Goodness, my typing is sloppy. The first sentence should read "I didn't use to be aware of what the studio space could bring to a recording until I started collecting releases from the jazz and classical label ECM".
(An edit function on Slashdot would be great, at least for posters with good karma whom one can trust not to e.g. change acceptable posts into Goatse links after they've been modded to +5.)
Any mention of a meetup place for protesters would all of a sudden shoot up the priority list for construction repairs. Many areas were cordoned off with armadas of street sweet sweepers.
Reminds me of two anecdotes:
The World Rainbow Gathering (a hippie event) was held on Hainan Island in 2008. The authorities had no problem allowing a couple of thousand foreigners to hang out in the forest, discreetly smoke, and live out their utopian society. Just one rule, though: no Chinese citizens were allowed in, because the idea of a large amount of Chinese congregating somewhere was unacceptable (who knows what such a large amount of citizens could discuss or plot).
A friend of mine busks when he travels. He made decent money in other East Asian countries. When he tried to busk in China, the local authorities would come and shut it down. They wouldn't hassle him for busking per se, but rather they really wanted to disperse the crowds that would form.
I recall reading about countries where any meeting of more than 3 individuals was technically illegal without a permit. Was China not so at some point?
I didn't use to be aware of what the studio space bring to a recording under I started collecting releases from the jazz and classical label ECM, whose uncanny founder Manfred Eicher produces nearly every recording himself in the best venue he can find. I've heard jazz recordings on ECM that might be banal under any other producer, but the studio ambience curiously becomes a sort of musical substance, endowing weight and beauty to otherwise unworthy music. For music that is great already, the production just pushes it to even more sublime heights (I'd point to the ECM recording of Arvo Part's Kanon Pokajanen as an example of that).
Anyone else know of a label where the studio ambience plays a large role?
Cite your claim that Shakespeare ascribed a "profound positive effect" to cannabis on his creative process, please. (And from a publication of a university press, not a pot advocacy website or similar).
If you believe that you first owe loyalty to "humanity" and then to your country and it's military it is doubtful that you would ever gain a security clearance in the first place.
Did you serve in the military and hold a clearance? I trained as a cryptologic technician - interpretive in the Navy and witnessed clearances being handed out left and rights to shipmates who, it later transpired, had political grumbles with the US government and people, psychological issues, scandalous private relationships, etc. I, with my shaky loyalty to the US and history of foreign contacts, was very close to being issued a clearance before I asked for and received honourable dischange as a conscientous objector (this was shortly before 9/11, when CO status was granted to most who asked for it). The military is so hurting for qualified individuals in certain fields, and apparently investigators are understaffed and overworked, so investigations into applicant's lives didn't appear to be very deep.
It takes a pretty specific mindset to rise above the level of grunt in the military and they are quite good at figuring out who has it and who does not.
Manning was a private (a grunt) and yet he held a clearance and, as we've seen, access to a huge amount of classified information. And in the Navy field which I experienced, rising above the level of grunt (that is, being promoted to E4 and deployed) required only diligently completing one's language studies at DLI and short follow-up training with limited contact with superiors who would notice and take issues with one's "mindset".
After someone with a security clearance leaves the military, they are expected to continue to honor the secrecy of the documents they worked with. You don't talk about what you've seen and done. Putting in an FOIA request for classified information is publically announcing the existence of that information.
Yes, eventually one can get away with alluding to one's work in the military, but by then so many years have passed that the public probably wouldn't care. Historians might, but by that point it's hardly "whistleblowing".
No, he wasn't. "Sauron" has a meaning in Tolkien's invented language Quenya, namely "foul". Tolkien was likely inspired in this by Old Norse saur "urine, filth". See Tolkien's etymologies in The Lost Road. In a letter to one Mr. Rang, Tolkien explicity disavowed any connection to the Greek word for "lizard" (and in fact the Proto-Elvish form didn't even have an initial s-).
Strictly speaking, communication is just the transfer of information, and language is whichever means of communication you are capable of using.
That's not "strictly speaking" at all, because when linguists use the term "language", it refers to human language, which is distinct from e.g. animal codes of communication. Only human language is capable of things like the ambiguity and contradiction in Chomsky's famous example "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously." Human language did not exist before large brains because it is deeply bound up in the functioning (warts and all) of large brains.
For anyone interested in the topic of how human language arose and how it differs from other means of communication, I'd highly recommend Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language, probably the best popular introduction to this topic.
I'm not sure that science stars are all that helpful. Something they can be self-aggrandising publicity whores that, instead of really educating the public, obfuscate the sciences by offering vacuous factoids on fields they have only a passing acquaintance with. At the same time, science popularizing takes time away with their own research.
Michio Kaku's a good example: once a fine research physicist, he has now become the media's go-to man whenever they want to look deep, even if it is on something outside his field like climate change or UFOs. (The signs of losing rigor were showing already in the early '90s with his first popular science book Hyperspace, which seemed curiously obsessed with -- and optimistic about -- humanity gaining "god-like powers").
Some might counter that these folks do good in attracting young people to the sciences, but I would like to see some hard figures on that. I suspect the bureaucrats that quietly set educational policy, not media go-to scientists, can have a much, much greater effect.
The only reason why I have a Mac Mini is because you are running a modified version of UNIX. This pleases me. But be forewarned: If your future plans include replacing BSD UNIX with your shitass iOS...
From the Wikipedia article on iOS: "iOS is derived from OS X, with which it shares the Darwin foundation, and is therefore a Unix operating system." So a change from Mac OS X to iOS would not shake the UNIX-ness of the operating system. What you seem to fear is the system being locked down, but that could be done with Mac OS X as it is, if Apple so wished.
There is nothing about the boddhisatva being a supernatural being!
Of course there is. The idea of living life after life (and retaining an awareness from one life to the next that one wants to remain in this cycle) is completely supernatural.
Buddha is HUMAN, plain and simple, regardless of the sect of Buddhism.
No, even the Pali canon, the earliest Buddhist teachings, ascribes a large number of magical powers and distinctive physical marks to the Buddha.
Also, there is no concept of Gods in Buddhism; neither acknowledges or denies it, so is agnostic.
The Mahayana canon (namely the Avatamsakasutra) acknowledges the existence of gods and asserts that the Buddha ascended to Mt. Sumeru to teach them.
The view of the gods specific to Buddhism is that they too are also stuck in samsara. However, Buddhism has always strongly believed in supernatural beings. Lower or higher planes of existence than the human one, some full of woe and suffering and others somewhat better (though still suffering compared to extinction from the cycle of rebirths), has remained a bedrock of the teaching of karma.
Zen Buddhism has been around for 1500 years or so. It focuses on the main teachings of the Buddha, which in themselves are not particularly mystical, at least in the sense of Gods and Heavens.
Both schools of Zen believe very strongly in the boddhisatva, a supernatural being who accepts rebirth for life after life in order to guide all other living beings in the universe towards nirvana. Indeed, imagery and veneration of the boddhisatva Avalokiteshvara is particularly common in Zen practice. Again, your perception that Zen is free of "gods and heavens" is due only to sources in the West that, embarassed of this supernatural features as they address a western readership, downplay them.
The only central beliefs are the four noble truths and the middle eightfold path. The other stuff are cultural things that local versions of Buddhism adopted.
Looks like someone has been reading too much Stephen Batchelor. In over two millennia of Buddhist philosophy, no thinker questioned the doctrine of rebirth and considered it just a "cultural thing". Ditto for the existence of supernatural beings. This changed only when some people in the West essentially made up their own religion by junking everything of Buddhism except what would appear to a modern secular humanist. Good for you, but don't pretend that it's Buddhism, let alone "pure Buddhism" or "central Buddhist belief".
Not quite the same thing. You've linked to the short single work "Cantatrix Soprano L.", while the book I linked to at Amazon (an anthology of the same title) includes not only that, but Perec's other faux-scientific articles.
Satirical scientific articles are a field of literature ripe for expansion. The only one I know of to have really found a wide readership (at least among those who follow modern literature) is Georges Perec's Cantatrix Sopranica L.. Of course, the Sokal hoax paper is also a brilliant piece of writing.
Not directly. It is part of liturgy and homiletics, which can be written down, and thus it finds its way into the patristic canon, but the practices of the Church through the centuries is more important to Holy Tradition than any written text (except, obviously, for the proceedings of the seven Ecumenical Councils of the first millennium). Individual episcopates keep each other in check, and it becomes fairly clear when one bishop goes out of line (thus the Great Schism).
While there may be small disagreements over what exactly Holy Tradition comprises (which were then resolved through ecumenical councils), historically the Church has never approved of homosexual acts, so Roman Catholics and Orthodox can securely point to Tradition as the grounds for their belief. (I'm aware of Boswell's work, but even from a purely secular perspective it looks like a whole lot of wishful thinking and "but what if?" exercises).
I disagree. Protestants are more common than Catholics in the US, and evangelicals are a large proportion of them.
I suspect that mainline Protestants plus Roman Catholics would make at least a slight majority in the US, but I am having problems finding current figures for the former and am willing to concede the point.
Besides, what is that holy tradition based on, if not the Bible?
In Orthodox apologetics at least (and probably in Roman Catholicism as well, as this was agreed upon by both East and West prior to the Great Schism), Holy Tradition is that aspect of the Church's teaching revealed by the Holy Spirit starting from the day of Pentecost. As the New Testament was not completed until decades after that date, Holy Tradition cannot be said to be based on Scripture, but rather the two stand in a complementary relationship.
If they get to point to Leviticus and say that homosexuality is evil, then I get to point at Leviticus and say that consumption of shellfish is evil, cheeseburgers are evil, and mixing two fibers in one fabric is evil
Christians who point to Leviticus are typically those who do hold to sola Scriptura and these are, as I mentioned, a minority of Christians both in the US . The majority of Christian bodies that oppose homosexual acts do so on the basis of something other than the passage in Leviticus, such as Holy Tradition, so arguing with them by "pointing at Leviticus and say that consumption of shellfish is evil, cheeseburgers are evil, and mixing two fibers in one fabric is evil" misses the point.
a) God gave us free will but not enough brainpower to understand his book?
Texts are only representations of human language, and language is inextricably ambiguous. Instead of focusing on anything in the text itself, which as I mentioned only sets up a strawman version of Chrisitanity most of the time, it might be a better thrust against Christianity or several other religions to ask why God created humans with such a fallibility and then expected them to make use of texts. At that point you would dealing with a fairly basic theism independent of Christianity etc., so you would no longer run the risk of getting your interlocutor's specific Christan beliefs wrong.
The other Christian groups are completely reliant on the bible.
The Eastern Orthodox Church (the second largest Christian body in the world) has a vocal stance against being "completely reliant" on the Bible, and Orthodox apologetics frequently makes the point that the Church existed decades before all of the New Testament had been set down, and the Church has historically allowed some disagreement in what books should be considered part of the canon of Scripture anyway. I'm sure that the Oriental Orthodox hold the same views.
And then the Anglican Communion, whose North American presence (the Episcopal Church) is a visible part of mainline Protestantism, also emphasizes a holy tradition that persists along with Scripture. I am not completely familiar with other mainline Protestant bodies in the United States, but I wouldn't be surprised if one or two more share this view.
So, it hardly boils down to "just Catholics and Mormons".
You may argue in effect that the foundational texts of Torah based religions require 3rd party "interpretation", but even a child can see through this hucksterism.
What texts do not require any 3rd party interpretation? That any text requires some degree of interpretation is recognized as a basic principle of literary criticism, going well beyond religious scriptures to all literature. If your child thinks this "hucksterism", he clearly isn't paying attention in English class.
You're joking, right? One of the most prominent aspects of Jewish practice is the production of commentaries on the Law, of which the Talmud is the central one, and then commentaries on those commentaries, in a never-ending back and forth. Orthodox communities all have differing approaches to the Law and favour the interpretation of one rabbi over another. No observant Jew would defend a behaviour or belief solely by pointing to the Torah, but by pointing to what the scholars have said of the Torah.
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Goodness, my typing is sloppy. The first sentence should read "I didn't use to be aware of what the studio space could bring to a recording until I started collecting releases from the jazz and classical label ECM".
(An edit function on Slashdot would be great, at least for posters with good karma whom one can trust not to e.g. change acceptable posts into Goatse links after they've been modded to +5.)
Reminds me of two anecdotes:
I recall reading about countries where any meeting of more than 3 individuals was technically illegal without a permit. Was China not so at some point?
I didn't use to be aware of what the studio space bring to a recording under I started collecting releases from the jazz and classical label ECM, whose uncanny founder Manfred Eicher produces nearly every recording himself in the best venue he can find. I've heard jazz recordings on ECM that might be banal under any other producer, but the studio ambience curiously becomes a sort of musical substance, endowing weight and beauty to otherwise unworthy music. For music that is great already, the production just pushes it to even more sublime heights (I'd point to the ECM recording of Arvo Part's Kanon Pokajanen as an example of that).
Anyone else know of a label where the studio ambience plays a large role?
Cite your claim that Shakespeare ascribed a "profound positive effect" to cannabis on his creative process, please. (And from a publication of a university press, not a pot advocacy website or similar).
Did you serve in the military and hold a clearance? I trained as a cryptologic technician - interpretive in the Navy and witnessed clearances being handed out left and rights to shipmates who, it later transpired, had political grumbles with the US government and people, psychological issues, scandalous private relationships, etc. I, with my shaky loyalty to the US and history of foreign contacts, was very close to being issued a clearance before I asked for and received honourable dischange as a conscientous objector (this was shortly before 9/11, when CO status was granted to most who asked for it). The military is so hurting for qualified individuals in certain fields, and apparently investigators are understaffed and overworked, so investigations into applicant's lives didn't appear to be very deep.
Manning was a private (a grunt) and yet he held a clearance and, as we've seen, access to a huge amount of classified information. And in the Navy field which I experienced, rising above the level of grunt (that is, being promoted to E4 and deployed) required only diligently completing one's language studies at DLI and short follow-up training with limited contact with superiors who would notice and take issues with one's "mindset".
After someone with a security clearance leaves the military, they are expected to continue to honor the secrecy of the documents they worked with. You don't talk about what you've seen and done. Putting in an FOIA request for classified information is publically announcing the existence of that information.
Yes, eventually one can get away with alluding to one's work in the military, but by then so many years have passed that the public probably wouldn't care. Historians might, but by that point it's hardly "whistleblowing".
No, he wasn't. "Sauron" has a meaning in Tolkien's invented language Quenya, namely "foul". Tolkien was likely inspired in this by Old Norse saur "urine, filth". See Tolkien's etymologies in The Lost Road . In a letter to one Mr. Rang, Tolkien explicity disavowed any connection to the Greek word for "lizard" (and in fact the Proto-Elvish form didn't even have an initial s-).
That's not "strictly speaking" at all, because when linguists use the term "language", it refers to human language, which is distinct from e.g. animal codes of communication. Only human language is capable of things like the ambiguity and contradiction in Chomsky's famous example "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously." Human language did not exist before large brains because it is deeply bound up in the functioning (warts and all) of large brains.
For anyone interested in the topic of how human language arose and how it differs from other means of communication, I'd highly recommend Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language , probably the best popular introduction to this topic.
That should have been "Sometimes they can be self-aggrandising...", sorry.
I'm not sure that science stars are all that helpful. Something they can be self-aggrandising publicity whores that, instead of really educating the public, obfuscate the sciences by offering vacuous factoids on fields they have only a passing acquaintance with. At the same time, science popularizing takes time away with their own research.
Michio Kaku's a good example: once a fine research physicist, he has now become the media's go-to man whenever they want to look deep, even if it is on something outside his field like climate change or UFOs. (The signs of losing rigor were showing already in the early '90s with his first popular science book Hyperspace, which seemed curiously obsessed with -- and optimistic about -- humanity gaining "god-like powers").
Some might counter that these folks do good in attracting young people to the sciences, but I would like to see some hard figures on that. I suspect the bureaucrats that quietly set educational policy, not media go-to scientists, can have a much, much greater effect.
From the Wikipedia article on iOS: "iOS is derived from OS X, with which it shares the Darwin foundation, and is therefore a Unix operating system." So a change from Mac OS X to iOS would not shake the UNIX-ness of the operating system. What you seem to fear is the system being locked down, but that could be done with Mac OS X as it is, if Apple so wished.
Of course there is. The idea of living life after life (and retaining an awareness from one life to the next that one wants to remain in this cycle) is completely supernatural.
No, even the Pali canon, the earliest Buddhist teachings, ascribes a large number of magical powers and distinctive physical marks to the Buddha.
The Mahayana canon (namely the Avatamsakasutra) acknowledges the existence of gods and asserts that the Buddha ascended to Mt. Sumeru to teach them.
The view of the gods specific to Buddhism is that they too are also stuck in samsara. However, Buddhism has always strongly believed in supernatural beings. Lower or higher planes of existence than the human one, some full of woe and suffering and others somewhat better (though still suffering compared to extinction from the cycle of rebirths), has remained a bedrock of the teaching of karma.
Both schools of Zen believe very strongly in the boddhisatva, a supernatural being who accepts rebirth for life after life in order to guide all other living beings in the universe towards nirvana. Indeed, imagery and veneration of the boddhisatva Avalokiteshvara is particularly common in Zen practice. Again, your perception that Zen is free of "gods and heavens" is due only to sources in the West that, embarassed of this supernatural features as they address a western readership, downplay them.
Looks like someone has been reading too much Stephen Batchelor. In over two millennia of Buddhist philosophy, no thinker questioned the doctrine of rebirth and considered it just a "cultural thing". Ditto for the existence of supernatural beings. This changed only when some people in the West essentially made up their own religion by junking everything of Buddhism except what would appear to a modern secular humanist. Good for you, but don't pretend that it's Buddhism, let alone "pure Buddhism" or "central Buddhist belief".
Not quite the same thing. You've linked to the short single work "Cantatrix Soprano L.", while the book I linked to at Amazon (an anthology of the same title) includes not only that, but Perec's other faux-scientific articles.
Satirical scientific articles are a field of literature ripe for expansion. The only one I know of to have really found a wide readership (at least among those who follow modern literature) is Georges Perec's Cantatrix Sopranica L. . Of course, the Sokal hoax paper is also a brilliant piece of writing.
It should be obvious that for a follower of religion X, the "merit" of a change is how well it accords with the teachings of religion X.
Not directly. It is part of liturgy and homiletics, which can be written down, and thus it finds its way into the patristic canon, but the practices of the Church through the centuries is more important to Holy Tradition than any written text (except, obviously, for the proceedings of the seven Ecumenical Councils of the first millennium). Individual episcopates keep each other in check, and it becomes fairly clear when one bishop goes out of line (thus the Great Schism).
While there may be small disagreements over what exactly Holy Tradition comprises (which were then resolved through ecumenical councils), historically the Church has never approved of homosexual acts, so Roman Catholics and Orthodox can securely point to Tradition as the grounds for their belief. (I'm aware of Boswell's work, but even from a purely secular perspective it looks like a whole lot of wishful thinking and "but what if?" exercises).
I suspect that mainline Protestants plus Roman Catholics would make at least a slight majority in the US, but I am having problems finding current figures for the former and am willing to concede the point.
In Orthodox apologetics at least (and probably in Roman Catholicism as well, as this was agreed upon by both East and West prior to the Great Schism), Holy Tradition is that aspect of the Church's teaching revealed by the Holy Spirit starting from the day of Pentecost. As the New Testament was not completed until decades after that date, Holy Tradition cannot be said to be based on Scripture, but rather the two stand in a complementary relationship.
Christians who point to Leviticus are typically those who do hold to sola Scriptura and these are, as I mentioned, a minority of Christians both in the US . The majority of Christian bodies that oppose homosexual acts do so on the basis of something other than the passage in Leviticus, such as Holy Tradition, so arguing with them by "pointing at Leviticus and say that consumption of shellfish is evil, cheeseburgers are evil, and mixing two fibers in one fabric is evil" misses the point.
Texts are only representations of human language, and language is inextricably ambiguous. Instead of focusing on anything in the text itself, which as I mentioned only sets up a strawman version of Chrisitanity most of the time, it might be a better thrust against Christianity or several other religions to ask why God created humans with such a fallibility and then expected them to make use of texts. At that point you would dealing with a fairly basic theism independent of Christianity etc., so you would no longer run the risk of getting your interlocutor's specific Christan beliefs wrong.
The Eastern Orthodox Church (the second largest Christian body in the world) has a vocal stance against being "completely reliant" on the Bible, and Orthodox apologetics frequently makes the point that the Church existed decades before all of the New Testament had been set down, and the Church has historically allowed some disagreement in what books should be considered part of the canon of Scripture anyway. I'm sure that the Oriental Orthodox hold the same views.
And then the Anglican Communion, whose North American presence (the Episcopal Church) is a visible part of mainline Protestantism, also emphasizes a holy tradition that persists along with Scripture. I am not completely familiar with other mainline Protestant bodies in the United States, but I wouldn't be surprised if one or two more share this view.
So, it hardly boils down to "just Catholics and Mormons".
What texts do not require any 3rd party interpretation? That any text requires some degree of interpretation is recognized as a basic principle of literary criticism, going well beyond religious scriptures to all literature. If your child thinks this "hucksterism", he clearly isn't paying attention in English class.
You're joking, right? One of the most prominent aspects of Jewish practice is the production of commentaries on the Law, of which the Talmud is the central one, and then commentaries on those commentaries, in a never-ending back and forth. Orthodox communities all have differing approaches to the Law and favour the interpretation of one rabbi over another. No observant Jew would defend a behaviour or belief solely by pointing to the Torah, but by pointing to what the scholars have said of the Torah.