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archives push me to post webmail :: xenii mail the hive :: for trading and raiding polymorph :: a cosmographia universalis chrisnelson.ca :: chiefwagonburner has a blog fortune cookie distro :: x's distro
Hey guys I'm not just slackin', I'm super slackin'! I'm at this conference in Burbank of all places and although I'm supposed to be demonstrating the extranet that we have for the community clinics in CA and signing the peeps up for it, I'm in fact nodding at people and writing you folks a post. and drinking burnt coffee. Burbank is depressing. At least the hotel at the end of the runway is depressing. And so are the two cheeseball blonde Pfizer (drug company) reps who are sitting at a table next to me and talking (loudly) about whether or not one of them should cheat on her boyfriend while he's out of town or some crap like that. Cheeseball #1's advice to Cheeseball #2 was "Well, you shouldn't think about your own pleasure, but about whether or not you'd be upset if he did the same thing to you." er, ah yeah. don't think about yourself, just, um, think about yourself! yeesh. But it's not all bad. Yesterday I sat outside in the warm bright southern california sun with the nice soft air and I thought, sigh, I could live in LA for awhile. There's just something about the sun and the feel of the air (not the pollution of it, just the softness of it) that makes me nostalgic for some unnamed thing. anyhoo, that's all for now.
Miss Speck and the Giant Librarians re: beauty and reductionism It seems like every single element of humanity that is capable of producing wonder and awe in a human being, such as beauty, love, fear and that sudden buzzing realization that we are tiny dots in a vast universe can be reduced to a small group of primitive causes, many of which are considered mere chemical reactions in our bodies and brains. Why is it that logical folk seem to think this is reason to suck the marrow out of life? I constantly hear people saying that "love is just an endorphine reaction" or "god didn't cause that tree to fall out of nowhere and stop your maverick car from going over the cliff edge, that could have happened at any time, the tree was old and dead". I am not a religious person; I have a concept of the infinite and a love of beauty which keeps me wide-eyed and aware of the possibilities of gods and angels, but no religion to speak of, and no desire for one. In this way, I understand their sentiments about "electrical anomalies, not ghosts, stupid" and what-not. Still, with my meager and pitiful junior college scientific training I am completely cognizant of the fact that this reductionist approach is completely screwed up, and I've written about it time and time again in the club, mostly just babbling, but these are things I think about and feel are a contributing factor to much of the worlds distress. Problem 1, explanation as refutation: I think a good analogical tool for the illustration of this problem is that of a giant windmill, whose inerts are tons of rusting metal gears and pulleys and chains and gear catches. Providing a mechanical explanation for the phenomenon of this fabulous machine grinding wheat should not be enough to allay anyone's fears that the windmill is a work of genius, and is deserving of awe and wonder. Yet the reductionists do this. "Well it's only a bunch of gears and differentials which turn the wind into an energy source for the grinding of wheat." They are of course right within extremely restrictive limits, as their analysis is fettered with unresolvable ommissions. They are actually logically constricted by such compelling issues as Godel's Incompleteness Theorem to explain only a fraction of what is actually occuring in the windmill. And there are still dozens more issues which need to be resolved to explain away the miracle of the windmill. So, when someone says, "all it is is a blablablabla", I usually let it slide, but here is what I should say: 1. "You don't know for sure what is going on there, and you never will." 2. "Scientific explanations such as the one you just gave are revised every fifteen minutes because of the aufgebau principle of knowledge. Science gives an approximation of the case. Who are you that knows for sure?" 3. "Zark off. You are merely pretending to understand what you don't actually understand to protect yourself from the fear of the unknown." Problem 2, ideal systems and Ockham's curse: I've used this analogy once before. When a scientist decides she can predict how long it will take for a car engine without oil to seize up it is because she has thoroughly studied the system and knows enough about its goings on that she can present a statistical argument for her prediction. If she claims that "it is 75% likely the engine will seize before running for 10 minutes" it is because she has collected enough data to support an inductive conclusion. Her ability to make predictions with any degree of accuracy does not disvalidate any claim that she has no idea for sure what is actually occurring. I would only expect her to make predictions about an engines likelihood to cease, without the absolute quality of "that engine is going to cease". If for some reason the engine did not cease after 30 minutes, and a pregnant woman driving herself to the hospital while in the throes of labor in such a vehicle decides to call it a miracle, the scientist has the right to refer to it as a "mere statistical anomaly", for that is what it is. In fact, most miracles can be referred to as statistical anomalies, it's almost synonomous with "miracle". Now if a man claims that he woke up one night to discover an army of ghosts running through his room in civil war uniforms shouting and screaming and passing through his walls as though they were thin air, a reductionist has the right to his incredulity. He cannot claim that the...[will edit the rest later, in a clients machine and she's done loading stuff so back to wizork; this is why i love blogger, i can edit it later! Hot.]
jimmy A couple of weeks back I wrote a small piece to exorcise a certain ghost. Well not exactly exorcise, maybe to reduce it from the ghost it was to a memory. Not a demon though, it was never a demon but even nice ghosts can stand in the way of growth. It has worked or is in the process of working. But what I really wanted to talk about here today was how in the process of writing this piece I was waylaid by a need for secrecy. Having made notes and having captured my feeling in these note to my satifaction I began the draft. But somehow the it seemed that I was exposing too much and I began hiding what I really meant. The piece became cryptic and no one but myself knew what it was about. The style changed to accommodate these changes. I'm not even sure I will recognise it as something I wrote 50 years from now. On beauty - in the animal kingdom beauty (what we call beautiful) is used to attract mates e.g peacock's tail. So is the function of beauty to get sex? Seems to work. People who are considered beautiful tend to have more partners. Devastate us Anna.
Ashok I like my new name. it's so Bowie-esque.... So many aliases. I wonder if the government is getting suspicious.... anyhoo. I've had oh so very much fun the past couple of weekends and I'd love to tell y'all about it but being the overacheiving slacker that I am, I am about to leave to go home. anyhoo, in addition to my different names, I've had many different personas over the past couple of weeks. rockstar raver (in Willits) punk rock go-go dancer traveling business woman (egads!) critical mass-er oh, and town drunk. but that was kind of wrapped up in the punk rock go-go dancer. Or actually I think I morphed from punk rock to tragic go-go dancer at some point in the evening. ah, well... anyhoo, I'll tell ya' more. later. off to Burbank. no, I'm not going to be on the Price is Right. sigh.
Miss Speck and the Giant Librarians My brain is on loan to the institution. I could tell you what beauty would mean to a post-structuralist, but it might be devastating. Sometimes the most beautiful things in the world to me are the most pathetic.
Anna Time for a boring blogger-czarina post. The archives work, finally. I didn't do anything special to fix them. Magic! Does anyone have any preferences for how many posts should appear here on the main blog display page? I have it set for 10 posts right now; it was loading slowly for me and I thought I'd experiment a bit. I had it set to 7 days' worth of posts before now. Anyway, suggestions are always appreciated.
coop Jimmy even as you were typing in that stuff about Sir Robert Ballcock, I bet, that you were thinking about who it was that going to respond with Thomas Crapper. It is told that old Tom invented the flush system and the rest, as they say, is history. The name that launched a thousand jokes. Rahoul was telling me just the other day about an experiment, babies looked at pictures of attractive people for up to 75% longer. Is what we find beautiful (physical beauty in humans) hardwired rather than learned? And then there is abstract beauty. No offence X man but how many people can find any maths beautiful. Mathematicians on the other hand say that their search for new maths or avenues to explore is guided by beauty! What would people say are the elements of beauty? To start it off I would say it includes: - elegance (for me the number one thing) - propotion of elements making up object to each other (and maybe to surrounding) - overall balance - ?? But seems all these things and beauty are/is subjective. If it is subjective then perhaps we can add another things to the list: - need there is nothing as beautiful as water to man dying of thirst (or is this really only playing with words?). Maybe it is playing with words. Ok ignore need. Interesting typo in my last post - when I call myself a dumb user! Wonder what Freud would have made of it? Goodnight slackers.
Ashok Yeah, Ashok. We actually call it a "ballcock" here. Stopcock is definitely a more attractive word. I hope there isn't some guy somewhere that the ballcock was named after. Sir Robert Ballcock. "As a child, little Bobby Ballcock liked to play in the outhouse." I don't know, but I wouldn't doubt it.
jimmy The first blog of October 2002! Don't you just love living in England where it's October before America. Oops I forgot that most of the slackers live on that side of the pond. Still you got to get them where they are. After all how many like-minded people are there that I can afford to let go of even one. I have been at my place of work for a year today. When I joined I was amused by the date then 01/10/01 (in British format dd/mm/yy). Two reflections. The year has not been bad but am getting itchy feet (put some powder on I hear you say). Unfortunately powder will not solve these itches. Some itches are deeper that the skin. Hey, beauty is said to be deeper than the skin - maybe itchness is a kind of beauty. Do the hollow men know? Bibbity-bobbity ball? Must admit I laughed out aloud when I read that. Stopcock it's called here. Or maybe the whole assembly is called stopcock. I don't know, I'm only a dump user and every time there is a problem the help desk tell me to reboot the system. My tiolet can't take all this booting I'm giving it. But most satisfying. Where there's a hive there's got to be honey.
Ashok Thanks Jimmy, or shall I say "tanks"? I was about to call the landlord to come fix it, but then I just went ahead and flooded my bathroom! Heheh, it's okay now, everything is okay. I was all in a panic there for a while as the water was just rushing out of the tank like my own private waterfall. I've learned a lot about toilets, and I know which direction NOT to adjust the bibbity-bobbity ball now. Bowie has it out for my toilet.
Anna I very like the new front page design, Jimmy. It's simple, clear, and aesthetically pleasing. (I would've said "very much like," but people who say "very much" like it's a more intellectually correct prelude to "is" really bug the noodles out of me, and I don't even want to put the two words together anymore, even out of context. As in, the leakiness of the toilet is very much a product of excessive length of the bibbity-bobbity ball chain. Gah.)
coop In most toilets there is a chain which leads to a lever which is connected to the bibbity-bobbity ball (that is the technical term) which activates the water shut-off valve when the water reaches a certain height. It sounds like your bibbity-bobbity ball's lever chain needs to be adjusted in such a way that it trips the shut-off valve before the water level gets too high. The one below has none of this stuff, but if you alter the lever somehow or adjust the bibbity-bobbity ball, you can change the maximum height of the water. ![[bibbity-bobbity ball; ok, it's called a ballcock]](http://www.dinapoli.com/dinapoliuser/images/ballcock.gif) Wait. Was that an actual toilet problem or a metaphor for some troubling aspect of your life? Thank you for using Toilet Tech. I'll be available should you have any more questions. Jimmy O. Toilet Technical Support jimmy@xenius.org
jimmy My toilet is leaking out the base of the flusher handle. It's like the tank fills up too much and then it starts seeping out where the handle is attached. *sigh*
Anna 
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