50. Note that we consider two frames of reference, so Andrew didn't actually went faster than the speed of light.

The paradox is related to relative motion, so basically why did the stationary brother age faster? Shouldn't the fact that speed is relative mean that we could've consider Andrew stationary but in that case he would have aged, and we know that Benjamin is the one aged... contradiction. This isn't important here (a possible explanation if you must, could be given by accelerated motion).

Now, with a little help from Wikipedia, let's give a more accurate example: Say an alien race (let's call them Zorgonians), found our planet 1 billion years ago. I would recommend you pay attention to the time-line because we're talking in relative terms here. After analysing the constituents of Earth's atmosphere they found out that it could support life. Zorgonia, their home planet is located some 100,000 light years from us (100000 ly is about the diameter of the Milky Way), so what they were seeing was actually the Earth 1,000,100,000 years ago. They sent a ship equipped with the Faztzorg-9800 engine that can reach a speed of 98% of the speed of light, carrying a crew of Scientzorgs. Given it's speed, the space ship should reach Earth in 102040 years, from our and from the Zorgonians' point of view.
But what do the Scientzorgs think of their trip? Because of distance contraction at very high speeds they only have to travel a fraction of the 100000 ly, more exactly for them, the trip takes about 20000 light years. But what about, if we use after-burners? Increasing our speed to 99.5%? Then the trip would last 10000 years, a unbelievable speed of 99.99998% of the speed of light gives us a trip time of only 63 years from the Scientzorgs' point of view. However, as the speed increases the mass of the space ship for also increases. So, a 1,000 ton space-ship, at 99.99998% of light-speed has a mass of 15 million tons. Which is quite heavy.

Truth is, that now, once I've done that math, a space ship travelling at 99.99998% of the speed of light seems unlikely, however, the point of this article was to show, that a sufficiently advanced civilization, could send scientists to another planet without having them die of old age before they reach their destination.
Still, the Zorgonians on Zorgonia would have to wait 2 * 100,000 years to hear from their Scientzorgs...

NOTE: A quick insight on the math / equations I used to get my results can be found on my blog's helper wiki: http://neduard.wikidot.com/specialrelativity

Which came first? The chicken or the egg?

A simple question that almost all of us are familiar with. But who has actually spent more than a few seconds of thought trying to work out this conundrum. Most will probably get a headache after a few iterations of the chicken-egg cycle and truth be told this is a very interesting concept indeed. I'm going to work specifically on the 'chicken' and 'egg' problem and I'm not going to tackle any of the more philosophical notions like: "If X depends on Y and Y depends on X, X is different from Y and they can not happen simultaneously. Thus, which came first, X or Y?"

I started to think about this during class, I can't remember what was the subject of discussion, but the teacher said "it's like the old chicken and egg question..." to which I replied with a proud tone in my voice: "It was the egg! The egg came first!". My colleagues, hearing this, instinctively adopted the opposite belief. I held a quick argument with them that evening but not much to show for. It was the day after that I elaborated and refined the proof for which the egg came first.

For those of you that are simply searching the internet for a answer to this question my opinion is this: The egg came first. Now for the proof:

Suppose that chickens evolved from reptiles (could have been dinosaurs for all I care) and that the only distinction between a bird and a reptile is the existence of feathers (the proof accepts further differentiation, but for the sake of simplicity let's just use feathers). Now, the reptiles were living happily when a mutation occurred and they started developing feathers. At first, this is called a mutation because the evolving feathers don't provide a sufficient increase in survival chances. So in the course of millions of years there were reptiles with feathers and reptiles without them (i.e. some generations had feathers and others didn't). Now suppose that we define a chicken to be the animal coated with feathers after 1000 consecutive generations of feather-bearing reptiles. We do this in order to eliminate the possibility of mutations: the fact that even then, individuals still have feathers means that they have an increased survival chance compared to their feather-less cousins. Ok, so the 999th egg is laid and a reptile with feathers comes out, that reptile in turn lays the 1000th egg. From that egg a chicken hatches (being the individual that corresponds to our definition). So, basically the first chicken appeared from an egg, and thus the egg was first.

Good, now you might consider our definition: the 1000th member with feathers, the idea is to strictly define the difference between a chicken and a reptile. You can use any definition you like, it's fundamental property is to classify all of the egg-laying animals into two categories: chickens and non-chickens. Once you have that it is easy to rebuild the proof.

So there you go, proof that the egg came before the chicken. I came up with this in the course of an evening, about a week ago. The big surprise came then I searched the internet today and found that I was right: according to evolution, the egg DID in fact come first.