Stuff
How many Zen masters does it
take to screw in a light bulb?
None. The Universe spins around
the bulb, and the Zen master
stays out of the way.
Stuff
How many Zen masters does it
take to screw in a light bulb?
None. The Universe spins around
the bulb, and the Zen master
stays out of the way.
Categories
Posted 2008 March 14 @ 15:23 - filed under Morons.
I choose to believe it was stupidity, rather than something worse. The kak the SA Police got up to this weekend in Stellenbosch is well-documented elsewhere (including a YouTube video, and articles in Die Burger, the Independent Online, and News24).
My photo above (click for a larger version) shows the 1000-strong crowd that gathered on campus today in protest.
On placards and t-shirts, the following: "Everyone has the right to human dignity", "Ek's 'n meisie: moet my nie mace nie!!, and the plain but highly effective "SIES!!!".
The behaviour of the police men and women boggles my mind. I'm not surprised when an armed police officer strikes a young woman with a night-stick, or kicks a woman with a booted foot, or repeatedly assaults an unarmed young man. The behaviour that puzzles me is that of the obvious idiots who authorize such behaviour. Surely there's a minimum IQ requirement to be granted entrance to the SAPD? Surely candidates are screened for intelligence before they are allowed to make decisions and order those under their command to employ physical violence and use firearms in public? Surely it's just stupidity, right?
I hope heads roll.
Posted 2008 February 27 @ 21:11, via Gustav - filed under Complexity.
fractal wrongness
noun \'frak-təl\ \'rông'nùss\
"The state of being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution. That is, from a distance, a fractally wrong person's worldview is incorrect; and furthermore, if you zoom in on any small part of that person's worldview, that part is just as wrong as the whole worldview.
"Debating with a person who is fractally wrong leads to infinite regress, as every refutation you make of that person's opinions will lead to a rejoinder, full of half-truths, leaps of logic, and outright lies, that requires just as much refutation to debunk as the first one. It is as impossible to convince a fractally wrong person of anything as it is to walk around the edge of the Mandelbrot set in finite time.
"If you ever get embroiled in a discussion with a fractally wrong person on the Internet--in mailing lists, newsgroups, or website forums--your best bet is to say your piece once and ignore any replies, thus saving yourself time."
(Keunwoo Lee, 2005 November)
Also see Dr. Goodword’s Language Blog for 2008 March 04.
Posted 2007 September 16 @ 09:42 - filed under Stuff.
50 Parties is an initiative by Jimbo Wales (Wikipedia, Wikia Inc.) and Heather Ford (iCommons) "to inspire 50 parties with a mix of people, all over the world. 50 Parties aims to bring together people from Wikimedia, iCommons, CC, FSF, and other Free Culture groups including artists and programmers."
The second of these parties was held in Cape Town yesterday, and I took these pics.
Posted 2007 July 17 @ 13:39 - filed under Recommended reading.
There is much to be said for failure. It is more interesting than success.
– Max Beerbohm
Posted 2007 May 25 @ 11:10 via Fritz - filed under Coffee.
A group of alumni, highly established in their careers, got together to visit their old university lecturer. Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life. Offering his guests coffee, the lecturer went to the kitchen and returned with a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups: porcelain, plastic, glass, some plain-looking and some expensive and exquisite, telling them to help themselves to hot coffee.
When all the students had a cup of coffee in hand, the lecturer said: "If you noticed, all the nice-looking, expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it is normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of all your problems and stress. What all of you really wanted, was coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for the better cups and are eyeing each other's cups."
"Now, if life is coffee, then the jobs, money and positions in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold and contain life, but the quality of life doesn't change. Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee in it."
Posted 2007 April 05 @ 09:35 - filed under Stuff.
Last night, suitably equipped & victualed with beer, we went unfishing. We uncaught 8 Tilapia spermanii. including four nice big ones. If you really want to know more, read the illustrated unfishing tale in the logbook.
Posted 2007 April 12 @ 10:02 via GP - filed under Study methods.
Unless one's reading material is limited to "You", from time to time you attempt a text that is particularly challenging. One such work is "The Mind's I" by Douglas Hofstadter.
According to Rails coder & blogger Trevor, the same is true for Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach". As he explains at Something Learned, he has devised a method to cope with the overwhelming complexity of such texts which, according to my correspondent GP, ought to enjoy wide applicability. Click here to be enlightened.
Posted 2007 April 04 @ 00:25 - filed under Stuff.
A tale of three travellers, in which we search for Julian May and good coffee and find neither but learn about life and penguins along the way.
Posted 2007 March 22 @ 13:00 - filed under Web & Tech.
A recent item from Scientific American caught my attention: it's estimated that the total data currently "on" the Internet is 161 000 000 000 Gigabytes... That's three million times more than all the bits 'n bytes contained in all the books ever written. Wow.
Put another way: say you buy a bunch of 160G hard drives. How many would you need? Start, by tiling an entire rugby field with a layer of drives. That's a lot of drives. Then, stack another 3000 layers over that first one. That's how many you will need.
Posted 2007 March 08 @ 12:17 - filed under Wordfees.
The "Philosophy Cafe" was a real treat. The highlight must have been Prof Willie van der Merwe's moving tribute to pornstar Anna Nicole Smith; get the bootleg mp3 while it's still legal... more
Posted 2007 March 06 @ 11:07 - filed under Wordfees.
Last night's discourse, about corporal punishment in schools, left me thinking.
Posted 2007 January 11 @ 08:12 - filed under Mythology.
British researchers may have solved a centuries-old mystery by locating Homer's Ithaca, the birthplace of the hero Odysseus. Called Ulysses by the Romans, he lent his name to Homer's second great tale, The Odyssey, which tells of the hero's return to his kingdom of Ithaca after his wooden-horse ploy led to the fall of Troy (recounted in Homer's The Iliad).
Troy, once believed to be a fable, was subsequently discovered, and Ithaca may turn out to be a real place, too. Geotimes has the details.
Constantine Cavafy, contemporary Greek poet, wrote an oft-quoted poem Ithaca, which I've posted here.
Posted 2007 January 10 @ 08:52 - filed under Stuff.
The American Dialect Society announced its 2006 Word of the Year last week: "Plutoed". To "pluto" is to demote or devalue someone or something, or to experience great disappointment. Already, Google returns some 375,000 hits on a search for the word.
The winner of the "most useful word" category went to climate canary: "an organism or species whose poor health or declining numbers hint at a larger environmental catastrophe on the horizon". Other neologisms bandied about include: the decider: with the definite article, a person who makes decisions for other decision-makers, as spoken by President George W. Bush; lancing: the forced public outing of a closeted gay celebrity, after 'N Sync singer Lance Bass; and lyric malfunction: obscenities scrubbed from the Rolling Stones' Super Bowl performance (cf. Justin Timberlake and that Jackson woman's 'wardrobe malfunction').
For another take on Word of the Year, check out the list on the alphaDictionary website, where I particularly enjoyed IMglish and Crackberry.
Posted 2006 Dec 20 @ 12:25, via Gustav - filed under Wow.
I've seen some pretty creative art in my time, but this takes the cake. Click the image for seconds.
Posted 2006 Dec 09 @ 08:24 - filed under Decor.
Cape Town's christmas lights (above) include at least two cute animations (below), one of the Table Mountain cable car shuttling back and forth, the other of a fire engine dowsing flames at the foot of the mountain.
Floating above Table Mountain was this odd thing (third image), which I first thought was rather nifty – but couldnt figure out what buckminsterfullerine has to do with the Mother City. Much later it's real significance dawned on me.
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