People do come up with new things. Farscape, Babylon 5, Firefly, Stargate, Lexx,... very variable in quality, of course. Just for the record, I find the idea of a Kirk prequel dumb as dumb can be. Star Trek jumped the shark with Voyager, it's done and over with.
It's actually not very hard to know what's important and what isn't, if you're intelligent. Can you read one of Paul Graham's essays and then of all his points, tell me which ones are crucial to his argument and which ones aren't? Sure you could.
This is a fair point, and I owe it to you to accept it and point out that I see this as the really crucial thing in your own post. But I don't accept your claim that "there are rules for literary criticism". Within limits it holds water, yes, but it looks like you're trying to make the broader claim that for all periods and all audiences there is one correct way of reading a text.
In the case of Genesis it's plainly obvious that not everyone's going to read it the same way. For example, you're not going to find many people in this day and age who would derive clear-cut and distinct literal, allegorical, anagogical, and moral readings. You don't, after all. But even within this day and age, when I read Genesis chapter 1 I don't see a story designed to explain how the world came into being, I see a polemic against polytheism: that, to me, is the crucial point, and everything else seems to me to be just feeding into that argument. And when I read chapter 2 I still don't see a story about creation; what I see is a story designed with two aims, namely (1) to justify the relationship between sexes in a very specific society and time, and (2) a polemical aim again, this time against gods with animal features. On my reading, these are aims that are clearly limited to a specific place and time, and are unlikely to be relevant in other places and times except as a matter of historical interest.
Now, I wouldn't claim my reading is the correct one -- I'm no specialist in biblical studies -- my point is that I don't agree that rigour is possible. Rigour may be attainable in theology, but not in exegesis. I certainly don't see any merit in claiming that one 3000-year-old creation myth has superior explanatory powers to any other 3000-year-old creation myth.
So, yes to evolution, and yes to the account of creation given in the first chapter of Genesis, and yes to the account of creation given in the second chapter of Genesis.
... um, mods, how is self-contradiction "interesting"? OK, well I suppose it's interesting in the sense that it's a very, very peculiar way to think. Or rather, I suppose, doublethink, since that is literally what it is.
Even the craziest sentence in this post --
Science will change in the next 1000 years shattering our notion of the universe, but the Genesis account will never change.
-- has some kind of rational meaning if you think about it in a sufficiently sideways fashion: e.g. "the Genesis accounts are unlikely to change in the next 1000 years, because people who are in the business of producing critical editions of historically important texts are going to want to preserve the text in a form as close as possible to its original". But just because it's possible to re-encode something in your head in such a way that it makes some kind of sense doesn't mean that it's a useful something for thinking with... and that goes for creation myths, too, by the way.
You're right that vocabulary is the main thing that distinguishes English from other languages quantitatively, but almost all of that is because of technical vocabulary, for which other languages often just use the English terms. It's certainly nothing to do with colloquial English (infixes, particles, emphatic participles, etc etc); English as she is spoke is neither unusually more or less versatile than other languages.
Unless your really meant to express that Jesus is copulating with God, which to answer your question, would seem to be pretty hard to do.
I dunno, I think that'd be a pretty good expletive. Certainly better than things like "By the balls of Zeus!" or "May Apollo rape me in the night!" or "By Aphrodite's breasts!" (OT: at least one of these expletives is genuine.) In any case, since they're supposed to be "consubstantial" with one another, it'd be at most just a kinky kind of masturbation (which also wouldn't be offensive in most pagan religions, incidentally).
Some of your comments here are off-target, as I (the poster of the gpp) am not the same person that you were replying to (the gggpp) -- apologies for butting in.:-)
But FWIW, the reason I was reminded of the Broken Window story by your post was simply the idea that the process of building culture through labour is equivalent to the culture built in other circumstances. Sure, there's culture built at the end of either process, but equating the two of them leaves out the fact one of them involves a particular kind of labour which could, under some circumstances (I'm sure there would be those who would say "most" circumstances), be considered as "loss" in some sense -- even if only the loss of opportunity to create the "other" kind of culture. Yes, I realise this is oversimplifying things, yes I accept it is not legitimate to draw a hard-and-fast distinctiong between "kinds" of culture, and no, it's not the Broken Window fallacy, -- but I don't think it's miles away either.
You're right, but I still have nagging doubts in my mind over why Grim Fandango worked so astoundingly well, while Escape from Monkey Island was just annoying and dull. As someone else in this discussion mentioned, Curse of Monkey Island, which was point-and-click like the first two games, was very much superior. I guess 3D can work; but I still find it easier to point'n'click than to have to navigate carefully around invisible obstacles (and yes, Grim Fandango did suffer from this to some extent). I find Still Life to be a pretty good compromise, even if I don't find the game itself very interesting: 3D, but also point'n'click.
Considering that PC games are wildly different from console games, I don't really mind. As a PC gamer, I took a look through the top 30 titles and was intrigued to see that
I recognised remarkably few of the titles (barring obvious things like "EA $RANDOM_SPORT 200x"), and
most of them are games that I would not be remotely interested in.
You get the same kind of thing if you go and compare the top-ranked games on the various platforms over at Metacritic.com or similar. Are Halo 1 and 2 really the best and third-best games of all time on the XBox? Well, I guess that's why I'm not interested in owning an XBox. There's really only one or two titles I'm missing out on that I have an interest in.
Yup, and on Windows most Word documents will open in Wordpad. Pages is also pretty good from what I understand. Then there are other word processors around (Open/NeoOffice, Mellel, etc etc). Let's hope things stay this way. Fingers crossed.
The PDF problems I've noticed have mostly to do with the spacing of specific fonts -- can't remember which ones now, unfortunately. I'm pretty sure they weren't fonts that were native to the Mac, though I wouldn't have thought that would have anything to do with it. I think, IIRC, the PDFs were created by either PDFCreator or OpenOffice under Windows, which shouldn't have been anything higher than PDF 4 -- nothing fancy. Pretty sure it was a font layout issue -- I've had problems with non-native fonts on OS X in other areas as well, come to think of it; I did report that to Apple, though, so hopefully it's fixed in 10.4.
How did Karl Marx the philosopher come to grips with having the same name as the snivelling misanthrope who wrote the communist manifesto and laid the groundwork for the two greatest mass murderers of all time?
Yes, that's how personal responsibility works. Similarly Jesus was personally responsible for the crusades, Nietzsche and Wagner was personally responsible for the Holocaust, Benjamin Franklin was personally responsible for Hiroshima and Dresden, and Justinian was personally responsible for all modern western legal systems. Or not.
No, if they want to see you convicted there must be a formal reason. Detention of people whom the police deem to be inconvenient comes for free. Charges can be invented then dropped. Oh sure, you could always sue; ha, good luck.
Yes, under a good Linux you can jury-rig a major app to run under Wine, and you can run unix command line tools.
On a Mac jury-rigging is also necessary, if you want to use a Unix app like Fontforge, involving loads of hassles with X11 (not intuitive, especially its tendency to swap mouse buttons around semi-randomly) and/or Fink (a bloody nightmare to set up).:-) Grass is always greener, neither solution is perfect for every situation, YMMV, etc etc etc.
Unfortunately, Apple is still stuck doing these marketing campaigns because of computing stigma's left-over from the 1980's. I still have clients who think that they need to do all this special stuff to send a Mac user a word document.
I shouldn't be at all surprised if those days return inside 10 years, you know. Once Microsoft stops making Office for Mac in a few years' time, and Pages supplants Word on Macs (as Safari has already done to IE),...:-) plus there are other kinds of incompatibilities to confuse the clueless. I've found pdfs that work in Acrobat/Mac but screw up formatting in Preview. Sure it's easy to just open them in Acrobat... if the user knows how to start Acrobat. Which is a big 'if', believe me (most users in my department don't realise there are more applications than just the ones on the Dock).
Um, no. I have had only positive experiences when buying things in US stores or online, though I neither live in the US nor am an American. (Mind you, I wouldn't touch peer-to-peer transactions from a different country -- like e.g. eBay -- with a bargepole.)
Actually no, I tell a lie. Once I bought a Budweiser by mistake in a hotel bar. That was not a positive experience.
Sometimes if you need the thing you're buying badly enough, you just have to put up with the shit. I remember one time I was in a small, poor country -- I don't want to offend anyone by naming names, it isn't really important anyway -- and wanted to buy an AA battery for my alarm clock. I was out in the suburbs and the only shop I could find selling batteries was an electronics shop specialising in larger items, like stereos et al. So to buy my AA battery I had to fill in two forms, give address and phone number, etc etc... but I needed it so that my alarm would go off next morning so I would wake up and catch my plane. I've no idea how places like that stay in business though.
I conclude from your informative but impressively pedantic answer that you are the kind of person who would announce, with a straight face, that the plural of "octopus" is "octopodes". Personally when I am speaking English I generally add -s or -es onto words to make them plural, e.g. consensuses, octopuses, since other people are unlikely to understand me if I do otherwise. (Disclaimer: I teach Latin.)
Oh, just a minor correction (other than the its/it's confusion that others have noticed): in fact there is a change between the singular and plural of consensus in Latin. The singular has a short -us ending (as in "radius"), the plural has a long -us ending (to rhyme, very approximately, with "footloose").
Slashdot Mirror
People do come up with new things. Farscape, Babylon 5, Firefly, Stargate, Lexx, ... very variable in quality, of course. Just for the record, I find the idea of a Kirk prequel dumb as dumb can be. Star Trek jumped the shark with Voyager, it's done and over with.
This is a fair point, and I owe it to you to accept it and point out that I see this as the really crucial thing in your own post. But I don't accept your claim that "there are rules for literary criticism". Within limits it holds water, yes, but it looks like you're trying to make the broader claim that for all periods and all audiences there is one correct way of reading a text.
In the case of Genesis it's plainly obvious that not everyone's going to read it the same way. For example, you're not going to find many people in this day and age who would derive clear-cut and distinct literal, allegorical, anagogical, and moral readings. You don't, after all. But even within this day and age, when I read Genesis chapter 1 I don't see a story designed to explain how the world came into being, I see a polemic against polytheism: that, to me, is the crucial point, and everything else seems to me to be just feeding into that argument. And when I read chapter 2 I still don't see a story about creation; what I see is a story designed with two aims, namely (1) to justify the relationship between sexes in a very specific society and time, and (2) a polemical aim again, this time against gods with animal features. On my reading, these are aims that are clearly limited to a specific place and time, and are unlikely to be relevant in other places and times except as a matter of historical interest.
Now, I wouldn't claim my reading is the correct one -- I'm no specialist in biblical studies -- my point is that I don't agree that rigour is possible. Rigour may be attainable in theology, but not in exegesis. I certainly don't see any merit in claiming that one 3000-year-old creation myth has superior explanatory powers to any other 3000-year-old creation myth.
It must be very nice, just happening to be the person who knows which claims are crucial and which ones aren't.
So, yes to evolution, and yes to the account of creation given in the first chapter of Genesis, and yes to the account of creation given in the second chapter of Genesis.
... um, mods, how is self-contradiction "interesting"? OK, well I suppose it's interesting in the sense that it's a very, very peculiar way to think. Or rather, I suppose, doublethink, since that is literally what it is.
Even the craziest sentence in this post --
-- has some kind of rational meaning if you think about it in a sufficiently sideways fashion: e.g. "the Genesis accounts are unlikely to change in the next 1000 years, because people who are in the business of producing critical editions of historically important texts are going to want to preserve the text in a form as close as possible to its original". But just because it's possible to re-encode something in your head in such a way that it makes some kind of sense doesn't mean that it's a useful something for thinking with ... and that goes for creation myths, too, by the way.
You're right that vocabulary is the main thing that distinguishes English from other languages quantitatively, but almost all of that is because of technical vocabulary, for which other languages often just use the English terms. It's certainly nothing to do with colloquial English (infixes, particles, emphatic participles, etc etc); English as she is spoke is neither unusually more or less versatile than other languages.
Yes, your tiredness had an effect on your affect and affected the effect of your post.
I dunno, I think that'd be a pretty good expletive. Certainly better than things like "By the balls of Zeus!" or "May Apollo rape me in the night!" or "By Aphrodite's breasts!" (OT: at least one of these expletives is genuine.) In any case, since they're supposed to be "consubstantial" with one another, it'd be at most just a kinky kind of masturbation (which also wouldn't be offensive in most pagan religions, incidentally).
Don't worry, Oblivion with all settings maxed will still bring it to a crawl.
Some of your comments here are off-target, as I (the poster of the gpp) am not the same person that you were replying to (the gggpp) -- apologies for butting in. :-)
But FWIW, the reason I was reminded of the Broken Window story by your post was simply the idea that the process of building culture through labour is equivalent to the culture built in other circumstances. Sure, there's culture built at the end of either process, but equating the two of them leaves out the fact one of them involves a particular kind of labour which could, under some circumstances (I'm sure there would be those who would say "most" circumstances), be considered as "loss" in some sense -- even if only the loss of opportunity to create the "other" kind of culture. Yes, I realise this is oversimplifying things, yes I accept it is not legitimate to draw a hard-and-fast distinctiong between "kinds" of culture, and no, it's not the Broken Window fallacy, -- but I don't think it's miles away either.
You're right, but I still have nagging doubts in my mind over why Grim Fandango worked so astoundingly well, while Escape from Monkey Island was just annoying and dull. As someone else in this discussion mentioned, Curse of Monkey Island, which was point-and-click like the first two games, was very much superior. I guess 3D can work; but I still find it easier to point'n'click than to have to navigate carefully around invisible obstacles (and yes, Grim Fandango did suffer from this to some extent). I find Still Life to be a pretty good compromise, even if I don't find the game itself very interesting: 3D, but also point'n'click.
Um, can I borrow your time machine? seeing as you appear have come forward in time from either 2003 or 2004. :-)
Considering that PC games are wildly different from console games, I don't really mind. As a PC gamer, I took a look through the top 30 titles and was intrigued to see that
You get the same kind of thing if you go and compare the top-ranked games on the various platforms over at Metacritic.com or similar. Are Halo 1 and 2 really the best and third-best games of all time on the XBox? Well, I guess that's why I'm not interested in owning an XBox. There's really only one or two titles I'm missing out on that I have an interest in.
My thanks for the correction, and I think I'd better also apologise to anyone who may have known Mr Menezes for getting the facts wrong. Sorry.
Unless you're running to catch a tube train in London, of course.
Yup, and on Windows most Word documents will open in Wordpad. Pages is also pretty good from what I understand. Then there are other word processors around (Open/NeoOffice, Mellel, etc etc). Let's hope things stay this way. Fingers crossed.
The PDF problems I've noticed have mostly to do with the spacing of specific fonts -- can't remember which ones now, unfortunately. I'm pretty sure they weren't fonts that were native to the Mac, though I wouldn't have thought that would have anything to do with it. I think, IIRC, the PDFs were created by either PDFCreator or OpenOffice under Windows, which shouldn't have been anything higher than PDF 4 -- nothing fancy. Pretty sure it was a font layout issue -- I've had problems with non-native fonts on OS X in other areas as well, come to think of it; I did report that to Apple, though, so hopefully it's fixed in 10.4.
I have a sneaking feeling you're skating dangerously close to the Broken Window Fallacy.
Pssst: "Vyvyan".
Yup, pretty much. It helps to have a false phone number memorised.
Yes, that's how personal responsibility works. Similarly Jesus was personally responsible for the crusades, Nietzsche and Wagner was personally responsible for the Holocaust, Benjamin Franklin was personally responsible for Hiroshima and Dresden, and Justinian was personally responsible for all modern western legal systems. Or not.
No, if they want to see you convicted there must be a formal reason. Detention of people whom the police deem to be inconvenient comes for free. Charges can be invented then dropped. Oh sure, you could always sue; ha, good luck.
On a Mac jury-rigging is also necessary, if you want to use a Unix app like Fontforge, involving loads of hassles with X11 (not intuitive, especially its tendency to swap mouse buttons around semi-randomly) and/or Fink (a bloody nightmare to set up). :-) Grass is always greener, neither solution is perfect for every situation, YMMV, etc etc etc.
I shouldn't be at all surprised if those days return inside 10 years, you know. Once Microsoft stops making Office for Mac in a few years' time, and Pages supplants Word on Macs (as Safari has already done to IE), ... :-) plus there are other kinds of incompatibilities to confuse the clueless. I've found pdfs that work in Acrobat/Mac but screw up formatting in Preview. Sure it's easy to just open them in Acrobat ... if the user knows how to start Acrobat. Which is a big 'if', believe me (most users in my department don't realise there are more applications than just the ones on the Dock).
Um, no. I have had only positive experiences when buying things in US stores or online, though I neither live in the US nor am an American. (Mind you, I wouldn't touch peer-to-peer transactions from a different country -- like e.g. eBay -- with a bargepole.)
Actually no, I tell a lie. Once I bought a Budweiser by mistake in a hotel bar. That was not a positive experience.
Sometimes if you need the thing you're buying badly enough, you just have to put up with the shit. I remember one time I was in a small, poor country -- I don't want to offend anyone by naming names, it isn't really important anyway -- and wanted to buy an AA battery for my alarm clock. I was out in the suburbs and the only shop I could find selling batteries was an electronics shop specialising in larger items, like stereos et al. So to buy my AA battery I had to fill in two forms, give address and phone number, etc etc ... but I needed it so that my alarm would go off next morning so I would wake up and catch my plane. I've no idea how places like that stay in business though.
I conclude from your informative but impressively pedantic answer that you are the kind of person who would announce, with a straight face, that the plural of "octopus" is "octopodes". Personally when I am speaking English I generally add -s or -es onto words to make them plural, e.g. consensuses, octopuses, since other people are unlikely to understand me if I do otherwise. (Disclaimer: I teach Latin.)
Oh, just a minor correction (other than the its/it's confusion that others have noticed): in fact there is a change between the singular and plural of consensus in Latin. The singular has a short -us ending (as in "radius"), the plural has a long -us ending (to rhyme, very approximately, with "footloose").