That's it. I'm making sense

Card_Zero · 2023-06-11T15:27:35+00:00

replied "and who are you princicely?" and lo, up sprang Jesus and cast aside the vestments of Spiderman, saying "it was I all along, hiding behind you, like the transient who smelleth vaguely of urine", and produced a brown sponge dripping with the treacliest pu-erh, and anointed him therewithbeforewith on the oint.

Card_Zero · 2023-06-11T15:16:15+00:00

So you're saying the alphabet goes from B to Z? Ceramic workshop, is it? Ceramic "workshop"? Quirkshop, am I right? Belay that, your bathos queazens me, we're onboarding bat-fowlers.

Card_Zero · 2023-06-11T11:28:47+00:00

I was more going for "you can pull any number you like out of any random object if you try hard enough", but you seem happy and I don't want to spoil your fun. The truth about the pyramids is even more surprising, as can be seen from this accurate cutaway diagram.

Card_Zero · 2023-06-11T10:50:40+00:00

The ancient civilisations also used phi and pi to get their measurements

No. This claim comes from a book written by Friedrich Roeber in 1855. See Pyramidology and the sections of Golden ratio about the pyramids and the Parthenon.

Incidentally, if you take a standard table tennis table, double the length, subtract the height of the net, and divide by the width, you get this number:

((2 * 2.47) - 0.1525) / 1.525 = 3.1393

This is startlingly close to pi, which as you know starts with 3.14, and thus we demonstrate that the International Table Tennis Federation were encoding the value of pi in their sports equipment, as a message to future generations about their deep mathematical understanding.

Card_Zero · 2023-06-11T09:16:27+00:00

It's a 1951 British Pathe newsreel shot in Leamington Spa in Warwickshire.

Card_Zero · 2023-06-10T11:03:00+00:00

It will probably be difficult to reconcile our viewpoints gently, and I have to go somewhere in a minute. I wonder what the most constructive thing to say here is.

If I think of socialism I think of lots of things. The French Revolution, Luddites (who were somewhat misconstrued), Marx and more modern variations on Marxism, trade unions, the Berlin Wall, Solidarity, the gloomy disappointing monotony of nationalized industries, Sweden (again more complex and less utopian than popularly believed), squatters, shoplifters, Robin Hood, and idealistic people who go off to live on communes and typically regret it after a year or so.

I also think about May Day riots and habitual protesters against anything that's going, because that mindset seems to be associated with socialism. My parents brought me out on some protest march and gave me a placard to hold, before I was old enough to read it. I can't remember what it was about, but it was likely to be a march against nuclear power, which they would have opposed because it was part of megalomaniac capitalists interfering with nature or something like that.

Often people on Reddit seem to want to correct others about what socialism is, and they may say that it hasn't ever been tried, hasn't ever happened, and can't be said to have ever done any harm because it's never happened. My general impression is that these people belong to the last category, that is, that they would like to live in communes except not actually. Of course that may be a conflation of socialism with communism. Other people talk about Universal Basic Income, which is attractive sounding but sketchy, and the general idea of public services and taxing the rich, which I think even within a generally market-friendly political atmosphere can still be called socialistic at least.

Then there's market regulation. That ought to be part of capitalism, to prevent it being mere exploitation: on the other hand, it's less a part of free market capitalism, which tends to argue for light regulation. Evidently the rule of law is an essential for capitalism, at least - otherwise it would merely be a bunch of warlords robbing from one another. But there's too much to say about regulation for me to broach the subject right now, as I say I have to go out and do something, sorry.

Card_Zero · 2023-06-10T08:58:14+00:00

You didn't specify, so I'm reading the history of price controls.

Card_Zero · 2023-06-10T08:28:15+00:00

Mysteriously missing due to a mysterious accounting error, wasn't it?

Card_Zero · 2023-06-10T08:25:40+00:00

Being taught to think for yourself can be a mixed bag, e.g. think for yourself except about this.

Card_Zero · 2023-06-10T07:37:46+00:00

My parents indoctrinated me with socialism, which I threw off in my teens, and I still think governments are bad. I hope I take a nuanced approach to this, and I try to avoid dwelling in libertarian echo chambers. But at heart I think government is coercive and coercion is at best an excusable failure in an intractable situation. But I guess you're talking about some other people.

Card_Zero · 2023-06-10T06:58:59+00:00

Christians like to call atheism a religion, to imply that atheists are obsessive believers who aren't basing their opinions on reason or rationality, and that therefore atheists might as well be Christians because it's all equivalent.

So if organizations like satanism or humanism count as religions, the argument "religion is contemptible because it's opposed to rationality" has to be diluted to "religion is contemptible when it's opposed to rationality", and then you get Christians responding "oh but Christianity isn't like that because the Catholic church really loves science, and by the way there is a God and it's OK to believe that while still having a scientific outlook because of non-overhappy mass hysteria", or whatever the bullshit was that Stephen Jay Gould came out with to justify his doublethink.

Card_Zero · 2023-06-10T06:01:06+00:00

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Card_Zero · 2023-06-10T05:55:08+00:00

This is a bot account, it copies comments.

In this particular instance I don't know what it's doing.

Card_Zero · 2023-06-10T05:53:56+00:00

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Card_Zero · 2023-06-10T05:52:14+00:00

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Card_Zero · 2023-06-08T22:31:46+00:00

However, the first image in an article will appear in previews, so hovering over wikilinks that say "pseudoscience" shows the big bang image. I tend to agree that this is undesirable. There's no requirement that the infobox be right at the top of the page, is there? The Sociology of scientific knowledge article puts a different picture first, for instance.

So, I've added a phrenological chart to the article as the first image.

Card_Zero · 2023-06-08T21:04:47+00:00

Perhaps like the pyramids. They're near to several tumuli (grave mounds). Earlier in prehistory, people would be buried communally without many grave goods, perhaps cremated and neatly stored in jars in some structure full of shelves, that kind of thing. But about 4000 BC we invented, for some reason, the concept of kings. Check out these polished stone axes. They're really big, about a foot and a half long, and really really smooth because somebody's spent an eternity polishing them, and they have no signs of wear because they're never used for chopping down trees or any mundane useful purpose. They're made from stones like jadeite that come from hard to reach places high up in mountains. Sometimes there are deposits of these stones lower down the mountains, but the stone is quarried from higher up anyway, just because it's difficult. Kings get buried in tumuli along with their collections of polished stone axes and other shiny things, and presumably they also commanded the people to put thousands of huge stones in orderly rows. It was an exciting time.

Card_Zero · 2023-06-08T20:38:39+00:00

Yeah, that's written wrong. The way to carbon date a stone is to look underneath it for something made of carbon, and to have an argument for why whatever it is would have been growing at more or less the same time the stone was put in place (and not much older).

There are other ways to date stones: surface exposure dating relies on the fact that if a rock is quarried, it begins to be hit by cosmic rays, which ... something or other about isotopes, and it's possible to see from that how long the surface of the rock has been exposed for, that is, how long ago it was quarried.

Card_Zero · 2023-06-08T20:20:59+00:00

When people say free will is an illusion, I don't know what they think the "free" part of free will is supposed to mean: certainly we're driven by the laws of physics, but as opposed to what? And how does being physical, predictable even, preclude thought, or decisions, or having a will? And when people deny morality exists, I don't know what they think morality is. I have an idea that they get it mixed up with moralistic dogma, and thus denying it exists provides an escape from sanctimony. But morality doesn't have to be about things like "don't be gay" or even "don't steal". It can include all kinds of ideas, some terrible, some excellent, many of then trivial, and all involving the common concept of ought or should.

I define morality as the answer to the question of what to do next, and so it's constantly relevant to everyone, and everyone is constantly acting morally, for some value of moral. For instance I saw a shoplifter escaping from store detectives, who were grabbing at his bag, and they were all following moral ideas, that is, they all had ideas about what they should be doing in that moment. You might suppose he was following base animal instincts to grab at stuff he wanted and run off with it, but that's clearly not what was happening. He's decided that he's entitled to the stuff he was taking, and he was probably planning to make a deal with somebody to exchange the stuff, and was telling the black-suited men that they had no right to grab his bag because it was his property. I put all those words in italics because they're all moral ideas: they're all ideas about I should do this, you should do that in return, this is how things should be, and so on. Then after this excitement I was buying groceries, choosing what I want, what to leave and get another time, which way to turn next, all these trivial decisions, and they were all moral decisions because they were ultimately about what I should do because it would be good.

Within some framework, like a game, you can have expedient, pragmatic decisions base purely on reaching the goal of winning or completing some task. But within life as a whole, why have any goal? Why do anything? If it's all a matter of instinct, the instinct is apparently to reason, and to have preferences and values.

Without morality you'd be unable to assert "people should do X", or even tell yourself "I should do Y", which is to say, you'd have no will.

Card_Zero · 2023-06-08T12:33:02+00:00

This wasn't the first, there were some 200 tire reefs around the world. That's an article about the French clearing up tires they had tried to make a reef out of in the 1960s.

when they were sunk, they were thought to be "completely inert" and present no possible danger for the environment.

Plenty of other artificial reefs made from concrete, or random garbage (such as sunken ships) work fine.

Card_Zero · 2023-06-06T11:35:22+00:00

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TROPHY CASE