Viraj's Weblog

There is this guy named Charles Darwin, and he said some interesting things on God:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

And another gem:

...the extreme difficulty, or rather the impossibility, of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity for looking far backwards and far into futurity, as a result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.

I wonder how many Darwin followers with fish bumper stickers know how Darwin felt about God. I'd guess many would be surprised.

Supposedly, belief in God is decreasing in the US. I'm reading a book called The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief by Francis Collins which is interesting.

One thing I truly believe is when less people believe in a higher power, there is less sanctity for life. I was reading in Discover magazine how there is more evidence coming out of fractures in Neanderthal skulls. What does this mean? Well it means it was a very, very violent time. When you think cavemen, you don't normally think of subhumans bashing each others skulls violently, or do you? Can you imagine what a violent time it must have been? We've sure come a long way, and honestly I think primitive religion played a big part in reducing the violence between humans. Say what you will about religion causing wars, but back in those times, religion must have stopped wars. That is, religion introduced humanity to humans.

I always loved the scene in 2001 where the pre-humans were fighting, a bone 'tool' goes flying up in the air, and then it cuts to a space station. That really sums up human evolutionary progress in the most visually poetic and visceral way.

• France promoting safe sex
• Bullet vs Hattori Hanzo
• Lebowski fun

Cool way to do automatic SSH brute force blocking in iptables:

iptables -A INPUT -m tcp -p tcp --dport 22 -m state \
  --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -m tcp -p tcp -s My.local.Lan.0/24 \
  --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -m tcp -p tcp -s \
  Trusted.Internet.Machine --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -m tcp -p tcp --dport 22 -m state \
  --state NEW -m limit --limit 3/min --limit-burst 3 \
  -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -m tcp -p tcp --dport 22 -j LOG \
  --log-prefix SSHBRUTE
iptables -A INPUT -m tcp -p tcp --dport 22 -j DROP

Or alternatively, use BlockSSHD.