What I meant by that, is that I (and most
people) are bright enough to come up with our own ideas about what the symbolism means, and that the personal meaning
found is more important and more personally enriching than trying to make sure that what you see is the same thing as some
random guy, that managed to get a book published on the subject.
But you forget that sumbolism often cannot be interpreted outside of a certain clultural context, and if you are not familiar with the context no amount of brightness will make up for it. Say, if you are trying to understand 2001 but nave never heard of Nietzsche, you might be able to come up with some personal interpretation, but in all likelihood it will have little to do with the film.
That's why I said it was hubris to think that you could compensate by brightness for lack of knowledge, which other people (not Wheat) perhaps spent their lives to achieve.
The point of contention was your statement that since you were bright you could interpret the symbols for yourself. Very bright people have spent their whole lives doing just that and I find that attitude extremely arrogant. Sorry if I misinterpreted your position.
As to the original essay, I would generally agree with you. The "no meat" business, 90% anagrams,
bathroom tiles and walls of Troy are all rather shaky, to put it mildly.
However, god born out of a bone and Nitzschean parallels seem very real. I've heard about them before, except for killing the god bit.
I am less sure about the tight rope walker analogy, though. Interestingly, Wheat does not accurately relate that story. In fact, whan the tight rope
fell, he did not die before he told Zarathustra,
that his life was like that of a beast. Zarathustra promised to bury him (not to dispose of his body, what a term!).
Did you know that the music in the film is from Strauss's Thus Spake Zarathustra?
The Odyssey interpretation is obvious, but seems somewhat more supeficial.
I find this arrogance disgusting. It is often worthwhile to listen to people who put a lot of thought and effort into it. While you do not have to do it, to think that just because you are bright you can understand everything is pure hubris.
Cable gets cold and becomes a superconductor. Nitrogen is still piped around at room temperature or, more accurately,
underground temperature. The only cold nitrogen was the stuff that was allowed to escape to become a gas.
Informative? Perhaps. Wrong? You bet!
The gas that escapes is actually hotter than the rest of the liquid, and takes energy away from it.
Thus the liquid becomes colder. You have to apply energy to remove the vapor, so overall you lose energy. (Otherwise you would have a perpetuum mobile.)
How can a cable get cold from contact with liquid which is at room temperature? Think about it for a second.
You'll notice there are two continents free from major conflict, and they have been for a long
time. That's better than any other period of history right there....
The peace at the end of the 19th century did not last 50 years.
Actually it did last pretty close to that. US had not participated in any major conflicts from the Civil war to the World War I. Spanish war, "splendid little war" does not really qualify as a major conflict. There were no major wars in Europe either - a few little skirmises here and there, certainly not bigger than the Serbo-Croatian conflict.
Arguably the Boer war was a significant war effort by the British but it took place way outside Europe it would be roughly comparable to the American war effort in Vietnam.
It is safer, nearly everywhere, than it was before.
I would actually argue that it is less safe now in many parts of the world, which used to be colonies. The colonial rule would quickly supress any dissent or minor conflict and would make procuring weapons difficult. After the fall of the colonialism weak governments cannot prevent
rebels and oppositions from acquiring weapons.
Machine guns and artillery are far more efficient for killing people then spears.
Now, what do we have? Little brushfires
that would have been considered to be, roughly, peace now are all that's there, and they draw attention from the
major world powers which fall over each other to stop the horror.
It's certainly a safe time to be alive as far as wars.
If you lived in Africa, parts of south Asia
or southern America you might have thought otherwise. There are plenty of people killing each other at any given moment of time. And don't forget that the war of completely unprecendented scope involving all major power happened only a little more than 50 years ago.
Also how about the 19th century? The end of the 19th century was remarkably peaceful. In fact the sentiment back then was quite close to what it is today - people believed in technological progress, equality, etc. As now most people believed that the civilization reached an advanced stage where major wars are unlikely.
Just because it is safe here and now does not make it a safe time to be alive.
3001 is a piece of crap that is difficult to spoil any further.
However, the analogies with Odysseus and Zarathustra are not far-fetched at all. E.g. the music in the movie is form Strauss's "Thus Spake Zarathustra" and also the three parts of the film can be though of as the three stages of development in Nietzsche - camel - the first scene with apes, lion - the bulk of the movie, and the
overman - the very end.
The black monolith can be interpreted as a symbol of transition between these stages.
It takes 15 1-megaton (read: SMALL) nukes to create an explosion equivalent to 15 H-bombs (read: BIIIIIIG).
You are mistaken, 1-meg bomb is not small. In fact a warhead on a multiple-warhead ICBM would tyically be 500k or 1 meg. Granted, there are misslies with much bigger warheads, 10 or 15 megs, but those are designed for destroying bunkers and well-fortified military installations.
Also all of these are H-bombs! Atomic bombs are much less powerful (for example, Hiroshima's explosion was around 15 or 20k).
This concept is not exactly new, goes back to Shannon's information theory, Kolmogorov complexity etc. Chaitin makes it seem like he invented the whole subject.
You can encode an awful lot of information in a single "real" number. It is not computable, so what? There are only countably many computable numbers anyway. It is an interesting idea, perhaps, but does not really tell you much without the details.
The article is bad, the journalists as usual have no understanding of the subject whatsoever and exaggerate everything to an unbelievable extent, making some cross of Goedel and Hilbert out of him.
The academic definition of science is: that which follows the philosophy of positivism and uses the scientific method. Mathematics does not fit this definition.
Science is that which follows the scientific method. Hm...
Positivism had not existed before early 19th century. Are you saying there had been no science prior to that?
Oxford English Dictionary:
6.b.In modern use, often treated as synonymous with 'Natural and Physical Science', and thus restricted to those branches of study that relate to the phenomena of the material universe and their laws, sometimes with implied exclusion of pure mathematics. This is now the dominant sense in ordinary use.
Whether you consider math to be a science or not is really a question of whether mathematical knowledge has a separate reality.
In english this time: take a triangle (call the points p,q,r). Draw a perpendicular line from each line to its opposite point (say going from line [qr] to point p,
and so on). These intersect at the centroid of the triangle (known geometric theorem).
The medians (i.e. lines connecting the vertex with the middle of the opposite side) interesect at the centroid. The perpendiculars do not.
My second question is: Why doesnt everybody understand this?
All too often people think that somehow new and faster machines make quality translation and voice recognition feasible.
The main problem is not the speed of the processor, it is a sad lack of basic understanding
of the underlying phenomen (such as speech production) in humans). After all out brain operates at a much lower frequency.
And Mr. Flynn is not a fool; he has a valid point, just poorly stated.
Perhaps not a fool, I would say he is misguided.
His point is quote clear and there may be some validity to it. However, the bizarre combination of engineereing and classical studies he proposes hardly makes any sense.
Have you read "Closing of the American Mind" by Allan Bloom? He raises similar points very intelligently and eloquently (although he thinks that decline in the teaching of liberal arts and the rise of specialized science is a symptom, if not the cause, of the poor state of American education)
but unfortunately comes short of any solution.
The problem, of course, is that education has to correspond to the social structures of the society and (to oversimplify a bit) it is hard to imagine going back to caning students for failing to produce correct conjugations of Latin verbs.
But first, a little background; I'm a classicist. I finished High School here in 1997
Don't you think you sound a bit grandiose calling yourself a classicist while still a college student?
In any case it does not seem to make much sense to argue with people without even a shadow of thought. Anyone who believes the value of engineering is self-evident is hardly capable of any.
someday, we'll begin to see life as another property of the carbon atom
What is enlightened about it?
Does it shed any light on the underlying mystery?
Rather arrogant and reductionist quote as far as I am concerned.
Properties of a complex system are not necessarily
reducible to the properties of its most elementary consituents.
It is hard to imagine understanding of the process of life coming from understanding chemical
reactions of a carbon atom.
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But you forget that sumbolism often cannot be interpreted outside of a certain clultural context, and if you are not familiar with the context no amount of brightness will make up for it. Say, if you are trying to understand 2001 but nave never heard of Nietzsche, you might be able to come up with some personal interpretation, but in all likelihood it will have little to do with the film.
That's why I said it was hubris to think that you could compensate by brightness for lack of knowledge, which other people (not Wheat) perhaps spent their lives to achieve.
As to the original essay, I would generally agree with you. The "no meat" business, 90% anagrams, bathroom tiles and walls of Troy are all rather shaky, to put it mildly.
However, god born out of a bone and Nitzschean parallels seem very real. I've heard about them before, except for killing the god bit. I am less sure about the tight rope walker analogy, though. Interestingly, Wheat does not accurately relate that story. In fact, whan the tight rope fell, he did not die before he told Zarathustra, that his life was like that of a beast. Zarathustra promised to bury him (not to dispose of his body, what a term!).
Did you know that the music in the film is from Strauss's Thus Spake Zarathustra?
The Odyssey interpretation is obvious, but seems somewhat more supeficial.
I find this arrogance disgusting. It is often worthwhile to listen to people who put a lot of thought and effort into it. While you do not have to do it, to think that just because you are bright you can understand everything is pure hubris.
Informative? Perhaps. Wrong? You bet!
The gas that escapes is actually hotter than the rest of the liquid, and takes energy away from it. Thus the liquid becomes colder. You have to apply energy to remove the vapor, so overall you lose energy. (Otherwise you would have a perpetuum mobile.)
How can a cable get cold from contact with liquid which is at room temperature? Think about it for a second.
Actually it did last pretty close to that. US had not participated in any major conflicts from the Civil war to the World War I. Spanish war, "splendid little war" does not really qualify as a major conflict. There were no major wars in Europe either - a few little skirmises here and there, certainly not bigger than the Serbo-Croatian conflict.
Arguably the Boer war was a significant war effort by the British but it took place way outside Europe it would be roughly comparable to the American war effort in Vietnam.
It is safer, nearly everywhere, than it was before.
I would actually argue that it is less safe now in many parts of the world, which used to be colonies. The colonial rule would quickly supress any dissent or minor conflict and would make procuring weapons difficult. After the fall of the colonialism weak governments cannot prevent rebels and oppositions from acquiring weapons. Machine guns and artillery are far more efficient for killing people then spears.
If you lived in Africa, parts of south Asia or southern America you might have thought otherwise. There are plenty of people killing each other at any given moment of time. And don't forget that the war of completely unprecendented scope involving all major power happened only a little more than 50 years ago.
Also how about the 19th century? The end of the 19th century was remarkably peaceful. In fact the sentiment back then was quite close to what it is today - people believed in technological progress, equality, etc. As now most people believed that the civilization reached an advanced stage where major wars are unlikely.
Just because it is safe here and now does not make it a safe time to be alive.
Well, if you don't like the word "proof" how about "justification" or "positive evidence"?
If you make a sweeping statement like that you should be prepared to defend it.
Any proof for this far-reaching statement?
However, the analogies with Odysseus and Zarathustra are not far-fetched at all. E.g. the music in the movie is form Strauss's "Thus Spake Zarathustra" and also the three parts of the film can be though of as the three stages of development in Nietzsche - camel - the first scene with apes, lion - the bulk of the movie, and the overman - the very end.
The black monolith can be interpreted as a symbol of transition between these stages.
Today?
25% of R&D budget for servers.
Very sizable but not the enormous total IBM's R&D budget!
Most sutend are unable to identify the MVT, when presented with its statement. Believe me.
You are mistaken, 1-meg bomb is not small. In fact a warhead on a multiple-warhead ICBM would tyically be 500k or 1 meg. Granted, there are misslies with much bigger warheads, 10 or 15 megs, but those are designed for destroying bunkers and well-fortified military installations.
Also all of these are H-bombs! Atomic bombs are much less powerful (for example, Hiroshima's explosion was around 15 or 20k).
This concept is not exactly new, goes back to Shannon's information theory, Kolmogorov complexity etc. Chaitin makes it seem like he invented the whole subject.
You can encode an awful lot of information in a single "real" number. It is not computable, so what? There are only countably many computable numbers anyway. It is an interesting idea, perhaps, but does not really tell you much without the details.
The article is bad, the journalists as usual have no understanding of the subject whatsoever and exaggerate everything to an unbelievable extent, making some cross of Goedel and Hilbert out of him.
Science is that which follows the scientific method. Hm...
Positivism had not existed before early 19th century. Are you saying there had been no science prior to that?
Oxford English Dictionary:
6.b.In modern use, often treated as synonymous with 'Natural and Physical Science', and thus restricted to those branches of study that relate to the phenomena of the material universe and their laws, sometimes with implied exclusion of pure mathematics. This is now the dominant sense in ordinary use.
Whether you consider math to be a science or not is really a question of whether mathematical knowledge has a separate reality.
The medians (i.e. lines connecting the vertex with the middle of the opposite side) interesect at the centroid.
The perpendiculars do not.
My second question is: Why doesnt everybody understand this?
I think you might be a bit confused yourself.
The main problem is not the speed of the processor, it is a sad lack of basic understanding of the underlying phenomen (such as speech production) in humans). After all out brain operates at a much lower frequency.
Wow... Talking about far-fetched...
Perhaps not a fool, I would say he is misguided.
His point is quote clear and there may be some validity to it. However, the bizarre combination of engineereing and classical studies he proposes hardly makes any sense.
Have you read "Closing of the American Mind" by Allan Bloom? He raises similar points very intelligently and eloquently (although he thinks that decline in the teaching of liberal arts and the rise of specialized science is a symptom, if not the cause, of the poor state of American education) but unfortunately comes short of any solution.
The problem, of course, is that education has to correspond to the social structures of the society and (to oversimplify a bit) it is hard to imagine going back to caning students for failing to produce correct conjugations of Latin verbs.
Don't you think you sound a bit grandiose calling yourself a classicist while still a college student?
In any case it does not seem to make much sense to argue with people without even a shadow of thought.
Anyone who believes the value of engineering is self-evident is hardly capable of any.
Remote places like Mexico or Quebec.
What is so different about consciousness. Perhaps it it
just another chemical property of carbon
I would say the relation of consciousness to life is similar to that
of life to chemical reactions of the carbon atom.
I guess my objection was agains using the word "enlightened" to describe that quote.
Amusing would be more appropriate perhaps.
someday, we'll begin to see life as another property of the carbon atom
What is enlightened about it? Does it shed any light on the underlying mystery?
Rather arrogant and reductionist quote as far as I am concerned.
Properties of a complex system are not necessarily
reducible to the properties of its most elementary consituents. It is hard to imagine
understanding of the process of life coming from understanding chemical reactions
of a carbon atom.
I think you are being far to kind to Mr Card by calling his creatures trashy novels.
As far as I am concerned they are not fit for reading with the possible exception of Ender's Game, which is indeed suitable for reading on the beach.
Poor review for an even poorer novel. How appropriate.
You shoot a high speed projectile at a comet, a chunk of the comet evaporates, looking at the spectrum one can figure out what the comet is made of.
Also note that asteroids and comets are have very little in common.