11.12.08
Posted in philosophy at 5:47 pm by nogre
I took a sculpture class as an undergrad (somehow I fit it in between the 18 philosophy courses, not counting the 3 I sat in on and never missed a day).
My professor said that one of his contemporaries had bragged that he had found five ways to represent drapery. This is no mean task, and my professor said he hadn’t a clue about how to go about representing drapery, let alone know five ways. But he said, after a while, he found one way to do it. And one way is all that he really needed.
In philosophy there are untold numbers of bad arguments and reasons why those arguments are bad. None of them matter, though, if you know one way to argue well.
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11.10.08
Posted in art, epistemology, ethics, language, logic, metaphysics, mind, ontology, philosophy, preterphysics, science at 4:12 pm by nogre
What follows is the second part of my metaphysics, which includes the basic outline of just about everything in this world: nature, science, ethics, language and more. Again it is impossibly short, but the overall structure is correct, so you get a flavor of how I think about everything non-preterphysical.
————
1 Metaphysical Ontology
1.1 Undisciplined Substances
To be disciplined is to take other people’s ontological position into consideration. Since it is impossible, without being crazy, to do otherwise, what is meant by `undisciplined’ is the minimal position: to take other people’s ontological position into consideration as little as possible.
1.1.1 Objects, Processes and Nature
Objects cannot exists alone. To observe an object, to recognize its existence, requires observing some process that the object is part of. Rational beings can lose their rationality; the process of losing rationality identifies a rational being, because the process could not occur without the existence of one.
Objects and processes are what make up Nature.
1.1.2 Words, Descriptions and Language
Words cannot exist alone; they are inseparable from descriptions. For a word to exist is for that word to be part of some description. Without being part of a description, a word is indistinguishable from anything else.
Words and descriptions are what make up Language.
1.1.3 Commitments, Values and Responsibility
Commitments cannot exist alone; they are inseparable from values. Values are how commitments are ranked. Without values all commitments are equal, and hence non-existent.
Commitments and values are what make up Responsibility.
1.2 Disciplined Substances
When you take other people into consideration when considering substance, then you have disciplined substance.
1.2.1 Science, Art and Craft
When we describe objects and processes in a disciplined way then we are describing nature scientifically. This means that the objects and processes are described in a way that is not limited to a particular person or place.
Craft is a level of discipline that is not as universalized: when you describe nature such that it refers to a group of people or various places, then you are describing craft.
1.2.2 Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric
When we describe words and descriptions in a disciplined way then we are are talking about the language’s grammar. This means that the words and descriptions are described in a way that is not limited to a particular description. If we are describing features that all languages have, then this is called logic.
Rhetoric is a level of discipline that is not as universalized: when you describe grammar such that it refers to a group of words or descriptions, then you are describing rhetoric.
1.2.3 Ethics, Worldview and Society
When we describe commitments and values in a disciplined way then we are talking about ethical responsibilities. This means that the commitments and values are described in a way that is not limited to a particular person or place. If we are describing features that all ethics have then this is a worldview.
Society is a level of discipline that is not as universalized: when you describe ethics such that it refers to a group of commitments or values, then you are describing a society.
File translated from TEX by TTH, version 3.79. On 10 Nov 2008, 14:59.
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10.27.08
Posted in art, fun, internet at 7:12 pm by nogre
Animal of the Month: Fighting Bugs!
(3:12) [via digg]
- .
- Runner-Up: Pseudo-animals - The Village Petstore and Charcoal Grill
- See videos of not-quite animals!
USA
- (2:55) via cursivebuildings MUST WATCH
- The National Anthem, 1983. Unbelievably good rendition.
- YouTube - The Manchurian Candidate (1:26)
- Modern presidential politics.
- Dispatches from the Culture Wars: Candidate Comedy
- “For those who haven’t seen the footage, McCain and Obama appeared last night at a charity dinner in New York to roast themselves and each other. Some of it was very, very funny. McCain was really, really funny…. (candidates’ speeches, McCain, Obama - 14:53, 13:39 respectively)
Art and Logic (somehow)
- somefield
- Awesome vision of Alice in Wonderland (written by a logician, for those who did not know what Lewis Carrol’s day job was.) [scroll down a little to see the Alice pictures. And I would be forever in someone's debt if they bought me a print.]
- Robert Downey Jr. as Sherlock Holmes — FIRST PICTURES
- Please let this movie not suck (take 2).
- PingMag - Levi Van Veluw: What’s That Tree In Your Hair?
- “Either you’ll be intrigued by the fascinating way Dutchman Levi van Veluw applies materials on his face, neck and head — or you’ll be kind of appalled by this weird appearance.[...]”
- — All I want to know what this man does for Halloween.
Alcohol
- Video review for real Duff Beer from The Simpsons | iFoods.tv (1:55)
- This is well worth your 2 minutes.
- MxMo XXXII Guilty Pleasures - Kalimotxo
- I have yet to try this, but judging by the review and the accompanying video (21s), it looks near perfect.
Interactive Fun
- Dispatches from the Culture Wars: Rachael Ray Corn Porn (1:39)
- “Okay, this is one of the funniest videos I’ve ever seen. It’s that evil little succubus Rachael Ray getting all naughty with an ear of corn - and being far more excited about it than any human being should be….
- RRRR : Don’t Shoot the Puppy (game)
- I haven’t gotten past level 12…
- The Associated Press: Video games feature ads for Obama’s campaign
- .
- swissmiss: The Unfinished Swan (1:55)
- The Unfinished Swan - Really cool video of the tech demo. This looks like serious fun!
i’m dead
- Paid Notice: Deaths GREENSTEIN, NOAH - New York Times
- not really me, but it is an odd site to see your name in the obits.
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10.25.08
Posted in epistemology, metaphysics, ontology, philosophy, preterphysics at 3:07 pm by nogre
A word of explanation before the actual text. Besides never setting out to write something like this, I think it is at best good; likely not too bad. Perhaps it is horrible, but all these determinations I leave to others. I wrote it because I felt there was nothing else to be done, and it is the best I can do at the moment.
So what did I write? The best way to describe the Prologue is to make a comparison to Descartes Cogito. I set out the barest basics for what I believe can be used as a foundation for knowledge and inquiry, and for what exists in general. And all in less than a page…
1 Prologue: Insanity
If am insane, then I have a problem. If I believe that I am insane, then there is nothing to be done because I am irreparably damaged and won’t be able to learn or understand anything.
I do not believe myself insane.
1.1 Substances
If I affirm the previous sentence then I may infer a few things:
- Descriptions and words exist, else I wouldn’t have been able to make the above statement; I wrote it.
- Commitments exist, else I wouldn’t have been able to affirm the above statement; I’m committed to it.
- Something other than words, descriptions and commitments exist, else I wouldn’t have had anything to describe or commit to.
These three existential statements are inferred from affirming that I am not insane. So if you say you are not insane then you can also be said to believe in commitments, descriptions, and other objects.
1.2 Discipline
Being irreparably damaged is the same as being insane; if damaged you’re incapable of understanding what others can understand. Therefore if you deny that you are insane then you deny that you are damaged.
Anyone who asserts that they are not damaged, not insane, is committed to an ontology that everyone who is sane will understand.
If it were false, i.e. you claim you are not insane and you are committed to an ontology that some who are sane cannot understand, then those who you say cannot understand are damaged in some way becaues they cannot understand but are also not insane. However, claiming that someone is incapable of understanding but not insane is nonsense.
Therefore there is no preferential ontological perspective: ontology is relative to the sane. All sane people are equal in the sense that they can understand each other, are reasonable, when researching the kinds of things that exist. This is not to say that there won’t be disagreements or that understanding will not take time and effort, but that there is no third option of being niether sane nor insane. Either you understand and can be understood or you do not and cannot. and this space between sanity and insanity will be dealt with in the section on preterphysics.
File translated from TEX by TTH, version 3.79. On 25 Oct 2008, 14:43.
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Posted in game theory, logic at 1:15 pm by nogre
I just saw the hit game show ‘Deal or No Deal‘. It wasn’t the first time, but this episode had a contestant with folksiness to rival Palin, so I was entertained and kept watching.
But is there any gamesmanship to the ‘Deal or No Deal’ gameshow? The short answer is: No.
The show begins with the contestant choosing a briefcase that contains a number that represents a real monetary amount. The case is chosen from a group of 26 cases, with the monetary amounts ranging from a penny to a million dollars. Recently, to up the suspense, the show has removed some of the lower amounts of money and replaced them with more million dollar cases.
The show I saw had 8 of the 26 cases carrying the million dollar value. So when the contestant makes the initial selection, there is a slightly less than 1/3 chance of picking a million dollar case. This case is then set aside.
The contestant then proceeds to pick other cases which are immediately opened, revealing the monetary amount they represent. These cases are removed from the pool of cases. After a few cases have been removed, the contestant is offered a sum of money to stop playing. If many of the cases that have been removed were low in value, i.e. most of the million (and other high value) cases remain, then the offer will be closer to the high value cases. If many of the high value cases have been removed, then the offer will be closer to the lower values. Usually the value is somewhere in the middle.
These offers are made periodically when there are many cases remaining and are made after every case for the last few. If you go all the way to the end, then you receive whatever value is in the case you initially selected.
If winning the big prize is the goal, however, all the offers are completely irrelevant. At the outset the case the contestant chooses has a 1/3 chance of containing the big prize. This doesn’t change throughout the game. Let me explain why:
The rest of the cases have the same approximate ratio of million dollar values to non-million dollar values, which the contestant chooses to open randomly. Therefore most of the time (logically speaking and whenever I watched) this ratio stays constant all the way to the end of the game. 2 cases out of the last 6 were million dollar cases in the episode I just saw.
Of course the possibility exists that the contestant will choose all of the lower value cases such that only million dollar cases remain and hence the case he or she initially chose will necessarily be a million dollar case.
However, imagine this analogous situation. Try to pick all the cards other than Jack, Queen, King and Ace out of a shuffled deck without looking. What will happen is that a selection of cards will be chosen irrespective of value, randomly, leaving approximately the same ratio of face cards to non-face cards remaining (Go try it if you don’t believe me). The chances of picking only the low values are very small. Deal of No Deal has been on for years here in the USA and this has never happened. The recent, and only, million dollar winner still had to choose on the last remaining case. So this part of the game has little ultimate impact upon knowing whether or not you have selected a million dollar case.
Secondly, since the cases are opened randomly during the show, no Monty Hall-like insight can be gained as to whether or not a winning case was initially selected. Therefore the initial probability of 1/3 remains unchanged throughout the show and all the song and dance of selecting and opening the cases is a red herring (though it is top notch song and dance provided by Mr. H. Mandel and models).
This leaves the contestant in the position of deciding whether or not to accept the offer made to stop playing part way through the game without any new information. Since the ratio of remaining monetary values remains somewhat constant, the offer made to buy the contestant out of playing should remain somewhat stable for most of the game. It appears however, according to Wikipedia, that the initial offers are kept artificially low to build suspense, but at the end the offers are where the mathematicians say they should be.
The decision then comes down to how badly the contestant wants/ needs the money. If the money offered to stop playing becomes large enough to significantly, to the contestant’s mind, make a big difference, he or she will likely take the money rather than take the 2/3 chance of winning significantly less. This is what happened during the episode today: after it was made known late in the game that a sponsor was going to make a matching donation to a national charity the lady supported, she became too afraid of losing the large amount of money that was already offered, even though she said she wanted to go till the end.
In the end, the deal with ‘Deal or No Deal’ is that it is a great deal for those who get to play. However, it is not much of a game. The only trick is to get yourself on the show and after that how much you take home is up to luck.
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10.20.08
Posted in internet at 11:53 pm by nogre
Online advertising budgets have been slashed due to the economic meltdown. Although this doesn’t affect loonies like myself, there are others who actually make websites for the common good. One of these sites was started by someone I went to highschool with, Rachel Sterne, and her site, GroundReport, is dedicated to democritizing news by splitting the ad revenue with the individuals who post to the website (and anyone can post- this means you!).
I can personally vouch that the site pays. I’ve made a few bucks, and if you consider that a few dollars US is still a month’s (or year’s) paycheck to many across the world, you can appreciate all the good that the site has done.
This is the message that was appended to my last payment:
Dear GroundReporters,
Thank you for your hard work over the past month– we’ve gained brilliant new contributors, broken stories on bombings in India, and launched a video project with YouTube.
This email contains instructions for claiming your earnings from GroundReport. Unfortunately, like just about everyone, GroundReport has been hit hard by the financial crisis, and we need your support and understanding to keep going.
After you read this, please tell 10 friends about GroundReport.com, and urge them to join our community. Together we can grow, thrive and democratize the media.
Thanks,
Rachel Sterne
If you want to help, all you need to do is go to GroundReport and check out some stories. There is reporting from all over the globe, maybe even your hometown. Write something and you’ll be contributing to those for whom a few Washingtons go a long way.
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10.18.08
Posted in Relativity, measurement, science, time at 9:32 pm by nogre
There is something about time that I can’t seem to stop thinking about.
We measure time by agreeing upon an event and then counting from that point onward. Today is October 17, 2008 AD. It is this AD that keeps my attention. It has been 2008 years, ten months and seventeen days since the birth of Jesus of Nazareth: AD stands for Anno Domini, or year of our lord. Those not wanting to be explicitly Christian use CE, which stands for Common Era, which is just a nice way of saying the same thing without recognizing Jesus as the lord. Wikipedia dates the use of this term to 525 AD, though this is how everyone has been measuring time forever. AD began to be used in 525, but before that people just used other events (like natural disasters, battles worn or lost, etc.) as starting points to count the date from.
The only result is that time is not universal but relative to whenever people agree to start counting from. This is nothing new, but maybe like The Ring, if I pass it along, then it won’t bother me any more. If you become similarly afflicted, I apologize, but you know what to do.
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10.15.08
Posted in internet, random idiocy at 12:00 am by nogre
Poverty anywhere is a threat to life everywhere.
This is a contribution to Blog Action Day 2008:
When someone is living in poverty he or she is struggling to sustain the basic requirements for life. This means that this person has no opportunity to change his or her life because all of his or her effort is dedicated to satisfying those basic needs.
Hence a person living in poverty is cornered; death is the only retreat. This at once makes a person in poverty dangerous because a person in poverty has nothing to lose.
Having nothing to lose but your life changes a person in ways hard to imagine. Stories of people stranded come to mind. Take a look at the product description for the book Alive:
On October 12, 1972, a plane carrying a team of young rugby players crashed into the remote, snow-peaked Andes. Out of the forty-five original passengers and crew, only sixteen made it off the mountain alive. For ten excruciating weeks they suffered deprivations beyond imagining, confronting nature head-on at its most furious and inhospitable. And to survive, they were forced to do what would have once been unthinkable …
This is their story — one of the most astonishing true adventures of the twentieth century.
Yes, the people had to eat each other. My morbid sense of humor made me smirk that this is described as an adventure. Having nothing to eat in harsh weather conditions might seem like adventure while sitting in a comfortable chair, but when it is daily reality, it is just ordinary poverty.
Like adventure poverty is dangerous. Unlike an adventure, poverty can be just as dangerous to those who are not the ones in direct danger of losing their lives. When Cortez landed in Mexico he burned his ships so that his soldiers would know that there was no retreat - they were in essence shipwrecked - and hence would fight their hardest. Not only was he trying to encourage his men to fight, he was trying to scare the Aztecs, who, he knew, would see the burning ships and know that they would be fighting people with nothing to lose. The Aztecs retreated.
When there is nothing to lose desperation sets in, and there is no reasoning with the desperate. What is there to say to someone whose child is starving to death? So given the opportunity to escape such a situation, a person is willing to do and support things that the rest of us find unimaginable.
Therefore:
- Physical poverty of some implies a poverty of imagination of the rest.
- Poverty anywhere is a threat to life everywhere, always.
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10.06.08
Posted in SEO, fun, internet at 11:35 pm by nogre
animal of the month: Ninja Kitteh! [1:13]
- This seriously reduced me to giggles for a full minute or two… though the elephant made a strong bid again this month.
art & design
- Vincent van Gogh’s “Bedroom in Arles” Real Life and Digital Recreations
-
- Staring Cats Light Sculpture is Fixating
-
- 1 Hour Design Challenge: Sick-Ass Car Rendering Winners!
- Videos of the coolest cars designers could draw in an hour. Unbelievable skills and cars. (I think this would be a good idea for philosophy: 1 hour philosophy challenge. You would have to write something on a philosophical topic in no more than 1 hour of actual write time. Expect to see this in the future some time and contact me if you want to help setting one up.)
- PingMag - Aya Kato: Mystic Realms
- Tilt Shift + Stop motion VIDEO - Fubiz™
-
- Paranoia mix [2:14] (MUST WATCH):
-
comedy
- Demetri Martin funny chart presentation [8:57] - information aesthetics
-
- A Softer World’s take on the financial problems
- If you are in the mood for something different and hilarious, read Joey’s book, now free!
- Salon Newsreal | A joke too bad to print?
- How Sen. John McCain’s tasteless two-liner about Chelsea Clinton and Janet Reno was censored out of the nation’s leading newspapers
…. J. McCain: Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly?
……………………..Because her father is Janet Reno.
- The Steakhouse Incident
- Perhaps the first ‘essay’ that had me laughing since this Walt Whitman paper.
science
- Large Hadron Rap [4:49]
- If you are a physics or philosophy of science person, this is a must watch.
- The Truth About the Spinning Dancer - NYTimes
- An illusion I meant to post long ago in a different link roundup, but misfiled.
- Ovablastic: Sound Waves [2:10]
- In the spirit of ooblek dancing on a subwoofer, check out this video of salt acting strangely near a massive high quality speaker.
how to
- Leadership/Not Leadership
-
- StatCounter Blog » SEO: Content 1
- Another useful place to look for SEO information.
- The Gentleman Grafter [4:14] [via]
- Video of this man selling vegetable peelers: “By night, Joe Ades dines with his fourth wife at exclusive restaurants, sips Veuve Clicquot at the Pierre, and goes home to a three-bedroom Park Avenue apartment. By day, he is something else altogether. At 72, the “peeler guy” in the Turnbull & Asser shirts is a New York legend.” —– I can personally vouch for the impressiveness of his presentation. If I wasn’t broke at the time, I would have bought a peeler.
other
- Blog Action Day 08
- For all my fellow bloggers, check this out. Let’s do our part to make poverty extinct.
[59s] via
-
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10.04.08
Posted in ontology, philosophy at 7:08 pm by nogre
Below is a tentative table of contents of my Preterphysics.
Prologue: Insanity
- Undisciplined Ontology: Metaphysical Substances
- Undisciplined Nature: Objects and Processes
- Undisciplined Language: Words and Descriptions
- Undisciplined
ValuesResponsibility: Commitments and ResponsibilityValues
- Disciplined Ontology: Technical Substances
- Technical Nature: Science and Craft
- Technical Language: Grammar and Logic
- Technical
ValuesResponsibility: Ethics and Worldview
- Preterphysical Ontology: The Metaphysical Vacuum
- Vacuum of Craft: Creation
- Vacuum of Logic: Force
- Vacuum of Worldview: Love
Now it’s just a matter of filling in the blanks…
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