So Obama's plan is to steal money from one underfunded program to pay for another underfunded program? We should be taking that money from the monstrously bloated DoD budget. Five percent of one year's military budget will put us on Mars.
5. Work. Actually do the recommended reading... and the exercises.
I went from being a C student to getting 98 out of 100 on calculus exams from this approach to things. It sounds like someone's old man saying stuff like "In my day..." but the fact is, you just have to cowboy up and then it's easy.
And once you've done this for a hard course like calculus, everything else is downhill. I discovered that the first half of lots of teachers' lectures was a paraphrase of the chapter you were assigned to read. When I went into class having read it already, I found that (1) I understood it much better because of multiple sensory methods (a trite but true method), (2) I was able to ask intelligent and useful questions about things that were vague on first reading, and (3) teachers noticed this.
The benefits of (3) are both gross and subtle. One semester, I had 60 migraine headaches in about two months (I didn't know about aspartame then), and scored 55 out of 100 on a calculus exam. The teacher had known me for 2-and-a-half semesters though, and threw that exam out, because he knew it was not due to me screwing around. He knew I wanted to do well.
The real benefit, though, was better instruction. The teachers would talk to me. They'd say things it would never occur to them to say to more passive students. I converesed with them, instead of being just lectured to. There was a richness to my education that I got because I was involved. In short -- cliche alert -- you get out of life what you put into it.
That's a slightly different story. I started watching Andromeda early on, based on rumors of a five-year arc. Unfortunately, Robert Hewitt Wolfe, Andromeda's jms, was cut loose in the middle of season two so the show could be NEW AND IMPROVED, NOW WITH MORE SORBO POWER!
I think of this as a Tribune thing, but I'm kind of vague on that. Earth: Final Conflict, the other posthumous Gene Roddenberry project, also came from Tribune Entertainment. EFC ran for five seasons, like Andromeda, and lost what seemed to be a long-term arc early on, like Andromeda. The last few episodes of season one of EFC were changes and setup for season two. All the subtlety and beauty of the first season was slowly removed. It's no wonder the end result was poorly structured.
The relationship between Boone and Da'an was just stunning to watch, and Kevin Kilner and Leni Parker, the actors who played them, were tremendous. What was going on there was part romance, part friendship, part spiritual, and completely without words. They played characters in a world of politics and manipulation who couldn't speak freely, and most of the profound connection between them happened on-screen in silence. They were beautiful to watch.
SciFi had nothing to do with shooting the Farscape movie. I wish people would stop giving this channel credit for things like this. The show was canceled with no indication that anything would follow.
And Farscape was cancelled after SFC had already renewed it for two seasons, both 4 and 5. SFC pulled the rug from under Farscape after the cliffhanger ending of season 4 was completed. The same thing happened to Forever Knight on USA: USA funded one-third of FK's third and final season, and then pulled the funding at the last minute, leading to the bottle episodes at the end of that show.
As near as I can figure, the common element is someone named Bonnie Hammer, who ran the channels in question at the right times and seems not to like genre shows, based on the Scare Tactics and John Edwards garbage that was the staple of SFC's line-up the last time I subscribed to it.
"If Shell prevails... Google will have to get online publishers to 'opt in' before they can be crawled, radically changing the nature of Web search."
For the better.
As clichéd as the g-phrase has become, people that don't want Google to index their sites just don't "get it", and we're better off without them. The internet is a new system that is profoundly more co-operative than any built before. (I say this in the context of all modern culture, which could not have been built without consistently high levels of co-operation for millennia.) I hate leaving anyone behind, but we all have to choose, we all have only 24 hours in a day, and I'd rather work with those people who believe in working together.
Its obvious that MS's (and most other corporations) sole goal is to maximize profit. The question is- should we, as society, allow such organizations to exist?
If these corporations would simply seek to maximize long-term profit they would automatically seek to serve others by putting out the best possible products. The problem is that neither producers nor consumers have long-term memory. (People who read Slashdot don't count: statistically, Slashdotters are better educated and thus more aware of long-term consequences.)
The only solution to these corporations sociopathy is to educate people to be aware of and care about long-term results. At that point, you have to realize that the "we, as society" you speak of isn't the "we, as society" others are taking about. Most people don't care about the long-term picture, and they certainly don't want you telling them or their kids about it. Shall we forcibly educate their children to care about the long-term results that we care about? I find that ethically distasteful. Shall we reason with them? I'm so done with that.
Suggestions on what to do with the mundanes so as to enable faster species progress are welcome. (I already have "Soylent Green" and "Did I say death camps? I meant happy camps!" already, no need to post those again.)
So, yes, compared to the total deaths in S. Korea from cancer (~65,000 in 2004) or suicide (~12,000 in 2004) [source] I would say it is rather insignificant.
It's worse than that. According to the UN, a child dies of hunger every five seconds. The number of children who die of hunger and hunger-related issues is approaching six million a year.
Keep in mind, the religious denominations that trace their heritage to the Puritans are the Unitarians and Congregationalists. Those aren't exactly among the most conservative denominations out there.
Yah, I make no claim to have followed all of the varying denominations very closely, which is why I said "ethical and intellectual descendants" as opposed to something more concrete. It just seems that, with the exception of a major spike from maybe the 1760s to about Marybury vs. Madison, you have a long term trend in the US of profound and increasing anti-intellectualism.
The founders were dedicated to Enlightenment ideals, moderation and reflection. Even when there were major disagreements, the subtext was that the issues of the day were profoundly important, and both sides believed that the issues were not just worthy of discussion, but required both educated discourse and thoughtful, considered action. Now we've elected a leader who seems proud of being an average joe and believes he has all the answers. There are those who say that the elections were fraudulent, but that's almost irrelevant. How did this man get anywhere close to 50 percent so that the elections could be manipulated? Just getting to know ordinary people, the answer seems obvious. They think it's a good idea that the President of the US is a regular joe too.
I don't hear of this kind of thing from Europe or Asia, or even Canada or Mexico, our nearest neighbors. On the contrary, it seems like most other countries have a respect for teaching and education.
What I find sadder personally is that the US government has degenerated largely into rule by lawyers and financial elites.
What are the both of you smoking? The US is still and will continue to be at the forefront of (true and verifiable) scientific advances.
Sorry, maybe others can't get the pharmaceutical-grade drugs you've been on. I live in the US, and the average citizen not only has no clue as to basic science, they think it's just not all that important. Science, learning and education have zero emotional or intellectual value to the vast bulk of the US population. Ninety-nine percent of people you can choose at random in the street don't know and don't care about science or technology. Hell, were we talking about science? Most people in the US don't know where major cities are on a US map. They don't know how to punctuate a sentence, and don't want to.
Big civilizations have fallen before due to their ignorance and arrogance, and the US is long overdue. People at a site like Slashdot lean a little left and think of the real US as the nation created by the founders in the late 1700s, but a far greater number are the ethical and intellectual descendants of the deliberately ignorant Puritans who came here in the 1600s. The Enlightenment-era US the founders tried to create was just a spike, an aberration in the overall cultural trend toward ignorance and obedience.
Every cell-phone enabled citizen would be able to broadcast the truth of whatever is happening anywhere. Bush won't let protesters near a rally? Crash the party. What are they going to do, arrest everyone with a cell phone? The pictures of the Secret Service trying to arrest hundreds of people doing nothing more than exercising their constitutional rights are money-in-the-bank news coverage. Are you the guy who tells people wearing Kerry shirts to Bush rallies that they're not allowed in? Smile, you're on Candid Camera!
I don't necessarily think that vigilantism is the answer...
Vigilantism is exactly the answer. For some reason, there's this idea that people aren't supposed to "take the law into their own hands". Well, who is supposed to maintain the law? The authorities? They can't do it. If every last cop on every last police force was Joe Friday, they still wouldn't come close to having the manpower to control traditional crimes, let alone email spammers.
More to the point, every last cop on the force isn't Joe Friday. Frank Herbert wrote that the saying "power corrupts" needed to be re-written as "power attracts the corruptible". With profound respect to those who become the authorities of society because they genuinely want to make the world a better place, there are also lots of people who do it because they want the power. From street cops to the presidency, we have seen that bad people are drawn to power. The worst ones are on the take, beating people who surrender, invading other countries without justification, passing legislation that favors institutions over individuals, and so on. The ones who are just misguided genuinely believe that only particular, designated officials should run a society. Both types support the idea that people aren't supposed to take the law into their own hands.
How does all this happen? How do people get into situations where bad people ruin things and nothing can be done? Because there are people who don't believe in taking the law into their own hands. Because there are people who believe that making things better is a job for someone else, not a sacred trust. Because there are people who don't feel like this is their world. And because lots of people who care only for themselves are willing to take advantage of people who don't believe in vigilantism.
Of course, the word "vigilantism" is not a native part of my vocabulary. I have another word that I use there. Let me rewrite the original statement: "I don't necessarily think that responsibility is the answer..."
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Writers basically paint themselves in a corner since they are bounded by the events that are supposed to come later.
"As I mentioned in my introduction to Frank's Dark Knight, one of the things that prevents superhero stories from ever attaining the status of true modern myths or legends is that they are open ended. An essential quality of a legend is that the events in it are clearly defined in time; Robin Hood is driven to become an outlaw by the injustices of King John and his minions. That is his origin. He meets Little John, Friar Tuck and all the rest and forms the merry men. He wins the tournament in disguise, he falls in love with Maid Marian and thwarts the Sheriff of Nottingham. That is his career, including love interest, Major Villains and the formation of a superhero group that he is part of. He lives to see the return of Good King Richard and is finally killed by a woman, firing a last arrow to mark the place where he shall be buried. That is his resolution--you can apply the same paradigm to King Arthur, Davy Crockett or Sherlock Holmes with equal success. You cannot apply it to most comic book characters because, in order to meet the commercial demands of a continuing series, they can never have a resolution. Indeed, they find it difficult to embrace any of the changes in life that the passage of time brings about for these very same reasons, making them finally less than fully human as well as falling far short of true myth." -- Alan Moore, in his proposal Twilight of the Superheroes
If you think, after reading the entire proposal, that Twilight sounds a little like Kingdom Come in providing a possible ending for our modern heroes, you're not alone (look at the Wikipedia article), and I think there are a lot of geeks who will tell you that Kingdom Come was quite simply one of the best comics ever. Hell, in Babylon 5, we knew the end of Londo and G'Kar's stories in Season One, Episode One, and B5 is one of the defining epics of our time!
Yes, there have been a lot of bad prequels, but those have been a result of the money-driven Hollywood system, not because we knew the ending of the stories. The voyage of discovery, the 'how' of getting there, counts profoundly. The decisions that turn a man into a hero, or a monster, are at the heart of all great storytelling. That doesn't change because we know the end of the story.
Re:Missing features wishlist
on
Google Calendar
·
· Score: 1
Anyone else want to add a wish?
* fully customizable calendar colors -- i like google's colors, but some of the color differences are way too subtle for older, cheaper or uncalibrated monitors
* along the same lines, maybe the ability to add a micro-icon (8x8) to mark different calendars -- NHL team icons, for example
* ability to schedule something on "the last day of the month" or the "third monday in September" -- this was once in and then vanished from sunbird, but you need this sort of thing if you get a paycheck on the last day of the month, or want to track Quit Your Job Day
* ability to list all the events on a particular calendar -- scrolling from month to month seems an awkward way to keep an eye on things, and that won't help you catch one-time events
"Google awarded patent on time." It was really only a matter of google!
I understand the Marklars and the Smurfs were also going for this patent, but none of the patent clerks could understand what the Marklars were saying, and Attorney Smurf was busy representing Smurfette in yet another paternity suit.
How can we debate a song (or any work of art) if not from the approach of taste, as you say? That's the only way we can, in fact, since there's no objective idea of "good" art. Thus, any opinion will be based on taste. Linguam Latinam quoque dicere possum, sed ratio mea potentior fit? non sic. Et eloquentia et substantia praesint.
Sorry, I only know the little bit of Latin I picked up watching gladiator flicks with Cliff and Norm. I'm going to presume you said something wittily devastating, stutter and stammer a bit, exclaim "Oh, for crying out loud!", head to the bar and switch to something stronger.
To answer your question, though, art can't be debated. You can discuss how much you like or dislike something, and you can try to express in words why you feel that way, but you can't ever decide whether something is good or evil. You can't 'objectively' determine that Britney Spears isn't the Almighty Apotheosis of Art (insert trumpety fanfare, change mind, insert catchy pop tune you can bop to).
This all changes, of course, once you arbitraily declare some premises. If you decide that "good art is art which makes me feel happy", then we could measure your endorphins or dopamine or something like that and announce that certain works are "good art" and "bad art". If you decide that "good art is art which increases the likelihood of reproduction and thus improves the odds of the survival of the species", then you can make the case for Britney Spears being the Greatest Artist Ever(TM) and not genetically engineered by the Disney Corporation to bring western culture to its knees.
That's probably the "Insightfully Funny" or "Imformatively Funny" mod. You don't get karma for +1 Funny, so generous moderators give the +1 Informative or +1 Insightful mod instead.
Slashdot Mirror
So Obama's plan is to steal money from one underfunded program to pay for another underfunded program? We should be taking that money from the monstrously bloated DoD budget. Five percent of one year's military budget will put us on Mars.
Suppose he has threesomes with sluts.... Are you gonna take away his funding for that, too?
Are you kidding?!? We're going to double his funding!!!
The day arrives.... Two hours later, your eyeballs are bleeding.
You've just described the day I brought my friends to see Highlander 2.
is that Earth-Mars internet pipe up yet? :)
Yah, but the latency is wikkid bad.
5. Work. Actually do the recommended reading... and the exercises.
I went from being a C student to getting 98 out of 100 on calculus exams from this approach to things. It sounds like someone's old man saying stuff like "In my day..." but the fact is, you just have to cowboy up and then it's easy.
And once you've done this for a hard course like calculus, everything else is downhill. I discovered that the first half of lots of teachers' lectures was a paraphrase of the chapter you were assigned to read. When I went into class having read it already, I found that (1) I understood it much better because of multiple sensory methods (a trite but true method), (2) I was able to ask intelligent and useful questions about things that were vague on first reading, and (3) teachers noticed this.
The benefits of (3) are both gross and subtle. One semester, I had 60 migraine headaches in about two months (I didn't know about aspartame then), and scored 55 out of 100 on a calculus exam. The teacher had known me for 2-and-a-half semesters though, and threw that exam out, because he knew it was not due to me screwing around. He knew I wanted to do well.
The real benefit, though, was better instruction. The teachers would talk to me. They'd say things it would never occur to them to say to more passive students. I converesed with them, instead of being just lectured to. There was a richness to my education that I got because I was involved. In short -- cliche alert -- you get out of life what you put into it.
I, for one, hope it doesn't work.
You realize that this is not at all where we thought this sentence was going.
what about andromeda?
That's a slightly different story. I started watching Andromeda early on, based on rumors of a five-year arc. Unfortunately, Robert Hewitt Wolfe, Andromeda's jms, was cut loose in the middle of season two so the show could be NEW AND IMPROVED, NOW WITH MORE SORBO POWER!
I think of this as a Tribune thing, but I'm kind of vague on that. Earth: Final Conflict, the other posthumous Gene Roddenberry project, also came from Tribune Entertainment. EFC ran for five seasons, like Andromeda, and lost what seemed to be a long-term arc early on, like Andromeda. The last few episodes of season one of EFC were changes and setup for season two. All the subtlety and beauty of the first season was slowly removed. It's no wonder the end result was poorly structured.
The relationship between Boone and Da'an was just stunning to watch, and Kevin Kilner and Leni Parker, the actors who played them, were tremendous. What was going on there was part romance, part friendship, part spiritual, and completely without words. They played characters in a world of politics and manipulation who couldn't speak freely, and most of the profound connection between them happened on-screen in silence. They were beautiful to watch.
I wish I'd seen their whole story.
SciFi had nothing to do with shooting the Farscape movie. I wish people would stop giving this channel credit for things like this. The show was canceled with no indication that anything would follow.
And Farscape was cancelled after SFC had already renewed it for two seasons, both 4 and 5. SFC pulled the rug from under Farscape after the cliffhanger ending of season 4 was completed. The same thing happened to Forever Knight on USA: USA funded one-third of FK's third and final season, and then pulled the funding at the last minute, leading to the bottle episodes at the end of that show.
As near as I can figure, the common element is someone named Bonnie Hammer, who ran the channels in question at the right times and seems not to like genre shows, based on the Scare Tactics and John Edwards garbage that was the staple of SFC's line-up the last time I subscribed to it.
"If Shell prevails... Google will have to get online publishers to 'opt in' before they can be crawled, radically changing the nature of Web search."
For the better.
As clichéd as the g-phrase has become, people that don't want Google to index their sites just don't "get it", and we're better off without them. The internet is a new system that is profoundly more co-operative than any built before. (I say this in the context of all modern culture, which could not have been built without consistently high levels of co-operation for millennia.) I hate leaving anyone behind, but we all have to choose, we all have only 24 hours in a day, and I'd rather work with those people who believe in working together.
Its obvious that MS's (and most other corporations) sole goal is to maximize profit. The question is- should we, as society, allow such organizations to exist?
If these corporations would simply seek to maximize long-term profit they would automatically seek to serve others by putting out the best possible products. The problem is that neither producers nor consumers have long-term memory. (People who read Slashdot don't count: statistically, Slashdotters are better educated and thus more aware of long-term consequences.)
The only solution to these corporations sociopathy is to educate people to be aware of and care about long-term results. At that point, you have to realize that the "we, as society" you speak of isn't the "we, as society" others are taking about. Most people don't care about the long-term picture, and they certainly don't want you telling them or their kids about it. Shall we forcibly educate their children to care about the long-term results that we care about? I find that ethically distasteful. Shall we reason with them? I'm so done with that.
Suggestions on what to do with the mundanes so as to enable faster species progress are welcome. (I already have "Soylent Green" and "Did I say death camps? I meant happy camps!" already, no need to post those again.)
... Darl McBride is looking to get Unix developers back onboard with cash incentives...
Wow. When you have to pay a community reknowned for volunteerism and hacker fascination, that's just profoundly sad.
Musicians will continue to "get the shaft" as long as they rely on majors.
One of the best references on the subject: Courtney Love Does The Math.
s/marklar/angst/g;
More like 125 times.
Nope, Malor specified "six times as wide", which leads to 216 times as massive, ceteris paribus.
So, yes, compared to the total deaths in S. Korea from cancer (~65,000 in 2004) or suicide (~12,000 in 2004) [source] I would say it is rather insignificant.
It's worse than that. According to the UN, a child dies of hunger every five seconds. The number of children who die of hunger and hunger-related issues is approaching six million a year.
Keep in mind, the religious denominations that trace their heritage to the Puritans are the Unitarians and Congregationalists. Those aren't exactly among the most conservative denominations out there.
:-)
Yah, I make no claim to have followed all of the varying denominations very closely, which is why I said "ethical and intellectual descendants" as opposed to something more concrete. It just seems that, with the exception of a major spike from maybe the 1760s to about Marybury vs. Madison, you have a long term trend in the US of profound and increasing anti-intellectualism.
The founders were dedicated to Enlightenment ideals, moderation and reflection. Even when there were major disagreements, the subtext was that the issues of the day were profoundly important, and both sides believed that the issues were not just worthy of discussion, but required both educated discourse and thoughtful, considered action. Now we've elected a leader who seems proud of being an average joe and believes he has all the answers. There are those who say that the elections were fraudulent, but that's almost irrelevant. How did this man get anywhere close to 50 percent so that the elections could be manipulated? Just getting to know ordinary people, the answer seems obvious. They think it's a good idea that the President of the US is a regular joe too.
I don't hear of this kind of thing from Europe or Asia, or even Canada or Mexico, our nearest neighbors. On the contrary, it seems like most other countries have a respect for teaching and education.
What I find sadder personally is that the US government has degenerated largely into rule by lawyers and financial elites.
If only they were elite in any other way.
What are the both of you smoking? The US is still and will continue to be at the forefront of (true and verifiable) scientific advances.
Sorry, maybe others can't get the pharmaceutical-grade drugs you've been on. I live in the US, and the average citizen not only has no clue as to basic science, they think it's just not all that important. Science, learning and education have zero emotional or intellectual value to the vast bulk of the US population. Ninety-nine percent of people you can choose at random in the street don't know and don't care about science or technology. Hell, were we talking about science? Most people in the US don't know where major cities are on a US map. They don't know how to punctuate a sentence, and don't want to.
Big civilizations have fallen before due to their ignorance and arrogance, and the US is long overdue. People at a site like Slashdot lean a little left and think of the real US as the nation created by the founders in the late 1700s, but a far greater number are the ethical and intellectual descendants of the deliberately ignorant Puritans who came here in the 1600s. The Enlightenment-era US the founders tried to create was just a spike, an aberration in the overall cultural trend toward ignorance and obedience.
I Don't See the Point...
Every cell-phone enabled citizen would be able to broadcast the truth of whatever is happening anywhere. Bush won't let protesters near a rally? Crash the party. What are they going to do, arrest everyone with a cell phone? The pictures of the Secret Service trying to arrest hundreds of people doing nothing more than exercising their constitutional rights are money-in-the-bank news coverage. Are you the guy who tells people wearing Kerry shirts to Bush rallies that they're not allowed in? Smile, you're on Candid Camera!
I don't necessarily think that vigilantism is the answer...
Vigilantism is exactly the answer. For some reason, there's this idea that people aren't supposed to "take the law into their own hands". Well, who is supposed to maintain the law? The authorities? They can't do it. If every last cop on every last police force was Joe Friday, they still wouldn't come close to having the manpower to control traditional crimes, let alone email spammers.
More to the point, every last cop on the force isn't Joe Friday. Frank Herbert wrote that the saying "power corrupts" needed to be re-written as "power attracts the corruptible". With profound respect to those who become the authorities of society because they genuinely want to make the world a better place, there are also lots of people who do it because they want the power. From street cops to the presidency, we have seen that bad people are drawn to power. The worst ones are on the take, beating people who surrender, invading other countries without justification, passing legislation that favors institutions over individuals, and so on. The ones who are just misguided genuinely believe that only particular, designated officials should run a society. Both types support the idea that people aren't supposed to take the law into their own hands.
How does all this happen? How do people get into situations where bad people ruin things and nothing can be done? Because there are people who don't believe in taking the law into their own hands. Because there are people who believe that making things better is a job for someone else, not a sacred trust. Because there are people who don't feel like this is their world. And because lots of people who care only for themselves are willing to take advantage of people who don't believe in vigilantism.
Of course, the word "vigilantism" is not a native part of my vocabulary. I have another word that I use there. Let me rewrite the original statement: "I don't necessarily think that responsibility is the answer..."
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For those who had to look this up (like me
If you think, after reading the entire proposal, that Twilight sounds a little like Kingdom Come in providing a possible ending for our modern heroes, you're not alone (look at the Wikipedia article), and I think there are a lot of geeks who will tell you that Kingdom Come was quite simply one of the best comics ever. Hell, in Babylon 5, we knew the end of Londo and G'Kar's stories in Season One, Episode One, and B5 is one of the defining epics of our time!
Yes, there have been a lot of bad prequels, but those have been a result of the money-driven Hollywood system, not because we knew the ending of the stories. The voyage of discovery, the 'how' of getting there, counts profoundly. The decisions that turn a man into a hero, or a monster, are at the heart of all great storytelling. That doesn't change because we know the end of the story.
Anyone else want to add a wish?
* fully customizable calendar colors -- i like google's colors, but some of the color differences are way too subtle for older, cheaper or uncalibrated monitors
* along the same lines, maybe the ability to add a micro-icon (8x8) to mark different calendars -- NHL team icons, for example
* ability to schedule something on "the last day of the month" or the "third monday in September" -- this was once in and then vanished from sunbird, but you need this sort of thing if you get a paycheck on the last day of the month, or want to track Quit Your Job Day
* ability to list all the events on a particular calendar -- scrolling from month to month seems an awkward way to keep an eye on things, and that won't help you catch one-time events
"Google awarded patent on time." It was really only a matter of google!
I understand the Marklars and the Smurfs were also going for this patent, but none of the patent clerks could understand what the Marklars were saying, and Attorney Smurf was busy representing Smurfette in yet another paternity suit.
How can we debate a song (or any work of art) if not from the approach of taste, as you say? That's the only way we can, in fact, since there's no objective idea of "good" art. Thus, any opinion will be based on taste. Linguam Latinam quoque dicere possum, sed ratio mea potentior fit? non sic. Et eloquentia et substantia praesint.
Sorry, I only know the little bit of Latin I picked up watching gladiator flicks with Cliff and Norm. I'm going to presume you said something wittily devastating, stutter and stammer a bit, exclaim "Oh, for crying out loud!", head to the bar and switch to something stronger.
To answer your question, though, art can't be debated. You can discuss how much you like or dislike something, and you can try to express in words why you feel that way, but you can't ever decide whether something is good or evil. You can't 'objectively' determine that Britney Spears isn't the Almighty Apotheosis of Art (insert trumpety fanfare, change mind, insert catchy pop tune you can bop to).
This all changes, of course, once you arbitraily declare some premises. If you decide that "good art is art which makes me feel happy", then we could measure your endorphins or dopamine or something like that and announce that certain works are "good art" and "bad art". If you decide that "good art is art which increases the likelihood of reproduction and thus improves the odds of the survival of the species", then you can make the case for Britney Spears being the Greatest Artist Ever(TM) and not genetically engineered by the Disney Corporation to bring western culture to its knees.
come on people. mod funny not informative!
That's probably the "Insightfully Funny" or "Imformatively Funny" mod. You don't get karma for +1 Funny, so generous moderators give the +1 Informative or +1 Insightful mod instead.
Feel free to mod +1 Hint, hint! for this post.