A little light reading... (2003/11/07)
So, one of my habits is genre fiction. I love genre fiction. I know it’s not “real literature.” I don’t care.
[read more...]A definition is the obituary of an idea. (2003/11/06)
One of my father’s favorite sayings was “a definition is the obituary of an idea”. For all that our culture, and our very survival, depend on rationality, it has its limits. There are things we cannot usefully encapsulate in our nice, rational, minds. Some things don’t survive dissection; you can take a clock apart to find out how it works, or at least how it used to work, but you can’t take a kitten apart to find out why it’s cute. There are things which no definition can fully capture. I can describe them, and you can recognize them if you’ve experienced them, or possibly just if you’ve experienced something similar. I’ve “recognized” what people were talking about when they spoke of “being in love” more than once. I think I’m right this time, but that’s what I thought last time, too.
[read more...]... and all he hears is some indistinct buzzing noises. (2003/11/03)
One of the problems you occasionally face is trying to communicate with people who simply don’t have the framework to understand what you’re doing. For instance, some of the junk faxers I’ve talked to have been, so far as I can tell, incapable of comprehending the motive “I think this behavior is wrong, and want to make people stop doing it”. If it’s not profitable, it doesn’t make sense. You talk about damages, they understand. You talk about giving money to charity, and all they hear is indistinct buzzing noises. The words simply can’t make sense. A couple of these people have made it quite clear that they’ve “seen through” my claims that I think junk faxing is wrong. They don’t buy it, not for a minute, because that’s not how people are.
[read more...]Too beautiful. (2003/10/31)
Yahoo! is one of the companies who spams. They don’t harvest addresses the convential way. What they do is, every so often, declare that “database errors” mean that they can no longer be entirely sure about their database records, and that the only thing they can do is… Mark everyone to receive everything. They have done this at least once, possibly twice.
[read more...]Summary Judgment for the Plaintiff (2003/10/29)
I won my junk fax case against Mobile Cellular Unlimited on Monday.
[read more...]Sprint is totally and utterly incompetent. (2003/10/27)
So, the most stunning thing about this is the sheer bulk quantity of massive, total, incompetence. I can’t imagine how they managed to end up with so many people with totally different claims.
[read more...]Understanding agnosticism (2003/10/25)
Thomas Henry Huxley coined the word “agnostic”, describing it as follows:
[read more...]Another formal debate coming up. (2003/10/24)
Well, I’m a total sucker, so I’m arguing Problem of Evil. I’m arguing that it ends up not disproving anyone particularly interesting. My opponent is arguing that it does. Here’s the debate thread. As of this writing, no posts yet. My opponent should have something up in the next couple of days, I’d guess, and I’ll get back to him on it eventually.
[read more...]Standardization (2003/10/22)
People wonder what standards committees are like.
[read more...]Formal debate over. (2003/10/21)
Well, my formal debate is over. It was fun. It pleases me to imagine that I did fairly well, but I can hardly be sure. Obviously, my arguments convince me.
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