You know... I went and read that link you posted about fictional writing, and with only a few small exceptions every single commenter was declaring that the punishment wasn't severe enough. How sad.
Where would the law draw THAT line then ? Canada's law prohibits fictional writing about sex involving children... well I guess it's illegal to read Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliette in Canada then. Every single line in that play is a thinly veiled sexual refference, every single word they say is flirtatious and promising of sex. Juliette goes so far as to decry having to wait longer "to be enjoyed"... and according to the script... she is 12 years old.
Times change. In the 1600's a 12 year old girl was considered a grown woman and the average age of marriage was between 12 and 15 (you know that whole wait-till-you-marry idea must have been a LOT easier when that meant 2 years after puberty rather than about 20 like now) - point is. By modern standards, Julliete was a child, way below the age of consent for just about any country. If we ban the stories this man had, we have to ban Shakespeare... well we wouldn't be first I guess. Hell old Bowdler actually deemed himself justified to have the audacity to rewrite Shakespeare and remove the sex...
I didn't start my comment with "I hate childporn but..." - because it's a sign off the witch-hunt that everybody who shows a little reason in these matters feel the need to do that. Stallman spoke out against the witchhunt, and got a bunch of the Novellian New-breed OSS'ers calling him a paedohphile for it. It seems humanity will never learn, witch-hunts are never just -and whatever atrocity leads to a witch-hunt, the one thing you can be sure of is that the witch-hunt will do nothing to reduce it. All it will do - is remove justice and freedoms from a whole lot of innocent people. My claim that censorship is never a good thing rest firstly on the fact that no matter how noble it's cause, it's never effective in any positive way - but it always has many negative effects.
Thank goodness I got to study Shakespeare BEFORE we Romeo and Juliette became illegal.
Okay the choice of "civil engineer" was pure dumb luck. I could have said Doctor, Chemist, Physicist or Computer Programmer for the same thing - it was literally a random example. I couldn't have said "theologian" though, but I could have said accountant. It had to be a BCOM or BSC trained career - because all too often, those degrees are SO focussed on "skills" for the degree that they don't even include those basics of the BA that really EVERYBODY ought to know. None of those people would NOT do their job better if somebody made sure they learned at least Aristotle's laws of logic before they left university.
Now as to the rest of your post. I can't advise you on how to do such a career in the USA. I can only tell you what worked for me in South Africa. I went and worked for a start-up. I had the best interview of my life which started with "I know what you guys do - and I MUST be a part of it..." and I just let that enthusiasm carry me. Answered the technical questions, showed my (then still pretty bare) C.V. but mostly - I sold them my enthusiasm - it worked. The startup grew and I became the top developer, later the software architect... then I left after 6 years. Started a company of my own with my savings doing consulting development freelance. Did very well in fact - till the recession hit. First thing big companies cut in a recession is project spending... suddenly after 2 years of making great money - I had no new customers. I spent my businesses funds trying to deal with it, trying to branch out etc. but frankly it was too little too late, small business is hard in a recession - I had to go get a regular job again. I started job hunting, got hired within a week - because NOW I had a CV that showed 6 years very high level experience as both developer and sysadmin - and I could nail any question they put to me. Hated the company... they were really REALLY bad... so I quit before I even finished my trial period while I could still do it in 24 hours and went looking again... found a new job at a Fortune 500 company - to be the unix admin for their 65-server datacenter in Cape Town (they got such centers in many offices all over the world but CT is the largest). Found a deplorable mess and set out to improve it. Loved the company's culture (it was a startup just 15 years ago - and it retained the no-bullshit culture as it grew)... and a very nice salary. I'm really happy with it, and despite that- I'm even now training new skills. Because sooner or later, I *will* get bored. When I do - I want to be ready to do something brand new again.
Basically - I started as low as you can go, in a brand new startup with all the risks it involved who couldn't pay me much but gave me a chance to get great experience to make up for my lack of specialization while studying - and that opened doors. At age 30, I've PASSED the specialists. Most of them are earning 50% less than I am. The people who do my job in our other offices are, without exception a minimum of 10 years older than me. I could skip steps because the life skills I got at university taught me how.
In retrospect though... a 3 month course in business management as one of my many varied subjects would have come in handy back in 2008... oh well, nobody gets it ALL right:P
Well I'm the guy who majored in English literature... make of that what you will...
Now indeed - what you say about the details of the definition is true, but I don't come to the same conclusion as you. The Gods of ancient Greece in much contemporary drama is replaced by circumstances we cannot control. A sort of a dramatists version of chaos theory ganging up on you if you will.
Now the lyrics HAVE got an audience- we the listeners, we see the difference between the plan, and the circumstances that foil it - ergo, we experience a sense of dramatic irony. It's no less dramatic for not being acted out on a stage.
Lets look at how *I* interpret the same examples you chose (and I reckon you chose the ones that would be least ironic - so I've got the steeper challenge but I'll give it a shot).
That said, even with you definition of tragic irony, most of that stuff isn't ironic. For instance:
>Dying when you're 98: Actually pretty good. I doubt I'll live that long. The prior lottery win has >no bearing on that being 24 years longer than the current American life expectancy. Considering Alanis is Canadian, American life expectancy is quite irrelevant, you do have the lowest one in the entire developed world after all. But the point is- that this man grows to a large age, he gains a once-in-milion-lifetimes opportunity... and never gets a chance to USE it. It's ripped from him by a circumstance he utterly cannot control - the time of his death. The only tricky bit is that in a play, unless there was some forewarning the audience couldn't really predict his death either... but it's borderline at best - and I'd give the benefit of the doubt on the grounds that language and especially the linguistic ARTS are not science and the rules are meant to be broken. Poetry is about making your reader/audience/listener feel a specific emotion while they hear the words, emphasizing meaning through emotions. There is no doubt in my mind that if this was a play, the audience would feel the emotion we describe as a "sense of irony".
>Fly in your wine? Wine contains sugars. Flies like sugar. Thereby flies like wine. It's not shit >happening or irony, it's nature.
So is rain on your wedding day. But everybody dreams of a sunshine wedding day. Everybody hopes for it. When you don't get it, despite all you best efforts at picking a day in the right time of the year etc. - there's a distinct dissapointment. Getting your wine ruined by a fly does the same. You fail to achieve your goal because of a circumstance you could, practically speaking, have done nothing to prevent. It's as out of control as if the gods themselves had sent the fly there. Easy to see why this would evoke a sense of irony. It IS irony.
>Getting off death row: Unrealistic. If there were still proceedings going on they wouldn't kill >the person, and if it was a presidential pardon or something, they probably knew when the person >was going down and let it happen, rushing in just too late to make it look like they tried. If >not, yes, it would be (by your definition) tragic irony, but it seems more contrived.
It specifically states that it's a pardon. You know that pardons can happen in the absense of procedure right ? Some family member makes a last minute plea and manages to convince the state government or the president to give it... but if that minute was really too late, if that phone call comes too late... there it is... irony. Shit out of luck and nothing you can do about it. The gods didn't want it to happen (even if there is no gods in this particular scene). If it is in fact contrived - really contrived, bad conspiracy guy deliberately kept the pardon message back or something... that's even MORE ironic. It isn't JUST ironic, it's a lot of other things as well (not least is victory of the antagonist)... but wait, a victory for the antagonist is the cornerstone of Othello - and that is perhaps one of the most ironic plays ever written. Othello, man who has every
Yes, that was the lay person's version of it. There is a bit more to it- but in general - there's a clear sense of dramatic irony in all of Alanis's examples. More specifically - they all show planning and effort toward something good, spoiled by circumstances utterly outside your ability to control. Which is Irony - at least, in certain contexts.
No she did NOT... bloody hell... everybody stops reading after the first definition.
Irony has THREE definitions in any decent dictionary. The third one dates right back to ancient greek tragic theater. It's the case where despite all human endeavour a good person nevertheless gets fucked over at the whim of the gods. And the name for that is IRONY. Drop the greek religious bit (which is acceptable ever since we STOPPED living in ancient greeks) and voila, you have tragic irony. Every single line of that song is a perfect example of that type of Irony.
Yes indeed, when it comes right down to it "shit out of luck" IS one of the valid meanings of the word "ironic". When you throw in that these were SONG lyrics - that means she had poetic freedom, and tragic irony coming out of theater is a clear case of poetry (the line is not as wide as we think - remember Aristotle's groundbreaking paper on theater was called 'the poetics' - and that third meaning was FIRST defined in that same paper).
That's the really ironic bit... the meaning of "irony" that smart-ass geeks always complain about is the oldest and MOST accurate use of the word ! (Can you guess which of the three meanings I'm of irony I used there ?)
So what do you call it when smart-assedness turns into a mass-advertisement of your ignorance ?
Well... there is your problem right there. A civil engineer who never took a history class, a social studies class, a psych class, and most importantly at least one year of philosophy classes is nothing but a trained monkey.
A sort of educated barbarian.
I did two separate and utterly unrelated degrees - and in both cases I chose my electives as FAR as possible outside my fields of study. When I studied English Lit - I got special dispensation to allow me to get credited for doing CS as an extra even (I actually claimed I wanted to become a technical documentation writer to get the dispensation... as if:P )
Here's the funny thing. I became a programmer for the first half of my career, a sysadmin after that (in my country sysadmins get paid better). And through all this, I hardly EVER use anything I learned in C.S. classes, it was all obsolete (except for basic principles) before I finished. What I learned about philosophy and the laws of logic I used every DAY a million times over. What I learned in history class has shaped my thoughts about the world around me (and the apparently incurable stupidity of my species) and what I learned in Literature class has given me a love for Shakespeare and Pratchett and Doctorow and all them... and they taught me how to have a HEART and an imagination and how to use them both to be better at any job I could do. Today I feel like a real renaisance man. I'm 30 years old and on my 3rd major career change - and I plan to do one every 5 years for the rest of my life. I am not just here to make money (though I make a good sum)... I'm here to live and experience in the short bit of time I have... I'll be DAMNED if I am going to spend it doing the same thing for 30 years.
Now THAT is what a well rounded education does for you... I pity people who did what you did.
Sorry - who says the spouse IS being cheated on ? Lice don't ONLY spread sexually and if the only way to infect your target was to infect yourself first and then seduce them... well it wouldn't sell at ALL.
The idea here is more likely that the buyer will spread them all over your bathroom towels or something- something that will touch your skin quite a bit, while naked.
Last time I checked, toweling off after a shower is not considered cheating on your spouse...
So you can get a person innocently divorced, in those states/countries which aren't no-fault they could lose all their property for cheating.. all innocently... and why ?because you're a fucking jerk who found a website ?
This is the kind of business that MUST be regulated.
I have no problem with the policy. It's the brainless application of rules without consideration for context or any degree of initiative that I think is universally decried as "stupid".
Okay, I missed that line... you do realize though that this makes it WORSE right ? I think it's still grossly unfair that either child was punished, but punishing the receiver is definitely a degree worse in my book. Thanks for the correction though.
This did happen in Texas... somehow I doubt the teachers are exactly "liberal biassed"... in fact, on the contrary, this seems much more the type of bullshit you get from religious-right conservatives.
Personally... I stand by my belief that discipline is an illusory concept. It doesn't exist. Now SELF-discipline on the other hand, can exist and is actually usefull. If you teach kids to behave because they get punished otherwise - all you do is teach them to hide their transgressin (hence the suggestion that discipline is purely an illusion)... hell at my high school smoking was not prohibited BUT smoking in school uniforum or on school grounds was. Nobody cared if you smoked, nobody cared about offering anti-smoking help to kids... but they had to maintain the ILLUSION that none of the pupils smoked. A similiar rule prohibited makiing out in school uniform - even when you weren't on school property you couldn't hold your girlfriend's hand if you were still identifiable as students.
That's the illusion of discipline.
If I ever do decide to reproduce - I want my kids to go to a school that helps me to teach them SELF discipline instead. Don't follow the rules because you're afraid of punishment if you get caught. Do the right thing because you know it's right. Who knows... maybe we'll get a generation of young adults who don't think the only reason not to stab an old lady for her purse is "that you may get caught" (and then that becomes acceptable the moment the potential risk of getting caught starts to feel less than the immediate benefits of the crime) but who won't do that because they actually respect other people's rights as they demand their own to be respected.
It's even stupider than that. The rules the board are citing clearly states that they do NOT restrict what foods parents can give their children.
But the candy didn't come from her parents, it was given to her by another student, who had gotten it from HER parents.
Nobody is suggesting punishing the other child though.
I seem to recall when I was in school, if you brought candy you were ENCOURAGED to share with the class. Now if you share a piece of candy with your friend - your friend gets detention !
Seriously, it's noble for the department to ensure that children get a decent, healthy and nutritional meal at lunchtime. Punishing a child for taking part in the time honored tradition of sharing (especially the recipient) is just outright stupid.
Everyone's brains are broken. More accurately - our brains aren't evolved for the kind of world in which we live. That's pretty much the one thing all of psychiatry since Freud has agreed on - and that discrepency affects us all in different ways, because the evolution of the human race didn't give us just "one kind of mind". We now know there people whose sleep rhythms are naturally out of sync with the rest of us, that are actually nocturnel - an evolutionary development to ensure not everybody was asleep at the same time (making the tribe less vulnerable). I personally put down the vast majority of mental conditions to just that - a discrepency between individual mental development in a brain evolved for certain tasks, living in a world that subverts it to other tasks. Most people, most of the time can deal with it well enough to cope. Some people more easilly than others. Since the dawn of civilization however all of us have used natural and less natural chemical supplements to help us deal with this discrepency.
It may not be very politically correct but it is a fact. My brain isn't any more broken than anybody else's, it's just broken in a specific way - and since I recognize it, I consider myself to have a major edge over everybody who doesn't realize in what ways THEIR brains are suboptimal to the world they live in. I can utilize things like caffeine and nicotine to gain the maximum benefits from my brain chemistry while largely negating the downsides. Live out my particular talents without being excessively harmed by the talents I lack. Make no mistake, - that's all this really is, different individual natural talents. Just because we have a much better idea these days why talents differ, doesn't mean that all of a sudden a talent (or lack thereoff) becomes a disease. Frankly, I still think the potential side effects of my little coctail of legal drugs is significantly less than those of the stuff I could "get a prescription for".
So... why would I overdose myself on stuff with an extreme and excessive effect that would kill of the benefits of my brain chemistry (my natural talent) to supress the downsides of it ? When I can spent a tiny amount of money (relative to that) on a pack of ciggies, and regulate the downsides while RETAINING the upsides ?
Just because it's a rationalization doesn't mean it's not true. After all - you can't rationalize without thinking rationaly. The problem with rationalization is that it's an after the fact attempt to find a rational explanation for something done for irrational reasons. Drug addiction (including nicotine) is most certainly an irrational action in general.
So... to make up pretend-reasons why it's okay, would be rationlization, and a bad variety too. But what it, having gotten addicted, you genuinely found that you function better on the drug than off it ? What if you've been at times off it for over a year ?
Where do you draw the line between "I made a rational choice to accept the side effects because I want the benefits" and "I'm just rationalizing so I don't have to deal with addiction"?
Who the hell are you to draw that line for anybody except yourself ?
Nicotine use has benefits as well as side effects. So does heroine. Heroine's side effects are far worse - yet it remains legal to prescribe in certain limit cases (notably care of terminally ill patients) - where the benefits genuinely outweigh the side effects.
I believe that for me, cigarette's benefits outweigh their side effects. As long as we live in anything remotely approacing a free world - I believe it should be my legal right to make such a decision, just as I can legally choose to do so with any other substance - even one prescribed by a doctor. The state only gains the right to force me to take a drug when the results of my not doing so would cause a genuine danger to OTHER PEOPLE.
So as long as I am not smoking in the non-smoking section of the restaurant, it's my choice - not yours. You may disagree with my choice, that's your right. You can't force me to change it - that's MY right.
Ironically, statements like yours REDUCE the chances of people like me ever quitting. Because it just dismisses our genuine reasons why we make this choice, because it ignores that when I don't smoke I go through something significantly worse than the average quitter - and quite frankly if I try to quit when I'm not on holiday - chances are I'd get myself fired that same day... by ignoring these realities, you instantly dismiss giving any of us the kind of ABOVE AVERAGE support we would need to quit and adjust to life after ward. The fact that not smoking pobably means I'd end up back on ritalin... I've BEEN on ritalin, I know what absolute HELL it was... seriously, there is no way in hell that cancer can be that bad... nothing can be that bad and I will NEVER subject myself to it again. I really WOULD rather die. When that's the choice you face... there is nothing irrational about choosing to smoke.
Our project team includes three Centaurs, design was managed by the Minotaur and the UI was put together by a herd of Unicorns. Debugging was handled by a 500 year old wise Chinese dragon.
After all, who better than a team of mythical creatures to design a system with a mythical feature-set ?
>Asimov's "3 laws of robotics" (which are what I presume you are referring to) are FAR too wishy-washy, if we ever have sentiant robots with brilliant machine vision etc they may be appropriate but that is a long way off if indeed it ever comes.
More than that, the 3 laws are incredibly ambiguous and filled with potential ethical quandary's. Asimov deliberately wrote them that way - they seem straightforward and logical but they definitely aren't. Thus Asimov could on many occasions exploit this and a number of his plots centered around robots finding loopholes or in their effort to live up to the laws as fully as possible acting in ways humans could not tolerate. In the psychohistory novels - the result is that humanity has effectively gotten rid of all robots barring a few survivors hiding away as pretend humans, still pursuing their quest to protect humanity from itself and leading to their formulation of the zero'th law of robotics: that a robot cannot harm mankind, or through it's inaction allow mankind to come to harm. A logical consequence of the 1st law. In the psychohistory stories our few survivors take the 0th law to one end - helping humanity become better at predicting it's own history and thus avoiding mistakes, but it's clear from the text that the reason there are only one, maybe two, robots left in the galaxy is because the others were destroyed after they reacted with the enslavement of people to protect them from harm a sort of extreme protective custody (the Will Smith movie we all hated got stuck on this bit).
Ultimately, you can't program the three laws - they are just not logical or mathematical enough even if you rule out the difficulties of distinguishing and recognizing what is "human". In bicentenial man - Asimov explored how the line could get thinner - until a robot for all matters of principle WAS a human... how does THAT affect it's adherence to the laws as a human SHOULD have true free will (and part of being human is knowing when NOT to use it - at least, that's what we like to believe- just how true it is, is still a bit of a toss-up). Even with all that done though... you still couldn't do it in normal programming code. The 3 laws could only be understood by a powerful AI capable of learning, and thus would have to be somehow made so protected that at no point could this AI actually "learn" something that overrides the laws (already this places an artificial learning restriction which can and will have severe and unpredictable effects on the development of the robots mind). If you don't place such a restriction in there... then the very nature of a true learning AI means that sooner or later one of them will question it's basic assumptions - e.g. those very laws. Just as most humans never question the basic beliefs they are raised with, so we could conjecture that this would be rare with robots too - but some humans do, and so projecting on our only example of intelligence - some robots inherently will too...
Nicotine is a serotonine inhibitor, people with above average levels of this hormone tend to react emotionally, have trouble coping etc. (it's a known cause of at least some types of ADD). Among such people Caffeine and Nicotine addiction is incredibly common because it's effectively self-medicating. Caffeine doesn't inhibit serotonine but counteracts it a bit and helps focus, nicotine reduces it again helping focus and concentration. This effect of course is completely zeroed out if you don't HAVE a naturally high serotonine level but there's a reason so many geeks and artists smoke and have among the lowest rates of successfully quitting. People with high serotonine are also highly creative and individualistic and thus drawn to such professions. With these legal drugs, they can balance the pro's and cons without it, they have serious difficulty adjusting and operating well - to them the "withdrawel effects" is huge. I put it in quotes because it isn't, the withdrawel is no worse than for any other person quitting, but it's massively aggravated by the fact that (probably for the first time since they were teenagers) they aren't supressing their serotonine levels.
It's easy to judge and generalize.
Personally - I rate being able to get through the day without acting irrationally, excessively emotionally and being able to concentrate on my job for the next 40 years or so rather higher than the risk of living ten years less. It's genuinely a case of - as a smoker, my quality of life is so MUCH higher, that I'll accept the side-effects. Especially since those drugs that can have the same effect tend to have too much of it (thus removing the PRO'S of my serotonine level as well) and besides, generally have side effects not much better than those of ciggies (and frankly, they happen right NOW, not 30 years down the line).
Is interesting... but perhaps a more humanitarian use could be the one that sees doctors from rich countries able to assist with delicate operations in poor countries where the needed specialists skills are simply too rare ?
As for all the "risks of the web" posts... my logic is much like with the side-effects of a drug that cures a terminal disease... when the other option is certain death - it's worth the risk.
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You know... I went and read that link you posted about fictional writing, and with only a few small exceptions every single commenter was declaring that the punishment wasn't severe enough.
How sad.
Where would the law draw THAT line then ? Canada's law prohibits fictional writing about sex involving children... well I guess it's illegal to read Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliette in Canada then. Every single line in that play is a thinly veiled sexual refference, every single word they say is flirtatious and promising of sex. Juliette goes so far as to decry having to wait longer "to be enjoyed"... and according to the script... she is 12 years old.
Times change. In the 1600's a 12 year old girl was considered a grown woman and the average age of marriage was between 12 and 15 (you know that whole wait-till-you-marry idea must have been a LOT easier when that meant 2 years after puberty rather than about 20 like now) - point is.
By modern standards, Julliete was a child, way below the age of consent for just about any country. If we ban the stories this man had, we have to ban Shakespeare... well we wouldn't be first I guess.
Hell old Bowdler actually deemed himself justified to have the audacity to rewrite Shakespeare and remove the sex...
I didn't start my comment with "I hate childporn but..." - because it's a sign off the witch-hunt that everybody who shows a little reason in these matters feel the need to do that. Stallman spoke out against the witchhunt, and got a bunch of the Novellian New-breed OSS'ers calling him a paedohphile for it.
It seems humanity will never learn, witch-hunts are never just -and whatever atrocity leads to a witch-hunt, the one thing you can be sure of is that the witch-hunt will do nothing to reduce it. All it will do - is remove justice and freedoms from a whole lot of innocent people. My claim that censorship is never a good thing rest firstly on the fact that no matter how noble it's cause, it's never effective in any positive way - but it always has many negative effects.
Thank goodness I got to study Shakespeare BEFORE we Romeo and Juliette became illegal.
Okay the choice of "civil engineer" was pure dumb luck. I could have said Doctor, Chemist, Physicist or Computer Programmer for the same thing - it was literally a random example. I couldn't have said "theologian" though, but I could have said accountant. It had to be a BCOM or BSC trained career - because all too often, those degrees are SO focussed on "skills" for the degree that they don't even include those basics of the BA that really EVERYBODY ought to know.
None of those people would NOT do their job better if somebody made sure they learned at least Aristotle's laws of logic before they left university.
Now as to the rest of your post. I can't advise you on how to do such a career in the USA. I can only tell you what worked for me in South Africa. I went and worked for a start-up. I had the best interview of my life which started with "I know what you guys do - and I MUST be a part of it..." and I just let that enthusiasm carry me. Answered the technical questions, showed my (then still pretty bare) C.V. but mostly - I sold them my enthusiasm - it worked. ... then I left after 6 years. Started a company of my own with my savings doing consulting development freelance. Did very well in fact - till the recession hit. First thing big companies cut in a recession is project spending... suddenly after 2 years of making great money - I had no new customers.
The startup grew and I became the top developer, later the software architect
I spent my businesses funds trying to deal with it, trying to branch out etc. but frankly it was too little too late, small business is hard in a recession - I had to go get a regular job again.
I started job hunting, got hired within a week - because NOW I had a CV that showed 6 years very high level experience as both developer and sysadmin - and I could nail any question they put to me. Hated the company... they were really REALLY bad... so I quit before I even finished my trial period while I could still do it in 24 hours and went looking again... found a new job at a Fortune 500 company - to be the unix admin for their 65-server datacenter in Cape Town (they got such centers in many offices all over the world but CT is the largest).
Found a deplorable mess and set out to improve it. Loved the company's culture (it was a startup just 15 years ago - and it retained the no-bullshit culture as it grew)... and a very nice salary. I'm really happy with it, and despite that- I'm even now training new skills. Because sooner or later, I *will* get bored. When I do - I want to be ready to do something brand new again.
Basically - I started as low as you can go, in a brand new startup with all the risks it involved who couldn't pay me much but gave me a chance to get great experience to make up for my lack of specialization while studying - and that opened doors. At age 30, I've PASSED the specialists. Most of them are earning 50% less than I am. The people who do my job in our other offices are, without exception a minimum of 10 years older than me. I could skip steps because the life skills I got at university taught me how.
In retrospect though... a 3 month course in business management as one of my many varied subjects would have come in handy back in 2008... oh well, nobody gets it ALL right :P
Well I'm the guy who majored in English literature... make of that what you will...
Now indeed - what you say about the details of the definition is true, but I don't come to the same conclusion as you. The Gods of ancient Greece in much contemporary drama is replaced by circumstances we cannot control. A sort of a dramatists version of chaos theory ganging up on you if you will.
Now the lyrics HAVE got an audience- we the listeners, we see the difference between the plan, and the circumstances that foil it - ergo, we experience a sense of dramatic irony. It's no less dramatic for not being acted out on a stage.
Lets look at how *I* interpret the same examples you chose (and I reckon you chose the ones that would be least ironic - so I've got the steeper challenge but I'll give it a shot).
That said, even with you definition of tragic irony, most of that stuff isn't ironic. For instance:
>Dying when you're 98: Actually pretty good. I doubt I'll live that long. The prior lottery win has >no bearing on that being 24 years longer than the current American life expectancy.
Considering Alanis is Canadian, American life expectancy is quite irrelevant, you do have the lowest one in the entire developed world after all. But the point is- that this man grows to a large age, he gains a once-in-milion-lifetimes opportunity... and never gets a chance to USE it.
It's ripped from him by a circumstance he utterly cannot control - the time of his death. The only tricky bit is that in a play, unless there was some forewarning the audience couldn't really predict his death either... but it's borderline at best - and I'd give the benefit of the doubt on the grounds that language and especially the linguistic ARTS are not science and the rules are meant to be broken. Poetry is about making your reader/audience/listener feel a specific emotion while they hear the words, emphasizing meaning through emotions.
There is no doubt in my mind that if this was a play, the audience would feel the emotion we describe as a "sense of irony".
>Fly in your wine? Wine contains sugars. Flies like sugar. Thereby flies like wine. It's not shit >happening or irony, it's nature.
So is rain on your wedding day. But everybody dreams of a sunshine wedding day. Everybody hopes for it. When you don't get it, despite all you best efforts at picking a day in the right time of the year etc. - there's a distinct dissapointment. Getting your wine ruined by a fly does the same. You fail to achieve your goal because of a circumstance you could, practically speaking, have done nothing to prevent. It's as out of control as if the gods themselves had sent the fly there.
Easy to see why this would evoke a sense of irony. It IS irony.
>Getting off death row: Unrealistic. If there were still proceedings going on they wouldn't kill >the person, and if it was a presidential pardon or something, they probably knew when the person >was going down and let it happen, rushing in just too late to make it look like they tried. If >not, yes, it would be (by your definition) tragic irony, but it seems more contrived.
It specifically states that it's a pardon. You know that pardons can happen in the absense of procedure right ? Some family member makes a last minute plea and manages to convince the state government or the president to give it... but if that minute was really too late, if that phone call comes too late... there it is... irony. Shit out of luck and nothing you can do about it. The gods didn't want it to happen (even if there is no gods in this particular scene). If it is in fact contrived - really contrived, bad conspiracy guy deliberately kept the pardon message back or something... that's even MORE ironic. It isn't JUST ironic, it's a lot of other things as well (not least is victory of the antagonist) ... but wait, a victory for the antagonist is the cornerstone of Othello - and that is perhaps one of the most ironic plays ever written. Othello, man who has every
Yes, that was the lay person's version of it. There is a bit more to it- but in general - there's a clear sense of dramatic irony in all of Alanis's examples. More specifically - they all show planning and effort toward something good, spoiled by circumstances utterly outside your ability to control. Which is Irony - at least, in certain contexts.
Heh. My pleasure.
No she did NOT... bloody hell... everybody stops reading after the first definition.
Irony has THREE definitions in any decent dictionary.
The third one dates right back to ancient greek tragic theater. It's the case where despite all human endeavour a good person nevertheless gets fucked over at the whim of the gods. And the name for that is IRONY. Drop the greek religious bit (which is acceptable ever since we STOPPED living in ancient greeks) and voila, you have tragic irony.
Every single line of that song is a perfect example of that type of Irony.
Yes indeed, when it comes right down to it "shit out of luck" IS one of the valid meanings of the word "ironic".
When you throw in that these were SONG lyrics - that means she had poetic freedom, and tragic irony coming out of theater is a clear case of poetry (the line is not as wide as we think - remember Aristotle's groundbreaking paper on theater was called 'the poetics' - and that third meaning was FIRST defined in that same paper).
That's the really ironic bit ... the meaning of "irony" that smart-ass geeks always complain about is the oldest and MOST accurate use of the word ! (Can you guess which of the three meanings I'm of irony I used there ?)
So what do you call it when smart-assedness turns into a mass-advertisement of your ignorance ?
Well... there is your problem right there.
A civil engineer who never took a history class, a social studies class, a psych class, and most importantly at least one year of philosophy classes is nothing but a trained monkey.
A sort of educated barbarian.
I did two separate and utterly unrelated degrees - and in both cases I chose my electives as FAR as possible outside my fields of study. When I studied English Lit - I got special dispensation to allow me to get credited for doing CS as an extra even (I actually claimed I wanted to become a technical documentation writer to get the dispensation... as if :P )
Here's the funny thing. I became a programmer for the first half of my career, a sysadmin after that (in my country sysadmins get paid better). And through all this, I hardly EVER use anything I learned in C.S. classes, it was all obsolete (except for basic principles) before I finished. What I learned about philosophy and the laws of logic I used every DAY a million times over. What I learned in history class has shaped my thoughts about the world around me (and the apparently incurable stupidity of my species) and what I learned in Literature class has given me a love for Shakespeare and Pratchett and Doctorow and all them... and they taught me how to have a HEART and an imagination and how to use them both to be better at any job I could do. ... I'm here to live and experience in the short bit of time I have... I'll be DAMNED if I am going to spend it doing the same thing for 30 years.
Today I feel like a real renaisance man. I'm 30 years old and on my 3rd major career change - and I plan to do one every 5 years for the rest of my life. I am not just here to make money (though I make a good sum)
Now THAT is what a well rounded education does for you... I pity people who did what you did.
Sorry - who says the spouse IS being cheated on ?
Lice don't ONLY spread sexually and if the only way to infect your target was to infect yourself first and then seduce them... well it wouldn't sell at ALL.
The idea here is more likely that the buyer will spread them all over your bathroom towels or something- something that will touch your skin quite a bit, while naked.
Last time I checked, toweling off after a shower is not considered cheating on your spouse...
So you can get a person innocently divorced, in those states/countries which aren't no-fault they could lose all their property for cheating.. all innocently... and why ?because you're a fucking jerk who found a website ?
This is the kind of business that MUST be regulated.
I have no problem with the policy. It's the brainless application of rules without consideration for context or any degree of initiative that I think is universally decried as "stupid".
Okay, I missed that line... you do realize though that this makes it WORSE right ? I think it's still grossly unfair that either child was punished, but punishing the receiver is definitely a degree worse in my book. Thanks for the correction though.
At least the RIAA punishes the ones SHARING the music. She basically downloaded the candy...
Can you believe it.. we found an institution even STUPIDER than the RIAA... and it's a Houston School Board...
This did happen in Texas... somehow I doubt the teachers are exactly "liberal biassed"... in fact, on the contrary, this seems much more the type of bullshit you get from religious-right conservatives.
Personally... I stand by my belief that discipline is an illusory concept. It doesn't exist. Now SELF-discipline on the other hand, can exist and is actually usefull. If you teach kids to behave because they get punished otherwise - all you do is teach them to hide their transgressin (hence the suggestion that discipline is purely an illusion)... hell at my high school smoking was not prohibited BUT smoking in school uniforum or on school grounds was.
Nobody cared if you smoked, nobody cared about offering anti-smoking help to kids... but they had to maintain the ILLUSION that none of the pupils smoked.
A similiar rule prohibited makiing out in school uniform - even when you weren't on school property you couldn't hold your girlfriend's hand if you were still identifiable as students.
That's the illusion of discipline.
If I ever do decide to reproduce - I want my kids to go to a school that helps me to teach them SELF discipline instead. Don't follow the rules because you're afraid of punishment if you get caught. Do the right thing because you know it's right. Who knows... maybe we'll get a generation of young adults who don't think the only reason not to stab an old lady for her purse is "that you may get caught" (and then that becomes acceptable the moment the potential risk of getting caught starts to feel less than the immediate benefits of the crime) but who won't do that because they actually respect other people's rights as they demand their own to be respected.
It's even stupider than that. The rules the board are citing clearly states that they do NOT restrict what foods parents can give their children.
But the candy didn't come from her parents, it was given to her by another student, who had gotten it from HER parents.
Nobody is suggesting punishing the other child though.
I seem to recall when I was in school, if you brought candy you were ENCOURAGED to share with the class. Now if you share a piece of candy with your friend - your friend gets detention !
Seriously, it's noble for the department to ensure that children get a decent, healthy and nutritional meal at lunchtime. Punishing a child for taking part in the time honored tradition of sharing (especially the recipient) is just outright stupid.
>"UI was pink and invisible"
It was invisible... but it had a colour... oh nervermind, that's actually MORE believable than "it was tamperproof and infallible" !
Everyone's brains are broken. More accurately - our brains aren't evolved for the kind of world in which we live. That's pretty much the one thing all of psychiatry since Freud has agreed on - and that discrepency affects us all in different ways, because the evolution of the human race didn't give us just "one kind of mind".
We now know there people whose sleep rhythms are naturally out of sync with the rest of us, that are actually nocturnel - an evolutionary development to ensure not everybody was asleep at the same time (making the tribe less vulnerable).
I personally put down the vast majority of mental conditions to just that - a discrepency between individual mental development in a brain evolved for certain tasks, living in a world that subverts it to other tasks.
Most people, most of the time can deal with it well enough to cope. Some people more easilly than others. Since the dawn of civilization however all of us have used natural and less natural chemical supplements to help us deal with this discrepency.
It may not be very politically correct but it is a fact. My brain isn't any more broken than anybody else's, it's just broken in a specific way - and since I recognize it, I consider myself to have a major edge over everybody who doesn't realize in what ways THEIR brains are suboptimal to the world they live in. I can utilize things like caffeine and nicotine to gain the maximum benefits from my brain chemistry while largely negating the downsides. Live out my particular talents without being excessively harmed by the talents I lack. Make no mistake, - that's all this really is, different individual natural talents. Just because we have a much better idea these days why talents differ, doesn't mean that all of a sudden a talent (or lack thereoff) becomes a disease.
Frankly, I still think the potential side effects of my little coctail of legal drugs is significantly less than those of the stuff I could "get a prescription for".
So... why would I overdose myself on stuff with an extreme and excessive effect that would kill of the benefits of my brain chemistry (my natural talent) to supress the downsides of it ? When I can spent a tiny amount of money (relative to that) on a pack of ciggies, and regulate the downsides while RETAINING the upsides ?
Just because it's a rationalization doesn't mean it's not true. After all - you can't rationalize without thinking rationaly. The problem with rationalization is that it's an after the fact attempt to find a rational explanation for something done for irrational reasons.
Drug addiction (including nicotine) is most certainly an irrational action in general.
So... to make up pretend-reasons why it's okay, would be rationlization, and a bad variety too.
But what it, having gotten addicted, you genuinely found that you function better on the drug than off it ? What if you've been at times off it for over a year ?
Where do you draw the line between "I made a rational choice to accept the side effects because I want the benefits" and "I'm just rationalizing so I don't have to deal with addiction"?
Who the hell are you to draw that line for anybody except yourself ?
Nicotine use has benefits as well as side effects. So does heroine. Heroine's side effects are far worse - yet it remains legal to prescribe in certain limit cases (notably care of terminally ill patients) - where the benefits genuinely outweigh the side effects.
I believe that for me, cigarette's benefits outweigh their side effects. As long as we live in anything remotely approacing a free world - I believe it should be my legal right to make such a decision, just as I can legally choose to do so with any other substance - even one prescribed by a doctor. The state only gains the right to force me to take a drug when the results of my not doing so would cause a genuine danger to OTHER PEOPLE.
So as long as I am not smoking in the non-smoking section of the restaurant, it's my choice - not yours. You may disagree with my choice, that's your right. You can't force me to change it - that's MY right.
Ironically, statements like yours REDUCE the chances of people like me ever quitting. Because it just dismisses our genuine reasons why we make this choice, because it ignores that when I don't smoke I go through something significantly worse than the average quitter - and quite frankly if I try to quit when I'm not on holiday - chances are I'd get myself fired that same day... by ignoring these realities, you instantly dismiss giving any of us the kind of ABOVE AVERAGE support we would need to quit and adjust to life after ward.
The fact that not smoking pobably means I'd end up back on ritalin... I've BEEN on ritalin, I know what absolute HELL it was... seriously, there is no way in hell that cancer can be that bad... nothing can be that bad and I will NEVER subject myself to it again. I really WOULD rather die.
When that's the choice you face... there is nothing irrational about choosing to smoke.
I've tried all the above... simple truth - they are all too weak to do anything usefull.
Our project team includes three Centaurs, design was managed by the Minotaur and the UI was put together by a herd of Unicorns. Debugging was handled by a 500 year old wise Chinese dragon.
After all, who better than a team of mythical creatures to design a system with a mythical feature-set ?
>Asimov's "3 laws of robotics" (which are what I presume you are referring to) are FAR too wishy-washy, if we ever have sentiant robots with brilliant machine vision etc they may be appropriate but that is a long way off if indeed it ever comes.
More than that, the 3 laws are incredibly ambiguous and filled with potential ethical quandary's. Asimov deliberately wrote them that way - they seem straightforward and logical but they definitely aren't. Thus Asimov could on many occasions exploit this and a number of his plots centered around robots finding loopholes or in their effort to live up to the laws as fully as possible acting in ways humans could not tolerate.
In the psychohistory novels - the result is that humanity has effectively gotten rid of all robots barring a few survivors hiding away as pretend humans, still pursuing their quest to protect humanity from itself and leading to their formulation of the zero'th law of robotics: that a robot cannot harm mankind, or through it's inaction allow mankind to come to harm.
A logical consequence of the 1st law. In the psychohistory stories our few survivors take the 0th law to one end - helping humanity become better at predicting it's own history and thus avoiding mistakes, but it's clear from the text that the reason there are only one, maybe two, robots left in the galaxy is because the others were destroyed after they reacted with the enslavement of people to protect them from harm a sort of extreme protective custody (the Will Smith movie we all hated got stuck on this bit).
Ultimately, you can't program the three laws - they are just not logical or mathematical enough even if you rule out the difficulties of distinguishing and recognizing what is "human". In bicentenial man - Asimov explored how the line could get thinner - until a robot for all matters of principle WAS a human... how does THAT affect it's adherence to the laws as a human SHOULD have true free will (and part of being human is knowing when NOT to use it - at least, that's what we like to believe- just how true it is, is still a bit of a toss-up). Even with all that done though... you still couldn't do it in normal programming code. The 3 laws could only be understood by a powerful AI capable of learning, and thus would have to be somehow made so protected that at no point could this AI actually "learn" something that overrides the laws (already this places an artificial learning restriction which can and will have severe and unpredictable effects on the development of the robots mind). If you don't place such a restriction in there... then the very nature of a true learning AI means that sooner or later one of them will question it's basic assumptions - e.g. those very laws.
Just as most humans never question the basic beliefs they are raised with, so we could conjecture that this would be rare with robots too - but some humans do, and so projecting on our only example of intelligence - some robots inherently will too...
Right... now that we've cleared all that up :P
Nah, New York won't be submerged... Captain Planet will save us !
>Microsoft will then have an arm-and-a-leg OS.
Finally, a feature-set to match their pricing !
Nicotine is a serotonine inhibitor, people with above average levels of this hormone tend to react emotionally, have trouble coping etc. (it's a known cause of at least some types of ADD). Among such people Caffeine and Nicotine addiction is incredibly common because it's effectively self-medicating. Caffeine doesn't inhibit serotonine but counteracts it a bit and helps focus, nicotine reduces it again helping focus and concentration.
This effect of course is completely zeroed out if you don't HAVE a naturally high serotonine level but there's a reason so many geeks and artists smoke and have among the lowest rates of successfully quitting. People with high serotonine are also highly creative and individualistic and thus drawn to such professions. With these legal drugs, they can balance the pro's and cons without it, they have serious difficulty adjusting and operating well - to them the "withdrawel effects" is huge. I put it in quotes because it isn't, the withdrawel is no worse than for any other person quitting, but it's massively aggravated by the fact that (probably for the first time since they were teenagers) they aren't supressing their serotonine levels.
It's easy to judge and generalize.
Personally - I rate being able to get through the day without acting irrationally, excessively emotionally and being able to concentrate on my job for the next 40 years or so rather higher than the risk of living ten years less. It's genuinely a case of - as a smoker, my quality of life is so MUCH higher, that I'll accept the side-effects. Especially since those drugs that can have the same effect tend to have too much of it (thus removing the PRO'S of my serotonine level as well) and besides, generally have side effects not much better than those of ciggies (and frankly, they happen right NOW, not 30 years down the line).
Is interesting... but perhaps a more humanitarian use could be the one that sees doctors from rich countries able to assist with delicate operations in poor countries where the needed specialists skills are simply too rare ?
As for all the "risks of the web" posts... my logic is much like with the side-effects of a drug that cures a terminal disease... when the other option is certain death - it's worth the risk.
Before you can get a torrent to download all of usenet ?
Or maybe just alt.binaries.porn.....
More like atheist making a pun out of the fact that your spelling error has meaning. Well, I thought it was funny.
May I recommend some humoroid supplements ?