Comments for Keeping it Small and Simple

Comment on My birthday :-( by Felix

Felix — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 09:30:29 +0000

Happy Vegetable Day!

Comment on My birthday :-( by Felix

Felix — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 23:55:48 +0000

hmm, now your youngest post here is two years ago – happy birthday!

And happy birthday to you too, I wonder if you’ll ever read this?

Felix

Comment on My birthday :-( by Felix

Felix — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 20:28:13 +0000

So your last post now is one year old – and you are now years! Happy Birthday!

What’s up? where are you and what are you dong?

Best regards,
Felix

Comment on My birthday :-( by egoleo

egoleo — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 11:08:36 +0000

hey happy belated birthday. make sure no one finds u and fry u up.

Comment on My short-lived adventure with Icedove by Greg Kochanski

Greg Kochanski — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 12:37:15 +0000

Why do I use it? Because I just want to read my mail, and I don’t care about odd little files. I use IMAP anyway, so I can read my mail from several machines.

I save my perfectionistic, vaguely obsessive tendencies for other aspects of my life and work.

Comment on Recursive conspiracy theory by Marc Trius

Marc Trius — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 10:02:13 +0000

Actually, the difference between “conspiracy theory” and “theory” or “hypothesis” is worthy of more examination; is it scarcity of evidence? Well, proofs start as theories which start as hypotheses which don’t have a lot of evidence. Perhaps it is the ethical argument that does it — conspiracy theories can be defined as theories believed in by crackpots. The flaws in this definition are glaring, obvious, and rather amusing. Conspiracy theories defined as wrong hit the atheist/agnostic pitfall as well as the fact that we don’t call Ptolemy’s cosmography a conspiracy theory. If you said that the difference was in that conspiracy theories are obviously wrong, then you’d have to deal with stuff like a lot of modern science making very little obvious sense, starting with relativity. Perhaps conspiracy theories are deliberate misinformation, but I’m sure that conspiracy theorists are, on the whole, sincere.
What then? I seem to have exhausted my reductionist repertoire and now I await the exciting cut-and-thrust of philosophical debate, to inaccurately quote a Terry Pratchett footnote; perhaps reductionist methods are insufficient and one must resort to intuition — but here, I have another one: conspiracy theories are theories involving usually high-level conspiracy that the speaker does not believe in, although of course that is a dangerously unstable definition. To use 9/11 as an example,, I have recently been exposed to some 9/11 truth propoganda, and some of their arguments are, well, definitely arguable. It appears that some of the people arguing that 9/11 was, at least in part, an inside job are not crackpots and can argue persuasively. I have seen some evidence that definitely made me stop and think, despite the obviously propagandistic presentation. Even if one defines conspiracy theories as theories that fall afoul of Occam’s Razor, the Razor is a fickle tool — broadly, simplicity is not always apparent and its appearance can be misleading — frankly, I think that some of the 9/11 theories are acceptable even to a fervent student of medieval English philosophy.
And above all, I wouldn’t put it beyond them. I remain an agnostic, but my point is that rejecting things outright as conspiracy theories has a little bit of intellectual dishonesty — after all, the true skeptic must give every theory a consideration, however cursory, and although I did enjoy reading about the Recursive Conspiracy Theory, humor is a dangerous instrument with which do discount something, simply because it is so effective and free of the constraints of relevance.

Cheers,
Marc Trius

PS-OT: I think I’ve been reading your blog for two or three hours now, as it is highly entertaining, instructive, and allows me to procrastinate instead of trying to figure out the art of programming, in python. I think I’m done for tonight but I will be back =]

Comment on The food crisis by Marc Trius

Marc Trius — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 08:35:02 +0000

Lorenzo,
This post is a little old, but I have to make a comment: as a solution to these beautiful crises our world is enduring, you suggest revolution; as a fairly earnest anarchist myself, I would like to remind you all about the sad fact of revolution: it tends to end where it began; look at the former USSR (where I was born): one group of fat cats got replaced with another group of fat cats, marginally worse than the first. Then came 1990 and yet a third group of our ever-changing chameleon class rose to power, which is incidentally not without connections to the old one. I am sure you are familiar with Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zones; while I cannot say that I agree with everything he says, I certainly see the superior value of insurrection over revolution: while temporary (isn’t everything?), it gives a true sense of freedom, which always involves struggle, but it hasn’t yet turned into the ironically reactionary policy of established revolutions. I am always baffled by proclamations of the need to “protect the revolution” after it has succeeded and, common sense tells me, ought to have ended; more often than not ideological zeal — which is a very dangerous thing — causes the victorious vanguard to become a master even more oppressive than the one which was overthrown; as an extreme example, look at the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, or the purges that followed the formation of the USSR, eventually culminating (one might argue) with the famous application of an icepick to Trotsky’s head. Those purges eventually eliminated all the old revolutionaries who were not corrupted: in the twenties and thirties, it was a very dangerous thing to be an earnest communist; afterwards, none remained outside of the underground.
In our denunciation of capitalism, globalization, the nation state, and the rest of that rot, we must not forget the sins of our ideological ancestors lest we repeat their mistakes; what sort of progressive, whether anarchist, communist, or any other kind, can admire the war that the Soviet Union waged against its intellectual and creative class? The Bolsheviks were more reactionary than the czars!
We must also remember when we denounce the dominant paradigm that most of the competing paradigms aren’t that hot either — today’s Russia is just as worthy of denunciation as the West, the Palestinian national movement sucks as well as Zionism.
There is a caveat here: one spends more time criticizing one’s own masters than somebody else’s; therefore, when I lived in Israel I spent much more time denouncing Israel and supporting the Palestinians than I did the opposite: there were plenty of other people to do the latter so I didn’t have to. Now that I live in the USA I spend much more of my time defending Israel and Israelis because they are often demonized: Israel is actually a beautiful country full of absolutely awesome people! Would you have believed it? It’s not a coincidence that a lot of the awesome people are under 18; again, it is the state that snatches them out of their homes and haunts to put them into uniform and their minds through a blender. I confess, I was in the Israeli Army for ten days; the whole time I was terrified that my brain would default to its natural reaction in the face of martial authority and salute an officer with a straight arm, if you take my meaning.
To conclude the above, it is important to see both good and evil wherever they are and regardless of one’s expectations, otherwise one would end up betraying everything one purports to believe in. Don’t defend Russia and Iran just to have more fodder against the USA, and don’t (not that I am accusing you, Lorenzo, I’m just on a roll here) revert to some euphemised form of antisemitism because of the Occupation; I say this although I daresay I hate it far more than you do: for sixteen years my family and I have been unwilling accomplices to its horrors, and all we wanted to do was not to be called Kikes (or Zhids, as it were) all the freaking time (we ended up being called Russians. Irony never fails).
I think that a sense of irony’s powerful influence on history, and especially the history of idealism, is absolutely necessary: did you know that the first Jewish colonists were anarchists and communists who wanted to establish a sort of Marxist utopia that would incidentally also be a place where Jews wouldn’t get murdered all the time; as usual, it was fear that thwarted their original purpose; fear and the jackals who mongered it.
Personally, I hope that our crises will result in the more or less unaided collapse of the current world order; I don’t want any vanguards setting themselves up with a new one that might well be worse; a barbarian horde would be quite handy just now.
I apologize for the long, rambling, and unedited nature of this comment, but the text box is small and it is easy to lose track. I also have a lot to unload and since I don’t have my own blog you appear to be the unfortunate soul which has been chosen for the purpose by the ineffable nature of Google and the usefulness of your python tutorials.

Absolutely no disrespect (as I hope you already know),
Have a great one,
Marc Trius,
Leningrad, Haifa, Minneapolis (in that order)

Comment on Retrogaming: Dungeon Master by Kymba

Kymba — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 21:28:48 +0000

For DMJ keyboard controls, use the numeri keypad: forward = 8 turn left = 7 turn right 9 step left = 4 back = 5 or 2 step right = 6 – hope that helps. Also, DMJ might have been superceded by Return to Chaos, not sure. I prefer DMJ because it’s more easily edited, so you can get your own dungeons up n running a lot easier. RTC has an editor, but it seems a bit tougher to get stuff done. happy gaming!

Comment on Alternating row color in HTML/CSS (with PHP) by SPI

SPI — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 09:47:46 +0000

Nice, thanks a lot…

Comment on WordPress.com upgrade by AgewAgritte

AgewAgritte — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 08:33:00 +0000

Thank you