Re: The Conversion of John C Wright
On 1/5/07, Robert Seeberger [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I guess that is part of what fascinates me about all this. That someone who has the ability to write as well as he does in fiction, will when writing a blog make it so painfully obvious that he has drunk the kool-aid. I don't in any way begrudge him his belief and in general find believers to be reasonable in all realms only excepting a rigourous examination of their faith [note]. But Wright seems to go far beyond that, he seems to have swallowed whole and digested the American right wing version of christianity and it is now a part of his being. I almost expect to see him go on an anti-evolution rant any day now. ... xponent Wide World Of Whatchamacallit Maru rob It might be amusing to compile a list of such authors. I nominate Orson Scott Card and Terry Goodkind to follow Wright! ~maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: The Conversion of John C Wright
On 1/5/07, Ritu [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Rich said: Let's also not forget the great Hellenistic centre of learning at Alexandria, which included the famous library. I sometimes wish I can forget it...thinking of what happened still makes me feel like crying... Ritu Not to be a party pooper here, but I feel compelled to point out some things. From the EB: The museum and library survived for many centuries but were destroyed in the civil war that occurred under the Roman emperor Aurelian in the late 3rd century AD; the daughter library was destroyed by Christians in AD 391. http://search.eb.com/eb/article-9005631 Or, from Wikipedia Ancient and modern sources identify four possible occasions for the destruction of the Library: 1. Caesar's conquest 48 BC; 2. the attack of Aurelian in the 3rd century; 3. the decree of Theophilus in 391; 4. the Muslim conquest in 642 or thereafter. Each of these has been viewed with suspicion by other scholars as an effort to place the blame on particular actors. Moreover, each of these events is historically problematic. In the first and second case, there is clear evidence that the library was not in fact destroyed at those times. The third episode has had some strong supporters, including Edward Gibbon, but still many dispute this. The fourth episode was not documented by any contemporary source, although some maintain that the final destruction of the Library took place at this time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_alexandria#Destruction_of_the_Library ~maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Library book sales - huzzah!
On 11/20/06, Deborah Harrell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: When I recently joshed about elephants in spaceships, somebody here mentioned _Footfall_ as the book to read; last week, what did I spy on the SF shelf of our library's booksale but that very title?! I haven't started it (I'm in the middle of too many right now -- gonna have to start some over, like _Hyperion_, b/c I've forgotten pertinent details], but I will get to it at some point. Also found: _Consider Philebas_ (?sp?), several Tony Hillerman Southwestern mysteries I was looking for, and the middle of a Timothy Zahn trilogy. massive smugness! ;) . Debbi I wonder if Consider Philebas is where Banks got his Consider Phlebas from? It's an interesting title which didn't really seem to be explained by the book. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consider_Phlebas ~maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Library book sales - huzzah!
On 11/22/06, Deborah Harrell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: maru dubshinki [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 11/20/06, Deborah Harrell wrote: snip ...Also found: _Consider Philebas_ (?sp?), several Tony Hillerman Southwestern mysteries I was looking for... I wonder if Consider Philebas is where Banks got his Consider Phlebas from? It's an interesting title which didn't really seem to be explained by the book. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consider_Phlebas rolls eyes Hence the (?sp?) afterward in my post... Actually, I think 'Philebas' sounds nicer out loud. ;) Debbi Borderline Snarkiness Maru Actually, I was serious there. Reading the Wikipedia article, I see that it's from The Wasteland. Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell And the profit and loss. A current under sea Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell He passed the stages of his age and youth Entering the whirlpool. Gentile or Jew O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you. But that only pushes the question off further: what did Eliot mean? What did Banks mean about Eliot's meaning? ~maru [Once Ummon asked a letter light// Are you a gardener// //Yes// it replied\\ //Why have turnips no roots\\ Ummon asked the gardener\ who could not reply\\ //Because\\ said Ummon// rainwater is plentiful] ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Why junk email will NEVER go away.
On 11/14/06, Gary Nunn [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Last April, I created an email address to use for my mom at H R Block. I only used that address for that one specific reason. I never posted it or used it for ANYTHING else. Since April, that email address has received just under 3000 pieces of spam. I emailed HR block security with a complaint, and their response was that when I checked the box and agreed to their terms of service, I agreed to allow them to share my email address with carefully selected partners. I guess their carefully selected partners all sell sex aids, diet patches and everything else you see in typical spam. So, that made me go look at other online agreements at places I do business with like Chase bank, credit card companies and so forth. EVERY single company has that clause in their online terms of service that indicate they can share your information with selected partners. Spam will NEVER stop because companies will always share your email address with their partners. Unfortunately, in the case of HR Block, their carefully selected partners really meant whoever pays us the most for our client list. If you doubt this, go to any company you do business with and somewhere buried in their terms of service or privacy statement will be the clause allowing them to share you information. The irony here is that Gmail tagged your email as spam. ~maru I have plenty of spam, along with some spam (on spam), spammy spam ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Quote of the day.....
On 11/4/06, Gary Nunn [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The box said 'Requires Windows 95 or better'. So I installed LINUX. - Unknown I remember that quote... Used to be Unix though. ~maru Remember, GNU's Not Unix ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Liberty means never having to say things aren't going well
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/21/world/middleeast/21statistics.html U.N. Says Iraq Seals Data on the Civilian Toll By WARREN HOGE UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 20 -- The United Nations office in Baghdad says that Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, has ordered the country's medical authorities to stop providing the organization with monthly figures on the number of civilians killed and wounded in the conflict there, according to a confidential cable. The cable, dated Oct. 17 and sent to United Nations officials in New York and Geneva by Ashraf Qazi, the United Nations envoy to Iraq, says the prohibition may hinder the ability of his office to give accurate accounts in its bimonthly human rights reports on the levels of violence and the effect on Iraqi society. Concern over the numbers of civilians who have died in Iraq has risen sharply at a time when organized attacks by insurgents are swelling the numbers of victims and when a new report from a team of Iraqi and American researchers shows that more than 600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion. Mr. Qazi, a former Pakistani diplomat, says that the order to let the prime minister's office take over the release of the numbers came down a day after a United Nations report for July and August showed a serious upward spike in the number of dead and wounded. The leader of the Health Ministry in Iraq appealed to be allowed to continue supplying the figures to the United Nations but was turned down according to a subsequent letter from the prime minister's office, Mr. Qazi's cable said. The existence of the cable was reported Friday by The Washington Post. Feisal al-Istrabadi, Iraq's deputy ambassador to the United Nations, said he had not seen the cable and therefore could not comment on its specifics. But what I can say is what the prime minister is aiming for is to have one voice reflecting accurate information about the statistics of those who are dying every day, he said. So, the concern was that the Ministry of Health, which has had accurate figures to date, be the official source of the information. It is trying to avoid a situation where different agencies, which may have different perspectives, put out sets of numbers that are, in fact, not as accurate as they should be. The most recent United Nations report, published in September, showed that 3,590 people were killed in July and 3,009 in August in violence across the country. Compiled by statistics from Baghdad's central morgue and from hospitals and morgues countrywide, the report posited an average death rate of 97 people per day. The United Nations reports have been cited by independent researchers as reliable indicators of the incidence of violence in Iraq and were not disputed by the Iraqi government until the September report that showed sharp rises in the figures. In his cable, Mr. Qazi described a process by which his office tried to compile the most reliable statistics. He said that initially his office had been able to overcome Iraqi government reluctance to release figures by obtaining statistics from the Health Ministry's Medico-Legal Institute in Baghdad. The institute records the number of unidentified civilians killed violently whose bodies are taken to the morgue in Baghdad, but not those killed violently whose bodies are taken to hospitals and later handed over to families for burial. Therefore, Mr. Qazi said, the institute's figures represented only an indicator, albeit imperfect, of the growing number of civilian victims in the capital. To come up with a more thorough account, Mr. Qazi said, the United Nations combined the institute's findings with figures from the Department of Operations at the Ministry of Health, which records those killed or wounded as a result of violence from hospitals across almost all parts of the country. Mr. Qazi noted that the figures may have contributed to an increased international awareness regarding the severe consequences that the conflict in Iraq is having on civilians. The cable said that following the release of the last United Nations human rights report on Sept. 20, the prime minister's office expressed doubts about its accuracy. The next day, the Ministry of Health was told that it should no longer release its figures but instead channel them through the prime minister's office. Mr. Qazi said he learned of this on Oct. 12. Mr. Qazi said the United Nations would continue to seek figures from the Department of Operations at the Ministry of Health and use our contacts to see what measure of verification may be possible. ~maru Is any comment really needed? ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Paradox, or, Breaking the mind of logic
On 10/11/06, David Hobby [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: jdiebremse wrote: ... But how does this work for N(blue) = 4? The initial state is that each native has two cases: 1) There are three blue-dot natives, and each blue dot native sees two blue dot natives. 2) There are four blue-dot natives, including himself, and each blue dot native sees three blue dot natives. In this case, I don't see how the naturalist provides any additional information. In the initial state, every native knows that every other native knows that there is at least one blue dot. JDG JDG-- Maru's original post didn't say this, but the puzzle has an additional assumption: All the natives are expert logicians, they all know that all are, they all know that everybody knows that all the natives are expert logicians, etc. Without this, nothing happens even for only two blues, as each would say, So, maybe the other guy sees only reds but is dumb. True, true, but remember this is a logic problem, after all. If we wanted to specify all the assumptions, we'd get into silliness like there exists an objective reality or each native will succeed in killing themselves should they try. The role of the outsider is to make it clear to everybody that any situation with only one blue leads to suicide. Of course when N = 4 everybody knows there are blues, but this is different. But isn't the case of only one blue already clear without the outsider? All the natives would eventually conclude that there could not be just three blues, since each of the three would only see two, and eventually wonder why those two hadn't killed themselves, finally concluding that the reason was that each of the two actually saw two blues, since the one thinking all this was the third blue. Etc! ---David And this reasoning stands for all N equal to or greater than 3? ~maru Mmm... sicilian... ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Paradox, or, Breaking the mind of logic
On 10/11/06, Alberto Monteiro [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: . He does. Because of the omniintelligence hypothesis, each native can reason like this: (a) If there is only one blue dotted native, then, seeing that everybody else is red dotted, this native will commit ritual suicide in the first night. Induction Hypothesis: (b) Suppose that there are (N+1) blue dotted natives. Then, each of these natives, noticing that the other (N) blue dotted natives didn't commit suicide in the N-th night, will commit ritual suicide in the (N+1)-th night The naturalist provides information because he starts the process, by forcing step (a) of the induction. Alberto Monteiro This is basically my conclusion as well. I put it differently, though: with the outsider's pronouncement, each native can know reason about the beliefs of each of the others. While it is true that the outsider provides no new information about the physical situation to each blue dot, each blue dot now knows something new: that each native *must* believe there to be at least one blue dot, because the stranger told them all so, where before each blue dot could believe that they themself were red and the other blue dot ignorant of their status. With this forcing of belief, the induction argument becomes operative. ~maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Paradox, or, Breaking the mind of logic
A while ago on #Wikipedia, I fell into a discussion with a fellow editor. He posed me a question about the following riddle: Suppose there is an island with a number of natives on it. Each native has either a red or a blue spot on their forehead. But they are not allowed to indicate to each other or otherwise divine in any direct observational fashion what the color of their particular spot might be. One of the iron-clad customs of these indigenous persons is that any native who deduces the color of their spot through logic must kill themselves that midnight. Now, suppose further that of all the natives there, only two have blue spots and all the rest have red spots. A outsider comes along (perhaps he is an ignorant ethnographer), and truthfully mentions to the natives that At least one of you has a blue dot on your forehead. What will happen to the natives, and how long will it take? (Answer will be supplied below to further the cause of discussing the question) spoiler Are you really sure you don't want to figure it out yourself? If you need a hint, you can always Google the problem. It's a classic logic problem you know. Well, if you're sure. Begin spoilers All the natives will eventually kill themselves. The precise number of days is something like N+1 days. The reason is that if either blue dot looks around, and sees the other blue dot, they should believe that they are probably red (since most natives are red), and thus there is only one blue dot, the other guy. So they believe that the other blue dot will kill themselves that day. Now, he won't (because there is another blue dot, and he is using the same reasoning - to him, it's the *other* blue dot who should be killing himself). On the second day, nobody will be dead, and so the second blue dot must conclude that the reason for this is because they themself are the second blue dot. Both will kill themselves. This same reasoning can be generalized (mathematical induction?) for all numbers 2 and above, since if 3 blue dots, they will wait to day 3 before all the blues are dead, and so forth. If there is only one blue dot, then they will kill themselves immediately, since there is at least one blue dot, and they know that everybody except themself is red, thus they must be the blue dot. Anyway, once the blues have killed themselves off, all the reds will immediately commit suicide: they followed the blues' reasoning after all, and know that all the blues are dead, which means that they are red, and so since they know, they must kill themselves. So that's that. Necessary background is over and done with. The problem that fellow editor posed me (once I'd solved the original riddle) was this: in the case of 2 blue dots and a bunch of reds, each blue dot *already* knows what the original stranger told them, that there was at least one blue dot. They can see the other blue dot! So it's quite obvious to them that there is at least one blue dot, and so the stranger tells them absolutely nothing new - they already knew what he told me, after all. What is not quite as obvious is that if the stranger is removed, the 2 blues will exist in stasis; in the first round, each will be waiting for the other to do something (their situations remember are absolutely symmetrical), and so *every* round they will be waiting for the other to do something, and of course that means they never do anything. The reds are irrelevant since they don't affect matters until the blues are gone. Now, the stranger appears to be absolutely useless, but nevertheless, removed from the picture the whole thing breaks down in the case where N = 2. What is the use of the useless stranger? ~maru We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel; But it is on the space where there is nothing That the usefulness of the wheel depends. We turn clay to make a vessel; But it is on the space where there is nothing That the usefulness of the vessel depends. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Brin: basic is evil, why it must be eradicated
On 9/23/06, Alberto Vieira Ferreira Monteiro [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Maru wrote: The Wikipedia entry for R is under GNU-S :-) I hate to play the pedantic resident Wikipedia expert here, marudubinski, I presume :-) You forgot the Dr.! ...(Nah, I'm kidding.) Ok, but if we want to use the search engine from the initial page, it's much simpler to search for GNU-S then to search for R :-P Alberto Monteiro Certainly, but how many people know of it as the GNU implementation of the S programming language (or is it family now? Doesn't seem very clear) rather than as the R programming language? Google hits prove nothing of course, but R programming language gets ~50,300,000 ghits and GNU-S ~3,910,000 (I'm not including hits for GNU S, since looking over the top 20 shows it to be a rather ambiguous term, but even GNU-S's first hit is for the mail reader Gnus). ~maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: The Morality of Killing Babies
On 9/24/06, Julia Thompson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: By regulars, I think he means people who post frequently. How frequently is frequent enough, I don't know. So I don't know how many he means. Julia Well, we can find out simply by asking each poster whether they get enough roughage in their daily diet. ~maru the least intrusive methods are best... ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Brin: basic is evil, why it must be eradicated
On 9/22/06, Alberto Monteiro [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: . The Wikipedia entry for R is under GNU-S :-) Alberto Monteiro I hate to play the pedantic resident Wikipedia expert here, but it's actually at [[R (programming language)]] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_%28programming_language%29), like it should (since programming languages' whose name are ambiguous are supposed to be disambiguated rather than be at [[R programming language]], which could be misleading). Now, [[GNU S]] and [[GNU-S]] do indeed redirect to the actual article, but that's not the same thing as the article being at those names... ~maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Jobs, not trees! (Collapse, Chapter 2)
On 9/11/06, Deborah Harrell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: .. No. Anytime a culture squanders its resources, it runs the risk of destroying itself; it may be made worse by the natural environment (like Greenland) or climatic change (frex the little ice age). An aside: has anyone proposed that part of what led to the downfall of Egypt was its resource depletion by building monuments to/for the dead? Although they certainly survived many centuries - and of course had a very large area to exploit, with neighbors to plunder and so forth. Debbi who got to recheck the book out, 'cause it wasn't on hold! :) I'm not sure the pyramids and other funerary things can really explain much of the ancient Egyptians. I mean, the big pyramids were Old Kingdom predominantly, and the interregnums, Middle and New Kindgoms were more inclined to rock tombs, and it was during those periods that Egypt reached its zenith and approached its nadir, no? Also, would the pyramids have had all that much of an economic effect? The farmers were not all that busy in the periods they were conscripted, and I don't think there would be much of an opportunity cost - if the farmers weren't working on various infrastructural improvement projects and vanity projects like pyramids and temples, what enduring gains could they have made? Not much; it's nowhere comparable to today where any nation that forced a sizable proportion of its populace to do manual labor on vanity projects would be eaten alive by the opportunity costs. ~maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: unholy OS wars
On 9/6/06, Richard Baker [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: JohnR said: What we really need is an OS with all of the advantages of XP and Ubuntu and none of the disadvantages of either. Then maybe we would have a decent operating system. That's called OS X. Oh, except for the fact that OS X is much easier to use (and prettier!) than XP. And traditional Unix doesn't actually make a whole heap of sense. Why are there dozens of different configuration file formats? Why does no other Unix have things like launchd and lookupd but rather a rats nest of systems for starting processes and looking up directory data? Rich Tradition! Why, without tradition, we'd be like... like a fiddler on a roof! Non-facetious answer: you're seriously underestimating the incredible constraint of backwards compatibility. There's millions and millions of lines of C and other Unixy languages programs, representing uncountable millions of dollars and man-hours of which crucial bits depend on that rats nest. Rewriting that for a more sensible operating system design is simply unfeasible - I've heard that IBM maintains backwards compatibility for programs back to the IBM 360 and even earlier -- they're not doing it for the hell of it you know. There are endless scads of research operating systems that are clearly superior to the big 6 - in capability (Genera, the LMI OS, Plan 9), mathematically verified reliability and security guarantees (think Coyotos and such), extensibility (SPING, the Lisp machine OSs) etc. And why has essentially none of them caught on? (I'm going to except GNU HURD here since there's an outside possibility that when it gets POSIX decently implemented the Debian HURD project might actually accomplish something) No backwards compatibility. Go ahead and analyze the various big 6: Windows was backwards compatible with DOS, which was the first big mover in the small microcomputers; Mac OS X, see Mac OS 9 and the larger microcomputers; the BSDs and Linux were determinedly backwards compatible with the long lineage of Unix. If people don't value security enough to take the comparatively trivial tasks of switching from Microsoft Word to OpenOffice's formats, and so on and so forth, why the *dickens* do you think the *developers* will dive back into their code to port to some novel operating system which presumably would otherwise break their programs in all sorts of novel ways (since otherwise there would seem to be little point to the new OS)? Chicken and egg problem. In the short-term, that rats nest is utterly rational. Unfortunately, the short term turns into the long term. ~maru notice I'm typing this with a Qwerty keyboard... ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: I Recommend...........
On 9/9/06, Robert G. Seeberger [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: One day the boy met the monster that went west I have a name said the boy. It's a wonderful name. And then the monster that went west said... I don't need a name. I'm happy even if I don't have a name. Because we're monsters without names. The boy ate the monster that went west. Even though he now had a name There was no one left to call him by his name. Johan. It is a wonderful name. xponent Monster Maru rob I *knew* another Brin-eller would discover Monster one day! Now we can have semi-involved discussions of whether Monster would be better as a live action series, why the ending themes are so compelling, and whether the early portions of the series moves too slowly. ~maru /tenma-chan! ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Religious freedom
On 9/4/06, Charlie Bell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 04/09/2006, at 6:44 AM, Andrew Crystall wrote: Really. So Keith Henson is not an atheist? I'd be surprised to learn that. Yes, there's allways the odd one. But in my experience, the people opposing Scientology are in the ratio of arround 20:1 theists:atheists. Maybe because the families of people affected are more often theists, maybe because there are just MORE theists than atheists in the first place? Charlie That first might be closer to the truth; I recall hearing that as a percentage of the population (willing to admit it to a pollster), atheists were not much above 10%, if that. ~maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: unholy OS wars
On 9/3/06, William T Goodall [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 4 Sep 2006, at 2:27AM, Alberto Vieira Ferreira Monteiro wrote: Andrew Crystall wrote: A low-end Mac Pro will cost you $2,124 compared with $3,071 for a In America. For one specific model. And with a very expensive Windows PC make for comparison. And without similar options for warranty, etc. Here in Brazil it's even worse. A Mac costs about twice as much as the equivalent PC-cum-Windoze. But that's a short sighted view. The Mac is much cheaper in the long term. I recently retired an old Mac still in working order, that was nearly ten years old. Ten years of useful life! Reliable technical sources available on the internet confirm that a Windows PC connected to the internet is filled with backdoors, trojans, key-loggers and other malware in ten minutes. Ten minutes of useful life! Thus even if a Mac cost $100,000 and a PC only $1 over the course of ten years the Mac would work out cheaper! Still only $100,000 whereas you'd need over $500,000 worth of PCs! Comparisons Maru -- William T Goodall Oh, how I wish PCs cost only $1... I'd buy a couple dozen and stick Linux on them; even accounting for the time to set up OpenMosix and a networked file system (to cope with those darn PCs dying on you every few years), I'd still be ahead by scores of thousands of dollars. ~maru /I hear the PDP-11 equivalent today would be less than $1... ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: unholy OS wars (was Re: history is evil, why it must be eradicated)
On 9/3/06, Andrew Crystall [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On 4 Sep 2006 at 1:33, William T Goodall wrote:
In the UK, the difference for someone like me who builds my own is in
the region of 60% more expensive for the mac in raw performance
terms, and I cannot get a base spec Mac which suits me as a gamer.
So by non-technophile you don't mean somebody who doesn't build their
own PC or run Linux. OK, so what do the technophiles do then?
I build my own PC because when I was first doing it ('92) that was
the only realistic option. It remains far cheaper and I can ensure
build quality.
And I have Linux...I just don't use it as my primary OS.
That wasn't what I meant, however. That's just your take on what I
typed, running a post of multiple parts into one.
And yes, I despite blue LED's. My case sits beside my desk. Its a
utilitarian grey and pale blue, and its best features are the power
button is on the top front and it has a carry handle on top.
AndrewC
Could you elaborate on this? I'm kind of curious since I don't think
computer building has been discussed on list, and I've been
contemplating building a PC for some time now (following the template
of Ars Technica's Hot Rod
(http://arstechnica.com/guides/buyer/system-guide-200608.ars/3),
although I'd probably wait for a decent AMD replacement for the Core 2
Duo processors they reccomend - I just plain don't like Intel.
Something about them bugs me.)
~maru
___
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Re: Religious freedom
On 9/2/06, Andrew Crystall [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Here's just the best link again: http://www.xenu.net And you know who fights them? Not your precious atheists, it's Christians and Jews. AndrewC Really. So Keith Henson is not an atheist? I'd be surprised to learn that. ~maru http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Henson#Henson_versus_Scientology ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Religious freedom
On 9/2/06, William T Goodall [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 2 Sep 2006, at 11:49PM, Nick Arnett wrote: On 9/2/06, PAT MATHEWS [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: TIME! Everything's been repeated - asserted, not debated - several times over and we're getting into battling assertions now with ad hominem trimmings. I resent that. I believe I wrote something original about pink unicorns. Perhaps the pink unicorn is actually the elephant in the room that nobody talks about? Perhaps a pink elephant. Or an elephantine unicorn? Or some strange hybrid of unicorn and elephant? Perhaps an indeterminate number of them are performing a gavotte on the head of a pin? After all, nobody can prove a negative and it's all just a theory anyway... Third Policeman Maru -- William T Goodall Clearly that the pink unicorn is actually an Invisible Pink Unicorn, as no one can see it. ph34r t3h |_||\|1C0rN's |-|00\/3s! ~maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: James A. van Allen, 1914-2006
On 8/10/06, Ronn!Blankenship [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=20565 -- Ronn! :) Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever. -- Konstantin E. Tsiolkovskiy That's really too bad. My father studied under him as a student, and he seemed like a neat guy (quite aside from his accomplishments). ~maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Moving to Montana Soon?
On 8/2/06, Doug Pensinger [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Collapse by Jarred Diamond Part One: Modern Montana Chapter One: Under Montana's Big Sky Diamond picks Montana for his first chapter because he can gage the attitudes of the people that live there, because it provides a contrast to the more fragile societies discussed in later chapters and because it illustrates the five main themes of the book: human impacts on the environment; climate change; a society's relations with neighboring friendly societies; a society's exposure to acts of other potential hostile societies; and the importance of a society's responses to it's problems. He uses Montana as a reference for the reader. A familiar situation with which we can relate to the more severe problems he discusses later on. A similarity to my home town of Morgan Hill, Ca. to the Bitterroot Valley is the contrast in attitudes of the old timers; farmers and ranchers with sizeable land holdings and upper-middle class to upper class professionals with a fondness for the small town atmosphere in close proximity to a major metropolitan area. Morgan Hill has a slow-growth policy that allows a limited number of new housing units per year. This is frustrating to landowners because there is a huge demand for housing in the area. Montana's environmental problems include toxic wastes, forests, soils, water, climate change, biodiversity losses and introduced pests and while Diamond classifies Montana as probably the least damaged of the lower 48 states, the problems he describes seem severe. One interesting conundrum he discusses is the conflict between businesses that exist to make money and moral obligations to clean up after themselves. Is this a good argument against the preeminence of a free market economy or can we have both a strong economy and a clean environment? Fascinating! Read on. -- Doug Me and the pygmy pony over by the dental floss bush, maru This is a long-standing and fascinating (IMO) objection to market economies. After all, economic activities driven by market economics seem to inevitably fall into tragedies of the commons, which is exactly what one sees here: the penalties fall on (other people's) descendants in the far future, or even if they manifest soon enough to be on a company's radar (remember that there is discounting of possible future liabilities going on here; I dunno what the discount rate is, but it's probably pretty high when you consider examples like the tobacco companies), they are often negative externalities for which the company can get off scot-free. What makes Montana such a good example is that because of the light long-term population of Indians, we can see pretty well just how our birds done come home to roost. Unsurprisingly, I think this is very much a matter of tradeoffs. Clearly a market economy can find effective ways to minimize long-term impacts if the market is sufficiently distorted (say, by government regulations), but almost by definition, such a distorted market is not The Efficient Market, and so there's a real cost there. ~maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Look on my works, ye mighty...
On 7/30/06, Charlie Bell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Not yet - it's silly money in the bookshops here, and the library doesn't have it yet. But don't wait on me, i'll just put the discussion to one side 'til i can catch up. Charlie Far be it from me to encourage breaking of - oh, what the heck. You know you can find it online pretty easily, right? For example, a quick search turned up an audio version of all things: http://www.isohunt.com/torrents.php?ihq=collapse+diamond ~maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: My Wraptures-ready Sunday
On 7/30/06, Gibson Jonathan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Greetings Tribe of Brin,
For those of you who use graphics in your work and play I have a small
treat.
I am pleased to announce to this small group the imminent public
offering of my multi-CD image libraries. Not a must-buy Wall Street
deal to buy stock in an image company, but a gift to the world open
source-ish. I'm hoping to generate good ju-ju releasing this
intellectual property after many years under moth-ball, The hope is
traffic flocks, leaves a gratuity, and {ideally} purchases the newer,
snappier, yet-more clever HD-sized textures vastly better suited to
this XXIst century. You folks are invited to scratch-n-sniff the
original collection as I prepare for a fall-winter launch of my
high-def Pro line. I'm only telling a handful of friends and you folk
as I am not terribly interested in generating publicity - yet. I'm
eager for technical business feedback and of course curious where the
low-key viral marketing leads. If I suddenly end up with a tiger by
the tail, then all the better.
http://www.formandfunction.com/wraptures/index.html
...
Gigabytes of fun. Enjoy!
- Jonathan -
For what it is worth, your link is down for me.
~maru
___
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Re: Wealthy couples travel to U.S. to choose baby's sex
On 7/24/06, David Hobby [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: maru dubshinki wrote: I think having them cancel out would be a better idea. We could formalize each god as really being a infinite series of ethical axioms (covering every possible action), each of which says to do or do not a specific something; with an infinite number of gods, every possible binary string of axioms will be represented, but each one will cancel out (since if we have one god with YYYNNN, we *know* there is another with NNNYYY) with another god's string. I suspect we need not worry about one string outvoting another string, since subsets of the infinite-gods set could themselves be infinite? Maru-- Yes, that's the kind of thing I was thinking of. Alberto was talking about probability. Since all probabilities sum to one, that might well imply that each god got probability zero. You seem to be looking at this in terms of voting. Maybe you can make it work, but infinite elections do have problems... By the way, some of the ethical axioms would contradict each other, so some of the possible strings would be contradictory. I presume you'll stick with tradition, and assign them all gods too? : ) ---David As well to count the angels Maru The Gods Must Be Crazy? ~maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Wealthy couples travel to U.S. to choose baby's sex
On 7/19/06, David Hobby [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Alberto Monteiro wrote: Dan Minette wrote: So, I don't think it is helpful to make arguments based on one's own axiom set and then expect them to sound reasonable to someone who holds a different axiom set. Or we can hold all sets of axioms, assign a prior probability to each of them, then apply Bayesian analysis with real world examples and get a posteriori probability for each sets. And then decide based on some conservative criterium, like do not kill if it's murder with 5% or more probability. Alberto Monteiro Alberto-- Interesting, but there might be some obstacles. There are an infinite number of axiom sets based on the pronouncements of gods. I imagine that we would have some difficulty agreeing on what probability to assign them. : ) (The obvious solution is to assign all gods probability zero, but that too might prove unpopular...) ---David I think having them cancel out would be a better idea. We could formalize each god as really being a infinite series of ethical axioms (covering every possible action), each of which says to do or do not a specific something; with an infinite number of gods, every possible binary string of axioms will be represented, but each one will cancel out (since if we have one god with YYYNNN, we *know* there is another with NNNYYY) with another god's string. I suspect we need not worry about one string outvoting another string, since subsets of the infinite-gods set could themselves be infinite? ~maru we can clearly through a simple diagonal argument along the lines of cantor that the number of angels is uncountable, and thus the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin is the same number as the number of real numbers... ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Internet Archive Wayback Machine
On 7/17/06, Gary Nunn [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm not sure if this archive is cool or disturbing. Cool for historic purposes, but a bit disturbing if you once posted things you may not want potential employers to find. From the webpage... About the Wayback Machine Browse through 55 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. To start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available. The resulting pages point to other archived pages at as close a date as possible. Keyword searching is not currently supported. http://www.archive.org/web/web.php One of the things that saddens me most about the current state of Wikipedia is that we don't use the Internet Archive all that much. So many dead links just get removed. It's heart-breaking. ~maru on the cool side here ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Physics Prof Finds Thermate in WTC Physical Samples
On 6/27/06, Robert J. Chassell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Although at least muon-catalyzed cold fusion worked . . . although in the short life of a muon, it apparently cannot catalyze enough fusion reactions to make as much energy as it took to make the muon in the first place, so it is not a great new source of energy. Muon-catalyzed fusion is elegant: the muons cause protons to come closer together! If I remember rightly, a muon as currently produced by humans must catalyze more than 800 fusion reactions before the method becomes energy-effective. (I cannot remember how many a muon catalyzes, but the number is, or was, considerably smaller.) I was in Provo at the time, and I'll try to find a summary I wrote of what went on if anyone's interested . . . Yes, I am curious. -- Robert J. Chassell The number appears to have been around 100. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion ~maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: When BatLeths Are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Have BatLeths
On 5/31/06, Horn, John [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Behalf Of Damon Agretto You guys and your swords. I'll take a pollaxe... Never bring a sword, batleth or a poleaxe to a gunfight! - jmh I think you meant never bring the weapon of public opinion (a pollaxe) to a knife fight. ~maru Of course, one should never bring a gun to a political fight either... ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Let your fingers do the computing . . .
On 6/5/06, Ronn!Blankenship [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At 03:19 PM Monday 6/5/2006, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Shocking, just shocking. :-) Dan M. And the second time you use it, it'll be revolting. But, the third time you use it, you will get a charge out of it. :-) Dan M. ___ And the 4th time you use it stops working because the grease from the potatoe chips and buffalo chicken wings have destroyed the screen Methinks you have stumbled upon its main vulnerability . . . --Ronn! :) Dammit! Were only I your parents, I could ground you both and end these horribly punny jokes! ~maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Good Math, Bad Math entry
On 5/21/06, Julia Thompson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/05/magic-23.html Mark takes on pyramidiots (as one commenter tags them). If you enjoy people poking fun at conspiracy theorists, this is a must-read. If you have absolutely no interest in that sort of thing, don't click the link. :) Julia If I didn't know better, I'd say that's just a bunch of Discordians having fun. ~maru hail eris! ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Autism PSA
On 5/16/06, Dave Land [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On May 16, 2006, at 8:20 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Documentary Film on Autism Stuns Internet Viewers Autism Every Day produced for Autism Speaks. This is very difficult to watch: my heart is breaking for these parents and their children... I think it's impossible for me to say this without pissing somebody off -- including myself -- but watching this reminded me that there are worse things than having your child die of brain cancer. Dave I'm curious- where are you guys getting the file from? The linked Autism Speaks page doesn't work- nothing downloads. ~maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Brin: BASIC
On 5/8/06, Alberto Monteiro [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The Fool wrote: I don't get it. QBasic came standard with MS-DOS 5-7. But not with Mac... BTW, I can find Linux compilers/interpreters for all languages [C/C++, Fortran, Pascal, Perl, Python, Haskell, Prolog, etc], but not BASIC. Maybe Mac lacks BASIC too. Can this be an anti-M$ Conpiracy? :-) Alberto Monteiro Then you're not really trying. I found an article with overviews of Purebasic, Realbasic, HBasic, Gambas, XBasic, KBasic, and Phoenix Object Basic. (all for linux, apparently) in 10 or so seconds of Googling. ~maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Religious affiliations of superheroes
On 4/28/06, Deborah Harrell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: maru dubshinki [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: That anime girl-hero one... *apprehensively*... wouldn't happen to be Man-Faye, would it? Ah, yes -- that was it! Do I need to know something else about that one? One now gets the feeling that fishiness is ongoing... Debbi who is perpetually amazed at the bizarre Colorado weather: T-shirt Sunday, snow and ice Mon-Tues, 70's yest, and snow again today! Man-Faye is a bit of a running joke in anime fan-dom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-Faye -- has the gory details. ~maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Optimism for the USA
On 4/27/06, Klaus Stock [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: inspired later Muslim philosophers and theologians. For example, the Brethren of Sincerity (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Brethren_of_Sincerity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_of_the_Brethren_of_Sincerity - full disclosure: I wrote those articles) took a position that the Creator was unbounded in ability and attributes, and that to even describe him in remotely earthly (or comprehensible for that metter) terms was to commit a falsity. Heck. At least visually God resembles a human, as the Bible tell us so. Darwinists however might conculde that this means very little, because during the creation of the universe, apparently no complex structures existed - so the similarities with God won't neccessarily extend past the basic structure/interaction of elementary particles and energy. This discussion can of course be circumvented by adopting one of the most popular religious viewpoint (kill all non-belivers). - Klaus Yes, that is true. But it is easy to work around such an objection: of course God could take on a human form, or that's how we perceive him. Similarly, the Brethren were not Hanbali theologians; they and quite a few of the other schools accepted multiple non-literal exoteric and esoteric readings of the scriptures, and indeed, even allegory. ~maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Optimism for the USA
On 4/25/06, Robert J. Chassell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [I don't say it in the draft, but I have heard that for the past 600 or so years, various Muslim theologians have said that their God is omnipotent and unrestrained. Does anyone know whether this is true?] Robert J. Chassell Hard to say. I'm not really sure what you are trying to get across? The supreme deity as omnipotent? That's been around for a lot longer than 600 years, and Islamic theology is no slouch in picking up neat innovations like omniscience or omnipotence. Unrestrained does sound a little more iffy; it reminds me of the Greek Neoplatonists who inspired later Muslim philosophers and theologians. For example, the Brethren of Sincerity (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Brethren_of_Sincerity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_of_the_Brethren_of_Sincerity - full disclosure: I wrote those articles) took a position that the Creator was unbounded in ability and attributes, and that to even describe him in remotely earthly (or comprehensible for that metter) terms was to commit a falsity. ~maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the Origin of War
On 4/25/06, Horn, John [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Behalf Of Keith Henson I have not been posting here much for a while... How goes the war against the Cult? - jmh Well, the last I or Wikipedia have heard was that he had quietly decamped Canada for somewhere in the US. ~maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Jack Chick parody
On 4/23/06, Julia Thompson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.angelfire.com/alt/c4ts2101/tract.html Three points to the first person to post my favorite text from it. :) Julia When all you powers are combine... I AM GOD-JESUS! ~maru well, if it isn't, it should be. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Religious affiliations of superheroes
On 4/20/06, Deborah Harrell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yes, I just got to this one (I'm still catching up)... --- Nick Arnett [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I know I've lost a lot of sleep wondering about this. If you've lain awake at night wondering if Superman is a Methodist or Jimmy Olsen is Lutheran, here are the answers. http://www.adherents.com/lit/comics/comic_book_religion.html Did anyone see Leno last night, and the segment on 'if you were a superhero, who would you be?' *Hysterical!* Monkey Girl, Ice Bitch, Talking Man, and some guy who thought he should gross folk out by portraying one of the anime girl-heros (don't recall the name). EarthMan wore skins, Thunderbolt a T-shirt...Stan Lee was there. Excelsior! Debbi aka Lead Mare Superpowers: being a werehorse neighing loud enough to rupture eardrums striking hooves on metal starts fires tail can crack like a whip (I'll pass on the expulsion of grass fermention products... evil smirk) That anime girl-hero one... *apprehensively*... wouldn't happen to be Man-Faye, would it? ~maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Linux suckz
On 4/14/06, Alberto Vieira Ferreira Monteiro [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Maru Dubshinki wrote: ... an apt-get away. But I see you are a KDE man. You deserve what you get, you and the GNOME partisans both. Perdition on both your houses! If you hate both KDE and GNOME, what else do you like? I got accostumed to KDE, and I am conservative [if it ain't broken, don't fix it] :-) Alberto Monteiro At the risk of shocking the more tenderminded persons in the audience, I must confess that my chosen window manager is ratpoison. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratpoison When I need a program that doesn't quite fit the ratpoison paradigm, I switch over to fluxbox. Gnome and KDE are slow stifling mountains of cruft and ill-functionality. ~maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Linux suckz
On 4/13/06, Alberto Monteiro [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: maru dubshinki wrote: ... Shouldn't it be used on a partition? Both uses are possible. But _after_ I have installed the system, there's no safe way to create a partition. Well, not easily. I'm pretty sure the Reisers and Ext2 and up support resizing. And if you are using it on a partition, are you running as root? And if so, is your partition set to be a swap partition? There should be no problem with mkswap, because I had done that before, with Fedora Core 2 and some of those one-CD-distros. If all that doesn't work, just use Debian or Ubuntu. :) :-) I tried Kubuntu, but I hated it. How can a linux distro come _without_ gcc and make? Meh. It's just an apt-get away. But I see you are a KDE man. You deserve what you get, you and the GNOME partisans both. Perdition on both your houses! Incidentally, I'm probably trying to teach my grandmother to sew here, but are you really sure you're using the right kind of file? The man pages make it sound like a very specific, profane kind of file is needed. Alberto Monteiro ~maru Tomorrow, tomorrow, it's just an apt-get install tomorrow away... ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Great Sam Harris Interview
On 4/11/06, Doug Pensinger [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 11 Apr 2006 08:33:08 -0700, Nick Arnett [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Isn't it blindingly obvious that the bin Ladens of this world find followers because of the social and economic conditions where they recruit? No, that's not obvious at all. I'm pretty sure that many of his recruits are middle/upper income types. I would argue that it is the wealth of the region that stimulates terrorism and that if the Middle East was economically and politically irrelevant there would be no epidemic of terrorism. -- Doug Seconded. I remember reading the 9/11 report and interestedly looking at the wealth statistics- predominately middle and upper class (bin Laden himself being a good example). ~maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Great Sam Harris Interview
On 4/12/06, Nick Arnett [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 4/12/06, The Fool [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I believe only in the purity of math. Everything else is nonsense. Seriously? And what do you do with Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem? Nick Based on what I've read of the Fool's messages, of the dilemma it poses, I think he would accept the incompleteness choice. ~maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Linux suckz
On 4/12/06, Alberto Monteiro [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: After a FR [long story...], I am trying to install Fedora Core 4 in my home computer. So far, no problem that I could not solve or see a chance to solve, except this: mkswap file1 returns error file1: Permission denied Does anyone know what the hell is going on? mkswap worked with every other distro I tried. Alberto Monteiro Reading the mkswap man page- why are you trying to use it on a file? Shouldn't it be used on a partition? And if you are using it on a partition, are you running as root? And if so, is your partition set to be a swap partition? If all that doesn't work, just use Debian or Ubuntu. :) ~maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Tales From Earthsea.........Anime!!!!!
On 4/9/06, Julia Thompson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Robert Seeberger wrote: (I'd provide a link but Wiki seems to be down) AAAIGH! AAAIGH! AAAIGH! AAAIGH! AAAIGH! AAAIGH! AAAIGH! AAAIGH! AAAIGH! AAAIGH! AAAIGH! AAAIGH! AAAIGH! AAAIGH! AAAIGH! AAAIGH! AAAIGH! AAAIGH! AAAIGH! AAAIGH! AAAIGH! AAAIGH! AAAIGH! AAAIGH! Julia If you think that annoys you, a mere reader/dilettante editor, what do you think it does to adminstrators like me? ~maru On the positive side, it is back up, though slowly. Stupid Florida colos and crappy power supplies! ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Robert Jordan
On 4/6/06, The Fool [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ... Further updates by Jordan himself: http://www.dragonmount.com/RobertJordan/?p=38 http://www.dragonmount.com/RobertJordan/?p=39 So help me, if I don't find out definitively who killed asmo, rggrgr! Forget Asmodean. It was obviously Slayer or Graendal. (Lanfear, alas, while almost perfect in everyway as a suspect, was trapped at the time of his death.) What *I* want to know is what Herid Fel discovered about how to refix the Dark One's prison as well as the Creator made it, just before the gholam made hamburger out of'im. ~maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Unspeakably offensive canine behavior
On 4/1/06, Nick Lidster [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I figured id use this group for this little question... what do you all know about cobweb plots and its relation to chaos theory? My friend is working with them now and explained it just simply as they are related to chaos theory. Any helpful guidance would be great. Nick RTFW? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobweb_plot ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: NASA Reinstates the Dawn Mission
On 3/27/06, Ronn!Blankenship [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: March 27, 2006 Erica Hupp/Dean Acosta Headquarters, Washington (202) 358-1237/1400 RELEASE: 06-108 NASA REINSTATES THE DAWN MISSION NASA senior management announced a decision Monday to reinstate the Dawn mission, a robotic exploration of two major asteroids. Dawn had been canceled because of technical problems and cost overruns. The mission, named because it was designed to study objects dating from the dawn of the solar system, would travel to Vesta and Ceres, two of the largest asteroids orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter. Dawn will use an electric ion propulsion system and orbit multiple objects. The mission originally was approved in December 2001 and was set for launch in June 2006. Technical problems and other difficulties delayed the projected launch date to July 2007 and pushed the cost from its original estimate of $373 million to $446 million. The decision to cancel Dawn was made March 2, 2006, after about $257 million already had been spent. An additional expenditure of about $14 million would have been required to terminate the project. ... I look forward to seeing the results we'll get from the Robots of Dawn. ~M. Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: hardware suckz
On 3/22/06, Alberto Monteiro [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The Fool wrote: Fat32 There's your problem _Right There_. Unless you are using some version of win9x that needs to be able to see this partition, you need to be using NTFS. It's better in every way. And you can compress NTFS drives. See if you can't dig up an old version of scandisk.exe or norton utilities DOS version. But NTFS is not visible to Linux. If Linux did it, then Linux can fix it :-P But I still think it was not a software bug, but a hardware bug. Alberto Monteiro Actually Linux can read NTFS, and fairly well. I once helped a friend set it up so he could listen to his music collection - but the real problem is that you have to go in via the command line (AFAIK), and Windows is *extremely* hostile to CLIs, what with all the special characters and spaces in the file names. Not to mention we couldn't seem to get tab completion to work, so it was manual copy-paste-quoting. Not fun. As for writing, the devs have it working, but they caution users that it is very much alpha and that there are drives that have been screwed up by being written to. Not something I would use, but fortunately, it is not a problem I will face anytime soon. ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: hardware suckz
On 3/23/06, Steve Sloan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: maru dubshinki wrote: Actually Linux can read NTFS, and fairly well. I once helped a friend set it up so he could listen to his music collection - but the real problem is that you have to go in via the command line (AFAIK), and Windows is *extremely* hostile to CLIs, what with all the special characters and spaces in the file names. Not to mention we couldn't seem to get tab completion to work, so it was manual copy-paste-quoting. Not fun. If this was from Linux, couldn't you have bundled together each directory -- or even large directory tree -- you wanted to keep into a tarball on the working Linux drive? That would have at least saved a lot of individual file copying. __ Steve Sloan . Huntsville, Alabama = [EMAIL PROTECTED] Well, yes we could have. But this was a dual-boot system (obviously), and there was barely enough space on the Linux partition for Ubuntu and a reasonable selection of extra programs. So ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: TV Weekend
On 3/18/06, The Fool [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -- From: Maru Dubshinki [EMAIL PROTECTED] On 3/17/06, Robert G. Seeberger [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dr Who is on Sci-Fi tonight The final episode of FullMetal Alchemist is on tomorrow on Cartoon Network. I suggest y'all watch it; it really is a good ending, especially when you consider they had to come up with it from scratch, as Arakawa never penned an ending to date. My comrades dislike the episode, as they feel it makes for a lousy ending, - Doesn't the ending occur in the theatrical movie or am I mistaken? Both endings are *a* ending, but not *the* ending, if you catch my drift. Strictly speaking, the manga is canon by the usual reckoning of these things, and both the TV series ending and the movie are not in the manga, so take them as you will. Myself, I would've been perfectly happy if Shamballa never came out, as it wasn't very good. ~maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Possibly explaining why flatulence has been a recent topic on several lists
On 3/14/06, Robert Seeberger [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ... This thread is going down the crapper. G xponent Thomas Maru rob I'll thank you to can that toilet talk! Won't someone think of the children? ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Um, does this make any sense?
On 2/17/06, Julia Thompson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.timecube.com/ I'll explain where I found the link after a suitable number of people have expressed their bogglement. Julia Did you find it here? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube ~Maru Until Emails are CUBIC in all their faces (atheistic and catholic) mailing lists will continue to be subeverted by the Scientific Establishment which DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW EMAIL IS TRIANGULAR. This comes from the obvious observation that -1 x -1=+1 is stupid and evil. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Hyperion
On 2/15/06, Jim Sharkey [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ... I was on the fence about them because it seemed to me that Simmons' editor was letting him get far too verbose in some sections, probably adding a good 50+ pages of fluff between the two Endymion books, which made sections of them drag. And then I also have a pet peeve about authors who change the established rules of their universe because it's convenient (that's why I think Goodkind's pretty much a hack, excepting the first and sixth SoT books), which I felt Simmons did a fair amount of. But the last 50-100 pages of _Rise of Endymion_ I found to be incredibly affecting, and they rescued the series for me. Jim Going off on a tangent here... you liked Faith of the Fallen? Ugh. I was disgusted when I realized I was reading a *bad* rehash of Ayn Rand- if I wanted Randian ideologues spouting off in fiction at me, I'll go to the source, thank you every much. Totally spoiled the series for me. ~Maru One was just plain awesome though. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Hyperion
On 2/14/06, Jim Sharkey [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hrm. I think after reading the Endymion books I'd have to add a fourth line, wherein the Shrike is there to protect Aenea, possibly sent by those in the Void. Though it could be an intercepted and altered Shrike from the UIs, or sent by the human UI to defend its third part. The difficulty with this is, what was that fourth Shrike doing while the other three were messing around with the pilgrims and various political situations? I'd suggest that this was the Reaper faction AI- since when you think about it, what Aenea did was to upset the status quo, rip the TechnoCore out of their comfortable dead-end evolutionary niche (forcing them out into unsearched evolutionary fitness landscapes, laden with Lions and Tigers, and Bears oh my!); which is exactly what Ray's reaper functions did on a smaller scale. The other three you listed make reasonable sense; however, I will admit that I never considered the various Shrikes to be separate timelines as much as they were foci in the war to establish one future. That is, they were developed by one faction then co-opted by the various factions in their struggles. That makes sense too- one Shrike and one set of Time Tombs, not a couple co-valent ones phasing in and out, if that makes sense- intermittently controlled by different factions. I'm not completely sure because I seem to remember some incidents which had to take place simultaneously, but since I can't remember what those were, I'll drop this. What I found interesting about the first two books was not the SF portions of it nearly as much as the *human* portions. The stories of the pilgrims were all gripping, and that's what I liked about Hyperion more than the future conflicts and all. It was the people in the books, not the events surrounding them, that really spoke to me. In fact, to some extent Simmons' insistent EYKIW's (everything you know is wrong) in Endymion irked me, and I felt cheapened the first two a little bit. I still liked them, but for different reasons and certainly not as much as the Cantos. The focus in Endymion was on Raul and Aenea, who just couldn't carry that sort of load- it took at least 6 interesting characters from all sorts of genres and everything Simmons could warp and borrow from Kelly's Out of Control to make the first two, and the second two just didn't have that sort of firepower. Endymion still made me fairly happy because it included a decent quota of new and interesting and farout ideas, but there were far more in the Hyperions. Jim Listening to the living Maru ~Maru Listening to the music of the spheres ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Perspectives: Political Humour from John Cleese
On 2/14/06, Nick Arnett [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In light of your failure to elect a competent President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective immediately. Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths, and territories (excepting Kansas, which she does not fancy). Your new prime minister, Tony Blair, will appoint a governor for America without the need for further elections. Congress and the Senate will be disbanded. A questionnaire may be circulated next year to determine whether any of you noticed. To aid in the transition to a British Crown dependency, the following rules are introduced with immediate effect: You should look up revocation in the Oxford English Dictionary. Then look up aluminium, and check the pronunciation guide. You will be amazed at just how wrongly you have been pronouncing it. The letter 'U' will be reinstated in words such as 'favour' and 'neighbour.' Likewise, you will learn to spell 'doughnut' without skipping half the letters, and the suffix -ize will be replaced by the suffix -ise. Generally, you will be expected to raise your vocabulary to acceptable levels. (look up vocabulary). Using the same twenty-seven words interspersed with filler noises such as like and you know is an unacceptable and inefficient form of communication. There is no such thing as US English. We will let Microsoft know on your behalf. The Microsoft spell-checker will be adjusted to take account of the reinstated letter 'u' and the elimination of -ize. You will relearn your original national anthem, God Save The Queen. July 4th will no longer be celebrated as a holiday. You will learn to resolve personal issues without using guns, lawyers, or therapists. The fact that you need so many lawyers and therapists shows that you're not adult enough to be independent. Guns should only be handled by adults. If you're not adult enough to sort things out without suing someone or speaking to a therapist then you're not grown up enough to handle a gun. Therefore, you will no longer be allowed to own or carry anything more dangerous than a vegetable peeler. A permit will be required if you wish to carry a vegetable peeler in public. All American cars are hereby banned. They are crap and this is for your own good. When we show you German cars, you will understand what we mean. All intersections will be replaced with roundabouts, and you will start driving on the left with immediate effect. At the same time, you will go metric with immediate effect and without the benefit of conversion tables. Both roundabouts and metrication will help you understand the British sense of humour. The Former USA will adopt UK prices on petrol (which you have been calling gasoline) -roughly $6/US gallon. Get used to it. You will learn to make real chips. Those things you call French fries are not real chips, and those things you insist on calling potato chips are properly called crisps. Real chips are thick cut, fried in animal fat, and dressed not with catsup but with vinegar. The cold tasteless stuff you insist on calling beer is not actually beer at all. Henceforth, only proper British Bitter will be referred to as beer, and European brews of known and accepted provenance will be referred to as Lager. American brands will be referred to as Near-Frozen Gnat's Urine, so that all can be sold without risk of further confusion. Hollywood will be required occasionally to cast English actors as good guys. Hollywood will also be required to cast English actors to play English characters. Watching Andie MacDowell attempt English dialogue in Four Weddings and a Funeral was an experience akin to having one's ears removed with a cheese grater. You will cease playing American football. There is only one kind of proper football; you call it soccer. Those of you brave enough will, in time, be allowed to play rugby which has some similarities to American football, but does not involve stopping for a rest every twenty seconds or wearing full kevlar body armour like a bunch of nancies. Further, you will stop playing baseball. It is not reasonable to host an event called the World Series for a game which is not played outside of America. Since only 2.1% of you are aware that there is a world beyond your borders, your error is understandable. You must tell us who killed JFK. It's been driving us mad. An internal revenue agent (i.e. tax collector) from Her Majesty's Government will be with you shortly to ensure the acquisition of all monies due (backdated to 1776). Thank you for your cooperation. -- Nick Arnett http://www.snopes.com/politics/satire/revocation.asp ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Hyperion (was RE: Take The Catholic Geocentrism Challenge)
On 2/13/06, Jim Sharkey [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The Fool wrote: Teilhard de Chardin Courtesy of the hearty recommendations of _Hyperion_ by all of you, I actually know who this guy is! :-) The local library *finally* had a copy of _Hyperion Cantos_, and I recently finished it. While the two Endymion books have gotten a trifle self-indulgent IMO, _Hyperion_ and _Fall of Hyperion_ were excellent, and I thank the Brin list for pointing me toward them. Not to mention any number of other tasty books! Anyone feel like having, I dunno, and actual book discussion on this here ostensibly SF literature list? :) Jim Silly Optimist Maru I'll take you up on that challenge. How many different timelines do you think were interacting in the first two books? (IMO, this is one of the fundamental questions for the Hyperion Cantos). Incidentally, if any of you are interested in the TechnoCore AI Ummon, I wrote a kick-ass article on the original Ummon at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yunmen_Wenyan ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Hyperion (was RE: Take The Catholic Geocentrism Challenge)
On 2/13/06, Jim Sharkey [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Maru Dubshinki wrote: Jim Sharkey wrote: Anyone feel like having, I dunno, and actual book discussion on this here ostensibly SF literature list? :) I'll take you up on that challenge. Uh-oh! :) How many different timelines do you think were interacting in the first two books? Do you mean in terms of alternate/possible futures? Jim I don't like to use those terms, since it makes the various world-lines sound less real and influential than they were. ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Hyperion (was RE: Take The Catholic Geocentrism Challenge)
On 2/13/06, Jim Sharkey [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Fair enough. Well, I think the Rachel/Kassad timelines diverge and converge at times, so that's one-and-half or two, depending on your POV. I'd say Brawne Lamia's timeline could be thought of as another, while Het Masteen's could be third. But that's only thoughts after the fact. Certainly the pilgrims share a common past, and while they seem to have possibly divergent futures, I never really thought of their futures as separate timelines. But then, metaphysics has never been my strong suit. :) Jim I never thought of putting it in per-character terms. I always broke it down into factions- ie. you had the first timeline, in which TechnoCore and humand warred, which sent back Mnemosyne; you had the other timeline with the twin UIs, which dispatched one of the shrikes, and you had a third faction which sent back yet *another* shrike to fetch Weintraub's daughter (which I suspect to have been the Reaper faction). At least, three timelines made the most sense to me. I'd be interested to hear your thinking on it. ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Brin: Something of interest
On 1/26/06, Jim Sharkey [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ... Mr. Smith fought back against the administration, standing his ground that kids risking getting their limbs blown off to prosecute President Bush's war ought to get some more benefits. Imagine thinking such a thing was appropriate!! Well, Mr. Smith's reward for this one oppositional stance to the administration's policies? Removal from his post as chair on the committee to which he'd dedicated most of his 20+ years in Congress. He may have even been removed from the committee entirely, but I'm fuzzy on that detail. Jim From his website, apparently removed entirely. However, As a champion of global human rights since being elected to Congress, Smith is proud to have been selected as Chairman of the International Relations Committee's new super subcommittee entitled Africa, Global Human Rights, and International Operations. I gues that's something... ~Maru What? no mention on Wikipedia? Unpossible! ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Technique
On 1/13/06, Robert Seeberger [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ... I think you can make a good argument that the terrorists have won ~something~. They have caused us to volunteer to give up some freedom and convenience. If *I* have to be searched to travel from Houston to Memphis or Atlanta, then we have given up something. And I don't think this exact method of protection has actually made us safer than some less rigorous method would or could... Unless one considers Mrs. Smith from Peoria to be a serious threat. xponent Fragile Maru rob I would argue that what they've won is a ~trillion dollar unnecessary military expenditure (even if you discount Stiglitz's estimate solely for the Iraq War, I'd say lumping in homeland security expenditures for the War on Terror and the costs of Afghanistan definitely bump the total cost of 9/11 up to one trill, easy). One hell of a bang for their buck. ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
A clone's best friend
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=7101refer=asiasid=auCcoOaqyTuY *Stem Cell Researcher Hwang Faked All Human Papers, Panel Says* Jan. 10 (Bloomberg) -- South Korean scientist Hwang Woo Suk faked both his first and second papers on human stem-cell research, dashing hopes that his work is a breakthrough in treatments for diabetes and Parkinson's disease. Stem cells stored at Seoul National University, DNA fingerprints and photographs submitted to Science magazine for its 2004 paper were found to be fabricated, the university said in a statement after a monthlong investigation. The panel backed Hwang's claim that he cloned the world's first dog. I would have been crushed if it were all vile damnable lies. ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Query on trust
On 1/8/06, Robert J. Chassell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: But it is hard to convey the equivalent information on a low-resolution display or in one dimension. How would you display this information on a low-resolution display, such as Lynx, or in one dimensions, such as with text that is converted to speech by Emacspeak (for car drivers, for example)? -- Robert J. Chassell [EMAIL PROTECTED] GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8 http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc ASCII art. At the outside limit, treat a screenshot of the full resolution output and feed it as input to one of the video -- ASCII programs (like HasciiCam; http://ascii.dyne.org/. Don't know how well it works, never used it.) Then, you can use that for textbrowsers/low-resolution displays. I dunno how well this would be comprehensible when fed through emacspeak however. ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Google: creator of the universe = FSM #1hit......News at 11
On 1/8/06, Robert G. Seeberger [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ... The worldwide popularity of the FSM puts a whole new spin on If god did not exist we would need to create him (where is that quote from?) http://urlx.org/google.com/19ef xponent Hee Haw! Maru rob Voltaire. ~Maru The ways of the wiki are dark and deep ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Have a Nice Winter Break...
On 12/26/05, Julia Thompson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What? No Nice Newtonmas? Or what about our Flying Spaghetti Monsterism brethren? And as always, those poor Discordian people are totally neglected. I expected better of you. OK, I'm a little fuzzy on the whole Pastafarianism thing. What, besides September 19, is considered a holy day for the followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Julia fnord Err... (hm, when did I ever let facts get in the way of anything?) Dec. 25 is. I just declared it Spaghetti day, by the power vested in me as an official POEE Pope and Knight of the Pentagon. So there. ~Maru I see dead fnords. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Have a Nice Winter Break...
On 12/24/05, Deborah Harrell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Political correctness past moderation! So, hope your Solstice was Soulful, and Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Kool Kwanzaa, and Delightful Diwali (although that's a bit late, I think!). I just finished a costumed Christmas ride, Renaissance dress for me and bells for Darby. Fun! Last night I decorated the tree (cut on the property), and earlier in the week I made rolled-and-cut sugar cookies (*no,* not from a tube; from scratch!). Got a few presents to wrap yet, and part of tomorrow's dinner to start... Debbi Bashir The Cat Thinks The Tree Is For His Pleasure Maru What? No Nice Newtonmas? Or what about our Flying Spaghetti Monsterism brethren? And as always, those poor Discordian people are totally neglected. I expected better of you. ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Online Trust L3
On 12/18/05, Robert J. Chassell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: .. Jurors should evaluate an article in several ways. An encyclopedia entry, for example, requires one evaluation for accuracy and another for style. Thus, an inaccurate article that claims the earth is flat might show great style. The evaluation should be on a scale of one through five, with five the best. Moreover, since people pay attention to the words that frame an option, the scale should be: 5 -- excellent much better than expected 4 -- good better than expected 3 -- normal expected 2 -- bad worse than expected 1 -- terrible much worse than expected A minimum number of jurors must judge before the results are published. Otherwise, a few people will effect many. As a beginning, I suggest a minimum of twelve. However, as I said above, editors might want to look at infrequently judged items. Administrators must choose when (or whether) to ask editors to edit a modifiable posting. As a beginning, I suggest a threshold in which a majority of posters say that accuracy or style is less than normal. (This is in addition to editing that ordinary people may do. Editors are, to some extent, `insiders', which means they have duties as well rights.) Every one needs to see a profile of judgements. In some situations, the profile will bimodal. For example, I suspect that in 2003 in the United States, we would have seen a bimodal distribution of accuracy judgements about an article that claimed that in 2002 Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi government were giving chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons to Al Qaeda. On the other hand, I expect that every accuracy judgement about a claim that the earth is flat would tell us that the article is at level 1, and is much less accurate than expected. (Style judgements might be different; the article would be wrong but might be well written.) At the same time, many entries will be judged the same way, so an average should be posted, too. Jurors might also tell us their confidence about their judgements. For example, regarding accuracy, many might be confident that Michael Faraday was not born in the 17th century since he worked in the 19th century, but be not so certain whether he was born in the latter 18th century (as he was) or early 19th. As a practical matter, I expect that jurors will be more confident in style judgements than accuracy judgements. A confidence scale could use five levels: 5 -- entirely certain 4 -- strongly certain, but some doubt 3 -- moderately certain 2 -- somewhat uncertain, but a little confidence 1 -- completely uncertain To show certainty, an accuracy or style profile would have to be three dimensional. Each level of accuracy or style displays its own confidence scale. A high-resolution computer or printed output can do this readily. The output is an image. It is harder to convey the equivalent information on a low-resolution display, as with Lynx, or with an audio output for the blind, such as Emacspeak. (Since car drivers should keep their eyes on the road, audio is becoming more and more important. Consequently, every design must consider it as one of several different kinds of output.) Is it true that in common law countries randomly selected jurors serve both on grand and petit juries? What more should I add? (I am thinking of adding this, or part of this, to `Choice and Constraint'. See http://www.rattlesnake.com/notions/Choice-and-Constraint.html for the HTML, the same directory for the other output formats) -- Robert J. Chassell Some interesting ideas here, Rob. Looks to me like you are trying to do several things here- you want multidemensional judgments (2, if I understand you); one for general quality (including comprehensiveness, formatting, and prose quality), and the other for accuracy. It would be neat if someone were to write a plugin for Wikipedia's wiki software (MediaWiki) which displayed a little Cartesian 2-d graph, where x could be general quality and y accuracy (or vice versa), and all one had to do was mouse-click in the right location, and your vote would be registered. ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: 'The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, '
On 12/9/05, Dave Land [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Folks, Last night, I invested 45 minutes in watching Mr. Pinter's speech. It was stunning. Not so much the production (although the three- camera setup with a deep-blue backdrop and a large photograph of a younger Pinter was used well enough) but the man, his ideas and his delivery. His offer to write a speech for President Bush and his delivery of that speech are spellbinding. He makes no attempt to imitate Bush's mannerisms or accent, but the short sentences, the danger masked by a smile is very Bush. If you don't watch the whole thing, watch that bit, very near the end. Dave Dare I hope there is a copy of the speech floating around online, and it was that you watched? ~Maru Mmm, that's good demagoguery! ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Work photos
On 11/10/05, Robert G. Seeberger [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.flickr.com/photos/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ These are pictures of a project I have been working on, off and on, over the last few months. xponent Lots Of Pipe Maru rob Nitrous Oxide supply in The Womens Building http://www.flickr.com/photos/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/61875881/ Heh. ~Maru Say, where can I get me one of *those*? ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Knife of Dreams
On 10/15/05, Julia Thompson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ritu wrote: Julia, if you are in the mood to read a yet-unfinished grand fantasy series, George R.R. Martin's _A Song of Ice and Fire_ has my vote. I'd recommend Jordan only if you have nothing else to read and are unable to sleep or find other diversions. Unlikely to happen in the next 10 years. :) Julia Actually, you know what saddens me most about WoT? It's not that Jordan desperately needs an editor to trim down his series and get him to evaluate seriously what scenes and subplots really add to the experience (WoT exhibits all the telltale signs of an edifice encrusted with cruft and tottering. When fan discussions begin showing the signs of a full-blown academic discipline, complete with jargon, methods, a literature, and rank, you know that the subject books have perhaps gotten far too baroque for their own good. Hell, the WoT faq is beginning to approach book-length itself, and that is just the faqs, and outdated faqs at that!), or that the length and the sprawling plot and characters may exceed Jordan's capability to bring to a satisfactory conclusion; no, I think of the human costs. WoT started way back when *Reagan* was president AFAIK. How many fans have died, to never see WoT finished? How many readers has WoT outlasted? ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Knife of Dreams
On 10/15/05, Julia Thompson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The Fool wrote: -- From: Maru Dubshinki [EMAIL PROTECTED] to a satisfactory conclusion; no, I think of the human costs. WoT started way back when *Reagan* was president AFAIK. How many fans have died, to never see WoT finished? How many readers has WoT outlasted? If by 'Reagan' you mean the chimperor's father... Publication date of January 1990 would indicate that Bush 41 was president. (Very easy to go to amazon.com and check publication dates!) Now, when Reagan was president, the big fantasy thing I remember was people desperate for the next David Eddings installment. I never got very far into any of his stuff. (And this continued into the Bush 41 administration -- at the end of 1989, no less than 3 of my friends were overjoyed to get the latest one of his at Christmas.) Julia I do not trust Amazon for publication dates. In the course of my Star Wars work for Wikipedia, I've found many publication dates that were simply wrong, even for the editions listed as the first published. But in this case, yeah, it does seem to have started in '90. Still, 15 years is a long time. ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Knife of Dreams
On 10/14/05, The Fool [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From: The Fool [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reminder: It comes out tomarrow. Yes, very nice indeed. Much better than the previous 3/5s of a book. Does it actually dare I hope out loud? move the plot forward without introducing *even more* complications? ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: The dark side of faith
On 10/3/05, William T Goodall [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The LA Times has picked up on the story... http://tinyurl.com/7fxny The dark side of faith By ROSA BROOKS IT'S OFFICIAL: Too much religion may be a dangerous thing. . William, we get it. Post stories or studies now which don't demonstrate correlation, but rather *causation*, and we'll be interested. ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Brin: Pictures of Brin
Anyone know of any Free (as in software and speech) pictures for our beloved G. David Brin? I ask because the Wikipedia article is shockingly devoid of his visage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brin ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Brin: Pictures of Brin
On 10/2/05, Doug Pensinger [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Maru wrote: Anyone know of any Free (as in software and speech) pictures for our beloved G. David Brin? I ask because the Wikipedia article is shockingly devoid of his visage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brin http://david-brin.tripod.com/ -- Doug Those are nice photos, very much along the lines of what I was hoping for. But looking the pages over, I don't see any mention of licensing, a vital issue for Wikipedia. ~Maru Speaking of Wikipedia, yesterday I was made an admin on it. Go me! ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Brin: Pictures of Brin
On 10/2/05, David Brin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: These photos all came from me and I give permission for wiki use. Problem is that you must copy them from Tripod. Linking to them will make tripod inactivate them. Or use images at http://www.davidbrin.com/ The rest of you! I am serializing an important essay on the evils of gerrymandering at http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/ Thrive all! With cordial regards, David Brin www.davidbrin.com I really hate to be a pain and take up more time, but I've spoken with higher ups at Wikipedia to get exactly the image policy, and the license must satisfy at a minimum this criteria: They must be freely reusable by anyone, for commercial and non-commercial purposes. Giving permission for wiki use, while admirable, has been decided not sufficient, as then *only* Wikipedia can use it, which then brings you right back to proprietary licenses, precisely the thing Wikipedia was designed to avoid. :( If you see your way clear to licensing it under the GNU Free Documentation License, or perhaps releasing into the public domain, or releasing all rights (not quite the same thing as public domain, but effectivel), or possibly one of the Creative Commons licenses (but not one of the ones that forbid commercial usage or commercial use), well that would go just swimmingly with your article. ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Guns kill people
On 9/20/05, Julia Thompson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Mauro Diotallevi wrote: On 9/3/05, Nick Lidster [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ok I have to say it Guns don't kill people, people kill people. Nick high noon Lidster Guns don't kill people, bullets kill people. Allow people all the guns they want, but make bullets illegal. Bullets don't kill people. Pinpoint momentum trauma kills people. Julia Pinpoint momentum trauma don't kill people; loss of blood, changes in the chemical balance of cells, and bacterial infection kill people. ~Maru outlaw chemicals and bacteria ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: New trigonometry is a sign of the times
On 9/18/05, Robert G. Seeberger [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://physorg.com/news6555.html Mathematics students have cause to celebrate. A University of New South Wales academic, Dr Norman Wildberger, has rewritten the arcane rules of trigonometry and eliminated sines, cosines and tangents from the trigonometric toolkit. What's more, his simple new framework means calculations can be done without trigonometric tables or calculators, yet often with greater accuracy. Established by the ancient Greeks and Romans, trigonometry is used in surveying, navigation, engineering, construction and the sciences to calculate the relationships between the sides and vertices of triangles. Generations of students have struggled with classical trigonometry because the framework is wrong, says Wildberger, whose book is titled Divine Proportions: Rational Trigonometry to Universal Geometry (Wild Egg books). Dr Wildberger has replaced traditional ideas of angles and distance with new concepts called spread and quadrance. These new concepts mean that trigonometric problems can be done with algebra, says Wildberger, an associate professor of mathematics at UNSW. Rational trigonometry replaces sines, cosines, tangents and a host of other trigonometric functions with elementary arithmetic. For the past two thousand years we have relied on the false assumptions that distance is the best way to measure the separation of two points, and that angle is the best way to measure the separation of two lines. So teachers have resigned themselves to teaching students about circles and pi and complicated trigonometric functions that relate circular arc lengths to x and y projections – all in order to analyse triangles. No wonder students are left scratching their heads, he says. But with no alternative to the classical framework, each year millions of students memorise the formulas, pass or fail the tests, and then promptly forget the unpleasant experience. And we mathematicians wonder why so many people view our beautiful subject with distaste bordering on hostility. Now there is a better way. Once you learn the five main rules of rational trigonometry and how to simply apply them, you realise that classical trigonometry represents a misunderstanding of geometry. Wild Egg books: http://wildegg.com/ Divine Proportions: web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~norman/book.htmhttp://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~norman/book.htm xponent Wonders How This Will Affect Power Factor Correction Maru rob Doesn't this scheme make it really hard to calculate distances? From the looks of it, it involves a lot of square-rooting. ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Irregulars question: Linux distributions
On 9/5/05, Ronn!Blankenship [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So, any recommendations? _ ¹As I mentioned a few days ago when I was trying to get these new hard drives installed, I have the latest version (8.0) of Partition Magic and the Boot Magic program which comes with it in order to accomplish this (though I haven't set them up that way yet), and I left 100GB on the primary hard drive for a Linux partition, just in case those facts are of significance . . . -- Ronn! :) Well, Ubuntu plays nice with Windows, as do Fedora and Mandrake. Linspire is (I think) temporarily free as in beer, and SuSe is fairly popular. Of course, there is Debian as well, if you are the moral Free Software type, but Ubuntu is generally more useable. It's good you left a primary partition open. That'll make things easier. If you don't mind building the distro yourself mostly, Gentoo has unparalleled comprehensive package management, which is also the most up-to-date. My personal experience is that it's somewhat unstable (one particular program, ncurses, particularly fubars things up), though as always YMMV. ~Maru is a universe of possibilities. We haven't even *begun* to discuss the other Unixes out there! ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Irregulars question: Linux distributions
On 9/5/05, Dave Land [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sep 5, 2005, at 6:18 PM, Ronn!Blankenship wrote: is a universe of possibilities. We haven't even *begun* to discuss the other Unixes out there! Any suggestions appreciated. Then I hope you won't mind a mention of FreeBSD, about which I knew nothing until I started using a FreeBSD-based flavor of Unix recently, one from a certain fruit-themed company in Cupertino. It'll be a while 'til you can get a copy of OS X that will run on non-Apple Intel hardware, but in the meanwhile, FreeBSD itself is very well-regarded from a security standpoint and has all the requisite bits and pieces. And when you *can* get a copy of OS X that will run on arbitrary Intel hardware, you will be in for the treat of your Unixy life. Dave I assume you meant to prefix legally in front of every ocurrence of a copy, correct? ~Maru Now me, my opinion of Mac OS X is that adherents of it are merely attempting to raise a prettier monopoly in place of Microsoft. MS learned from the best. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: The Doom That Came To N'Warlins - II
On 9/1/05, Ronn!Blankenship [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At 07:07 AM Thursday 9/1/2005, Alberto Monteiro wrote: Russell Chapman wrote: Under marshall law, in a state of emergency (and I understand both have been declared) these people should be rounded up and used as labour to clean up flooded hospitals or something. Makes me so angry to think of some small business owner who is going to come in when he sorts out his home, only to find someone thought they deserved to just take the stock. Those looters should at least show some ethics, like demolishing the looted stores to their grounds - this would even make the owners thankful, because they would get full insurance for the stores. Anyone who is looting big-screen TVs, computers, DVDs, and other high-ticket electronic items from stores in an area where there is no electricity and there is not likely to be electricity for weeks at the earliest (more likely months) has already shown evidence of somewhat less-than-perfect reasoning . . . -- Ronn! :) Perfectly rational: the transportation costs of getting those items to a location where it would be useful are far smaller than the cost of the items themselves, if they were purchased in an area with electricity. And the value of those items are still enough to make the effort of looting worthwhile even after a few months of non-use. ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: FLCL followup
On 9/1/05, Warren Ockrassa [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ride on Shooting Star is pretty cool. What I like, of course, is the lyrics I can get. There aren't many. Spider and Sniper, sure. Grunge Hamster was a bit harder. Ride on shooting star I got of course. But there's this bit, I swear, that sounds like Sometimes you don't want it try to duke it out This makes sense to me. Or it did. Sometimes you don't want a thing; sometimes you have to fight. So perusing the transliterations I find this, in phonetic Japanese: sandanjû no yô ni (Sometimes you don't want it) utai tsutzuketa (Try to duke it out) This is the phonetic rendering that sounds so much like Sometimes you don't want it… The translation is: like a shotgun I kept on singing I think I like my version better. -- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books Heh. I'd like to hear what you made of Hybrid Rainbow, or Blues Drive Monster. On a side note, have you heard any of their other stuff, like Skeleton Liar (a personal favorite) or Backseat Dog, or Funny Bunny for that matter? ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: This post made in honor of Ronn
On 8/23/05, Warren Ockrassa [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Aug 22, 2005, at 10:31 PM, Maru Dubshinki wrote: Didja like how I threw in some legitimate scholarship like Freud's anal fixation theories of sexual maturation, and the Great mother religious motif, and Jung's shadow, just to camouflage the nonsense? Since that's how it's usually done by groups with serious complaints, I'd bet that was the part that had Gautam going for a moment. ;) Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books Heh. That amuses me almost as much as writing it did. Well shoot- now that I've thought about it a little more, I could have had a decent paragraph ranting against the cultural imperialism of denigrating a person's unique spelling. Oh well. ~Maru next time ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Mindless and Heartless
On 8/22/05, Dan Minette [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: - Original Message - From: Nick Arnett [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Killer Bs Discussion brin-l@mccmedia.com Sent: Monday, August 22, 2005 6:23 PM Subject: Re: Mindless and Heartless On Mon, 22 Aug 2005 17:39:30 -0500, Dan Minette wrote Perhaps someone wants to argue that GWB should *not* have to endure a half-hour with her, and maybe even that he's not accountable to her (or even the public). Why, because of her views, is half an hour with her more important than half an hour with her other son, or his father (both of whom seem to think his death is a nobel sacrifice). Cite, please. Sure, no problem Nick. quote Others in the family bitterly opposed Cindy's stance. In a statement, her sister-in-law - Casey's aunt - said that the rest of the Sheehan family supports the troops, our country and our president. Cindy's surviving son begged her to come home. It was revealed that her husband had filed for divorce. Their son's death, as in so many families, had strained their marriage rather than, as in others, making it stronger. unquote http://tinyurl.com/cdlee http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20050819/cm_usatoday/cindysheehandecampsleavingverymixedmessages;_ylt=AqYNJoNff80.ib6rG5dFNmys0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3YWFzYnA2BHNlYwM3NDI- Dan M. Tsk, tsk, tsk, Dan. Did you check the source? The Drudge Report. http://www.drudgereport.com/flashcs.htm Let's count the weak links: first, an item on Matt Drudge's website, who is a known (and I believe self-avowed) hard-core rightwinger. A weak link, but not decisive. Ad hominem and all that. I'll simply confine myself to mentioning that Drudge has made up stuff in the past; does anyone remember how Drudge broke the news that John Kerry commited adultery? The item claims that they received an e-mail (a form of communication easily faked, both on the sending and receiving ends, as spammers demonstrate to everyone's daily dismay), which itself is said to say: Our family has been so distressed by the recent activities of Cindy we are breaking our silence and we have collectively written a statement for release. Feel free to distribute it as you wish. Thanks, Cherie In response to questions regarding the Cindy Sheehan/Crawford Texas issue: Sheehan Family Statement: The Sheehan Family lost our beloved Casey in the Iraq War and we have been silently, respectfully grieving. We do not agree with the political motivations and publicity tactics of Cindy Sheehan. She now appears to be promoting her own personal agenda and notoriety at the the expense of her son's good name and reputation. The rest of the Sheehan Family supports the troops, our country, and our President, silently, with prayer and respect. Sincerely, Casey Sheehan's grandparents, aunts, uncles and numerous cousins. How much editing the DR did is unknown. Furthermore, it is unclear just who is signing it: a Cherie certainly signed it, who is apparently an aunt on the paternal side of the dead son, but who else is unclear. Which grandparents (are Sheehan's grand-parents even alive? I do not know.), unspecified (even unenumerated!) aunts, uncles and numerous cousins. None of which have publicly stated that they support the e-mail, or even that the e-mail is genuine. Cindy Sheehan has stated that her aunt's politics and that of several other family members are opposite hers, but sheer probability dictates that, which helps the probability of validity only a little. So the most likely scenario? It's a plausible fake, or the aunt going it alone. It is unfortunate that the MSM chooses to elide discussion of the source. ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: This post made in honor of Ronn
On 8/23/05, Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: An example of the true value of a Harvard education, drawn from a recent post on the Harvard Boston recent grads email list, as part of a request for a roommate: Looking for someone similar to the two of us already in the house: mid-20's young professional or grad student. Someone who is clean, respectful, easy to get along with, who values having a nice home, and doesn't mind emptying the dishwasher or changing the role of toilet paper. So, does anyone have any ideas as to new _roles_ for toilet paper? Apparently the old one isn't sufficient anymore :-) Gautam Mukunda Clearly what we have here is a rather progressive youngster, a shining example of the further march of liberty: this wimmin, or persun, is advocating that toilet paper be liberated from its constricted role of cleaning our bottoms. They hold with Freud that this fixation on the anus is infantilizing, and retarding of progress integrating the self; in short blocking personal growth. Thusly, we must change the role which toilet paper plays to clean other areas, such as the nostrils, or the mouth, other bodily orifices. I dare say that in this cry for progress we can see a covert dialectic, leading to a synthesis of the negative, or shadow aspects of the whole metemphysical nature of toilet paper: what could be more subversive than turning an item that is meant to clean, and tragically, be immediately disposed of into a representation of the Great Mother that the patriarchal Western scientific society has repressed and demonized than by into the embodiment of its enemy, waste, and permament waste at that? ~Maru I promise I won't do that again. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Physics question
On 8/22/05, Dan Minette [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If a physicist were here, There are at least two physicists here: Rich and myself. I've only been active on the list for about six years, so maybe you didn't notice that I'm here. :-) I did not know that. There really should be a short page listing names and professions of major posters, to prevent such amusing errors as that. he'd probably smack us and tell us to distinguish between entropy and the arrow of time/dimension of time. That's not the real problem: the real problem in this thread is that you are trying to force special relativity (SR) into a classical physics box. In classical physics, we have x,y,z space, and a separate dimension t. We have d^2 =x^2+y^2+z^2 (where d is the distance between two objects.) The values for x, y, and z are coordinate system dependant: x, y, and z can be defined by any three orthanormal vectors (orthanormal vectors are both mutually orthogonal and have value 1). The value of d is coordinate system independent. A minor point: why are you representing the cartesian distance formula in squared form? I've always elsewhere seen it as sqrt(x^2+y^2+z^2). And I agree partially: the time discussion is flowing out of the absolute zero?=space travel discussion, which does suffer from the Newtonian space problem. But I'm not sure our time discussion is similarly flawed. snippage of some interesting discussion of Einsteinian space There is perfect symmetry. Each observation is equally valid. Finally, two objects that are timelike (a signal at the speed of light can travel from one point in spacetime to another), will have the same sequence in time for all observers. Two objects that are spacelike (a signal at the speed of light cannot travel from one point in spacetime to another), will be simultaneous in one inertial system, have A before B for some reference systems, and have B before A in the remainder of the reference systems. Hope this helps. If there are any questions, just yell. Dan M. How exactly does that work for space-like relationships? Is this potential to mix up ordering of A and B what allows reverse time travel? ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: This post made in honor of Ronn
On 8/23/05, Warren Ockrassa [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Aug 22, 2005, at 10:02 PM, Maru Dubshinki wrote: Thusly, we must change the role which toilet paper plays to clean other areas, such as the nostrils, or the mouth, other bodily orifices. Oh, I see, so its proper role, according to you, is cleaning? What a typically phallocentric white-male view. I suppose you expect it to be barefoot and pregnant besides! And by the way, it's NOT toilet paper. Toilet paper is the name given to it by its oppressors. It's REALLY ribbon-formed tree pulp (RFTP). If you were REALLY interested in RFTP liberation, you'd be refusing to put ANY role distinctions on it. Only by being unroled can RFTP be truly free to reach the lengths of its potential. -- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books I shall not lower myself to answer the baseless calumnies of this persun, save to note solely that the statement phallocentric white-male view is especially ripe for deconstruction and deviant textual readings coming from him. Furthermore, if this Ockrossa *really* did care, like he claims, about RFTP freedom, he would never say such biased, regressive, and outrageous to liberated sensibilities things like lengths of its potential. What about square RFTPs, you insensitive clod?! Are their viewpoints of no value, non-privileged and censored?! ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: This post made in honor of Ronn
On 8/23/05, Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- Maru Dubshinki [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Clearly what we have here is a rather progressive youngster, a shining example of the further march of liberty: this wimmin, or persun, is advocating that toilet paper be liberated from its constricted role of cleaning our bottoms. They hold with Freud that this fixation on the anus is infantilizing, and retarding of progress integrating the self; in short blocking personal growth. Thusly, we must change the role which toilet paper plays to clean other areas, such as the nostrils, or the mouth, other bodily orifices. I dare say that in this cry for progress we can see a covert dialectic, leading to a synthesis of the negative, or shadow aspects of the whole metemphysical nature of toilet paper: what could be more subversive than turning an item that is meant to clean, and tragically, be immediately disposed of into a representation of the Great Mother that the patriarchal Western scientific society has repressed and demonized than by into the embodiment of its enemy, waste, and permament waste at that? ~Maru Frighteningly enough, it wasn't entirely clear to me that this was a satire the first time I read it... Gautam Mukunda Didja like how I threw in some legitimate scholarship like Freud's anal fixation theories of sexual maturation, and the Great mother religious motif, and Jung's shadow, just to camouflage the nonsense? ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Irregulars Question: mod format in Linux
On 8/21/05, Alberto Monteiro [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Does anyone know wtf is a .mod file in Linux? How can I get useful things out of it? It seems like it's a zip-like bundle of stuff. Alberto Monteiro Really, Alberto. I'm somewhat disapointed in you. But for your browsing delectation, here are some scrumptious links (I'll be assuming here that you are not talking about the Fortran thingy): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOD_(file_format) , http://groups.google.com/group/bit.listserv.coco/browse_thread/thread/f934c8fc1a5ae2d4/fb39a89903eddc0e?lnk=stq=.mod+filernum=10hl=en#fb39a89903eddc0e or http://tinyurl.com/8gccq , http://www.modarchive.com/ ~Maru I have millions of gathas instant sures for every trouble if you need a friend try the Tientai Mountains join me deep in the cliffs we'll talk about truth and mystery you won't see me though you'll just see the mountains -pick up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shide ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Physics question
On 8/22/05, Andrew Paul [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yes, and thus there are places, where time is going faster, relative to earth... eg places going slower (as we are going rather fast). And is there a minimum and maximum speed of time? Andrew Well, assuming Green's metaphor holds, yes. Quite simply: maximum speed of time would be a constant inertial reference frame; no accelerating in any direction. To be the furthest into the time-dimension (ie, farthest into the future, if that makes sense), you would have to have a frame that was not accelerating since the Big Bang. Minimum speed of time is the opposite: all possible acceleration, that is, light speed.Intuitively, this should make time stand still, and it does. And faster still would be going backwards in time (tachyons, anyone?). ~Maru deaf leading the blind. Or is it blind leading the blind? ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Physics question
On 8/22/05, Andrew Paul [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: No, that's good, that's what I was thinking too. And the Big Bang part is an interesting angle.. Is there somewhere like that, can we identify a centre of our universe?. And what about the maximum speed of time? Andrew A physical centre? No; the Big Bang happened everywhere, to paraphrase one physicist. It was space expanding, not stuff expanding outwhere from one point. ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Physics question
On 8/22/05, Damon Agretto [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Minimum speed of time is the opposite: all possible acceleration, that is, light speed.Intuitively, this should make time stand still, and it does. And faster still would be going backwards in time (tachyons, anyone?). Speaking of which, if this were possible, HOW exactly would time go backwards? Would time flow backwards ONLY for the internal time reference (I assume; i.e. nuclear decay would go backwards, etc), or would you actually be able to see the universe go backwards in time in the same way we can now see the universe go forwards? Damon. If a physicist were here, he'd probably smack us and tell us to distinguish between entropy and the arrow of time/dimension of time. My understanding is that going backwards in time is the same as moving about, just the place we move is, in our time reference system, prior to our ownl; entropy would still proceed forward as usual. Now, what entropy going backwards consistently would look like, or whether we could even be meaningfully said to live, is a whole different kettle of worms. ~Maru IANAP; I only play one on the radio ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: David Brin's blog
On 8/17/05, d.brin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: /in the interests of brevity, much cut To this end, I have corresponded for years with experts in several fields, suggesting certain lines of investigation. (I'm not shy.) And now... you are all invited to drop in and view An Open Letter To Researchers In The Fields Of Addiction, Brain Chemistry And Social Psychology. Paste in this address: http://www.davidbrin.com/addiction.html ... and feel free to tell your biologist pals. I cannot think of any single scientific result that might do more to help heal society and empower the pragmatists, while marginalizing screeching dogmatists of every stripe. /more cut Your idea is pretty interesting: my sense of it is that you are proposing that politics these days are not rational, and that the reason (or a major contributing reason) is that public discourse has been warped by extreme ideologues, who have thrived and (like a warped Gresham's Law) driven out better, more moderate sensible commentators, by hooking into the consumer's reward feedback loops using self-righteousness. I had wondered what plausible mechanisms there existed to explain that most disagreements in politics are dishonest; have you by any chance seen one of Robin Hanson's papers, entitled Are Disagreements Honest? In it they pretty persuasively show that most arguers are irrational, and suggest countermeasures: http://hanson.gmu.edu/deceive.pdf or, in Google-ized html versions: http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:DKPRjOn9YOoJ:www.gmu.edu/jbc/Tyler/deceive.pdf+hl=en http://tinyurl.com/akr4d ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Curious coincidence
I was reading Slate the other day, and I saw the article on a new presentation of that old mainstay, the periodic table. It is quite visually interesting, as the elements are arranged in a spiral (hence the name, Chemical Galaxy). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_Galaxy But what struck me most was the acute resemblance to Stanislaw Ulam's prime number spiral. http://www.numberspiral.com/ http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PrimeSpiral.html The strange coincidences in this world sometimes are pretty impressive. ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: MTG_fans=3A_Yer_missin_out
On 7/21/05, Jim Sharkey [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Some of his homegrown spells are just other cards renamed. There are a few neat ones among them, but he crosses up on when things should be an instant and when they should be sorceries a few times. There are also a few that are just strictly better or worse versions of other cards, which is kinda meh IMO. The repeat mechanic is neat. This is one I'd love to see; the arguments alone of whether or not it's better than storm would be worth the price of admission. :) Stall is...OK. I think it would probably be better on big fatties for the Timmies rather than on weenies. A 2/2 flyer for one mana is ridiculously cheap, true, and it *would* allow for a number of quick flying beats by turn three, but if it doesn't come out turn one, it's practically useless. A few of his decisions are puzzling; a pumpable 1/1 for one mana? And it's common? It's better than Nantuko Shade! OTOH, his costless splice spells are decent; the black one in particular is cool. Pit's Pull could rock, and the lands that allow you to choose depletion or pain are neat, though maybe a bit powerful; I mean, Starlit Lake would allow you to play Lightning Angel on turn 2 in Extended; that's strong stuff and well worth 2 damage! The goblin Spikes would make in their pants over Tar-Lan Palace, I think. :) Overall, despite any criticisms I may have made, it's not a bad effort. He managed to get a little in there for Johnny, Timmy and Spike, which is good. Jim I believe in the heart of the cards Maru Wait a sec- That's Yu-Gi-Oh! You traitor! ~Maru anyone understand the rest of it? ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Not unexpected news
On 7/20/05, Ronn!Blankenship [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: About 3-1/2 hours ago: http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/TV/07/20/obit.doohan.ap/index.html --Ronn! :) He's dead, Jim. ~Maru /teh obvious ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Uplift locations and dates. Hey, Alberto?
Perhaps I've missed something rather obvious, but... Why don't you guys just ask Brin about all these niggling lil' details? This is his list, and it's not like he's dead. ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Uplift locations and dates. Hey, Alberto?
On 7/19/05, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In a message dated 7/19/2005 8:28:53 PM US Mountain Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Why don't you guys just ask Brin about all these niggling lil' details? This is his list, and it's not like he's dead. But, and this is the Gawds honest truth, we know more about the dating than he does. Vilyehm /boggles. ~Maru heh, 'boggles'. Wonder if that's actually a word. Later... Hmm. Did you know that the OED says that Boggle was originally derived from a wraith that a horse sees and is spooked by, and the use of boggle as a synonym for incredulity, astonishment etc. is very recent? ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Harry Potter Discussion (Spoilers!!!) L3
Gautam Mukunda wrote: The big shock was not Dumbledore dying, of course - it's been obvious that that had to happen at the end of Book Six since, well, Book 1, probably. What is a huge shock, of course, is that _Snape_ would be the one who murders him. I am quite impressed by Rowling's skill in setting this up. As in each of her other books, she plays absolutely fair with the reader. We had enough information to figure out (before Harry does) what Malfoy was doing, for example - although I doubt many people will. But in each book Rowling has carefully crafted a structure - we suspect Snape, we hate Snape, we discover that Snape is actually a good guy. By this book, of course, I was so used to that structure that I completely failed to suspect Snape. So when Snape appeared at the last minute - I expected him to rescuce Dumbledore (somehow) or perhaps even die in glorious but futile defense of him. I certainly didn't expect the murder. Yet again, here - Rowling actually provides us with a Voldemort-approved explanation for his behavior, and we knew (from Harry's Occlumency lessons) that Snape was a half-blood - although I don't recall _anyone_ suggesting Snape as the Half-Blood Prince, and it certainly didn't occur to me while I was reading. Very enjoyable analysis, Gautam. The plot was defintely slower than usual because of all the revelations/memories/ backstory (which, as I said, improve the previous ones. A dab bit of retconning.). But I must quibble with one bit: How on earth can you claim that we could've figured out Malfoy's plot? We knew that there was a plot, yes, and that it would involve smuggling past the security (here's an interesting and timely parallel: for all the endless cameras and paranoid signs I saw in London, the bombers *still* got through handily, just as Malfoy and the Deatheaters did with the endless reams of security 'round Hogwarts.), and that two large objects would be involved, but we had no information suggesting that the pair of objects would be the key to circumvention. Even stretching Harry's observation that the security would ignore poison in a bottle doesn't lead us to all of Malfoy's plot, and most definitely not to a pair of space-twisting chests or whatevers as the mechanism, esp. a pair of chests which have never been mentioned before (IMO... I could have missed a reference or two. Correct me here if I'm wrong please.) And I felt very annoyed when the Prince turned out to be Snape rather than Voldemort. I feel a little cheated at such dishonesty- one expected the Prince to be actually a prince, no? ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
