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Multitasking, whoo-hoo. - 14 October 2007
Oct. 15th, 2007 01:02 amHad Mac and Cheese tonight, with actual cheddar in place of the other stuff I normally use. Very good stuff. Will make an excellent lunch tomorrow. Spent a lot of today sort of lazing about, but productively lazing about, or something like that. Compiling, deciding, buying, cooking, that sort of thing. Tomorrow the tooth doctor gets some uninterrupted alone time with me and my molars, before work. That should be interesting.
Discover Magazine takes a look inside the most important future military technologies, focusing on the areas of hypersonics, so that missiles, and perhaps eventually planes, will go really fast, laser and other directed energy weaponry, better information awareness to coordinate logistics, identify enemies a long ways off, and make the battlefield look like a bunch of yellow (or was that pink?) arrows moving from one side to another, and ways of winning minds and pouring all that additional information into a soldier’s brains. More than just propaganda, this moves more toward “Stand By For Mind Control” (although it’s really about information flow and control). American Samidzat takes issue with this last point, considering it waging a war not only against an "enemy", but against the American populace, to mold them into the kind of people that will continue electing and praising governments that rape them and try to promulgate rules like needing to get clearance to fly three days before flying, with any information captured, submitted, or requested going into the government’s warehouse, for them to use as they please.
Speaking of those kinds of governments, claims are now being made that the NSA appraoched and got telecommunications companies to spy on American telephone records seven months before the 11 September attacks. And then, a useful catalyst came along allowing them to bring their already in-place equipment out into the open, at the request of the government. If you believed that the 11 September attacks were not hijackers, but government operatives, this sort of revelation might add some weight to that idea.
Having said something she probably regrets, Maureen Dowd makes way for Stephen Colbert in her Op-Ed column, after Colbert took her up on a dare to write an Op-Ed. While Colbert hasn’t declared yet (still most likely the Stewart/Colbert ticket), he’s been hinting that he might. If he does, and files the paperwork for it, I wonder whether people would elect him.
If one were wondering whether one’s favorite celebrity is a blogger type, here's a list of 66 that do maintatin blogs. Of course, they could always have a MySpace page, too. (Actually, some of those links are to MySpace.) If, instead, you’re an interview kind of person, Rolling Stone, in 1974, got Bowie and Burroughs together and got them to talk. Very fun to see.
Forty-three years after last being seen, a farmer has taken photographs of a wild South China tiger. Feared extinct, it appears that there are some wild populations left. Not that this gets them anywhere near out of endangered. In other animal kingdom stunts, pregnant moose move toward human habitats to help them fend off predators. By getting close to human roads and camps, they can avoid the bears that would normally attack them.
Austin Cline puts out possible reasoning why conservatives fight even small things like an expansion of a government health-care program as “socialized medicine”: "socialized medicine" and government assistance frees people from the control of the elite, the religious, and brings people up toward a more even footing. Rather than believing social ills stem from individuals, or believing that some people really are superior, government assistance falls on the just and the unjust equally. If not going as far as total redistribution, at the very least ensuring equal education for everyone, rich or poor should be part of what we want to do. Income gaps produce education gaps - if the school’s tax base has trouble affording books for the children, then the schools and libraries aren’t going to be able to do much better. Others take the idea of equal footing for all out to a logical conclusion, saying if government were to ensure that basic needs were met for everyone, many reasons for strife would disappear. Not only that, but if drudge work were completed by robots or automatons, or in fact, anyone could design a robot that did their work for them, then everyone could work at a job they enjoyed, rather than one they had to keep to pay the bills. Needs taken care of, then everyone is free to choose whatever profession they like, and occasionally to take time off and be indolent here and there. Or change professions as one’s interests change. Mortgaging oneself to a job/professional category is a decision with the same sort of impact as mortgaging one’s house. It locks you in for a long time. And, much like the house mortgage, we expect you to make the decision while you’re young and haven’t fully figured out what it is you really want to do in life. And we’ll penalize you horribly if you later find out this isn’t what you wanted and you want to change.
Archonoclast has a wonderful insight about philosophy and religion - there is usually a base state, and an end state, but very little on the methods by which one traverses from start to finish. And thus, in the intervening states, an institution, like the Catholic Church, or a Protestant worship house or the temples, appears, and procedures and rituals flow from those institutions, even the kind that say to just sit. And that sort of gets me thinking in two directions. The first is “Would a religious or philosophical leader deliberately leave out parts of their system, expecting adherents and disciples to find them and use them as bridges, or because he wanted flexibility in interpretation at that point, so that the philosophy didn’t become too rigid or backwards-looking?” My guess would be “Probably not.” There was likely a specific meaning imparted in the words said, but an incomplete understanding, transcription, recording, or transmission all could have introduced enough noise that the meaning was lost. And with that part lost, something needs to be constructed to replace it. Would that void a philosophy? Probably not, unless it was one of the major pillars that was lost to time, and then the philosophy itself would probably crumble or be seen as nonpracticable. From there, the second question arises, and that is “Are all of our philosophical and religious transmissions actually complete, and thus require no addition, no subtraction, only the correct interpretation?” If all you had was The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao, wouldn’t that be enough to deduce a philosophy of living and interacting from? Just taking Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad could feasibly produce an entire philosophy. The things that come after it, chronologically, like “And Mohammed is His Prophet” or “You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments the whole of the Law rests would also work for making a complete thing when paired with the Shema. Given a base point and an end point, finding the way between the two is often considered an exercise in wisdom, with rewards awaiting those who find a wise path and punishment awaiting those who find a foolish path. Or the obtaining or liberating of karma. If we went back to the real fundamentals of all of our philosophies, discarded the rest and started again, what would happen? Would we learn from past mistakes and generate better intermediate institutions? Would we find those institutions the cause for problems and eliminate them entirely? I don’t know. Which sort of leads to the final question - if there’s no defined path for the novice to walk that leads to the promised reward, are all paths that start at the beginning and end at the end, regardless of where they meander through, merge, cross, or run parallel with other paths, equally valued, equally important, equally valid? Were I to have a hypothetical question or three for an intelligent designer, or Universal AC, I might ask that as one of them. (Another being ”Why?“ and hoping for a response other than ”Why not?“ Although, if the answer truly is ”Why not?“, then even from that, I suspect much of the workings of the cosmos and time will become clear.)
I do believe the winner tonight of the coveted Last Spot award is Regrets Only, a column that apologizes for just about everything. Of course, the column itself won’t make much sense without the footnotes, a.k.a. the ”Cheat sheet“ for this particular column.
Thus, because the dentist is going to scrub my teeth, I’m brushing mine and going to bed.
Discover Magazine takes a look inside the most important future military technologies, focusing on the areas of hypersonics, so that missiles, and perhaps eventually planes, will go really fast, laser and other directed energy weaponry, better information awareness to coordinate logistics, identify enemies a long ways off, and make the battlefield look like a bunch of yellow (or was that pink?) arrows moving from one side to another, and ways of winning minds and pouring all that additional information into a soldier’s brains. More than just propaganda, this moves more toward “Stand By For Mind Control” (although it’s really about information flow and control). American Samidzat takes issue with this last point, considering it waging a war not only against an "enemy", but against the American populace, to mold them into the kind of people that will continue electing and praising governments that rape them and try to promulgate rules like needing to get clearance to fly three days before flying, with any information captured, submitted, or requested going into the government’s warehouse, for them to use as they please.
Speaking of those kinds of governments, claims are now being made that the NSA appraoched and got telecommunications companies to spy on American telephone records seven months before the 11 September attacks. And then, a useful catalyst came along allowing them to bring their already in-place equipment out into the open, at the request of the government. If you believed that the 11 September attacks were not hijackers, but government operatives, this sort of revelation might add some weight to that idea.
Having said something she probably regrets, Maureen Dowd makes way for Stephen Colbert in her Op-Ed column, after Colbert took her up on a dare to write an Op-Ed. While Colbert hasn’t declared yet (still most likely the Stewart/Colbert ticket), he’s been hinting that he might. If he does, and files the paperwork for it, I wonder whether people would elect him.
If one were wondering whether one’s favorite celebrity is a blogger type, here's a list of 66 that do maintatin blogs. Of course, they could always have a MySpace page, too. (Actually, some of those links are to MySpace.) If, instead, you’re an interview kind of person, Rolling Stone, in 1974, got Bowie and Burroughs together and got them to talk. Very fun to see.
Forty-three years after last being seen, a farmer has taken photographs of a wild South China tiger. Feared extinct, it appears that there are some wild populations left. Not that this gets them anywhere near out of endangered. In other animal kingdom stunts, pregnant moose move toward human habitats to help them fend off predators. By getting close to human roads and camps, they can avoid the bears that would normally attack them.
Austin Cline puts out possible reasoning why conservatives fight even small things like an expansion of a government health-care program as “socialized medicine”: "socialized medicine" and government assistance frees people from the control of the elite, the religious, and brings people up toward a more even footing. Rather than believing social ills stem from individuals, or believing that some people really are superior, government assistance falls on the just and the unjust equally. If not going as far as total redistribution, at the very least ensuring equal education for everyone, rich or poor should be part of what we want to do. Income gaps produce education gaps - if the school’s tax base has trouble affording books for the children, then the schools and libraries aren’t going to be able to do much better. Others take the idea of equal footing for all out to a logical conclusion, saying if government were to ensure that basic needs were met for everyone, many reasons for strife would disappear. Not only that, but if drudge work were completed by robots or automatons, or in fact, anyone could design a robot that did their work for them, then everyone could work at a job they enjoyed, rather than one they had to keep to pay the bills. Needs taken care of, then everyone is free to choose whatever profession they like, and occasionally to take time off and be indolent here and there. Or change professions as one’s interests change. Mortgaging oneself to a job/professional category is a decision with the same sort of impact as mortgaging one’s house. It locks you in for a long time. And, much like the house mortgage, we expect you to make the decision while you’re young and haven’t fully figured out what it is you really want to do in life. And we’ll penalize you horribly if you later find out this isn’t what you wanted and you want to change.
Archonoclast has a wonderful insight about philosophy and religion - there is usually a base state, and an end state, but very little on the methods by which one traverses from start to finish. And thus, in the intervening states, an institution, like the Catholic Church, or a Protestant worship house or the temples, appears, and procedures and rituals flow from those institutions, even the kind that say to just sit. And that sort of gets me thinking in two directions. The first is “Would a religious or philosophical leader deliberately leave out parts of their system, expecting adherents and disciples to find them and use them as bridges, or because he wanted flexibility in interpretation at that point, so that the philosophy didn’t become too rigid or backwards-looking?” My guess would be “Probably not.” There was likely a specific meaning imparted in the words said, but an incomplete understanding, transcription, recording, or transmission all could have introduced enough noise that the meaning was lost. And with that part lost, something needs to be constructed to replace it. Would that void a philosophy? Probably not, unless it was one of the major pillars that was lost to time, and then the philosophy itself would probably crumble or be seen as nonpracticable. From there, the second question arises, and that is “Are all of our philosophical and religious transmissions actually complete, and thus require no addition, no subtraction, only the correct interpretation?” If all you had was The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao, wouldn’t that be enough to deduce a philosophy of living and interacting from? Just taking Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad could feasibly produce an entire philosophy. The things that come after it, chronologically, like “And Mohammed is His Prophet” or “You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments the whole of the Law rests would also work for making a complete thing when paired with the Shema. Given a base point and an end point, finding the way between the two is often considered an exercise in wisdom, with rewards awaiting those who find a wise path and punishment awaiting those who find a foolish path. Or the obtaining or liberating of karma. If we went back to the real fundamentals of all of our philosophies, discarded the rest and started again, what would happen? Would we learn from past mistakes and generate better intermediate institutions? Would we find those institutions the cause for problems and eliminate them entirely? I don’t know. Which sort of leads to the final question - if there’s no defined path for the novice to walk that leads to the promised reward, are all paths that start at the beginning and end at the end, regardless of where they meander through, merge, cross, or run parallel with other paths, equally valued, equally important, equally valid? Were I to have a hypothetical question or three for an intelligent designer, or Universal AC, I might ask that as one of them. (Another being ”Why?“ and hoping for a response other than ”Why not?“ Although, if the answer truly is ”Why not?“, then even from that, I suspect much of the workings of the cosmos and time will become clear.)
I do believe the winner tonight of the coveted Last Spot award is Regrets Only, a column that apologizes for just about everything. Of course, the column itself won’t make much sense without the footnotes, a.k.a. the ”Cheat sheet“ for this particular column.
Thus, because the dentist is going to scrub my teeth, I’m brushing mine and going to bed.
