TheVat

Great story by Borges. I liked the religious cult that emerges in the Library which believes that somewhere must be a book which perfectly indexes all the other books.

The monkey/typewriter thing (have usually heard it as a roomful of monkeys, with them eventually typing Hamlet) is just a way to grasp some concepts about infinity and probability. I remember a prof invoking it in Evo biology, in re random molecular interactions leading to a proto-cell. Very low probability events become common, given sufficient time.

Oh what a tangled web we weave...

The first law of holes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_holes

Potayto, potahto.

Four years ago, I saw clearly that this trend in jokes was coming. It was 2020. You really can't compare Canadians and Americans. In two centuries, it's only been possible to draw one parallel between them. Canadians have more freedoms than Americans do. It's because we gave them more latitude. Things were simpler 1923 years ago. That's why we start with History 101.

Doubtful. A psychotic break changes one's orientation with respect to the world and the input coming from the world. It is about distortions of perception and delusions. One might come to believe, say, that it was okay to steal a car because it belonged to a demon who was riding about distributing brain worms into innocent people. Or steal because a dark force was coercing one to do bad things. But the underlying moral sense would be less likely to change. That kind of change would more likely be due to a stroke or head trauma (Google Phineas Gage case) especially affecting the frontal lobes.

A wee joke. You posted which struck me as somewhat less skeptical than what I've seen in other posts from you. I think you were kindly tossing Dim a bone there. No pun intended, and I was sorry to hear he lost a faithful 4-legger friend.

Where is Peterkin and what have you done with them?? 🙂

Well, for example, the brain as a musical instrument analogy seems muddled. It seems to imply an external player - clarinets don't get up and start playing themselves. Without perhaps intending to, you are inviting in some sort of metaphysical dualism. Also obscure is lines like (would imagine all brain processes involve metabolism, given that neurons are cells with the standard metabolic pathways to keep living) or You seem to have invented your own nomenclature which does not map well onto the definitions usually used in neuroscience.

Nice, haven't listened to Hindemith in a while. My wife, an oboist, played several Hindemith pieces including his famous oboe sonata. He was part of the Nazi brain drain, fled to the US. The US has always benefited from fascists, at least in how they drive many of their brilliant people to our shores.

Reads like word salad and cited no supporting research. And it's homeostasis not "hemostasis," which is an entirely different thing involving the treatment and healing of wounds.

iirc, De Tocqueville visited America and spoke of the "tyranny of the majority." It is this often well-meaning tyranny that calls for those distinctions many are so tired of. As The Onion's famous headline put it, Racism Over, White People Declare! We have to acknowledge the diverse aspects of humanity in order not to tread upon them - this is true both in civic life and in medicine. And, as @J.C.MacSwell notes, not exaggerate those differences to where we get a distorted view of individuals. Kind of a delicate balance, in America right now.

Might help engagement, as a newbie, to focus on one topic rather than starting a dozen new threads in two days? Also, the search function is your friend, as regards several of your topics, where previous discussions have already been started on them. Take your time, pace yourself, learn what interests folks at SFN.

This seems to conflate science, in the pure sense of empirical inquiry, with technology - a set of particular applications of science. Science in itself does not preclude choosing to live a primitvist lifestyle (indeed one could easily envision scenarios where a society developed advanced ecological knowledge and then based on that deliberately abandoned a hi-tech way of life). People derive values based on scientific knowledge, but science itself is value neutral - it is just an array of empirical methods and techniques for testing (experiments). Humans, as moral agents, still have to develop valuations on whatever knowledge or craft is derived from science. This is why "scientism" is largely a straw man term used by people who have an ideological agenda.

I like the expansion of my earlier comment on the absurdity of Hell. It's funny how various sects find a loophole for God by essentially saying hey, that's Satan, a ruffian angel who fell. Totally not Jehovah's fault! Jehovah's all about the love and compassion and will do his best to get you into purgatory so you can scrub those peccadilloes and stay out of the firey pit. The loophole, as I understand it from Christians, is that free will allows an angel to turn nasty which then allows a zone over which God's omnipotence has gaps. It also sets up a moral dilemma God who, to love all beings must give them free will and then let that will play out, even if it means going down to the Hot Place. So it's postulating that God didn't just whack Lucifer and bury him in a cornfield because he (meaningless pronoun, I know) would violate his own moral compass. I like Mark Twain's line on which Place to choose: Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.

Plus one. As a Zen person, I've long been skeptical of the belief that a deity must be essentially a violent psychopath who will hurl me down into a lake of fire, a pit of torment, endless agony, for making some bad moral choices while existing as a very limited creature. The notion that some vast universe-permeating being, the ultimate and highest consciousness, would operate in this manner is absurd.

Stop trolling. OP reported to mods.

Outstanding piano reduction of one of the great jazz symphonic classics, An American in Paris, by George Gershwin.

Following this with great interest. No intention of delamination from this thread anytime soon.

You don't see rabbits being walked down the street And you don't see many cats on leads Dogs pet dogs dogs rapacious wet dogs Owner of dogs slow-witted dog owner Owner of rabid dog saving fare for tunnel Euro-dream of civil, civil liberation for dogs Society secret society inevitable nightmare Of drift dog pet dogs street bullshit Dog shit baby bit ass-lick dog mirror Dead tiger shot and checked out by dog Big tea-chest-fucker dog Black collar sends East German refugee back switch and crap pathetic Of earth-like lousy dog role model for infidel doghouse continent Mutt citadel dog-eye mirror hypnotic school slaver and learn Lot from dog on grass and over nervous delicate dog Detracts light from indiscrepant non-dog-lover Dog pet dog come home to ya Come home we'll talk shit to ya Dog the pet-owner-owner blistered hanging there death dog Plato of the human example and copier dogmaster pet mourner Dog is life. The Fall, "Dog is Life/Jerusalem"

Aorta know the answer to this. (chuckle)

I liked Woody Allen's reply when he was asked in an interview, How would you like people to think of you a hundred years from now? Allen answered, I'd like them to think: my, but he looks good for his age!

I've heard the DHCP lease time in the US is about 7 days. Normally, when it cycles, you will get the same IP address you had reassigned to you. If anyone actually wants to change their IP address, the trick is to know your ISPs DHCP lease cycle and then shut off your router that day. This will prevent the "static" option, because the router will be offline and can't get that reassignment. So you will get a new one when you switch back on, and voila, dynamic IP. (the easy way is to shut off wifi when you go on vacation, which is also a good idea for general security) IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, theoretically allowing 2128 addresses, which is somewhat reassuring as far as future address exhaustion is concerned.