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 |
|---|---|
| Xylgham udwlnit skretcko!1!! in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Wednesday, April 26 2006 01:24
Profile
Yep. Zelazny's darkest book, a sort of outlier in his oeuvre. Somehow undeniably a minor work, but strangely memorable. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| International Bad Pun Day in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Wednesday, April 26 2006 01:09
Profile
A rope wants a drink, but the sign on the bar door says 'No Ropes'. So he tangles himself into a head-shaped snarl and pulls his threads so they stick out like hair. Then he rolls in, hops onto a stool and demands a beer. The suspicious bartender asks, "Are you a rope?" "I'm afraid not." -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Backyard Mythbusters in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Wednesday, April 26 2006 00:59
Profile
One day my brother and I built a trebuchet on the beach near our cottage. Its first shot landed about 1 foot in front of the thing's front legs. After improvements we had it throwing fist-sized stones perhaps 100 meters, maybe a bit more. Our accuracy did not suffice to hit a one meter sandcastle, after many attempts. Eventually we built a new target sandcastle in the middle of the trebuchet's beaten zone, and got a couple of glancing hits. Our biggest trouble was that every shot made the whole structure buck and rear out of the sand, so that it had to be repositioned and re-dug-in every few launches. Our continual efforts to lock the structure more firmly into the ground culminated just as evening approached. With big spikes pounded into the bases of the legs, weighted under heavy rocks and buried deep in the sand, we were sure that we had finally made a stable firing platform. We fired, and it was a great shot. But it was our last. Without the freedom to jerk itself out of the sand, our trebuchet could not handle the shock of firing. The main throwing arm broke. Our device had been improved to death. We looked at each other solemnly, and went in to supper. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| "Policing" ourselves? in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Tuesday, April 25 2006 07:29
Profile
String theory is trying to make testable predictions. So far it has not succeeded, but it does differ from doctrines which accept untestability as a goal. String theory is a scientific failure (so far), but it is scientific. General relativity, by the way, does explain what gravity is, in a way that Newtonian gravitation does not. Einsteinian gravity is the geometry of spacetime: time runs slower the closer you are to a massive object. And this is a true reduction, and not just a begging of the question, Why does time run slower? Time passes, everywhere, and this we have always known. Einstein tells us to admit the possibility that it passes differently in different places. Why not? Once the prospect of variable time flow is raised, we realize that our naive assumption that time marches everywhere in lockstep was simply arbitrary and unwarranted. So what would happen then, we ask, if time did flow differently in different places? This question can be answered, without making any additional assumptions, and the answer is that the effects would be exactly those that in Newton's day we called gravity. The beautiful conclusion, then, is that gravity IS differential time flow. We always had spacetime geometry, though before we thought it was trivial; and before we also had gravitational force. After Einstein, instead of these two things, we have only one. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Earth Day (belated) in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Tuesday, April 25 2006 06:02
Profile
Nuke, Nuke, Nuke Nuke for Earth, Nuke, Nuke ... -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| I have to change Signature? in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Tuesday, April 25 2006 05:59
Profile
quote:Now that I actually read it and think about it for a moment, which I never did when it was in your signature, I agree. Would you perhaps be able to supply the original, too? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A Few Advance Notes On Geneforge 4 in Geneforge Series | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Tuesday, April 25 2006 03:27
Profile
An Awakened Servile is just one in whom the deep instinct to serve the Shapers has been lulled into a restless sleep. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Stereotypically Yours in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Monday, April 24 2006 23:59
Profile
I think we create our own stereotypes here, for instance by posting mostly when we are in certain moods. If the image people have here is only a minor facet of themselves, that's probably the image they choose to present. Thus, I'm quite willing to believe that people aren't really as they are thought to be on Spidweb, but I'm unsympathetic to claims of misrepresentation. For bad press here, I blame the victims. Like practically everything, this cuts both ways. A webboard is an easy place to present a kinder and better informed image than one can in real life. Perhaps the nicest people here are really horrible people, faking. Usually the first hint of this is poor punctuation. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Power Corrupts in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Monday, April 24 2006 12:40
Profile
The idea of the ontological argument is that you can imagine some great but non-existent being, but then imagine an exactly similar being which exists. The second one is clearly greater. So whatever other good qualities God should have, existence must be added to ensure maximum greatness. Kant's objection as I understand it is to present the concept of the greatest conceivable $100 bill (originally some other currency, talers I think). He further specifies, and I can't help but feel he is right in this, that a bill which is in my wallet is greater than one which is not. Therefore there must be a $100 bill there. *checks Rats. So much for ontological arguments. Well, that's the catchy part, which I like. Kant elaborated by saying that 'existence is not a predicate', but somehow I've never really been as gripped by this part of his argument. There's a lot of literature on this, and you'd be better off consulting it if you're seriously interested. I'm not a professional in this stuff. I certainly don't want to defend the argument, since I'm quite sure it's bogus; I was just pointing out that its waters are murky. But I think I may be passing the point where demonstrating murkiness is informative. So amusing as it would be to realize a lawyer's dream, and play God's and Devil's advocate simultaneously, I think I'll bow out of defending Anselm any further. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| "Policing" ourselves? in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Monday, April 24 2006 10:44
Profile
You should do 5 in any case. It's good for them. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Xylgham udwlnit skretcko!1!! in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Monday, April 24 2006 05:34
Profile
Great, now I'm going to be dead for a long, long time. Me and my big mouth. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Power Corrupts in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Sunday, April 23 2006 22:41
Profile
Lots of people these days have seen movies about malicious aliens, and probably also watched The Wizard of Oz on TV once or twice. So I'm not sure a booming voice from the sky would really persuade many people to believe whatever the voice said. For the sake of argument, though, suppose that it would. Nobody who really appreciated what 'God' meant could be persuaded by a mere booming voice, so I'd say that the people who believed in the booming voice would not really be believing in God, but only in some primitive booming-voice-god. So this method of revelation would be self-defeating, for a true God. I do believe in God, and not just as an afterthought. I go to church regularly, and pray a fair amount. And in the back of my mind, when I am trying to think of some original approach to the foundations of quantum mechanics, I am wondering what sort of fundamental laws would be characteristic products of God. I don't think I can say, though, that I believe based on evidence which clearly supports the existence of God over non-existence. I think that the available evidence is consistent with Christianity, but I find it consistent with other theories as well. I find Christianity a more appealing theory intrinsically, so in the spirit of Pascal's Wager I plan to bet on it. I end up being pretty contrarian in discussions like these, in that I'll argue against anyone who thinks there is compelling evidence or argument either way. The God in whom I believe doesn't want to be believed in by mistake. I believe everyone ought to respect personal judgements professed as such, either way, especially if they have been arrived at through serious effort. Everyone has to make up their own minds, or do their best to do so. I'm not satisfied with my own state of belief; I try to keep looking for more evidence, either way. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Demonslayer and Sentinels in Avernum 4 | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Sunday, April 23 2006 12:56
Profile
If you stay in combat mode while exploring, the golems don't cluster nearly as thickly. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A Few Advance Notes On Geneforge 4 in Geneforge Series | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Sunday, April 23 2006 12:49
Profile
Well, there's Firebolt. But I sort of like the reloading. Actually, I like the way reloading in G1 and G2 is a separate action, instead of automatic as in G3. I hate the fact that you can only reload by trying to shoot someone with an empty baton, which is silly. But having to count your shots and create tactical opportunities to reload is fun. There's the pucker factor of seeing a fresh wave of rogues approach just as your baton goes X, the anxiety of getting to cover after burning 5 AP in that reloading 'scritch', then the joy of stepping back out with a fresh 6 rounds to blow those rogues away. Which is to say that I'm currently replaying G1 with a missile Guardian on Torment. I never tried this combination before, never used batons much before in fact, and it's fun. Tricky enough to be rewarding, but not so much as to be frustrating. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| "Policing" ourselves? in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Sunday, April 23 2006 12:35
Profile
quote:It's a little known fact that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, published 11 years after his more widely known Special Theory of 1905, is the modern theory of gravity, replacing Newton's Law of Gravitation. When people hear 'gravity' they think 'Newton', but they should really think 'Einstein' just as much, because gravity was the greatest of his (ridiculously many) great achievements. There are no currently measurable deviations from Einstein's theory depending on the type of matter, but a few theorists continue to speculate that there could be, and a few experimentalists periodically check for them, whenever new technology allows more precise checks. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Power Corrupts in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Sunday, April 23 2006 12:09
Profile
quote:We're not talking about Superman, who could prove he was super by leaping a tall building. No event that humans could take in -- not speaking with a booming voice from the sky, stopping the rotation of the Earth, or changing the color of the Sun -- would be beyond the power of an advanced alien race as portrayed on Star Trek. Yet even an entity capable of manipulating galaxies would be nothing compared to the editor of reality, at whose whim every atom and all of space persists from instant to instant. So how could God declare to us God's existence in any convincing way? Your other questions are not about God's existence, but about specific religious doctrines concerning God's nature. quote:If you re-read my post carefully I think you'll find I said none of these things. I'm sorry if I wasn't clear. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Power Corrupts in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Sunday, April 23 2006 11:41
Profile
quote:This particular statistic is one of those third type of lies. In general there are never any reliable ways to compute probabilities this small, because the chances of one the assumptions in the computation being drastically wrong are far higher than the claimed result. And for protein formation in particular, the many-body quantum mechanics of protein formation will remain far beyond the total computational power of humanity for the foreseeable future, so this number can only have been pulled out of somebody's armpit. Finally, the statement is meaningless as presented (and I have seen it presented before in exactly the same way) because it doesn't specify how many random collisions are involved, or of what kinds. (It's like saying the chance of my having a car accident is one in 10,000. In my lifetime? Per year? Per opportunity?) -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Power Corrupts in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Sunday, April 23 2006 11:24
Profile
quote:But is there sufficient evidence to responsibly assert that God does not exist? I don't mean to put words in Alec's mouth either way, but this is all the excuse I need to post some remarks on Ockham's Razor. A common atheistic assumption is that the burden of proof is somehow on theism, but this assumption seems to me to beg the question just as much as any theistic assumption ever does. The predator for which there was no evidence when you pitched your tent can still eat you in the middle of the night, and it's not as though William of Ockham will give his angels charge over you, because you were faithful in not multiplying entities unnecessarily. He's just a dead guy, and however appealing it may be as an aesthetic principle, his Razor can simply be wrong. Moreover it is not easy to avoid adding entities in the big picture. There are many questions to which a theist will answer, "God", but to which many atheists answer, "Chance". Go all formal and rigorous at this point, and you find that the role played by "chance" in atheistic metaphysics is so much like that of "God" in the theistic structure, that it is hard to say why the Razor should only trim God. So, appealing to Ockham's Razor is in my opinion a cop-out, firstly because it is itself an arbitrary premise, and secondly because when it is applied with true rigor it cuts both ways. Finally, Alec's quark analogy is an interesting one to me, because I think my belief in God is probably fairly similar in nature to my belief in quarks. I find the evidence for quarks compelling, but it is evidence that is hard to find and almost as hard to understand. Deep inelastic scattering of protons can't be done in the rec room, and demonstrating quark confinement is still an open problem in the theory of quantum chromodynamics. Quarks were undreamt of fifty years ago; no evidence for them had ever been imagined then, let alone found. Yet practically all the matter we see is (and was) made up of quarks (and virtual gluons, alas — there's the rub). The moral I draw is that finding evidence for real things can be very difficult. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Power Corrupts in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Sunday, April 23 2006 10:24
Profile
quote:Well, it's hard to argue with someone like that. But you know, this is really a tricky topic to argue. For instance: quote:You're just asserting this, when obviously the ontological proof is claiming otherwise. So this is no rebuttal; this is just saying, "No." quote:It was about this stage that I thought I would have had my guy, because I had got him to advance a rule of inference whereby "The concept of an X is the concept of a Y" would imply "X is a Y". A rule of inference like that is ridiculous since, as Kant showed long ago, it would allow me to get rich by postulating definitions of currency. But I never quite bagged the guy, because the argument was being conducted on an e-mail list, and at that point it had gone on for rather a long time. Since everyone was bored with it by then, it just faded out without any declared victor. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Xylgham udwlnit skretcko!1!! in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Sunday, April 23 2006 10:05
Profile
quote:Fantasy literature trivia question: What novel has a character named "The Colonel Who Never Died"? It's a bit of spoiler to reveal that his name changes during the course of the plot. Anyway, since Thuryl is now back, he should die twice this time to make up. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Spidweb Community Xbox Live Party! in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Saturday, April 22 2006 08:23
Profile
This I gotta see. Anyone can bring their villains back from the dead these days, but you're going to have resurrect the entire cast. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Power Corrupts in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Saturday, April 22 2006 08:21
Profile
Genetic evolution might conceivably be relevant, in that I think I remember reading of evidence that Neanderthals buried their dead with valuable items. That might indicate that the primitive roots of religion developed over evolutionarily long time scales. Or it might not. Most religions now extant, however, have undergone most of their development in historical times, in which the human genome has probably not changed appreciably. So if one speaks of religion evolving, one is probably thinking of memes rather than genes. And in this case one should especially consider the 'selfish meme' principle: being useful for humans is only one factor that may help an idea proliferate; anything else that works will do as well. Thus Richard Dawkins considers religion a virus. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Spidweb Community Xbox Live Party! in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Saturday, April 22 2006 06:24
Profile
quote:Hey, after what we all just went through with the Ur-Noob, killing us all like that, I think maybe we should get a bit more pro-active about this sort of thing. Oh, wait, that was just Dikiyoba's script. It seemed so real. Still, though. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Power Corrupts in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Saturday, April 22 2006 01:27
Profile
Much — maybe even all — of the problem of free will is independent of theology. Plenty of atheists doubt the existence of free will. It will take a pretty neat trick for free will to get past the iron laws of physics; if it pulls it off, the same trick will probably work to get by God. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Power Corrupts in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Saturday, April 22 2006 01:21
Profile
quote:It's an interesting idea to attack the definition of greatness, but my own feeling is that this part is probably not the problem. That is, I'd be happy to take 'greatness implies existence' as an axiom, but then I would still feel that the Ontological Proof is invalid — and be hard pressed to specify why. I'm pretty sure Kant was on the right track, but I once failed to uphold his criticism against a philosophy prof who actually believed a version of the Ontological Proof (the one that introduces the concept of 'necessary existence'). Anselm's original argument is obviously pretty naive about precision of definition. This is fair enough for a product of the 11th century, but it has been dressed up since, even by someone as precise as Kurt Gödel. (I don't actually know his version of it, though.) -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |