Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat

haha. hmm, angua and demagogue are reading this topique

True. And aren't we happy living in the modern age, where (supposedly) the industriousness of our forefathers and the miracles of modern technology allow us to enjoy a high standard of living and actively pursue imagination and other such activities instead of droning about trying to earn our bread like in pre-industrial (and industrial (Dickens)) societies.

From what you said what I get, boiled down, is you're saying spirituality is the key to happiness. With regards to tantric or surrealist sex, I prefer a theme which these days is called gothic. Namely, restrictiness, formality, expressiveness, aspiring for high feelings and high culture, etc, etc. And I like gothic-revival buildings a lot too, contrary to my chinese friends who like the modern glass-paneled airy high-rise buildings.

So you and I force ourselves to look in opposite directions.

I'm trying to find some good videos of PS3 in action, something inspirational. Even though it's released, all I've found so far is pre-release tech-demoes which show the same thing over and over again, some game trailers with lots of running and annoying rock music which are playing very jaggedly (bad servers, tight compression) and some crappy youtube videos of some idiots showing the introductory screen for 16 minutes. Any advice as to where I can find some genuine demonstrations of PS3's power? So far my opinion is that all people are very slow idiots and the only difference PS3 has is more polygons on people. I was hoping to see massive fly-bys of impressive vistas which demonstrate its capacity for massive simultaneous processing.

I think what he meant is manipulating the brightness of various parts of the screen so that bright spaces are more realistically bright and dark places more realistically dark compared to a standard render, so increasing contrast on a differential level to simulate high dynamic range. That's just the way I understood it.

I think it's possible. I've been thinking of people as a collection of complexely regulated micromachines. Especially after taking molecular biology. Cells, hormones, tissues, etc, lately. This is bad, because I've started losing the ethical view which is required to live in a society. So I've started forcing myself to regard people more as "humans" than "homo sapiens". I've just done my first exam, and went to the movie theatre, as usual for a random movie. Oh boy, this one had flying Christians, devil worshippers, evil corporations, southerners living in the bayou, fire from the sky, raining frogs, etc. I've gone to the movie theatre three times this school year, always to a random show, whatever's soonest. All three movies were about apocalypse. What is the world turning to?

This site http://hometown.aol.co.uk/northerntrumpet/...bbies_front.jpg for example I had only tried previewing previously and thus only noticed lack of rendering. Tried posting now, and saw this error given: Sorry, dynamic pages in the tags are not allowed

apostrophes as part of embedded image location make the image not rendered. I don't know if it's new or not.

With so many people talking about MMOs as their hobbies, I thought I'd talk some too. I thought I was unusual when at four or five years of age I used to have sexual fantasies that I would meet a girl at the playground who shares my pation for collecting caps from dairy product bottles. Now I see I was average: this guy collects smarties and smarties caps. http://hometown.aol.co.uk/northerntrumpet/...be_Gallery.html I remember wondering when I was 4 years old why the light brown smartie disappeared, but thought at the moment it was replaced by a second purple colour. I wasn't concious enough then to seriously enquire about it, just set some aside as proof, showed it to my disinterested grandmother, and ate them half a year later during a smartie shortage. Now I know better, that what I thought was purple was actually blue, and that the change occured 1 year before Noticed it. I also saw on his website the boxes, http://hometown.aol.co.uk/northerntrumpet/..._07_12g_box.jpg and it brought floods of warm memories to me. I did not understand why they changed to http://hometown.aol.co.uk/northerntrumpet/...bbies_front.jpg and I had mixed feelings about it. It was more colourful, but the old one was nicer. The cap collecting craze ended a year after it started, and in 1989 computer gaming became my favourite activity on our 8088. And You?

also, through a misconfiguration of various enzymes, an unnatural balance of substances is established. For example, people smelling like dead fish. trimethylaminuria.

Well, I called my classmates and determined that I won't miss too much if I don't come to any classes tomorrow. On such occasion I decided to sit down, relax a bit, and write about my idea of zombification in the TDM universe. It's a good thing I looked at the previous posts, too, because I almost forgot the hot chocolate. Hmm, as I'm stirring it I'm thinking of a formula that would tell me how much more power I'd have to apply to the spoon if I made the cup baffled. My dream then consisted of a stereotypical industrial era environment, in some imaginary conflux of a research park, industrial park, and university town (brick buildings, concnrete factories, etc). I was walking, mostly among some industrial structural ruins, when the realization that it's best for me not to be seen by the masses started entering my conciousness. Incidentally, then, night started giving way to sunrise, and the masses in the form of both students, researchers, and factory workers, started strolling the summer park pathways to their respective destinations. At that moment I noticed I was standing on hilly terrain, near a path but closer to a small brick building, which at its corner had an iron sheetmetal covering a small hole near the ground about 4 by 4 feet. I ducked in. The inside did not surprise me, but did englighten me as to my nature. The halls had exposed concrete and ash blocks with patchy appearance. They were narrow, short, as were the rooms. The ceiling, walls, and floor were of a light gray yellowish tones. The doors were thin, wooden, the kind you see on pre-1940's laboratories. Light was streaming in through the few holes and slits near the ceiling close to the exterior walls. The few tiny rooms into which I looked were crammed with cots with people. People like me. They contain outright unwelcome foreign organisms such as Ascaris lumbricoides: http://arpa.allenpress.com/arpaonline/?req...AL%3E2.0.CO%3B2 or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascariasis Infected with parasites as this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminth parasites cause some infections: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutaneous_larva_migrans various mites live beneath the skin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheyletiellosis They've got 'haole rot' or 'pityriasis' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinea_versicolor and flesh-eating-bacteria: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necrotizing_fasciitis All these things combined and merged through a filter of horror and fantasy and overall Thiefiness. For a look at how some of the people looked, here's a site that contains stereoscopic images of some common graphic skin infections. [WARNING] http://poetry.rotten.com/clinic/ here are three faces with infections [sAFE TO LOOK] from that site: http://poetry.rotten.com/clinic/index1.html http://poetry.rotten.com/clinic/index3.html http://poetry.rotten.com/clinic/index4.html You wood agree with me most resemble our idea of "zombies" An important fact that needn't be forgotten is mental retardation frequently accompanies the above maladies. Also fungal infections can severely damage the internal organs while keeping them functional, making the appearance of a "rotting from the inside" person. So the people there, and I, were severely pustulo-crustaceous, immuno-deficient, parasite-infested with fungi with flaking skin. How do you like this preliminary concept outline of an abolishment of necessity of magic?

What are you studying?

You likely have already seen this, but here's another Microsoft OS: http://www.mslinux.org/

That's just who I am right now and you have the right to not like it. I only wish I absorbed information on designing distillation columns etc as readily and thoroughly as I absorb information in my history lectures.

I've never seen oddity behave uncivilly - I don't know what you're all talking about.

The empire was good. I think that Justus Liebig is the key reason it collapsed.

Hmm, that's kinda true. The whole fault lies with the Spinning Jenny and James Hargreaves. Because of that people lost their freedom and opportunity to work from home in the british textile cottage industry. This started the move of people to factories and made almost every person an employee.

Yeah, Chinese grammar is like English. The tonality is easy for me to recognize and mimic. But it's hard for me to remember to use when trying to speak all of a sudden to someone Chinese. I think it's because the same part of my brain is responsible for tonality as for emotions, and maybe for native speakers it's more separated.

I do like the sound of japanese because of that. But my Chinese friends think Chinese and Japanese are RISC while English is CISC with added indeterminacy of pronunciation. They said Chinese is easy to pronounce because it has very few sounds, and I have no excuse speaking the way I do.

Thanks spar. Ishtvan, it just seems to me like Torontonians easily tolerate horrible accents, but Chinese don't.

I spent the past few hours compiling a list of 2000 most commonly used German words and their English translations. Turns out over the past few years I have forgotten all computer skills, so it took a bit longer than expected. I can't query, program or script anymore, even forgot html. I learn fast and forget fast. In 2006 I started learning Japanese using the Pimsleur method, but what stopped me was the time it consumed, you can't control the speed of learning. In 2007 I started learning Chinese because it seemed more reasonable given that 80% of my classmates speak it. After a month I could hold simple conversations, and attepted to do so. However, it took me 3 times of saying something for them to begin understanding, apparently that's how horrible my accent was, so after those attempts I lost any spirit to continue using my Pimsleur CDs. (I think English-speaking Toronto-inhabiting people are used to English-breaking immigrants and are capable of understanding them, but Chinese people expect complete native Chinese pronunciation.) In our chemistry labs we have some documentation, textbooks, and some old yellowed posters on the wall in German. The Engineering library also contains mostly English works, with the remaining 20% being German, French, japanese, Chinese, Russian, Arabic. Recently I've been listening to a lot of German rock music. I've frequently thought most language-learning methods are very mismatched to how I learn. Most technical education is also mismatched. Usually any learning consists of long boring periods where my concentration is not needed, with very dense periods where I'm too relaxed to concentrate, and consequently fall behind. This led me to believe the best way of learning a language (once you're exposed to it) is to memorize a list of most commonly used words. And I am mostly exposed to Mandarin, French, German, Japanese, and formerly, Hindi, and Arabic. Because of the above I've compiled the 2000-word list, which Should give me about 75-80% word coverage in average reading materials, and I got a very popular Children's book, "Der Struwwelpeter" at http://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Der_Struwwelpeter. However, the Children's book seems a bit too short, and I was hoping if somebody like Sparhawk could point out where I could download other suitable reading materials with simple sentence structure and vocabulary. PS, there was a time whhen I could hold a conversation in French, Dutch and German, and could read Arabic, but I learn fast and forget fast. Last year I spoke Japanese to professor Masahiro Kawaji, he told me I should speak to Douglas Reeve instead. For some reason that demoralized me and I put away the Pimsleur CDs.

But then there's a key difference, we can think about society, cells can't think about us. This complicates matters.

The only new thing I learned from all these discussions is that it's possible to model a mind using independent clusters which compete with each other. I have for years wondered about the similarity between a collection of neurons and specialized clusters becoming concious and a collection of individuals and groups forming a society, which can perhaps be called concious (not yet certainly). But how will we know when a society is concious? Only by obvservation because we're capable of noticing because we're concious? Because neurons are not aware of the brain. The next question that I always thought of is how do we organize people in such a way as to promote a concious society? Do we increase the amount of interconnections, and grouping of people, and pre-defined filtration and routing of information?

A better question than how they do it, in my opinion, is how do we change the system so that such people rise to the top in much smaller numbers? I was approached by some representative of the new Church of Jesus or something like that. A Mormon. I've always wanted to see Amish people, wish he were Amish instead. He said there's a Prophet living right now. In Sault Lake City. I said I thought so. He wondered if I knew about the new book they published, the book of the Mormon or something. I said I had it on my bookshelf, which was true. He said it's easier to read than the bible because the truths haven't been lost through so many successive translations. Overall, I think it's not so bad America is in a state in which it is. Sometimes it's fun to roleplay with religion. To humour people.