Homo sapiens lives a rich and varied fantasy life. In fact, even more than the opposable thumb, it's our defining criterion. It allows us to plan, rationalise, and make decisions without actually doing anything other than simply thinking. For example, if you have to mail a letter, you will probably, at some point, try to recall the location of the nearest mailbox. You'll imagine yourself approaching the mailbox and perhaps even picture yourself dropping the letter in the slot. When you plan your day, you think about the different goals that you need to accomplish and fantasise a number of possible outcomes to determine which plan makes the most sense. This fantasising is omnipresent -- don't believe me? Try catching yourself out when you do it. You'll probably be surprised at how often it occurs.
The purpose of having a mock-life in your head has clear evolutionary advantages. You don't need to walk into the lion's den to find out what would happen -- you can simply imagine the outcome and do something harmless, instead. (please don't quibble with the example -- it's contrived, but the point still stands). However, our ability to imagine things that haven't (or won't) happen has a secondary, and possibly inadvertent, purpose. It's mental masturbation. It stimulates the pleasure centers of our brains. Not just by thinking about sex, but by thinking about things that give us pleasure. Daydreaming, for example. In fact, the extreme extension of this unique condition explains our love of TV shows and movies (and books, for that matter).
But also, it provides us with pleasure not as a "how can I achieve this goal" function but as a "I'd like to _____ but the consequences would be too severe so I'll just imagine it, instead." I'm sure we've all been with our respective bosses at one point or another and imagined clubbing him/her over the head with a clipboard or stuffed barricuda, I mean, who hasn't?
Yeah, yeah, get to the point, right?
Many men fantasise about rape (I won't say 'most', because I don't have any studies with numbers at hand, but I'd be inclined to) for a number of reasons, one of the most pertinent being that rape provides zero cost access to the thing men desire extremely highly (I'll skip the Freudian bit about how everything boils down to sex and death, but it's well understood that men spend a lot of time trying to get laid, not just in bars, but trying to get prestige careers, fancy cars, etc.) Zero cost because there's no initial investment (everything from buying drinks and being interesting to demonstrating long-term fitness as a mate) and there's no follow-up investment (everything from cuddling when you want to sleep to being a long-term fit mate). It's what Erica Jong refers to as the "zipperless fuck".
Most male rape fantasies commit what is generally termed the "she really wanted it" genre. And this is because most men really don't want to hurt their sex partner -- they want to be nice guys and still get zero cost sex. Once again, I haven't read or conducted any studies on the matter, so this part is pure speculation, but I would be very surprised if the majority of men who have rape fantasies imagine the way it really is. That is, I doubt they imagine the pain and suffering they're inflicting.
To use a couple of examples from the media. I'm guessing for most guys it's closer to the rape scene from "The Hollow Man" -- sexy, a little scary, and mercifully blurred, as opposed to the rape scene in "Boys Don't Cry" one of the most visceral moments in American cinema, in my opinion.
My point is that men's sexual fantasy lives, especially as conditioned by the media, are of the 'bonk the boss on the head' sort of thing. Any rape support group will tell you that rape isn't about sex, it's about violence. My contention is that rape fantasies, generally speaking, are about sex and that most men find the idea of violence against women to be abhorrent.
These same arguments apply to kiddie porn. Imagining sexual relations with a child is a far cry from the reality. I think that, in order to be fair, the bifurcation between fantasy and reality needs to be carefully considered. Especially the idea that more often we fantasise so as not to do something than to do it.
DISCLAIMER: I do not advocate rape. I do not advocate molesting children. I do not advocate violence. In fact, I don't even advocate thinking. I think we were better off as monkeys. Most of this diatribe is pure flim-flammery and it's only purpose is to propose an idea that may incite thought, but I hope not, as I don't advocate thinking. Please don't send me e-mail telling me I'm a sick bastard (I already know that -- my degree was in philosophy and cognitive science). One final point -- I think the same arguments apply towards women, but I omitted them since I'm not "in-house".
I never said that the video wasn't art. I just said that the criteria presented above for what makes art didn't work very well. That is to say, commenting that heart and love are necessary and sufficient conditions for art to be produced is specious.
If we were to discover that Edvard Munch's "The Scream" were not made with heart and love, but rather a smothering dread and intense claustrophobia, would that mean that it wasn't art? Of course not. Therefore love and heart aren't necessary. On the other hand there are plenty of people who claim that Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ" isn't art simply because it's an image of a crucifix submerged in his (then pregnant) wife's urine. Interviews with him indicate that he wasn't attempting to be blasphemous -- the extra chemicals in his wife's urine due to her gravid condition produced a colour that Serrano found appealing. So, it's arguable that love and heart aren't sufficient. If they are neither necessary nor sufficient, they are simply not meaningful. It's just as appropriate to say that giraffes and bananas are needed for art.
And, incidentally, infant sacrifice has been with us for a long time. In Tunisia, around the time of the Roman Republic, the natives worshipped a pair of gods named Baal-Hamon and Tanit. They put their first born children in the arms of large statues of Baal-Hamon and lit a fire underneath the statue. When the metal heated up, the arms separated and the infant was dropped into the fire. There's a long standing connection between art and the divine -- in fact, many artists and philosophers use divinity, rather than heart and love, as the defining criterion for art.
Finally, if you use 'love and heart' as the defining criteria for art, then, since there's no empirical way of determining whether something possesses those antecedent qualities, there's no way of determining whether something is art. The only recourse is to admit everything into the realm of art. At this point, the term 'art' ceases to be meaningful since it's just a synonym for 'everything'.
That's an awfully weak definition of art. How do you define 'heart' or 'love'? If I take a baby and, with much heart and love, carve it up on video, is that art?
I think what the previous poster was referring to is people's tendency to mistake mawkishness for profundity, which, I admit, is tiring. For example,
America
how I
love your bold bravitude
and the ideals
that make you the gratest [sic]
country in the world
May you live
forever
Now, that's a shite poem. But, by virtue of being patriotic in this time of national fragility, it's beyond criticism.
Wanker: Um, dude. That poem sucks.
Me: Apparently you don't realise the heart and love I put into that poem. Maybe it's not great art, but you need a serious attitude adjustment to say that it's not artistic. I know one thing... Until we understand and believe that every little thing that people create with their emotions, time, passion and love is art and respected for the effort the artist made, and until we all wake up and realise that the only thing worth doing is art, we will never be free of all of our hate, prejudice, intolerance, wars, poverty and destruction.
I'm picturing something like David Starr (Space Ranger)'s CO2 space propellant guns, except with vomitus instead of carbon dioxide. Imagine the space duels!
IANALMLAL (I am not a literate, much less a lawyer) but isn't RAV being used in a lot of campus free speech issues? Granted, it's not a contract, but it's not u.s, state, or local governments, either.
Actually, I believe this has already been overturned in R.A.V. vs. St. Paul. The St. Paul statute read:
"Whoever places on public or private property a symbol, object, appellation, the ordinance is facially unconstitutional in that it prohibits otherwise permitted speech solely on the basis of the subjects the speech addresses.
The Supreme Court found that "the ordinance is facially unconstitutional in that it prohibits otherwise permitted speech solely on the basis of the subjects the speech addresses."
I have to say, honestly, "What good is free speech if you're DEAD?"
What a question? Do you think the colonists who went to war for their independence said something like, "What good is independence if we're DEAD?" "Oh, never mind. Sorry about the row, King G." Of course, the good is that 1) not everybody will be dead and 2) the live ones, their progeny, and (perhaps) yours will be able to enjoy the liberties that you've secured for them.
The problem with all the rhetoric that's getting flung around, as I see it, is with the poor examples that keep getting chosen. Someone gave the example about how you should be willing to give up the right to have an e-mail sent to your wife remain sacrosanct in return for helping the government catch terrorists. What about a letter to your wife saying that you don't agree with the way U.S. is conducting these affairs and that the U.S. should adopt more of an isolationist position? Or what about a letter to your wife saying that you're happy that the WTC was bombed and Allah is doing a little jig as you write this? An unpopular opinion, to be sure, but a Constitutionally protected one.
If there's one thing a bureaucracy likes to do (I'm talking about our government, here) it's make lists. Lists of people who receive pinko literature (McCarthy), people who express unAmerican sentiment, people who don't follow the party line. Pick up any hornbook on 1st Amendment law to get a history of the court's decisions and the government's attitude towards free speech during wartime. Here's a quote from Schenck v. U.S. (1919)
When a nation is at war many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.
The opinion was written by Justice Holmes.
And let's not forget the chilling effect that wiretap legislation would cause. Would you still feel perfectly free to say whatever is on your mind, not knowing whether someone's listening, or not? Actually, that's a bad example (but one that seems to be fairly common). Your e-mail won't be displayed just long enough to be read to insure it's not a terrorist document and then erased. Instead, it'll be stored, indexed, and available for later searches. When the war is long past and the FBI is looking for more bogeymen, they'll go to their archive and type:
Keywords: government bomb overthrow
And you better hope that you haven't expressed any unamerican sentiment. Or, what if it's not even political. What if you say something like, "I think that virtual child pornography should be legal. As long as no actual children are involved, it's a victimless crime. I believe that people should be punished for what they do (child abuse) not what they think or feel (child eroticism)" It's a controversial, but still valid and constitutionally protected opinion. Do you want it in the FBI's database?
I think that most of us would gladly allow the FBI to snoop our shopping lists if it would help prevent people from dying. But it's not going to be about snooping shopping lists, it'll be about finding terrorists and terrorist sympathisers and terrorist supporters. And it won't just be over the next month, two, or six. Once it's in place it won't be dislodged.
And it won't matter if there's legislation that prevents your e-mail from being used directly against you, because, after all, if you've said something that'll get you in trouble once, you'll probably say it again. It just requires a little diligence on the part of our justice department to catch it legally. Or, it doesn't even have to go through due process. The FBI can get a warrant on suspicion, take apart your house, confiscate your computer equipment, and release a statement to the press that you're a terrorist sympathetic pedophile -- and then never press charges. (Good luck getting your computer equipment back.)
Actually, lisp is the language I first did non-trivial programming in. In school we primarily used Turbo Pascal. My emphasis was in AI, so my advanced classes were lisp heavy. But that's not the point I'm trying to make. As has been mentioned before, one of the barriers to entry that lisp/scheme suffers from is the perceived inability to write enterprise applications (and I use this term to refer to any application that relies on one or more of database access, distributed components, asynchronous messaging, persistance, etc.) in these languages. As I said before, there's nothing I'd like better to do than to sit down with Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and do every single exercise. However, I'm constantly playing catch-up as it is.
A few months ago, there was an article on the guys who built the Yahoo! Store system (I believe it was posted here on Slashdot). They talked about how they wrote it in Lisp and development time was very fast and the system was extremely robust. It sounds fascinating, and I'm sure that it's the sort of success story that others would like to emulate -- I certainly would! What would be nice is a HOWTO for setting up an environment on a machine that would permit this.
I. Getting and installing the software
A. Get this package
B. Get this package
C. Get this package, too.
II. Setting up the environment
A. Get this IDE
B. Set up your directory structure
C. Test with "Hello World"
III. Setting up a Database
A....
B....
IV. Resources
A. Books
B. Sample Code
C. Articles
V. Etc. Etc.
See what I'm getting at? Yes, I realise that there's no quick way to shift from an imperative/oo programming style to a functional one. On the other hand, if I could spend six hours getting a full development environment for scheme and be able to read and write from databases and do network programming, even if it is just a 'hello world', I'll be much more likely to invest the time to develop my mad lisp skills. I'd be curious to see how many people get excited about scheme, download scheme48, and then drop it just because they can't figure out how to modify their.emacs file to spawn a scheme subshell.
First, let me say that I'm a professional Java programmer who spends a lot of time with the J2EE class libraries. I've done a number of projects that use app servers, messaging, database access, etc. However, while in school I took a couple AI courses where we used Lisp and I liked it a lot. So, here's my question -- how does someone with a fair amount of programming/software development under his/her belt learn how to do enterprise computing with Scheme or Lisp?
My bookshelf has about thirty books on J2EE programming, alone. It also has SICP, The Little Schemer, The Seasoned Schemer, Common Lisp (Steele), Lisp (Winston & Horn), and my old AI texts. The Little Schemer and the Seasoned Schemer are great for learning about functional programming, but they don't say anything about using slib. It would take me a year to work through SICP (and I don't doubt I'd be a much better programmer) but I don't have a year, and it still (after a quick browse through the TOC) doesn't say anything about the things I have to do every day (say, yank data out of a database, turn it into an XML document, run it through an XSLT engine, and send the result back to a web browser).
This isn't a troll. It's a plea for help. What's a fast and efficient way to start developing apps in scheme or lisp?
A 'shibboleth' is a distinguising characteristic, often linguistic, used to differentiate between two different groups of people. For example, the pronunciation of GNU is a shibboleth to discern between people who are Gnowledgable vs. those who aren't (sorry). I think the word you're looking for is 'bugbear'.
A.K. Dewdney (quondam writer of Computer Recreations in Scientific American) wrote up some stuff on "organic computing" like sorting in O(n) -- take a handful of uncooked spagetti of different lengths, whack one end on the table, yank out the longest piece, then second longest piece, etc.
Check out his book "The New Turing Omnibus" for further examples. Incidentally, I recommend this book as one that should be in every hacker's library.
Slashdot Mirror
The purpose of having a mock-life in your head has clear evolutionary advantages. You don't need to walk into the lion's den to find out what would happen -- you can simply imagine the outcome and do something harmless, instead. (please don't quibble with the example -- it's contrived, but the point still stands). However, our ability to imagine things that haven't (or won't) happen has a secondary, and possibly inadvertent, purpose. It's mental masturbation. It stimulates the pleasure centers of our brains. Not just by thinking about sex, but by thinking about things that give us pleasure. Daydreaming, for example. In fact, the extreme extension of this unique condition explains our love of TV shows and movies (and books, for that matter).
But also, it provides us with pleasure not as a "how can I achieve this goal" function but as a "I'd like to _____ but the consequences would be too severe so I'll just imagine it, instead." I'm sure we've all been with our respective bosses at one point or another and imagined clubbing him/her over the head with a clipboard or stuffed barricuda, I mean, who hasn't?
Yeah, yeah, get to the point, right?
Many men fantasise about rape (I won't say 'most', because I don't have any studies with numbers at hand, but I'd be inclined to) for a number of reasons, one of the most pertinent being that rape provides zero cost access to the thing men desire extremely highly (I'll skip the Freudian bit about how everything boils down to sex and death, but it's well understood that men spend a lot of time trying to get laid, not just in bars, but trying to get prestige careers, fancy cars, etc.) Zero cost because there's no initial investment (everything from buying drinks and being interesting to demonstrating long-term fitness as a mate) and there's no follow-up investment (everything from cuddling when you want to sleep to being a long-term fit mate). It's what Erica Jong refers to as the "zipperless fuck".
Most male rape fantasies commit what is generally termed the "she really wanted it" genre. And this is because most men really don't want to hurt their sex partner -- they want to be nice guys and still get zero cost sex. Once again, I haven't read or conducted any studies on the matter, so this part is pure speculation, but I would be very surprised if the majority of men who have rape fantasies imagine the way it really is. That is, I doubt they imagine the pain and suffering they're inflicting.
To use a couple of examples from the media. I'm guessing for most guys it's closer to the rape scene from "The Hollow Man" -- sexy, a little scary, and mercifully blurred, as opposed to the rape scene in "Boys Don't Cry" one of the most visceral moments in American cinema, in my opinion.
My point is that men's sexual fantasy lives, especially as conditioned by the media, are of the 'bonk the boss on the head' sort of thing. Any rape support group will tell you that rape isn't about sex, it's about violence. My contention is that rape fantasies, generally speaking, are about sex and that most men find the idea of violence against women to be abhorrent.
These same arguments apply to kiddie porn. Imagining sexual relations with a child is a far cry from the reality. I think that, in order to be fair, the bifurcation between fantasy and reality needs to be carefully considered. Especially the idea that more often we fantasise so as not to do something than to do it.
DISCLAIMER: I do not advocate rape. I do not advocate molesting children. I do not advocate violence. In fact, I don't even advocate thinking. I think we were better off as monkeys. Most of this diatribe is pure flim-flammery and it's only purpose is to propose an idea that may incite thought, but I hope not, as I don't advocate thinking. Please don't send me e-mail telling me I'm a sick bastard (I already know that -- my degree was in philosophy and cognitive science). One final point -- I think the same arguments apply towards women, but I omitted them since I'm not "in-house".
If we were to discover that Edvard Munch's "The Scream" were not made with heart and love, but rather a smothering dread and intense claustrophobia, would that mean that it wasn't art? Of course not. Therefore love and heart aren't necessary. On the other hand there are plenty of people who claim that Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ" isn't art simply because it's an image of a crucifix submerged in his (then pregnant) wife's urine. Interviews with him indicate that he wasn't attempting to be blasphemous -- the extra chemicals in his wife's urine due to her gravid condition produced a colour that Serrano found appealing. So, it's arguable that love and heart aren't sufficient. If they are neither necessary nor sufficient, they are simply not meaningful. It's just as appropriate to say that giraffes and bananas are needed for art.
And, incidentally, infant sacrifice has been with us for a long time. In Tunisia, around the time of the Roman Republic, the natives worshipped a pair of gods named Baal-Hamon and Tanit. They put their first born children in the arms of large statues of Baal-Hamon and lit a fire underneath the statue. When the metal heated up, the arms separated and the infant was dropped into the fire. There's a long standing connection between art and the divine -- in fact, many artists and philosophers use divinity, rather than heart and love, as the defining criterion for art.
Finally, if you use 'love and heart' as the defining criteria for art, then, since there's no empirical way of determining whether something possesses those antecedent qualities, there's no way of determining whether something is art. The only recourse is to admit everything into the realm of art. At this point, the term 'art' ceases to be meaningful since it's just a synonym for 'everything'.
I think what the previous poster was referring to is people's tendency to mistake mawkishness for profundity, which, I admit, is tiring. For example,
Now, that's a shite poem. But, by virtue of being patriotic in this time of national fragility, it's beyond criticism.Wanker: Um, dude. That poem sucks.
Me: Apparently you don't realise the heart and love I put into that poem. Maybe it's not great art, but you need a serious attitude adjustment to say that it's not artistic. I know one thing... Until we understand and believe that every little thing that people create with their emotions, time, passion and love is art and respected for the effort the artist made, and until we all wake up and realise that the only thing worth doing is art, we will never be free of all of our hate, prejudice, intolerance, wars, poverty and destruction.
Hey, what's the "postercomment compression filter"? I violated it prior to adding this useless text.
I'm picturing something like David Starr (Space Ranger)'s CO2 space propellant guns, except with vomitus instead of carbon dioxide. Imagine the space duels!
IANALMLAL (I am not a literate, much less a lawyer) but isn't RAV being used in a lot of campus free speech issues? Granted, it's not a contract, but it's not u.s, state, or local governments, either.
The Supreme Court found that "the ordinance is facially unconstitutional in that it prohibits otherwise permitted speech solely on the basis of the subjects the speech addresses."
Scalia wrote the opinion. Find it at http://laws.findlaw.com/us/505/377.html
If there's one thing a bureaucracy likes to do (I'm talking about our government, here) it's make lists. Lists of people who receive pinko literature (McCarthy), people who express unAmerican sentiment, people who don't follow the party line. Pick up any hornbook on 1st Amendment law to get a history of the court's decisions and the government's attitude towards free speech during wartime. Here's a quote from Schenck v. U.S. (1919)
The opinion was written by Justice Holmes.And let's not forget the chilling effect that wiretap legislation would cause. Would you still feel perfectly free to say whatever is on your mind, not knowing whether someone's listening, or not? Actually, that's a bad example (but one that seems to be fairly common). Your e-mail won't be displayed just long enough to be read to insure it's not a terrorist document and then erased. Instead, it'll be stored, indexed, and available for later searches. When the war is long past and the FBI is looking for more bogeymen, they'll go to their archive and type:
Keywords: government bomb overthrow
And you better hope that you haven't expressed any unamerican sentiment. Or, what if it's not even political. What if you say something like, "I think that virtual child pornography should be legal. As long as no actual children are involved, it's a victimless crime. I believe that people should be punished for what they do (child abuse) not what they think or feel (child eroticism)" It's a controversial, but still valid and constitutionally protected opinion. Do you want it in the FBI's database?
I think that most of us would gladly allow the FBI to snoop our shopping lists if it would help prevent people from dying. But it's not going to be about snooping shopping lists, it'll be about finding terrorists and terrorist sympathisers and terrorist supporters. And it won't just be over the next month, two, or six. Once it's in place it won't be dislodged.
And it won't matter if there's legislation that prevents your e-mail from being used directly against you, because, after all, if you've said something that'll get you in trouble once, you'll probably say it again. It just requires a little diligence on the part of our justice department to catch it legally. Or, it doesn't even have to go through due process. The FBI can get a warrant on suspicion, take apart your house, confiscate your computer equipment, and release a statement to the press that you're a terrorist sympathetic pedophile -- and then never press charges. (Good luck getting your computer equipment back.)
A few months ago, there was an article on the guys who built the Yahoo! Store system (I believe it was posted here on Slashdot). They talked about how they wrote it in Lisp and development time was very fast and the system was extremely robust. It sounds fascinating, and I'm sure that it's the sort of success story that others would like to emulate -- I certainly would! What would be nice is a HOWTO for setting up an environment on a machine that would permit this.
I. Getting and installing the software
A. Get this package
B. Get this package
C. Get this package, too.
II. Setting up the environment
A. Get this IDE
B. Set up your directory structure
C. Test with "Hello World"
III. Setting up a Database
A.
B.
IV. Resources
A. Books
B. Sample Code
C. Articles
V. Etc. Etc.
See what I'm getting at? Yes, I realise that there's no quick way to shift from an imperative/oo programming style to a functional one. On the other hand, if I could spend six hours getting a full development environment for scheme and be able to read and write from databases and do network programming, even if it is just a 'hello world', I'll be much more likely to invest the time to develop my mad lisp skills. I'd be curious to see how many people get excited about scheme, download scheme48, and then drop it just because they can't figure out how to modify their
My bookshelf has about thirty books on J2EE programming, alone. It also has SICP, The Little Schemer, The Seasoned Schemer, Common Lisp (Steele), Lisp (Winston & Horn), and my old AI texts. The Little Schemer and the Seasoned Schemer are great for learning about functional programming, but they don't say anything about using slib. It would take me a year to work through SICP (and I don't doubt I'd be a much better programmer) but I don't have a year, and it still (after a quick browse through the TOC) doesn't say anything about the things I have to do every day (say, yank data out of a database, turn it into an XML document, run it through an XSLT engine, and send the result back to a web browser).
This isn't a troll. It's a plea for help. What's a fast and efficient way to start developing apps in scheme or lisp?
A 'shibboleth' is a distinguising characteristic, often linguistic, used to differentiate between two different groups of people. For example, the pronunciation of GNU is a shibboleth to discern between people who are Gnowledgable vs. those who aren't (sorry). I think the word you're looking for is 'bugbear'.
Check out his book "The New Turing Omnibus" for further examples. Incidentally, I recommend this book as one that should be in every hacker's library.
Actually, the word is 'quash'.
A.
Yes, you did.