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 |
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| Author | Recent posts |
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| Europa, God, and you, or Where it all fits. in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, July 16 2007 05:42
Profile
A little googling turns up a transliteration into Roman characters of the Septuagint Book of Joshua, in which "ihsous" is the Greek rendering of the Hebrew name whose English version is "Joshua". (The transliteration represents eta with 'h', which looks like the Greek letter eta, but doesn't sound at all like it.) 'Ihsous' is also the original New Testament name that got transliterated into Latin as 'Jesus'. ('Jesu' would be the vocative case, I believe.) So, as Christians have always said, 'Jesus' is the same name as 'Joshua'. A fitting enough name for someone who was alleged to be picking up where Moses left off. The Septuagint (so called for its legendary production by seventy scholars) was a late BCE Greek version of the Bible, widely used by diaspora Jews. Jerome evidently transliterated Greek Ihsous into 'Jesus', but working directly from Hebrew to Latin instead of through Greek, transliterated the Hebrew for Joshua into 'Josue'. So in Latin the two names became different. I await correction from any of the real classicists or Hebraists who are around. I'm just a googler who once audited intro to ancient Greek. [ Monday, July 16, 2007 05:46: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Final Fantasy in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, July 15 2007 23:03
Profile
(Just so you know, I read how I listen: ignoring random stuff.) (And welcome to the boards.) -------------------- 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 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, July 15 2007 12:25
Profile
Yep, a believer who simply never bothers to think seriously about things is every bit as lazy as the lazy kind of agnostic. Unquestioning belief of that lazy kind isn't even really belief, as I see it, let alone faith. -------------------- 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 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, July 15 2007 00:15
Profile
Psalm 90 gives 70 as a norm of some kind, with 80 allowed as a possible exceptional case. It doesn't say 70 was an average life span; interpreting it in such a sophisticated statistical way is reading far too much into the passage, and in a quite unreasonable way. What the psalm most plainly says is that the human life span was roughly 70 years; and it indicates that 'roughly' means a range of around a decade. Since quite obviously lots of people died of acute illness or injury decades before 70, the passage can only be talking about 'natural' life span, up to death from causes that can reasonably be labelled 'old age'. Since what we now call 'life expectancy' includes everyone who survives birth, and takes all possible forms of death into account, Psalm 90 says nothing at all about life expectancy. It speaks of the onset of extreme old age. For that, it is a useful and probably reliable data point in medical history. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| For all of you who haven't noticed... in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, July 14 2007 23:43
Profile
By 'hoarding fatigue', I only meant that you make sure your fatigue level is at max (or at zero, if we more logically consider fatigue to be bad) before the big fight. It would be a great feature for certain magic items to boost your maximum fatigue level, or to increase your fatigue recovery rate. I mean, that's almost a logical thing for some sort of 'mystic blade' to do. Of course, such an effect should probably scale with level, otherwise the mystic blade that was so great at level 10 becomes a trinket at level 20. Well, unless that's what you want it to do, I guess. But the best mystic blades, the real keepers, should have their fatigue effects scale with level. Could there be an 'anti-demon' or 'anti-undead' battle discipline? You focus your will into the spirit plane, or something, and do more damage to supernatural foes, for as long as you can keep it up. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Avernum 4 on reflexive.com? in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, July 14 2007 02:07
Profile
Oberon Media is listed as having developed so many games, it must itself be a sort of redistributor. Jeff's deal is probably with them, rather than with the linked site directly. -------------------- 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 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, July 14 2007 02:04
Profile
quote:These forums must be doing more for JS than they do for me. Maybe I should loosen up, take a walk on the wilder side for a change. YEEE HAWWW!!! :D :cool: :D :P :eek: Hmmm. I must not quite have the hang of it yet. -------------------- 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 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, July 13 2007 21:55
Profile
How do we know the afterlife test is all or nothing? Maybe you get part marks for being close. Or maybe the test is on an entirely different subject. The idea that God is obsessed with precise theology seems ludicrous to me. Depending on what precisely it means, agnosticism may be a viewpoint for which there is a strong case, or mere laziness. Atheism is a faith I can respect, but I don't understand atheists who consider their view more rational than theism. I think the Qu'ran puts it well, in Sura 45, verse 24 (Pickthall translation): quote:The void is a guess. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Mac OSX White on Black in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, July 13 2007 00:10
Profile
What scares me is the Unbound floor. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| For all of you who haven't noticed... in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, July 13 2007 00:06
Profile
And that smells good. But more important is, will these new things be fun? I want to be able to burn up my fatigue hoard and roar into battle, trashing half the enemy; then run out of steam half way through the fight, and only win by the skin of my teeth. That's entertainment. -------------------- 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 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, July 13 2007 00:02
Profile
The fact that humans developed Christianity is not incompatible with the theory that God did it, too. Was this message typed by me, or by my fingers? It's a false dichotomy. The fact that men, as opposed to women, developed Christianity, is not entirely a fact. Virtually all of the revered theoreticians of Christianity have been male, from the apostles on. On the other hand women get quite a number of important scenes in the gospels. What is unclear is whether the role of women in the New Testament represents an ideal norm, or a seed planted in stony soil, which would take millennia to grow. -------------------- 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 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, July 12 2007 07:45
Profile
It is not precisely conflict that I am seeing between the 'neither male nor female' and 'wives obey' verses. It is a question of which one gets taken most literally and broadly, and which one gets hemmed in with contextual limitations. Stillness evidently takes the 'neither male nor female' passage rather narrowly, insisting that the equality it prescribes is limited to one specific sense. He takes the 'wives obey' as a straightforward prescription of a universal ideal. He does not reconcile the two verses any more or less thoroughly than I do, but he weights them differently. Some people consider that there is no subjectivity or ambiguity in interpreting the Bible, that its literal meaning is always plain. Everyone who admires the Bible finds many passages that do seem wonderfully plain to them. Yet every Bible student or teacher I have ever known finds many problem passages in there as well, whose plainest interpretation is repugnant, and which are therefore interpreted in more elaborate ways. People can differ on which are the plain truths, and which are the hard sayings. I spent an instructive hour once, for example, exchanging seemingly trinitarian and seemingly unitarian verses from the New Testament, with a fairly senior Jehovah's Witness minister. I have to admit that he had about as many on his side as I had on mine. I still think mine are the clearer and more highlighted ones, but one can't cite chapter and verse for an impression like that. -------------------- 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 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, July 12 2007 07:30
Profile
Religion changes, indeed, or at least it should. The changes need not, however, simply be slavish accommodation to secular trends. There is in principle nothing impossible or inconsistent in the ideal of changing in order to more faithfully represent the religion's own essential tenets. Christianity, for one religion at least, has always been explicit about this idea, because Jesus preached this kind of reform of Judaism. Christianity was about how religions reform themselves before it was even Christianity. There is inevitably a temptation to change just to pander to popular attitudes. There is a converse temptation to knee-jerk rejection of popular attitudes. Both should be resisted, of course, because the question isn't really whether re-interpretations are initially prompted by insiders or outsiders. It's just whether they seem to be right, as best we can discern. -------------------- 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 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Thursday, July 12 2007 03:25
Profile
Wanting your neighbor's yak is bad. But it's okay, as far as the coveting commandment is concerned, to want not their yak, but a yak of your own, just like theirs, or if possible better. This attitude is more likely to lead to production than to stagnation: stop gazing wistfully into your neighbor's field, and start working for your yak. About obedience in marriage: my wife might actually have gone for that, at least in theory, but in fact we didn't and don't buy it. I have a low view of the authority of scripture (which view is doubtless heretical) so in principle I'm happy to just disagree with the New Testament, if I have to. But what I find is that the explicit New Testament passages about subjugation of women all have something funny about them. A couple are followed by disclaimers that seem to indicate that the verses describe then-standard customs, rather than prescribing ideals. Of those that are not, the one that sticks in my mind is in (IIRC) 1 Peter, "In the same way, wives obey your husbands." But that 'in the same way' refers to the immediately preceding exhortation that slaves should obey their masters. Whatever may have been right or wrong in the early Roman empire, slavery is certainly out today. In the same way, I figure we can ditch patriarchy. About semper reformandum: Christian reform is indeed always cast as an improvement in fidelity to the true meaning of the original scriptures and/or tradition. What truly changes is the interpretation of what this true meaning is. Of course it does not change arbitrarily; the claim that the new interpretation is more accurate must be convincing. But this is a subtle game, because the text itself contains lots of divergent strands. This is not the same as saying the scriptures are self-contradictory. Any large text is bound to contain a number of contexts, and claiming contradictions between statements made in different contexts can be like insisting that Australians fall up. But once you admit that meaning depends on context, you admit a factor in interpretation that can be hard to pin down, because contextual weight can be very subjective. For example, does one interpret 'wives obey your husbands' in the light of 'there is now in Christ neither male nor female, free nor slave, Jew nor Greek'? Or does the light shine in the opposite direction? Which verse has the greater contextual weight? To me, the latter one definitely seems a lot heavier. It's a ringing peroration in a major theoretical epistle, the encapsulation of a long and crucial argument. The other statements seem to me, in comparison, to be mere boilerplate disavowals of social revolution as an immediate and primary goal. In past eras the balance of contextual weights may have seemed to tip the other way. If now it tips my way, we reform, and yet consider ourselves to be restoring the true message of the scriptures, rather than simply inventing a new message. -------------------- 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 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, July 11 2007 10:22
Profile
I edited my previous post a bit. It took forever to get female Anglican priests; after that, bishops were quick, as everyone knew they would be, because there was no good sand for drawing lines in past the priest point. Did Anglicans ordain women priests — as not all Anglicans even yet do — through their own doctrine? Certainly, since Anglicanism has for centuries (though it doesn't have many centuries, compared to Rome) defined its doctrinal base as a tripod of reason, revelation, and tradition. And when Rome ordains women, it too will do so by its own doctrine, because the Pope will authorize it. That's what having a Pope is all about. The idea that Christianity is about adhering forever to an exhaustive code that can never change is a heresy. Some basic doctrines are certainly fixed, but the whole enormous issue of doctrinal authority, which the older churches have all handled at length in their various ways, presumes that lesser but still important doctrinal decisions must continually be made. Semper reformandum is one of the fixed Christian doctrines. -------------------- 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 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, July 11 2007 09:32
Profile
quote:[/b] The Bible, well, yeah. But I'd argue that the New Testament at least presents principles that undermine patriarchy, and that it is in a sense as unpatriarchal as it reasonably could have been in its times and places of composition. It makes explicit parallels, for instance, between the obediences owed by wives to husbands and by slaves to masters. It does not actually endorse patriarchy any more than it endorses slavery. It certainly condoned both, on the grounds that spreading the gospel was a higher priority at that time than trying to right entrenched social wrongs. It's the scripture of an otherworldly religion, after all. But it asserts that women and men, as slaves and free, are equal before God. William Wilberforce certainly felt that he was fighting slavery under the inspiration of the New Testament, and he beat Abe Lincoln by a good thirty years. A strong case can be made that enthusiastic Christians have done more for ethical progress than bold freethinkers. Yeah, it could be that all this ethical progress, even the part led by Christians, was in spite of Christianity rather than because of it. But I think it must be naive to treat such a massive factor in Western intellectual history as Christianity as though it can so easily be distinguished from humanism and reason. I'd be much less quick to dismiss the pervasive intellectual and moral influence of capitalism, for instance. Christianity is a huge thing, with strands going every which way, and it shapes its cultural children even in rejection. Most major reforms were won, not by trumping Christianity with humanism, but by trumping one Christian tradition with another — which is itself one of the oldest and most important Christian traditions. There are some female bishops these days. [ Wednesday, July 11, 2007 10:01: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Seperated from a loved one. in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, July 10 2007 11:54
Profile
The devotion to keeping the relationship may not be the entirety of love, but I wouldn't say it's not love. I'd say that it's a big part of what love is. My wife and I started dating about three months before moving to cities on separate continents, eight time zones apart. We lived apart for nearly six years, including the first four years of our marriage. With longish vacations, and strong geographical bias in choice of which conferences to attend, we actually spent something like 1/4 of that time together, usually a few weeks at a stretch. Still, we were mostly married but living apart for those years. I used to say we were living in sin. Our story is the worst I know, but it's by no means astonishing in academic life. Academics have spent long years preparing for jobs that are fantastic to have, but are thinly scattered over the globe; they make these kinds of sacrifices. We are much more aware now than we were then, that those four years of our youth will never come back to us. But a generation or two ago, millions of couples were separated for years by war. My wife didn't have to worry about getting a telegram saying I'd been killed when my integral blew up. We have now been living together full time for nearly eight years. Together is much better, but a long-distance relationship is indeed viable if both parties really want it to be. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Forgotten zone in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, July 10 2007 07:31
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quote:We love this game. [ Tuesday, July 10, 2007 07:32: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Most in depth game. in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, July 10 2007 07:20
Profile
In G1 and G2 you wander around some ruins, and encounter a few minor rogues, before reaching a friendly village which is very far from the real action, and where nobody really knows much. It's ages before you encounter anything like a rebel, or any important orthodox Shapers for that matter, either. In G3 the rebels have just finished attacking, which was already pretty different from the previous games, and you have some serious fighting to do before you can reach any actual town; but you're still a long way from anyone who will tell you anything important, on either side. In G4 you meet General Greta and a Kyshakk right off the bat, and get into some serious doo-doo about ten minutes later. To me that seems pretty different. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Life on Europa in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, July 10 2007 07:04
Profile
Before deciding on what properties would imply that something is alive, I'd like to know better what we want the property of being alive to imply. Why do we want to know whether something is alive or not? If it is only in order to know whether or not we get to lurch around the lab cackling 'It's alive!', then the definition of life only depends upon how much we want to lurch. Set the bar low, and cackle away, if that's what you want. If on the other hand you never want to have to admit that humans have created life in a lab, set the bar as high as you can. If there is any other issue than cackling rights at stake, then that issue needs to be mentioned, in order to decide what constitutes life. Is the real issue, for instance, whether or not something will poke us back if we poke it? Or whether or not its spores will spawn on earth and blight our crops? Or whether we can understand its literature? Of course, once we mention any such particular implication of life, the discussion of life as such will immediately be replaced by a discussion of poking reactions, spore proliferation, or inter-species communication. I think that's the right way to go, though. I think 'life' as a concept is sort of like Mona Lisa's smile. From a distance it's a fine topic for discussion, but up close it dissolves into brushstrokes. That's not to say 'life' is a meaningless term; just that it has its limits. 'Life' is a useful concept, as long as you don't have to ask too closely what it means. Perhaps that's true of all concepts. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Video Game Addiction in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, July 9 2007 05:39
Profile
Coca Cola is sugar water, with caffeine. People pay a premium for the caffeine, because drinking caffeine alters their brains in ways they like. Coca Cola is sugar water, with coolness. People pay a premium for the coolness, because drinking a 'cool' beverage alters their brains in ways they like. Proposition: brain alterations from caffeine and from coolness aren't really different in any important sense. Given this proposition (which I propose to explore, not defend), the only difference between the caffeine and the coolness in Coke is the delivery business model. The caffeine is physically put into the can, with the sugar water, at the factory. The coolness is put into the customer's mind, through advertising. The coolness is a sort of free download into the customer's brain. Actually drinking the cola is like buying the license code: only with both the advertising and the cola do you get to enjoy drinking a cool beverage. Advertising and caffeine injection are both manufacturing processes that add value to the product. So I think Drew's link between addiction and advertising is interesting because I think it can cut in different directions, depending on one's other attitudes. Being influenced by the outside world, whether through drugs or through advertising, might be bad, in some views, on principle. On another view, the question is only whether the influence is one that we want. Or want to want. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Forgotten zone in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, July 8 2007 23:05
Profile
The Great Secret of G5 will be that the Ur-Ornks have secretly been controlling it all, everywhere, from the very beginning. After all, the ornks are everywhere. And everything in the Geneforge world is within six degrees of Bruce Bacon. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Vlish under-rated in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, July 5 2007 05:21
Profile
Hmm. Perhaps I should admit that my only significant experience with creations in G4 was from a single game as a loyalist lifecrafter, in which I switched from six seasoned vlish to a single wingbolt as soon as I hit Camp Gamma, and then gradually added two rotghroths and a kyshakk. So although I didn't keep a cryoa alive from zone 3, or anything, I did keep a single creation for the last 60% of the game. That worked quite well — rather too well, in fact, on Normal difficulty. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Vlish under-rated in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, July 5 2007 02:16
Profile
I've always had the same experience, but then other people speak of getting cryoas that perform comparably to drayks by the endgame. And even in the endgame, a drayk is not a bad thing, especially if it costs no more than cryoa. Somehow for me everything either dies or goes obsolete, until I reach the upper tiers. Though my lifecrafter had no troubles finishing with 4th tier creations only, so I'm not sure the fifth tier is really needed. So I dunno. It may be that there is some sort of a shoulder on the curve, somewhere in the midgame, and if you can keep lower tier things alive through that point, then it starts to pay off. I've never really figured this out, though. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| cussing in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, July 4 2007 18:56
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The oddest example I know of culturally unique taboo words is in Québec, where the typical Anglo-Saxon terms are not considered particularly offensive. The ultimate French Canadian swearwords are the names of various items related to the Roman Catholic Mass. Chalice, host wafer ('estie'), tabernacle — these are the words to make old ladies faint. I kid you not. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |