I Feel A Bit Free
Peter Lindberg has quoted another interesting thing about Semiotics...#
``Julia Kristeva declared that "what semiotics has discovered… is that the law governing or, if one prefers, the major constraint affecting any social practice lies in the fact that it signifies; i.e. that it is articulated like a language" ''
Michael Feldman asks, "Why is Fasting Not A Competitive Sport?"...#
``In the last few years competitive eating has been transformed into a national circuit complete with television coverage, prize money and its own governing body, the International Federation of Competitive Eating.
[...]
Its competitors include superstars like the 144-pound Japanese professional speed-eater Takeru "Tsunami" Kobayashi, a 25-year-old who holds the world record of 50 1/2 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes. Kobayashi is said to make more than $150,000 a year between the American and Japanese circuits.''
Just A Gwai Lo provided a link to a Funny Resume of Bush. JAGL notes it's not really a resume but it is funny and link-ridden...#
``5. I am the first president in U.S. history to enter office with a criminal record.
14. I appointed more convicted criminals to administration than any president in U.S. history.
15. I set the record for least amount of press conferences than any president since the advent of television.
21. I have set the all-time record for most people worldwide to simultaneously protest me in public venues (15 million people) shattering the record for protest against any person in the history of humankind. ''
Note how the links and citation slow degrade towards the end as the ammo is used up.
Just A Gwai Lo also writes this...#
``Halley Suitt's Alpha Male series: I call bullshit on pretty much all of it, especially Confidence Game. It's not so much that I think that "girls like confident guys" is bullshit. It's a little unclear how she thinks it's not patently obvious to those who don't have confidence that girls like confident guys. The part about needing to work to get confidence is bullshit, because it assumes that being yourself is the wrong strategy. NotDating™ seems like an approach best suited to those who, when asked by the Nelsons of the world "How come you suck?", as Skinners, reply meekly "Uh, I lack confidence?". ''
In the comments of a post by Brad DeLong there is a lot of conversation about mathematical logical implication...#
`` I soon learned when I took mathematical logic that p -> q was supposed to be the same thing as q v (~p). But I never believed it. It didn't make sense that p -> q should automatically be true whenever p was false. Consider the sentence: "If Socrates were a parrot, he would be 200 feet tall." p = "Socrates is a parrot" q = "Socrates is 200 feet tall". Since p is false, p -> q is supposed to be true. But it clearly isn't. "Implication" in mathematical logic is not what I mean by "If... then... " ''
A "My Job" article in the New York Times by John Carr is kind of clever, it's called "Fasten Seat Belt. Start Engine. Deflate Ego"#
``ONCE, a kid wearing a baseball hat backward got into the driver's training car and pushed the seat back as far as it would go. He confidently put his left hand in the 12 o'clock position on the steering wheel, placed his right hand on the console next to him, looked at me and said "Let's go."
He couldn't drive worth a darn. Kids are so excited about driving that they think they know more than they do. Usually, when I take them to a parking lot and set up the cones to practice parallel parking, it takes them down a notch.''
Rands describes what's up with corporate T-shirts...#
``In general, corporate wear is just plain embarrassing. Whether it's corporate logos a'blazin' or obscure produce code names, this apparel should not be worn outside of the mother ship. It was intended for one of two things: free advertising or as a token team building trinket. It was not intended for public usage and when it is worn, it only further the geek stereotype that we're a bunch of boobs who don't know how to dress ourselves. Still, we wear it. We keep it. We keep it longer than we should and they is a very good reason.
We keep it because it's the only thing they actually build.
[...]
For many geeks, corporate wear is the only actual proof that they did anything with their lives. Yes, they can drag their friends to Fry's and point at boxes of their software to give they actually built something in the physical world, but the boxes aren't what they built. They merely contain the media which contains the alleged product. ''
Peter Lindberg highlights a quote about "Bricolage"#
``I am reminded here of an observation by … Lévi-Strauss that in the case of what he called bricolage, the process of creating something is not a matter of the calculated choice and use of whatever materials are technically best-adapted to a clearly predetermined purpose, but rather it involves a "dialogue with the materials and means of execution"''
``The act of writing, for instance, may be shaped not only by the writer's conscious purposes but also by features of the media involved—such as the kind of language and writing tools used—as well as by the social and psychological processes of mediation involved. Any resistance offered by the writer's materials can be an intrinsic part of the process of writing.''
This makes a lot of sense and needs little interpretation. Everything is constant feedback loop.
My friend just said this to me...#
``Friend: I had a class with her once.
Friend: I told her I loved her.
Friend: Just in my head though.
Je': She's your Amanda Beckett?''
Jorrit Wiersma comments on Kim's post about "Declarative Semantics"...#
``Basically what Kim is after is a programming language that is as intuitive when it comes to semantics as humans. This is not very feasible and she realizes that. In my opinion the problem is that even if the programming language could have human intuition, that would produce problems as well as solve them. Human language is convenient in that it is not very strict in its syntax, but just look at how inaccurate it is: how often people misunderstand each other. If computer languages would work in the same way, they would have a much larger chance of misunderstanding you, and I think computer programs already have enough bugs as it is.''
When was the last time you saw someone this pretty on the street? (Work safe, it's parent site is not though.) I really like this woman's skirt and purse.#
Matt W. at Gene Expression wrote a response to National Review writer, Rich Lowry calling for a reduction in legal immigration...#
``The NR has been railing against illegal immigration, multiculturalism, and especially immigrants who present a direct national security threat, but has not generally been so hard on legal unskilled immigration. It's good to see the NR taking a tough stance on legal immigration, because any immigration reform that does not include the reduction of legal unskilled immigration is not taking care of the main thrust of our immigration problem--the importation of a persistent, dependent, and resentful underclass.''
``do i have to get nut cancer? does a man have to give his right nut to get the cubs a closer?
i'll do it. is that all it takes?
tom green only has one nut and he gets to be on tv every night so how important are nuts after all?''
A Kuro5hin Article that is a quick overview of Buddhism...#
``Siddhartha had learned some simple truths which he had been shielded from before: we all get sick, old and die. He decided to abandon his old life and devote himself to working out a way to end suffering. His initial method was to emulate the traveling monk and was extreme: he denied all pleasure and followed a life of extreme asceticism. From what I've read this wretched state nearly killed him. What saved him was that one day he heard someone speak about the strings on a musical instrument: if a string is too tight it will break and be ruined. If it is too loose you cannot make beautiful music. Siddhartha applied this to his own existence and formulated the idea of the Middle Way: do not deny the physical body totally and yet do not live life to indulge the body's every whim.''
Schizmatic at Gene Expression writes about "Understanding The Religious on Their Own Terms"...#
``The modern west has always had a hard time understanding the Islamic world on its own terms. The Orientalists regaled their readers with tales of the dark-eyed Musselmen, hot-blooded and quick to anger, a people that were inherently sensuous and accustomed to ease, luxury, and fatalism. In our own day, the right wing polemicist (who probably knows less of Arabic and of history than the Orientalist before him) denounces Muslims as backward savages who understand only force and must ruthlessly be crushed lest they overwhelm our civilization in a brown tide. The left-wing polemicist, on the other hand, sees the Muslims as oppressed people of color, allies in the war against whiteness, patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, and Zionism. None of the above pictures are fully accurate, and all instead serve as a projection of our own fantasies and fears.''
``Why then am I writing this? I merely write to make the point that Islam is a monotheistic religion that differs by time and place depending on the historical contexts, and must be understood as such. The book Europe and the People Without History makes the excellent point that Europeans, when looking at the Other, have a disturbing tendency to view them as existing in some sort of timeless never-never land like insects trapped in amber and existing apart from the vicissitudes of history. So it is that the character of the Muslim was often portrayed as fixed and unchanging by the Orientalists, and so the people and religion of Islam were seen to exist in something of a timeless past/present, in which Islam and Muslims are always the same. It is exactly such thinking, though, that causes people to say that Muslims cannot possibly be intolerant based on a Spain that was, to be honest, a geographically small part of Islam that existed for two hundred of Islam's fourteen hundred years of existence.''
``What if, though, we were to try to examine the Islamic world on its own terms? What might we find? We would find a religion, like Christianity, that believes itself to be the final revelation, and that the Koran is the sole repository of this revelation. As such, dar al-Islam will have most of the same quirks, peculiarities, and great accomplishments that that other monotheistic religion had. We will find a faith that believed that it had superceded all that had come before and yet needed to reach some sort of accommodation with the faiths it had replaced. As I have said above, system of dhimmitude was a perfect system if one accepted as a given that there was but one true religion, but that remnants of those who had almost gotten it right remained. Likewise, in states that believe Christianity is the Final Revelation, the Jews were allowed some sort of grudging tolerance.''