12:44
“
There is a sadness everywhere present
but impossible to point to, a sadness that hides in the world
and lingers. You look for it because it is everywhere.
When you give up, it haunts your dreams
with black pepper and blood and when you wake
you don’t know where you are.”
— Jennifer Grotz - “Poppies” via Ta-Nehisi Coates (Cf. the Japanese concept of awaré)
12:54
Siglemic - Super Mario 64 120 Star Non-Tool Assist Speed Run
This is one of the most fascinating videos I’ve seen in a while. I was listening to the 8-4 podcast and they suggested everyone watch this speed run by Siglemic. Apparently he was live streaming world record attempts for several days before he finally took the crown. It took me a while to find the link, and I ended up watching another video (now apparently taken off YouTube?) by the former world record holder Nero instead.
I have to say, tool assisted speed runs are interesting from an academic point of view—how was the game made such that all these glitches are possible?—but not watchable for more than a few minutes of idle curiosity. This, on the other hand, is absolutely captivating to me. To think that there’s a real, honest-to-God human being sitting down and wearing out the short lifespan of a Nintendo 64 controller by playing this game at this level of skill is mind blowing. It’s like the Olympics, only way more intense. I know Mario 64 pretty well, because I’ve beaten it so many times, so I get the basic idea for each of the star runs, but I can’t imagine how much dedication it must take to be able to get, for example, exactly 100 coins in exactly the right order exactly at the same time that one gets the 8 red coins and snag both stars on the way out on so many different levels. The sheer athleticism of it is awe inspiring to me. It’s not that anything done in these videos is impossible for me to do; it’s that they’re done one after another without a break and with only a few rare mistakes in the course of an hour and half to show the humanity of the player. (The mistakes themselves are fascinating.)
Even the pace of the video is perfect, because the stars come at a rate of about one per minute, so you can’t help yourself from watching one more and one more until you’ve been staring at YouTube for an hour and a half. As soon as your mind starts to wander, he’s taken all 7 stars out of a level and he’s on to the next one, long jumping and wall kicking through the castle at a breakneck speed, glitching through barriers and breaking sequences.
Seriously, watch this video and think about what incredible things mere human beings are able to accomplish.
12:04
Daring Fireball - That Exact Nonsense
Daring Fireball’s John Gruber quotes Penn Jillette’s God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist:
There is no god and that’s the simple truth. If every trace of any single religion died out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.
You sometimes see people say stuff like this, but I don’t see any empirical evidence for it. Just the opposite in fact. Science in the West is a relatively new thing. For most of human history, Europe and especially Western Europe was a backwater. Francis Bacon’s three great inventions—printing, gunpowder and the compass—were all invented in China. OK, so what? So what is that science in China didn’t look anything like Western science until after the West conquered the planet. It was all about this crazy yin/yang stuff that we don’t know what to do with any more. But they invented rockets and whatnot. Given this example then, what are the odds that when aliens make rockets, they will use the same metaphors that we do? Chinese people didn’t use the same metaphors but little green men will for some reason. And if we had to re-do science from scratch, rest assured, we’d make all the same choices, including calling humans “mammals” because the guy doing the classifying will be into breast feeding again. It strains credulity to believe these things.
To the other side of the point about religion, it just seems ignorant and against an argument that I’m sure Jillette makes elsewhere. “Christianity is a rip off of Mithras.” “Christmas was stolen from Sol Invictus.” I personally don’t think that those are accurate characterizations of the facts of the matter, but if there’s one thing you learn from going into an Eastern Orthodox Church it’s that Christianity started out as a Mediterranean mystery cult. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Amida Buddha is a rip off of Jesus, and Saint Josaphat is a Bodhisattva: culture flows in both directions. Omphaloskepsis is an Orthodox term, but a global phenomenon. Karl Jung and Joseph Campbell were mostly full of crap, but there really are a lot of flood stories around the world. There are core things that religion tends to do, and it tends to do them everywhere with a minor amount of regional variation.
So, why do stories like this persist against the most apparent empirical evidence? For example, in a TED talk Murray Gell-Man suggests (starting at 2:40) that aliens will have the same physical laws that we do. What is the point of bringing aliens into the discussion, given that we have no evidence for what aliens believe one way or the other? I think the answer goes back to Kant and how he defined objectivity. Kant believed in aliens, but more importantly he defined objectivity as the view that one gets from the standpoint of Reason. Thus, to say that a scientific law is “objective” is to say that “Any Rational Being” will agree to—or better, come up with—the same law when given the same data. To illustrate this point, you then need to talk about aliens to show that the law conforms to Universal Reason and not merely human reason. The trouble with all this is, as Hegel pointed out, that Reason Itself has not been given to us to know, but only reason in appearance, that is historical reason. (You can tell someone is a Hegelian and not a Kantian if they talk about the law lasting into the infinite future instead of talking about the law being discovered by space aliens [the Pragmatists were all Hegelians].)
Anyway, the point is we all have faith. No, that’s not really the point. But atheists for the most part do have faith that science is objective and religion is subjective, and as a result come into a certain amount of confirmation bias distortion of evidence. But that’s life, what else can you do? You have to believe your own positions are right, even if you try your best not to be too dogmatic about it.
12:04
A rather impressive set of resolutions. Experience shows, however, that the fourth will in all likelihood prove a bridge too far.
On the topic of rambling, I think I should resolve to be the dreaming butterfly and not vice versa.
12:00
Chronicle of Higher Education - A New Philosophy for the 21st Century
More or less everyone has blogged some of the articles about the “crisis” in philosophy from this issue of the Chronicle: Ian Bogost, Splintered Mind, Feminist Philosophers three times, my Facebook friends…
Still, for posterity, here’s a nut graf:
the case for reform made here involves an appeal to prudential self-interest—devising ways to survive in a harried, impatient, and increasingly market-driven age. Philosophers have broad social responsibilities that require directly engaging social problems. This can mean activism, but in a bureaucratic age it is more likely to mean working at the project level with scientists, engineers, and policy makers. Rather than philosopher kings, our future is more likely to lie in becoming philosopher bureaucrats.
It seems to me that the project of philosopher bureaucrats has already been tried under the name “Mandarins.” We would do well therefore to study the successes and mistakes of the past. For now, I leave it as an exercise to the reader.
12:03
Jenn Frank - some sick stuff
So, this is the best writing about sex, God, and guilt in the universe ever not written by Eve Tushnet. Don’t read this link if you don’t want to read about those things in graphic detail. Here’s a representative sample:
And then I said to him, “Have you considered the possibility that you are frightened, not of genital herpes at all, but of incurring the wrath of God?”
And then you really should have seen his face.
It’s as emotionally honest as shrapnel from a bullet.
11:51
“
All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning”
Reblogged from The New Yorker.
