Profile for Student of Trinity
| Field | Value |
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| 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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| What is it with binoculars and politicians? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, February 23 2007 01:05
Profile
Would you believe it's the Emperor's New Binoculars? Funny binocular factoid that I don't really understand (though I absolutely should): The best binoculars have no focus knob. You can adjust one eyepiece to correct for your individual eye asymmetry, but there is no rolling cylinder control to refocus the instrument as you look at nearer and farther things. Instead, the natural refocusing of your own eyes does all you need, just as when you're not using binoculars. I've used binoculars like these, and they do work just this way. It's very nice. So, why do cheaper binoculars need to be focused, and why do the better ones not? [ Friday, February 23, 2007 01:07: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Chromite!! CHROMITE, baby!! in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, February 23 2007 00:59
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Traces of Access Hollywood can remain in your hair follicles for up to six weeks. I hope you're not one of the ones with outplants. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Round Table on Morality, Theology, and Ethics in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, February 22 2007 11:02
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I know of a few answers to the problem of evil, but the one I actually buy comes from the Bible, where it is directly attributed to God. I'm pretty sure I made this same post a couple of years ago here, but what the heck, I'll rehash. I know of two passages in the Bible where someone directly asks God, Why do bad things happen, when they don't seem to make sense as punishments? And (according to the Bible) God answers, clearly and non-trivially. The first is the Book of Job, which according to textual scholars is a pastiche, consisting of three serious but separately composed discussions wrapped in a rather cheesy frame story about Satan being allowed to test Job. In effect the present book consists of an original core surrounded by three layers of fan-fiction. (Fan-revelation?) All the layers are interesting, but they don't have to be taken the same way. The layer that impresses me most is the shortest; it's the penultimate section, just before the appended ending in which Job gets new money and family members and lives happily ever after. And in this layer, Job rails at God for injustice, and God answers 'out of the whirlwind'. And God's answer is, "When hast thou commanded the morning?" God goes on, of course, speaking well enough to be in character for God, but that's the theme. Running the universe is not as easy as it looks, and mortals simply do not know nearly enough to criticise God. The other spot in the Bible where, according to Christians, God gets taken to task for evil, is in the 9th chapter of John's gospel. Jesus encounters a man blind from birth, and the disciples ask why he was born blind. Jesus answers that he was born blind, not as a punishment for anyone, but in order that the glory of God should be revealed. He then miraculously gives the man sight, but he does so by a bizarre and uncharacteristic rigmarole involving smearing mud on the guy's eyes and then sending him off to wash. I interpret the mud-and-washing business as another of Jesus's parables, an appropriately tactile parable for a man born blind. The blind guy finds that the mudeye (or more precisely, the washing) buys him the unimaginable gift of sight. The invited parallel is that blindness (or more precisely, the healing of blindness) can somehow buy a correspondingly more wonderful unimaginable. Put together, the Biblical answer to the problem of evil seems to me to be that it is a problem of poverty of imagination. We can't think of anything that could justify the bad things that happen. The Biblical God simply says, But I can. If there is no God, that's the ideal cop-out answer. If there is a God, one should hardly expect a universe constrained by human imagination. It works equally well both ways. That's the either/or, where I think one has to choose. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Round Table on Morality, Theology, and Ethics in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, February 22 2007 10:18
Profile
quote:There are questions upon which the available evidence is not convincing either way. One can nevertheless choose to act on the premise that one answer is valid, even going so far as to stop thinking about the alternative possibility. And often this kind of belief choice is wiser than the alternative of professing agnosticism. Life is short, and at some point you may as well take a shot at something instead of holding your fire until you die. In fact, pretty much all questions are of this type, because practically no evidence is ever wholly convincing from a rational point of view. Consider for instance the questions we all shrug off every day. Will the sun rise tomorrow? Is there a hungry tiger on the other side of this door? If you find some proposition to be convincing on the evidence, I would submit that in fact you have simply followed the above choice approach subconsciously, and decided not to bother with the alternatives. I would say that every belief is a matter of choice, and the only difference is how conscious the choice is. quote:Which is the case for an awful lot of myths and cultures, so in fact there is a lot of common ground in human mythology. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Why You Suck in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, February 21 2007 06:34
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Some of the people who could best provide interesting discussions here seem to prefer caustic ranting instead. There's an opportunity cost. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Why You Suck in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, February 20 2007 11:12
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quote:It's not veiled, but it's not mine. quote:Ya gotta hustle. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Why You Suck in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, February 20 2007 10:02
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quote:Fixed your thought. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Why You Suck in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, February 20 2007 07:33
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Let's all give up meta-posting in favor of meta-meta-posting. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Ancient Greeks in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, February 20 2007 01:39
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Interesting as evolution itself is, I find it even more interesting to think about the basic concept of the mechanism. Darwinian evolution is an extremely robust concept, because it is only an iota away from tautology. As creationist preachers love to point out, Darwinian 'fitness' means nothing more than 'ability to survive' (or, more strictly, to proliferate). So 'survival of the fittest' means only 'survival of the survivors', and that doesn't sound so profound. But evolution is not actually a tautology at all. Fitness can indeed be anything that enhances survival, but the key point is that it has to be something in particular. And then the point of evolution is that whatever that something is, longer horns or frizzier whiskers or anything else, will tend to proliferate as a trait. But because evolution is so close to tautology, it can be lifted out of its original context of competition among biological organisms, and applied successfully to a very wide range of other things. Even within biology, modern genetics has added a huge new wrinkle to Darwin's theory, by revealing how much evolution seems to operate at the molecular level, and to what an extent this molecular evolution is independent of what happens on the level of organisms. For most of history, the definition of biology has very obviously been that it is the study of biological organisms. Today it is not so crazy to ask, What is the role of organisms in biology? And now we can ask whether evolutionary mechanisms may explain much of sociology. Following Dawkins we can ask whether Mormon fundamentalism should be considered as a package of memes, analogous to genes. It probably goes a long way. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| SpiderWeb Merchandising! in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, February 20 2007 01:23
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"You're cute!" isn't baffling enough to outsiders. It should be, "Spider says, 'You're cute!'" -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Spiderweb Monthly Stats - February 2007 in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, February 18 2007 12:38
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quote:That's the spirit. *Cracks Tupperware seal. *Sniffs cautiously. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Excellent lockings in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, February 18 2007 12:17
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1) Aran recently achieved what I consider the best locking ever. "Goodbye peryui" joins my lexicon. It's not so uncommon, alas, to have to express what it expresses so well: calm acceptance of the fact that athough bafflement remains, dismissal is necessary. 2) The only real reason for making a whole new thread here is that, while I was composing a post congratulating Aran as above, in another recent thread in which a remark about thread locking seemed not to be too much of a non sequitur, Imban locked the thread. 3) I invite any further commendations of our moderators for their work. If none are forthcoming, I can't imagine what will happen to this thread. [ Sunday, February 18, 2007 12:40: 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 Ancient Greeks in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, February 18 2007 11:17
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quote:Hey, it worked for those giraffes who kept stretching their necks, right? Seriously, though, you might want to do a little review on how genetics works. The genes sit snugly in their chromosomes, safe in their microscopic world, and aren't affected any more by a warrior's exertions than the warrior is by the motions of the planets. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Oldbiehood -- Analysis in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, February 18 2007 04:47
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Isn't it actually a Dutch word, Thralni? The German is Dreck, which is how the word is sometimes also spelled in English. Anyway, I believe it's just a loan word from either other language, originally used in English as a sort of genteel euphemism. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Recommend a new (to me) game in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, February 17 2007 23:39
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I found a great Lode Runner a couple years ago on HOTU, somewhere. It was in color, with nice music. But I lost interest because it was a bit too hard. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Ancient Greeks in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, February 17 2007 23:32
Profile
There are also some reasons to doubt even the more plausible option. What was the daily manual labor of most ancient Greeks? Farming. Most of us have probably seen third world farmers in documentaries. They don't look like supermen to me. Subsistence farming can be a tough way of life, but it's not like an 8-hour gym workout every day. Trireme crews in training may well have made more effort than that, but in fact we just don't know. It has always been true that forming military units and keeping them well-trained are two different things, the first generally much easier than the last. And to dominate the sea, a navy only needed to be better than its contemporary opponents. Ancient people were all little guys. The average height of people seems to have increased rapidly in just the last century or two, at least in richer countries. My understanding is that getting more protein in childhood is the cause, not any genetic change. And, other things being equal, bigger people are stronger. And I don't know about ancient times, but I recently read somewhere that the average level of health in the US civil war was pitiful by modern standards. The incidence of chronic disease was appalling, and armies suffered more from disease than from battle. I believe that again the explanation for modern superiority is thought to be improved childhood nutrition, making everyone more robust throughout their lives. Obviously my own source citation could use some work here. Extrapolation from the US civil war to the ancient Greeks is of course not obviously sound. But altogether, for what it's worth, I'd bet that a properly trained crew of modern athletes, in a trireme built to modern scale, would totally whup the best trireme ancient Greece ever saw. For that matter, a properly trained modern team, of whatever kind, would whup the best anything ancient anywhere ever saw. And a team from a few centuries in the future would whup us, assuming no catastrophe befalls before then. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Oldbiehood in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, February 17 2007 12:13
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Alorael's recent taunts cut deep, and he has withdrawn into bitter solitude. His potato comforts him in vain. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Oldbiehood -- Analysis in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, February 17 2007 12:08
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*Inhales fiercely Boring drek, man! *Again Dude! This is some really great boring drek! -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Ancient Greeks in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, February 17 2007 08:12
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In response to moonear, I think we probably don't disagree much. I read ancient history kind of as a Gallup poll: accurate to within such-and-such percentage, 19 times out of 20. There's always a small but non-negligible chance that the historians' picture is grossly wrong. Otherwise, they always have some margin of error. And this margin of error is almost always far larger than we can expect for modern journalism. So there's a point at which it just isn't worth thinking too hard about some historical questions, because the data just won't supply a secure enough premise. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Ancient Greeks in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, February 17 2007 08:04
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No, it's not solid at all. It has very few footnotes, for its length, and the ones that are present come at the ends of long series of assertions, making it difficult to tell how much of what has been asserted is really vouched for by the cited source. The fact that the article includes virtually no assessment of the accuracy of its many detailed descriptions is already rather damning. According to the notes that are there, the main source is Herodotus. If in fact I give the Wikipedia writer the benefit of assuming that the extensive details presented all come from Herodotus, we are still left with the fact that Herodotus's reliability, at least in matters of such detail, is extremely questionable. Google 'reliability of Herodotus', and you can begin to track an enormous academic debate. And on evolution and such: this was Alorael's point, that a couple of thousand years are simply not long enough for natural selection to have eliminated any superb ancient physique. History is an evolutionary eyeblink. [ Saturday, February 17, 2007 08:15: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Northwest corner of "The Eye's Road" in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, February 17 2007 07:46
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That would be nice, but nope. That area is just a little camp, in which you can meet some old friends from the Fens, if you did right by them. If you didn't, they won't be there, and you won't be able to get there. And, welcome to the boards! [ Saturday, February 17, 2007 07:47: 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 Ancient Greeks in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, February 17 2007 06:18
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Once again: how the heck do you know this? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Ancient Greeks in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, February 16 2007 14:01
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quote:This was supposed to be genuine respect for your efforts to maintain your position against superior numbers. quote:The accounts of Leonidas's body being mutilated are plausible, but not completely solid, because atrocity stories in wartime are often exaggerated as propaganda. Since we have no memoirs from Xerxes, though, we have no idea why such a mutilation may have occurred. It could have been out of disgust at how easy it had been to mow down the legendary Spartans with archery. We are told that Leonidas had been awfully rude to Xerxes. Maybe Xerxes was just being a xerk. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Ancient Greeks in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, February 16 2007 10:22
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quote:I have to give Kyrek credit for holding off up to 2 million opponents in this argument. But you still can't build a solid mountain of evidence by piling up sand. In this case, our evidence for how many Persians were present at Thermopylae, how many Greeks, and just what they did, remains weak. The gist of the legend is probably true, but we have nowhere near a precise enough idea of what happened to use this battle as evidence for incredible ancient stamina. For all we know -- in fact, this would be the best guess -- most of the three-days' battle consisted of standing around waiting for something to happen. I do grant the point that congruence of many small pieces of evidence can build a much greater collective strength. And by careful collection of evidence, even ancient history can arrive at some probable facts. But you have to be awfully careful not to cherry pick your small pieces of evidence; and you have to be awfully careful that their apparent congruence is not simply an artifact of interpretation that is based on a presupposed theory. I have read perhaps a dozen or two general-reader-type books on various bits of ancient history. And I have also read a couple of much more technical treatises. And it was quite an eye-opener, the way the general-reader books confidently laid down the law, but the really expert books were mostly about the enormous range of conflicting conclusions drawn from the meagre evidence, and the tentative and approximate nature of the best available guesses at the time of writing. My coffee table book would tell me that Trajan's Rome had a population of two million; my academic tome devoted a chapter to weighing the rival claims for figures ranging from 250,000 to 4 million. So my impression is that real ancient historians are not at all confident in their conclusions, except within quite broad limits. Even with that caveat of broad limits, ancient history is still fascinating stuff. I don't doubt that the ancient Greeks rowed their triremes very well. What I doubt very much is that we know their triremes' typical speed to within a small enough margin of uncertainty that we can say, with any confidence, that they rowed them faster than we could today. We're talking a 30% discrepancy folks. Given the ancient technologies for measuring time and distance, I wouldn't trust any ancient measurement of speed or duration to within such a margin. And this is where it's not a symmetric situation, in which I need to advance evidence for my skepticism. Nobody said the search for truth had to be a fair game. Thousands of ancient ships once existed; we have a fragment of one. Thousands of ancient sailors sailed; we have half a dozen manuscripts that describe their doings, preserved in copies made centuries afterwards. It's like trying to reconstruct a Brontosaurus from a handful of teeth and vertebrae. The skeptic has a grossly unfair, built-in advantage. If you want to overcome that advantage, you have to do more than just form a best guess. You have to present substantial evidence for how accurate your guess is likely to be, to the point of being able to put quantitative limits on how much it could plausibly be wrong by. In physics one works at least as hard to assess one's accuracy quantitatively, as to determine one's best value for a figure. It's no fault of historians that they can't get their error bars as small as ours, but they have the same obligation to give serious thought to just how big they are. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Jeff linked to on Slashdot in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, February 16 2007 02:43
Profile
People like getting stronger. Maybe it's some leftover childhood instinct, about wanting to get big enough to tie our own shoes and stay up past 8 pm. So level progression is the caffeine in the RPG coffee. Which is fine if you have a good story, in which level progression makes sense, and in which you achieve your level progression by doing interesting things. A string of good stories within a great big story, with steady power progression, makes people happy. What stinks is for lazy designers to hook people into lousy, tedious stories, using nothing but the levelling addiction. This is why I so much wish Jeff had done more in his Geneforge games to provide a plot-related reason for how and why your character increases in power. His games have a pretty low tedium factor, for me. But he could have really punted the whole 'grind your way to godhood' thing in G4, by making it a key plot point that your adventures are bringing out the latent effects of the Geneforge. The progression from weakness to strength is not a problem in RPGs; it's the decoupling of this feature from a good story that makes RPGs seem awful. Geneforge offers a great opportunity to reunify the story and the growth fantasy, and I hope Jeff eventually takes it up. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |