I’ve put back online one of my favourite sites ever:
is it god?.com
Original idea by Justin Frankel.
The site disappeared suddenly a couple of years ago, so I decided to revamp it. I created all of the code in some hours on december 2002 but then remebered to reput it online only 2 days ago 
so, the basic idea is that a number of pixels of random colours could, in theory, form an image of god? 
yes, why not?
mhh… that was not what I expected (silly photos)
hehe, I know this as an project on my old art-school. seems thats idea is a obvious one. the idea is that if you generate images randomly that sometime there might come something “real” out of it.
but you’d need MUCH more picks to get one ‘real’ picture out of one-shot randomness…
you’d need to implement some kind of evolutionay system to make it work.
“Find God in a random made picture consisting of pixels”?
…Is it just me or has this Matrix thing gone too far??
That would be really cool … have some sort of AI that would tally the votes for yes and no to influence future image creation … after enough votes the image would start to resemble what most visitors consider “god” to look like …
an evolutionary system, together with Fuzzy logic based system, was discussed and rejected: we can’t base our research on parameters other than complete randomness.
God could be one of that combinations of white-noise you would never display by using such a method, and you could recognize him only by viewing his image.
now i wonder how you would recognize that god on a picture… i guess you haven’t met him lately on the street? 
anyway, since i’m in the mood of posting some idiocy again…
although that pic-of-god research most likely is meant as a joke, it’s a interesting idea to display that god-thing as noise…
i understand it in a way that it goes against that western (nonsense) idea of a god that is an actual being, an aware creature with a mind.
randomness propagates the idea that god simply is the sum of all possibilities that are possible inside this system (the universe and stuff).
since entropy is the maximum of information, while order, arrangement, regularity has has only few information, it is the sourcepool for all possibilities/ ideas/ development (take evolution for example).
is this what you had in mind?
though in theory you should use a chaotic system instead of pure randomness to calculate your pictures of course
(ok, i guess that algo that does the randomation is of course not real randomness but rather a chaotic thingy which follows some underlying rules… but it should be a model of the real world, i.e. all laws and rules included )
actually these coloured pixels wont get you far, a 150x200 pic with random black and white pixels gives you a higher chance to see something.
<oldKlondikeGoldseeker’sVoice>
huh, these young boneless generation… they don’t have patience! During the Golden Age… aaawww my poor back… I’ve searched for gold for months before finding a SINGLE goldstone!! Now what? They want God and they want it now!! awww my poor neck…
</oldKlondikeGoldseeker’sVoice>
I can’t help but thinking of a quote from Stefano Benni… it’s difficult to translate it correctly but it would sound something like:
I don’t know if god exists…
but if he does not
he would make a much better impression
And I can’t help thinking of the quote
“I hate God. I don’t need no God. I make my own fking destiny. Religion is fking sick.” - Sascha Konietzko (member of KMFDM)
“If god exists, then what created god”
-spline 1996
GOD IS DEAD
AND NO ONE CARES
IF THERE IS A HELL
I WILL SEE YOU THERE
oh trent. learn to write lyrics.
actually don’t. against all my better judgement, i love your gothic pseudo-intellectual anti-musings 
a guy comes to hell, he is afraid to death.
satan comes to him, and asks “hey, why the f**** are you so scared ?”
the guy says “yeah come on, I know what going on now ! you will make me suffer to eternity, I will feel pain I never felt before, I will wish to die but cannot.”
satan starts to laugh and says “haha, come on dude, thats just propagandha from the other side, hell is great actually. You can do whatever you like all day, hell is like a huge city full of fun. we got bars, clubs, cinema, whatever you want, everything is for free.”
so the guy wonders first but then jumps right in. And its true, its all alot of fun, everything is for free.
so this goes on for a while, the guy gets used to it, thinks its a great life. Sometimes he just wonders again about the torture, but with time he just feels save and gets convinced that hell is a great thing.
But one day he is sitting in a bar and following a strange feeling he goes to a window, pushes the curtains aside and …
sees a huge landscape out there, filled with people being tortured. fires are burning everywhere, people get dipped into bowls of molten iron, they get dragged by horses and so on and so on.
so the guy totally freaks out, starts screaming “oh my god ! oh my god !” and totally looses it.
Satan appears, goes to the guy, slaps him in the face abit and asks “What the f**** is wrong with you ?” So the guy starts screaming again “Yeah f****, you lied to me, all this fun and thing, thats just part of an evil plan to torture me even more ! You make me feel safe here, and then the torture starts ! f****, thats to insanely evil.” Satan starts to laugh and answers :
“no man, the people out there are the catholics. they want it that way.”
haha great joke, and so true 
i heared this one before some time, but forgot it… thx for reminding
There’s a bug on that site…
When you press “No” it’s supposed to show a new picture, but it doesn’t. The page says it’s a new image so the statistics are all screwed up now.
It does show a new image when you reload the page though.
The most interesting thing here is not wheiter or not you will see god… the real interesting thing is that if you watched every single image generated you sooner or later would see yourself. And not only one time… No, you would see yourself from different angles, with differnet lightning, some times with a clown nose, sometimes with spinnage between your teeth, sometimes with your left eyebrow slightly higher then it normally is… and ofcourse you would also see christina aguilera, crawling out of the remains the crashed Roswell UFO… and so on… Heck it would generate every frame of you life so that you could asemble them to a 120*150 pixel movie of your entire life.
Infinity is a wonderful mind toy and allthough where not talking about infinity here it still seems like it to our puny brains. And when you begin to grasp the consept of endless possibilities then the need of a God to explain things is eradicated.
I don’t see that bug… if you take a closer look to it, you will see that the picture starts reloading after a few moments (you will see a little horizontal bar going down while the image reloads), and the new image is different (at least on my mozilla1.3 and explorer6).
the content of the tag is streamed, so I don’t think such a bug could ever be experienced.
however, very good point you had on your post…
should I move this site to “isitsomething.com”?