Profile for Student of Trinity
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Displayed name | Student of Trinity |
| Member number | 3431 |
| Title | Electric Sheep One |
| Postcount | 3335 |
| Homepage | |
| Registered | Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
Recent posts
Pages
| Author | Recent posts |
|---|---|
| Ahht in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Wednesday, August 22 2007 04:55
Profile
Of course what we're all getting at is that framing in general is important. But it's also tough to pin down. For instance, it seems to me that if Joe Schmoe frames a soup can, it's worth nothing. It will never make it into any gallery, and rightly not. But if Andy Warhol does it, once he's already made a bit of a name for himself, then it's something. That 'bit of a name' provides a frame for the idea; the artist's fame is another kind of big white gallery room. It would be just as good if Joe Schmoe's framed soup can appeared at a garage sale and got picked out and hung on his wall by Andy Warhol. The point is that the picture now comes with Warhol's endorsement, which invisibly frames the picture. If I pick the thing up at a garage sale, it's still worth nothing. Or at least, it's worth considerably less than if Warhol does it — and by worth I mean some sort of objective (ha) aesthetic worth, not cash. Warhol is a much better frame than me for pop art. He spent years, after all, turning his career and persona into its ideal frame. That's some meta-art, there. I'm not exactly talking about snobbery here, but I might also say that decrying snobbery is snobbery, because most people are natural snobs. I'm presuming this snobbery actually has some utility, or people wouldn't adopt it. And people are snobs in cases where they hardly stand to profit in any direct material way from their snobbery, so the utility doesn't just seem to be that you can sell a genuine Warhol for major bucks. So I think there's something to the idea that an artist's fame is a frame. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Ahht in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Tuesday, August 21 2007 20:43
Profile
My own theory is that as long as the gallery's rooms are big, white and bright enough to pass muster, the gallery assures me that it would not be stupid to be impressed by the things in it. With this confidence I feel free to look for what's good in them. At the garage sale in contrast I'm sure that actually liking anything would be dumb, so I am afraid to see anything but crappiness. You could put the same object from the gallery in the garage sale, and even if I bought it, I would be embarrassed to hang it on my wall, and have to tell people it was some thing I picked up at a garage sale. Because then they'd have the same reaction as me, and be afraid to like it. I'm working toward some sort of theory here that galleries provide some aesthetic analog to economic liquidity. And my own vote is for garage, because there are definitely things in galleries that I'm happy to despise, so it's not that I'm a complete sucker for big white rooms. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Ahht in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Tuesday, August 21 2007 13:33
Profile
We went to an art gallery the other day, and there was a lot of stuff that I thought was quite cool. But my wife pointed out a vase that we both agreed looked great in the museum, and observed that if we had found it at a garage sale we wouldn't have offered fifty cents for it. And indeed most of the stuff that impressed me as being well worth thousands, displayed in the gallery, would not have impressed me as worth two bucks, at the garage sale. The question is, where am I stupid: in the gallery, or at the garage sale? (Please assume for the sake of argument that you cannot pick both.) Poll Information This poll contains 1 question(s). 0 user(s) have voted. You may not view the results of this poll without voting. function launch_voter () { launch_window("http://www.ironycentral.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=poll;d=vote;pollid=XHGDmNHjRHhJ"); return true; } // end launch_voter function launch_viewer () { launch_window("http://www.ironycentral.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=poll;d=view;pollid=XHGDmNHjRHhJ"); return true; } // end launch_viewer function launch_window (url) { preview = window.open( url, "preview", "width=550,height=300,toolbar=no,location=no,directories=no,status,menubar=no,scrollbars,resizable,copyhistory=no" ); window.preview.focus(); return preview; } // end launch_window   -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Ornks in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Tuesday, August 21 2007 13:24
Profile
One firebolt and you can chomp jornky. If it doesn't gross you out to be eating your own essence. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Typo under Temple of Brigantia in Nethergate | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Monday, August 20 2007 10:58
Profile
They're not expected to. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Sky Is Falling...? in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Monday, August 20 2007 10:35
Profile
I believe sunspot activity is measured by counting sunspots. You can see them easily with a telescope, and it's well worth doing if you never have. Obviously: do NOT look directly at the sun with an unfiltered telescope. Less obviously: do NOT rely on a solar filter that fits on the back end of your telescope, in front of your eye. It will be trying to absorb magnified sunlight, which is really hot, and so it may suddenly crack and let all that light fry your eye. What works and is safe is either: a) Hold a piece of paper somewhere in line behind the telescope, and focus the telescope until you see a projected image of the sun's disc on the paper. Watch this. The little black spots are really there. b) Use one of the big and relatively expensive filters that goes on over the front end of your telescope (the end that is towards the sun). This is quite safe, as long as you check to make sure there are no holes in the filter. (If there are, just patch them with bits of electrician's tape; the image will not be noticeably affected.) You can convince yourself that these are quite safe by just looking at the sun through them without the telescope. It is so faint that even if all that light reaches your It can be tricky with either method to actually find the sun with the telescope. You can't even use a little spotter scope to line up with; that will damage your eyes, too. What I found worked best was to leave the rear lens off and try to center the sun as best you can that way, either using the projection on paper method or the front filter. Then put a low power lens in and try to fine adjust the sun into view. Sometimes there are no sunspots visible. Sometimes there are lots. They each typically last a few days. Some are big and some are small. They seem to move across the sun over the course of about two weeks, as the sun slowly rotates. What sunspots mainly are is localized regions of high magnetic field. We know this quite directly, because we can measure the spectrum of light emitted by sunspots, and find frequency patterns that precisely match those generated on earth by hot hydrogen and helium in magnetic fields of given strength. Since the sun is composed of charged plasma swirling around, the presence of strong magnetic fields in the sun is no surprise; but the precise mechanism by which the sun's field is generated as it is is not yet known. Sunspots look dark because they are cooler than the surrounding solar surface. The lower temperature and the higher magnetic field go together, but I forget now which causes which, or even if the direction of causality is known for sure. People with good eyes who risk making them not so good can see big sunspots without a telescope, and they have been reported in ancient times. They have only been systematically observed for a couple of centuries, though, so an 8000 year cycle must be a theoretical extrapolation from more limited data. There does not seem to me to be any plausible link, however, between an 8000 year sunspot cycle, and a fifty year warming trend — which although slow in terms of a human life, is faster than any natural global climate variation of which we know. EDIT: And this, by the way, is an example of how science is NOT a matter of choosing your religion. You can see the sunspots, you can measure their temperature, and this measurement is really convincing. The way science gets reported and explained, by crackpots and mainstream media alike, is frequently poor enough, that an intelligent layperson can definitely be forgiven for having this religious impression. But people with this sort of post-modern relativistic impression generally get rude shocks if they ever meet actual scientists of any articulacy. It turns out that the evidence and reasoning behind scientific conclusions is really convincing, if you can ever get someone to actually present it, instead of just regurgitating the conclusions themselves. [ Monday, August 20, 2007 10:49: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Sky Is Falling...? in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Monday, August 20 2007 00:15
Profile
If you dig around with Google about this Y2K glitch story, the rebuttal by NASA's James Hansen comes up quite quickly. There was a glitch, but it had nothing to do with Y2K. Its effect on the data was about one thousandth of a degree — inconsequential against a warming trend of about a tenth of a degree per year. The only reason 1934 made it past 1998 as a result is that the two years are extremely close in average US temperature; this was always clearly acknowledged. Global warming is about a slow trend underneath larger annual fluctuations, and occasional hot and cold years are irrelevant. There is also a recent Nature article that seems to discredit the solar cycle theory (BBC piece about it). -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Sky Is Falling...? in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Saturday, August 18 2007 12:52
Profile
Synergy is right that clouds and water vapor are a large and fuzzy factor in climate modelling. People are working hard on this, but nonlinear partial differential equations are always brutal. And nucleation and evaporation of liquid droplets in air are not all that well understood fundamentally: there are no really good microscopic theories of any first order phase transitions. On the other hand, it seems naive to me to put so much faith in an at least equally fuzzy theory about solar cycles. The possibility that rising temperatures may increase atmospheric CO2 levels is in no way reassuring. It is precisely the danger of global warming, that past a certain point the process might take on a self-reinforcing life of its own, and turn Earth into Venus. Can we really afford to just rely on the hope that the earth's Gaia-ish self-regulation will inevitably avoid this, and keep the climate livable? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Harry Potter *WITH SPOILERS* in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Wednesday, August 1 2007 11:46
Profile
It's pretty hard to write a book in which every plot turn makes such complete sense as to seem inevitable in retrospect, and still be writing about a world with magic. Any restriction or possibility at all is conceivable, if it's about magic. In principle magic is still supposed to have its rules, and not just be arbitrary. But if all these rules and all their implications are fully worked out by the author and explained to the reader in advance, then what you have is not so much magical fantasy as hard Sci Fi with alternate science. It's hard to pull off a good hard Sci Fi book, and even if you can, it has a totally different feel from magical fantasy. The feeling that anything might happen is a big part of what makes a series like HP work. An inherent tendency to deus ex machina is a price that I think one just has to accept for that: it's a world full of gods and machines. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Social Degradation and Religious Decay (Split from "Life on Europa") in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Friday, July 20 2007 14:43
Profile
The doctrine of papal infallibility was adopted at the first Vatican council in 1870. It stipulates that (and from here on I speak of Catholic doctrine, which I do not myself profess) the Pope is infallible when and only when "in discharge of his office ... he defines that a doctrine concerning faith or morals must be held by the whole Church". In other words, the Pope is as fallible as anyone else in everything but the narrow subject of deciding what are the essential Catholic doctrines concerning faith and morals. He does not have, and no Pope is deemed ever to have had, infallibility in things like inciting crusades. The Pope is not even infallible on topics of faith and morals in general; only on defining which ones are necessary for all Catholics to believe. If all he does is declare that a view is correct, without declaring that it is necessary for all Catholics to believe, then he is fallible. And even on the precise question of necessary Catholic beliefs concerning faith and morals, the Pope is only infallible if he speaks 'in the discharge of his office'. This is the famous 'ex cathedra' clause. If the Pope is just chatting with friends after dinner, and enunciates a dogma to them, he is fallible. If he formally issues the dogma, he is infallible (according to Catholic theory). Papal infallibility has only been invoked once, in 1950, when Pius XII declared it a necessary Catholic belief that Mary was taken up bodily to heaven at the end of her earthly life. I think this pretty much rules me out as a Catholic. I'd actually have a slightly easier time believing it, than accepting that it was necessary to believe it. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Social Degradation and Religious Decay (Split from "Life on Europa") in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Friday, July 20 2007 04:18
Profile
I guess I mean, any of the above. Any theory that one action is somehow better or wiser or more right than another, when it doesn't have an obvious motivation in terms of such simple utility as not getting murdered, would seem to me to be a theory of morality, modulo arbitrary terminology. I seem to use morality and ethics as approximate synonyms. It may be that one solution to this philosophical question, of how such apparently non-utilitarian problems are to be decided, has already been found — by our genes. Massive evolutionary algorithms can be great for finding complex solutions. But that doesn't mean that morality doesn't exist, any more than the fact that a massive computer has now solved checkers means that checkers strategy is a meaningless concept. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Social Degradation and Religious Decay (Split from "Life on Europa") in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Friday, July 20 2007 03:06
Profile
My vague term 'ultimate underpinning' is not a banner I will fight under but a smokescreen behind which I retreat. Some graemlins are still black and white. Still, Thuryl's arguments indicate that utility only goes so far in support of morality: there are cases in which naive game theory would seem to prefer immoral behavior. This seems to me to undermine Thuryl's claim that morality is a meaningless concept. It may be unnecessary in cases where utility leads to the same conclusions, but what about the other cases? If morality is still in any way preferable to immorality in these cases, then I expect Thuryl could say that there must in fact be some kind of utilitarian substitute for the idea of morality, even here. If Thuryl won't say that, I will. But the nature of the utility involved here must be rather less trivial than the utility of not being murdered. Insisting that this non-trivial, generalized utility is still just utility, and not morality, would be mere quibbling over arbitrary terminology. If morality simply means a particular non-trivial form of utility, that's hardly meaninglessness. And hierarchical rank among terms this abstract is pretty loose, really: one could just as well say that self-preservation is an aspect of morality. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Social Degradation and Religious Decay (Split from "Life on Europa") in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Friday, July 20 2007 00:06
Profile
quote:Thuryl has just established that belief in God is the ultimate underpinning of morality. :P -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Unhandled expection in Exodus in Blades of Avernum | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Thursday, July 19 2007 11:03
Profile
An unhandled expection must be when someone shouts, "Look out!", but you don't. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Anvil Recipes in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Thursday, July 19 2007 02:43
Profile
At first I thought this was an Avernum 4 topic. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Avernum 5, June Update in Avernum 4 | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Wednesday, July 18 2007 11:40
Profile
It'll be tough fitting the blowtorch in there too. But it'll be so worth it. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Insert Random Nethergate: Resurrection Questions Here in Nethergate | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Wednesday, July 18 2007 04:07
Profile
Follow up some other quests first, then eventually you can get to that mine. -------------------- Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| creations in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Wednesday, July 18 2007 02:53
Profile
Or the iBeast. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Avernum 5, June Update in Avernum 4 | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Wednesday, July 18 2007 01:30
Profile
There'll be an option to play with fixed game world orientation, not turning if your character turns. You'll want to play with six monitors, arranged in a cube around your head. The top monitor will mostly just show blue, of course, but if some NPC should conjure an anvil to fall on you, you'll be glad it's there. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Avernum 5, June Update in Avernum 4 | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Tuesday, July 17 2007 03:40
Profile
What I'd like would be logical respawning. I've always assumed that there are lots of hidden areas implicit in Jeff's games — little secret tunnels known only to monster-kind, thick woods between zones in Geneforge, etc. So a few foraging chitrachs gradually returning to the chitrach nest, or raiding goblins returning to the lair, that makes sense, even if there was never any way the player could have found those chitrachs or goblins while they were out foraging or raiding. Respawning undead actually seems less plausible to me. I think of those things as being controlled by some evil power or necromancer, and if you've destroyed the controller, there should be no autonomous stragglers to return. And so on. A good bandit lair might receive a few returned foragers soon after being cleared, but thereafter there should be a longish lull. Eventually squatters show up, but only after there has been time enough to reveal that the property is vacant. It would be great if there could be a pop-up or screen message with the squatters, remarking that 'they must have heard the bandits were gone and moved in', or something like that. This way respawning would make the world seem more real, and make the player's actions seem more significant, instead of undermining their importance. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Europa, God, and you, or Where it all fits. in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Tuesday, July 17 2007 02:30
Profile
It's sad that you people are joking about this. The whole sport of competitive cycling is collapsing, as leader after leader fails urine tests for divine assistance. They all thought it was undetectable, but testing technology caught up with them. Now the officials just hang around outside the stalls, watching for the telltale glow. Fail two photon counts in a row, buddy, and you can hand back that yellow jersey. Some of them try to protest that they don't even believe in God, that they only said those prayers to please their mother. Sure. EDIT: Seriously, though, I had a cool experience with this once, which is certainly not evidence for God or anything, for anyone else, but which was and is important to me. I tell the story here for its take on the ethical problem of divine assistance. In my undergrad school the freshman honors physics course was notoriously the toughest thing on campus. It owed this reputation in part to the fact that its exams always featured one question, out of only four or five in total, that was essentially a brain teaser, since nothing in the course material had directly prepared for it. On the half-year exam that I took, there was one of those 'prove something that is hard even to believe' questions. (For the physicists here: a uniformly charged sphere, with an empty spherical cavity inside it, anywhere, but fully contained by the larger sphere. Prove that the electric field inside the cavity is the same everywhere in the cavity. There's a particular formula for it, that we had to prove, but the constancy is the surprising feature.) After staring at this for a while with no idea how to deal with it, I decided that it would be no more unfair for God to just inspire me with an answer during the exam, than to have made me smart enough in the first place not to have needed any such hint. So I prayed for inspiration. Then I spent the last half hour or so of the allotted time, having solved all the other problems, calmly poking around the various things I could think of that might have some connection to that weird fourth problem. And in the last minutes of the exam, the answer came to me. It was very short and elegant: one simple lemma, invoke linear superposition, draw a diagram, done. 25% of the exam points in three lines. I realized that I had the answer only in the act of writing it. As one of the few other people who solved this problem said to me afterwards, 'What a rush!' He must have had a somewhat similar experience with the problem, though I never heard him say prayer was involved. But the professor remarked later that my solution was the only one that found the elegant diagrammatic proof. I have had much more fervent prayers for far more vital things denied, before and since. But I feel as though my ethical premise, that there isn't really any such thing as 'my own abilities', was somehow endorsed. [ Tuesday, July 17, 2007 03:20: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Social Degradation and Religious Decay (Split from "Life on Europa") in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Tuesday, July 17 2007 02:21
Profile
quote:Wait, h-bar is atheist? But it shows up on all sorts of Christian priestly vestments, sandwiched between those two other profound symbols, i and c.  -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| 3D graphic in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Monday, July 16 2007 08:05
Profile
Eeee are not amused. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Europa, God, and you, or Where it all fits. in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Monday, July 16 2007 07:56
Profile
If a Jewish guy was just named Joshua, then it makes as much sense to derive his name from an acronym as to start figuring out what GEORGE might stand for. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Europa, God, and you, or Where it all fits. in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Monday, July 16 2007 05:45
Profile
(Blazes, again I hit 'quote' instead of 'edit'. Covering up fast ... Nah, I don't really have anything interesting to say about determinism. I've had enough quantum mechanics for today already. Sorry.) [ Monday, July 16, 2007 05:48: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |