Life in This World

2012/5/21

Clearly, this comic was a reference to Xenophanes:

But if cattle and horses and lions had hands or could paint with their hands and create works such as men do, horses like horses and cattle like cattle also would depict the gods’ shapes and make their bodies of such a sort as the form they themselves have.

Interestingly, Xenophanes didn’t take this as an argument for atheism, but for the conclusion that the real gods go beyond mortal form.

I’m sympathetic to his point, but no one will ever succeed in removing the anthropomorphism from the thoughts of anthropes. Quoting myself:

As super-arrogant as it is to assume the universe is like us, it’s way, way more super-arrogant to think we’re so cool that we can understand the universe though it’s not like us. Sure, horses would have a horse god, but wouldn’t we really laugh at them if they thought that god was a mouse? Or what if they thought God was algebra or something else they can’t do? It would be ridiculous of them to try to be something other than horses with horse gods. But horse gods though they are shaped like horses must go beyond the limits of horses as well, if they are to be true gods. A horse god could only be useful to horses if it surpassed the limits of horses, even as it resembled them. Maybe it could be horse-shaped algebra, but never just a horse or just algebra.

2012/5/20

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. […]

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

[…]

Not all is delight, however […] One must perform perfectly. The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too. If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn’t work. Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it.

— Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month (via plasmasturm)

2012/5/17

Stephen Walt - Top 10 Lessons of the Iraq War

Good article, starting with point one:

Lesson #1: The United States lost.

I would correct #8 though:

Lesson #8: Counterinsurgency warfare is ugly and inevitably leads to war crimes, atrocities, or other forms of abuse.

That should be just “warfare” without the “counterinsurgency.” And this technically doesn’t count as a lesson because it was known well in advance.

2012/5/16

Waffle House Ninja - Angry at Birds

Staying on the cutting edge of comedy trends is John Pading’s passion.

2012/5/03

They tortured men at military bases and detention centers in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Guantánamo, and in U.S. Navy bases on American soil; they tortured men in secret CIA prisons set up across the globe specifically to terrorize and torture prisoners; they sent many more to countries with notoriously abusive regimes and asked them to do the torturing. At least twice, after the torturers themselves concluded there was no point to further abuse, Washington ordered that the prisoners be tortured some more.

They tortured innocent people. They tortured people who may have been guilty of terrorism-related crimes, but they ruined any chance of prosecuting them because of the torture. They tortured people when the torture had nothing to do with imminent threats: They tortured based on bad information they had extracted from others through torture; they tortured to hide their mistakes and to get confessions; they tortured sometimes just to break people, pure and simple.

And they conspired to cover up their crimes. They did this from the start, by creating secret facilities and secrecy regimes to keep what they were doing from the American people and the world. They did it by suppressing and then destroying evidence, including videotapes of the torture. They did it by denying detainees legal process because, as the CIA’s Inspector General put it in a 2004 report [pdf], when you torture someone you create an “Endgame” problem: You end up with detainees who, “if not kept in isolation, would likely divulge information about the circumstances of their detention.”

They managed all this, for a time, through secrecy—a secrecy that depended on the aggressive suppression of two groups of voices.

Over and over again, in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Guantánamo, in secret CIA black sites and at CIA headquarters, in the Pentagon, and in Washington, men and women recognized the torture for what it was and refused to remain silent. They objected, protested, and fought to prevent, and then to end, these illegal and immoral interrogations. While the president and his top advisers approved and encouraged the torture of prisoners, there was dissent in every agency, at every level.

— Slate - How America Came To Torture Its Prisoners via Eve Tushnet

2012/4/24

SETTLED: There’s no truth-or-falsity in aesthetics!

The footnote at the end really sells it for me.

2012/4/21

Sam Anderson - Angry Birds, Farmville and Other Hyperaddictive ‘Stupid Games’

Here is a Big Magazine Think-o about our digital rosaries.* It seems Anderson swore off games back in the ’90s because he was a-fear’d of their terrible addictive powers, but the iPhone snuck into his life and crippled him with Drop Sevenitis.

Here is an interesting observation:

Tetris was invented exactly when and where you would expect — in a Soviet computer lab in 1984 — and its game play reflects this origin. The enemy in Tetris is not some identifiable villain (Donkey Kong, Mike Tyson, Carmen Sandiego) but a faceless, ceaseless, reasonless force that threatens constantly to overwhelm you, a churning production of blocks against which your only defense is a repetitive, meaningless sorting. It is bureaucracy in pure form, busywork with no aim or end, impossible to avoid or escape. And the game’s final insult is that it annihilates free will. Despite its obvious futility, somehow we can’t make ourselves stop rotating blocks. Tetris, like all the stupid games it spawned, forces us to choose to punish ourselves.

That’s a nice metaphor, but I think that Tetris is a game less about free will than about life and the inevitability of death. All games of Tetris end the same way. All one can do is delay the inevitable by dealing with the increasingly speedy collapse of things around one and piling up detritus. A good game is one the passes well with skill and grace, but sometimes you’re just happy to be able to keep things going for a while.

I tried to think about what — if anything — I had learned from this window into my brain. Like their spiritual forefather, Tetris, most stupid games are about walls: building them, scaling them, knocking them down. Walls made of numbers, walls made of digital bricks, walls with green pigs hiding behind them. They’re like miniature boot camps of containment. Ultimately, I realized, these games are also about a more subtle and mysterious form of wall-building: the internal walls we build to compartmentalize our time, our attention, our lives. The legendary game designer Sid Meier once defined a game as, simply, “a series of interesting choices.” Maybe that’s the secret genius of stupid games: they force us to make a series of interesting choices about what matters, moment to moment, in our lives.

Incidentally, if you have a 3DS, you are required by law to purchase the best version of Tetris for it. If you just have just an iOS device, don’t buy the touch versions of Tetris, they stink.

* The author uses this metaphor, but I am pretty sure I coined it myself back in 2001. It’s also possible I stole it from a friend.

Thug life.

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