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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| Just say no in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, July 22 2005 16:56
Profile
In this instance the '/' is a phoneme. Probably needle\ferrets exist as well. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Who plays pencil and paper roleplaying games? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, July 22 2005 06:39
Profile
In a rush of nostalgia I failed to answer the original questions. I made up my own campaign setting, whole hog. As I said I played modified AD&D. I used the classic mix of platonic dice plus d10s, but I liked d20s best because they rolled well. I didn't buy any commerical products after the first few years, and just did everything from scratch instead. I was always a DM and my longest campaign lasted about 15 years if you count the career of the longest-serving character in the party, or about 5 years if you count the longest continuously connected plot. Initially my parties would play every two or three weeks for about six hours, but as we got older this shifted into playing every four to six months for about 48 hours, with breaks for meals and sleep. I had parties as small as two players and as large as 18, but I found that 4 to 8 was the best range, with six about ideal. -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Who plays pencil and paper roleplaying games? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Friday, July 22 2005 06:20
Profile
Yeah, one of the greatest things about RPGs is the way chance generates cool stories. My youngest brother's character somehow kept being the one who failed his save whenever some evil force tried to possess party members. (This wasn't a particular focus of the campaign, but we ran for years and it came up from time to time.) It got to the point that whenever some possession started going down, everyone turned on him as a matter of course. Then finally, in the stronghold of the Inquisition, they met an evil-cloud-entity-thing, and everyone was possessed except him. I forget how he got them all out of it, except that it was hair-raising, but after that the curse, or meta-curse, seemed to be broken. -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The arrow of time in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, July 22 2005 06:08
Profile
Yogurt stirring is a perfectly good instance of irreversibility. Spin echo is a classic example of how subtle irreversibility can be. It is important to realize, though, that the physics of fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt is actually outrageously more complicated than that of spin echoes. The highest-tech experiments are very often used to create the simplest physical systems. So Incredibly Sad is quite right that microphysics does not actually seem to be invariant under time reversal; you'd need to reverse space and charge as well. But the violation of T is an extremely tiny effect involving the nuclear forces, and it is very hard to see how it could possibly be the driving agent for the irreversibility in yogurt cups. So the working assumption is that the interesting kind of irreversibility is an emergent property of macroscopic systems governed by reversible microphysics. If only we knew what that meant. Zeviz, my statement about equal numbers of states is exact, apart from the issue just raised by SIS. Your point about temperature is true, but temperature is not a microphysical parameter. Your observation that all logs in a hot enough room will flash, but hot ashes won't unburn, is really just the same as my observation that states with 'ashes about to unburn' are an incredibly small fraction of states with ashes. "Ashes at temperature T" means "a typical state with ashes and total energy E(T)". -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Were we prepared? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, July 22 2005 05:49
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The problem with talking about evidence for divine acts is that making wide enough allowances for the ability of omnipotence to hide itself undermines the whole notion of evidence. Logically the point is irreproachable; practically, it makes the whole discussion pointless. Everything cuts both ways. A scriptural text that seems bizarre can be evidence that the Bible is unreliable, or evidence that it is undistorted by redaction. A story that seems to have a profound moral can be evidence of divine inspiration, or an indication that the story was invented to illustrate a point. The only thing that seems unambiguous to me is wisdom. Unverifiable accounts of events are always open to doubt, but a profound idea is a profound idea. I have found some ideas I consider profound in the Bhagavad Gita, in the Koran, and in various secular and scientific texts; but to me there have been more in the Bible. Possibly that's just because I was raised to look for them there. What constitutes a profound idea is of course pretty subjective; deciding that something is profound is already the next thing to religious faith. To me it seems to be more an exercise in pattern recognition than in logic. Jesus himself addressed these issues, it seems, because the NT gospels frequently record him complaining about people's demand for miracles as demonstrations of authority. They consistently show him as a very reluctant miracle-worker, who seems to have felt that miracles were a great obstacle to real faith. -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Huzzah in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, July 22 2005 05:29
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*Reaches for another bottle* -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Who plays pencil and paper roleplaying games? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Friday, July 22 2005 05:25
Profile
I haven't played in ten years, alas. I was always DM, and the few times I tried playing instead, it was too hard to adjust: I'd either get away with murder, or get stomped for things that I would have rewarded. But as Toast says, DMing is horribly time consuming. It used to take me something like four hours -- or was it six? -- to prepare enough stuff for one hour of playing. That's as bad as lecturing at a university. I worked from a base of AD&D -- the first D&D version to come out in hardcover. Over the years I had incorporated a few modifications that we liked. As time went by, it got more fluid, and I would tend to just make up monsters, items and spells a lot of the time. I would basically decide separately what kind of monster would be cool, and what stats it should have. If player character humans could be tougher than brontosaurs, then an especially tough ogre might have ten hit dice and wear plate armor. The game also did get harder for the players, because their characters reached high levels -- after about 15 years somebody hit 15th level -- and it actually got to be a major technical challenge to choose optimally from all the tactical options. On the other hand, I assumed that the Pontifex of Ahriman would have to be not just a 17th level evil high priest, but also pretty smart, to have risen that high in a ruthless cult. With my long hours of preparation, my villains were generally pretty cunning, and the players had to be at the tops of their games to survive. The last game we tried to play, everyone was rusty, and they all died. It's a young person's game, because you need a lot of time. -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Official Election Final Round Voting in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, July 22 2005 05:04
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quote:At least you can say that. The rest of us are being watched under. -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Would you rather play Homeland or... in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, July 22 2005 04:58
Profile
Need-to-know again, I'm afraid, Alorael. If we were meant to know what we were agreeing to, our implants would have told us. If you succeed, feel free to edit my first post to re-translate the subject. [ Friday, July 22, 2005 06:52: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Scent of new-mown hay in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Friday, July 22 2005 04:54
Profile
The website of these linguists at Maine explains that deaf children raised in hearing environments develop 'homesign' proto-languages, and thus do learn to communicate, with varying degrees of effectiveness. I've only ever heard of two cases where 'wolf children' were studied, and one was a century ago or so. In the second case the term is a misnomer, but the point is that a girl was essentially raised in solitary confinement to the age of twelve or so, and never learned language. Since situations like this amount to monstrous child abuse, there is little data. (The case of this poor girl was not an experiment! Her father was a monster, and she was removed from his custody once she was discovered.) I used to know more about all these things, but it has faded to the point where I'd be googling the same as anyone else, so I'll shut up. [ Friday, July 22, 2005 06:26: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Scent of new-mown hay in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Thursday, July 21 2005 18:22
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One lone deaf child, growing up without any instruction in communication, will be lucky to learn to communicate at all. The known cases of 'wolf children' raised without language weren't deaf, but they never learned to speak as adults at even a childish level. A community of deaf children, growing up without anyone to teach them to communicate, spontaneously develops a new sign language. One appeared this way in Guatemala something like ten years ago. It made the careers of the lucky students doing their linguistics PhDs on it. Sign languages are fully fledged human languages, with grammatical structures that fit fine in current linguistic theory. They bear no relation to the spoken languages of the regions where they are used. Kelandon is right: it was Nicaragua, not Guatemala. [ Friday, July 22, 2005 04:27: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Would you rather play Homeland or... in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Thursday, July 21 2005 18:09
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It wasn't easy for me to get that translation. I had just enough actual German of my own to recognize that Babelfish's 'gerechtes sagen ja' didn't sound quite right. (I believe it would be, roughly, 'the righteous agree'.) Fortunately the internet is so full of actual German that you can type rough guesses into Google and see whether any real German speaker has ever said them. [ Thursday, July 21, 2005 18:12: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Huzzah in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Thursday, July 21 2005 17:59
Profile
That you painstakingly photoshopped it, of course, because not even among 6 billion humans was there a ready-made ferret wedding image. Please? EDIT: AAGGAHHH! It's the very first hit! *Takes to drink* [ Thursday, July 21, 2005 18:00: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Were we prepared? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Thursday, July 21 2005 17:52
Profile
Actually it would be pretty hard to predict solar eclipses, because the moon only just covers the sun from Earth, so it has to hit close to dead-on, and the orbit of the moon is nasty, because the moon is strongly affected by both the Earth and the sun. There's a simple sort of a cycle saying how often the possibility of an eclipse comes up, but saying whether or not one will actually occur, let alone be visible from a given location, is just beyond ancient computation. It's no joke today. Anyway, I don't know of any religious claims that have ever been based on predictions of solar eclipses. For large-scale Biblical miracles, I think you've got your Red Sea (or Sea of Reeds?), your walls of Jericho, a sun stopping for Joshua, and a shadow moving backward for Isaiah (I think?). On the Christian side there's one episode of mid-day darkness, a storm blowing out quickly, and a modest tremor. These are either essentially impossible, or miraculous only in timing. The sun stopping would leave collossal evidence, since arresting the rotation of the Earth is only the least catastrophic way of doing it. That would have produced global tsunamis. It would probably also have left visible damage to fragile ancient mineral formations in caves. At least as disturbing, to faith in the literal accuracy of this purported miracle, is the fact that the Bible itself cites another book, now lost, as an authority for the story: it makes it sound suspiciously second-hand. The value of pi implicit in the two Biblical descriptions of Solomon's big golden bowl is 3.0. No biggie if you figure they rounded to one figure, or if you allow that the bowl wasn't really all that round, or that they measured an outer diameter and inner perimeter of a thick bowl ... In other words, no problem at all if you expect a reasonable human account from that period, huge problem if you want literal inerrancy unto geometric detail. The coolest claim I've heard about this, though, is one I'd love to hear assessed by a rabbi. I was told once that the two scriptural descriptions of that same bowl differ in one word, and that the numerical values of the two alternative words are 355 and 113. Noo-noo noo-noo ... unless this is hooey, of course. -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Were we prepared? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Thursday, July 21 2005 14:05
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I think it depends how simplistically you play the Bible-versus-archaeology game. There's lots of evidence against literal six day creation, global flood, or Joshua stopping the sun. There's decent amounts of evidence for creation of the universe ex nihilo, epochal floods in the Middle East, and walls collapsing at Jericho (several times in its history, I understand). As odds-on favorite contender for most remarkable human document of all time, the Bible stands alone. As literally inerrant supernatural oracle, it doesn't stand. Whether you accept it as an indirect communication from the ultimate transhuman intelligence seems to me to be quite independent of this last issue, though. A creator of the universe would surely be at least as sophisticated as the subtlest human authors. If the Bible is a divine revelation, the option not to have it appear on titanium plates cast down from the sky already seems to indicate a subtle approach. EDIT: But Salmon, the God of the monotheistic religions is supposed to be the proprietor of natural law. A tidal surge that came at just the right time could still be the hand of God, even if no violations of natural law were involved at all. [ Thursday, July 21, 2005 14:08: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Huzzah in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Thursday, July 21 2005 13:44
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Please don't tell us that you could get that just by typing 'ferret wedding' into Google Image. :eek: -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Official Election Final Round Voting in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, July 21 2005 09:01
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"Potatoe" was wrong but "potatoes" is right. What I like is the star that shines right through the dark part of the moon -- clearly it's really just a marker in honor of the recent anniversary of the first landing. I don't want an overtime election, though. Maybe we can have trial by single combat, or by seeing which candidate floats? [ Thursday, July 21, 2005 09:04: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Official Election Final Round Voting in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Thursday, July 21 2005 07:12
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Perhaps if there's a tie it can be settled with penalty kicks. -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Avernum 4 Complete Wish List in The Avernum Trilogy | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, July 21 2005 05:50
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Aw, and I thought Mortimer had us covered brilliantly. Well, maybe A4 will include haggis as a substitute for those endless mushrooms, and then the impartial judgement of history will absolve us. Until then, no more irrelevance. Irrelevance never forget. [ Thursday, July 21, 2005 05:53: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Just say no in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Thursday, July 21 2005 05:45
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No wonder my daughter won't eat beans. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The arrow of time in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, July 21 2005 04:38
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Yes, you could frame the question as, "Why is the set of typical initial conditions not invariant under time reversal?". It is conceivable -- though I wouldn't bet a nickel -- that other eras or regions have different arrows of time. But this doesn't make the arrow of time we observe any less interesting. The preponderance of probability against the 'unburning ash' states, in our observations, is far too overwhelming to write off our arrow of time as a fluctuation. I do want an explanation, but for starters I'll settle for anything that sheds some more light. I don't think lack of experience with alternatives is an insurmountable barrier. Where the mind's eye is blind we can feel our way with math. The anthropic principle is a cop-out, of course. It only makes sense if you postulate an enormous number of universes, so that the occurrence of our peculiar one among them ceases to surprise; and that doesn't exactly seem like economy of premisses. Moreover, we don't understand how consciousness depends on an arrow of time. We're just conjecturing that it relies on processes that are subject to the thermodynamic arrow of time. So I don't see that we can reduce the thermodynamic arrow to the psychological one in the first place. -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Just say no in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Thursday, July 21 2005 04:23
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Maybe this is just the implants talking, but I've heard a rumor they're experimenting with superstring beans: six more directions from which to backstab! -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Scent of new-mown hay in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Thursday, July 21 2005 04:21
Profile
Yeah, it's an idea that easily wobbles between platitude and absurdity, with the sweet spot of profundity still elusive. FWIW I agree with Kelandon that language can make some thoughts easier or harder. If you really need to frame a certain thought, I'm sure you can do it in any language; but perhaps in one language the thought would just strike you like Newton's mythical apple. I mean, I used to like trying to write sonnets just because the desperate hunt for rhymes would sometimes lead me to new thoughts. So sometimes the idiosyncrasies of a given language can drive content. Jack Vance wrote a decent enough novel about Sapir-Whorf at the cultural level, called The Languages of Pao. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Avernum 4 Complete Wish List in The Avernum Trilogy | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, July 20 2005 17:54
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That was the other problem with my Scottish-made kilt: it was very light weight. The army-issue kilts are indeed very heavy, but I never actually wore one in winter. Officers were expected to buy their own, thus my light, bright variant. I couldn't afford to replace it. I didn't complain in the summer, and in the winter I walked briskly to the armory. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Favorite Movie in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, July 20 2005 17:47
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I have a bipolar taste in movies. Movies that are trying to be great and, in my view, fail even slightly, become despised. Movies that make no pretenses are indulged. Thus I like Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. You've got to respect a guy who doesn't remotely pretend to be an actor. I also don't see many movies. I was tremendously impressed by Ran. It was more King Lear than King Lear. I liked Amadeus. American Beauty was okay. The Usual Suspects was sort of wasted on me, because I had once run a D&D sequence with such a similar set-up that I had Kaiser Soze pegged within the first half hour. Lost in Translation was very good; which is to say that Bill Murray was great. I missed where he went from quick-talking ham into serious actor, but somewhere he did. I generally like CGI movies. The Incredibles was very good. Spiderman 2 was good. I usually avoid serious movies, unless my wife hauls me to one. If I start feeling like a book is coming on too strong, I can put it down, but I don't want to feel trapped in a theater by a film that is trying to disturb me. -------------------- It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |