I often say this to my wife when we're working on our house (struggling with plumbing as Trent/Tiffany struggled with the tubing and the photo of Jean Harlow: "We'll lick those Leather Goddesses of Phobos!"
I also love how in the end game, when Trent/Tiffany needs a part for the machine which you don't have, he/she says "Well, I'll try and work around the X..." but of course the incomplete machine ends in failure (with a different description depending on what part is missing.)
No thread on IF would be complete without mentioning Willie Crowther's Adventure game. I can vouch personally that the Colossal Cave section parts of Mammoth Cave (yes, there is a Bedquilt entrance to Mammoth) resemble the game.
Occasionally a caver familiar with the game will be introduced to the actual area of the cave, and it is traditional to allow him or her the chance to ramble around and have fun trying to figure out what's where. (Will Crowther was a Mammoth Caver as well as an MIT student...along with wife Patricia Crowther (later Wilcox) was among the first people to reduce cave survey data to line plots using a computer (an early step in the cave cartography cycle.)
I live in Kentucky, 2,000 miles from Berlin, but I seem to remember that the cylinders on top of the walls were pivoted so that they would rotate if you tried to climb them, so you would just fall off of them.
I do have a piece of that wall though.
You should be made an *honorary* American for pulling the trick of disguising yourself as an American tourist....it's up to you to decide if the recognition is reward or punishment:)
Merrell Williams, an unemployed theater arts teacher, walked out of the headquarters of Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corporation in Louisville Kentucky with over FOUR THOUSAND pages of company documents. He was hired as a temp by the company to reclassify documents according to how damaging they would be in a Federal investigation.
He did it by slipping small numbers of the documents in his back brace (a very wide belt that ties around the waist.) I don't know whether he photocopied and then returned the documents or just stole them outright, but the whole batch wound up getting mailed to UCSF's medical school in San Francisco, IIRC.
>The magnitude and direction of the acceleration >is constant, assuming a simple circular orbit. >The acceleration is directed inwards.
Er, no.
The direction of "inwards" is constantly changing from the standpoint of an inertial reference frame. Imagine hovering far "above" the plane of a planet's orbit, looking down at the orbit. The direction from the planet to the body it's orbiting (i.e. the star) is always changing. If the planet starts off to your "East", then the direction from the planet to the star is "West." If the revolution is anti-clockwise (seen from above), after one-quarter orbit, the direction from the planet to the star is South. Then East, then North, then West again.
So yes, of course the direction of acceleration is always towards the star. But "always towards the star" is constantly changing with respect to a non-rotating reference frame, and a simple experiment on the planet, without looking at the sky, should establish this.
As the parent points out, not everything with regard to position and motion is described by Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. Only constant non-accelerated motion. A frame of reference which obeys this constraint is termed an "Inertial Reference Frame."
A common misconception, with an easy to learn answer.
This answer can then be applied to say that Einstein does not support Ptolemy, as Ptolemy's theory describes motion that does change. In rotating even at a constant rate around a fixed point, the orthogonal ("at right angles") components of the motion (e.g. East-West versus North-South) each oscillate between maximum and minimum values. That's the acceleration. The total magnitude of this acceleration may be constant, but its direction isn't. The reason for it in the case of the planets wasn't even apparent in Kepler's time. It took Newton to find laws which approximately described this effect (his laws of motion and of universal gravitation) and this model was further refined by Einstein with General Relativity published the year after the Special Theory.
The fact is that Kepler had no more sophisticated ideas of the mechanism underlying orbital motion than did Ptolemy. Kepler is better than Ptolemy on the grounds of superficial description of the motion alone.
This is far from an indictment of Kepler, but speaks rather to Kepler's imagination, trust to observation (notably from the perspective of history, Tycho Brahe's data), and willingness to challenge the accepted theory, which authority at the time was backed up by armies and courts of Inquisition.
The late Richard P. Feynman's little treatise "The Character of Physical Law" (MIT Press) is the best introduction to this history, and features Feynman's extrodinarily hilarious expository style, as well as his legendary insistance on accuracy with regard to interpretations of both the various physical theories, and their canonical histories.
I wish to God that Feynman were still with us. Goodbye, Dick, we hardly knew you.
It occurs to me that Microsoft may be well aware the suit is doomed and that SCO will crater. But if you integrate under the declining curve of FUD against Linux, the area under the curve looks like XP and Windows 2003 license fees to Microsoft while they get ready for their next big thing. At the same time, Microsoft knows well how agonizingly close Linux is to breaking in big to the desktop market.
The growth of Linux on the desktop is inevitable. So the best Microsoft can hope for is to slow it down and bank the profits while they last. Buying SCO would be pointless precisely because it has no future besides this doomed litigation. By simply chucking money SCO's way, it's a lot cleaner for Microsoft: plus they distance themselves from the liability of being seen to have anticompetitive practices or any damages from countersuits by IBM, Novell, RedHat, or any of the other players.
PJ of GrokLaw should get the Hopper Award once the dust has settled. She's Marvel Superhero sized to me. We hackers should get together and make her a cool amphibious superhero vehicle or something.
I'd say that as simple and relatively inexpensive as the scheme sounds, it should certainly be worth at least a try. I'm sure it's a hell of a lot cheaper than the current Rover mission, for all *that* does to directly benefit the third world.
Communication and education are necessary ingredients in the transition to an industrial society. One of those emails could include a whole lesson on some vital skill or area of interest to a young Cambodian child, prepared by a volunteer school system in Paris or New Jersey. A digital photograph of a wound or infection might save that child's life by bringing a surgeon on the *next* motorcycle.
Pollution? Please. I imagine the Cambodians don't have tons of surplus fuel just lying around to burn. The very nature of the situation means that the system will evolve in the least wasteful way possible. Of course a bike pollutes, but I doubt these provinces are Los Angeles....
This is just a start. Think back to when email was exclusively the province of Universities and the occasional large corporation, or when the Web was brand new. The Internet was growing slowly back then because public interest it hadn't reached a critical mass: it just wasn't on the radar screen.
If there are enough emails pouring in and out of a province by motorcycle, all those people may just educate themselves on how to build a repeater station halfway between their village and the next, pool their resources, and now another village has a live Pringle's can connection to the nearest motorcycle-served village...or all the way to Pheom Penh.
Sheesh. If you want to help, instead of whining about mispent money, learn French or Cambodian and *send* a volunteer tech support email by motorcycle to one of these villages. And while you're at it, pull that shitty old 10GB 5400 RPM hard drive out of your closet, partition it for 'em, and have *that* arrive at the village at the same time as your email on how to install it on the local node.
If you do not have a working XF86Config file, there are several ways to start: there is a sample config file that comes with XFree86, and there is a sample config file included with the NVIDIA driver package (it gets installed in/usr/share/doc/NVIDIA_GLX-1.0/). You could also use a program like 'xf86config'; some distributions provide their own tool for generating an XF86Config file. For more on XF86Config file syntax, please refer to the man page.
If you already have an XF86Config file working with a different driver (such as the 'nv' or 'vesa' driver), then all you need to do is find the relevant Device section and replace the line:
Driver "nv"
(or Driver "vesa")
with
Driver "nvidia"
In the Module section, make sure you have:
Load "glx"
You should also remove the following lines:
Load "dri"
Load "GLcore"
if they exist. There are also numerous options that can be added to the XF86Config file to fine-tune the NVIDIA XFree86 driver. Please see Appendix D for a complete list of these options.
I have been wrestling with getting Framebuffer support to work with the driver that ships with the 2.6.1 kernel, and the XFree86 4.3.0 nv driver. Could never get them to play together. Perhaps this will be the ticket for getting my NV17/GeForce4 card working.
Any hints on what the best kernel framebuffer device/XFree86 configuration is with the new drivers?
The present series of orbiters/landers (Nozomi, Mars Express, Spirit, Opportunity) were launched at such a time as to take advantage of the most optimal Mars-Earth configuration for something like 60,000 years. I believe the bottom line is that it was a time you could get the most science there for the least cost of launch.
Shame on my fellow American who said we should strip Beagle 2 and leave it up on cinderblocks. If Beagle is ever discovered to have soft landed, I would think the only proper thing to do would be to restore whatever's wrong with it, and let it complete its mission. (HAL, V'Ger, anyone?) Given the discussion of things like the effects of radiation exposure on electronics, you'd just have to be interested to know what a 50-or-150-year-old "dead" lander might be able to wake up and do.
If Spirit's problems aren't resolved, the Mars Scorecard should at least reflect that Beagle was the less expensive failure.
(Disclaimer: I visited England for the first time last year, and falling in love with the whole place doesn't begin to describe it. R.I.P. Beagle 2. *sniff*)
>Good Lord, people, get off your phones while you're >driving your minivans full of nine kids! Only in >northern Virginia do I have to watch the traffic IN >FRONT OF ME while I do a high-speed merge onto the >Beltway! JESUS, people, find a hole and stick >yourself in it! OK I'm done.
0. Calm down. 1. Take your hands off the keyboard. 2. Put them back on the wheel.
The Y2K preparedness team at my company went crazy over the hype. They set up a big "Y2K Command Center" (commandeered a big teleconferencing room) with PCs full of nothing but Excel spreadsheets with all the functionality metrics for our whole enterprise painstakingly listed. Every ten minutes, all of us in the trenches were supposed to telephone this "command center" so they could update their spreadsheets (yes, web site "foobar" is still responding, yes, this database still works.)
About 30 minutes before Y2K hit our time zone, I noticed the maintenance guys firing up the big diesel backup generators in our rear parking lot. I asked my boss about it. "Oh yeah," he said, "They're going to take us off the power grid just in case." No big deal to us: we have UPS's on all our PCs, and the power fails over all the time in the always-spectacular Kentucky summer thunderstorm season. (Half of the building's lighting turns off to conserve power, everyone slightly gasps, but keeps working...we're used to it.)
But not so for the "Y2K Command Center." The "suits" had plugged all their spreadsheet-running PCs straight into the wall, and when we changed over to the generators (on their command) the momentary power drop caused *every single one* of their machines to go down....
We laughed in their faces openly. If that's not being hoist by one's own petard I don't know what is. It almost made it worth it not to be kissing my sweetie on New Year's Eve.
C. S. Lewis and his writings are among the most salvageable things of Christianity. His view on the human condition makes him a British version of Mark Twain in my eyes. C. S. Lewis is most emphatically NOT the sort of oppressive, thoughtless Christian who gives the whole religion a much-earned black eye. Lewis in his own gentle way "calls shenanigans" on many of those aspects of Christian dogma. But he can be just as ascerbic as Twain on theose themes, it's just with a different sensibility.
As a fundamentalist-Christianity-hating reader who would love to see folks like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson magically go away, C. S. Lewis was a major turning point for me in terms of thinking that all Christians must be like Falwell and Robertson. Since I am not a fundamentalist, I will never try and coerce anyone into my viewpoint, but, damn it, if you want a good Christian read, try C. S.
Trends in contemporary Christian thought have to do with recognizing the Bible as what it is: the collected mythology of a particular group of people at a specific place and time in our history. The new view is that doing so is a good thing, and doesn't erase Christianity's merit, but rather salvages its value from the literalism applied disastrously in the past as now. Eternal truths are encoded in *all* mythology, from the Brothers Grimm to the Matrix.
C. S. Lewis could be credited with anticipating this re-mythologizing of Christianity by many decades.
Trivia question: Who converted C.S. Lewis to Christianity? (hint...his own famous trilogy just got made into a famous set of movies starting Elijah Wood and Ian McKellen.)
>IBM last year helped one of Brazil's largest fast >food chains, Habib's, install a Linux system that >lets customers order by phone for home delivery >within 28 minutes.
Though a lifetime computer geek I have recently returned to active cave exploration, and have gotten to reacquiant myself with old friends that helped me get started caving years ago.
On a recent cave trip, one of them remarked (to the other's wife, who's also a caver) that I had it lucky...that geeks were now totally cool and mainstream, where he and his friend had been geeks when it was definitely NOT cool!
Made me remember when I first knew him (helped him get dates) and snicker.
What about geeks that are also club musicians (narrowly avoided the term "clubbing musicians," whew!)? You have the perfect excuse to go out and meet single women/men: you're supposed to be playing! Worked for me for years *shudder*.
I'm 34 now, married and am sure I have little idea what a life as a Gen-Y geek is like, but it sure looks fun! Party on, little geeks!
"Dr. Banzai is using a laser to vaporize a pineal tumor without damaging the parthogenital plate. A subcutaneous microphone will allow the patient to transmit verbal instructions to his own brain."
"Like, 'raise my left arm'?
"Or 'throw the harpoon.' People are gonna come from all over. This boy's an Eskimo."
-- The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the Eighth Dimension
I'm on a very liberal church board, and we're grappling now with whether to let a startup, earnest yet fundamentalist-seeming church find a worship home in our Parish Hall for a nominal rental fee every week. I'm personally an "escaped" fundamentalist with a strong background in science, thanks to people like Brinley, Hofstadter, and Feynman.
Now in my early middle age I'm reinvestigating Christianity for the salvageable aspects of it. Which started explicitly as a scientific experiment, in the interest of gathering more data as I learned of churches that didn't preach Creationism (and also who didn't hate gays, women etc.) I'm trying to help the more enlightened ones: to my way of looking at it, I have escaped from a burning building, and now am trying to see if anyone's still trapped inside. Since this new Christian mission of mine is to help people dissatisfied with fundamentalism, which helps those who have been oppressed by fundamentalism, I have to say that my non-churchgoing friends (which is to say, all of my friends) are pretty enthused, if they do wonder why anyone would bother spending time with a church.
I'm delighted to say that in addition to the above mentioned scientific authors who have influenced me, I can now add Christian writers such as C. S. Lewis and John Shelby Spong, the latter of whom likes to point out his late friend, Carl Sagan's comment that if Christ literally ascended into the sky 2,000 years ago at the speed of light, "He hasn't yet escaped our galaxy!"
Spong, now the retired Bishop of Newark, New Jersey, calls gentle but firm "shenanigans" on any notion of literalizing the Biblical narrative. But religion can be valued and cherished for the good that religion does teach, often using myths, while at the same time called to account for the evil it has produced. Protestant guy Nun Scientist. Boy the fundamentalists hate hate hate Bishop Spong.
Now I have to stop before this post actually becomes evangelical (shudder)
Slashdot Mirror
I often say this to my wife when we're working on our
house (struggling with plumbing as Trent/Tiffany struggled with the tubing and the photo of Jean Harlow: "We'll lick those Leather Goddesses of Phobos!"
I also love how in the end game, when Trent/Tiffany needs a part for the machine which you don't have, he/she says "Well, I'll try and work around the X..." but of course the incomplete machine ends in failure (with a different description depending on what part is missing.)
No thread on IF would be complete without mentioning Willie Crowther's Adventure game. I can vouch personally that the Colossal Cave section parts of Mammoth Cave (yes, there is a Bedquilt entrance to Mammoth) resemble the game.
Occasionally a caver familiar with the game will be introduced to the actual area of the cave, and it is traditional to allow him or her the chance to ramble around and have fun trying to figure out what's where. (Will Crowther was a Mammoth Caver as well as an MIT student...along with wife Patricia Crowther (later Wilcox) was among the first people to reduce cave survey data to line plots using a computer (an early step in the cave cartography cycle.)
I live in Kentucky, 2,000 miles from Berlin, but I seem to remember that the cylinders on top of the walls were pivoted so that they would rotate if you tried to climb them, so you would just fall off of them.
:)
I do have a piece of that wall though.
You should be made an *honorary* American for pulling the trick of disguising yourself as an American tourist....it's up to you to decide if the recognition is reward or punishment
Merrell Williams, an unemployed theater arts teacher, walked out of the headquarters of Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corporation in Louisville Kentucky with over FOUR THOUSAND pages of company documents. He was hired as a temp by the company to reclassify documents according to how damaging they would be in a Federal investigation.
He did it by slipping small numbers of the documents in his back brace (a very wide belt that ties around the waist.) I don't know whether he photocopied and then returned the documents or just stole them outright, but the whole batch wound up getting mailed to UCSF's medical school in San Francisco, IIRC.
>The magnitude and direction of the acceleration
>is constant, assuming a simple circular orbit.
>The acceleration is directed inwards.
Er, no.
The direction of "inwards" is constantly changing from the standpoint of an inertial reference frame. Imagine hovering far "above" the plane of a planet's orbit, looking down at the orbit. The direction from the planet to the body it's orbiting (i.e. the star) is always changing. If the planet starts off to your "East", then the direction from the planet to the star is "West." If the revolution is anti-clockwise (seen from above), after one-quarter orbit, the direction from the planet to the star is South. Then East, then North, then West again.
So yes, of course the direction of acceleration is always towards the star. But "always towards the star" is constantly changing with respect to a non-rotating reference frame, and a simple experiment on the planet, without looking at the sky, should establish this.
As the parent points out, not everything with regard to position and motion is described by Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. Only constant non-accelerated motion. A frame of reference which obeys this constraint is termed an "Inertial Reference Frame."
A common misconception, with an easy to learn answer.
This answer can then be applied to say that Einstein does not support Ptolemy, as Ptolemy's theory describes motion that does change. In rotating even at a constant rate around a fixed point, the orthogonal ("at right angles") components of the motion (e.g. East-West versus North-South) each oscillate between maximum and minimum values. That's the acceleration. The total magnitude of this acceleration may be constant, but its direction isn't. The reason for it in the case of the planets wasn't even apparent in Kepler's time. It took Newton to find laws which approximately described this effect (his laws of motion and of universal gravitation) and this model was further refined by Einstein with General Relativity published the year after the Special Theory.
The fact is that Kepler had no more sophisticated ideas of the mechanism underlying orbital motion than did Ptolemy. Kepler is better than Ptolemy on the grounds of superficial description of the motion alone.
This is far from an indictment of Kepler, but speaks rather to Kepler's imagination, trust to observation (notably from the perspective of history, Tycho Brahe's data), and willingness to challenge the accepted theory, which authority at the time was backed up by armies and courts of Inquisition.
The late Richard P. Feynman's little treatise "The Character of Physical Law" (MIT Press) is the best introduction to this history, and features Feynman's extrodinarily hilarious expository style, as well as his legendary insistance on accuracy with regard to interpretations of both the various physical theories, and their canonical histories.
I wish to God that Feynman were still with us. Goodbye, Dick, we hardly knew you.
It occurs to me that Microsoft may be well aware the suit is doomed and that SCO will crater. But
if you integrate under the declining curve of FUD against Linux, the area under the curve looks like XP and Windows 2003 license fees to Microsoft while they get ready for their next big thing. At the same time, Microsoft knows well how agonizingly close Linux is to breaking in big to the desktop market.
The growth of Linux on the desktop is inevitable. So the best Microsoft can hope for is to slow it down and bank the profits while they last. Buying SCO would be pointless precisely because it has no future besides this doomed litigation. By simply chucking money SCO's way, it's a lot cleaner for Microsoft: plus they distance themselves from the liability of being seen to have anticompetitive practices or any damages from countersuits by IBM, Novell, RedHat, or any of the other players.
PJ of GrokLaw should get the Hopper Award once the dust has settled. She's Marvel Superhero sized to me. We hackers should get together and make her a cool amphibious superhero vehicle or something.
Mod parent up: it's the full text.
I'd say that as simple and relatively inexpensive as the scheme sounds, it should certainly be worth at least a try. I'm sure it's a hell of a lot cheaper than the current Rover mission, for all *that* does to directly benefit the third world.
Communication and education are necessary ingredients in the transition to an industrial society. One of those emails could include a whole lesson on some vital skill or area of interest to a young Cambodian child, prepared by a volunteer school system in Paris or New Jersey. A digital photograph of a wound or infection might save that child's life by bringing a surgeon on the *next* motorcycle.
Pollution? Please. I imagine the Cambodians don't have tons of surplus fuel just lying around to burn. The very nature of the situation means that the system will evolve in the least wasteful way possible. Of course a bike pollutes, but I doubt these provinces are Los Angeles....
This is just a start. Think back to when email was exclusively the province of Universities and the occasional large corporation, or when the Web was brand new. The Internet was growing slowly back then because public interest it hadn't reached a critical mass: it just wasn't on the radar screen.
If there are enough emails pouring in and out of a province by motorcycle, all those people may just educate themselves on how to build a repeater station halfway between their village and the next, pool their resources, and now another village has a live Pringle's can connection to the nearest motorcycle-served village...or all the way to Pheom Penh.
Sheesh. If you want to help, instead of whining about mispent money, learn French or Cambodian and *send* a volunteer tech support email by motorcycle to one of these villages. And while you're at it, pull that shitty old 10GB 5400 RPM hard drive out of your closet, partition it for 'em, and have *that* arrive at the village at the same time as your email on how to install it on the local node.
ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/1.0-53 36/README
/usr/share/doc/NVIDIA_GLX-1.0/).
From the README:
If you do not have a working XF86Config file, there are several ways
to start: there is a sample config file that comes with XFree86,
and there is a sample config file included with the NVIDIA driver
package (it gets installed in
You could also use a program like 'xf86config'; some distributions
provide their own tool for generating an XF86Config file. For more
on XF86Config file syntax, please refer to the man page.
If you already have an XF86Config file working with a different driver
(such as the 'nv' or 'vesa' driver), then all you need to do is find
the relevant Device section and replace the line:
Driver "nv"
(or Driver "vesa")
with
Driver "nvidia"
In the Module section, make sure you have:
Load "glx"
You should also remove the following lines:
Load "dri"
Load "GLcore"
if they exist. There are also numerous options that can be added to
the XF86Config file to fine-tune the NVIDIA XFree86 driver. Please see
Appendix D for a complete list of these options.
I have been wrestling with getting Framebuffer support to work with the driver that ships with the 2.6.1 kernel, and the XFree86 4.3.0 nv driver. Could never get them to play together. Perhaps this will be the ticket for getting my NV17/GeForce4 card working.
Any hints on what the best kernel framebuffer device/XFree86 configuration is with the new drivers?
The present series of orbiters/landers (Nozomi, Mars Express, Spirit, Opportunity) were launched at such a time as to take advantage of the most optimal Mars-Earth configuration for something like 60,000 years. I believe the bottom line is that it was a time you could get the most science there for the least cost of launch.
Shame on my fellow American who said we should strip Beagle 2 and leave it up on cinderblocks. If Beagle is ever discovered to have soft landed, I would think the only proper thing to do would be to restore whatever's wrong with it, and let it complete its mission. (HAL, V'Ger, anyone?) Given the discussion of things like the effects of radiation exposure on electronics, you'd just have to be interested to know what a 50-or-150-year-old "dead" lander might be able to wake up and do.
If Spirit's problems aren't resolved, the Mars Scorecard should at least reflect that Beagle was the less expensive failure.
(Disclaimer: I visited England for the first time last year, and falling in love with the whole place doesn't begin to describe it. R.I.P. Beagle 2. *sniff*)
>Good Lord, people, get off your phones while you're
>driving your minivans full of nine kids! Only in
>northern Virginia do I have to watch the traffic IN
>FRONT OF ME while I do a high-speed merge onto the
>Beltway! JESUS, people, find a hole and stick
>yourself in it! OK I'm done.
0. Calm down.
1. Take your hands off the keyboard.
2. Put them back on the wheel.
>deliberately wrote crappy, thread-unsafe, fragile
>macros just so he could point back to them now.
So *that's* why you're supposed to do that....
The Y2K preparedness team at my company went crazy over the hype. They set up a big "Y2K Command Center" (commandeered a big teleconferencing room) with PCs full of nothing but Excel spreadsheets with all the functionality metrics for our whole enterprise painstakingly listed. Every ten minutes, all of us in the trenches were supposed to telephone this "command center" so they could update their spreadsheets (yes, web site "foobar" is still responding, yes, this database still works.)
About 30 minutes before Y2K hit our time zone, I noticed the maintenance guys firing up the big diesel backup generators in our rear parking lot. I asked my boss about it. "Oh yeah," he said, "They're going to take us off the power grid just in case." No big deal to us: we have UPS's on all our PCs, and the power fails over all the time in the always-spectacular Kentucky summer thunderstorm season. (Half of the building's lighting turns off to conserve power, everyone slightly gasps, but keeps working...we're used to it.)
But not so for the "Y2K Command Center." The "suits" had plugged all their spreadsheet-running PCs straight into the wall, and when we changed over to the generators (on their command) the momentary power drop caused *every single one* of their machines to go down....
We laughed in their faces openly. If that's not being hoist by one's own petard I don't know what is. It almost made it worth it not to be kissing my sweetie on New Year's Eve.
C. S. Lewis and his writings are among the most salvageable things of Christianity. His view on the human condition makes him a British version of Mark Twain in my eyes. C. S. Lewis is most emphatically NOT the sort of oppressive, thoughtless Christian who gives the whole religion a much-earned black eye. Lewis in his own gentle way "calls shenanigans" on many of those aspects of Christian dogma. But he can be just as ascerbic as Twain on theose themes, it's just with a different sensibility.
As a fundamentalist-Christianity-hating reader who would love to see folks like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson magically go away, C. S. Lewis was a major turning point for me in terms of thinking that all Christians must be like Falwell and Robertson. Since I am not a fundamentalist, I will never try and coerce anyone into my viewpoint, but, damn it, if you want a good Christian read, try C. S.
Trends in contemporary Christian thought have to do with recognizing the Bible as what it is: the collected mythology of a particular group of people at a specific place and time in our history. The new view is that doing so is a good thing, and doesn't erase Christianity's merit, but rather salvages its value from the literalism applied disastrously in the past as now. Eternal truths are encoded in *all* mythology, from the Brothers Grimm to the Matrix.
C. S. Lewis could be credited with anticipating this re-mythologizing of Christianity by many decades.
Trivia question: Who converted C.S. Lewis to Christianity? (hint...his own famous trilogy just got made into a famous set of movies starting Elijah Wood and Ian McKellen.)
"It's not just a crazy idea that some lefty Commie hippie dreamed up in a drug-induced stupor." -- L.T.
The thing I like about the hippie quote is how non-exclusionary it is...the GPL is not MERELY a crazy idea, etc.... The GPL is all that and MORE!
>IBM last year helped one of Brazil's largest fast
>food chains, Habib's, install a Linux system that
>lets customers order by phone for home delivery
>within 28 minutes.
What are they running that thing on, a 486SX25?
Il y a une horloge qui ne sonne pas.
Clarke treats of the computer/robot distinction in the novel, _2001: A Space Odyssey_. He points out that Hal, if metaphorically, "was the ship."
You mean, this
Though a lifetime computer geek I have recently returned to active cave exploration, and have gotten to reacquiant myself with old friends that helped me get started caving years ago.
On a recent cave trip, one of them remarked (to the other's wife, who's also a caver) that I had it lucky...that geeks were now totally cool and mainstream, where he and his friend had been geeks when it was definitely NOT cool!
Made me remember when I first knew him (helped him get dates) and snicker.
What about geeks that are also club musicians (narrowly avoided the term "clubbing musicians," whew!)? You have the perfect excuse to go out and meet single women/men: you're supposed to be playing! Worked for me for years *shudder*.
I'm 34 now, married and am sure I have little idea what a life as a Gen-Y geek is like, but it sure looks fun! Party on, little geeks!
"Dr. Banzai is using a laser to vaporize a pineal tumor without damaging the parthogenital plate. A subcutaneous microphone will allow the patient to transmit verbal instructions to his own brain."
"Like, 'raise my left arm'?
"Or 'throw the harpoon.' People are gonna come from all over. This boy's an Eskimo."
-- The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the Eighth Dimension
(*taunts the Buckaroo fans*)
*I* remember Special Bulletin! Got in trouble for ;)
running in and trying to convince my parents it was for real....
I'm on a very liberal church board, and we're grappling now with whether to let a startup, earnest yet fundamentalist-seeming church find a worship home in our Parish Hall for a nominal rental fee every week. I'm personally an "escaped" fundamentalist with a strong background in science, thanks to people like Brinley, Hofstadter, and Feynman.
Now in my early middle age I'm reinvestigating Christianity for the salvageable aspects of it. Which started explicitly as a scientific experiment, in the interest of gathering more data as I learned of churches that didn't preach Creationism (and also who didn't hate gays, women etc.) I'm trying to help the more enlightened ones: to my way of looking at it, I have escaped from a burning building, and now am trying to see if anyone's still trapped inside. Since this new Christian mission of mine is to help people dissatisfied with fundamentalism, which helps those who have been oppressed by fundamentalism, I have to say that my non-churchgoing friends (which is to say, all of my friends) are pretty enthused, if they do wonder why anyone would bother spending time with a church.
I'm delighted to say that in addition to the above mentioned scientific authors who have influenced me, I can now add Christian writers such as C. S. Lewis and John Shelby Spong, the latter of whom likes to point out his late friend, Carl Sagan's comment that if Christ literally ascended into the sky 2,000 years ago at the speed of light, "He hasn't yet escaped our galaxy!"
Spong, now the retired Bishop of Newark, New Jersey, calls gentle but firm "shenanigans" on any notion of literalizing the Biblical narrative. But religion can be valued and cherished for the good that religion does teach, often using myths, while at the same time called to account for the evil it has produced. Protestant guy Nun Scientist. Boy the fundamentalists hate hate hate Bishop Spong.
Now I have to stop before this post actually becomes evangelical (shudder)
-1 Offtopic...make my day.
Dude, Get A Life!