metadigital
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Posts posted by metadigital
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I got admitted into University of Jyv
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Letters from Iwo Jima.
Expertly filmed and directed but who could've known war was so long and boring.
It was about half-an-hour too long, but I agree it was (written,) directed and filmed superbly.
I also saw Pan's Labyrinth, which was brilliant: beautifully melancholy, and melancholically beautiful.
Saw a couple of other films on the flights, including Happy Feet, which was decent.
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The Surgeon of Crowthorne (Simon Winchester) and Siddhartha (Hermann Hesse).
Siddhartha now also realized why he had struggled in vain with this Self when he was a Brahmin and an ascetic. Too much knowledge had hindered him; too many holy verses, too many sacrificial rites, too much mortification of the flesh, too much doing and striving. He had been full of arrogance; he had always been the cleverest, the most eager -- always a step ahead of the others, always the learned and intellectual one, always the priest or the sage. His Self had crawled into his priesthood, into his arrogance, into his intellectuality. It sat there tightly and grew, while he thought he was destroying it by fasting and penitence....
No, a true seeker could not accept any teachings, not if he sincerely wished to find something. But he who had found could give his approval to every path, every goal; nothing separated him from all the other thousands who lived in eternity, who breathe the Divine.
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Do you then really think that you have committed your follies in order to spare your son them? Can you then protect your son from Sansara? How? Through instruction, through prayers, through exhortation? My dear friend, have you forgotten that instructive story about Siddhartha, the Brahmin's son, which you once told me here? Who protected Siddhartha the Samana from Sansara, from sin, greed and folly? Could his father's peity, his teacher's exhortations, his own knowledge, his own seeking, protect him? Which father, which teacher, could prevent him from living his own life, from soiling himself with life, fromloading himself with sin, from swallowing the bitter drink himself, from finding his own path? Do you think, my dear friend, that anyone is spared this path?
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'When someone is seeking,' said Siddhartha, 'it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal. You, O worthy one, are perhaps indeed a seeker, for in striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose.'
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'...[A] truth can only be expressed and enveloped in words if it is one-sided. Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity. When the illustrious Buddha taught about the world, he had to divide it into Sansara or wholly Nirvana; into illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation. One cannot do otherwise, there is no other method for those who teach. But the world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. Never is a man or a deed wholly a saint or a sinner. This only seems so because we suffer the illusion that time is something real. Time is not real, Govinda. I have realized this repeatedly. And if time is not real, then the dividing line that seems to lie between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.'
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I cannot put into words how incredibly angry I am that you consider the Beastie Boys a bigger name than the motherf***ing Chili Peppers. Especially as good as I've heard their live show is.
And Bjork?!! Friggin' drug addled Europeans.
just because they are bold doesn't mean they're more important. It's just easier to read that way. I'm looking much more forward to seeing RHCP than BB - espcially because I heard they are freakin' awesome live!
But 'Bj
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Any recommend any excellent contemporary sci fi, or beautiful fiction work?
I just finished a recently compiled anthology of (not necessarily newly published) short stories, which I highly recommend:
I found a book I bought to read on a recent plane flight Extreme Science Fiction.Some highlights:
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Death in the Promised Land (Pat Cadigan)
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The Girl Had Guts (Theodore Sturgeon) ... a spiritual precursor to Alien
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Wang's Carpets (Greg Egan) ... a story that I wish I'd written.
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Death in the Promised Land (Pat Cadigan)
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I think the original poster is saying that in a crpg the world is flat, but with the illusion of being a sphere.
That's my take, too.
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Yeah, it's a little hard to co-op around a 17" computer screen.
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I liked the whole "year-long training mission" mechanic of System Shock 2, too.
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Custom PC is a great source here in the UK for ideas and working examples of people creating cases from scratch (out of every material, from steel to wood to plastic) and the tools they use.
I've been thinking about building something that is more conducive to cooling, myself, so that the electronics will run more efficiently.
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mkreku is on holiday in Australia for a month or so.
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To quote that great American, Antonin Scalia "I cannot define it but I know it when I see it".
The "I know it when I see it" line wasn't Scalia. It was Potter Stewart, in his concurrence to Jacobellis v. Ohio, in 1964.
Ethical values, as steady states in a society, are inherent in people.
(Hey, I got to talk about the origin of ethics!
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That's an interesting point, though I disagree with security by obscurity in principle. (These people will still be able to get the information, in the form of centrally-distributed training tapes, for example.)
I was drawn to the illustration of not filling in one's tax return, as an attempt to secure one's fiduciary status, by obscurity.
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Right, now I have a spare minute I shall make a couple of comments.
Qwerty, you are, by your own admission, SPECIFICALLY AND DELIBERATELY excluding faulty premises, so that you may redefine the cosmological argument in such a manner so as to make it adhere to the strict rules of formal logic. This is a species of intellectual dishonesty, whether intentional or otherwise.
So, YOU are guilty of (the FORMAL FALLACY of) faulty generalisation (probably half-truth).
As well as using a narrow definition (faulty premises notwithstanding), you also denigrated my citations from the wikipedia and appealed to an authority (of sorts: JSTOR). I think it's worth spending a moment to explain this process, so I shall.
The wikipedia is a (notionally) independent, third party knowledge base that is readily available to all. I agree that it is by no means definitive, though it certainly lists sources and gives a good starting point for research. Added to this you cited a restricted website; I had to access it through my university's online library (fortunately I had recently matriculated, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to). I searched for journals relating to "Aquinas" and "Cosmological Argument", though none were particularly relevant (though I could easily have not had total access or missed an article, to be sure), and none matched your details (though you didn't provide any identifying descriptions, like authors or published dates). Denigrating my sources as being "basic" (I had three sources, which is triple the amount you cited), an ad hominem fallacy to boot (why not update the wikipedia to bes less "basic"?), whilst not providing either a quote or a direct link is poor etiquette at best, and disingenuous at worst.
Finally, and this is a general comment that was touched on by Cantousent, and I wanted to clarify some netiquette for everyone. Yes, I have been as guilty as anyone (if not more) of taking threads off-topic. The lexa non scripta, though, is that this is with the permission of the topic starter. Why? Because the topic starter implicitly has undertaken the duty (and pleasure / privilege) of monitoring the thread, replying to people and generally managing the discussion. To take someone's discussion off-topic is just rude. Start your own topic. Basically, it is cashing in on the audience of the topic; a type of attention-whoring (intentional or not), probably based on the fear that no-one would read the new topic. And the onus is on the topic-starter to monitor every reply. But here's the point: if Qwerty had started a topic about the formal logic deployed in theological proofs, I (and everyone else) would be able to read and contribute as and when appropriate, at our discretion and pleasure, instead of having to read through multiple off-topic replies (i.e. thanks for spamming).
Quite frankly, Qwerty, owing to the discourtesy you demonstrated, as outlined above, I nearly wrote a line-by-line dissection of your entire posting history in this topic, with appropriate commentary. I refrained for a number of reasons (not least of which is that I have a lot of work to finish at the moment, and writing in-depth responses with appropriate links takes a lot of time and effort (though not everyone shows this courtesy)).
I try very hard not to moderate unless it is absolutely necessary. I have never had to moderate one of my own topics, so far, and I would rather try to argue points cogently rather than resort to editing others' posts.
Here's hoping that some lessons can be taken away from this.
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Just finished Coupland's latest (notionally a sequel to Microserfs, though not really) novel jPod. He certainly has a talent to enumerate the various characteristics of geek culture and the mildy-autistic individuals who swim in it. It's not much more than an airport novel, though, and (apart from about three pages of excoriating analysis) is pretty silly. I think he's just resting on his laurels, and I came away feeling a little dirty.
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The only difference with the cinematic release of Blade Runner was that it explained everything, via Harrison Ford's voice-over, for the cheap seats. The voice-over was pretty well done, though, even if the plot didn't include the final twist. It's certainly not a bad film, it's just that the Director's Cut is so much better.
As for Minority Report, it was a great idea that was drowned under the weight of Cruise's ego.
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Ballad of Black Mesa
Instawin.
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Meaningless drivel.
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So, a fictional aggregation of dualistic natural essences protects against an equally fictional supernatural power. And you said games were dead.
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Because:
- the nature of logic is completely irrelevant to the topic of science and faith (start another topic);
- I can't tell if Qwerty is agreeing that Aquinas's Proof is fallacious or not, because every reply has a different voluminous reply about some obscure quodlibet,
- whatever the point is, it's wrong.
- the nature of logic is completely irrelevant to the topic of science and faith (start another topic);
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All the Civ games are available (re-released) as part of one of the latest Civ4 game bundles. Civ2 is my favourite, though I haven't played Civ4 past the tutorial, and it is about 2MB in disk space ..!
Building the castle was always the best!
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Are you advocating stoning?
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Qwerty, before your ludicrous mutterings make me go back and draw out line-for-line this inane argument, just STOP.
You started by telling me that I was wrong in calling the circular logic fallacious. Then you retreated to a semantic argument about the definition of a Formal Fallacy. Enough!
petitio principiin noun Logic a fallacy in which a conclusion is taken for granted in the premises.
ORIGIN
Latin, literally 'laying claim to a principle'.
Circular reasoning: also known as Begging the question.
In logic, begging the question has traditionally described a type of logical fallacy, petitio principii, in which the conclusion of an argument is implicitly or explicitly assumed in one of the premises
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Movies You Have Seen Lately
in Way Off-Topic
Posted
Yes.