The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Michael Turyn:

fidelio @ 520

Ecco's The Name of the Rose is a novel about the appropriation and domestication of the generation of '68 told via the similar story of St Francis and the other movements of his tim---among many other things.

As much as traditional religions can have its problems (misogyny, homophobia, assistance in racism, war, and in oppression of the poor) simple cultural evolution means that they tend not to be as fatal as some of the newer variants.

Religions tend to either settle down (Judaism, L.D.S., Christianity maybe, Islam maybe) and live, or flame out (Mansonism, Heaven's Gate, the Skoptsi).

Think of how The Pox evolved after it, or a new-to-Europe variant of it, crossed the Atlantic---it used to cut a wide swath of death, now it will generally settle down for awhile, giving you time to breed and pass it around (and down) before it leaves you an insane sort who'd best avoid relatives who like to play "Got your nose!".

Very nice quilt.

It must be accounted a character flaw, and a double-wide one at that, but I lose interest in anything I make as soon as I'm done designing it. Whether it's a piece of code, a way of fixing a lamp socket with a nail, an essay, a bookcase made of foam-core, or the proper eigenfunctions for a problem, or (theoretically) a battery-powered steam-pipe suitable for use on a space-station (thanks a _lot_, Ken, _now_ how do I get that half-hour back?), once I Know How it's Done...well, the fun part's over. (And, speaking as one normally given to self-deprecation, I'll baldly assert that I've never learnt anything interesting about a problem after and if I've reached the I.K.H.i.D. state.)

True, there can be pleasure in proper use and development of technique, but it's always mixed with irritation that that thing in my head doesn't exist outsude it yet. (And yes, the first time I ever heard anyone opine that it's the Journey, not the Destination, my eight-year-old heart told me, 'This person is _insane_,'---I have since moderated my opinion to include the possibility of sour grapes, or that the person is merely alien to me in this respect.)

As far as I can tell, all such groups insist on Authority as their effectively-primary value, and never so much as for children, whom even women may rightfully command. This makes it in their own context quite reasonable for them to fear their children's ever being exposed to a jot's worth of a Foreign opinion in a book or from an adult.

I herd you liek Iehosephatz.

Xoper @ 7:

I'm afraid that there are a fair number of people of good will who believe in Heaven who must, due to their religious training, believe that she is roasting in Hell even as we speak, or will after the Judgement, along with all of my ancestors and most of anyone's.

I'd like to believe that anyone of good will could not believe so, but people who believe in many versions of eternal damnation have spent lives tending the sick, helping the poor, and so on, so I can't give it any credit.

Far from original: religion does a better job making good people monstrous than making bad people good.

Small good out of great evil: Anne's reference to her menstrual period was the first widespread acknowledgement of such in Japan, with the consequence that it (for awhile, at least) became known as 'Anne's Day' and could be discussed.

Joel Polowin @ 101 et al: Sorry, but measured by purely objective critaeria, there is no better song about sex in space than Mustang Sally.

Glenn Hauman @ 118:
>Since you're stating that your very old MT install is screwed up[....]

This particular M.T. install is feeling old, but not 'very' old yet, and uninstalling still doesn't feeling like a proper option. Maybe this install is in need of some fixes at a fundamental level, what I believe the young folk don't call a "soul patch".

(Apologies to those who have mentioned jam already, but here's my take on it:)

This implies that every jet-pack is covered in jam.

This _might_ have further implications for the sodding, but I'm not volunteering to find out, either as subject _or_ observer. More likely, and I know that this is not strictly entomologically right, it means that your jet-pack might end up COVERED IN BEES.

I found myself agreeing with much of what was suggested in the post, but it called to mind an annoying song whose refrain was something like, 'Blow up your TV/Eat a lot of peaches/Try to find Jesus on your own'. I don't trust the Simple Life: I think it produces narrowness of a sort not seen even in the callous sophisticates (make fun of my tiny head though they might), and might in fact lead you to religious belief. I've also recently heard a few Econanists get as prescriptive as any theocon, and it brings out the nascent Extropian in me....

(Ahh...my pre-Implant search kludge came up with Spanish Pipedream by John Prine, whose stuff I generally like but whose 'Your Flag Decal...' I found simultaneously funny and too self-righteous).

I can only add: If you can afford to do, borrow money for needful, capital, improvements whilst other people will still work more cheaply and could use the work. Eat out sometimes at small restaurants that do one type of food really well. And Free Software; if you, like me, you still pray to move entirely to Linux ('...but not quite yet,'), don't use that as an excuse (at least install Cygwin like a Decent Person).

If you're a coder, out of work:

1. The future is largely mobile,
2. You can download Android and Eclipse gratis,and run them on a cheap PC
3. Applications written for Android run on only one extant phone, but they can prove that you can write phone apps.
4. Acquire the Android phone, or its better-build successor whenever that shows up, because nothing demos a phone application like a phone

It might be better to acquire, if need be, Mac technology and try to write and sell iPhone apps, but I think treating them as a portfolio would still make more sense than any expectation of noticeable ??? PROFIT!.

If you know a bunch of other coders out of work, well, 'Let's put on a show!' (I say this all as someone with a strong expectation of having to have to follow this advice in a couple of months, Grid help anyone so desperate as to take my advice....)

1.) It's incredibly petty of me to say, but it was strange for me to read this tonight, as I was feeling terrible about a lot of minor and larger screw-ups I've been perpetrating lately, and which now don't seem all that important, and which are now easier to see as perhaps related to (overly felt) family and employment stress. Again, terribly petty---it pales before what I feel when I wonder if one or another deaths in my family could have been prevented by my paying more attention and energy---but true nonetheless.

2.) (On reading of the posts to the Post) Fucking 'narrative'. I'm sorry if I've just broken a rule here, but as I don't curse in print very much it seemed an appropriately forceful way to put it. 'Narrative' keeps you from leaving your country before the government seizes your assets and kills you, because 'that sort of thing doesn't happen'. Narrative makes you think you won't get AIDS, because you're no queer, you just have sex with them. Narrative tells you it's o.k. to torture Bad People, and you're safe doing it because not even torturing will make you a Bad Person. A narrative will keep you in an obviously-crashing Market or drunk-driven car. A narrative will tell you how you absolutely must liquidate those kulaks, kill of those Injuns, blow up those Crusaders, cluster-bomb those terrorists. God-damned stories, including the God and Damnation stories...it's o.k. to try to make some sense out of what's going on, but the sheer seductive toxicity of a good story that lies to you, throws reifications up in front of your eyes to blind you to---well, things like, sometimes parents fuck up very, very, more 'very's-than- this-page-can-hold badly, and they're not bad people, or at least not worse than you.

Hab rachmones. This is not really a Fallen world, as it was never higher (unless you consider the amoral purity of rhododontonychal Nature 'higher'), nor is it a Broken one, as it was not made to do or to be anything in particular, but neither it nor we measures up to what we know we want and intuit could be.

Sure, there are good and beneficial stories, but given how much ill the bad ones do, I'd rather leave them all to the printed page where they belong, and where we have some hope of remembering what they are.

Understand the misery of cities, and of bodies and their epiphenomenal minds, and hab rachmones.

160: erratum:
"Elect and Damned"-->"Elect and Damned each _deserve_ their status"

161: Serge: Ever read "The Bridge of Birds"? There's a monster there you might like.

166: Clifton Royston:
1.) Flattery will get you.
2.) 'Productive people' and 'parasites'...'fruits of your labour'...'you deserve...'...'undeserving élite...Free Marketeers and Communists have always sounded alike to me. Both are symptoms of the hilariously primitive technological level that allows for scarcity and the credulity (born of survival terror) that engenders (I'm certainly not above terror as, my coding job ends with July of this year, and my employer won't retain contractors over two years---the fruits of a decision against Microsoft of which I approved and still do...)

(Reaction: Tea --> tl;dr)

Mr Macdonald, your response was not relevant to the original: TexDoc clearly knew what was true, so why would he need any facts? Any man as convicted as he evidently is will never lack for a comfortable prison....

#65 ::: Naomi Libicki [...]
[...]
3) Actually, people who like to tell this story probably do see money as an evaluation of one's -- performance is probably too strong a word, but let's say worthiness -- conferred by some sort of infallible authority figure.

And just when I was going to go into my Dumbed-Down Calvinism rant---and one of the reasons it's 'Dumbed-Down' is that its adherents believe that their Elect and Damned (the Rich and the Losers, Good Guys and Bad Guys,Productive Members of Society and Parasite Welfare Queens) at least in real Calvinism, you're specifically not supposed to believe you deserved Election.

It's also a funny semi-ghost of the Labour Theory of Value, which propertarians deride when used by the Left, 'funny' because of the derision and 'semi-' because, to be fair, they are also willing to factor in the quality of the labour being expended...but still, the basic assumption is that you worked for everything you got...clever of me to have invented or fully-funded the keyboard, CPU, and Web that allow me to do this post, not to mention English, the alef-beis, and the Universe (or are you saying that the Universe is some kind of Free Lunch, you Commie who does not have 'TANSTaaFL' on her flag, and might even criticise its grammar, you snob?).

My reaction to the 'college' story: as others have said, grades are not properly rewards or goods, they are assessments, supposedly accurate within the limits of error of the graders, and not working properly if any individual doesn't get the assessment proper to him. All but the most lunatic proponents of the Market* will admit that it is a very imperfect instrument of valuation in many specific cases, but rather the best instrument of valuation at equilibrium and en masse.

(It is a strange really-existing, not-at-all-a reification, entity, this Free Market*---so incredibly strong and robust and efficient and equilibrating, yet capable of being utterly destroyed by the slightest touch of Evil Gummint, leading me to believe that 'Free Market', like the Vulcan 'Logical' is actually a synonym for 'kosher', that is, 'ritually pure'.)

*please assume I have embedded an object that will play the sound of an heavenly choir just as your eye[s] scan the word or words '[Free ]Market'.

'You knew damn well I was a snake
Before you took me in'

Appropriate to see this: I just finished Macleod's Cydonia, which features a V.R. recreation of a fully-staffed Kennedy assassination site, including all major conspiracy theories' players.

My favourite moment from the Illuminatus! version: after a few of the other shooters fire away, bar bs gur Qvyyvatre dhvaghcyrgf who just happens to be there (no conspiracy!) shrugs his shoulders, says, 'Why not?,' and joins in.

My personal belief: J.F.K. was shot by a jealous husband. An assassination-interested friend heard this, and said, 'I never thought of him as "Stackerlee Oswald"....'

I am fairly neutral* on the particular conspiracy theory in Libra (non-crazy, less gripping than Tears of Autumn's), but I do like its implication, and one fitting in well with the facts: Oswald was involved with so many different parties and intelligence agencies that when it seemed likely that he had been the shooter, every single one of them woke up and said, 'Did one of our guys tell him to do this? Even if none did, can we prove that?,' and immediately began rocketing tinsel into the atmosphere just in case.

That is to say, none (or maybe just one) of the conspiracies existed, but maybe all of the cover-ups did.





===========================================
*'[If I should die] tell my wife "Hello."'
---Futurama

Ever since the November Coup of 2000, I've been certain that we're living in one of those timelines the heroine must go back in time to prevent.

I'm torn, though, between love of country and love of the movies, when considering whether or not I'd rather live in the world in which President Bogart starred in "Everybody Comes to Rick's" and Ronnie Reagan wound up in the Oval Office....

I forgot my original comment: I don't think this is sneer-worthy, or yet another sign of the sophocopalypse. If it were The Voyage of the _Space_Beagle_ (in the absence of a working tag), or "The Voyage of the Space Beagle", or even The voyage of the space Beagle, now that would be a thing. It will be easier once your spex or implants flag nouns as proper or not, just as (if you are of a mind to do) it will flag dress as improproper or not, using laser-interferometric data and a Biblical/Quranic expert system.

Also, <Obligatory "'Two Cultures' reference>.

>the first class around about junior high should be about renormalization schemes

This presupposes a proper maths background: complex-plane integration, Riemann-Lebesgue theory, and group theory at least.

>#35 ::: Doctor Science
I spend enough time in the shallower end of the tubes that I feel compelled to speak for them, albeit mockingly: "Don't you know that HIV both was developed by the C.I.A. and does not cause the AIDS*---they spent billions and indulged in years of secrecy in order to develop a virus that does nothing at all...perhaps they are claiming godhood through their fine grasp of the Principle of Heavenly Œconomy."




*It's caused by poor diet, AIDS drugs, a splinter of the Knights Templar, and an excess of the bilious humour

Actually, I felt a little sad when the "Smoke, smoke,...," crew stopped approaching me...about the same time security guards stopped regularly searching my backpack as I exited stores.

Arrrr, I wonders if they hits Canal St or BitTorrent firrst.

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