Echoes and Mirrors

Of course I posted that too soon, Australia

Daniel — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 20:08:18 +0000

So Australia, I was hasty in my clicking ‘publish’ not because I was wrong or felt bad about making knifey-spooney jokes, but because America being a rotting cesspool of Religiously fanatic politicians that pander to minority watchdog groups is more right than ever. From the AHA:

The American Humanist Association (AHA) expressed concern with the religiously motivated attacks on Hawaii’s gubernatorial candidate, Neil Abercrombie. The claims, which declare Abercrombie’s voting record “anti-Christian”, were produced by Island Values, a group comprised of volunteers and supporters of Muffi Hannemann, Abercrombie’s opponent.

“There are acceptable and unacceptable candidates,” the Island Values statement read. “Neil Abercrombie is unacceptable. He declares no religious affiliation.”

“This attack on Neil Abercrombie is filled with blatant religious prejudice that has no place in a productive, civil campaign” said Roy Speckhardt, executive director of the American Humanist Association. “Religious affiliation doesn’t indicate how qualified a candidate is to serve the public. Claims that having no religion is ‘unacceptable’ are inconsistent with the intent of our nation’s founding fathers.”

The U.S. Constitution’s No Religious Test Clause, Article VI, paragraph 3, states “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”

Australia elected an openly atheist woman to be their leader. In the US, any hint of something like that causes a shitstorm of outrage from a dozen people with money and bullhorns.

Way to go Australia

Daniel — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 19:32:02 +0000

You’ve re-elected Julia Gillard.

I find this fascinating because you’ve not only elected an atheist, but you re-elected an atheist. I don’t think that could ever happen here; politicians are the leading sellers of “The Fear Of God” in America. It totally blows my mind and makes me a little envious. Maybe this can be the proof that the world needs that atheists aren’t immoral or crazy.

So I may know nothing about Australian politics outside of this, and I’m not sure exactly what the Labour party is (but I could make an educated guess) I do know that Foster’s beer sucks, that stupid Outback restaurant has nothing to do with Australia, and that dingos eat babies. I’ve even made Australian girls say that line for me, so it must be true.

Actually, everything I know about Australia I learned from Quigley Down Under and The Simpsons.

The thing’s hollow—it goes on forever—and—oh my God—it’s full of stars!

Daniel — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:00:05 +0000

(via Psychedelic Medicine News)

No, the box is full of high-grade, medical LSD. But judging from the look on Dr. Peter Gasser’s face, it might as well be full of stars.

If they’re doing experiments again, where do I sign up? Seriously. I have issues that need to be fixed. With therapy. LSD therapy.

But for real serious (serious serious, if you dig reduplication) it’s good to see testing like this happening again. Put down your petty anger, folks, this is medicine as much as the terribly debilitating and addictive opiates are. (Wait, did I argue for my side or yours? Hmmm…)

Wittgenstein & Me: A Love Story, Part II

Daniel — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 03:08:25 +0000

Names, like little points
Propositions, point at things:
Because they have sense.

Between Logical Atomism and the Picture Theory of Language, there really seems to be a robust ontology developing in the Tractatus.

1.Facts are made up of States Of Affairs.
2.States of Affairs are made up of named objects

and

1.Names refer to objects.
2.Propositions have sense of facts.

Propositions are models (or, a loosely defined “picture”) of facts. They hold the same logical form. Neither is reliant on the actuality (for lack of a better word) of any object or SoA for it to have meaning.

To muck it up a bit, the model itself is a fact whose meaning is that it has a certain structure. Which seems a bit self-referential.

An expression of a proposition (i.e. a sentence) is a model of that proposition; it maps out the structure of names. It is a fact that consists of whatever arbitrary states of affairs the proposition it represents points to. The sentence is a projection of the expression.

The expression of a proposition has the form it does because it necessarily must: if it does not share the same logical form as the fact it points at, then it is illogical.

The elements of a pictures must be connected with objects. Schroeder notes that “this connection is not intrinsic in words.” The act of ‘thinking out’ the sense of a proposition, gives a sentence a sense. It becomes an expressed thought, which is a proposition.

Hopefully, this analogy works:

An Actor:A video recording of an actor :: A Proposition:A Sentence

It’s a broken analogy because the video recording cannot be used to recreate (bring to life) the actor. Vincent Price is, and will remain, dead. But a sentence can be used to project and ‘think out’ a proposition.

Thoughts are pictures, organized in the same logical form as the fact they have sense of.

So thoughts are pictures
mirroring the form they sense
and they make Hulk smash

Also, everyone should listen to The 21st Century Monads while they study:

I’ll Never Shave Again

Daniel — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 01:57:28 +0000

After beard-growing contest, small Missouri town’s men eager for a shave

BENTON, Mo. (AP) — It has been more than four months since many men in Benton put away their razors for a beard-growing contest to celebrate the small southeast Missouri town’s sesquicentennial.
On Saturday, they get to shave. And many can’t wait.
Contestants gather Saturday night at the Benton ballpark to have their beards judged in three categories: longest, wooliest and best-groomed. The Sikeston Standard-Democrat reports they will then be escorted to a barber chair and shaved.
The contest began April 24.
Resident Sterling Proctor says he’s been called a wooly mammoth, Sasquatch and other names since he began growing the beard. He’s ready to get rid of it.
But residents say the high volume of participants shows the commitment to the community.

To which I say:

It’s been a while since I posted anything in the ‘Beards‘ Category. Give me a break here, folks.

I Have Even More Problems With Science

Daniel — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 22:33:22 +0000

First, Science is slow. Yeah, I’m excited about finding hundreds of exoplanets. I really am – it is downright amazing. We’ll probably be identifying hundreds of them inside the so-called ‘Goldielocks’ zone, and detecting habitable atmospheres within a year or two. And I’ll never get to go, nor will anyone else. Because science is slow. Science simply looks and says, “things are like this: and they could be fucking amazing. But it’s not yours. Can’t have.” Well, fuck you too, science. I want my tuition back.

Second, the Universe is huge. And I don’t mean, like, “wow, that city is big, I bet it would take a day or two to walk from one end to the other” or “it would take weeks to walk from ocean to ocean”. I mean, some of these planets are so far away that if intelligent life, similar to our own and at a similar level of technology, lived there, we wouldn’t know because we wouldn’t even pick up their radio signals for another thousand years or more. This is a problem with science because it makes me feel infinitely smaller than I should (and women could handle that, probably, science notwithstanding). Science, you make me make bad self-deprecating penis jokes, are you happy now?

Third, science isn’t concerned about how awesome things are. It’s mostly just numbers and shit.

Fourth, I still don’t have a space-ship. Let alone a jet-pack. Or a flying car.

Fifth, stop talking about generations from now. Unless you come up with a way to freeze me until then, I don’t want to hear it. From the looks of it, I’m not reproducing, and I don’t care about generations from now, because they won’t even be my kids. Your kids suck; they’re loud, obnoxious and they listen to Justin Bieber. Do you really want them, or worse, going into space instead of us? Seriously? It would almost be as bad as sending the Baby Boomers into space on any trajectory that didn’t land them on the surface of a much hotter object (the sun, for example).

Six, no, I do realize it’s not entirely science’s fault because either the government, private enterprise or stupid people in general don’t want to put money into it. That is a valid point: the US isn’t even going to have the capability to go to the moon, at all, soon. So much at least a moon base. I was promised a moon base, but science, you’re off the hook on that one.

AMC’s The Walking Dead: I’m fucking stoked.

Daniel — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 00:52:30 +0000

Needless to say, I’m pretty stoked about this show. There is a terrible amount of potential for a series like this, and if AMC’s recent offerings (such as Rubicon) are any indication, it won’t be a disappointment. There is a similarity to 28 Days Later, but the zombies look far more Romeroesque (I didn’t see any running, and apparently their strength is in numbers, as per the Dead trilogy). Although some other common tropes were displayed, it is a trailer meant to hook as many viewers as possible. But with any luck, we get a great deal more character-driven than plot-driven story, more exploration of the human condition (especially fun in light of the undead roaming the streets) and a nice, slow multi-season plot arc.

Daily Links

Daniel — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 19:22:51 +0000

New items for August 25, 2010:

Google Reader: How summer138 Kicked Oxy and Xanax and Broke Up With Her Boyfriend, Killa T

Wittgenstein & Me: A Love Story, Part I

Daniel — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:53:42 +0000

The first portion of Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus (1-3.328), doesn’t seem to be as wildly confusing after a second reading. It lacks the more artful style of any other philosopher I’ve ever read, that much is certain. But what it lacks in artful (or dare I say playfulness of) prose, it makes up with in conciseness.

These initial propositions seem to be trying to wheedle out what knowledge is, how knowledge relates to reality, how reality is represented in both thought and language, and how any language that is to be used to represent language ought to function (or how he intends to use it for the purposes of logically analysis, as the case may be).

Propositions 2.1 through 3.1 seem to be very nearly in line with what Bernard Lonergan posits very early in Insight, specifically:

2.1    We picture facts to ourselves.
2.12 A picture is a model of reality.
2.131   In a picture the elements of the picture are the representatives of objects.
3          A logical picture of facts is a thought.

This seems very clear to me in what I’ve gleaned from Insight previously: thoughts are the logical representatives of objects, through pictures (Lonergan calls them images). Still, I think they were both aiming at roughly the same apple. The idea of how knowledge comes to be is difficult. Wittgenstein’s mucking around with signs, symbols, the signified, signifiers, and signification seems to correlate directly with what I’ve learned of literary analysis. He breaks it down in a very forthright manner, seemingly.

However, the following propositions troubled me:

3.04 If a thought were correct a priori, it would be a thought whose possibility ensured its truth
3.05 A priori knowledge that a thought was true would be possible only if its truth were recognizable from the thought itself (without anything to compare it with).

But it occurred to me that he may be trying to banish all ideas of tautalogical arguments from his work by initially stating upfront that everything must be compared to some other thing and cannot prove itself true on its own. From earlier:

2.225 There are no pictures that are true a priori.
3 A logical picture of facts is a thought.

Which seems about as straight-forward as it can get.

There was a proposition that irks me a bit, if only because it seems to take the logic a step too far (and goes meta in itself far too early in the text):

3.1432 Instead of, ‘The complex sign “aRb” says that a stands to b in relation R’, we ought to put, ‘That “a” stands to “b” in a certain relation says that aRb.’

Which makes sense, but seems pedantic. Although it is in line with the previous propositions, it seems unnecessary and obtuse. It took me much page flipping and head scratching to grasp it (and to seemingly little purpose).

Most Zen Video Ever Cut

Daniel — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 16:47:28 +0000

TOBACCO – Super Gum from TOBACCO on Vimeo.

It’s kinda zen like that. There is no denying that what is in this video exists. It’s not really horrifying, or pleasing. It’s more like a benign tumor. Yes, yes it is a tumor. This time.

If I ever make a movie, I want it to be something like this but with more explosions and keyboard cat.