"I still haven't heard an explaination for why we're supposed to eat fish on Fridays that made any sense."
This is an explanation: meat is expensive; in the past it was often prohibitively so. Christians who had the means to afford meat for their daily meals were asked to give it up on one day a week, that is, on the weekly celebration of Christ's death each Friday. They were then asked to donate to the poor the money that they would have spent on the meat. This was, and still is, considered to have two benefits: the Christian can to a very small degree identify with the self-giving of Christ by making a personal sacrifice (by not indulging in tasty meaty goodness), and by providing for the less fortunate (giving the funds to the poor), all in one act.
Why fish then? Fish was substituted as a less expensive alternative to the more expensive beef, pork, or poultry, so that the Christian could still have a healthy meal in his or her diet on Friday. Recently this practice has been relaxed (except during Lent when it is still required), so that the Christian can come up with his own penitential act each Friday.
Whether you agree with this practice or not, I don't think you can deny that it makes at least a little sense. Also, this might help: imagine a similar practice in another culture of which you are less critical than you are of Catholic culture (Native American spirituality, Buddhism, Islam, etc). You'd probably not criticize it so readily; in fact, you'd probably have praiseworthy things to say about it.
"Hell, go to a Catholic mass for once. It's all "Stand, sit, stand, kneel." It's like the priest is a gym teacher putting the parishioners through calisthenics."
Again, an explanation: Catholics and Orthodox Christians, much more so than Protestants, hold that we are spiritual AND bodily beings, and that we pray not only with our souls but with our bodies. Your posture (i.e, bodily position) is the way to pray with your body. Similar to the way that you stand in a courtroom to show respect to an entering judge, or the way that you go down on one knee when you propose to a woman, what you do with your body is an outward sign of what you're doing with your soul. The Catholic Mass is full of various "postures" of the soul toward God and toward your fellow congregants, and the bodily postures are designed to be signs of these inner dispositions. It seems like calisthenics to an outsider, but when understood rightly it is quite beautiful.
Again, you might not agree with all the sitting, standing, or kneeling, but you asked for a reasonable explanation, and I've tried to give one. I'm really not trying to be antagonistic here, just to explain the things you've asked about; I hope it helps you to be a more informed Catholic.
Yeah, well, it's a lot easier to make something structurally sound if it's not expected to have the same occupancy load that would be required for a modern western city. There weren't nearly as many Incans as there are Italians. Particularly since the former weren't Catholics.
This might be funny if it were even close to being true. However, despite their being predominantly Catholic in name, Italians are not in fact Catholic regarding this practice. They are among the heaviest users of artificial birth control in the world, and are not reproducing themselves fast enough to maintain current population levels (around 1.1 births per woman according to the UN [PDF]).
Only immigration is keeping the Italian population stable, and this is true for most of Western Europe as well.
Philosphers have perennially defined the soul simply as the principle of life in living things. So whatever lives, has some principle of that life in them, and they gave that principle a name, "soul".
Under this understanding, carrots have souls, horses have souls, men have souls. Note that nothing religious is being said here. These are not (necessarily) immortal souls, just souls.
If you distinguish between living and non-living, you've already got the soul. There may be some dispute about whether certain things are living or not (viruses, crystals, whatever) but the common recognition that some things live (I live, you live, Mr. Ed lives) and some things don't (rocks, dirt, the gerbil you forgot to feed) gives rise to the notion of "soul".
Some souls are nutritive only, that is, they provide nutrition to the body. That's plants. Some are nutritive AND sensitive, that is, they feed the body and provide a way for sense information about the outside world to be perceived. That's non-rational animals. Some souls are nutritive AND sensitive AND intelligent, that is, they also have the added ability to universalize (i.e., understand) the information provided by sensation.
This is how the soul was understood in philosophy going all the way back to the Greeks. That's what the word means to philosophers.
Kurzweil seems to be using it in an entirely different sense, something to do with conscious reflection.
Maybe it's just because I'm getting old and cranky, but I'd say for about 90% of the blogs I happen upon these days, I wish the death penalty were the punishment for blogging in the rest of the world, too.
The US Dept of Defense has been doing this very same on US military bases abroad for a long time. I went to high school in Germany in the late '80s, and we didn't use pennies at all in US currency transactions (e.g., at the military Post Exchange or Commissary). All prices got rounded up or down to the nearest 5c. It worked fine. Plus we used $2 bills as part of everyday life.
maybe other planetary systems have more planets out of the elliptical plane
It's the plane of the ecliptic, not elliptic (it's okay, the OP made the same mistake). This was named such by the ancient astronomers as it was the narrow band in the sky where eclipses of the Earth's moon were observed to happen. They observed that it turned out that all of the wandering stars (i.e., planets) traveled within this band as well. It's not strictly speaking a plane, but a range of planes at relatively small angles to each other.
IANAA (astronomer), but I'm not sure what it would mean to speak of a plane of the ecliptic for another planetary system, except maybe that the name "ecliptic" is transferred to that range of planes where all of the planets revolve around a given star. Do you astronomers call this the plane of the ecliptic in other systems too?
Maybe next there should be an article about hot air can make balloons lift off the ground and go up instead of down! Or about how magnets can actually make iron particles rise vertically off of a table top! Or about how a drinking straw can make your lemonade elevate from your glass right into your mouth! The laws of physics are shamefully being flouted!!! Gravity has been a hoax all along!!!
I was mostly kidding. But the first thought that ran through my head (when I saw Wikipedia and "science reference" in the same sentence) was the image of a lazy grad student sitting at home in his underwear grumbling about the long, cold trip to the damn research library, convincing himself that Wikipedia "is just as good as those worthless peer reviewed scientific journals; and who's gonna find out, anyway?"
But I guess if I'm thinking of dirty grad students in their underwear, I have bigger problems...
And if you're morally opposed to having a poker hand with five aces of spades (or five of any single card rank, since they can't come from one deck of cards), here's one address that will give you a legitimate royal flush (this one happens to be in spades, and is in ascending order, from the ten of spades to the ace of spades):
36.162.204.3
Royal flushes in the other suits are left as exercises for the reader.;)
And while we're at it, am I the only one who has noticed that the joke in every single Marmaduke comic for the last thirty years has been, "Oh no! Marmaduke is too big and (get this...) is in the way!" Maybe mix in a new punchline?
No kidding. Until last summer, I was an IT admin and faithful daily slashdot reader since 1998. After getting out of sysadminning, I found that I had less time/need/inclination to read slashdot regularly. Now that I'm on academic break, and having not read slashdot in about six months, I thought I'd fire up the old site and see if anything had changed, and this was the first article on the list. Guess I'll check back again in June to see if there's anything new.
Moore is quoted in this article as saying, "I would like to see Mr. Bush removed from the White House...It [the movie] is an op-ed piece. It's my opinion about the last four years of the Bush administration. I'm not trying to pretend that this is some sort of, you know, fair and balanced work of journalism."
The second, of course, is the definition of propaganda: "The spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person."
As you can see from the definition, even if the film contains nothing but fact, which is still being debated, it can, and is, be done in a way so as to be considered propaganda.
So, as you can see, I'm not spreading lies, I'm spreading Moore's own words and using common meanings of words to understand what he says.
The fact that you bring up a source where he claims that the film is not propaganda reveals either that he doesn't know what the word means (which makes him uneducated at best, stupid at worst), or that he is contradicting himself (which makes him inconsistent at best, or a liar at worst, or perhaps it means that he has changed his mind about his own work between the two interviews).
This decision from Michael Moore is not surprising as he has always said that his goal is to touch as many people as possible. I think he simply doesn't care about the money.
Close. This decision is not surprising as the movie is propaganda, which Moore readily admits. The goal of propaganda is not to make money, but to spread a particular political message to as many people as possible. The impending election makes that goal all the more urgent. However, I'm sure he doesn't mind the fact that it is making bucketloads of money.
Similar thing with Gibson and The Passion (not the part about propaganda, but the part about how he didn't make it just to make money, but I'm sure he doesn't mind the money).
Oh and I'm French and I'm living in the US so I'm ready to be modded down and insulted.
Oh, you must be new here. Insulting the Bush administration, or supporting those that do it for you, with facts no matter how shoddy, is the best way on Slashdot to get modded up and perhaps even worshipped as deity.
Our e-mail team wants us to forward SPAM to them so they can tweak the filter, BUT, if you do them Outlook will d/l images which tells the low-life spammers that I'm a real account.
See if you can get them to do what we do: have them create a folder under "Public Folders" called "Spam", and train the users to drag/drop their uncaught spam into there. No messy fowarding. Then get fetchmail to grab all of the messages from that public folder every night (you can connect via IMAP to public folders) into a dummy mailbox on your spam filter, and have a cron job run them through the bayesian engine (we use spamassassin, which comes with sa-learn for training the engine), original headers and all.
Note: we use Samsung Contact's (formerly HP Openmail, but much, much improved) groupware server instead of Exchange on the backend, but nothing in my spamfilter re-training setup is Samsung Contact-specific. AFAIK, it would work just the same with Exchange.
I'd be happy to discuss the details of this setup further with anyone who wants to know.
Slashdot Mirror
"I still haven't heard an explaination for why we're supposed to eat fish on Fridays that made any sense."
This is an explanation: meat is expensive; in the past it was often prohibitively so. Christians who had the means to afford meat for their daily meals were asked to give it up on one day a week, that is, on the weekly celebration of Christ's death each Friday. They were then asked to donate to the poor the money that they would have spent on the meat. This was, and still is, considered to have two benefits: the Christian can to a very small degree identify with the self-giving of Christ by making a personal sacrifice (by not indulging in tasty meaty goodness), and by providing for the less fortunate (giving the funds to the poor), all in one act.
Why fish then? Fish was substituted as a less expensive alternative to the more expensive beef, pork, or poultry, so that the Christian could still have a healthy meal in his or her diet on Friday. Recently this practice has been relaxed (except during Lent when it is still required), so that the Christian can come up with his own penitential act each Friday.
Whether you agree with this practice or not, I don't think you can deny that it makes at least a little sense. Also, this might help: imagine a similar practice in another culture of which you are less critical than you are of Catholic culture (Native American spirituality, Buddhism, Islam, etc). You'd probably not criticize it so readily; in fact, you'd probably have praiseworthy things to say about it.
"Hell, go to a Catholic mass for once. It's all "Stand, sit, stand, kneel." It's like the priest is a gym teacher putting the parishioners through calisthenics."
Again, an explanation: Catholics and Orthodox Christians, much more so than Protestants, hold that we are spiritual AND bodily beings, and that we pray not only with our souls but with our bodies. Your posture (i.e, bodily position) is the way to pray with your body. Similar to the way that you stand in a courtroom to show respect to an entering judge, or the way that you go down on one knee when you propose to a woman, what you do with your body is an outward sign of what you're doing with your soul. The Catholic Mass is full of various "postures" of the soul toward God and toward your fellow congregants, and the bodily postures are designed to be signs of these inner dispositions. It seems like calisthenics to an outsider, but when understood rightly it is quite beautiful.
Again, you might not agree with all the sitting, standing, or kneeling, but you asked for a reasonable explanation, and I've tried to give one. I'm really not trying to be antagonistic here, just to explain the things you've asked about; I hope it helps you to be a more informed Catholic.
Yeah, well, it's a lot easier to make something structurally sound if it's not expected to have the same occupancy load that would be required for a modern western city. There weren't nearly as many Incans as there are Italians. Particularly since the former weren't Catholics.
This might be funny if it were even close to being true. However, despite their being predominantly Catholic in name, Italians are not in fact Catholic regarding this practice. They are among the heaviest users of artificial birth control in the world, and are not reproducing themselves fast enough to maintain current population levels (around 1.1 births per woman according to the UN [PDF]).
Only immigration is keeping the Italian population stable, and this is true for most of Western Europe as well.
Philosphers have perennially defined the soul simply as the principle of life in living things. So whatever lives, has some principle of that life in them, and they gave that principle a name, "soul".
Under this understanding, carrots have souls, horses have souls, men have souls. Note that nothing religious is being said here. These are not (necessarily) immortal souls, just souls.
If you distinguish between living and non-living, you've already got the soul. There may be some dispute about whether certain things are living or not (viruses, crystals, whatever) but the common recognition that some things live (I live, you live, Mr. Ed lives) and some things don't (rocks, dirt, the gerbil you forgot to feed) gives rise to the notion of "soul".
Some souls are nutritive only, that is, they provide nutrition to the body. That's plants. Some are nutritive AND sensitive, that is, they feed the body and provide a way for sense information about the outside world to be perceived. That's non-rational animals. Some souls are nutritive AND sensitive AND intelligent, that is, they also have the added ability to universalize (i.e., understand) the information provided by sensation.
This is how the soul was understood in philosophy going all the way back to the Greeks. That's what the word means to philosophers.
Kurzweil seems to be using it in an entirely different sense, something to do with conscious reflection.
Maybe it's just because I'm getting old and cranky, but I'd say for about 90% of the blogs I happen upon these days, I wish the death penalty were the punishment for blogging in the rest of the world, too.
But "that begs the question" is close to "that 'begets' the question," which does mean "that raises/invites the question."
This usage of 'begets' was somewhat common in 18th c. English. Take a look at Hume, Enquiry, sec. XII, pgh. 2
Belloc
The US Dept of Defense has been doing this very same on US military bases abroad for a long time. I went to high school in Germany in the late '80s, and we didn't use pennies at all in US currency transactions (e.g., at the military Post Exchange or Commissary). All prices got rounded up or down to the nearest 5c. It worked fine. Plus we used $2 bills as part of everyday life.
maybe other planetary systems have more planets out of the elliptical plane
It's the plane of the ecliptic, not elliptic (it's okay, the OP made the same mistake). This was named such by the ancient astronomers as it was the narrow band in the sky where eclipses of the Earth's moon were observed to happen. They observed that it turned out that all of the wandering stars (i.e., planets) traveled within this band as well. It's not strictly speaking a plane, but a range of planes at relatively small angles to each other.
IANAA (astronomer), but I'm not sure what it would mean to speak of a plane of the ecliptic for another planetary system, except maybe that the name "ecliptic" is transferred to that range of planes where all of the planets revolve around a given star. Do you astronomers call this the plane of the ecliptic in other systems too?
Maybe next there should be an article about hot air can make balloons lift off the ground and go up instead of down! Or about how magnets can actually make iron particles rise vertically off of a table top! Or about how a drinking straw can make your lemonade elevate from your glass right into your mouth! The laws of physics are shamefully being flouted!!! Gravity has been a hoax all along!!!
You are seeing the result of "engineering" something to just barely meet requirements, to save a penny or two.
$0.01 (or $0.02) x about a bajillion mailings = about $10 or $20 majillion in savings for Netflix.
See, they have lots of customers, with many mailings per customer, so a tiny per-envelope savings means a lot to them.
Right here.
You suddenly and inexplicably become unrecognizable as your alter ego.
I hope there wasn't a monkey...
But on the bright side, if there was, it would give Karl something true to talk about for a change.
I was mostly kidding. But the first thought that ran through my head (when I saw Wikipedia and "science reference" in the same sentence) was the image of a lazy grad student sitting at home in his underwear grumbling about the long, cold trip to the damn research library, convincing himself that Wikipedia "is just as good as those worthless peer reviewed scientific journals; and who's gonna find out, anyway?"
But I guess if I'm thinking of dirty grad students in their underwear, I have bigger problems...
And if you're morally opposed to having a poker hand with five aces of spades (or five of any single card rank, since they can't come from one deck of cards), here's one address that will give you a legitimate royal flush (this one happens to be in spades, and is in ascending order, from the ten of spades to the ace of spades):
;)
36.162.204.3
Royal flushes in the other suits are left as exercises for the reader.
Just...wow.
Kant figured this out back in the mid-nineteenth century. He argued that spatial and temporal conception is a prerequisite of consciousness.
(FYP)
The White House, misreading the term "global warming", immediately denied that Pluto exists.
I knew that somehow we would find a way to blame this on Bush.
"Which begs the question..."
That's not what begging the question means.
Do we have to go through this EVERY time?
And while we're at it, am I the only one who has noticed that the joke in every single Marmaduke comic for the last thirty years has been, "Oh no! Marmaduke is too big and (get this...) is in the way!" Maybe mix in a new punchline?
Bon Jovi? What is this, 1987?
No kidding. Until last summer, I was an IT admin and faithful daily slashdot reader since 1998. After getting out of sysadminning, I found that I had less time/need/inclination to read slashdot regularly. Now that I'm on academic break, and having not read slashdot in about six months, I thought I'd fire up the old site and see if anything had changed, and this was the first article on the list. Guess I'll check back again in June to see if there's anything new.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Belloc
Apparently our sensitive alphabetical sorting technology has been sucessfully prevented from reaching the DPRK.
So have our advanced sociological practices like Diversity and Integration. All of the pictures on the site are of Asians! Racists.
Where are your references?
I'm using two pieces of information and putting them together. The first is Moore's claim that F911 is an "op-ed" piece.
Moore is quoted in this article as saying, "I would like to see Mr. Bush removed from the White House...It [the movie] is an op-ed piece. It's my opinion about the last four years of the Bush administration. I'm not trying to pretend that this is some sort of, you know, fair and balanced work of journalism."
The second, of course, is the definition of propaganda: "The spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person."
As you can see from the definition, even if the film contains nothing but fact, which is still being debated, it can, and is, be done in a way so as to be considered propaganda.
So, as you can see, I'm not spreading lies, I'm spreading Moore's own words and using common meanings of words to understand what he says.
The fact that you bring up a source where he claims that the film is not propaganda reveals either that he doesn't know what the word means (which makes him uneducated at best, stupid at worst), or that he is contradicting himself (which makes him inconsistent at best, or a liar at worst, or perhaps it means that he has changed his mind about his own work between the two interviews).
Belloc
This decision from Michael Moore is not surprising as he has always said that his goal is to touch as many people as possible. I think he simply doesn't care about the money.
Close. This decision is not surprising as the movie is propaganda, which Moore readily admits. The goal of propaganda is not to make money, but to spread a particular political message to as many people as possible. The impending election makes that goal all the more urgent. However, I'm sure he doesn't mind the fact that it is making bucketloads of money.
Similar thing with Gibson and The Passion (not the part about propaganda, but the part about how he didn't make it just to make money, but I'm sure he doesn't mind the money).
Oh and I'm French and I'm living in the US so I'm ready to be modded down and insulted.
Oh, you must be new here. Insulting the Bush administration, or supporting those that do it for you, with facts no matter how shoddy, is the best way on Slashdot to get modded up and perhaps even worshipped as deity.
Belloc
Our e-mail team wants us to forward SPAM to them so they can tweak the filter, BUT, if you do them Outlook will d/l images which tells the low-life spammers that I'm a real account.
See if you can get them to do what we do: have them create a folder under "Public Folders" called "Spam", and train the users to drag/drop their uncaught spam into there. No messy fowarding. Then get fetchmail to grab all of the messages from that public folder every night (you can connect via IMAP to public folders) into a dummy mailbox on your spam filter, and have a cron job run them through the bayesian engine (we use spamassassin, which comes with sa-learn for training the engine), original headers and all.
Note: we use Samsung Contact's (formerly HP Openmail, but much, much improved) groupware server instead of Exchange on the backend, but nothing in my spamfilter re-training setup is Samsung Contact-specific. AFAIK, it would work just the same with Exchange.
I'd be happy to discuss the details of this setup further with anyone who wants to know.
Belloc