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 |
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| Who are you? and What's your IQ? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, June 9 2005 17:16
Profile
Hmmm. Breadth would seem to be a necessary condition for what I'm after, but not a sufficient one. Though maybe all that's missing is the awareness of exercising a common faculty across the broad range of subjects. I mean, it would be possible to take a liberal arts education as a garage sale of factoids. Usually people do eventually come to some synergistic reflection on the whole; but the system doesn't explicitly encourage this, at least not as much as I think it should. -------------------- 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 |
| WARNING : Do Not Read EraserHead's Topic, Apology, or Hello Topics - Nasty Images in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, June 9 2005 17:07
Profile
He is forgotten in the thread that bears his name. So mote it be! -------------------- 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 |
| RWG in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, June 9 2005 17:01
Profile
Perhaps he received a healthy advance on Galactic Core royalties, and is lying low to avoid having to pay it back. Perhaps he is nervously checking this very thread every day, to make sure that spidwebbers still don't have a clear bead on him. A clear bead is about what his royalties ought to have been worth. [ Sunday, June 12, 2005 18:34: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| What are you addicted to? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, June 9 2005 12:56
Profile
Yeah, the Dutch have versions of those horrible salty-sour balls too. I tried one once, and it was by no means less abominable than it sounds. [ Thursday, June 09, 2005 12:57: 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 |
| RWG in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, June 9 2005 12:02
Profile
Goodness, I don't want to go down in history as the person who introduced fruitless wrangling to these boards. I retract my suggestion! -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| What are you addicted to? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, June 9 2005 11:46
Profile
Yeah, the anise liquors do go cloudy if you add water. Thing is, that's how they're traditionally consumed, at least for the ones I've tried, so it's not a matter of detecting adulteration. And if the idea is to gauge the proportion of added water, I'd have thought taste would do just as well, regardless of the flavor; so why pick anise? -------------------- 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 |
| WARNING : Do Not Read EraserHead's Topic, Apology, or Hello Topics - Nasty Images in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, June 9 2005 11:38
Profile
The funny thing about default reasoning is that it seems to be quite hard to get it to work reliably. The classic example of this problem was noticed in a candidate model that basically assumed you should minimize the number of 'unusual' things that you expect to happen. (It was, of course, more formal than that; but that's the gist of it, and anyway it's all I remember of it.) Sounds like a promising approach to me. The nub is obviously defining 'unusual', but you can at least get started by saying that any kind of change is by default unusual. Then some folks at Yale (okay, Yale does have its moments) noticed the following. Suppose your situation is that there is a victim to be shot, you have a thing called a gun, and your options for action are load, unload, wait, and shoot. The idea is to use default reasoning to anticipate whether the victim will die as a result of your actions, without having to explain anything about how guns work. It turned out to be pretty easy to get default reasoning to conclude that if you do Load, then Shoot, the victim ends up dead, but survives if you try Load, Unload, Shoot. But what if you do Load, then Wait, then Shoot? The 'minimize anomalies' scheme turned out to be just as happy to conclude that the victim would be fine after this, because it was no more anomalous for the gun to spontaneously unload while you waited, than for the victim to die. This is called the "Yale Shooting Problem", and I understand that it is quite a bad problem. Essentially the YSP shows that default reasoning runs into problems even before you have to deal with actual events: DR has a hard enough time just being right about what it means for nothing to happen. -------------------- 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 |
| What are you addicted to? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, June 9 2005 07:26
Profile
Hey, what is this thing so many Europeans have for anise? It's the flavor of a whole lot of traditional liquors and sweets. I just don't see the attraction. It's not a horrible flavor, just not something I'd want to celebrate so much, you know? My guess is that anise was one of the first non-horrible flavors that could be concentrated into strong-flavored food and drink. That doesn't make it the best. And while I'm ranting about the European palate, why do so many Europeans think that hazelnut is a peer to chocolate? Again, it's fine stuff; but it's hardly chocolate. And these people do know chocolate, for Pete's sake. If I had to restrict myself to all European or all American food and drink for the rest of my life, I'd go European in a heartbeat and never look back. It is the generally far superior level of quality in European comestibles that makes these few little quirks so puzzling to 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 |
| LHS. in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, June 9 2005 07:18
Profile
Folks, if you look through the Lighthouse School website mentioned above, it's pretty clear that one of this school's missions is to provide training for kids with severe developmental problems. From the fact that Charles V has been around here so long and written coherent posts, it's obvious that not all the LHS students are in that category. But think about it. Kids with serious intellectual handicaps or psychiatric conditions are still kids. They need education. They hit puberty and grow big and strong. They may need a specially adapted education. None of which is to say that private goon squads can beat kids in padded rooms, no matter who the kids are. It could be that this place is out of hand, and if so the special problems of some of its students would only make that a worse crime. It's just that comparisons with military academies are missing the point here. -------------------- 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 |
| WARNING : Do Not Read EraserHead's Topic, Apology, or Hello Topics - Nasty Images in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, June 9 2005 06:37
Profile
Here in fact is a tremendously profound problem. It is part of what is known in AI as the 'frame problem'. As a child, Upright Stranger did not think that goatse existed. In effect this was an implicit belief that goatse did not exist. It is this implicit belief which recently died. The profundity of the frame problem lies in the difficulty of explaining just what is meant by that 'in effect'. In trying to build an artificial intelligence, one apparently faces the insurmountable task of specifying the enormous body of information which humans carry around as implicit belief. This is clearly impossible, yet human intelligence cannot be qualitatively different from artificial intelligence (so the assumption goes), so presumably there is a workaround, and humans have found it. One theory is that the workaround is a system of default reasoning -- an algorithm for generating default answers to any question, without even anticipating what kinds of questions might be asked. Thus we are to suppose that Upright Stranger held no explicit childhood beliefs about goatse, but did hold a default reasoning algorithm which would have supplied the answer No if 'Does goatse exist?' had ever arisen as a question. This seems a very fair model for implicit knowledge, at least to me. But unfortunately there seem to be grave and surprising difficulties in defining such default reasoning algorithms. Here, however, we approach the very modest limits of my own knowledge about this issue. To discuss it much further, I would have to invoke default reasoning myself. -------------------- 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 |
| RWG in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, June 9 2005 06:15
Profile
Somebody should put a 'whatever happened to Richard White?' subplot into a BoA scenario. We would then have a canonical answer to this question. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Artila Eye in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, June 9 2005 06:13
Profile
Shaper society has a peculiar kind of flat tax. Everything anyone owns above 30K is instantly confiscated and used to fund that fine universal health care system that puts scissors, scalpels and bolts of cloth in every zone. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The diferent factions *POSSIBLE SPOILERS* in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, June 8 2005 16:46
Profile
quote:I knew they were pinkos, whining for rights all the time like that. [ Wednesday, June 08, 2005 18:09: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| What do YOU want to see in G4? in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, June 8 2005 16:43
Profile
Ah, romance in Geneforge IV. Two young creations meet in the steaming swamps and fall in love. The cruel Shapers who control them forbid their union, on the senseless grounds that a mating of Submission Vlish and Rabid Roamer could bring no good. Plot complications build, alarums and excursions, and in the fifth act everybody gets re-absorbed. [ Wednesday, June 08, 2005 16:51: 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 diferent factions *POSSIBLE SPOILERS* in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, June 8 2005 16:37
Profile
There are only two: the Shaper loyalists with whom you nominally begin, and the rebels, who will contact you soon and several times through the game. You can postpone deciding for a long time, but the sooner you decide, the better: there is no reward for sitting on the fence in G3. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Optimal Agent in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, June 8 2005 16:33
Profile
The point isn't so much that the melee Agent would be a weak Guardian, but that she would be so much like a Guardian that you might as well play a real Guardian instead. Compensating for your less effective melee attacks with Daze may well be effective, but it isn't as much fun as slugging it out with a live opponent, and may the best entity win. A possibly crucial factor left out, in the otherwise excellent 'melee Agent' analysis of the Agent vs. Guardian thread, was the Guardian's greater Health for the same Endurance. I'd like to see this factored in. Even apart from this, I'm not sure the differences that were pointed out - and which I agree are right - are really so small. As percentages of the stats typical of an end-game melee Guardian, they would be quite appreciable; and earlier in the game they would be larger still, proportionally. Plus, the difference between taking down an enemy in n swings or (n+1) can often be dramatic, so the practical consequences of a modest skill difference might be larger than you'd think from just staring at the raw numbers. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Optimal Agent in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, June 8 2005 15:13
Profile
It's really just Speed that is the one key trick for Agents. With all those AP, and high quick action, you can attack infinitely many times in a row, as long as there's a corner to duck around. Everything else is just a matter of speeding up the process of chewing down the enemies, a process that Speed makes inevitable, because they never get to react. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| WARNING : Do Not Read EraserHead's Topic, Apology, or Hello Topics - Nasty Images in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, June 8 2005 14:49
Profile
Nobody dies of old age; eventually it is the only thing that keeps you alive. It's just starting to work early for TM. -------------------- 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 |
| Artila Eye in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, June 8 2005 14:34
Profile
The main advantage of my last Guardian's obstinate purism was that I didn't have to worry about scrounging money to pay those 'trainers', who are really just foul, tempting fiends that want to forge your genes! So I could finally stop picking up every bolt of cloth and suit of quicksilver plate I found, and be free! On the other hand, I had to take several trips back and forth to the monastery island just to haul in all the stuff I needed for my assault on the Caves. I left the place with burnt-out Inferno Wands scattered like cigarette butts in an airport smoking area. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The artifacts (SPOILERS) in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, June 8 2005 14:18
Profile
It would be an honor, of course: go ahead! Somebody else posted a nice summary of all the artifact powers and features a while back, too; that would be a good complement. And of course Drakefyre started us off with his Recipes thread. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Optimal Agent in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, June 8 2005 14:11
Profile
Delicious Vlish is pretty much the expert on Agents, but I prefer the battle magic emphasis for mine. I like blasting things more than just scaring or controlling or confusing them. For best all-round effectiveness, as opposed to iron-man-like challenges, I think you've got to go for Strong Daze and you've got to go for Speed. Past this I don't think you really need more blessing or mental magic. Put everything else into battle magic and spellcraft, and enjoy zapping everything. You also need to keep up your Quick Action so that you can guarantee to get the drop on things, and raise your Intelligence to keep your Energy up. Nothing else really matters, though some leadership and mechanics can be convenient. That having been said I know that the mental magic Agent also works, and DV can tell you more. I've never heard of anyone trying a blessing-focused Agent. In principle I guess it could work, but I think it would be too much like playing a pseudo-Guardian. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| curious about something in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, June 8 2005 10:34
Profile
Whether or not Ghaldring will appear in the Ashen Isles in person is explained clearly at a couple of stages in the game. Ask about him when you can and you'll find out. Several other characters are unkillable at various stages of the game. In most cases, this is just to make sure that they get to accomplish certain things before dying, and they become killable again soon. What you can do in the school is lock Hoge in his own bedroom, then kill his Battle Alpha. Doing so turns the whole darn school hostile, including the Servant Mind and Alwan. And if you then decide to open the bedroom door a crack, to see what Hoge has been doing in there all this time, Whoosh. Hostile doesn't begin to describe Senor Hoge at this point. It's like the bedroom-locking and creation-killing also makes him realize that YOU were the son-of-a-clawbug apprentice who put the demon bile in his orange juice last term. All that for a lousy 120 XP: it ain't worth it, my friends. [ Wednesday, June 08, 2005 10:45: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| What are you addicted to? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, June 8 2005 09:34
Profile
Since "ignoramus" is a verb in Latin — it means "we don't know" — the correct plural should not be "ignorami". As used in English, this word is actually a reference to a 1615 play, in which it is the name of a very ignorant character. So "ignoramuses" is the most reasonable plural form, and arguably the only correct one. [Okay, I didn't know this myself until just now; all I actually knew is that naive Latin and Greek plurals are often wrong, so there might be a chance to see Thuryl hoist with his own petard. And as it turns out, paydirt.] -------------------- 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 |
| Have You Ever Used Alorael's Signature in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, June 8 2005 09:21
Profile
Never have, but hmmm, what would it be like? — Could do it. Not gonna. Wouldn't be prudent. Not at this juncture. -------------------- 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 |
| WARNING : Do Not Read EraserHead's Topic, Apology, or Hello Topics - Nasty Images in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, June 7 2005 14:11
Profile
It has no horrible images, but if you were worried about not checking it because you might miss something interesting: No Fear. Wow, Wikipedia.org has gotten really good. I just got caught up on all the internet shock images, without ever having to see anything traumatizing. That's an information resource Claude Shannon never thought of. It doesn't seem long ago that Wikipedia was a very haphazard collection of pages, mostly just soliciting content. Now it's entering the Googolic information heaven. Speaking of which, though, Google itself isn't quite what it used to be, I'm finding. I remember when it didn't really seem much better than the many other search engines, then when it suddenly took off, and gave you what you most wanted as the first page almost all the time. Well, lately I've been having to click through a few Google pages. Things fall apart. -------------------- 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 |