Times 24390 - What do you call a man ...?

... "Russell" = RUSTLE, the first of our "What do you call a man..." jokes. Bertrand Russell is famous for his paradox, which proves there can't be a set of all sets; which rather did for axiomatic set theory, although various workarounds are available. Put succinctly, either you believe in the law of the excluded middle or you don't. 2 P for penny + R[OVID]ENT = PROVIDENT. "Stopping", the ...

Blurb on the origin of free will

... will, of course, is all the things we can't imagine as choices. Nietzsche was a creative guy, but he never examined the origin of the concept of free will, instead taking it as an obvious granted, axiomatic, even though it isn't. I'm mostly writing this down for, well, two reasons. First is reinforce in my own mind that free will is an essentially Christian and Muslim construct in the West, for ...

... them. I have many, many thoughts on many things. One of them, after yesterday, is this Obvious Thing is Obvious, because it was driven home to me, even though it's been axiomatic for, ah, a while... Communities designed as "safe spaces" who largely serve a white, privileged demographic are never as safe for WOC or other marginalized groups, because the definition and enforcement of what is "...

Evolved altruism won't save us - a response to Stefan Pernar

...goals. However, since continued existence is an extremely useful instrumental goal for carrying out many other goals, this is a relatively minor objection and we can probably treat continued existence as an axiomatic goal for now. Resolving moral paradoxes . Here Stefan is saying that the intuitive concepts of altruism and selfishness are rather worthless and in reality there's no such thing as ...

... this week: In short, Godel showed that provability is a weaker notion than truth, no matter what axiomatic system is involved. - Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter (I'm ... quarter through the book, but one of the morals I am gleaning is that *everything* is an axiomatic system. Of course, if you've taken above a certain threshold of math classes, you're ...

links for 2009.10.31

... the Interesting Debate, we can hope that you were not garish and opted to put the issues in sort of Rocco frame. ) And yes, you were suppose to have read Retrospective: An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming and Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs since they will make clear to all that EITHER you are on the correct side of PostGlennBeckIstania, or you are EVIL! Would Lou ...

Thoughts on Freedom

“We are confronted with the incontrovertible fact: At no time in the history of human society did masses of people succeed in preserving, organizing, and developing the freedom and peace they had achieved by bloody battles. We mean genuine freedom of personal and social development, the freedom to face life WITHOUT fear, freedom FROM all forms of economic suppression, freedom FROM reactionary ...

Взлом -- это конструктивное опровержение правильности программы. Или всё-таки деструктивное? (по мотивам Ч.Хоар, "Retrospective" ) ... В Греции всё есть, даже проблемы с кодировками ...

Sliced, diced, pickled and boxed

...; thousands of miles of drive-ins and strip malls featuring blanded, branded, standardized food made with corn starch and refined white sugar. Where time is money, sandwiches are food. This is axiomatic for rushed Anglo-Saxons raised in bread-based, pragmatic cultures. But other cultures have different solutions to the problem of lunch. In Japan they have the bento box, an ancient and elegant ...

On the drabble fest again

...marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. --John Steinbeck 23. All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware. --Martin Buber 24. It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places. --Paul Theroux 25. The Germans have a word to describe the chronic affliction many of us suffer from, that insistent urge to be somewhere out...